Yes, Chef (9 page)

“Why should we make an exception for you?” he asked. “This is not standard policy.”

I responded with the confidence of a cocky teenager. Or the desperate. “You know I’m going to become a real cook when I leave here,” I said. “Unlike most of the kids here, I’m serious about it. And if I don’t get more real-world experience, I’ll fall behind in my chances of getting a good job after I graduate. Please?”

“OK, Samuelsson, we’ll give it a try,” he said. “But you can’t miss any of your other classes. Remember: You’re still in school.”

W
HEN
I
ARRIVED IN
S
WEDEN
, I was assigned a birthday of November 11. Each year, on that day, my mother or grandmother baked a cake, and at the end of supper, I opened a handful of presents. My grandmother gave me sweaters she’d knitted herself; my father gave me books; and my mother gave me clothes she thought I needed, usually more stylish than I would have picked out on my own. I could count on Linda and Anna to go in together on something cool. The year before, they’d cooked up the perfect Afro-Swedish gift: a Public Enemy album and a pair of turquoise Converse high-tops.

That year—my seventeenth birthday—as my mother cleared the cake plates from the kitchen table, Anna leaned over to Linda and whispered something in her ear. Linda sprang up from her chair and ran downstairs to Anna’s room. She was back a minute later with a long rectangular box wrapped in paper I recognized from the previous Christmas.

“Open it,” Anna said.

I took my time peeling the tape off. The box seemed awfully similar to the ones we gave to my father on his birthday, the ones that held ties he promptly wore to the office for the next week straight and then buried in the sock drawer of his closet. With the paper off, I could see it was a box from Holmens Herr, the classiest—and least cool—menswear store in town. I tried to mask my disappointment and lifted off the lid, psyching myself up to show them only happiness.

It was not a tie. It was a brand-new cook’s knife with an eight-inch-long carbon steel blade. This was the multipurpose knife every chef needs, with a blade thin enough to chop herbs, but a wide flat surface for crushing or picking up food. Better still, it was the Rolls-Royce of knives, brand-wise, made by the French company Sabatier.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said, and when I hugged them, I meant it.

I
WORKED AT
T
IDBLOMS
every day for the rest of the year, which made school bearable. My father might have known next to nothing about fine dining, but he had ingrained in me a flawless work ethic: I knew to show up on time, to listen to instructions, and never to talk back to my bosses. And the hard work paid off. I may have lost my place on the soccer team because I wasn’t as big as the rest of the guys, but in the kitchen, my size didn’t matter. All that mattered was the work.

The cooks thanked me by letting me do more than simple prep work; I began to make
à la minute
sauces—those we cooked to order. For sole meunière, I’d step in after the fish had been cooked in butter, then add a few more tablespoons to the pan and watch until it turned
a golden brown. At that point, I stirred in some minced parsley and poured in lemon juice, then took a half-teaspoon taste of it to see if it needed salt. Once I got it right, I handed the pan back to the cook, who checked my flavoring and drizzled the sauce over the plated fish.

At Tidbloms, I learned the danger of complacency. Dialing it in is one of a chef’s worst habits. No matter how tired you are, no matter how stressed, you can’t take shortcuts. One day, we were serving a broiled cod special. I was helping out at the fish station and doing some of the final seasoning adjustments with salt and pepper. After half a dozen orders went out onto the floor, I had my seasoning down pat. The next day, I helped out at the fish station again, and I performed the same final role of seasoning the daily special. All seemed to be going well until Jorgen passed by and saw me shaking salt onto the plate.

He came over and took a taste of what I’d been working on.

He spit it into a napkin. “What the hell is this?” he asked. Turns out I’d been salting gravlax, a salt-cured fish.

He was furious—wasting good food was a no-no—and I thought I’d be fired. I felt sick. But he didn’t fire me. My mistake was one of judgment, not of laziness, and to him, the difference between those mattered.

