Yes, Chef (24 page)

“Yo, Marcus,” he said as I passed by. “I heard there was an accident at Aquavit.”

I didn’t pay him much attention, went in the front doors, and signed in. Two cooks came out of the service elevator, heading for the exit—the opposite direction from where they should have been going.

“Where are you clowns headed?” I asked.

“Jan died, man. The restaurant’s closed.”

Died? The words didn’t sink in. I kept moving.

I got in the elevator, went down one flight, and walked numbly through the dining room. The seven-story atrium was as beautiful as ever, with water purring down a sculpted copper surface against one wall and a giant mobile suspended above, a colorful smattering of kites borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art. Once I stepped into the subbasement, I saw Adam, the restaurant manager and one of Jan’s closest friends, sitting on a stool, alone. Adam never sat still, but there he was, staring blankly, holding a cup of coffee in both hands but not drinking it, tears running down his cheeks. Then I got it. Jan was gone.

“V
I SITTER ALLA I EN KNEPIG PLATS HÄR,”
H
ÅKAN SAID AS THE TWO OF
us sat in the empty restaurant. We are all in a difficult place here. It was only late afternoon, but grief and winter’s dark blanketed the room. Someone had brought us a basket of crispbread and a ramekin filled with caviar spread. Håkan dipped a knife into the putty-colored roe and smeared it across a cracker, then left it on his plate, untouched. I pulled the napkin from the place setting in front of me, folding it and refolding it.

Håkan didn’t waste words: No one in-house was in a position to take over. It was enough to have gambled on Jan, a thirty-two-year-old first-timer, so Håkan would be going to Sweden in search of someone to fill the position. Could I deal with a new boss?

“Yes.”

In the meantime, Larry was going to hold down the fort. He was older, and a natural manager. As for me: Jan had come to Håkan only a few days before his death to say he wanted me to become his
sous-chef
. They hadn’t gotten around to telling me, but now, here it was. I could take the promotion, but only if I were willing to take marching orders from Larry.

“No problem.”

We reopened the next day. Larry, who was probably Jan’s best friend, tried his hardest to set aside his feelings and work as if nothing had happened. He kept the team together by writing up the shift schedule, ordering the food, and showing everyone that it was OK to keep pushing forward. For the first couple of days after Jan’s death, the rest of us were in shock, distracted, going through the motions. The food suffered.

“Get your shit together!” Larry shouted. “We’ve got people to feed.”

I honestly believe the restaurant wouldn’t have survived if Larry hadn’t stepped up and taken charge. He was so steady that Håkan worried he was in some kind of unhealthy pattern of denial, and suggested he take a few days off so he wouldn’t crash and burn. Larry brushed off Håkan’s suggestion, reminding him that when you come from a rough neighborhood like he had, tragedies happened.

“Listen,” Larry said. “Most of my friends from growing up are dead or died when we were kids. This is bad, but I’ve been through it before. I need to keep working.”

Larry was a rock, but there was no way to completely smooth over the loss of his talented, charismatic friend. Without Jan at the helm, the other Mesa guys started heading back to Bobby’s kitchens—slowly at first, then like rats fleeing a sinking ship. We lost people every week, and we didn’t have the pull in the job-hunting market to bring in anyone new. The staff grew leaner and leaner, and we eventually turned every dishwasher and porter we had into a line cook. I spent a lot of time teaching people how to chop onions without hurting themselves.

To any visitor passing through over those next couple of months, it would have looked like Larry was running the show with me as his right hand. But there were three of us heading up the kitchen, the third person being the ghost of Jan. We’d be working on the spring menu or trying to streamline the workflow, and somebody would always bring him into the discussion.

“But Jan would never …”

“I don’t think that’s where Jan was going.… ”

“Jan didn’t really like …”

Larry ran the show and talked to the press and the fish guy and the dishwashers; I worked on the menu and filled in wherever he needed me to. We fell into a good groove, but even though I respected him tremendously, I sometimes felt he didn’t understand Swedish cuisine. In fact, he’d never been to Sweden, which made it hard to come up with new dishes. Larry would go on years later to have a great career in Las Vegas, but it wouldn’t be in a Swedish place. Sweden wasn’t in his soul.

