Yes, Chef (23 page)

I left on good terms, even though I turned down Blanc’s offer. How do I know the parting was positive? Because I’ve subsequently sent a couple of my own guys there to
stage
. One was a black kid, and I’m proud that I paved the way for him, that Georges Blanc gambled on something new by having a
negre
come, and the
negre
turned out to be an asset.

A
S MY TIME AT
G
EORGES
B
LANC CAME TO AN END
, I
SAT DOWN AND
wrote three letters. The first was to an American talk show host I’d watched during my Aquavit internship. He was edgy and funny and, more than anything else, smart.

“Dear Mr. Letterman,” I wrote, “have you ever considered branching out into restaurants?”

I wrote a similar letter to Oprah Winfrey, who was already much more than just a TV personality and would surely see the wisdom of partnering with me.

“Dear Ms. Winfrey,” I wrote. “Nothing could be a better accompaniment to the conversations you have on air every day than a restaurant.… ”

Just to be safe, I also wrote to Aquavit’s founder, Håkan Swahn. “If you hire me,” I promised, “I will make Aquavit one of the top ten restaurants in the city.”

Only Håkan wrote back.

I was twenty-four years old and I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. I didn’t know how American rating systems worked, I didn’t know the difference between
Gourmet
and
Bon Appetit
. I just knew that of all the places I’d lived, New York was where I fit in best, and I was willing to give everything I had to get back there.

Aquavit had opened its doors in 1987, about the time I walked through the entrance of Tidbloms in Göteborg as a culinary student casting about for my first internship. Håkan Swahn and his chef Tore Wretman quickly distinguished their restaurant from the smorgasbord houses that had, for so long, been the face of Swedish food in America. They paid tribute to the spirit and ingredients of Swedish cuisine, but they also understood they were in New York where sophisticated diners prized bold flavors and fresh ingredients.

Over the years, Aquavit ran into trouble finding the right match for the kitchen’s helm. All of Swahn’s executive chef choices were Swedes, but that was no guarantee they could maintain the level of excellence to which Swahn aspired. One was dutiful in the execution of Swedish classics but lacked initiative to break new ground; another was
too
Swedish, paying almost no attention to the tastes of the American customer. The August before I returned, Swahn had made a risky move by hiring away a
sous-chef from
Bobby Flay. This was years before Bobby became famous for his
Throwdown!
television show, before
Iron Chef
and
Boy Meets Grill
, but he had already made a mark with his two restaurants, Mesa Grill and Bolo, as well as by winning the Rising Star Chef of the Year Award from the James Beard Foundation. Flay may have been a fourth-generation Irish-American New Yorker, but he had fallen in love with southwestern and Cajun cooking, both of which distinguished him then and still. Maybe because his own story was so unorthodox, Bobby didn’t see any problem in hiring Jan Sendel, a young Swede who’d come to New York to be an actor and had
no formal culinary training whatsoever. Bobby had his hands full with Jan, whose passion was a blessing and a curse. Jan loved food and was a devoted student of the craft, but he also got bored quickly. Still, the two worked together well enough that after eighteen months, Bobby promoted him to
sous-chef
.

The New York fine-dining world is a small one, and Håkan got wind of Jan’s impressive performance down at Mesa. When he needed a new chef to infuse Aquavit’s menu with energy and freshness, he approached Jan. This was a bold move on Håkan’s part, since Jan was only thirty-two and had never run a kitchen before, but Håkan wasn’t afraid to gamble on a guy who radiated talent, and Jan couldn’t resist the chance to be an executive chef. Jan arrived at Aquavit in August, and when I came in five months later, he had already begun to turn things around.

O
N
D
ECEMBER 31, 1994
, I left a New Year’s party in Göteborg before midnight. My mom drove me to the airport, I slept on the plane, and I woke up in New York on January 1. The day was dead, as it probably is all over the world, but I didn’t care: I had three hundred dollars in traveler’s checks in my pocket, and a new life.

