Heat (20 page)

This is what happened: Mark, having cooked up a large quantity of linguine for its regulation six minutes and thirty seconds, emptied it into a pan of New Zealand cockle-clams, sloppily dripping lots of that starchy water on them in the process, a big wet heap of pasta on top of several dozen shellfish. He swirled the pan, gave it a little flip, swirled it again, and then left it alone so that it could cook, bubbling away, for another half minute. (This was curious, I thought, watching him—you don’t normally leave a pan of pasta on the flattop.) Then he took a strand and tasted it. He gave me one. It was not what I expected. It was no longer linguine, exactly; it had changed color and texture and become something else. I tasted it again. This, I thought, is the equivalent of bread soaked in gravy. But what was the sauce? I looked at the pan: the cockle-clams had been all closed up a few minutes earlier, and as they cooked their shells had opened, and as they opened they released the juices inside. That’s what I was tasting in this strand of linguine: an ocean pungency. “It’s about the sauce, not the little snot of meat in the shell,” Mario told me later. “No one is interested in the little snot of meat!”

Most pasta dishes are about the pasta, not the sauce (that
mere
condiment): that lesson had been drilled into me over and over. But here, in this strand of linguine, I had discovered a dish that wasn’t about the pasta or the sauce; it was about both, about the interaction between them, the result—this new thing, this highly flavored noodle—evocative of a childhood trip to the sea.

I
F YOU’RE TEMPTED
to make linguine with clams according to the kitchen’s preparation, you should understand that the only ingredient that’s measured is the pasta. (A serving is four ounces.) Everything else is what you pick up with your fingertips, and it’s either a small pinch or a large pinch or something in between: not helpful, but that, alas, is the way quantities are determined in a restaurant. (When a cookbook is prepared, a tester comes to the kitchen, picks up all the ingredients needed to make a dish, and takes them away to translate them into quantities that people at home might recognize. In the foodie publishing world, these testers—who have very white kitchens with carefully calibrated ovens and computerized weighing devices—are the despots of the written recipe. But I’ve never been persuaded by the reliability of the translation: either the quantities in the restaurant original are so large that they don’t seem right when shrunk down—lamb shanks for thirty-four doesn’t look the same when it’s done for two; the chemistry is different, the sauce less rich—or the restaurant portions are so small that they don’t seem accurate when they’re assigned a specific measurement. For instance, do you really believe the Babbo cookbook when it tells you that a linguine with eels takes four garlic cloves, that a lobster spaghettini takes two, and that the chitarra take three? No. It’s the same for each: a small pinch. And what happened to the red onions, essential to the lobster spag—a medium pinch, as it happens—but not mentioned? Were there no red onions the day the tester arrived?) The downside of measuring by hand is what happens to the hands. At the end of an evening your fingertips are irretrievably stained with some very heady aromatics, and there’s nothing you can do to eliminate them. You wash your hands. You soak them. You shower, you scrub them again. The next day, they still stink of onion, garlic, and pork fat, and, convinced that everyone around you is picking up the smell, you ram them into your pockets, maniacally rubbing your fingers against each other like an obsessive-compulsive Lady Macbeth. At night, in bed, my wife and I had some tough times when I was working at the pasta station, ever since one of my hands flopped across her face and woke her with a revolting start.

My advice: ignore the Babbo cookbook and begin by roasting small pinches of garlic and chili flakes and medium pinches of the onion and pancetta in a hot pan with olive oil. Hot oil accelerates the cooking process, and the moment everything gets soft you pour it away (holding back the contents with your tongs) and add a slap of butter and a splash of white wine, which stops the cooking. This is Stage One—and you are left with the familiar messy buttery mush—but already you’ve added two things you’d never see in Italy: butter (seafood with butter—or any other dairy ingredient—verges on culinary blasphemy) and pancetta, because, according to Mario, pork and shellfish are an eternal combination found in many other places: in Portugal, in
amêijoas na cataplana
(clams and ham); or in Spain, in a paella (chorizo and scallops); or in the United States, in the Italian-American clams casino, even though none of those places happens to be in Italy. (“Italians,” Mario says, “won’t fuck with their fish. There are restaurants that won’t use lemon because they think it’s excessive.”)

