Yes, Chef (13 page)

Which bathroom to choose? When you spend enough time with your head in a toilet bowl, you become a connoisseur, and what you want is the cleanest and least used facility, which meant bypassing the toilets adjacent to the kitchen and instead taking an extra ninety seconds
to go down a long hallway that led to the bathroom by the administrative offices and loading dock. Running through the halls would get you written up, so you had to walk as fast as possible without breaking the rules.

I took off my chef’s coat and hung it on the peg inside the stall, making sure not to touch it again until I had thoroughly washed off. If no one else was in the bathroom, I could proceed undisturbed, but if other stalls were occupied, I would flush as I puked in order to cover the sound. Having food in my stomach made the process go faster, but I threw up even when I hadn’t eaten, and the dry heaves took longer and were more physically taxing as my body cramped harder to expel what wasn’t there. I carried mints in my pockets just for this daily episode, but I was careful not to pop in so many that I froze out my palate.

Wash off, pop a mint, coat back on, apron on, speed-walk back through the hall, and back to the station as if I’d never been away.

E
VERY
S
UNDAY MORNING AT ELEVEN, THE STAFF ON DUTY CONVENED IN
the kitchen for a fifteen-minute meeting known as
assemblé
. Stocker’s
sous-chefs
would lay out a platter of good cold cuts and open a bottle of wine. It was a get-together for the kitchen only, not the front of the house, and Stocker used the time to announce who was getting promoted, how he felt last week’s special events had gone, and what was on the schedule for the week.

Sunday mornings were always busy, and as we stopped our work to attend this meeting, we all tried to act calm and relaxed when we were anything but. We were all dying for the meeting to be over quickly so we could get back to our stations and the relentless work of
covering our asses, but at the same time,
assemblé
was that rare moment when we, especially the lowly staffers like me, felt like we were part of the bigger picture: actual members of the team.

When you have a
brigade
of sixty people working for you, you need a consistent method of letting them know what’s going on. The wall postings and daily
sous-chef
meetings got some of that job done, but for interns like me,
assemblé
was a rare chance to hear directly from the general’s mouth—and in a setting where he was not yelling at you for some mistake you’d made. This was no holding-hands moment, of course. The hierarchy of the kitchen was zealously maintained, even in meetings: Line cooks and
commis
stood in the back of the room and said nothing.

My favorite part of
assemblé
was when Stocker talked about upcoming events. Because he had traveled so widely, he took a real interest in the international travelers who made up more than 80 percent of the hotel’s guests, and he would tweak the menu accordingly. On a week when we had several Arab parties coming in, he would tone down the pork entrées and amp up the vegetables and fish. When a group of wealthy Japanese people came in for a week of skiing, lots of sticky rice and exotic mushrooms suddenly appeared on the menu. He was very clear that our guest population was not homogenous, and we did our job well not only when they were happy with what they had ordered, but when, before they had arrived, we had the experience and ingenuity to figure out what the guests might want, before they knew they wanted it. When Stocker sensed how many customers were making special requests that had more to do with health than palate, he developed a spa-cuisine submenu and hired a full-time dietician.

The presence of Margrit, the dietician, a beautiful young woman with dark hair and blue eyes, completely threw the rest of us. She was not only the rare female in the kitchen, she was a female with privileges: She worked out of Stocker’s office, was the only non-chef to sit in on our meetings, and, most alarming of all, was treated by Stocker with a respect that bordered on deference. She helped Stocker tweak
the menu and together they composed new dishes that would be attractive to guests with diabetes, heart conditions, and various food allergies. Heart-healthy symbols on menus are commonplace now, but in the early nineties, it was practically unheard of even in finer hotels. I was a cocky nineteen-year-old at the time, and back then, I dismissed the guests who asked for special menus as finicky or unadventurous, not real eaters. But Stocker’s example nurtured my respect for guests with unique dietary needs, and for chefs as smart businessmen. More important, watching my boss interact with Margrit taught me an invaluable lesson for an up-and-coming chef: He didn’t live to torture us, he lived to give the guests the best service possible.