I started at Aquavit the next day. The minute I stepped into the basement kitchen, I sensed a new vibe. There were fewer Swedes on staff and the radio was turned up louder. Christer Larsson had been a quiet, calm boss and Jan was the opposite, with his shaved head and high-topped Doc Martens, in the way he rapped his wedding ring against the steel counter whenever he wanted a waiter’s attention, and in how he would call cooks out if they fucked up, yelling and cursing until his voice went hoarse. He loved the limelight, to be sure, and if there was none shining on him, he’d create it. The Swedes—who’d made up at least half of the line before—had been replaced by guys from Mesa Grill, so the influence of Bobby hung around us, a constant reference point for how things should be done.

None of the Mesa guys was more critical to Jan than his
forty-year-old Bronx-born
sous-chef
and right-hand man, Larry Manheim. Larry was a good cook, but he was also like the kitchen’s super: When the garbage needed to go out, Larry got someone to take it out. When the fish guy came by, Larry talked to him. This left Jan free to concentrate on developing new dishes. A growing buzz in the city about Aquavit’s new chef was starting to make everyone on the team hopeful.

I got hired on to join this ragtag band because Håkan had the wisdom to see through the naive bravado of my letter. I was talking shit for sure, but at least my goals were in line with his, my love for the city came through, and, underpinning it all, I had demonstrated my ability to contribute during my internship there the previous year; now that I’d been on the cruise ships and in France, I would be only a stronger worker, and my European training would be something neither Jan nor Larry could offer.

Jan didn’t come from a standard fine-dining point of view, and he didn’t give a shit about France. Instead, he looked to Latin America, the Southwest, and, to a lesser extent, Asia. He didn’t make classical stocks; as a go-to herb, he used cilantro instead of thyme. Avocado was a staple. If the best flavor was to be found in a jar, Jan took the jar. If he could have done Mesa Grill with a Swedish flair, he would have, but the problem was that those flavors were often too far away from each other. There were dishes where you could meld them, like a blue corn pancake with gravlax, but the balance he sought was a challenging one to strike.

What I loved about Jan’s food was that it was relentlessly flavor-driven. He might never have been to France, but the upside of that was that he wasn’t hamstrung by tradition. He relied on his palate, and he was gifted with a brilliant one. He loved the bold chilies of the Southwest, but he also embraced Asian flavors like miso and galangal, and those seemed to be a natural match with Swedish ingredients. Having been to the source countries for those ingredients while on the cruise ships, I often felt like I had a closer understanding than he did of the flavors he played with, but I was not there to challenge Jan,
I was there to work for him. I came in early, worked hard, and kept my mouth shut.

Jan seemed to like me from the start. Maybe it was because I was black; before the end of our first conversation, he made sure to let me know that he was married to an African American woman. I smiled politely, but thought, So what? How is that relevant to me? You wouldn’t believe how often people say things like this. What really impressed me about his wife was not her color, but that she did the window displays for Bergdorf Goodman. I had passed that store almost every day the first time I lived in New York. For a broke but style-conscious guy, Bergdorf’s was a fantasyland, and I knew every inch of those windows, studying the fabrics and colors and silhouettes as they changed from season to season. One day, I’ll go inside, I thought.

Or maybe Jan liked me because he saw I was totally comfortable in my role as a supporter, and he needed support big-time: Jan hadn’t become a name yet, and that made it hard for him to draw experienced cooks. Aside from Larry and Jan and a few of their Mesa Grill friends, Aquavit’s line relied on recent culinary school grads, young guys who might someday be good cooks, but who came to the restaurant with no chops whatsoever.

In my first weeks, Jan regularly invited me out after work to party with him and the rest of the Aquavit crew. “C’mon, Marcus,” he’d say. “Join us for one round.”

I went out a couple of times, while I was still learning people’s names, but I cut that off almost right away. I liked the people I worked with, but I wasn’t into the expensive champagne or the coke that often found their way into late-night escapades. I wanted to be taken seriously, and going out to bars and clubs and strip joints and getting trashed seemed like a good way to end up in an unprofessional situation. Plus, the last thing I needed was to make an ass out of myself in front of my employer. It seemed particularly crazy to me when waiters and cooks would go out with Jan and get wasted. That promised way more downside than upside. If I went out at all, it was with my
old crew of Mes and Sam and Teddy. If I acted the fool with them, so be it. They didn’t sign my paycheck.

