Yes, Chef (14 page)

His expression bordered on amusement.

“Non,”
he said. “We don’t have anything.” And then he walked away.

Common practice was to humor the
commis
who’d traveled from so far with a tryout for a day or two—kitchens could always use an extra hand—but I wasn’t being extended even that courtesy. What made it worse was that now I was without a tryout and a warm bed—as a room for the night was the usual exchange for the free labor.

I left, devastated. There were other beautiful hotels along the Promenade des Anglais, but I wasn’t willing to take second best. Or maybe it was that having spent all my bravado on the Negresco, I couldn’t risk being rejected by a second-tier hotel just because of the color of my skin. Fuck it, I thought, and caught the next train back to Interlaken.

I made it a point not to dwell on the matter of race. I believed in my knife skills, and my sense of taste, and my capability to listen and to get things done. I was never afraid of hard work. Every place I’d worked in so far was a success for me because once I had my whites on and started working, there was no doubt that I would be the last man standing, regardless of whom I was up against. One ignorant chef who couldn’t see past the color of my skin was not going to stop me. I’d go back to Victoria, learn everything I could, and, eventually, people would have no choice but to say yes.

W
ITH
C
HRISTINA BACK HOME
and out of the picture, I had been able to return my full focus to work, and my reward was to be moved to a new station frequently, exactly the kind of exposure I’d hoped for.
Entremetier, viande, pâtissier
—these were not simply descriptions anymore, they were essential elements of a magical experience that started when a guest checked in. During my stint with the
entremetier
, I learned to make a delicious summer avocado soup, creamy with coconut milk, garnished with pink grapefruit and pink peppercorns. When I was on
viande
, I sautéed a knuckle of veal with carrots, onions, and garlic, deglazed it with white wine, then cooked the juices down into a rich, meaty syrup. With
pâtissier
, I made hundreds of raspberry and champagne mille-feuille, each one garnished with a
scoop of champagne sorbet, each plate adorned with a swirl of buttery caramel glaze.
Mormor
always asked me what was it like to dine in a five-star hotel restaurant. I told her that I still didn’t know. But I did know that to cook at Victoria was to go to bed every night with a taste of perfection on your tongue that lingered, even after you had brushed your teeth.

No matter what my assignment, that was the prevailing code, and when I finally settled in to a more permanent placement in the kitchen, I joined the honor guard. The
garde manger sous-chef
was a cantankerous, exacting Brit named Paul Giggs.

Mannfred liked to say that if you wanted to make it in Stocker’s army, you had to match your heartbeat to his. Stocker was a Picasso in the kitchen: gifted, egotistical, bullish, and brutal, but an artist through and through. Giggs, on the other hand, was a heat-seeking missile. It just so happened that he was a chef, but one imagined that the experience of working for him would be the same if he ran a basketball team or a crew of bank robbers: You did what he said, and you did it quickly. If you wanted in with Giggs, you had to buy into more than his vision, you had to fall in, lockstep, with his methods. What Giggs excelled at was breaking staff the way cowboys broke down wild horses. This put him in good standing with Stocker, but almost no one else. The cheese manager did not appreciate Giggs reducing the cheese girl to tears when she wrapped the Stilton and the aged cheddar in the same plastic wrap. She thought she was conserving materials; he thought, and he told her quite publicly, that she appeared to have been born without a brain, and was putting the hotel’s very reputation on the line, besides. We chopped, cooked, and tasted our way to perfection because we ran on fear: fear that the chef would not like our work, fear that the chef would not like us, fear that a single misstep could get us humiliated or, worse, fired.

Giggs combed through the kitchen staff and picked out all the outcasts and English speakers for himself. Our crew had Jews, Asians, women (still a rarity in the kitchen), and me, a black Swede. Maybe he figured that if we’d made it that far without the advantage of being in
the majority, there was a chance we had both resilience and ambition, both of which he demanded. Since we all had obstacles to overcome, most of us worked our asses off to stay where we were. He knew how to ride that, to push us to the very edge without losing us. He would forgive inexperience, but he had no patience for laziness, and there was no room on his team for drunks or druggies. He would dismiss you just as easily for the hint of impropriety as he would for shitty performance.

