Yes, Chef (21 page)

“Marcus, what have you got?” he’d say.

L
IFE ON THE SHIP DEMONSTRATED
yet one more way in which a kitchen staff could be divided up into factions. Cooks sat with cooks, of course, and officers with officers. I was the only black in the kitchen, but I was
considered European and therefore given a middle level of status. The Norwegians were at the top of the heap, and the Filipinos who cleaned and actually ran the boat were at the bottom. There were plenty of onboard romances, but it went without saying that a Filipino dishwasher should never touch a Swedish chambermaid. The Filipinos lived four to a room and if the Europeans and Americans thought a nonstop five-month schedule was tough, it was nothing compared to theirs—eighteen months with not a single day off and not a single second of privacy. What the hell was that? They were hardworking people. The only benefit, as far as I was concerned, of the separate-but-unequal world on the ship was that the staff mess hall featured two menus, one for them and one for the rest of us. I always ordered theirs. Their food showed traces of the country’s Asian location, its Spanish colonizers, and its importance as a European and Arab trade route, and the results were richer, spicier, and tastier than anything else on offer. I would have been happy to eat the stewed chicken adobo over rice every day, but my absolute favorite was a jellyroll-style beef dish called
morcon
, filled with the unexpected but tasty combination of hard-boiled eggs, cheese, sausage, liver, and strips of pork fat, all tied together with string and simmered in a vinegary sauce.

New flavors were what I was after, and in almost every port of call, I smelled or tasted something I’d never tasted before. I’d have four hours to go ashore, and I’d go by myself unless Paul or Susan wanted to tag along. Ports are, as a rule, the seediest area of a city, and the captain often issued warnings to the crew to be careful. For a change, my color was an asset in terms of blending in; in many of our layovers, only my blond shipmates got the stares and hustles. Under the protective layer of my skin, I went unnoticed, which allowed me to observe and relish the most beautiful aspect of port culture: the street food.

Funny when you imagine how a certain food should taste, and then you experience the authentic version. In the middle of a food market in Acapulco, I ordered four tacos: two pork, one fish, one
chicken. I watched a small brown woman with long black braids make the tortillas right in front of me, patting the masa dough into flat circles much smaller than I thought they would be. The pork was simply roasted and pulled apart; the fish was a version of grouper that had been pan-seared and tossed with a little oil and chopped cilantro stems—not the leaves, just the stems. The chicken was shredded leg meat roasted with chilies and tomatoes and red onions. Doritos were about as close as I’d ever come to Mexican food, so my expectations were all fabricated from stereotyped images I’d gotten who knows where. I expected the tacos to come in crisp-fried tortilla envelopes, but instead, they were little pyramids of layered ingredients on top of soft flat pancakes. They were garnished with sliced red onions and jalapeños, lime wedges, and, on the side, green and red salsas and a dish of yellow rice. I spooned as much rice and salsa as I could into each taco, squeezed lime over the whole thing, and dug in. Fantastic.

The
pata negra
I tasted when we stopped in Spain, on the other hand, wasn’t love at first bite. The fat in the ham was too pronounced for me, but its distinctive flavor, coming from the black Iberian pigs that’d been fed a strict diet of acorns, caught my attention. It was an acquired taste, and I knew I’d try it again. For breakfast in Spain, they took ripe tomatoes, peeled them, and crushed them on top of toast, adding a grind or two of black pepper. It was so bright, it was almost blinding. I still do a sandwich like that, almost twenty years later.

In Jamaica, I had a grilled fish sandwich on the beach, the simplest preparation, but it was fresh and completely connected to the beautiful surroundings, the best damn sandwich I’d ever had. A waitress in Puerto Rico saw my surprised look when she set the
camarones de mofongo
I’d ordered in front of me. I probably wasn’t the first foreigner to be disappointed with a plate of grayish porridge, but she told me to dig inside with my spoon, and underneath the velvety plantain puree, I found a spicy blend of chopped shrimp and pork. Now that I’ve come to understand something about African cuisines, I see the dish as a blend of Africa’s plantains and Caribbean spices, but all I knew then was that it was delicious and filling. Borscht in Russia
tasted better after I’d spent the afternoon Rollerblading through Saint Petersburg’s Palace Square under the shadow of massive buildings that had played a role in the Russian Revolution, but borscht, let’s be honest, can be only so good.