I redeemed myself by working harder and faster than I ever had before. That was the pace of Tidbloms all the time—guys cooking six things at once with a constant sense of urgency but never panic. If we had an unusually busy lunch service, Jorgen would ask me to stay on beyond my scheduled shift, and I always said yes. “Yes, chef” is such a common parlance in a professional kitchen. You don’t even have to think about it for your mouth to form the words. You get asked to do something and you say yes. “Yes, chef” were the first words out of my mouth each morning and the last words I uttered as I left the restaurant each night. “Good night, Marcus,” Jorgen would call out. I wouldn’t say, “Have a good night, too.” I’d say, “Yes, chef.” I didn’t want to miss any chance I got to see the world that was opening up before me.

No matter how much I learned at Tidbloms, I never caught up with my classmate Martin back at Mosesson. The day we graduated, he won the school’s top honors. Martin was too nice a guy to resent, but there was another difference between us that kept me from feeling a twinge of envy. Since the age of twelve, Martin had worked in his family’s catering business. While we were at Mosesson, he continued to work for his dad in his off-school hours, and when a big job came in, he’d miss out on a few days of school. I envied Martin’s proficiency and talent, but I did not envy that his fate was sealed. He would eventually step into his father’s shoes, take over the family business, and never leave Göteborg. Maybe he could live with that, but the mere thought made me feel like the walls around me were closing in.

I graduated second in our class and walked away with a handshake from the principal, a diploma, and my first full set of knives, carbon steel blades and riveted wood handles, the blade’s weight counterbalanced by the tang, a strip of metal that continued through to the end of the handle. I would cherish those knives for years. They were the one constant in my luggage, along with my journals, as I made my way from country to country, continent to continent.

I
N THE WINTER OF 1989, WHEN
I
WALKED THROUGH
B
ELLE
A
VENUE’S
doors as its newest
köksnisse
, or kitchen boy, it was probably one of the top five restaurants in Sweden. In the front of the house, three layers of white linen covered each of the room’s fifty tables. Leather banquettes ringed the room. Knowledgeable, seasoned waiters were never more than a few steps away. A sommelier with a sterling silver tastevin around his neck stood by the bar, ready to guide guests through the extensive French wine list. The room operated at a muffled murmur as if both servers and patrons had agreed to treat the chef, and the meals he created, with the same deference one might show a great opera singer.

Attached to the main dining room was a kitchen that served more than just the restaurant. It fed all of the Park Avenue Hotel, including its bar and grill, a dinner theater with singing waiters, room service, and three banquet halls on the mezzanine floor. From sunrise to midnight, there was hardly a minute of downtime for the staff, fifty men and also a few women scattered in the traditional female kitchen roles of salad-making and pastry. I came in at the level of
köksnissen;
the only ones who ranked below me were the
garçons
, or interns, young guys who worked in the basement doing thankless prep work and cleanup. On my first day, I was issued my first chef’s jacket and houndstooth kitchen pants and told to report immediately to the fish department.

Gordon was my boss. He was a fortysomething former rugby player from Australia who seemed to have a perpetual sunburn, even in winter. He was the
boucher
, the butcher, and his job was to process all the meat and fish when it came into the kitchen. Gordon was physically powerful, with a personality to match. He was quick to laugh at a joke, but he didn’t hesitate to shut you down if you were wasting time. He taught me everything I know about cleaning fish. Not just cleaning the fish, but what you could do with the bones, how you stored each piece, and what the different fish were for. I understood the difference between herring and mackerel, but now I was looking at exotic stuff like turbot and sole, learning in a tactile way about the different qualities of each species, which types could hold up under poaching versus grilling, and whether a fish’s flavor stood up to a flavoring of lemon or a particular herb.

My main tasks were to unload fish orders and keep the refrigerator clean. The box, as we called the walk-in refrigerator, was lined with shelves and had four tall rolling trolleys in its center. Keeping it clean was the most physically difficult job I’ve ever had in a kitchen, not just because the fish came packed tight in large, cumbersome crates, but also because I had to haul hundreds of pounds of ice each shift to keep it from spoiling. You knew you’d done the job right if you didn’t smell anything when you walked into the box; even fish
that had been in-house for two or three days shouldn’t give off the slightest odor.