I’m glad I drew that line, too. It made everything simpler. I liked where Jan was going with his food, and we talked a lot about how he was going to tweak the menu for spring, what dishes to start introducing in March. My classical training came in handy when we were figuring out how to put a new dish into production, and he was always willing to test a recipe that I’d come up with.

“Show me that duck dish you’ve been talking about,” he said one night after service.

“I’ll have it for you tomorrow,” I said.

The next morning, I plunged a couple of duck breasts in salted water and weighed them down with a plate to keep them submerged, exactly the way my grandmother taught me to cure meat and fish. Six hours later, I took one breast out of the brine and sautéed it in honey and soy. I served a slice to Jan, and he chewed it, closing his eyes and frowning a little as he chewed.

“Nice, but let’s try adding another layer,” he said, and we sautéed the second breast, this time adding in lemongrass and Kaffir lime leaves. It was fantastic.

“This goes on the menu,” Jan said.

Things were going well for all of us. Jan posted every article that mentioned Aquavit on the bulletin board outside the changing room, and the mentions were consistently positive. Valentine’s Day fell on a Tuesday that year, but we were full to the gills, and that put everyone in a good mood. Two days later, Jan came into the kitchen carrying a curly piece of fax paper. “Check it out, man,” he said as he handed me the page. It was an advance copy of a
New York
magazine article about Jan and the restaurant, praising his leadership after only six months at the helm. His charisma had come across to the journalist, too, who dubbed Jan an “MTV-style” chef. Jan was glowing.

We had a big pre-theater seating that Saturday night, and our middle station cook called in sick at the last minute. This was a problem. Middle station is sometimes called the
friturier
or “fry cook,”
and he not only does the frying but also helps out the guys on either side of him, who are usually meat and fish. We were short-staffed so Jan tapped a kid named Allen to take his place. Allen was a culinary student doing an internship with us. He was probably nineteen years old, and on a good day, he would have been the third-level helper over in the
garde manger
station. He probably saw this as his shot, and besides, how could he possibly say no?

“You can’t fuck up,” Jan warned him. “Not tonight.”

“I got it, Chef,” he said, a little too eagerly. “I got it.”

Allen did not have it. He was too young and inexperienced to hold it together, he got swamped, and he went down hard during our early service. He hadn’t done enough prep, and he was running out of supplies while diners started to worry about whether they’d make it to their seats before the curtain went up. Allen lost track of his orders, and if he stopped cooking to catch up on prep, a dice that would take a practiced cook three minutes took Allen fifteen, and that was twelve minutes we didn’t have to spare. The meat and fish cooks stopped asking for Allen’s help, and the rest of us tried to help dig him out, but it was no use. For a good half hour, we couldn’t get meals out the door in any semblance of order. Guests complained; pissed-off waiters brought dishes back that weren’t cooked right. When that seating finally cleared out, and we had a half-hour lull before regular dinner service heated up, Jan exploded.

“What the fuck are you trying to do to me?” he yelled at Allen, who stood in front of the walk-in with his shoulders bowed, trying to take up as little space as possible. Jan kicked at the refrigerator door with one of his Doc Martens. The handle of the walk-in broke off and clattered to the floor. That only unleashed a new torrent of curses, some now in Swedish, capped off by Jan grabbing fistfuls of Allen’s shirt and slamming him into the stainless walk-in door.

“Why doesn’t Chef just fire him?” one of the meat cooks muttered. “It would be a lot less painful for everyone.”

The rest of service was no less disastrous, and when we finally finished breaking down the kitchen for the night, I was more than
ready to clock out. Our chef and the usual crew were headed out for drinks, but I politely declined. I was going to sleep.

“See you Monday,” I said to Jan on my way out.

Sunday was my day off and that Monday, I headed back into work, as usual. Aquavit was across the street from the Peninsula hotel, and on my way in, I said hi to my pal Joey, the hotel doorman.