Yes, Chef (25 page)

When Nils and I found a way to use a new ingredient, the next step was figuring out how to package it. I knew that a word like
galangal
on the menu would make Håkan go bananas, so we had to find a way to hide it. We’d make salmon brushed in miso and wrapped in Thai basil, then serve it with fennel and a broth that used Kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, galangal, and the Japanese citrus fruit called
yuzu
, and on the menu we’d call it crispy salmon with orange broth and grilled fennel. Wasabi was horseradish; ponzu was citrus vinaigrette. The key was presenting these things in accessible, understandable terms, which kept customers in their comfort zone. I had a responsibility to the restaurant not to confuse the diner, but I had an even greater responsibility to upgrade the food. It was a delicate balance.

At the same time I was trying to reimagine the menu, I was developing as a chef, and I had more than my share of failures. You could make a mistake back then without it sinking you. Reviewers always came more than once before they wrote their reviews, and food bloggers—who take the pulse of a restaurant every thirty seconds and sound the death knell if they don’t like the feel of a napkin—didn’t yet exist. One of my more notable disasters was a beef tenderloin dish. Aquavit never was and never will be a steakhouse, so I thought I’d replace the boring, straight-ahead grilled New York strip we offered with something more sophisticated and gentle. I poached the beef in milk and served it with potatoes and sorrel, a vegetable that seemed just right for late spring and early summer. It is a really great dish—if you have an all-star team in the kitchen. We didn’t. To begin with, poaching is a far more delicate process than grilling. It’s easy to miss the mark and end up with dried-out meat. With grilling, the texture and flavor that come from charring over high heat cover up a multitude
of sins. I was aiming for something more feminine, but the process requires close attention and periodic checking—in other words, a little too sophisticated for a busy Saturday night and the twenty-one-year-olds we had on the line.

After a week of failing miserably, Nils and I agreed to go back to the grilled New York strip.

Throughout the summer, we kept banging and pushing. I had so much food in me that I launched six- and seven-course tasting menus, changing them almost every day. It was an ambitious if not slightly crazy idea for an understaffed restaurant, and we kept at it for the better part of a year, until we started to settle into a rotation of dishes we felt worked, and also when I could see that it was unfair to expect the waitstaff to fully understand and represent the food when dishes flew in and out the door so fast. Håkan knew that we couldn’t and shouldn’t sustain so many changes, but he also knew the restaurant needed positive energy. I don’t regret pushing so hard because in the back of my mind, I knew this was my moment. Out of the tragedy of Jan’s death had come an amazing opportunity to communicate the diverse flavors I was so passionate about.

If Nils and I went too far, it was because we were there to kick ass, and anybody who didn’t fall in line either left of his own accord or got pushed out. Håkan put everything he had into supporting our efforts to turn things around, too—he renovated the restaurant’s interior, brought in a restaurant consultant, and hired the leading food PR company in the city, the same people who were representing established chefs like Alfred Portale and Bobby Flay. Between the consultants and the flacks and the press, I felt like I was undergoing interrogation: What’s your philosophy? What’s your food mantra? What’s your vision? Where do you get your inspiration?

“I’m just working,” I wanted to say, but of course that wasn’t enough. I had achieved my dream of becoming the
koksmastare
, the head of the kitchen, and I had to accept the corporate stuff that came with it. Through their efforts, I started to develop ways of talking about my food—that I liked it highly seasoned, that my anchors were
Sweden, France, and the world, and that I wanted to create something
different
.

Word started to get out. Editors from
Food & Wine
came in to eat, and so did the great Chicago-based chef Charlie Trotter, who instantly took a liking to our new direction and became an ally and a friend. Our consultants drew on their deep connections to the American dining scene: They arranged for us to host the meetings of the city’s most prominent wine society, to partner in a charity event for the James Beard House, to participate in a wonderful antihunger project called Taste of the Nation. Håkan dealt with most of the schmoozing, but he’d bring me out to this person or that group to shake hands and say a few words. Gradually, a buzz was building.