Stocker was a master at many things, but when it came to banquets and large formal affairs that numbered up to 1,500 attendees, he was a genius. Everybody’s been to a rubber-chicken banquet where the food was a cold, bland disaster, where one table or more sat without their dinners while everyone else was finishing dessert. This never happened at Victoria. Stocker could get a thousand meals out of the kitchen in a flash, all of it hot and all of it cooked to perfection.

He did this mainly by making great use of all that insane Swiss machinery. He had purchased powerful freezers to chill-shock vegetables blanched the day before the event. We plunged the vegetables into hot water, then scooped them out and immediately arranged them beautifully onto plates, covered the plates with foil, and put them onto trolleys that we rolled into the freezer. By chilling them so quickly we arrested the cooking: Peppers stayed red and spinach stayed green. Like I said, genius.

Stocker also used his armada of carefully calibrated ovens to make roasts similar to the
sous-vide
method that is so popular today, cooking them for hours at super-low temperatures so as not to sacrifice tenderness or moistness. By doing so much ahead, we could focus on putting the pieces together all at once when the moment of truth came. In Stocker’s giant warming ovens, we could reheat sixty vegetable plates at a time, and then transfer them to the long counter that ran down the center of the kitchen while the line cooks sliced meat or
finished sauces. From the second that first plate hit the kitchen counter to the last waiter placing a finished plate in front of a guest out in the ballroom, no more than eight minutes had elapsed.

T
HREE WEEKS AFTER
I
’D ARRIVED AT
V
ICTORIA
, I was in my room during afternoon break when someone came to tell me I had a call at the communal pay phone at the end of the hall.
“Hej, Marcus. Det här är Jens, Christina’s pappa.”
Why would he be making such an expensive international call to his daughter’s ex-boyfriend? The minute I got on the phone, I sensed trouble. Christina wouldn’t get out of her bathrobe, her dad explained. She had been depressed ever since I left and he and Aiko, Christina’s mother, were worried. The only thing that might lift her spirits was if she came down to Interlaken for a visit.

To be honest, I didn’t want her to come. But I had been raised to be respectful of my elders, so I couldn’t find a way to say no. At nineteen, how do you tell a man that your relationship with his daughter had been little more than a fling and that the fling was over and that you were working now and no longer found his nice but kind of clingy daughter to be very much fun?

“I’m working fourteen-hour shifts,” I said in a feeble attempt to dissuade him, but he was insistent. It’d be a short visit, he promised. We hung up the phone with the agreement that she’d arrive by the end of that week.

When I got back to my room, I paced back and forth trying to sort out my thoughts. (In my room, that meant three steps one way, three steps back.) What had I just said yes to? What kind of message would it send to the management of this elite Swiss resort that I was trying to desperately convince that I was more than an able kitchen laborer? I needed them to see me as a chef in the making, not a black Swedish kid with a girlfriend and one foot back in Gburg. That would not be a good look. Not a good look at all.

Christina came and, unexpectedly, I was happy to see her. Somewhere between home and Interlaken, she’d climbed out of whatever
funk she’d been in, and I have to admit: It was a kind of relief to be around someone who knew me well, who could speak Swedish and catch me up on life back home. And, of course, to sleep with each night. But I also didn’t want anything or anyone to get in the way of my work commitments, and I told her as much. She had to lie low. “If you go out, use the side exit,” I told her. That was the door least likely to put her in the path of one of my bosses. “Or wait here and do your thing. Whatever. Just be cool, OK?”

I’d half hoped Christina would stay in the room, writing letters and reading. But she was too curious, and she headed out almost every day to wander around the town or take day trips: a boat across Lake Brienze one day, a funicular ride up to the view-filled Harder Kulm the next. Half the time, when I came back to the room during my afternoon break, she would be gone, and I wouldn’t see her until after my shift, when we’d either hang out in the room or head over to Balmers, the bar popular with English speakers, where she charmed everyone we met.

One afternoon on her seventh or eighth day, after I’d put my laundry in the dorm washer, Christina dropped her bombshell.