Larry’s reference point was New York, and after a month or so, it was clear he was headed back to work for his fellow born-and-bred New Yorker, Bobby Flay. Larry said he’d stick with us until Håkan found the new guy, but then he would be gone. I could have left, too, but I didn’t want to quit on a place that had been so good to me. Plus, what would I go back to? I didn’t have a green card yet, so I would have had to head back to Sweden. I was here, why not try to make it work? Håkan had tremendous business smarts and a huge passion for the restaurant, and I wanted to see who he came up with to fill Jan’s spot. I kept my nose to the grindstone, working with the younger cooks, developing a menu with Larry, and solving problems as they came up.

Around the end of April, Larry decided he couldn’t wait any longer, and officially left to go back to work for Bobby. Håkan still hadn’t found Jan’s replacement.

“Can you keep it together for another month?” Håkan asked. “Even without Larry?”

“Yes,” I said, not knowing how in the hell I would live up to that
answer. Håkan flew over to Sweden, Larry left, and I kept the kitchen going, counting heavily on two young guys, Nicholas and another Marcus. Somehow, we kept the walls from crashing down around us.

When Håkan got back, he called me into his office.

“Have you found your chef?” I asked.

“I believe I have.”

“Who is it?”

“You, Marcus. I want you to be the new executive chef of Aquavit.”

W
E NEVER TALKED ABOUT
it with the press but Jan’s death was drug related. He had had a heart attack and he was only thirty-two years old. In many New York restaurant kitchens, the nineties still felt very much like the eighties. Jan’s crew partied hard.

In France and Switzerland, we went out drinking after work, but nothing like what these guys did. Giggs wouldn’t have tolerated us not being clear the next day. But with Jan and some of the people he hired, the late nights and drugs brought with it the usual tolls: mood swings, spotty attendance, forgetfulness; sometimes a guy would totally blank on the specials. So I had to not only rebuild the kitchen but send a message that Aquavit was no longer a party kitchen.

My one condition for accepting the job was that I be allowed to hire the
sous-chef
of my choice. I took inventory of everyone I’d ever worked with, thought about where they were and how well they’d blend into the somewhat chaotic picture at Aquavit. In the end, there was only one person who fit the bill: a Swede named Nils Norén. He was a couple of years older than I and an up-and-coming chef in Stockholm. He worked at an excellent restaurant called KB, the first Swedish restaurant ever to earn a Michelin
macaron
. Nils had come to
stage
at Aquavit earlier that year, and in the two weeks he spent in New York, we developed an unusually good rapport; I knew we’d be able to work together. We not only had Sweden in common, we were both classically trained, so Nils understood how to use France as a
reference point but not the end game. We also shared a frustration with the Swedish attitude toward fine dining, which generally hadn’t opened up much beyond traditional French and traditional Swedish.

A
stage
usually entails observation and schlepping, but Aquavit was short-staffed, so Jan put Nils on the middle station right across from me while I held down the fish station. That proximity gave us a chance to observe each other under pressure. Nils was controlled and specific in his work habits and he was extremely dedicated, but he was also a free spirit; he listened to reggae and had traveled to many places, including Asia and South Africa. That balance struck a chord with me, so as soon as Håkan gave me the thumbs-up, I placed the call. I expected Nils to give a measured, Swedish response, to thank me and tell me he’d consider the offer and get back to me shortly, but he said just one word.

“Absolutely.”

It was my first hire and it turned out to be a great one; we worked together for ten years. We never once fought. Nils shared my desire to bring new flavors into the restaurant, and yet we both knew we had to do it without freaking out Håkan or the regular customer base. One of the burdens of taking over the kitchen was that Aquavit was known for many classic Swedish dishes: Herring, gravlax, and meatballs were never going to come off the menu. I hadn’t cooked this kind of classic Swedish cuisine since Belle Avenue, and as I spent more time with these dishes, my fondness for them returned. I also felt a need to bring them up-to-date.

