Yes, Chef (26 page)

I was one of the lucky ones. I was an immigrant, first of all, here by choice and not a refugee escaping persecution. Not only was I here by choice, but Håkan was sponsoring my immigration process, and because I had a particular professional talent, as a Swedish chef coming to work in a Swedish restaurant, I moved to the front of the line in terms of processing citizenship. Still, I’d have to wait more than a year for the papers to go through, during which time I wasn’t allowed to leave the United States, but my parents supported me and we agreed that missing a few holidays at home seemed like a small price to pay. Even though my own situation was relatively stable, many of my friends were on edge.

I remember going up to the Bronx late one night with a few of the African guys I’d met through Central Park soccer. One of them had arranged to pay $200 for a fake green card, and he’d gotten a call that it was ready for pickup. Three of us hopped on the Seventh Avenue
express train and rode up into the Bronx to Grand Concourse, where we switched to another train. When we got out, it was about ten p.m., and we followed directions that led us to a small bodega with a red sign and blazing yellow light bulbs outside. The guy who had business to conduct went into a back room, and I hung by the counter, where a middle-aged Puerto Rican woman with hair pulled back into a ponytail perched on a stool, flipping through a Spanish-language version of the
National Enquirer
.

At the end of the counter sat a glass hot case, with three shelves inside. The top shelf held a tray of half-moon-shaped pastries.

“Excuse me,” I said to the woman. I pointed to the turnovers and raised my eyebrows.

“Empanadillas,”
she said. Mini beef turnovers.

The second shelf had a tray of what looked like fried skin. I pointed at them.

“Chicharrones,”
she said. Fried pork rinds.

The bottom shelf held a slow-roasted pork shoulder that had clearly been heavily rubbed with spices. Its skin was crispy and big chunks of it had been hacked off and sat next to it, the flesh looking tender enough to fall apart in your mouth.

“Pernil,”
she said. Roasted suckling pork.

“Por favor,”
I said, nodding at the roast. I dug into my pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill, and handed it over. She pulled out a Styrofoam container and, with a fork, began poking through the tray. From what I could figure, she was making me an assortment, equal parts crunchy skin and interior flesh, some fatty parts, some lean. I saw streaks of spices that had been pushed way down deep into the flesh. When the woman finished her careful selection, she reached for a bag.

“No, no,” I said, and pantomimed raising a fork to my mouth. For the first time, she smiled, and she rifled through a gray tub behind her, pulling out a white plastic fork.

Who knows how long that roast had been sitting in the warming case? I didn’t care. The skin still crackled between my teeth. The
meat, tender and moist, fell apart in my mouth, and I instinctively started to break down the components of the flavors involved. Garlic, of course, right up there in the front. Cilantro, peppers, tomatoes, but what else?

“Que?”
I said, pointing to the little deposits of seasonings that had sunk into crevices in the skin.

“Sofrito,”
she answered, then pointed to herself, identifying herself as the chef.
“Mi sofrito.”

T
HE YEAR THAT FOLLOWED
the
Times
review was full of learning curves, none steeper than figuring out how to staff a kitchen team. I didn’t have a following like David Bouley or Daniel Boulud; Culinary Institute of America grads weren’t lining up outside my door, begging to work at Aquavit. No one was lining up outside my door, actually. On top of that, the pace Nils and I set was too much for some of the employees already in-house, and every Friday for six months, it seemed like I had to fire someone who couldn’t keep up. One ethnically stereotypical but true fact: I never had to fire any of the Latinos on my crew; they worked harder than I did.

The guys I booted from my kitchen were mostly the entitled culinary school types who thought they could pick and choose their tasks. One exception was a kid named Paulie from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He was an Italian American kid, big gold jewelry, Brooklyn accent, cursing in Italian, the whole central casting deal. But Paulie had an enormous love for food. He always stayed focused; when everybody else went down, he stayed afloat. Paulie was ready to work for me every day of the week and he hinted that he preferred the life of a restaurant kitchen to, as he put it, “the family business.”

“If I’m not working here,” he told me after volunteering for two double shifts in a row, “then I just have to go work in my uncle’s butcher shop, which doesn’t sell much meat, if you know what I mean.”

Another kid I respected was from Saint Lucia, a guy named Nelly.
More than one of Nelly’s brothers were drug dealers, but Nelly was clean, and he worked his ass off. For these guys, working in a kitchen was a relief, a refuge. I understood. I had never been a boy from the hood, but I’d found life in Göteborg to be stifling in its own way. Anyplace where people do exactly as their fathers and brothers have done, it’s hard to make your own way.

