Yes, Chef (7 page)

I knew I was good, and with each winning match it became easier to envision a life in soccer, with GAIS as a launching pad to a pro career. I practiced every hour that I wasn’t doing homework or chores. I honed every move, not just my own. I borrowed the latest soccer magazines from Mats (my father believed in only newspapers and proper books) and, alone in my room, I devoured them.

In those days, there were three posters on my bedroom wall: Michael Jackson, the king and queen of Sweden (thanks, Mom), and Pelé, the man who had changed the game. I spent hours imagining myself on the field as a little Pelé, dribbling down fields in Barcelona and London, outmaneuvering world-class players as I drove to the goal, winning the World Cup with a header that would be played and replayed in slow motion on sports channels for years to come. Soccer was going to be more than my career. It would be the thing that got me out of Gburg. With soccer, I would get to see the world.

B
Y THE TIME
I
TURNED SIXTEEN
, I had been on GAIS for four years. My life had taken on a steady, comforting routine: seven months of soccer, three months of school in which I would spend the majority of my time thinking about soccer, and two summer months in Smögen, fishing with my dad and my uncles, practicing my moves, seeing the green and black GAIS jersey in the scales of every beautiful fish.

At the start of our fifth season, Mats and I went to see the new team roster posted on the wall outside of the coach’s office. We wanted to suss out the competition: Who were the new kids; who might be competing for our spots in the starting lineup? We were also looking to see whom the coach had axed: We wished nothing but the worst for the lazy bums who were finally getting their comeuppance for skipping one too many practices.

We looked at the list. There was Carestam, up toward the top of the alphabetized page. But when we got to the S’s, there was no Samuelsson. I looked again. Not there. My brain refused to process what was clearly visible in front of me. For a few moments, I just kept looking at the list, reciting the alphabet in my head. Q, R, S, T.
Where was I?
My name wasn’t there, no matter how many times I looked. It sounds melodramatic to say it, but I simply couldn’t imagine that there was no place for me on this team, with my friends, in the game that was my world.

I slammed my fist into the bulletin board, as Mats stood by, toeing the ground with a tip of one sneaker, averting his eyes.

“Javla skit!”
I screamed.
“Skit! Skit! Skit!”
Holy shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

The office door opened and Coach Lars stuck his head out to see what was up.

“Come inside, Samuelsson,” he said. “Carestam, wait here.”

I followed Lars into his office and he shut the door behind us. I sank into the chair across from his desk, which was scattered with the playbooks and lineups and photocopied schedules that represented all that had been taken away from me. I took deep breaths and tried to keep my hands from trembling.

“Marcus,” he said. “I know this is disappointing. You’re a great player, but you’re too small. The other sixteen-year-olds outweigh you by forty or fifty pounds, some of them more. You should keep playing, but it can’t be with us. Sorry.”

It was the first time in my life that I had ever been fired, and I didn’t even see it coming. I worked hard, I didn’t flaunt the rules, I was diligent, I was disciplined, I was
good
. I was also out. Cut from the team. The only career path I’d ever considered for myself was now closed.

Although I would continue to play soccer in a smaller, lesser league, even working with a special coach to bridge that size and strength gap, eventually I had to let the dream go. And when I did, food entered my life fully.

Maybe one of the reasons that I come on so hard in the food game is that I’ve been cut once before. I know what it’s like to see your name on the list year after year, and I know the heartbreak that comes the day you look up and your name is no longer on that list. Even now, all these years after GAIS let me go, I sometimes think of myself more as a failed soccer player than as an accomplished chef.

W
ITH A SOCCER CAREER OFF THE TABLE
, I
DECIDED TO APPLY TO A VOCATIONAL
high school. Sweden’s school system was compulsory only until ninth grade, at which point many kids went on to two or three more years of gymnasium, specialized high schools meant to equip you for either a job or university.

As I considered my options, I began to play around with the idea of being a chef. Cooking was something I loved and was good at. At fifteen, I applied for and was accepted into Ester Mosesson, a school where creative types from all over Gburg studied subjects like cooking, fashion, and graphic design. It was like a
Saturday Night Live
sketch of a European high school of the performing arts: Instead of
bursting into song or dancing on the cafeteria tables, students at Mosesson sketched intensely and learned to make flawless soufflés.

