Yes, Chef (10 page)

Jakob writhed on the floor, screaming in pain and holding his hand. I started shouting something along the lines of “Holy shit! Holy shit!”

All the commotion brought over the executive chef, who looked down at Jakob and chimed in at the top of his lungs.

“What have you idiots done?” he screamed.

Someone, definitely not me, kept his wits about him, picked up Jakob’s fingertip, dropped it into a bag of ice, and rushed him to the hospital. A few hours later, it was successfully reattached. But Jakob would never come back. At staff meal later that day, there would be no mention of what had happened. The older crew knew it was stupid rookie work; the younger ones realized it could have been any one of them.

At Belle Avenue, I learned what it was like to serve a meal to guests who were in no rush at all. When people booked dinner at our restaurant, they came to spend the evening. This gave the kitchen more time to work on each dish, to replace speed as a priority with attention to detail. I started to appreciate the implications of this
careful work, how differently garlic cooked depending on whether it was sliced, chopped, or crushed, how differently it released its flavor into the pan. Up until this point, fine dining had been an abstraction, a distant summit to ascend. Now that I saw how much strategy and how many levels cooking could operate on, it was clear to me: What we did in the restaurant was not all that different from the work the museum curators did across the street. We were both, in our way, trying to engage our customers’ senses, take them out of their day-to-day lives, and every once in a while, when they fell in love with a really well-executed Rydberg (pan-seared beef and potatoes in a red wine sauce) or ended their meal with a sweet botrytis Sémillon, they looked at the world in a slightly new way.

In jazz, a musician who is striving for a new kind of perfect is said to have gone “deep in the shed.” That’s what happened to me at Belle Avenue. It went from being a gig—a highly coveted one, but a gig all the same—to being my laboratory, my studio, my church. I never left. I worked my shift as quickly as I could, but it was never about getting done so I could get out, it was so I could learn something else. I started in the fish-cleaning department and then I went into the meat-cleaning department, then I got bumped up to junior cook on the fish station, then
commis
on the meat station. I did a turn in pastry and in
garde manger
, where we handled cold hors d’oeuvres, salads, and charcuterie. There were fifteen separate service stations in that kitchen, and I was determined to go through each one.

O
N MY RARE NIGHTS OFF
, I met up with my friends at one of the local cafés. One night there was a group of girls at the next table, and one in particular caught my eye. She was speaking Swedish, but she didn’t look Swedish; she had dark, shiny hair and almond-shaped eyes. I was never shy with girls—I have my sisters to thank for that—so I went over and introduced myself.

Christina was cute and smart and she was, like me, Swedish but not Swedish. Her father was a Swede, but her mother was Japanese.
We started dating, and quickly became a couple. I ignored the fact that she smoked cigarettes, something I’d never done and which, as I developed into a chef, seemed like the ultimate palate killer. I also came from a family of women who wore only simple makeup, if any, and Christina seemed to spend hours putting on layer after layer of the stuff.

“She’s such a pretty girl,” my mother said after meeting her. “Why does she need all that paint?”

Christina’s family lived in a rooftop apartment in the center of town, and while most teenage boys would be happier to be alone with their girlfriends, I was secretly pleased whenever her parents were around. They represented a world outside of Gburg, and for me that glimpse of the larger world was everything. I loved Sweden, but I didn’t want to stay there. I took my job at Belle Avenue so seriously because I hoped that it would lead to bigger things—in France, because all great chefs had to do a stint in France, but also London and New York. I was interested in anybody and anything that represented the places I hadn’t been, but wanted to see.

Christina’s father, Jens, was an architect in the city planning department, and he would talk to me about the way a city’s environment can influence people’s lives. Like my father, he was the first white collar professional to come out of his family. Her mother, Aiko, had a little shop in the city center, where she sold Japanese imports and foreign novelties, everything from Hello Kitty to Snoopy. Sometimes, when I’d go over to Christina’s house to hang out, her mother would make us Japanese snacks. The flavors blew my mind: This food seemed to be based on an entirely different calculation of flavor, texture, and balance. The first dish I remember her offering me was a plate of cucumber spears drizzled with white miso and topped with bonito flakes. Crisp, cold vegetables, earthy fermented sauce, and delicate slivers of fish that practically melted at the touch. Could that even be called a dish?