The liberation of being in New York was that the customers who made up our base didn’t have extensive knowledge of traditional Swedish food—they just knew what they liked. I saw that as my opportunity to turn the menu around. I could make the herring less salty; I could add a peppery heat to the smoked salmon; and even in the case of the
hovmästarsås
—a sweet dill mustard sauce, served with gravlax, that was almost a religion in Sweden—I made adjustments, aiming for a deeper, nuttier flavor. Adding actual nuts would have been costly and introduced textural challenges, so I used brewed
espresso instead. I started testing out the sauce in dining-room specials, and the response was strong. Eventually, it became the sauce we used for both herring and gravlax. Later, I even took away the chopped dill that had always been a given on the plate. I felt it was a cliché.

As excited as I was about bringing the restaurant back up to its past status, I knew I couldn’t fix everything at once. There were two kitchens to manage: for the upstairs café, which had a heavy flow at lunch, and for the dining room, which drew more covers at dinner. For the time being, I decided to leave the café alone. I shifted most of the Swedish cooks upstairs because they knew how to do the home cooking that the café was known for and they could manage its day-to-day operations.

As for the dining room, Nils and I poured all our creative energy into developing new dishes. I started by looking through my old food journals, remembering flavors and pairings and preparations from everywhere I’d ever worked, everywhere I’d ever been: I wanted to find ways to incorporate the efficiencies of Switzerland, the soulfulness of Austria, the reverence for ingredients I learned in France, but I wanted to do it with a Swedish accent. The key was to keep seafood at the front and center of the menu. I kept some of Jan’s dishes, like his lobster wrapped in pear slices, and began adding my own as soon as I could develop, test, and refine them. We fell into a routine of sitting down after lunch, talking through new ideas and then splitting up to go and work on them individually. Every idea was run through a gauntlet—not only did we talk about how it would taste, but we broke it down into distinct components: How would it look? What was the ideal temperature to serve it at? What kind of mouthfeel did we want it to have?

We both looked beyond food for our inspiration, which was key. I might build a recipe on the idea of being on a boat off the shores of Smögen; Nils would read a book about architecture and start out a concept based on shape. Each of us would take the lead on certain dishes; others were pure collaboration. Nils came up with an amazing counterpoint to our salty, spicy fish dishes: a goat cheese parfait. I
rolled salmon in parchment paper and served that with an orange-fennel broth. I made a salmon tartare using a barely smoked salmon, then served it with crispbread and a mustard we’d created. I knew right away I wanted to do a tomato soup with crab at its center. So I slow roasted tomatoes in salt, sugar, black pepper, and garlic, then filled each tomato with crab salad and placed that in the center of a low flat bowl that held a ladleful of a gingery tomato soup that had the citrus notes of lemongrass. I just knew these flavors would work together, and they did.

Nils and I used every spare moment to keep pushing into new territory, always with flavor in mind. For example, once I’d toppled the
hovmästarsås
god, the door was open for me to try more. From my Rollerblading adventures, I knew which Pakistani and Indian stores on Twenty-seventh and Lex would have mustard oil or purple and black mustard seeds. If I wanted to make a jackfruit sorbet, I’d take the D train down to Grand Street, do a lightning shop, then zip back up to the restaurant, carrying everything in my backpack. I’d try whatever caught my eye; because these weren’t fancy French ingredients, I never ran into cost problems. Bitter melon looked like a cross between okra and cucumber, but it was most definitely neither; lychee fruit, when peeled, looked like translucent eggs; sliced lotus root reminded me of the doilies
Mormor
put on the back of chairs to protect the upholstery. Some things I recognized from a market in Singapore or a stand in Hong Kong, but when it came to more mysterious items, I’d buy anything once, as soon as I’d established from the seller that it wasn’t going to kill me.

Every time I went down to Chinatown, especially in the early morning, the beauty and insanity of the neighborhood seduced me. In summer, the streets were already packed and smelly, even though the sidewalks were freshly hosed down. At a dim sum cart I could buy five cakes for a dollar. At a fish stand, I’d get giant prawns. I could see old people in their street clothes tucked into pocket parks doing tai chi, following the syrupy slow motions of a guy with a sword in his hand, red tassels hanging from its handle. With most of my interactions,
there was no common spoken language, and definitely no fabulousness. It felt direct and honest: You pointed, you paid, you stuffed your purchase into your bag, and you moved on. I’d go back uptown and try making jackfruit sorbet one week, then the next week experiment with wonton wrappers. Then and still, Chinatown was a tremendous source of inspiration.