A Cook's Tour (31 page)

     England’s worst boss? I don’t think so. England’s worst boss is the boss who doesn’t give a fuck, someone who’s wasting his employees’ time, challenging them to do nothing more ambitious than show up. Understand that in no-name pit stops and casual dining establishments, it’s just a mistake when a cook forgets a single unpeeled fava bean or a tiny smudge of grease, but in a three-star restaurant, it’s treason. In the cruel mathematics of two- and three-star dining establishments, a customer who has a good meal will tell two or three people about it. A person who has an unsatisfactory meal will tell ten or twenty. It makes for a much more compelling anecdote. That one unpeeled fava bean is the end of the world. Or it could be.

     As most really good cooks or commis working in similar circumstances will readily tell you: Mess with the chef at your peril. It’s his name on the door.

Where Cooks Come From

There’s a little town in Mexico where cooks come from.

     If you’re a chef and you’ve spent any serious time working in professional kitchens, you know what to do when Hector, your saucier, gets pinched for assault and you suddenly need a replacement. Faced with a situation where you need a French-trained, ready-to-go, reliable, hardworking guy who knows what to do when you need a solid flounder special and have time only to describe sole
grenobloise
as ‘filet sauté . . . with capers, lemon,
vin blanc
, shallot, butter,’ you know where to go. Where do you tap into the source for the best French and Italian cooks? Not France. Certainly not Italy. If you’re looking for a line cook who’s professional in his work habits, responsible with your food, dependable, a guy with a sense of humor, reasonably good character, and a repertoire of French and Italian standards, and who can drill out 250 meals without going mental or cutting corners too egregiously, chances are you go to Carlos, your grill man, and say, ‘Carlos,
mi carnale
. . . I need a
cucinero
. You know somebody for sauté?’ In every likelihood, Carlos will think for a moment and say, ‘Yeah . . . sure . . . I have a cousin.’ Or ‘Yeah . . . sure . . . I got a friend.’ And a few days later, someone will show up at your kitchen door with features similar to Carlos’s – or the now-incarcerated Hector’s – and he’ll step right into old Hector’s station like it’s a comfortable shoe. Hector, of course, was from the Mexican state of Puebla. As is Carlos. And just about every other cook and dishwasher in America. If there was a mandatory day of rest – or a public holiday for all Poblanos – a lot of restaurants in America would have to close their doors. As it is, the day after the fifth of May (Cinco de Mayo), half the cooks in America are hungover. Keep that in mind.

     Fifteen or twenty years ago, we’d have been talking about cheap labor. You know, the old ‘wetback’ story: exploited, unskilled immigrant labor, toiling away for inhuman hours in menial jobs, paid cash under the table at minimum wage or less. Things have changed somewhat for the better. While we have yet to see as many mestizo-looking chefs with Spanish-sounding last names running high-end French kitchens as we should, all those dishwashers and porters didn’t simply settle for spending the rest of their lives cleaning up after the rest of us. They watched, they learned, they trained on
garde-manger
and grill and prep and sauté – usually on their own time – and when some flighty white kid decided he wanted the winter off to go skiing in Colorado, they were ready to step in. When the French sous-chef appeared to be unable to work without a long, lingering two-hour lunch with his socialist comrades in the front of the house and the chef had finally had enough of his clock-punching, lazy prima donna act, the Poblanos were ready. Now, many areas of Puebla are like a talent pool of free-agent or draft picks in professional sports – pursued, protected, sought after by chefs who’d rather snip off a pinkie finger than lose them to the other team. They’ve been trained by a procession of French, American, and Italian chefs – most of whom come and go, turning over quickly, but who each leave behind a little knowledge, a new technique, a few more nuggets of information, some new ideas. So now, ask Carlos to do something with the soft-shell crabs and with that old asparagus and you can have a reasonable expectation that he will whip right into a salad of soft-shell crabs with asparagus and citrus vinaigrette in classic French nouvelle style. Stuck for a monkfish special or a soup? Don’t worry, Carlos is all over it, remembering some long-gone French chef’s preparation. (Old Henri-Pierre may have been a lazy Communist ratbag, but he could cook like an angel.) A lot of times, I’ll walk into an unfamiliar kitchen to say hello to the cooks – or to thank the chef for a freebie – and I’ll see the familiar posse of white-clad Mexicans listening to the Spanish station down by the dishwashing area, and of course I’ll say hello, then casually inquire where, exactly, they hail from.