Yes, it could be called a dish. A great dish.

From that point on, I tried to look hungry whenever Aiko was at
home. When she wasn’t, Christina and I would cook together and argue about which Japanese condiments I could or couldn’t use. I couldn’t read the labels, of course, and even the translated ones meant nothing to me, so I was ready to taste and try everything.

A
YEAR LATER
, I had fully settled in at Belle Avenue. Hard work there was rewarded a number of ways. You could get a raise, you could get moved up in the
brigade
, or you could be sent away. To be sent away was the highest honor: It meant that you would be sent off to spend a week, a month, or a season doing a
stage
, which was an unpaid apprenticeship. Typically, your boss would find the placement for you, and then he’d send you as his representative, with encouragements and threats to do well by him. The idea was that you’d either come back, bringing those new techniques and skills you’d picked up with you, or that your boss’s kindness would come back to him someday, in some form. Tony Bowman, the chef in charge of all hotel dining other than Belle Avenue, knew I wanted to see the world.

“Marcus,” he said after we’d finished breaking down a banquet buffet one afternoon, “I’m going to send you to
stage
in Amsterdam.”

I held off from calling my mother and telling her immediately so I could break the news to her and Dad at the same time, in person, over dinner.

“Amsterdam?” my father said. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. I’ve traveled there for work and I don’t think they have much in the way of food. And besides, it’s a very druggy society. You could fall in with the wrong element.”

I appealed to my mother. “Mom,” I said, “I’m not messing up. I’m not out there drinking like a lot of the guys. I work and come home and that’s it. Besides, you don’t have to leave Göteborg to do drugs.”

Mom agreed, but Dad held firm. “If they are willing to give you Holland now, something else will come in time. France is where you’ve always wanted to go. I think you should hold out for something better.”

In one day, my whole world had come together and then, a few hours later, completely fallen apart. I didn’t know enough about Amsterdam to argue with my father, and while I had never been reluctant to debate him, I felt I had to respect his wishes. After all, I still lived under his roof.

The next day, I looked at my shoes while I told Tony I couldn’t go. He looked at me intensely, as if he were trying to bring my face into focus.

“I thought you were in charge of your life,” he said. “You’re eighteen now, Marcus, how come you’re not in charge?”

T
HE JOURNEY TO
I
NTERLAKEN TOOK THIRTY HOURS
. I
T BEGAN WITH A
late-morning ferry from Göteborg to Denmark, during which the normally quiet boat was overtaken by boozy Danish college kids who started pounding overpriced beers from the snack counter even before the cranes of Göteborg harbor disappeared from sight. Passenger traffic was light that day, so I took my duffel to the far end of the cabin, away from the commotion, where I could stretch out on a bench with my bag for a pillow. As loud as the Danes were, I fell into a dead sleep. I’d had none the night before. Mats and I had been out all night, leaving me just enough time to pack my bag before dawn. I woke up to a staticky voice on the PA system announcing our arrival
in the port town of Frederikshavn and to the gentle bump of the boat as it kissed the side of the pier.

Using the duffel’s handles as straps, I slung the bag over my shoulders and headed out for the fifteen-minute walk to the train station. Because I’d made this same transfer traveling with my soccer teams many times before, and because I was still in a Scandinavian country, I felt more at home than abroad, a feeling that stayed with me all the way down through the peninsula of Jutland, until the train crossed over the border from Denmark to Germany.

I was going to Switzerland, to be a
commis
for six months at a famous resort hotel in Interlaken called Victoria Jungfrau.

