Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (19 page)

Carlos would usually just go ahead and do it. Sean was a little more passive-aggressive. He started showing up late and doing whatever he felt like. More than a couple times, Sean and I wound up prepping the same components of a dish. We’d each arrive at the stove with a pan full of mirepoix, or each peeled a pound of shrimp without the other being aware.

The exchanges between all of us in class got more curt and louder.

During the Skills classes, ingredients were truly communal. If you needed a pound of onions and only had half a pound, everyone would give up some of theirs so you could get yourself right. If you were short on thyme or Chablis, and someone else had it, they’d give what they could and adjust their recipes accordingly. These impulses were eroding away.

A lot of hoarding started, even if the person doing the hoarding didn’t need all the extra ingredients. Or pans. There were eighteen of us and a finite number of cooking vessels. We would take what we thought we
might
need and hide it in the reach-in refrigerators underneath our stations.

Unless they were in your momentary clique. Little alliances formed at the beginning of a class, but they would often not last until the end. One afternoon, Brookshire and I might have been fast friends since 2:00 p.m. But the second he’d show up at my side and say something like, “Oh, well, I guess that’s one way to cube your beef,” I’d start to resent him. And if he needed a particular sauté pan that I had in my possession, he’d go on needing it.

Once, we’d been supportive of each other. No matter how inedible someone’s dish may have been, you still told them it was great, just by way of encouragement. Now their dish was dissected behind their
back with purposeless cruelty, the line between the food and the person smudged in a wash of sarcasm and spite: “I can barely be bothered to throw this out. Only Tara would fuck up seasoning this bad.”

There was always Tara. Asking a thousand unnecessary questions, growing in volume with each class, perpetually confused and acting out from the fog of her bewilderment. She’d storm up to you and hiss, “You need to get your stuff out of the convection oven
right now
. Chef told me to put my meat in there. You’ve had it in for twenty minutes and I wanted to let it go but now I need it. Get it out of there. Right
now.”
Sartory had, in fact, told her to use the regular oven, which she had not yet preheated. Upon being informed of this, she’d walk away, saying nothing, and glower at you for the rest of class.

We were also getting sloppy. Food was frequently burnt, or underdone, or raw in the center, or just destroyed.

On the first midwestern day, when Carlos and I were preparing eggplant Parmesan, I sliced and salted the eggplant, letting it drain its bitterness away. I set up a breading station with a tray of flour, a bowl of beaten egg, and a pan of bread crumbs. Carlos assembled a tomato sauce. Carlos was starting to bread the eggplant in slow motion. I went ahead and prepped other things. I returned and he’d made no headway. Slowly, methodically, meticulously rolling the eggplant in the flour. Dipping it into the egg. Pressing it in the bread crumbs.

“Carlos, I swear—you are slower than a fucking crippled mule.” I started grabbing eggplant and breading it. He stopped what he was doing and stared at me. I raised my voice. “Hey, can you maybe get the oil heated up so we can fry these?” Carlos went away and heated the oil. When I was done breading, I just came out and ordered Carlos to start frying them and walked away to do other things.

I was slicing fresh mozzarella when Adam walked up to me and grabbed my arm. “Hey—you better go check on your eggplant; Carlos is burning the shit out of it.” I rushed over, and at least half the pieces he’d cooked were unusable. The oil in one of the two pans was discolored and filled with burnt-to-black crumbs. Time was becoming an issue; we’d need to serve this stuff in about forty minutes. “Check on
the sauce,” I said, and bumped him out of my way. I kept frying in one pan, heated up new oil in the other. When I finished, Carlos and I assembled the individual dishes of eggplant Parmesan—and one big dish, meant for our group dinner—to go into the oven. We put them in at almost 500 degrees.

Most oven racks have a curve on the edges to prevent tipping when you pull them from the heat. Ours did not. As I pulled, a tray of ten individual eggplants in small casserole dishes, and one giant panful, tipped at an impossible angle and slid. I leaped backward out of the way, and the mess spilled and shattered on the tiles.