Over time, more Swedes came to work for us, and they almost never had an issue when it came to their work ethic. They were talented chefs and hungry to go beyond the narrow confines of Sweden’s fine-dining world, so they were game for whatever Nils and I asked. Like me, a number were the children of academics, but where many of them felt they were breaking the mold of their parents, I felt like I was simply trying to live up to being the man my father was, a man who pursued his deepest passion. Only one of the
Svenskar
was a bad apple, a kid from Stockholm who’d come across the Atlantic in search of the world’s biggest party. I followed Paul Giggs’s example and tossed him right away. The rest aspired to make something of themselves, to turn this experience to their advantage once they got home. Sure enough, a number of those guys have gone on to have great careers all over the world, starting restaurants in Sweden and cooking at great hotels throughout Europe.

Our crew took shape as a band of misfits who probably wouldn’t have fit in anywhere else. That, in itself, made us tight.

B
Y THE MIDDLE OF THE FOLLOWING SUMMER
, I was starting to feel pretty well established. Our staff was solid, business was good. Paulie had worked super hard for me over the last six months, and I wanted to reward him by sending him out to
stage. Stages
are one of my favorite traditions in the restaurant world. First of all, half of who we are as chefs has to do with the chefs who came before us. So the
stage
shows respect for wisdom. Second, the fact that if you do well for your chef he’ll send you away still strikes me as one of the most generous professional acts I’ve heard of. If you were at a law firm and they wanted
to reward you, they’d probably give you a bonus or some time off. But in cooking, serious cooks understand that there’s nothing more valuable than the chance to learn something new.

“How would you like to spend some time working for Bobby Flay?” I asked Paulie.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he answered.

I took that as a yes.

I called up Bobby and told him I had a young guy who was really good; would it be OK for him to spend a week in Bobby’s kitchen?

“Let me think about it,” Bobby said. “I’ll get back to you.”

A few days later, I got his answer. “No.”

I hung up the phone in shock. I thought I had pull. I had no pull. Not only did I not have pull, but I had to go back to Paulie and explain how much pull I didn’t have. It took me a long time to realize that a great review from Ruth Reichl had signaled only that I was a talent to watch. In order to be a fixture on the New York dining scene, to be able to call someone like Bobby Flay and ask him for a favor, I needed to show I had staying power. Sure enough, a year later, when Felicia Lee wrote a nice piece about me and my food for
The New York Times
, Bobby was the first to call and congratulate me. I was solidly on the scene now, he said. Only then did other chefs begin to approach me at events—including Patrick Clark, who’d always seemed to steer away from me before the article appeared—but Bobby had led the pack.

“You’re here, man,” he said. “You’re here to stay.”

I’ve gotten to know Bobby really well since then, and he is one of the coolest, best chefs in New York. He is honest about his food, takes a lot of pleasure from his work, and has been extremely helpful in guiding my career. I can’t fault him for thinking, back then, that I hadn’t earned the right to ask what I was asking for.

This was before Las Vegas had its mega–restaurant boom, where regional chefs could supersize their efforts in the Nevada desert with corporate backing and high-rolling customers. All Bobby had were a couple of restaurants in Manhattan. All David Bouley had was his
place in TriBeCa. I’m not saying this to minimize their talents; I’m just pointing out that the world was smaller and, in some ways, the competition was fiercer. Making it in New York was The Shit. Capital
T
, capital
S
. And I had to work my way up, just like everybody else.

I’d overreached with Bobby, but I’d made Paulie a promise and I intended to make good on it. I had no choice but to throw a Hail Mary: Georges Blanc. I wrote a letter, sent it off, and to my amazement, they said yes. Small problem: Paulie’s dad didn’t want him to go. He wasn’t about to cough up the three thousand dollars so his son could go poach chicken. So I took matters into my own hands: I decided to host a fundraiser. I took over an Ethiopian place I’d been to a bunch of times and put on a forty-dollar tasting dinner: roasted duck salad with sweet potatoes; jam and hazelnut vinaigrette; crispy salmon with orange roasted fennel and purple spinach; and for dessert, warm chocolate cake with balsamic sorbet and candied pecans. I won’t say I leveraged my boss status to get Aquavit staff to come, but I did
strongly
encourage attendance. The house was packed, and we got Paulie’s money for him.

O
N
A
UGUST 11, 1996, MY FATHER
, L
ENNART
S
AMUELSSON, PASSED AWAY
. He was at home in Göteborg; I was at work in New York. He’d been struggling with the aftermath of a stroke, but then he took a sudden turn and was gone. I couldn’t leave the States to go to his funeral without jeopardizing my immigration status. My mother said she understood, my sisters said they understood, but honestly, it would take me years to say that I understood the choice I made. All I know is that I did what, by now, came naturally: I crammed my grief and fear into a little box and closed it up until I was ready to deal. There was no time, I told myself, to make a meal out of this misery. Nothing could get in the way of my cooking.

That night, I pulled out a copy of the letter my father had written, before he knew me, to the adoption agency: