Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (25 page)

“So do that”—he looked at the pan of slices—“a few dozen more times. And come find me.”

And so I chopped, and chopped, and chopped some more. I chopped methodically. I was after precision and exactitude, two qualities that were taking me close to fucking forever to approach. Many, many minutes passed. The pile of ginger slices eroded very, very slowly.
Behind and all around me, lunch service was in full swing. I smelled spices and melting butter and grilling meat. I heard a gnarled aria of sizzles and clattering pans and Ross’s persistent voice calling out phrases like, “Ordering one skate, fire one lamb.” I’d turn and look and all the cooks stood in one place, rocking maniacally back and forth, reaching for ingredients, pushing and shaking their pans, laying food on plates, garnishing, handing off the plate, and starting the processes over again—a tight and orchestrated freak-out.

Afternoon arrived. I’d completed the ginger. The cooks who’d been there when I arrived were replaced by the evening shift. All the frenetic prep work started anew. I spent some time cutting up lemons for chutney. I sliced cucumbers lengthwise on a mandoline. I ran back and forth to the various walk-ins fetching meats, fish, and produce for others. And then I ran into Ty.

Ty was tall, thin, and in his midthirties. He served as Tabla’s chef de cuisine, which meant he was the Waylon Smithers to Cardoz’s Mr. Burns. Cardoz had told me that if he was out of the kitchen before dinner service, Ty would run the show. He came off as affable and welcoming. It was a pleasure to meet me, he said, and he’d heard from “everybody” that I was holding my own so far that day.

I was pleased to hear it. “I’m trying to be more asset than liability,” I said. But I was still nervous.

“Well, how about you knock off for a bit? I want you to hang back and observe. Go from station to station and see what people are doing. Take notes. If anyone needs help, just do whatever they need.”

For the next ninety minutes, I drifted around the kitchen. Tabla’s lunch menu was mostly à la carte, but dinner featured two tasting menus. They constituted the majority of the nighttime orders. In addition, a whole crew of cooks and one dedicated prep person worked on getting the Bread Bar set for the night. The Bread Bar would typically sell its chicken
tikka, naan
breads, and lamb sandwiches to some two hundred fifty people on a bustling night.

It wasn’t solely that dinner service is usually more intense than
lunch, just in terms of sheer volume. There was something else in the air that I couldn’t quantify or qualify. The vibe of the room seemed a little more shrill than the morning. Motions were a little more frenzied, a touch more deranged. A tension had settled like a slight chill over the kitchen; I noticed that Ty used a brusquer voice.

Most of Tabla’s press had been favorable over the years. Ruth Reichl had awarded them those three stars in the
New York Times
. But they were undoubtedly rankled by a subsequent
Times
review in which William Grimes rabbit-punched the place, stating, “It’s getting harder to remember what all the fuss was about.” And just recently Cardoz had been slapped a little bit by the
Times
’s Frank Bruni for his
taquería
at the newly opened Citi Field.

These knocks were small scale, really, and Tabla had mounds of adoring press beyond those, but I wondered if every dinner service at Tabla felt like an audition or competition.

Ty worked the pass, where the food moves from the line cooks to the food runners, who take it to the tables. He expedited—or managed—all the orders, firing this table’s order, then that one, and gave the once-over to every plate leaving the kitchen, garnishing with microgreens and salt. The spice room stood next to the pass, and Ty told me to stand there in the doorway and to watch for the duration of the service. It was 7:00. The kitchen would pull the plug at about eleven, which meant I’d be standing and watching for a long time.

And it was a long time. By eight, I’d been in the Tabla kitchen for nine hours, in all the whirls of motion and heat, and hadn’t eaten anything for eleven hours. I was exceptionally thirsty. It’s more physically difficult to stand in one place, immobile, than to keep moving. My back bitched at me, and the bones of my feet murmured obscenities. But the orders started coming steadily at 8:00, first in small bursts announced by the ticket printer in staccato coughs, then in a quick steady stream. Ty was calling out, “Picking up one crab cake, picking up a watermelon salad. Fire another bass. Ordering one vegetarian tasting,” functioning as a conductor, and each station like a string
section or brass section or percussion section, operating apart and joining together, at a precise moment to see six different plates arrive simultaneously at the pass.