“By the way,” Christina said, “I’m applying for a job here.”

I flipped. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I talked to this nice girl in human resources, and she said they’d be very interested in hiring someone who spoke Japanese.” At least 20 percent of Jungfrau Victoria’s guests were Japanese; how perfect to have on hand a pretty girl who spoke French and Japanese, not to mention English and Swedish.

Christina searched my face, waiting for it to mirror the excitement she felt, but I was having a hard time faking enthusiasm. I was on a carefully plotted path to finding success as an international chef. I was on rung two of more than two dozen I’d have to climb before I reached my goal. I couldn’t bear the thought of being thrown off course. This is not good, I thought. This was not the plan.

“Fine,” I said, finally relenting. “But no one here can know we’re together.”

Christina was not daunted by my tepid response. “OK,” she said. “I’ll come back in the fall and put in a formal application.”

M
OST OF THE LETTERS
that came to my wooden mail slot outside the Chatterbox that summer were from Christina or my family. I wrote to them, too, but most of my correspondence was devoted to job inquiries. I sent letters inquiring about kitchen positions all over the world. This was in the pre-computer days, and word of mouth was the way job news traveled. A new
commis
would come in with glowing reports of the last place he’d worked, and ten eyebrows would go up as his peers made notes to themselves to follow up. Anywhere I saw racks of tourist brochures, I picked up pamphlets from hotels and applied for work. I had my rules, though: only three stars or more.

“Why set the bar so high, Marcus?” my father would say. “
Three
stars? Why not take something easier to get into and work your way up? Why make it so hard?”

My logic was simple: I wanted to learn from the best so I could be the best. The letter writing, my painfully slow typing, the proofreading all felt like a nightly round of
mise en place
. Everything had to be just so. And yet, for every twenty I sent out, I’d get one response, usually a curt “not right now.” I’d file those away for later, taking them at their word and keeping a flicker of hope alive, resolving to try again and maybe get a different response. Whenever I retrieved an unfamiliar envelope from my box, that flicker turned into a flame. So when I saw the stationery from Nice’s famous Hotel Negresco, I immediately put it in my back pocket and counted the minutes until afternoon break, when I could open the letter in the privacy of my room.

“Monsieur Samuelsson,” it began, and right away I could tell this letter was much better than a “not right now.” If I were to find myself in Nice, it said, I was welcome to come to their kitchen and see what positions were available. The Negresco was home to Jacques Maximin, the executive chef who had made the hotel’s reputation and produced
scores of great young chefs: Alfred Portale, Joachim Splichal, Alain Allegretti, and the chocolatier Jacques Torres.

As soon as I could score a couple of days off, I hopped on a train and headed south. All along the way, I alternated between reading the French cookbook I’d brought along and calculating my next steps. Once I got the Negresco job, I would not cut short the Victoria contract—that would be a no-no. But as soon as it was up, I’d go to Nice, and from there, maybe I’d head for Paris.

I walked from the Nice train station to the palm-tree-dotted waterfront Promenade des Anglais. The Negresco sat at the center of the Promenade, among a strip of art deco palaces, all of them looking out onto the Cote d’Azur and its brilliant blue waters. In the late afternoon light, the sun low enough to illuminate the building’s magnificent belle epoque facade and its unmistakable pink dome, I steadied my breathing and reminded myself to put one foot in front of the other.

Once I was inside, in carefully practiced French, I asked for the kitchen.

“The chef is not here,” one cook said. “Come back in an hour.”

I wandered along the beachfront, too distracted to appreciate the women sunbathing topless in their rented beach chairs, waiters bringing them cool drinks and fresh towels. When I returned, I got the same answer.

“Chef is not here. Come back in an hour.”

The third time I walked into the kitchen, I was steered to an imperious man in his midforties with a half-buttoned chef’s coat and a tremendous beak of a nose that he raised up in order to look down at me.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Marcus Samuelsson, here from Victoria Jungfrau.” I showed him the letter. “I’d like to work for you.”