No restaurant ever succeeds solely on the talents of its chef. There has to be a good business model, someone keeping careful track of food costs and management. This was where Håkan excelled. Håkan and the consultant, Richard Lavin, who was serving as the restaurant’s general manager, taught me how to be accountable to those points. At our Thursday morning meeting, the three of us would sit in Håkan’s elegantly appointed office and talk about long- and short-term goals. I walked in to the first meeting without a pen and paper, but never made that mistake again. If linen costs were up, we discussed why. If I wanted new plates in the dining room, where was I going to cut back in order to free up that money? If we talked about a challenge we faced, it wasn’t enough for me to say I’d take care of it.
How
was I going to take care of it?

We all pressed on and then, boom, one day in late September we found out we were going to be reviewed by Ruth Reichl, the top critic for
The New York Times
. The night before, a few of us gathered in Håkan’s apartment to watch a local news channel that gave a preview of the review. The minute they announced that Reichl was giving us three stars, Håkan and the rest of my coworkers jumped out of their chairs and shouted. I would have been thrilled with two stars: Three was beyond anyone’s expectations. There were toasts, there was backslapping, there was some fist pumping. I was happy because they were happy, but the import of the review didn’t sink in.

The day after the review came out happened to be one of our wine society dinners. The head of the society stood up to make his opening remarks, and after attending to the society’s announcements, he brought up the review.

“When I met Marcus,” he said, “I knew he would be the one. I knew when I picked this place for our dinners there was magic in the air.”

I thought, This is great; let’s all just get back to work. But the truth was that as soon as the review came out, it
was
magic. I had dreamed of success for so long. I’d left restaurant after restaurant, from Belle Avenue to Victoria to Georges, because I knew I could do better.

But the truth is that I had no idea what success would look like, feel like, taste like.

When you’re the new twenty-four-year-old chef at a relatively low-profile Swedish restaurant and you get a three-star review from
The New York Times
, it’s like taking a small indie movie to Sundance and walking away with all the awards and a major distribution deal to boot. The whole world shifted on its axis. In two days, our reservations doubled. The congratulations cards and calls and flowers were endless. Everything opened up in ways big and small. I used to have to argue with my fish guy over our order, which always came last on his list of deliveries; now we got our fish at 9:00 sharp and it was always the best. I didn’t have to argue with any of my vendors anymore; in fact, they began to send new products for me to try, gratis. I was flooded with invitations to all sorts of cooking events and for the best tables at restaurants. We started to get calls from Sweden, from cooks who wanted to come over to work. Wow, I thought. This is the way it is supposed to be.

“
V
ART DU VILL Å
KA,” HÅKAN SAID. ANYWHERE YOU WANT TO GO
.

Håkan decided we should celebrate our three-star review in proper fashion, so he was taking me out for dinner, along with Adam, Aquavit’s manager. Aside from my grandmother, I’ve never met anyone who kept a tighter rein on the purse strings than Håkan, but he would never pinch pennies when it came to a great meal. In the years to come, we would fly around the world together just to try out restaurants. We made special trips to Paris, eating at Ducasse and Taillevent, and we flew to Spain to try the thirty-five-course tasting menu at El Bulli, the temple of molecular gastronomy.

I was still getting used to my position as head chef, so I must have looked uncertain when he asked me to pick the place.

“I mean it,” he said. “This deserves the best.”

I chose Lespinasse, the four-star restaurant in the St. Regis hotel that I’d been reading about for some time. It was helmed by Gray Kunz, who was raised in Singapore by an Irish mother and a Swiss father. Kunz was my kind of chef: He made his mark by chasing flavors, by not only working with a broad palette of ingredients that spoke to his global citizen upbringing, but knowing the properties of each one intimately and combining them in fresh ways.

As much as I looked forward to the meal, for me, the evening presented several problems, the first being that I was going out with my well-dressed colleague and boss to the top restaurant in the city and I didn’t own a suit. As a matter of fact, I didn’t own a single pair of pants other than jeans. I went out and bought some black pants. In the back of my closet, I had a greenish jacket that would probably do, and a white shirt that would be OK if I ironed it and never took the jacket off. The shoes I would have to borrow.