     ‘
¿
Poblanos?’ I’ll ask, pretty sure of the answer.

     ‘
¡
Viva la rasa!’ will come the reply.

     My cooks are almost all from Puebla, and not just from Puebla but from the same small area around the towns of Izúcar de Matamoros, Atlixco, and Tlapanala, situated downwind from the famous volcanoes of
Under the Volcano
fame. If there’s an epicenter of fine French cooking, it appears to be Tlapanala, a sleepy little village surrounded by sugarcane fields and mango trees, about three miles outside of Izúcar. That’s where my sous-chef, Edilberto Perez, was born. It’s where Isidoro, my veteran grill man, hails from, and Antonio, my roundsman, and other cooks, runners, prep cooks, and dishwashers, past, present, and future. Their families still live there and they visit whenever possible. Over the years, I’ve heard a lot about the town, about Eddie’s house, his ranch, about his uncle, the
heladero
, who makes ice cream the old-fashioned way, about Antonio’s family, who live next door, about my prep cook Bautista’s former street gang, the terrifying Vatos Locos, whose distinctive tag I often find scrawled on locker room walls, and whose hand signs (a ‘
V
’ and an ‘
L
’, signified by turning the right hand and making a sort of open-thumbed peace sign) I recognize. I heard about my prep guy Miguel’s family’s
pulquería
, Isidoro’s family’s candy store. I heard a lot about the joys of
barbacoa
(Mexican-style barbecue),
mole
,
pulque
: I wanted to go. I wanted to go very badly. I told my cooks how I’d visit their parents and tell them all what
desgraciados
their sons have become, now that they’re living that
vida loca
in New York. So, when I first started putting together my ‘
Borrachón
Abroad’ pitch for my publisher, I knew one of the places I absolutely had to go. I huddled with my sous-chef and said, ‘Eddie, I want to visit your town. I want you to go with me, to show me your town. I want to meet everybody’s families. I want your mom to cook for me, if she’s willing. I want to drink
pulque
and
mezcal
and eat
menudo
and
pozole
and real
mole poblano
– like from Puebla – and
barbacoa
like you been tellin’ me about all these years. I want to wear a cool-looking cowboy hat, ride a horse, find out where that serial killer Bautista really comes from. I want to go down there with you and have a really good time. We’ll get the TV people to pay for it.’

     ‘Let me call to my wife,’ said Eddie, inspired. ‘I send her down first to making the preparations.’

     Which is how it happened that I found myself sitting by the
mercado
in the small central square of Tlapanala on a languid late afternoon, the sun slowly setting, watching as the women and children of the village lined up at the telephone kiosk, waiting to receive prearranged calls from kitchens in New York and apartments in Queens.

     The streets were quiet and dusty, kids kicking around old soccer balls, shooting hoops in the court by the
mercado
, where old women sold chilis, squashes,
chayote
, yucca, and vegetables. Occasionally, an old man passed by, driving a few head of cattle, a herd of goats, a few donkeys down Tlapanala’s tidy streets. A stray dog wandered over to see if I had any food. Young mothers sat with their babies. Children, still in their school uniforms, played on the back steps of the kiosk, the afternoon’s silence broken now and again by the singsong music from a propane truck, playing along to the unforgettable chant of ‘
Gaaazzz
!
GaaaaAAAaazz!
’ and announcements over a loudspeaker describing the products on sale at the
mercado
. At four o’ clock, the peal of the bread alarm informed residents that fresh bread, hot out of the oven, was now available at the bakery.

     A few yards behind me were the railway tracks. The train to Tijuana and beyond. Nueva York. The road out, the starting point, where generations of Tlapanala’s young men began their long, hard climb out of poverty to become cooks in faraway America.