I had never excelled in academics the way my father had, so here was a curriculum that I could finally get excited about. My only formal classes were in Swedish and English—I loved languages, so that was always fun. There was a mandatory PE program, which consisted mostly of easy soccer scrimmages—again, fun. The rest of the day was spent cooking. By this point, I’d been around food and cooking for so long that I couldn’t remember
not
knowing my way around a kitchen. I walked into the class feeling more than confident. On the third day, one of our instructors was running through basic knife skills for prepping vegetables. “Soon enough,” he promised, “you’ll dream about chopping onions.”

The teacher’s pattern was to demonstrate—from julienne to chiffonade—then have a student take his place at the cutting board and attempt to imitate. I held back at first, curious to see how much experience my new classmates had. Even under close supervision, blood was drawn. The kitchen, we quickly learned, was no place for the clumsy or distracted.

After a brief demonstration of how to cut a classic batonnet—a squared-off oversize matchstick—a kid named Martin got a turn at the chopping board. The teacher handed over his knife, and Martin said nothing. He just took the knife and, in one fluid motion, topped and tailed the potato, cutting off the rounded ends and edges so that he had a rectangular block. He sliced the block into quarter-inch-thick slabs, then stacked the slabs in piles of three and sliced them again, lengthwise.

The group fell silent, admiring the perfectly uniform pile of potato sticks. Martin took a towel from a peg below the counter and wiped down the knife blade.

“Did everybody see that?” our teacher asked.

My grandmother had been such a thorough and patient teacher that I came into school with basic techniques, far beyond most of the kids in my class. I knew how to hold a knife. I knew how to fillet a fish.
I knew how to sauté meat in a cast iron pan over high heat to produce a nice crust. But I could see in that mound of potatoes that Martin knew everything I knew, and more. Cooking was incorporated into his body like pure muscle memory, the same way I dribbled a soccer ball, the way the rest of us walked and breathed. From that day on, as I saw it, there were only two students in the entire school—me and Martin. He was the one to beat and I was the one to do it.

One of our instructors was a young Brit named John Morris. His job was to teach us how to grill, fry, sauté, and poach, all using French techniques and terminology, of course. Unlike most of our other teachers, he insisted we call him Chef John, as if we were in a professional kitchen. Chef John spoke in Swenglish, starting each class in polite Swedish and gradually slipping, as the day ground on, into a string of English curse words. He’d started off in his hometown pub, cleaning chickens and cooking liver. Then he moved to London and worked in the kitchen of the opulent Dorchester hotel, where he was promoted to
chef de partie
and cooked for the likes of Queen Elizabeth and Jimmy Carter. If he hadn’t met a Swedish girl in a bar, he said, he’d still be there. But that girl had become his wife, and love had led him to Gburg.

Chef John did not have an easy task. Try demonstrating the difference between simmering and poaching on an old government-issue stove whose gas line delivered its fuel in uneven hiccups. In a professional kitchen, if a pot burns one too many times, you throw it away. At Mosesson, if teachers had discarded every utensil that had been burned one too many times, we’d have had nothing left.

Chef John’s biggest obstacles, however, were his students.

“How do you know if the oil is the right temperature?” a kid named Niklas asked, interrupting Chef John’s lesson on deep-frying. It was a straightforward question, but Niklas was the type of entitled kid who thought he was funnier than he actually was. I could tell by the smirk on his face that he was up to something.

Chef John answered him straight. “There are three ways to tell.
One, drop in a couple of test fries. If they float up to the surface and start to bubble, and if you can hear a sizzle, then the oil’s hot.”

“I don’t want to lose a fry,” Niklas moaned dramatically. “I looooove my fries.”

A few scattered snickers rippled through the room.

“The second way is to simply watch the time,” Chef John continued. “If you give it fifteen minutes and then use a thermometer, it should read 360 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Then he turned to Nik, who stood on the other side of the vat of the hot oil. “Of course, you can always put your bloody finger in the fryer.”

Nik, being more moron than comedian, chose this method. His finger wasn’t in the fryer for more than a second before he began screaming, a shocked look on his face as if he hadn’t actually expected it to hurt. Chef John was screaming, too. “You stupid fucking bastard!” he said. “Why the hell did you put your fucking finger in there? Have you lost your mind?”

