Yes, Chef (15 page)

By November, I was slipping up only enough to be chewed out once a week. Since some guys were getting berated hourly, this was a huge improvement. I was finishing a lunch shift one afternoon when I got called into Mr. Stocker’s office. Now what, I wondered. As I
walked—fast but not so fast that I could be accused of running—I scrolled through my last few shifts the way people say the dying watch their lives flash before their eyes. I knocked.

“Herrn Stocker?” I said.

“Mr. Samuelsson.
Wie geht es Ihnen?
” How are you?

I said nothing in response. How was I supposed to answer? Mr. Stocker had never asked me how I felt about anything before. There was more than a desk between us. He sat there with his gold spoon and his tall pleated hat, his crisp pants and jacket. I had certainly learned how to be cleaner, but I was still a mess, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the fish salad I had left out in my rush to get to his office. So much for going a week without Giggs yelling at me.

Stocker cleared his throat and then spoke. “Mr. Samuelsson,
sie sind ein guter chef
.”

I translated and retranslated what he’d just said. Was I getting it wrong? No. He’d told me that I was a good chef.

“We have watched you be able to work with others and your effort is good. When you come back from the winter break, Victoria would like to hire you as a
demi chef de partie
. I have suggested you. I am not sure if you are going to make it but I’m willing to give it a go. Go to human resources and they will handle the details.” He picked up a pen and looked down at the papers on his desk.

I did nothing. I said nothing. Twenty seconds must have passed and he looked up at me.

“That is all. Why are you still here?
Raus! Raus!
” Out! Out!

I walked out in a daze, and all I knew was that I needed to doublecheck with Giggs. If he told me this was true, that I was getting promoted to
demi chef de partie
of the fish section at twenty years of age, then I would actually believe it.

I got back to the
garde manger
and when Mannfred looked at me, he raised his eyebrows. “Uh oh,” he said. “What happened?”

“Not now,” I said, looking for Giggs. I found him by the walk-in.

“So what did Chef say?” he asked.

“I think he wants me to be
demi chef de partie
.”

“Of course he does. I told him to give it to you. What? Do you think this stuff just happens? As far as I’m concerned, you owe me. And I’m gonna hold you to it.”

The plan was that I would work through New Year’s Eve, and then leave Victoria until the spring. I had to exit the country to renew my visa, and while I probably could have filled the time by working at Belle Avenue, being in Switzerland had made clear for me that I only wanted to work abroad and in kitchens with truly international staffs.

In anticipation of my six-month Victoria contract ending, I’d been sending letters up to my Göteborg connections every week looking for help with where to go next. Stocker himself offered to find me a placement between my Victoria contracts, but I wanted to show that I had juice—at least a drop or two, in my Göteborg world. Finally a Belle Avenue line cook hooked me up with a placement at Nordica, a Swedish-owned hotel in central Austria. I’d bracket Austria on either side with a week of R & R back home, just enough time for Mom to wash my clothes, to let my grandmother stuff me to the gills with her cooking, to hang out with Mats, and to pick up a few shifts at Belle Avenue. After all, I wanted to show off what I’d learned.

A
SERIES OF NIGHT TRAINS TOOK ME NORTH AND EAST TO
B
AD
G
ASTEIN
, an Austrian spa town with a long winter tourist season, thanks to its radon-rich springs and ski slopes that held a snow cover long after the other resorts had melted down to dirt. Unlike Interlaken, Bad Gastein didn’t attract much of an international crowd—no former higher-ups from the Marcos regime or Gucci-loafered Ferrari owners in sight. Bad Gastein was an Austrian destination for Austrians—the richest Austrians, but the ones happy to vacation within their own borders.

As soon as I walked through the doors of Nordica, the hotel where I was supposed to work, I knew something was wrong. There should
have been the clatter of silver and glass in the front of the house as waiters set tables and refilled condiments for lunch. But there were no waiters. No linens on tables, no silverware, not even any salt and pepper shakers. I found the manager, a distracted Swede who told me that the renovation had “fallen off schedule”—something to do with the plumbing. No one could tell when the restaurant would reopen.

My interim gig was gone.