When my second contract with Paul took me to Asia, all the flavors of the staff dishes Paul had made at Victoria went from black-and-white to Technicolor. I tasted coconut milk and lemongrass in hundreds of preparations, sweet and savory, and I thought, This is it: This food has as much integrity and power as any French food I’d ever eaten. Why did people fly in Dijon mustard when they could make their own, fresher and better? I started to ask myself, Who lied? Who started the lie that France had the greatest food in the world? That question ran through my head every time I bit into something new and that changed my notions of what “good food” is. Then that question was replaced by a second: Who’s going to make the people realize that food dismissed as “ethnic” by the fine-dining world could be produced at the same level as their sacred bouillabaisses and veloutés?

It wasn’t just the flavors that knocked me on my ass. It was seeing different people holding it, preparing it, serving it. Sometimes the chefs were not in the white jackets, and it wasn’t only men, it was women, it was children, it was everyone. There were Indians, blacks, Koreans, mixed people. When I had my own restaurant someday, I thought, I would never rule out someone based on race or sex or nationality. I wouldn’t do it because it was egalitarian, I’d do it because cutting people out meant cutting off talent and opportunity, people who could bring more to the table than I could ever imagine. I felt like I was climbing aboard a new food train, one that I’m still on to this day.

I
WAS IN THE CRUISE SHIP KITCHEN, OFF THE COAST OF
V
ENEZUELA ON
Christmas Eve, when the telegraph came through that my grandmother Helga had died from a stroke. True to her personality, it happened while she was cutting down a tree with a hand saw. A bursar brought the news to Paul, who hesitated before he told me. We were about to go into dinner service, and Paul worried I’d be too upset to make it through my shift. He was not unfeeling; I would have had the same worry. He did choose to tell me, after all, and I took the news and then kept working, no faster or slower than I would on any other day.
Mormor
was one of the most important people in the world to me. I was heartbroken, but I was also proud that I was able to finish
my day at work. Although I could not even afford to call her on a weekly basis during my many apprenticeships, I felt like her hands always shadowed mine in the kitchen—she had the instinct, I had the technique, and together we were unstoppable.

No one at work had any idea about my daughter Zoe. On one level, I didn’t want people to think I was nothing more than a cliché—the absentee black father. On another, I was afraid the information could somehow hold me back or limit my opportunities in a way that would, in the end, not only harm me but make it harder to meet the slim responsibility of financial support that my mother had assigned me. I told myself that when the time was right—which, for me, meant when I’d achieved what I wanted in my career—I would make my presence known in Zoe’s life. Next year I’ll be better, I would tell myself. Next year I’ll have time.

In the spring of 1993, I left to do my
stage
at Georges Blanc, the name of both the chef and the restaurant. Blanc had virtually taken over the village of Vonnas, not far from the Swiss border in the fertile stretch of grape-growing valley that produced Beaujolais, burgundy, and Rhône wines. Among chefs of my generation, Georges Blanc was a fixed point in the constellation of stars we looked up to. A fourth-generation restaurateur, he’d moved his family’s restaurant, also called Georges Blanc, from Michelin’s highly respectable two stars to three. He was a major player, the first globally renowned chef I’d ever been around. He had a helicopter pad out back so he could be flown to do lunch in Amsterdam before setting off for Dubai or Singapore or Japan. I’d never seen a celebrity chef before; I hadn’t even heard the phrase. While Stocker was a serious, hardworking chef, Georges Blanc had a French flair and an eye for opportunities. Tourists and guests loved meeting him: Blanc laughed easily and kissed women’s hands; he toured people through his kitchen, a winning, generous tour guide. His restaurant was especially popular among Americans, who came in as couples or on business, and wealthy Japanese, who arrived in busloads. Many of the Japanese saw Georges Blanc as a key stop on a string of the region’s three-star restaurants. If it’s Tuesday, it must be Alain Chapel. If it’s Wednesday, it must be Georges Blanc.