At 7:25 that night, Adam, Håkan, and I walked through the doors of the St. Regis, the flagship in a fleet of luxury hotels that had been built by one of the Astors. The Astor family came as close to local royalty as New York would ever know, and the hotel, while designed to make guests feel at home, was palatially appointed, down to the eagle-topped gilt-and-glass mailbox mounted to the wall of the lobby.

We made our way to the bar, an underlit and opulent space that would have made the king of Sweden uncomfortable, much less a
blatte
Swede in borrowed shoes. Håkan and Adam ordered dry martinis on the rocks, so I did, too. I took a big swig and began to cough. Håkan and Adam laughed; it was obvious I’d never had a martini before. I let the ice melt a bit before taking a second, more cautious sip, only to confirm that I’d never be ordering a martini again.

I hated the fussy decor and I was clearly not cut out for cocktails, but I will never forget that dinner. Never. The food that came out of the kitchen that night was all classical—salmon, filet mignon, duck—but the flavors, the spices, and the approach were unlike anything I’d had before. Kunz’s personal experience of East-meets-West showed up in his use of the Asian flavorings I was coming to love, the galangal
and lemongrass and red curry, but he wrapped them in the elegance of French traditions. In the kitchen, Kunz’s bench was deep, full of young chefs who would make names for themselves in the near future: He had Troy Dupuy as his executive
sous-chef
, along with Rocco DiSpirito, Floyd Cardoz, and Andrew Carmellini. It was like a nuclear reactor of talent, and it produced an unbelievable dining experience: French wines, French service, but the flavors of Singapore. I said to myself: That’s it. I can live without the mausoleum decor, but
this
is the direction I want to go.

At the end of the meal, we were invited to the back of the house. The kitchen was spotless, as if an army of workers cleaned it with toothbrushes every night, and the equipment was even more state of the art than Victoria Jungfrau’s. Håkan estimated later that we were looking at a $4 million job, if you added together renovation and equipment. It was so clean it sparkled; the room was literally humming. Everyone worked with an intensity that was completely self-contained.

As I walked down the center aisle, with the grill on my right and the salad station on my left, I was reminded of the kitchen tours at Georges Blanc. There, I had kept my eyes lowered at all times. Now, I could look everywhere, at everyone. We were shown everything, including the walk-ins and the pantry. This was a ritual that dated back to the way Michelin judges would tour a place that they were evaluating. A great restaurant should be proud to show what happened behind its doors, and clearly, Lespinasse was proud.

T
O SPEND THE EVENING
eating a meal worth thousands at Lespinasse and then head back to a seedy rent-controlled apartment on the West Side was very much my life. People always talked about how my neighborhood, Hell’s Kitchen, was going to be the next hot area, but when I lived there, the streets were still full of junkies and hookers. I didn’t have a doorman at the entrance to my building, but I did have a heroin addict who hung out, day and night. You heard fights in the
parking lot across the street, and of course wherever there are prostitutes and addicts, you’re going to find pimps, pushers, and crime; but for the most part, if I didn’t mess with them, they didn’t mess with me.

Friends from Sweden would come to stay—the apartment turned into more or less a hostel for
blattes
—and they would freak out about the street scene.

“Just keep moving,” I’d tell them. “Just leave it alone.”

The people on the street weren’t the only ones running scams. I shared that apartment with Magnus, the Swedish masseuse I’d lived with when I first came to New York. He was a great roommate, and the only reason we went our separate ways was that he wanted to move in with Jake, his American boyfriend. This was a problem for Magnus, because he was in the United States on a student visa. His solution: Marry Jake’s sister. In every circle I belonged to, from my
blatte
buddies to the restaurant crew, there was always some kind of hustle going, from buying a green card off the street to paying a year’s rent up front, and in cash, to get around not having a bank account or Social Security number. None of us judged each other; we were all hardworking guys doing what we needed to do.