To join Giggs’s ranks was an honor and a risk. There were already plenty of warring factions in the kitchen: The Germans and the Swiss hated each other, every one of the sixty people who staffed the kitchen was in competition for Stocker’s attention, and pretty much all of the other
sous-chefs
couldn’t stand Giggs. If Stocker had any problem with Giggs’s abrasive personality, he overlooked it because he understood that it was in service of his goal. Stocker was worldly but so was Giggs. He had traveled widely and spoke several languages, including Swiss-German, and if foreign guests needed a special meal, Stocker turned to Giggs and our station prepared it.

Working
garde manger
was part finesse and part butcher shop. The first time I volunteered to break down a whole lamb, Giggs laughed at me. But none of the other
commis
had volunteered, and I could tell he was impressed, at least enough to let me fail on my own initiative. On the next meat delivery, I went into the meat locker and asked for help, working step-by-step under the watchful eye and loud mouth of Franz, Giggs’s
chef de partie
. When Franz revved up the chain saw and handed it to me, the buzz of the motor brought back the turbot incident at Belle Avenue, but wimping out was not an option. When he wasn’t calling me an idiot, Franz actually imparted useful information, like why it was important to cut in the refrigerated room so that the fat would stay firm. If it warmed up enough to melt, that’s when blades could slip. How we saved the restaurant money by doing this work ourselves and not paying a premium for the discrete parts of the animal. He showed me how to remove the filet, kidneys, and sweetbreads with a small knife and how to saw down the
bones for stock. Everything had a purpose and a destination. The finest cuts, like the filet, went to La Terraza, the shanks would be braised for Stube, and the fat went with the trimmings for sausage. (La Terraza was the hotel’s fine dining establishment, Stube the more casual pub.)

We got to the leg, which needed to be deboned, filled with thyme and garlic, and set aside for the saucier. I plunged my knife into the flesh, rooting around for the bone.

“Scheisse! Dümmling!”
Franz yelled. “What’s in that woolly head of yours? I know it’s not a brain!”

He took the fillet knife from me and cut
along
the leg muscles rather than through them, lifting out a miraculously clean bone at the end. I loved this part of my time in Switzerland. There was so much knowledge in Stocker’s team, from the top on down to the line cooks. A guy like Franz could talk smack all day about my Afro, my lack of brains, my mother, her alleged lack of virtue. I didn’t care because I was learning to butcher from one of the best and once that knowledge was in me, it belonged to me.

O
F ALL THE KITCHEN’S STATIONS
, the
garde manger
did the heaviest lifting when it came to banquets. Other stations had their responsibilities, but we prepared the bulk of the food: platter upon platter of sausages and cured meats, sliced cold calves’ brain on beds of lettuces and herbs, chilled cream of asparagus soups, smoked halibut with horseradish cream, and eggs in aspic, all of it beautifully laid out on tiered, linen-covered tables. Giggs had a special eye for flourishes, so we also learned how to chainsaw ice blocks into eagles, mold sugar gum paste into flowers, and carve elaborate designs into the rinds of melons.

The first time Giggs handed me a felt-tipped marker and told me to cover a plate in plastic wrap, I thought he’d gone off the deep end.

“Draw your food,” he commanded, by which he meant he wanted the vegetables artfully arranged. “If you’ve arranged your veggies
beautifully,” he explained, “when it gets to the meat guy, he will respect the plate more. He won’t just push everything aside to get his filet on there.”

I’d been wrong when I said Giggs was merely a drill sergeant who served Stocker’s vision. I would eventually learn that all chefs worth their mettle have their own styles and their own passions, but every single one of them can go from zero to asshole quicker than the average Joe. You have to be willing to be a jerk. Otherwise it’s not worth it, the years of apprenticeship, the never Wall Street–level money, the ungrateful diners, the misfit miscreants you count on to execute each service flawlessly, not to mention the prima donna behavior of all those raw ingredients—the coquettish egg whites that may or may not fluff properly for you today; the potatoes that may decide that today is the day that they will burn, not crisp; the tomatoes that didn’t ripen because of an unexpected heat wave. As a chef, you are at the mercy of the farmer, the butcher, the fishmonger, the weather, and God.

