Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (37 page)

One night, I stood in the doorway watching a table of ten. They were loud and raucous. They were finger snappers and whistlers. I watched one woman eating most of her meal—steak and potato gratin—with her fingers. Papineau was standing next to me.

I asked him: “Is it me or do you think people’s manners keep getting worse?” I had been reminded of some of the kids in the Banquet and Catering dining room as I watched this party carry on.

He didn’t answer for a moment. The woman had her steak in her hand and was tearing a piece off with her teeth. “It’s a whole new philosophy of dining out,” he said.

“The new philosophy sucks,” I answered.

“It does. It really does.”

On quite a few nights, there weren’t many people in the dining room, and we had a lot of downtime. We’d do what we could to appear busy, but you can only fill water glasses so many times. So we stood off to the sides, hands behind our backs, appearing attentive, and talking among ourselves. Jeff told me that in addition to cooking, he wrote poetry and loved Rimbaud. It was surprising, not because he didn’t seem like he was incapable of writing poetry, but because these sorts of conversations never happened much. We all knew where each other was from, had heard all sorts of stories about one another’s externships, and often talked about experiences in past classes, but there were whole layers to one another that we never bothered sharing. I found out Micah wrote too, loved South American magical realist fiction, and was going to blog about the trip to Japan he and his girlfriend, Natasha, were taking after graduation. I found out that Carol was a devout Christian, and she ruminated endlessly about theology. As the nights passed, she and I would stand off together and talk about religion and philosophy. “Do you believe in evil?” she asked me once, holding a basket of bread in her hand.

“No. Not as a thing in and of itself. I believe that you can describe people’s actions as evil, but I don’t believe in evil as a force.”

“I do believe in evil,” she said. “But it bugs me because at the same time, if you believe in evil, you take away people’s individual responsibility. They can claim to be influenced or possessed by evil, and that washes away their personal guilt.”

D
URING THE FIRST FEW
days of Papineau’s class, we were scheduled to take our Fifth Term Cooking Practical. The test would be given daily to six students at a shot, in the same kitchen as the first practical, using
the same protocol, with the exact same menus, except instead of a soup, we’d be doing a fish course.

There was no reason to be scared, but I was. The first practical had offered a few difficulties, and even though I knew my skills had blossomed in the interim, two and a half hours to do a fish course, a meat, and three side dishes was almost no time at all. One error—just one—and the whole thing was shot.

The test would be proctored by Chef DiPeri, who had a hard-assed reputation for exactitude. Word was already out that any deviations from procedure—shortcuts, use of improper equipment or plates, mistakes of time—would result in a serious deduction of points. I’d found out a few times in the past that when you’re nervous, when you’re panicked, your hands can get stupid. No matter how much you’ve improved.

I could do any of the potential practical dishes, and I’d done them each a number of times. Strangely, this made me nervous too. Familiarity could breed carelessness.

Days before the test, I had all the recipes ready. I had gone over and over the oral exam questions. I had envisioned myself cooking the dishes, broadcasting the inner eye footage over my own closed-circuit Food Network.

The night before the test, I stayed up late studying. When I turned the lights out, sleep hovered just out of reach. When I replayed the footage of myself grilling a steak, or making french fries, I was including alternate endings of disasters and fire and food burnt to nothing. I finally drifted off around 1:00. I needed to be at school a little before 6:30. I awoke at 3:00 and, after tossing for half an hour, decided it was futile, got up, showered, and sat watching the sky lighten until it was time to go.

At 6:30, all six of us plus DiPeri stood in the kitchen. DiPeri had us reach into a cup and pull out a slip of paper that indicated which menu we’d be cooking. I drew shallow-poached flounder with a wine-reduction sauce, chicken fricassee, glazed root vegetables, rice pilaf, and green beans. I would go first, with the next testee starting twenty minutes later.

I was allowed ten minutes to stockpile whatever I needed. Almost every ingredient was gathered for me. I checked them over and supplemented the cache with butter, flour, cream, and oil. I grabbed all the pans I thought I’d need and I turned my oven on to 375.

At 7:00, DiPeri said, “All right, go ahead and start.”