     There were few young men left in the village. I saw only women, children, and much older men. In Tlapanala, you can tell the homes of families with a son or a father standing behind a stove in New York: They’re the houses with the satellite dishes on the roofs and metal rebars still protruding from the top of new additions and annexes (instead of capping or removing the extra lengths, they keep them sticking up out of the concrete; should money come, they can more easily add a second floor). I sat on my bench, contentedly watching and listening, an object of curiosity, a lone
gabacho
drinking
cerveza
Modelo, grinning for no apparent reason. Looking down the street, I spied my sous-chef taking an evening stroll with his wife, new baby propped on his arm, young daughter trailing behind, holding her daddy’s other hand. Thirteen years ago, Eddie took that train behind me to Tijuana, swam and waded across the border, then hopped a train to New York. He slept on the subway for his first few weeks, slept on the floors of friends’ apartments when he could, until he got a job as a night porter. Now he’s a sous-chef, a title inadequate to describe his importance. He’s opened and worked at every restaurant in the company – Washington, D.C., Miami, Le Marais – and, of course, for me – at the mothership in New York. Long before I arrived on the scene, he’d been the go-to guy for every chef who walked in the door. Now he’s a fully documented permanent resident (and soon-to-be citizen) of the United States of America, and a newly enrolled student at the French Culinary Institute, where he hobnobs with culinary luminaries like Jacques Pépin and André Soltner. (He’s learning where all that French food he’s been making brilliantly for years really comes from – and why. Eddie knows how to make a
gastrite
, he just didn’t know what to call it. I wish I could watch him in class, when they show him glaçage or how to make a liaison, or explain the principles of déglacer. He’ll say, ‘Oh, that! No problem. Same like for the ravioli at Les Halles.’) Eddie rents an apartment in Park Slope, owns both a house and a small ranch in his home town of Tlapanala – and considerable livestock. He’s an employer in Mexico, a role model and leader in New York. And he’s my friend. I wish I could take even the slightest credit for the Edilberto Perez story. But I can’t. He did it all. Watching him walk the streets of the place he was born, though, I was filled with pride just for knowing him, and for being lucky enough to have worked with him. Before visiting Eddie, however, I’d had a grim duty to perform. Yet another forced march to television entertainment. ‘Tony . . . Tony . . . listen. It’s a food show. It’s going on the Food Network. We need some variety! We can’t just show you hanging around in Puebla, getting drunk with your sous-chef! Don’t worry! We’re on it. We’ve got some really special ideas.’

     That’s why I went first to the state of Oaxaca. So I could be force-fed iguana.

Reasons Why You Don’t Want to Be on Television: Number Four in a Series

I was in Puerto Angel, a fishing village on the Pacific coast, staying at a remote, kooky, overgrown retreat built around a ravine on the slopes of a mountain overlooking the sea. The only other residents were Martin, my driver; two shooters; a burned-out geriatric hippie known as ‘Quiet Dave,’ who spoke in a spacey whisper; the proprietor and his wife and assistants; and a former CIA chief of base for Nha Trang during the Vietnam War and his Chinese girlfriend. As I’d just been to Nha Trang, we had a lot to talk about.

     Here’s what I hoped for in Puerto Angel: a neglected stretch of beach, a near-empty, far from luxurious hotel, a few straggling eccentrics. Down the road a ways was the resort town of Zipolite, a sort of Last Stop for well-toasted surfers, backpackers, beach bums, fugitive dope pilots from the seventies, the itinerant jewelry/handicraft set. It’s the sort of place you wake up in – after dropping one hit of acid too many at your 112th Grateful Dead concert – not having any idea how you got there, and far from caring.

     We shot a whole-roasted-snapper scene in Zipolite, watched the fishing boats come in at Puerto Angel, the whole town running to meet them as they skipped full throttle through the waves and onto the beach, hulls loaded with fresh tuna. We drove to Huatulco, about twenty miles away, with the idea of doing some snorkel fishing. It was one of those ludicrous, pointless exercises in television artifice so beloved by people who look at life largely through a lens: ‘Get some cool underwater shots of Tony! We can have him fish with a local! Cut to medium shots of Tony, looking hunky in a Speedo, in chef mode, grillin’ and chillin’ on the beach, sun setting dramatically in the background!’