Yes, Chef (22 page)

“Why won’t they let me go on the line?” he’d say. “It’s bullshit. I’m going to ask them why.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t draw attention to yourself. I know it sucks, but try to be as small as possible.”

He would never get on the line, I could tell. He wasn’t going to last. A lot of Americans had this problem in the European kitchens. It wasn’t that they didn’t love cooking, it wasn’t that they didn’t have the skills. They’d done their research and paid their dues and worked just as hard as I had to get to restaurants like Victoria Jungfrau and Georges Blanc. But to get ahead in that culture, you have to completely give yourself up to the place. Your time, your ego, your relationships, your social life, they are all sacrificed. It’s a daily dose of humility that a lot of Americans find difficult to swallow. Guys like Jeremy could never fully tamp down the desire to be seen and heard, to stand out and make his mark, to go up to the chef and get noticed by chatting: “I just want to say hi and thank you.”

The thing is, small talk with a
commis
is the last thing on a chef’s to-do list.

Correction: It’s not even on the list.

Many of the European kids who were going into cooking at that time came from blue-collar families; maybe their parents were farmers or had run small hotels. They understood what it meant to give yourself up. The European mentality was that if you were in town and happened to see the general manager, you crossed the road, you didn’t say hi. If you saw even a headwaiter coming toward you, you’d wait until he passed by. You hadn’t done anything wrong; it was just common sense to stay out of the way. Nothing positive could come of an interaction.

“Why do you think he doesn’t like me?” Jeremy would ask me when one of the
chefs de partie
came into the shop and ignored him.

“I don’t think he
knows
you,” I said. “I don’t think he has any idea who you are. Try to make sure it stays that way.” Time and time again, the Americans didn’t realize the benefits of invisibility until it was too late. Being noticed often led to being fired.

T
HE GUY WHO CAME
to deliver truffles drove up in a Mercedes-Benz. He sat with our chef at a table in the empty dining room, and over a glass of wine, they made their deal. Then he drove off to another three-star Michelin and did it again. The same thing happened with the duck guy, the chicken guy, the cheese guy, the woman who sold us our asparagus and haricots verts. I’d never seen food so fresh or treated with such reverence. For the first time, I realized what was missing back home. Fishermen in Sweden didn’t go straight to the restaurant, and Sweden didn’t have enough agriculture to support such direct relationships between growers and chefs. At Belle Avenue, we relied on shipments of shrink-wrapped or frozen specialty items, and that resulted in a chronic separation between our product and seasonality. We cooked foie gras all year round because that was what we thought it meant to be a French restaurant. But in Vonnas, when the spring harvest of asparagus came in, we’d feature it in five different dishes each night. In the fish station, we never opened scallops
during prep, even though that required stepping out of the fast-paced service to shell them for each order. It was a trade-off, but Blanc placed the highest value on keeping them fresh up to the very last minute. And because they came to us alive and in their shells, they were nothing like the ones that came to Belle Avenue in jars. The experience of cooking the two was completely different, too: The fresh scallops had a dryness to them that made the caramelization process significantly faster. Searing them off took seconds; if you didn’t pay attention, they were easy to overcook.

At Georges Blanc, we did not take shortcuts. Animals came in whole and we did everything but slaughter them ourselves. It took a while for me to learn how to clean a wild duck, and if you’re too slow, the duck’s fat warms to room temperature and you end up pricking the skin as you pluck it, rendering it useless. To clean truffles, we used toothpicks and toothbrushes to remove the dirt, never water. We’d store the cleaned truffles in dry rice, and once the truffles were used, the rice was boiled into the most aromatic side dish on earth. If Blanc microwaved a vegetable, it wasn’t to save time, as Stocker had done in Interlaken; it was to retain flavor by shortening the cooking time.

If any corner was cut, it was the corner they didn’t quite understand, the corner that included the rest of the world’s cuisines, so many of which were unknown to or considered beneath them. If those flavors had been included in a more forceful way, I think they could have created at an even higher level.