My father had greeted the news of this job as he did anything that had to do with the physical world—through the lens of geography. “Ahh, you’ll be right at the foot of the Jungfrau,” he said, pulling an atlas from the shelf. “That’s in the Bernese Alps.” As he ran his index finger down the book’s index, he squinted, scanning his memory for the details of Switzerland that mattered. He spread the open book across the kitchen table. “It is a landlocked country,” he said, lips pursing in disapproval. His Smögen-born bias toward living near the ocean was immense. “But at least you’ll be between two lakes. That’s how the town got its name, of course.
Inter. Laken
.” He tapped at the three-mile-wide strip of land that bridged the Thun and Brienz lakes. “There you are. And you have the Aare River running through.” Once again, he narrowed his eyes, then talked about how significant water was for the Swiss: how it had been harnessed for centuries as a source of manufacturing power; how two of Europe’s most significant rivers, the Rhône and the Rhine, started there; and, of course, how important it was when it came in the form of snow, to support the ski tourism that held up a large portion of the economy.

My mother passed through the room just as he finished his assessment. She looked over his shoulder at the map.

“Is it cold there?” she asked. “Will he need to bring extra sweaters?”

First and foremost, I had packed my knives—my most treasured possessions—which I’d wrapped in the leather roll my grandmother had made for me.

“Don’t buy that,” she’d said when she saw how much the rolls cost. She went and studied them in a store downtown, then came home and fashioned one herself, sturdier and more handsome than the cheap nylon ones she’d seen.

I wrapped the roll, my French pepper mill, and a Japanese sharpening stone Christina had given me inside the two chef’s jackets that my Belle Avenue coworkers had presented to me as a going-away gift. On my last day of work the hotel chef, Tony, had handed them to me, which seemed fitting since he was the one who had arranged the gig for me at Victoria in the first place. He’d been a
commis
there himself, ten years before.

“Don’t fuck this up,” he told me. “I’ll hear about it if you do.”

My other essentials included jeans, running shoes and the turquoise blue Converse sneakers I wore for work, my Walkman, and a pile of fresh notepads and pens so I could write down everything I saw, learned, and tasted.

Back in Göteborg, I’d left some ends tied up more cleanly than others. Belle Avenue was easy: Tony was part of the establishment and he was the one sending me away, so everyone treated me as a graduate rather than a traitor. My girlfriend, Christina, on the other hand, didn’t want to let go. When Tony made me the offer, I thought the timing was perfect. Christina had gotten an offer to model in Japan, a place she had wanted to know better and where her half-Swedish looks would definitely give her a competitive edge. We would both move on to the rest of our lives, I figured. It was time.

Christina saw it differently.

“I’ll wait for you, then,” she said when I told her about Switzerland.

“No, no,” I said. “You should go to Tokyo and live with your aunt.”

“No. I’ll wait for you right here.”

I didn’t want her to wait. I didn’t want to have any ties to Sweden beyond my family. I was moving on.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” I said.

“That’s OK,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

After a point, I stopped trying to talk to her. We were breaking up, as far as I was concerned. Cooking was the only thing I had room for. Cooking was the only thing I wanted to make room for.

There was nothing clean about my last loose end, which was the question of what I was going to do about the army. Sweden may not have taken part in a war for the last hundred years—not officially, at least—but it maintained an army, and service was mandatory. In my father’s generation, this duty was something you never questioned. In mine, and especially among my
blatte
friends who felt only marginally welcome in the country much of the time, the army seemed obsolete, a waste of time.

But once I had turned eighteen, my father started to bring up the topic every now and then. “Which station do you hope to go to?” he’d ask out of the blue. “You definitely don’t want to end up in Lapland.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I’d say. “I’m not going.”

This was a position my father simply couldn’t understand. To him, the only reason you should be excused from military service was if you were mentally ill, physically incapacitated, or, consistent with his generation’s ideas of maleness and gender, gay. I was none of those, so I should go. I suspect, too, that he felt I was a little too close to my mother, too protected by her. Maybe my cooking even baffled him. The army would make a man out of me.

“You can do something that has nothing to do with guns,” my mother suggested, trying to broker a compromise. But it wasn’t the guns; it was that nothing about the army fit into my dream of becoming a chef.