Yes, Chef (18 page)

“You can stay as long as you like,” Peter offered, and while I knew he was generous enough to mean it, I also knew I should find my own place as soon as I could.

Peter’s apartment was not far from the restaurant, which was then half a block west of Fifth Avenue and between Central Park and the Museum of Modern Art, all easy landmarks. But even with clear directions and a city laid out on a strict and logical grid, I got lost on my first day. I was distracted by everything. Especially the street people. In Göteborg, there was only one man who slept in the street. Everybody knew him and knew that he was rich—he
chose
to sleep there. In New York that first day, I saw homeless people on every block, stationed outside ATM lobbies and supermarkets, some holding Styrofoam cups, some passed out in entryways and alleys. I saw people smoking covertly, which meant, I figured, that they were not smoking tobacco. In Sweden, even though we had drugs, they were done in private, not out on the street. I was so turned around and discombobulated on the first day that even though I’d left the house after lunch and the commute was only a twenty-minute walk, I didn’t arrive at the restaurant’s doors until after my three p.m. shift start time. Not a good start.

Aquavit had two levels, a booth-filled ground-floor café adjacent to the bar, and a formal dining room downstairs. The dining room felt like a solarium: It was the one-time courtyard of the house, now closed in by glass, and its central feature was a Zenlike waterfall against one wall, which kept the mood of the room subdued and soothing.

The kitchen was smaller than any I’d ever worked in, a dozen cooks crammed shoulder-to-shoulder, pot racks overhead and screwed
onto every available inch of wall. Manhattan real estate was too expensive to waste on the back of the house; there wasn’t enough room for a kitchen with discrete stations and a traditional
chef de partie
system. We had Chef Christer and a couple of
sous-chefs
overseeing the rest of us, who were simply called line cooks. The other distinction was the smell, which was different from any kitchen I’d ever known. No matter how diligent we were in our cleaning, one odor lingered underneath: roach spray.

In many ways, Aquavit was the most comfortable work environment I’d had in years. I now had the skills to do most tasks automatically, which allowed me to pay attention to the overall rhythm of the kitchen, to the way Chef Christer worked through a week’s worth of inventory, putting a glazed salmon with potato pancakes on Monday’s menu and, by Friday, offering a tandoori-smoked salmon. The kitchen languages were English and a sprinkling of Swedish; the social culture was Swedish and American, a combination of familiar and relaxed; the flavor palate was in my bones. The informal café stuck to traditional Swedish fare: meatballs with mashed potatoes and lingonberries, vegetable and cheese-filled blini, rolls from the northern regions. In the dining room we used classical French techniques, with Christer applying Tore Wretman’s brilliant philosophy of taking regional and folk specialties and elevating them to a more sophisticated plane. We’d make venison just as my mother’s people did in the Skåne region, but instead of smoking it, we’d pan-roast it with olive oil, aquavit, thyme, garlic, allspice, and juniper berries. Instead of serving it with the traditional cream sauces, we’d lighten it up with a fruit and berry chutney. In another house favorite, Christer paired avocado and lobster, a melding of two worlds that worked so well it was hard to imagine no one had done it before.

On the line, I was able to hold my own from day one. I was more precise and probably a better cook than a lot of the guys, but they were fast and I had to get up to speed. We would churn out ninety covers for the pre-theater crowd, something I’d never seen before. In Göteborg, Belle Avenue was practically next door to the concert hall
and city theater, but no self-respecting Swede would have considered eating until after the shows. At Aquavit, we got the ticketholders in and out in under an hour, then turned around and fed another ninety people right after that. The first few times I was on a pre-theater shift, I thought, Holy shit. I was drowning, constantly behind, constantly playing catch-up to the guys around me. So what if I was cleaner? It was speed that counted.