When I arrived, Blanc was fifty years old and at the peak of his career. To aspiring chefs like me, he was one in a small handful of master chefs considered among the best in the world. Another was Paul Bocuse, who was almost twenty years older than Blanc. Bocuse was the ne plus ultra of twentieth-century cooking, credited with transforming haute cuisine into nouvelle cuisine. There was one of Bocuse’s students, the Austrian Eckart Witzigmann. There was Joël Robuchon in Paris and Frédy Girardet in Switzerland. The Roux brothers, Albert and Michel, were in London, changing the culinary reputation of the entire city, and Marc Haeberlin was launching a global food empire from his L’Auberge de l’Ill in Alsace. Notably, there were no Americans on the list. No Italians, even. France was the standard setter on the world stage, and back then, if you looked in their establishments, they were all, more or less, doing the same thing: exquisite execution of French cuisine, some of it modernized or lightened, but in terms of a flavor palate, they were all speaking the same language.

I knew my path would be different—the cruise ship travels had confirmed it—but I respected that language the way a modern composer might respect Bach. The better I could speak it, the freer I would be to create my own.

I
N BROAD DAYLIGHT
, I could see that Georges Blanc owned the town of Vonnas. Almost literally. He had bought up much of the real estate on the town square and, in addition to the quaint, half-timbered, luxurious hotel/restaurant I was headed for, he had created a somewhat more affordable, casual eatery called L’Ancienne Auberge. He’d also established his own vineyard some years before, just beyond town, and had transformed many in-town storefronts into specialty shops that made Vonnas into a food lover’s paradise.

I went into work the next morning with first-day jitters. I had replaced my Converse sneakers with Dr. Martens boots, my pants and jacket were fresh and crisply ironed, and I was wearing a simple dark tie. I had finally made it to Division One in the cooking world; there
was no higher for me to go. Division One is an elite club. Once you’re inside, you have established yourself, but that doesn’t mean you can slack off. Everyone at Georges Blanc worked with a palpable commitment to excellence. Everyone from the boy polishing glasses to the woman arranging flowers moved at a fast clip, no time to sit down, all of them preparing for the common goal of knocking each guest off his or her feet.

We were in constant competition, with ourselves, each other, and the other three-star restaurants. We had to be on our toes at all times. It didn’t take long for me to be grateful that I hadn’t gone straight from Belle Avenue to France. When I left Göteborg, I was still a novice. At Georges Blanc, you had to fight for your place every day. It would take everything I had to hang in France.

That first day, I crossed the perfect square filled with shops, which were all redone in a medieval style, with facades of plaster and exposed wood framing. I had the feeling of being in a gourmet theme park done in the best of taste. I thought I was just passing through the square on the way to Georges Blanc, but when I got there, the HR person pulled out my file, checked it against a list, and simply said,
“Boulangerie.”

Back outside I went, walking over to one of those shops on the square, a bakery that was to be my home for the foreseeable future. I wasn’t working in the actual restaurant kitchen, but I still felt a part of the team, and just as I’d found working in the garden at Victoria Jungfrau, there was plenty to learn. I’d never tasted bread like this. A croissant fresh from the oven is a beautiful thing, and now I know how they’re made, how much butter they require, and how fresh the butter has to be to give them their lightness and flake. Our shop also made small takeaway snacks and meals that sightseers could pick up on their way out into the countryside, where they’d drive through cornfields and visit vineyards and tour the farms that raised
poulets de Bresse
, a local chicken so special that it got the distinctive appellation AOC, a guarantee of authenticity given to such specialty items as Roquefort cheese and Le Puy lentils.

My favorite prepared dish in the shop was the lobster lasagna. This wasn’t like any lasagna I’d had before. We started with fresh lobster. Lots of lobster. The tail was reserved for restaurant use, but we got the claws, the body, and the legs. We dug out every bit of meat from them and used the shells to make our stock. Then we made our own lasagna sheets and layered them with sautéed spinach from the garden, lobster, and just-sweet oven-dried tomatoes. The results were brilliant.

I kept my head down and did what was asked of me, knowing that if I did a good job, someone would notice and I would be moved to the kitchen. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement: I was there to learn, but I knew they were also sifting through the stream of
commis
, looking for whom to pluck out of the group and add to their team. A friendly American I worked alongside, a big boulder of a guy named Jeremy, didn’t see this same big picture. He’d been stuck in the
boulangerie
for more than a month and still wasn’t cooking. He was pissed.