I started every morning at six a.m. I emptied out each shelf and trolley, transferring the fish temporarily to the produce refrigerator. I poured hot water over each shelf to melt any stray ice, then wiped it down with a diluted bleach solution. I scrubbed the floor with a steel scrubber, and refilled the à la carte trolley with the fish that had been butchered for that day, so cooks could come and grab what they needed as soon as it had been ordered. Deep plastic bins filled the shelves along the wall. They, too, needed to be wiped out and re-iced, and they held some of the longer-storage items, like the caviars and roes; the crabs, lobsters, and shrimp; the gravlax and smoked salmon. By ten a.m., my time in the box was done.

Between lunch and dinner I restocked the fish station’s
mise en place
, so that the chef could fill any order during meal service without having to hunt down an ingredient and chop it. In Sweden, dill was a principal seasoning, but chives, fennel, and other spices were also important.

In the beginning, I couldn’t see past my mountain of tasks to absorb the approach and creativity of the lead chefs, but I tasted the food and saved the menus, and noticed when the maître d’ and servers seemed especially excited about a particular dish. I saw decanters for the first time and asked my
commis
buddy Peter why they poured wine from one bottle to another before drinking it. Peter didn’t know, so I went to Herved Antlow, the older chef who was in charge of banquets and didn’t make fun of my naive questions. He was old enough to be my father; maybe he saw me as a son rather than a competitor. When I was working with him on an event, he always saved a small piece of meat or a taste of a sauce for me.

“Marcus,” he would say, “this is quail.”

“This is the rouget fish from France—see how sweet and nutty it is?”

“This is how you taste wine,” he would say, swirling the glass and then putting his nose at its rim to catch the aromas he’d released.
“Mmm, can you taste the oak? Can you taste the oak cask it was aged in?”

I would nod in agreement, even though at that point, I couldn’t have told the difference between a fully mature Bordeaux and red wine vinegar. I’m pretty sure Herved could see right through me, but he just kept showing me more. He told me good cooking was something that engaged all of your senses. “You’re not a shoemaker,” he said. Which meant you had to know that a truffle opens up its flavors in heat, so you added your truffles to a sauce at the very end so you didn’t cook them out. You checked a sauce not by looking at it, but by dipping a spoon into it and then watching how the sauce stuck to the metal. If it slid right off, the sauce was too thin; if it coated the spoon, it was ready. I tasted and learned, and I knew he was showing me purely out of generosity. I promised myself that when I became a chef, I would do that, too.

On Saturday nights, when I wasn’t working, I would go to
Mormor
’s and help prepare the big family supper. She loved to ask me questions about the kitchen at Belle Avenue as we stood at her counter, mixing cod with breadcrumbs to make fish balls. “Mackelille, what do you cook at Belle Avenue?” she asked, cracking open an egg and adding it to the fish mixture.

“I don’t actually cook yet,” I explained. “Mostly I chop and mop.”

Ever faithful, she assured me that my time would come. “Don’t worry,” she’d say. “Soon they’ll have you cooking and they’ll be sorry they waited so long.”

T
HE FIRST DAY
I
WORKED AT
B
ELLE
A
VENUE
, I didn’t finish with the fish station until two in the morning. But I got faster and more efficient as time went by, and by three months in, I was done by one in the afternoon. I fell into a rhythm and learned certain tricks, like not even attempting to skin a sole unless it had been thoroughly chilled—otherwise you’d pull off as much of the costly flesh as you would the skin. Speed was valued, but it was also risky. There were certain jobs
where you just couldn’t go faster or cut corners. Usually, you learned this the hard way.

One morning, another
nisse
named Jakob and I were in charge of breaking down fresh hunks of turbot for the day’s lunch service. They would be used in one of my favorite dishes: braised turbot on the bone. Jakob and I were not yet cooking the dish, but we were charged with cutting eleven-pound hunks of turbot into steaks. Even with our carefully honed fillet knives, the task promised to be slow; cutting through bone was tough.

“Let’s use the band saw!” Jakob said. We had seen Gordon use it to butcher dense cuts of beef and frozen fish, but never with wet, fresh fish. No matter: The first fish went through perfectly, and we thought we were in business. We did another, then another, no problem. But when Jakob got to the fourth fish, it slipped out of his grasp. The blade went through his finger instead of the fish, fully severing its tip. Blood spurted everywhere.