Yes, Chef (17 page)

As soon as we got back home to Göteborg, I headed over to Mats’s house. Lots of boys in our neighborhood went to Mats’s dad, Rune, for advice. We felt close to him because he’d coached us in the local peewee soccer league, but he was also just an all-around solid guy who’d listen, tell you what he really thought, and get you out of a jam if he could.

“This is one I can’t help you with,” Rune said, after I finally spat
out my news across his kitchen table. “Go to your parents, Marcus. I can’t make this go away.”

I went home and confessed to my parents.

“OK,” Mom said.

“OK,” Dad said.

This is going well, I thought. I didn’t need Rune’s help after all. I’d practiced on my sisters just minutes before breaking the news to my parents. (Anna and Linda had squealed with delight. Not helpful.) Now I was in the living room, doing it for real. My father looked down at the pipe he held in his hand, fingering its smooth stem. My mother had shifted from lounging in the overstuffed chair that sat at the end of the sofa to sitting up straight, letting her knitting rest in her lap. The silence lasted too long.

“I know a guy who works at La Toscana,” I said, trying to show that I’d been thinking things through, “who doesn’t have to pay child support based on economic hardship or something.”

“No, Marcus,” my mother said, in a hard-edged tone I rarely heard from her. “You are going to pay. You are going to pay every month.”

“I don’t have any money—”

“That’s OK,” she interrupted. “We will pay until you do, and then you are going to pay us back and start paying it yourself. And you are not going to miss one month. I guarantee it.”

I’m sure I looked confused; up until now, earning money had been last on my list of career considerations.

“You can still go back to Switzerland and cook where you want to cook,” Mom said. “But this is your responsibility, and while we will help you now, that little girl is yours to take care of. Always.”

W
HEN
I
GOT BACK TO
S
WITZERLAND
, Giggs bumped me up to
chef de partie
. At twenty-one years of age, I oversaw ten guys at a time, and I attended Stocker’s morning meetings, which were always held in German. I also became a master compartmentalizer, pushing Brigitta
and the baby, a girl she’d named Zoe, back into the farthest reaches of my mind, focusing only on the job at hand. I tracked food costs for my station, calculated orders for our various purveyors, and evaluated the new
commis
who streamed through. Who had “it” and who didn’t? I was brutal in my judgments. After all, there was a woman and a baby—my baby—in Austria who were proof of just how much I’d been willing to sacrifice for my career. I’d always had plenty of ambition to spare, but the secret awareness that I was now a father, that there was a little girl who would someday need me, drove me harder.

Herrn Richter
, Giggs started to call me when I’d tell him that one guy was fucking up and would be out in a week, or another guy was going to go far. “Mr. Judge.”

Stocker’s assistant passed out the day’s menu at the start of the morning meetings, along with a list of upcoming special events. I stood in the back of the room as we looked over the sheet one morning and saw a giant corporate banquet—a black-tie buffet for nine hundred—scheduled for the next weekend. For such big events, part of the personnel deployment discussion was always how many runners would be needed. Runners were the lowest rung on the serving ladder, and one that would gather in busboys, porters, and
commis
as needed.

“Twenty-one,” Stocker calculated. “We’ll need twenty-one
nègres
for this.” He used the French kitchen slang for underlings, which literally translated to “blacks,” and which also meant “negroes.”

I froze in my spot. I was the only
nègre
in the room. Not even the darker-skinned Tamils were represented in Stocker’s small office, not even an Italian. No one looked over at me. Was it good or bad that I was so invisible? Was it actually a compliment that no one made the connection between the term for a near-worthless employee and this newly promoted
chef de partie
who stood among their ranks?

My industry was far from perfect, but it was my industry now, the place I had chosen for myself. For all its shortcomings, it met most of my needs. I’d proven to my father that I could make something of
myself and on my own, and now that I was twenty-one, I had officially aged out of the Swedish military obligation. I had made many small mistakes and one very big one, but I was still moving forward. I would keep writing letters to restaurants all over the world—it had become an obsession—but for the moment, I was exactly where I needed and wanted to be.