As it was, the restaurant produced impeccable dishes it had been serving for generations. We were famous for
poulet mère Blanc
, a chicken braised in cream. To make it, we used only the select local chickens, never more than three pounds in weight. We plucked and then blanched each bird, which separated the skin from the meat. Then we skinned and butchered it, separately simmering breasts and dark meat in chicken stock and cream, until the legs and thighs were tender, and the breast was still moist. We let the chicken sit overnight in its liquid, then lifted out the meat and reduced the remains into a wonderful, even
heavier
cream sauce. Labor alone makes this one of
the most expensive chicken dishes I’d ever seen, but it also showed me that chicken can hold its own on a menu with lobster and truffles and other expensive ingredients if you take a lot of care and treat it with respect and elegance. On the (barely) lighter side of the menu, Georges Blanc would roast endives, basting them with butter and honey, then put a steamed lobster on top and finish it with butter, mustard, and lemon. It might not sound light, but the absence of a cream sauce was practically revolutionary.

Georges Blanc built his cuisine on three pillars: to preserve the honest and rustic heritage of his ancestors; to maintain the level of elegance that had earned him his third Michelin star; and last, a distant third, to look into the future, exploring new techniques and ingredients.

One dish that spoke to this last category was an appetizer of frog legs in curry sauce with pea puree. When the frog legs came in, we had to clean them, skinning them and then trimming down the legs into pearlescent drumsticks. We’d sauté the legs in garlic and onion until the pale flesh turned golden brown, then debone the meat, using the tip of a knife and being careful not to do a hatchet job that would leave us with mush. We served it with a simple, bright green pea puree. For the puree, we used a pre-blended Indian curry powder that came in a large saffron-colored tin, and we mixed that with garlic, salt and butter, frog leg bones, chicken stock, white wine, cream, and peas. Once we plated the puree, we laid down the frogs’ legs and drizzled curry froth across the top.

This appetizer was very popular and somewhat surprising to find in Vonnas. It showed me that Georges Blanc had paid attention when he traveled beyond his world, and he looked to bring those flavors in as long as he could make them have some relationship to French traditions. His example would be invaluable to me when I unexpectedly took over the kitchen at Aquavit a year later. At Aquavit, I found that I didn’t have to deny my interest in the flavors I’d tasted while traveling the world, but I also had a duty—and a sincere desire—to uphold the restaurant’s Swedish identity. Georges Blanc had shown me how to achieve a balance between those conflicting aims.

———

B
Y THE TIME
I
GOT TO
B
LANC
, I’d pretty much gotten past my ritual of throwing up before a big shift. I still had stomachaches from time to time, but even in the intensely competitive and demanding world of that kitchen, I had come to a point where I felt I deserved to be there. I wanted to learn but also to make a contribution, to prove that they had made the right choice by inviting me. I was so intent on doing a good job that I passed up nights out with the staff, even tempting offers to play soccer on the inter-restaurant league. As much as I loved playing soccer, I didn’t want to turn France into a soccer trip. I didn’t want to stand out for any reason other than my work as a chef.

In New York, I’d reveled in making new black friends. But in France, I hardly spoke to the other black man in the kitchen, a dishwasher from Africa. Other than my giving soiled pans to him, we had no interaction. I was, to be honest, afraid of overfamiliarity and stereotypes. I didn’t want him to call out to me, “Oh, African brother …” and then end up with both of us in trouble for wasting time. The truth was I chatted with no one, but it particularly sticks with me that I didn’t chat with him. We were, after all, part of an underclass, objects of a prejudice that showed up in the common vernacular of the kitchen. Just as in Switzerland, the French term for a low-level kitchen assistant is
negre
, which directly translates to “black.” I’d heard people use it countless times, people whose politics are straight up, people who consider themselves worldly and unprejudiced. But there it was, and every time I heard it, the word was more than a word, it was another wall I had to climb.

I had to find my own ways of letting off steam, and I was too strict to let myself experiment with drugs or drink excessively the way so many cooks I knew did. Running became my release. Some of my best moments in France were when I had a day off and I went running in the cornfields or through vineyards. Everywhere I looked, I saw where the food we cooked came from. The farmers seemed to be living very simple lives in direct contact with the earth; the men wore knickers and boots, and the women wore flowery dresses and aprons, much
like my grandmother. I felt the high of the serotonin that running released into my brain, but also I was just happy to be there, in that moment. It was a time of no women, no money, and hard work, but I knew that I was lucky to have it all.