In Stage Two, you drop the pasta in boiling water and take your messy buttery pan and fill it with a big handful of clams and put it on the highest possible flame. The objective is to cook them fast—they’ll start opening after three or four minutes, when you give the pan a swirl, mixing the shellfish juice with the buttery porky white wine emulsion. At six minutes and thirty seconds, you use your tongs to pull your noodles out and drop them into your pan—all that starchy pasta water slopping in with them is still a good thing; give the pan another swirl; flip it; swirl it again to ensure that the pasta is covered by the sauce. If it looks dry, add another splash of pasta water; if too wet, pour some out. You then let the thing cook away for another half minute or so, swirling, swirling, until the sauce streaks across the bottom of the pan, splash it with olive oil and sprinkle it with parsley: dinner.

I
LEARNED
many things at the pasta station, but I don’t want to exaggerate my achievement. I never got through an evening without one profoundly humiliating experience. By now, I was in the kitchen five days a week, and each time the service commenced I had the same thought: maybe, tonight, I’ll manage not to fuck up. The narrative I dreamed of involved my mastering the station, of proving Mario wrong, of showing that I could do a task that only twenty-somethings were able to do. I never made it. On the night I was finally on my own I didn’t get through the first hour, although, for most of that first hour, I coped well enough. There were a lot of orders, and I was doing my Stage One prep, stacking my pans on the shelves surrounding the pasta cooker, filling them up, double-stacking them as I had been taught to do when it gets busy, and then triple-stacking them, an emergency efficiency. I was fast, assured, utterly ready, when I turned and heard the sounds of many pans crashing down behind my back and into the pasta cooker (Splash! Splash! Splash!), and the kitchen came to a frightful halt. The fear was that the water—now polluted by gobs of ragù, truffle butter, caramelized mushrooms, toasted guanciale, tomato sauce, shellfish, butter, plus all those aromatic pinches of onion, garlic, and pork fat—was no good. The cooker would have to be drained, refilled, and brought back to the boil. It would take an hour. There were twenty-eight orders pending. The kitchen would die. Tony Liu, in Andy’s spot that night as expediter, walked over and inspected the water, boiling blackly, looked up at the shelf, observed that only many of the pans had fallen in, not all of them, and said it was okay. Was it? For the rest of the night, Mark retrieved random clams off plates at the last second “just as dishes were going out,” and most of the pasta tasted, ineffably, the same. “The kitchen loves it when someone makes a mistake,” Mark told me later. “‘Pssst: check it out! He dropped the pans!’ They talked about you for a week.”

In the event, Mark bolted, and I ran out of time. He decided it was time to move on. Having coached me at two stations and patiently endured the sort of trials a god would devise, he’d earned himself an Old Testament nickname. (What can I say? It had come to this: I was Kitchen Bitch, and he was Job.) And although he was next in line to be a sous-chef, he wanted a challenge. Mark would be thirty in the spring—Mario had been twenty-nine when he left his job in Santa Barbara—and, like Mario, he wasn’t interested in the next senior position; he wanted to go to Italy. He asked Mario for help, and Mario, again flattered, found what he regarded as the perfect spot, a restaurant with a Michelin star and a reputation for the best handmade pasta in a region famous for its handmade pasta: Il Sole, outside Bologna. Or at least that’s where Mark thought he was going—“Mario talks so fast,” he confessed, “I’m never sure what he’s saying,” which I thought showed a remarkable ease with his fate. Mark didn’t know Italian yet; he’d learn it on the job, where—who knows?—he might remain for two years, maybe more. “I’ll never have this chance again. I want to stay as long as I can.”

Mark’s going gave me pause. In emulating Mario’s journey, he was going off to learn the real thing: handmade pasta fresca. Hadn’t that been my mission? Instead, I came to understand something I’d once dismissed: that industrial product, pastasciutta. I was grateful for the instruction. But I was also a little jealous of Mark’s adventure. Everyone was.