I now had three months to fill before my second Victoria contract started and only enough money in my wallet for a night or two in a hostel. Even more urgently, I had the sense that if I didn’t fill my time with cooking, the guys back at Victoria, including Mannfred, would pull ahead of me. Three months was a lot of learning time, and goofing off would only hurt my prospects. It was like soccer drills: There were a thousand ways to skate by, to fake your way through them without giving 100 percent effort, but you were only cheating yourself. No one was going to chart my course for me; the cooking world didn’t work like that. I had to find my own way.

I walked down the hill from the hotel to the center of the village, down the winding streets lined with four- and five-story buildings that stood shoulder to shoulder as if huddling against the bitter winter winds. I can figure this out, I told myself; I just need to think.

I wandered around town until I spotted the Elisabethpark, a gigantic yellow-stucco hotel with four stars on the plaque by its front door. The building had a regal yet worn quality to it: The twenty window frames on each floor held sparkling panes of glass but, if you looked closer, the white paint on their frames was chipped and fading. The domed awning over the front entrance showed fatigue where the metal frame had rubbed too long against the fabric. I saw no obvious staff entrance—it would turn out to be down a hidden alley—so for my first and only time, I passed under that awning and entered through the front door.

A bellhop and two desk clerks looked at me when I walked in. In the few extra beats of their gazes, I sensed that familiar shift from “Who’s this young guy?” to “Who’s this young black guy?” A small,
middle-aged woman in a brown dress and black pumps, with reading glasses on a gold chain around her neck, crossed the lobby to intercept me. She used the formal form of address,
Ihnen
, not the familiar
dir
, to ask if she could be of assistance. At least she respected me enough to throw me out politely.

“I’d like to work in the kitchen,” I answered in German, and mentioned what had just happened up the hill. By chance, I was speaking to the owner of the hotel, Frau Franzmaier, who ran Elisabethpark with her husband. She took the Victoria Jungfrau reference letter I pulled out of my bag, held up her glasses without bothering to rest them on her nose, and read.

“I can start right away,” I said.

“You speak German and you’re not afraid of work,” she answered. “OK, then. We’ll give you a try.”

M
EMORY IS FUNNY AND
, of course, comparative. In a matter of hours, life under Stocker and Giggs began to seem positively cushy. At Elisabethpark, fifteen people did the work of sixty and I worked six days each week, not five. I started at eight in the morning, worked straight through till four, downed a quick staff meal, and zipped up to my room to rest. By 5:30, I was back in the kitchen in a fresh uniform—which would be damp and dirty by the time the kitchen closed at midnight.

The payoff for those fifteen-hour shifts was that I jumped several rungs up the ladder. I was given the vegetable station right off the bat, which meant there was no one between me and Mannfred, the executive chef. I was Chef’s right hand and Heidi, a talented young woman from Berlin who worked the grill, was his left. By the end of the first week, our trio had established a rhythm: How much we spoke correlated to how fast the orders were coming in, and when Chef asked if we were ready—
“Bereit?”
—I could tell from his inflection whether he was cueing me up to fire a new order or asking me to step in and plate with him.

Frau Franzmaier was our bridge to the front of the house. She burst through the swinging door to the dining room a hundred times a night, plucking a white smock off a hook and putting it over her nice clothes as soon as she came into the kitchen. If it was slow, she’d have a few sips of wine from a straight-sided juice glass and gossip with Chef about this purveyor or that competitor. If it was busy, she would call out orders through the small microphone across the counter from Chef or dip into the back room to retrieve fresh napkins, then shed the smock and head back out to charm the guests.

At Elisabethpark, we did not look to France as the core of our cuisine. We didn’t bow down to truffles or put foie gras on a pedestal. Instead, we looked to Austria itself, to goulash and dumplings and noodles and freshwater fish like lake trout and perch. This was a revelation.