I bellowed obscenities; Carlos yelled, “What did you just do? What did you just do!” The kitchen was at a standstill. Sartory was at my back. He put his hands on my shoulders and shook.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, hey, hey—listen to me: it’s just food. Did you get burned? No? Okay, let’s solve this. How much did you lose? Okay, that’s okay. It was an accident. Shit happens. We’ve got ten servings left? Then that’s what we have to offer. You guys finish up a little earlier is all. Tomorrow, you make it again, and use a different oven. So let’s get this cleaned up, and we’ll go from there. Accidents happen, accidents happen.” I don’t know if we got marked down or not, but I loved Sartory right then. He got down on his knees with the two of us and helped clean up.

T
HAT WEEKEND
, N
ELLY AND
I went to the local supermarket. There was a parking space right by the front door and as we were pulling into it, someone else immediately to our right was getting out of his car. It was Viverito. He was heading into the store as Nelly and I got out.

“Who are you looking at?” she asked.

“See that guy? That’s Viverito.” Nelly turned to see.

“Oh!” she said loudly. “He’s handsome.” I ducked out of sight. As we walked in, she said, “Are you going to say hello?”

“Nah, the guy’s off-duty. I’ll leave him alone.”

“Oh, come on, Jonathan Dixon. That’s ridiculous. You should say
hi.” When we walked in, he was standing over a crate of broccoli right inside the door. He looked strange to me in jeans and hiking boots. He glanced up and I saw a flash of recognition.

“Chef Viverito, how are you?” I held my hand out. “Don’t know if you remember, but I was in your fish class.”

“Jonathan, right? Yeah, I remember.” He looked at Nelly. I wasn’t sure how to introduce him, but he saved me the trouble. “Hi, I’m Gerard.” They shook. He turned to me. “How are your classes? You must be getting close to your externship, right?”

Nelly said good-bye and wandered off.

“Yeah, I’m close, but I’m really not certain where to go.”

“You haven’t applied yet?” He looked surprised. “You better get going, man.”

“I’m at a loss. It has to be in New York City, but … I don’t know, I don’t know if I’m skilled enough for Per Se, which is”—I couldn’t believe I was admitting this—“where I really want to go. I just don’t have a ton of experience yet.”

“Well, Jonathan Benno is pretty damn amazing. But, yeah, that’d be a pretty high-pressure place. Where else have you thought of?”

I mentioned another place.

“Now
that
will be high pressure. If you’re prepared for a lot of abuse, then, hey—go to it. But, you know, I got to a certain point where I just thought to myself, ‘Man, I’m
tired
of working for screamers. I don’t want that anymore.’ Guys our age”—and here he gave me a pointed look—“are maybe not as eager to put up with that. That’s stuff you suffer through when you’re a kid.”

“I looked at Daniel Boulud’s places but, get this—the description on the database says you’d be working ninety hours a week.”

He looked outraged. “What?? Ninety hours a week? Are you kidding me?”

“If I were fifteen years younger and not in a relationship, I’d consider it.”

“Ninety hours? No way. That’s insane.” He started walking away. He stopped. “Do you need a recommendation?”

“Yeah, that would be … great.”

“Come by the fish room Tuesday morning. Bring your list of potential sites.”

I made up a list that night: Gramercy Tavern, Tabla, the Modern, Per Se, San Domenico. I’d start with those. The next day, I was early for class and ran into Perillo in the hallway. I was glad to see him. We talked for a few minutes and the subject of the externship came up. Since he was from the city, I showed him my list. Perillo read it silently. “Huh,” he said, handing it back. “Per Se? I don’t know, Jonathan …” He trailed off and I felt a little foolish.

“I think you might need …” he continued.

“Yeah, I know—more experience.”

Perillo nodded. “San Domenico—that’s a good one. Odette Fada is great. But, you know—you’re more mature than your classmates.”

“ ‘Mature’? That’s a great euphemism, Chef. Thank you.”

“No, I mean it literally, in this case—you’re older, you’re more mature. I don’t think at this point you want to go anyplace where you’re going to get screamed at.”

“What about Tabla?”

He shrugged.

“Gramercy Tavern?”

“Michael Anthony is amazing. Just amazing. You’d learn a ton. But, if you had asked me without the benefit of having this list, where
you
should go, I would have told you the Modern. It’s classical; it’s contemporary; Gabriel Kreuther is brilliant. It’s a calm kitchen. You should be there. It’s
exactly
where you should be.”