Giggs was a bruiser who came from humble roots, working-class Sheffield, an English city south of Manchester. He’d killed and sold chickens in the local market at age twelve, and the closest thing to fancy food he knew growing up was a can of blood pudding. It was his inherent love of food and an ability to work harder than anyone around him that got him out. His biggest break was to get a job on “Lizzie,” the RMS
Queen Elizabeth
luxury ocean liner that ferried passengers across the Atlantic until 1968. His exacting standards, withering sarcasm, and penchant for publicly ridiculing his staff always had, at their base, a loyalty to upholding quality. His arrows stung, no doubt, but they were shot democratically; he picked on everyone equally. With one exception. As someone who’d earned every penny he ever spent, he had even less patience for wealthy guys who had no drive. As far as Giggs was concerned, to grow up awash in opportunity and then
not
do something with yourself was a sin of the greatest proportions. The rest of us committed more common crimes, which he relentlessly policed.

Giggs would send you back to your room if your shoes weren’t polished.

“You’re not respecting me!” he’d shout.

If we had a banquet coming up for 124 Mercedes executives, and someone was foolish enough to round the number up to 130, he’d scream about his food costs being jacked up for no good reason.

“What the fuck makes you think you’re prepared for a five-star establishment such as this? Whatever it is, you’re sorely fucking mistaken!”

If Giggs had kicked our butts once too many times in a given week, we’d go to Mannfred’s parents’ on our day off. His mother would cook for us and coddle us until we were fortified enough to return. Mannfred was one year younger than I was and nowhere near as experienced in soccer, but we played for the hotel’s team and helped them win the local hospitality league tournament. Little by little, I could see my grown-up life come together—a lot of work, a little play. My friendship with Mannfred helped me keep the balance.

I
CLEANED UP THE STATION
after service one night, and when I was done, I reported to Giggs so he could sign me out.

“You’re done?” he asked.

This usually made me think twice, but on this night, I’d been extra careful, so I stuck to my guns.

“Yes, Herrn Giggs.”

“You’re ready? Really? You think you’re ready?” he kept asking as he inspected each shelf of the walk-in. When he got to a plastic tub of aspic that I’d carefully wrapped and rewrapped, he stopped.

“Are you sleeping, Samuelsson?” he asked. “Were you out too late last night or something?”

I’d dated the tub, as we did with all perishables, but I got the day’s date wrong and had put down the twenty-second instead of the twenty-first. A ten-minute rant ensued, in which Giggs accused me of wanting to poison the guests when we served them bacteria-ridden
aspic. He let me know that I was a lazy son of a bitch, and maybe that’s how we did it in Sweden in our backwoods, pissant country restaurants, but poisoning the guests was not the policy at Victoria Jungfrau. About the fourth time he mentioned the idea of poisoning, he lifted the tub off the shelf, ripped off the plastic wrap, and tipped it over onto my feet.

Giggs continued at full volume, and in another minute or so, Stocker stuck his head through the doorway to see what the commotion was. This did not quell Giggs in the slightest.

“Herrn Stocker,” he said, switching from English to German. “Mr. Samuelsson has decided to be lazy today.” Stocker glanced at the pink gloppy mess around my feet and then turned to Giggs.

“We need to go over the menu for tomorrow. I’ll be in my office.”

I spent the next hour recleaning the walk-in, and rewrapping and redating each container, then enduring a second thorough inspection, which ended in a grudging dismissal.

To endure such humiliation didn’t get easier after months of working with him, but I did learn to make fewer mistakes—and every day started off with a level playing field, which is to say that everyone else who worked for Giggs had just as much of a chance as I did of being on the losing end of a shitstorm. I also understood that Stocker needed his
sous-chefs
to be paranoid sons of bitches so that he didn’t have to micromanage each station. If Stocker spent all his time in the trenches, no one would be keeping an eye on winning the war.

The thing that made Giggs my hands-down favorite boss was that he protected his own. If he had chosen you for his team and you pulled your weight, he made sure you got promoted, even if it meant leaving his crew. If openings came up on another station and with a
sous-chef
he respected, Giggs would go straight to Stocker and make a case for one of his own to get the spot. This was rare.