I inhaled. I was exhausted. And I was wired. And something in my head said,
Turn off your mind. Turn it off and just cook
. I exhaled.

Two hours and fifteen minutes later, I was done. I’d finished fifteen minutes early. I’d done all the hard stuff first, like making a roux for both a fish and chicken velouté, and filleting the flounder as the roux cooked and concocting a fumet, or broth, with the bones. The rest just flowed—flowed unconsciously, smoothly—from there. I broke the spell just once, stopping at the ninety-minute point to assess where I was. I saw what I had done and I knew I was fine.

At 9:20, I presented my food. I’d made two errors: My sauce for the fish was slightly thick. And I overcooked the rice. That last was just a dumb mistake. Mere forgetfulness. I remembered thinking at one point,
Take care of the rice in about five more minutes
, but the thought didn’t reoccur.

I got an 84. DiPeri shook my hand and told me I’d done a good job. I went outside for a few minutes to get some air and call Nelly.

I dialed the number and she picked up on the first ring.

“Jonathan Dixon.”

My voice was bright. “Nelly.”

“You don’t sound like someone who just failed a cooking practical …”

Later, I was back inside doing my dishes. I stood next to Diego, the student who’d gone after I did.

“How’d you do?” I asked.

“I did well. I got a ninety.”

“Nice.”

“I was so nervous going in there.”

“Did you tell yourself, ‘Turn your mind off and cook’?”

He turned and looked at me. “Yeah. Exactly.” He laughed. “And it worked.”

T
HE
E
SCOFFIER
R
ESTAURANT IS
the campus showpiece, a small, ornate temple to classical French cuisine. The menu is pricey—$39 for a ragout of lobster, $32 for sliced duck breast set atop cassoulet—and yet there are few nights when the restaurant isn’t filled by at least two-thirds. It’s an award-winning, Zagat-rated establishment, and it would be our last stop.

Just before our time at St. Andrew’s had ended, Jessica, our group leader, had met with the teaching assistant to work out who would be going to which station. The group would be splitting up again. Some would be moving to the American Bounty restaurant, on the opposite end of the building from Escoffier, or E-Room, as it was known. The rest would take over the E-Room afternoon shift, with the addition of a few students who’d been working at the Caterina restaurant.

Jessica wouldn’t tell me whom I’d be working with—“You’ll find out soon enough,” she said—but, one night before dinner service, as she and I sat at a table folding napkins, she let it slip that they had tried to pair strong students with weaker ones. A few moments of silent folding passed until something occurred to me.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I said. Jess looked up. “Answer me honestly: Am I one of the weak ones?” She stared for a second, laughed, shook her head, and went back to folding.

“I’m serious,” I went on. “It’s okay; it’ll be character building. Just let me know, so I can really figure out how to approach this.”

“You’re not the weak one. Let’s put it that way. You’ll have two other partners. One of them is also pretty strong. Seriously, don’t worry about it.”

I watched her for a moment to see if her face betrayed her, but she looked as if she could pass a polygraph.

“W
HO IS GOING TO
be the next Ferran Adrià? Who is going to be the next Thomas Keller? The next Ducasse?” Alain De Coster, chef-instructor of the Escoffier Restaurant, paced the front of his classroom on the first day, half an hour before we’d begin cooking for that night’s customers. “Who is going to be the next Girardet? What if it’s you?” He pointed at a student up front. Then to the back: “Or you?”

De Coster was a Belgian émigré in his fifties. He looked quite a bit like James Ellroy, and he’d spent his professional life training in the old-school way, starting in restaurants as a thirteen-year-old apprentice and working his way up. He was regarded as an encyclopedia of classical cooking; rumor had it he was a soon-to-be candidate for the title of certified master chef; and yet he was renowned at school for never—
never
—raising his voice.

De Coster told us first thing that not yelling was a new development in his life, that he had, in fact, been a screamer when he was younger. “I was, if you’ll excuse my language, a real asshole,” he told us. But one day—and he didn’t describe exactly what had happened—he’d had an epiphany and vowed never to lose his cool again. He said that a chef needs to have the loyalty of his staff, and that fear was in no way equivalent to loyalty. Therefore, he didn’t ever want to inspire fear in anyone who worked for him. Which, at this moment, meant us.