I observed a lot of moments of harmony between the stations, but I benefited from any mistakes. If anything sat under the heat lamp for too long, Ty explained, it usually got discarded and cooked again. Instead, tonight they came to me. I ate a samosa, spicy skate, a cheese-stuffed naan bread, a small, ever-so-slightly overcooked piece of lamb, a too-brown crab cake, and a really good layered vegetarian entrée of rice, sautéed greens, spices, and nuts. I’d later calculate that I’d eaten around $120 worth of food.

While I was watching frenetic action by the fish station, Ty appeared in front of me. “We don’t stand like that in the kitchen.”

I was puzzled. “I thought you told me to stay here. Should I go somewhere else?”

“I did tell you to stand here. But we don’t stand like
that.”
He motioned toward my feet. I had crossed one foot over the other.

“Okay,” I said. I uncrossed my foot.

“If you stand like that, you’re off balance. If I bump you you’re going to fall. I might trip over you if you fall, and what if I was carrying something?”

“Okay, got it,” I said.

“You need to stand with both feet firmly on the floor.”

“Okay.”

“Like this …” He demonstrated what both feet firmly on the floor looked like.

“This way, if I bump you”—Ty went ahead and bumped me—“this way, you’re not going down.” He bumped me again.

“Right,” I said. “Okay.”

At eleven, Ty informed the kitchen that all the orders were in, and it was time to clean up. He gestured to get my attention. “Okay—interview time. Let’s chat.” I followed him to an office that was only marginally bigger than an elevator.

We squeezed in and sat down. The questions started, many of them
and with much rapidity. I knew it probably wasn’t prudent to indicate from the jump that I had no designs on a restaurant career. Otherwise I told the truth. I acknowledged that, yes, I was older, but argued that only underscored the seriousness I had about learning—this wasn’t a dilettante thing. I admitted that, yes, I was a writer and would always write and while I planned to document my experiences at Tabla, I wasn’t here to write. I said that my focus here was on cooking. Eleven became eleven forty.

At midnight, he told me to go change, that I was done for the night. What had to happen next, he said, was that, tonight, he needed to do some serious thinking. Depending on what he decided—and, he informed me, he was really on the fence—I’d have to come in and trail one, probably two more times. Then, he and Cardoz would make a decision. After I changed, he led me to the exit and said good night.

As I walked to the subway, I asked the phantom of Ty in my head,
One, probably two more times? Are you serious? Are you fucking kidding?

I went back upstate and waited to hear something from Cardoz. A week went by, and I started approaching restaurants in the Hudson Valley about externships. The farms and farmers’ markets were in full swing, and I targeted a few places that sourced their food from them. I figured doing an externship someplace that was closely allied with the food sources would be a real education. Another week went by, and I received word that the position at Tabla was mine and I’d start five days later.

I’d spend Tuesdays through Saturdays at Tabla and venture back to Saugerties on Sundays. Nelly wasn’t thrilled with the schedule. She’d really liked the idea of my working upstate. “All I get with you is about an hour a day. I already feel like I’ve been single for a year now. I had really been hoping we’d have this great summer together. Well, now I’m definitely going to be living like a hermit for four months.”

On Tuesday, June 9, at 10:45 a.m., I presented myself at Tabla to start my externship.

Ross was cutting up skate at the pass when I walked in. He looked up, smiled broadly, greeted me, stripped the latex gloves off his hands,
and took me past the garde-manger station, to a steel worktable standing next to a large bank of refrigerators and directly across from the tilt skillet. This was my station for the next four and a half months. I was, he said, to be the prep cook for the Bread Bar. He told me that each morning I’d get a checklist of some thirty-seven possible dishes and tasks to undertake and I could expect to do about a third of them. Some of the tasks were simple: julienne green papaya, or boil fingerling potatoes. Others, as I saw from the book of recipes he issued to me, required a bit of work, like the chickpea chole or eggplant bartha.

I spent that day and the next training, during which I followed first Nicole, whom I’d be replacing, then Chris, another of the sous-chefs, as they performed various tasks on the list. I took notes and annotated my sheaf of recipes. Today—the third day—I was on my own.