W
ITH
C
HRISTINA NOW OUT OF THE PICTURE
—she’d broken up with me after the trip to France—my social life in Interlaken revolved around Mannfred and his friends. When it came to skiing, Mannfred and his friends had me beat.

Fortunately, I couldn’t have cared less: Getting out of town and working out the kinks of a stressed-out body were more than satisfying. One weekend, seven of us decided to take a ski trip to Zermatt and ski the Matterhorn. Mannfred brought along Sascha and Jorgen, two old friends of his from school. The rest of us were from Victoria: Martin, a waiter from southern Germany, and two cooks, Klaus and Giuseppe.

We needed two cars to fit the lot of us. Giuseppe had an old Fiat and Mannfred commandeered his sister’s new car. We left early on a Thursday morning, and in the two-hour drive south, we seemed to be driving straight uphill to the little mountain village of Zermatt. The old Fiat strained once we reached the town of Visp, and Giuseppe worked the clutch heavily as he negotiated the hairpin turns. When the roads narrowed to one lane, we pulled over to the very edge of the mountain every time an oncoming car passed by, and I made the conscious choice not to look down. Instead, I daydreamed. I wondered where I’d go next after Victoria, felt bad about how the years with Christina had ended, but was also relieved to be back on track, career-wise. I wondered if my parents were disappointed in me because of the baby, and I thought about how work, with all its pressure, was now the easiest part of my life, the one place where I could drop every other concern and just learn and taste and cook.

Mannfred hit me on the shoulder. “
Nicht mehr schlafen
, Samuelsson.” No more sleeping. We were there.

I was a decent skier by Swedish standards. I’d dabbled in it as a kid and watched ski competitions on television religiously—at that time, one of my countrymen, Ingemar Stenmark, was considered one of the best in the world. But now I was standing at the top of the same slopes he’d sped down, and what had looked steep on television looked like a perfect vertical in real life. The other guys, who’d grown up on mountains like this, took off in straight lines while I launched into a cautious slalom. Mannfred stayed back and skied with me, never mocking, never teasing, and we’d regroup with the others when we reached the bottom and do it all again.

At night, we ate sausage, pounded cheap wine and cold beer, and made fondue. As we drank, we also talked shop: We all decided that Mannfred would one day be the chef of Victoria and the rest of us would work for him. (First, though, he and I would get Giggs to hook us up with a
stage
on a cruise ship so we could see the world.) We argued about which
sous-chef
was the biggest hard-ass and speculated on why there seemed to be a sudden influx of East Germans on staff. We tabulated how many of the waitresses Klaus had dated and which of the interns was his next victim. We skied six hours straight each day, and after a couple of hours of drinking and winding down, we hit our beds hard.

Driving back on Sunday, I jumped in the front seat of the Fiat with Giuseppe. Klaus and Sascha climbed in the back. We were in a hurry: We had to get the other car back to Thun in time to catch a train to Victoria, and the Swiss guys said the Sunday train schedule was spotty. Driving downhill was just as tricky as driving up, with the additional challenge of ice slicks that could combine, dangerously, with the downhill momentum. Jorgen had won the poker game on our last night, so his prize was to drive Mannfred’s sister’s car. No one else cared who drove, but Jorgen had just gotten his license, so every turn behind a wheel excited him. Giuseppe passed Jorgen whenever he had the chance, then Jorgen would make a
comeback on a wide flat stretch and overtake our car. The rest of us shouted and pointed whenever one car passed the other. We stopped to gas up and while our tanks filled and a light rain began to fall, we stood under the tank shelter. Giuseppe and Jorgen got into a playful pissing match over whether Italians were the best drivers in the world.

With full tanks, we climbed back into the cars and the game began again. I settled into the front passenger seat, thinking about the stiff muscles I’d be taking into work the next day. Giuseppe and I had a perfectly unobstructed view of the other car as Jorgen sped past us to get in first place. Jorgen was still at an angle to the main road when a large sedan suddenly appeared, coming straight at us. Neither car could stop or slow down in that millisecond of visibility, and the sedan slammed into the new car. Mannfred, unbelted, flew out the side window on impact and the car spun three times before coming to a stop, wedged up against the side of the mountain. I saw him land at an awkward angle, his body making the dark equivalent of a chalk outline in the snow. He was hurt. It was bad. But he was alive.