On Tuesday, I returned to the fish room. Viverito was hunched over his computer. I knocked.

“Here’s my list,” I said.

He read it. After a few moments, he said, “You know where you should go? The Modern. I think that’d be a great place for you. What do you think?”

“You’re the second person within twenty-four hours who’s told me that. I say okay.”

“I’ll do one recommendation for Kreuther, and then another with a generic ‘To whom it may concern.’ ”

I began, for the first time, to feel excited about the externship.

S
ARTORY MIXED THE ROSTER
up a little bit one night, possibly in an attempt to save us from one another, and I was working with Brookshire on a dish of black beans and sautéed snapper. We burned our beans because we weren’t paying attention. We doctored them with half a pound of butter to make them semiedible. When it came time to cook the snapper, someone had accidentally turned our oven off. We were supposed to have started the snapper in a pan on the burners and finish it in the oven. So in the middle of service, none of our fish was cooking, and the line waiting for it grew and grew.

Another team’s guava-glazed ribs had been cooked to dust, and some of the students eating them had complained. I’d tried the curried goat and it was tooth-meltingly spicy—a miscalculation of measurement on someone’s part.

Sartory stood by his desk looking grim and a little sad. He’d put out the fires where he could but, in all, we’d had a pretty poor showing. He let us sink under the weight of our own carelessness.

Brookshire and I finally got the late orders of the snapper out. No one spoke; all you could hear was the small clatter of pans on the burners, ovens opening and closing, meat on the grill. Then, above it all, I heard Tara start to yell.

“Shut up! Shut up! I don’t want to hear anything from you!
Anything!
You have no right to tell me
shit
! You do not have the right!”

I stepped around the corner and Tara was wet eyed and red in the face. She stood screaming at Adam, who was making gestures to calm her down. Sartory looked over and then made himself busy with his computer. Tara strode right out of the room, and Adam went back to his station. I could see her knife kit on the table next to Adam’s and I realized they must have been partners.

Adam called a group meeting that night. I was there. Gio was there.
Brookshire, too. A couple of others. But most everyone else declined to show up.

Adam canceled the meeting and he and I walked together to the parking lot.

“Well, Captain Bligh,” I said, “looks like you had a mutiny.”

He was much more upset than I thought. “I keep trying! I don’t know what people want from me. I’m really, really making the effort to be a good leader.”

“I understand that. But Thanksgiving is a few days away. We’ve got the Asia cooking class, then Christmas, and then it’s pretty much time for externship. I think you have a bunch of people who are just a little burned out and they just want to get through it. I know I’m feeling burned out. All you can do—all you really should do—is just try to make sure people communicate if they need help. But otherwise … most of these cats are just delirious with ego and hormones anyway, and unless you’re a faculty member, I’m not sure they’re going to recognize you as an authority figure.”

“I have more experience. That’s all I’m trying to do: pass it on.”

“Yes, and I have no problem with that. I’ll take whatever guidance I can get. Not everyone is like that, though. Just keep that in mind.”

I
LOOKED AT THE
syllabus one afternoon and saw that two days later, Sean and I were partnered up to make roasted ducks in a port-raspberry sauce. When I read this, I stood upright. I remembered being apoplectic when I’d eaten this duck months ago, gnawing at the dried and nasty flesh, declaiming that the duck had died in vain.

On duck day, I arrived early. The night before, I’d made a meticulous list of all the necessary ingredients for the duck, the port-wine sauce, scalloped potatoes, roasted carrots, and broccoli. I gathered every ingredient and all the pans I thought I’d need. I cranked up the convection oven to 475. I got out the duck stock that two students had made the night before.

Sean was late—forty minutes late. I was pissed, but as far as I was concerned, my only true partner was the spirit of the departed duck.

“Hi,” he said. I didn’t answer. He shuffled. Then cleared his throat. “Okay, then. I’ll start on the duck. Do you want to get the potatoes peeled?”

I leaped in front of him. “No. No. No. I’m doing the duck. No one else is touching it. I’m sorry. I know that sounded bad. But this is personal.”

He just stared at me, utterly perplexed. From behind him, Lombardi said, “It’s probably better not to get between Jonathan and those ducks.”