Niklas quit the program a couple of months later, but I learned an invaluable lesson from his stupidity. The kitchen is a dangerous place and if you want to stay safe, you’ve got to not only watch your own back, you’ve got to keep your eye on all the weak links.

I
N ANY PROFESSIONAL KITCHEN
, the lower-ranked staff responds to any request from above with military-like respect. “Yes, chef” is what I was taught to say whether he or she asks for a side of beef or your head on a platter. Yes, chef. Yes, chef. Yes, chef. I had failed at soccer and the failure made me humble and determined. At Mosesson, I was determined to be the best. Soon I was serving up not only classic three-course Swedish smorgasbords but damn good renditions of coq au vin, steak au poivre, and bouillabaisse.

Halfway through the first term, my class started working in the restaurant school, cooking for customers. Most of the time, our lunch
menu was pure Sweden: plates of gravlax with boiled potatoes and herring in all manner of sauces—mustard and dill, cream, curry, and 1-2-3 with slivered onions. We also prepared contemporary classics like toast Skagen: a sautéed round of bread topped with shrimp salad, finished with a spoonful of whitefish roe. Dinner, on the other hand, was typically French, which was considered an elegant cut above homey Swedish fare: sole meunière or duck a l’orange.

We worked in rotating shifts, so I might be a waiter for three weeks, then a dishwasher, then a line cook. I was a decent waiter and I knew it was useful to see how customers behaved in the front of the house, how they ordered, and how they regarded their meal once it was served, but I never felt at home in the front like I did in the back. The back of the house was where the real action, the real creativity, was. Even with only forty seats in the restaurant, and even if only half of them were filled, the kitchen was guaranteed to be humming at a pitch that bordered on chaos. And it was that organized chaos that I loved. I still do.

At restaurant school, the kitchen hierarchy was structured like most professional kitchens—using the classic French
brigade de cuisine
. Each
chef de partie
was assigned a distinct task—meat, fish, salads—and one person was designated the expediter, who organized and dispensed orders as they came in from the dining room.

Although teamwork systems had been around in professional kitchens since the Middle Ages, it was the now legendary French chef Georges Auguste Escoffier who codified it and put it all down on paper at the beginning of the twentieth century in his classic book,
Le Guide Culinaire
. The success of the
brigade
depended on employees understanding and embracing two tenets: one being the hierarchy system, and two being the
chef de partie
division of labor, which compartmentalized the tasks of the kitchen into
parties
or parts, each with its own managing chef. Whatever your status, from
garçon
and
commis
at the bottom to
chef de cuisine
at the top, you had to learn where you were in the pecking order. When anyone above you asked for something,
you said yes and double-timed it to meet his demands. In turn, you had the right to order around whoever fell below your rank.

In restaurant terms, an expediter is only as good as her or his ability to “order fire.” This means that as the orders come in, the expediter must order the dishes so that everything will be ready to serve at once. A table of four might be having a broiled chicken, a medium steak, a rare steak, and a poached turbot fillet: Each entrée would be cooked for a different amount of time and by different
chefs de partie
. The expediter calculates when to start each dish, using backward-counting math and accounting for any extra steps, like pan deglazing or meat resting. The ability to impose order on so much fire is the difference between a great restaurant and one that is merely good; the difference between a flawless service and one that has customers complaining and skimping on tips.

The meals we cooked had been copied straight out of our cooking bibles:
Larousse Gastronomique
and
The Escoffier Cookbook
. Appetizers led sensibly into main courses and side dishes counterpointed or complemented entrées, but nothing about them seemed exciting or surprising or fresh. Every day I would look at the menu and wonder, What if we paired the duck a l’orange with curried fried rice instead of serving it with the traditional potatoes dauphinoise? If thyme and mustard added such wonderful flavors to the roasted lamb, couldn’t we do a similar variation with roasted goat instead? It was in me already, the desire to mix cultures and foods. But this wasn’t just about my desire to introduce international flavors into traditional cuisine. I could also see that at the school, we prized French food above our own national culinary treasures. It was the 1980s and the locavore movement may have been in full swing in northern California, but it sure as hell hadn’t yet come to Scandinavia. I learned more about the foods of the Alsace than I did about Västerbotten, the Swedish county that produced the country’s best cheese. Soon, that would begin to change.