It took thirty terrible minutes for the ambulance to arrive. Each minute was a bomb, in which our lives slowly ticked away, exploded, and then slowly began ticking again. I knelt by Mannfred while we waited and he lay still, taking shallow, awful breaths. We alternately screamed for help and cried. Blood and glass were everywhere.

Martin, who had been in the backseat, stumbled out of the car in shock. He’d have many stitches but came out with no broken bones. Jorgen would never walk again. The driver of the other car died on impact.

Mannfred died in the ambulance.

I got back to Interlaken at two in the morning and somehow fell instantly asleep. When I woke up, it was noon, and as I remember it, there was no sun, only gray and dark. Stocker was in his office, and I sat and talked to him. For the first and only time, we had a long conversation that had almost nothing to do with work. We talked about the accident and about Mannfred.

“It’s time for me to leave,” I said at the end, and Stocker did not argue.

“Take a couple days off for the funeral, then come back for a week to finish up,” he said. “I am very sorry about this, Marcus.”

I had no idea he knew my first name.

M
Y PLANE TOUCHED DOWN AT
N
EW
Y
ORK’S
J
OHN
F. K
ENNEDY
I
NTERNATIONAL
Airport, and when I stepped into the terminal, the first thing I noticed were all the black people. They were everywhere. Black gate agents, black flight attendants, black baggage handlers, black cashiers, black cab drivers. Black people, everywhere I turned. The second thing I noticed was that no one was looking at me differently. No, scratch that: No one was looking at me at all.

Right then, I knew I’d come to the right place.

In the weeks after my grief-stricken departure from Switzerland, I’d scrambled to find another restaurant placement. I was still aiming for France, but while I looked for a three-star spot that would have
me, I needed to keep moving forward, not to mention keep some money rolling in. I followed up on every lead except for the ones that would have kept me in Sweden. Ironically, the apprenticeship I finally secured was in a Swedish restaurant … in New York. In fact, this restaurant was more Swedish in its menu than any I had ever worked in. Aquavit, housed in a former Rockefeller mansion, had opened in 1987, back when I was still a student at Mosesson. It was the brainchild of a food-loving Swedish businessman named Håkan Swahn who had settled happily in New York some years before but had missed the flavors of his homeland. In collaboration with the famous Swedish chef Tore Wretman, Håkan opened a restaurant that would be the first in the United States to serve more than smorgasbord and meatballs. Aquavit found a receptive audience among adventurous patrons who appreciated the pairings of sour, sweet, and savory that were, on the one hand, slightly exotic but, on the other, crafted from ingredients familiar to the European palate.

I’d landed the job at Aquavit thanks to my old friend Peter, a former
commis
at Belle Avenue. Peter had gone on to do well, and now he was a
sous-chef
at Aquavit. He got the executive chef, Christer Larsson, to offer me a nine-month apprenticeship, and so here I was at the airport, with nothing more than a telephone number and an address.

I threw my two duffels into the luggage hole of the bus, handed my ticket to the black bus driver, squeezed past a black woman nodding along with whatever was streaming out of her earphones, and sat by a window. I was more well-traveled than the average middle-class Swedish kid, thanks to soccer and my apprenticeships, but I’d never been anywhere that seemed as exotic as this. Over the course of the half-hour drive in from Queens, the enormity of the city started to sink in. There was just … more of everything. More congestion, more cars, more people, more skyline, more garbage. I don’t think I looked away until the bus emptied out at Grand Central.

My first apartment was on the east side of the island, on Fifty-second Street and Third Avenue. Peter was not only my direct boss at work, he was my roommate, generously letting me bunk with him and
his brother Magnus, a massage therapy student at the Swedish Institute College of Health Sciences, in their second-floor walk-up. Technically, the apartment was in midtown, but really, it had none of the business-world cachet of that label. We were more or less on the edge of the world then, in a tenement apartment so small I slept on the massage table set up in their living room.