Meanwhile, a new person would take over the station and have to be trained, and as the training took weeks (even for grown-up cooks), I gave up my spot. There wasn’t room for two students. With Mark’s going, there was also another hiring: the structure was such that Mark, near the top, was replaced by someone who would start at the bottom, at the pantry station, preparing starters. (The invisible structure also meant that Abby was no longer the rookie.) The new guy was Alex Feldman. I was there the day he started: no small thing, as we’d be spending hours in his company and none of us knew what he was like. In fact, he was no small thing. He was six foot four, or at least that’s what he said, but I didn’t believe him. He seemed taller or, more frightening, might still be growing. (He had a growing boy’s appetite. At the family meal, which featured hot dogs, he ate twelve.) He was twenty-two, excitable, gangly, clumsy, and oblivious. He called to mind a cartoon character—some floppy, long-limbed thing: Goofy with his puppy dog features. Alex’s nose, for instance, was puppy-dog-like, big and not quite finished, as though still being formed. He had very big feet, like paws. He wore his long hair parted in the middle, like an overgrown schoolboy.

“Why would Mario hire someone so big?” Elisa asked under her breath. “He knows there’s no room.” But Mario had made up his mind before he’d met him, because, once again, Alex had Italian kitchen experience. He’d worked in Florence for a year at Cibreo, a restaurant known for its uncompromisingly Tuscan cooking. I hadn’t heard of Cibreo. Actually, apart from Mario, no one had. But after a month or so, everyone knew a great deal: about the freshness of Cibreo’s olive oil and how it arrived immediately after it was made—“not days or weeks but hours.” (Alex tasted the Babbo oil and squished up his nose in a reflex of disapproval.) Or the importance of Cibreo’s
soffritto,
the mystery of Tuscan soups, and how, at Cibreo, the preparation took all morning. (No one in the kitchen had heard of soffritto, but when Alex said the word his voice got whispery and reverential, and you understood that soffritto, whatever it was, was very important.) Alex shared his knowledge of the Italian language as well and corrected the pronunciation of anyone who got a word wrong. In fact, Alex tended to speak principally in Italian.

“Maybe,” Abby said quietly, “what we have here is an acquired taste.”

13

N
EW YORK, 1995.
On May 15th, an office assistant at a cable television start-up called the Food Network came across an article in
The New York Observer
that she felt might be of interest to the head of development, Jonathan Lynne. It was about a cabal of chefs hanging out at a downtown restaurant called Blue Ribbon. The restaurant was open late (last orders were between four and five in the morning) and took no reservations, except for a round table near the door which could accommodate between five and ten people. Batali had discovered Blue Ribbon shortly after Pó opened and often claimed the table for himself and several chef friends at the end of a Saturday-night service. “Just as the Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s and 30s gathered to commiserate about their literary careers and their love lives, and to zing wisecracks at each other,” wrote Frank DiGiacomo, the author of the
Observer
piece, “so the Blue Ribbon round table gathers to share horror stories about customers from hell, culinary techniques, business gossip, and, of course, the trials of making a romantic relationship work on a chef’s insane work schedule.” In New York mythology, in which darkly creative things happen in wee morning hours, there are two archetypal settings: the round table that Dorothy Parker and her friends frequented at that famous Midtown hotel and the downtown artists’ hangout, and people are always on the lookout for where one of the two archetypes will manifest itself again. Blue Ribbon, downtown and with a round table, had both.

Mario, then thirty-four, wearing clogs bought from a surgical supply company and dressed in “California jams,” was described as the antic funnyman holding the group together (he may act like a clown, one chef told the reporter, but you’d be surprised—he’s actually very smart), and his I-get-along-with-everyone attitude was illustrated by a story he told of being in San Francisco and having to charm a policeman who had wanted to arrest Batali’s drinking buddy, the fortuitously met writer Hunter S. Thompson, who had pulled a gun on a cable car operator who refused to take Thompson to his front door: the evening ended with Batali’s waking up in the Fairmont Hotel (he hadn’t been a guest) wearing wet swimming trunks (the hotel doesn’t have a pool). Other chefs at the round table—” a group of high-testosterone dudes,” Batali said, to explain the enthusiasm with which the talent of the room was commented upon—included Tom Valenti and “the street-toughened, baby-faced” Bobby Flay. Flay had already published a book, won an award as “Rising Star Chef of the Year,” and employed a publicist. “Where’s Bobby tonight?” someone asked. “He couldn’t make it today because the roof here wasn’t able to support his helicopter.”