I learned the regional variations in Austrian cuisine, from Vienna’s
beuschel
ragout made from calf lungs and heart to the local
krut-spätzle
, a side dish of flour noodles made with sauerkraut, pressed through a strainer and sautéed with butter.
Salzburger Nockerln
became my favorite dessert: Its meringue peaks echoed the surrounding Alps, and the warm vanilla sauce spooned on top was said to be the melting snow. We put flecks of smoky Tyrolean bacon into dumplings and, of course, served loads of
tafelspitz
, the dish that all Austrians loved the way Swedes loved their herring.
Tafelspitz
was aged sirloin, preferably from a young ox, simmered with parsnips and carrots and spiced with paprika, dry mustard, and cayenne, then served over buttered noodles. I liked it instantly, but I couldn’t help wondering how much better it would taste if it had lingonberry sauce to cut through the rich, savory broth.

My shifts may have ended at midnight, but the buzz didn’t wear off for another few hours. Some nights I staggered back to my room to record the day’s menu in my journal. If I’d learned a new technique for poaching cabbage, I wrote it down. If I’d watched Chef roast a pork belly over potatoes until the drippings practically caramelized them, I wrote it down. If I saw him make button-shaped spaetzle noodles
and wondered how they would taste with dill rather than caraway, I wrote down that idea, or made up the recipe and recorded it, step-by-step, amount by amount.

Of course, I was also a twenty-year-old guy, not a monk. I found a way to exist outside of this cycle of work and reflection. A couple of times a week I’d go out with my Austrian comrades to a local bar, drinking beer or
most
, a local hard cider, while we argued over whose job was harder, whose burns were more serious, and who almost went down during service. My story of the Aspic Massacre definitely won me a spot in the Fuck-ups Hall of Fame.

One night, I ran into a band of Swedish guys at Gatz, an après-ski spot on the ground floor of Hotel Gisela. I was not so interested in pounding schnapps shots the way my countrymen clearly had been doing all evening, but it was such a relief to speak in my native tongue that I hung with them for an hour or two. Some had come to work in the kitchen at Nordica and had, like me, arrived to find that the place wasn’t open. They were drinking through the two weeks before the restaurant was slated to open.

“What could we do?” one of them said. “We went skiing!”

I was reminded again that while I may have shared a heritage and a language with my fellow Swedes, most of my countrymen lived much more luxuriously than I did. Maybe it was because of my race, maybe it was because I was adopted, maybe it was simply because I was Lennart and Anne Marie’s son and they suffered no fools, but all this talk about not working and no real plans struck me as kind of pathetic. I went back to the table with my buddies from the hotel.

A couple of Austrian girls eventually wandered into our crowd, and I recognized one from the workers’ entrance at Elisabethpark. Brigitta worked as a chambermaid. She was a few years older than me and lived above the laundry room. She didn’t seem to mind my kitchen German and, like everyone I met in Austria, she seemed intrigued by this black Swede who’d dropped into their midst. Brigitta was beautiful like an old-fashioned movie star; she reminded me of the women in my mother’s photo albums from the 1940s. She was from a tiny
village in the part of the valley that grew apples and pears, and she paid attention to me as I struggled to make myself understood. We talked for a while, and then a band started playing and it was almost impossible to hear.

“Do you want to come over and listen to some music?” she asked.

I followed her back to her apartment and spent the night.

T
HE THREE MONTHS IN
A
USTRIA
instilled in me a deep appreciation for hard work, and the power of a regional cuisine. In some ways, those Austrian dishes were my first real experience with soul food. Elisabethpark may not have been a five-star restaurant, but I saw that warmth and camaraderie and dedication could produce outstanding food just as well as the cutthroat competition that fueled Stocker’s kitchen staff. With fewer resources, we pulled off a different five-course tasting menu each night, as well as a new à la carte menu, handwritten by Frau Franzmaier, every day.

In late March, on one of my last days off, I sat in a coffeehouse by the town’s waterfall, at a table by the front window. Swedes may drink more coffee than any other Westerners, but Austrians know how to serve it. Waiters bring a glass of water and a chocolate to go along with your order, and the coffee is always beautifully presented, served in a glass on a saucer, the foam peaked just so. A
Franziskaner
was a latte made with whipped cream and a double espresso was called a
kleiner schwarzer
. I could never order
schwarzer
without butting up against the memory of
“schwarzkopf,”
a slur I’d heard growing up from Swedish skinheads back home.