I got to my station and put my things down. I grabbed two bains-marie, one for garbage, one for my equipment. I got a cutting board. I got out my knives. Then I reached for the clipboard. My prep list read: make cucumber raita, make spicy yogurt, make lamb marinade, marinate lamb top round, cut asparagus, soak beans for sprouting, sprout already soaked beans, make foogoth base, make mushroom korma, make lamb stew, make chole, make green sauce for halibut seviche.

My stomach pitched as I read the list. This was a lot of work. I crosschecked some of the tasks with the recipes. Just the chole, a dish of chickpeas served to customers like a stew, for instance, required the following: simmer five pounds of the chickpeas until done. Make a small dice of ten onions, slice forty-five cloves of garlic on the mandoline, small dice twenty tomatoes, and julienne a 9-pan (a vessel holding about three cups) of ginger. Toast spices for a mix: cumin, coriander, green and black cardamom, cloves, cinnamon sticks. Grind all of them, along with fifteen dry red chiles. The onions needed caramelization, the ginger and garlic had to be sweated, and the tomatoes cooked until they “broke down.” Everything got mixed into a steam kettle, and cooked for twenty more minutes. The stew was finished with a 9-pan of tamarind paste and some mango powder. Upon completion, it was decanted into a large hotel pan, put on ice, cooled, and put away.

Line cooks were moving quickly and steadily past, and one of them bumped me. I dropped the clipboard and picked it back up.

I felt a pulse or two of desperation. I wanted to succeed. Cardoz walked by and said hello. He asked what I was working on and I told him I was about to start the chole. He nodded, looked around at my equipment, and left.

I poured the chickpeas into one of the steam kettles, filled the kettle with water, and turned on the heat. I stood over the peas, watching the water start to bubble, and reminded myself that I’d need to get the lamb seared for the stew. I had no idea how long it would take, but I knew that it needed to braise for at least four hours. I had the tomatoes and onions to dice, the spices to toast and grind, fingerlings to cook. And there was much more coming after that.

I discovered that as soon as water boils on chickpeas, a thick scum of starch forms and comes together on the water’s surface. It needs to be skimmed constantly. As soon as one layer of scum disappears, a new one appears immediately. The steam kettle with my peas stood about twenty-five feet away from my station.

While they cooked, I turned on the tilt skillet to heat up, diced the onions, then the tomatoes. First Ty, then Cardoz, then Chris walked by the kettle and had a tiny conniption about whatever starch was presently at the top of the peas.

I’d been told to waste nothing. When an onion is diced, there’s always some waste; there’s the base of the onion that acts as support while you’re actually doing the dicing, and a few scraps always turn out to be too long or too big. I worked with large yellow onions, cutting them in half, carefully making several horizontal slices, cutting—very deliberately—fifteen or so perpendicular slices, then making the whole thing into chopped dice. I did this with a number of them, the fumes rising up, stinging my eyes, making them weep. I chopped the waste into the approximate size of the dice and mixed it in. This stuff would be cooked down to translucency, and then cooked some more. Exactitude of shape, I reasoned, wasn’t a primary concern.

Chris arrived, leaned in past me, and ran his fingers through the
bowl of dice. He found some of the imperfect pieces, announced they were “unacceptable” and told me to go through and cull them out. I dumped my onions onto a sheet tray and plucked the offending pieces away. After a few minutes, Cardoz arrived, dismayed by the several tablespoons of onion I was about to get rid of, and told me to incorporate them back in.

Ty shouted that the peas needed more skimming—right that second. I dashed over. Cardoz kept inspecting the onions and then moved on. From somewhere out of sight, Chris wondered aloud—fervently—why the lamb wasn’t being seared.

I retrieved twenty-five pounds of cubed lamb from the meat refrigerator, poured oil into the tilt skillet, tossed a cube in to test it, and, when it spit and sizzled with a violence, dumped about a third of the meat in and spread it around.

Ty stood by the peas, telling me to skim again, and after I walked over to start skimming, he went to the tilt skillet. “Whoa! Whoa!” he shouted. “That is way, way too much lamb!” He began poking at the pieces, many of which had taken on a nice brown color. The meat sizzled very loudly. “You’re never going to get
any
color on it. It’s not going to sear, it’s going to steam. And listen to that—you shouldn’t be able to hear me speak right now because this pan should be
that
loud. You just completely wrecked this meat. Maybe we can salvage it. I don’t know. Dammit.”