W
HEN
I
WAS AT WORK
, I gave everything I had to Aquavit, but when I was off the clock, I was a full-time student of New York. Here, it seemed, was everything I ever wanted. At first, I tried to make my $250 weekly paycheck go further by buying a used bike to get around. It got stolen almost instantly, which led to my first big American purchase: a pair of Rollerblades. I hardly rode the subway after that. The energy of the city was infectious, and I took to Rollerblading all over town on everything but the wettest and iciest of days. Skating was a way to save money and satisfy a lifelong addiction to exercise, but it was also a way to learn the map of the city, its architecture and topography, its neighborhoods and, most exciting of all, its foods. To get to work, some days I’d skate uptown first and cut back through Central Park, sailing through the aromas wafting from the chestnut-roasting vendors, the hot dog and shawarma carts, the syrupy burnt sugar of the peanut and cashew men. Other days I’d dip down into the thirties so that I could skate through Koreatown, with its smells of kimchi and its modest barbecue joints in the shadow of the Empire State Building. All those years of playing hockey on bumpy pond ice were finally paying off.

If I worked the early shift, I’d take off after lunch service and skate down the east side of the island, stopping in the Indian groceries to wander through the spice aisles, once in a while treating myself to something unfamiliar, like the pungent, gummy asafetida, which went from having a truly objectionable stink when raw to a pleasant garlic-meets-leeks vibe when cooked. One week I’d try yellowtail
sushi in the East Village, and the next week I’d save up money to sample the tamarind-dipped crab rolls at Vong.

My favorite of all the ethnic-food areas, though, was Chinatown. Manhattan’s was the biggest enclave I’d ever seen (at least until I ventured off the island to discover the South Asian neighborhoods of Jackson Heights, Queens), and I had my first dim sum at Golden Unicorn, a two-floor restaurant a couple of streets below Canal that was so vast and well-trafficked that it will probably outlast any other on the island. Chinatown’s curbside stalls reminded me of the fishmongers in Göteborg’s Feskekörka and along the Bryggan up on Smögen Island. There weren’t just snails on offer here, but five different kinds of snails that had been graded into three sizes each. Some of the fish I could recognize, but many vendors didn’t know how or didn’t bother to translate their signs into English—besides, the bustling shoppers that jockeyed for service suggested that language was not a barrier to commerce. I went into basement supermarkets on Mott Street where I found entire aisles of dried mushrooms, and varieties of ingredients that I’d never known came in more than one version, like sea salt, which I now saw packaged in different grinds—fine, coarse, and flake—and in colors from white to pink to black.

My old boss Paul Giggs kept me company on many of these adventures—in my mind, at least. I’d look at the dish section of the supermarket, noting the graceful curves of teapots, the thousands of chopstick designs, and I’d recall his instructions to draw our food, to study the gemstones in Bern. “Food is not just about flavor,” he’d lecture us. “It has countless dimensions, and one is visual. What do you want it to
look
like? What do you want the customer to see? Your job is to serve all the senses, not just the fucking tastebuds, OK?”

In the aisles of Kalustyan’s, a spice market on Lexington Avenue that continues to be one of New York’s best exotic food sources for everything from
farro
to Kaffir lime leaves, I’d hold different dry curry blends up to my nose, committing their distinct aromatic structures to memory, but also remembering that they wouldn’t release their full powers until they met up with heat.

“Toast your spices in the pan first or don’t even bother,” Giggs would say when he made a curry for Victoria Jungfrau’s staff meal.

One spring day, I skated by a greengrocer in the northern corner of Chinatown, a block from the part of the Bowery where lighting supply stores alternated with restaurant equipment warehouses, chandeliers and exhaust fan hoods spilling onto the sidewalks. The unusually patient and orderly line of patrons stopped me. They were watching a woman with a large knife who stood at a makeshift counter between bins. Wearing a thick glove, from a stack by her side she picked out a green, spiky orb the size of a soccer ball, then sliced it open and into wedges, sliding her knife between the thorned skin and a milky interior flesh. In one fluid motion, she dropped the flesh into a plastic bag, secured the bag with a knot, and exchanged the bag for cash, only to start the process over again.

I watched for a minute or two, trying to locate a sign that would tell me the name of this object that resembled a medieval weapon. No luck. Was it a melon? A squash? I was upwind of the counter, but now and then I caught a whiff of something that cleared my sinuses. I smelled something nutty and fetid. The odor was repellent, but so tantalizingly strange that I couldn’t break away. Finally, I tapped the shoulder of the last person in line, a young woman holding the hand of a toddler who looked to be her son. In her other hand, she held a bouquet of plastic shopping bags, pinks and greens and blues, all spilling out with leafy vegetables and paper-wrapped packages.