The first day, he lectured in a voice quavering with enthusiasm. “Pay attention to the product, and the product will reward you!” he exclaimed. “Everything you cook should trigger the ‘wow!’ factor for
anyone who eats it! Everything at a peak of refinement! Every detail is crucial! No step matters less than another!”

De Coster talked about the history of French cuisine, from Carême to Escoffier to Fernand Point to the icons of nouvelle cuisine. He spoke about these people and their accomplishments in terms of upheaval and revolution. He made it all wildly exciting.

“Read! Read! Taste!
Learn!
” he implored. “How do you help make revolution? How do you make something new? Look at the classics. Look at every single element of a dish—
every one
—and figure out,
What can I do to make each one of those steps contemporary? What can I do to make them new? Make them my own? How much skill and technique and knowledge can I bring to bear on each element?
”

I sat listening, burning with revolutionary fervor, like Bill Ayers in a toque. I wanted to get upstairs in that kitchen, and excel and shine. I wanted to stay glued to De Coster’s side and watch him in action, to learn everything, observe everything I possibly could.

This was not in the stars for me, though, because it turned out I wouldn’t be cooking any food for customers. The station assignments were called out name by name. I discovered, to my dismay, I had been assigned to the family meal team.

The family meal team’s job was to cook vast quantities of food in a very short time for a bunch of moaning, grumbling ingrates. Or, put another way, we would be making a nightly dinner for our classmates. We could occasionally order meat and vegetables but needed to use a lot of what we had on hand in the kitchen—that is, stuff from the walk-in refrigerator that was about to turn bad.

The one thing that made De Coster angry, the one thing that might tempt him to raise his voice, was waste. No matter what it was—an apple core, broccoli stalks, shrimp beginning to throb with rot—there was a use for it.

We had from 3:00 in the afternoon until 4:50 to prepare an entrée, a starch, a vegetable, and a salad for fifty people, which included our group, the E-Room student waitstaff, any security or buildings and grounds people who wandered in at dinnertime, and any instructors
who wanted to eat. The kitchen was tiny. You couldn’t move without bumping into someone else. The temperature routinely got to 110 degrees. We had the most space of anybody—an entire metal worktable for the three of us—Max, Lou, and me.

Max was about twenty, the son of a Lutheran minister, and shared the same dim view of the world at large that I did. Lou was a pain in the ass—snide, sarcastic, smirking. He was not incredibly industrious, and Max and I didn’t really count him as part of the team. It was the Jonathan and Max Show.

We had only a vague idea of what we’d be cooking each day. We had come up with menu ideas in advance—spice-rubbed steak one night, yogurt-braised lamb (ripped off directly from Tabla’s menu) on another—but we found out the first two nights that our orders weren’t likely to come in. Jon, the teaching assistant who was in charge of physically placing our orders, had a laissez-faire relationship with accuracy. So our initial menu—steak, roasted potatoes, sautéed broccoli rabe, and a salad of spinach and red onion with raspberry vinaigrette—never came into being. Neither the beef nor the potatoes arrived. The spinach was absent too. Plan B: we found several huge pork loins in the refrigerator, each one on the verge of turning slightly slimy; we found a sack of cornmeal; we discovered a cache of fennel, a bag of Valencia oranges, and a tub of kalamata olives. Max and I trimmed the worst of the pork away, rubbed what was left with a mix of coffee, cayenne, brown sugar, and dried herbs and threw it in the convection oven. We made polenta. We julienned the fennel, sectioned all the oranges, chopped up the olives and mixed everything together with salt, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil. At the last minute, we found some broccoli, hacked it up, boiled it, and tossed it with butter, salt, and pepper. We served dinner five minutes late. And the results were solidly … okay. At least, we thought so.

Because we had to do some quick tidying after we served everything, we found that the three of us were the last to eat. That first night, we made our way into the dining room where the others were already seated and listened to the comments of “What is this shit?”
and “I think I’m going to go hungry tonight” or “This is terrible” from the student waitstaff and maintenance people. This would go on night after night, like something reflexive, no matter how good or bad our results were. Our group was usually a little more polite. But I came to understand that praise meant not hearing the word “shit” in connection with the food.