Georges Blanc and his wife, Jacqueline, who worked the front of the house, often brought favored customers through the kitchen. As staff, we never made eye contact; we knew we were expected to conduct ourselves in a dignified way, to speak, if it was absolutely necessary, in a subdued tone. Once Georges Blanc saw that I was there to work, that I could handle the tasks I was assigned, and that I spoke English well, I started to go along on cooking demonstrations. He was not one to overlook an asset. For most of these outings, I stood to the side and translated for the chef who was doing the actual cooking. Or I’d go along on a catering job for events at Blanc’s winery when he knew there’d be a lot of English speakers there. I was not merely taking omelet orders as I had in Switzerland; I was responsible for communicating concepts, for true interaction.

When things got tough, I’d think about Mannfred and how he was so good at always moving forward. I tried to do the same, to take nothing personally, to see opportunity in every moment. So what if I had to cook for Georges Blanc’s dog? A
stage
is a
stage
, and I did my best. That old, ill-tempered retriever ate better than anybody: I’d take a piece of tenderloin, salt and pepper it and sauté it off quickly, then maybe put mustard on it. The end result reminded me of beef Rydberg, the classic Swedish dish that we’d often make at Aquavit. The dog didn’t care about the dish’s provenance: He wolfed it down the minute the plate hit the floor.

Commis
were also responsible for making our afternoon staff meals. We weren’t given instructions or recipes, and I suspect that this was the one chance to shine that the higher-ups gave us. If we did a good job, they let us know.

I sometimes made
röschti
, Swiss comfort food, in an iron pan. The dish made me think of Victoria—Mannfred, Giggs, Stocker—the place where I went from being a
commis
to a budding young chef.
Other guys would do more elaborate dishes, but I had learned how to deliver absolute rustic comfort with this. I built the flavors slowly, thinking about how the bacon adds salt, and how the apple and caramelized leeks add sweetness. When I served the table, they made all the universal signs of approval—smacking lips, kissing their fingers, waving a fork, grunting. These guys knew food. They knew flavor. So when they told me the dish was good, I knew they meant it. I knew I had something. More than a few of the dishes I served to the staff in Vonnas landed on the menu years later at Aquavit.

When Georges Blanc offered me a full-time job, I knew it was time to go. To me, that was equivalent to a diploma, proof I had been successful. But I was headed for different frontiers, ones with bolder flavors, to be made and consumed by a cross section of people who more accurately reflected the larger world and, for that matter, me.

It was tempting to say yes to Blanc; I had fallen in love with the spirit of the place, and with working with foods that were organic and seasonal before either became a trend. But the day he made his offer, I got caught in the walk-in refrigerator with a chef who decided to go off on his Japanese
commis
. The chef was a few years younger than the
commis
, and the
commis
, like most of the Japanese who came to work for Blanc, was an excellent worker, meticulous and fast. The chef was just a cocky guy showing that he was boss. He had not only called him a fucking idiot and an amateur, he had upended the
commis
’s
mise en place
, creating a holy mess inside the refrigerator. And when his screaming wasn’t enough to fully express his rage, he punched the guy in the stomach. Right in front of me.

The
commis
didn’t say a word. He’d flexed his stomach in anticipation, practically breaking the chef’s hand. The
commis
was going to be fine, but I remember watching this and thinking, OK, I’ve gotten all the training I need here. Time to go.

This was the dark side of the French tradition. All of the chefs had come up through that same brutal system, where only the upper echelons had any sense of job security. Even the
chefs de partie
didn’t know if they were going to get punched or fired the next day. Besides, if you
put a lot of guys in one room, they are going to fight. Ask any of the top chefs and they will tell you that they’ve all seen violence in the kitchen. It’s not what I do; it is not how I treat people, but there’s no denying that this is the way it was. By the end of the nineties, this nonsense started to disappear because cooking became so competitive. Good cooks are hard to come by: They have plenty of options now, and if you treat someone that way, they’ll leave. It is, thank God, a different time.