Not knowing if she spoke English, I combined raised eyebrows, pointing fingers, and speech.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Durian,” she said, in an English far less accented than my own. “Green durian. It just came in this week. You like the smell?” She smiled as she asked this, but even as she wrinkled up her nose in shared disgust, I could see she wasn’t about to give up her spot in line.

Again, Giggs’s voice spoke to me.

“Cat piss,” he’d once said, describing durian, a popular Asian fruit he’d first had in Singapore. “Smells like cat piss mixed with garlic, but
the custardy texture is pure velvet and, if you hold your breath while you eat it, the flavor is sublime.”

I slipped my hand in my pocket to make sure I had some bills, then took my place behind the mother and her son.

T
HE MORE GROUND
I
COVERED
in New York and the more people I met, the more I came to see the difference between international and diverse. Interlaken was international, and I got off on the energy of being around so many different cultures and languages there. But in the end, they were all going back to where they came from. The American waiters would head back to LA after one too many cold winters; the Portuguese dishwashers would be allowed work visas only as long as Switzerland needed their labor; the hoteliers and chefs in training, like me, would learn how to make fondue and
röschti
, then go on to the next kitchen, the one with more stars or a more famous executive chef. New York was different. There were divides along lines of race and class, but whereas the ethnic Swiss owned Switzerland and the ethnic Swedes owned Sweden, everybody in New York had a stake in where they were. Maybe you had to have a place this big to allow there to be a hundred different New Yorks living side by side, but almost everyone I saw seemed to move with a sense of belonging. This was their city whether you liked it or not.

I had an Italian-American friend named Anthony, a kid a couple of years younger than me whom I’d first met in Switzerland. Anthony was a good kid, if a little rich and bratty, the son of a hotelier who came from Garden City, a classic Long Island suburb. Sometimes I’d go visit him on a day off, which was like going back to the quiet of Partille or any other Swedish suburb, except even more removed. Anthony and his buddies drove everywhere, the girls sprayed their bangs into place and wore Reeboks, and when they weren’t listening to Taylor Dayne, they listened to black music, even though they didn’t have any black friends. I knew that Anthony genuinely liked me—I had his back the whole time we were working for Stocker—but I also knew
that I was something of a prize he could parade around his friends to up his coolness factor. Almost none of Anthony’s buddies ever went into New York City, except the adventurous few who’d snuck out one night to go in and hang out under the bright lights of Times Square.

All in all, I couldn’t have asked for a better launch pad into the United States than Aquavit. My friend Peter watched out for me. Chef Christer was kind to me. The work, the food, the familiar culture, and the easier languages gave me a serious comfort zone, but I came to America to be with Americans, not Swedes. I was still working on getting to France, but I had an inkling that I might come to live in the United States someday, and this was my chance to check it out and make sure.

Apparently, I made my enthusiasm and curiosity plain, because I quickly made friends who volunteered to show me their versions of New York. One of the most influential was Casey, a line cook at Aquavit who was the only African American there. He came from a working-class background, and in the summer, he’d take me to family cookouts. His parents lived in the city of White Plains, a short train ride north from Grand Central Station, and I felt like I was entering an MTV video set when I saw their backyard table laden with fried chicken, coleslaw, and potato salad, with the guys my age able to drop in and out of any song lyric blasting from the DJ mixes on the stereo, everyone joining in when their girl from Mt. Vernon, Mary J. Blige, came along.
“What’s the 411? / What’s the 411? / I got it goin’ on …”

Every experience Casey showed me was hardcore. He took me to late-night hip-hop clubs in distant corners of Queens. We’d change trains three times so that we could see every kind of act, from unknowns to Run-DMC. New York wasn’t as polished back then as it is now, and those three a.m. train rides home felt like scenes from
The Warriors
, where a gang rides subway after subway in its quest to get back to Coney Island. Casey’s friends either worried that I was some kind of cop or were amused by me: I was black but not black. I played soccer and they played basketball. I had darker skin than almost all of them but poor command of their language and even poorer command
of style—my Levis were too close-fitting, my Doc Martens were not Tims, and it took me a while to shift from my blown-out Hendrix fro to the fade I finally adopted for the rest of my stay.