Yes, Chef (27 page)

Our dearest greetings. That letter marked the beginning of our life together—my father and I—and it did not seem right, nor possible, that the journey was over before I had become chef of my own restaurant, before I had proven to him that I could do it. My father and I were meant to taste the world together. I wanted to take him to Jackson Heights in Queens so he could see why they called the neighborhood Curry Heights. I wanted him to try real fried chicken in Harlem. I wanted to chow down on po’boys with him in New Orleans. I imagined us eating hot dogs and beer at Yankee Stadium and conch fritters in Florida. My father was sixty-four when he died. Maybe that was why I took the news with what must have seemed like cold resolve: The numbers simply did not add up. I thought, I hoped, that we had as much time ahead of us as we did behind us. It seemed unfathomable to me that we did not.

When
Mormor
died, it had been easy to feel connected to her at work. Any kitchen could invoke the spirit of Helga; the smell of chicken roasting, the smell of fresh herbs, the sound of onions sizzling in the pan could conjure up my grandmother and make her seem close. My father, though, had been an academic, a bit of a taskmaster, a conservative Swedish man who had nonetheless crossed continents to find a son and love him. My relationship with my father was more complicated and the sweetest parts of it—fishing at the summer house in Smögen—felt outside of my reach. My father’s death left me rudderless; I’d guided myself by him for as long as I could remember. He was the one who taught me how to read a map, bait a hook, make a fire, fix a bike, pitch a tent. He taught me, by example, that some principles, no matter how clichéd they sound, really do mean something. Hard work
is
its own reward. Integrity
is
priceless. Art
does
feed the soul.

I went to work at Aquavit the morning after he died, and told nobody about what had happened. I had responsibilities to the restaurant, to Håkan, to my staff and my customers. This is the way restaurants work. No matter what happens in the course of a day—death, birth, celebration, love, ruin—you show up for your next
shift. For some people this becomes a burden, but that constancy over the years has kept me grounded. And it was Lennart who taught me how.

I talked to my mother every couple of days, worried she would fall apart without Lennart in her life. But she did not; she turned out to be a lot stronger than I’d given her credit for. She kept on, so I kept on. For six months after my father died, I didn’t stop working. If anything, to avoid dealing, I picked up the pace. I was working fourteen, fifteen hours a day. I was numb. By then, I’d changed apartments. I still lived in Hell’s Kitchen, but Magnus had moved in with his boyfriend—his brother-in-law, technically—and I’d moved in with Mes. One night I came home from work. It was late, but Mes was still up. We sat on our couch, watching MTV. We were talking about nothing in particular and, suddenly, I just lost it. I cried, for the first time since my father’s death and for the first time since I was a child. Mes sat with me, listening as I tried to repeat every single wise word, funny story, and lesson in manhood that my father had shared with me. When I finally went to bed, it was almost dawn.

N
O MATTER WHO YOU ARE
, whether you’ve got a small town Italian restaurant or you’re an Iron Chef, you want to create a signature dish—one you create or execute in a way that becomes forever associated with you. All chefs put our own twist on the food we serve, but a signature dish requires more than merely customizing. I considered many of the changes I’d implemented at Aquavit to be mere tweaks, whether it was changing the size of the meatballs, pulling back on the smoking of the salmon, or updating a mustard sauce by adding the nutty accent of espresso. The truth is, most chefs will never come up with a signature dish because it takes luck and time and the ability to look at things in a fresh, new way.

One approach to a signature dish is taking something famous like coq au vin, and making it so well that everyone knows it’s yours. The other approach is to go out and create something entirely new. That’s
the exciting route, especially for young chefs. For me, the path to my first signature dish was through foie gras.

I didn’t grow up with foie gras; I grew up with my grandmother’s liver pâté, which was rustic and grainy, but good. The first foie gras I saw was at Belle Avenue, but even that came out of a can. It wasn’t until Switzerland and France that I began working with real foie, and in both places, the ultimate expression of that core ingredient was in terrines that took days to prepare. When I came to America, chefs approached foie differently. They took American-produced foie gras from upstate New York—the idea of it being not only domestic but also local floored me—put it in a pan and seared it quickly, serving it on brioche toast with fig jam, say, or a slice of mango. I loved this taste; it seemed cleaner and it really explained the difference between French cooking (traditional) and American (flamboyant).

The only problem was that everyone was doing it, and I didn’t want to be like everyone else.

So I decided to focus on texture and temperature. My first idea was to make warm foie gras blinis. These little pancakes tasted good, but the overall effect was too chewy and dry, robbing the foie gras of the velvety texture that was one of its greatest assets. What would happen, I wondered, if I took that blini batter and steamed it in the oven like a pudding? That gave me back the velvet, but the texture struck me as too uniform. I tried one version after another after another. Along the way, in one of our post-lunch conversations, Nils and I debated what the end goal should be, and we hit upon the model of an extremely popular dessert at the time, the molten chocolate cake. These were incredibly rich little cakes that had a crusty exterior and a runny liquid center. You didn’t need much of one to satisfy you; in fact, too much would leave you stupefied.

With the molten cake model in mind, I turned to individual ramekins, lightened my batter by cutting back on the egg, and switched from steaming to high-heat baking in order to set the crust. This delivered the contrasting textures I wanted. I felt I was getting closer, but I didn’t like having the taste of flour in the mix, so I replaced that
with almond flour. I also found the standard four-ounce ramekins a little too big, so I hunted and hunted until I found a source for cups half that size. In France, I saw the customer often left us holding his sides, almost like, Oh my God, I’m never going to eat again. I wanted customers to leave Aquavit saying, Oh my God, I hope I can do that again tomorrow. You have to be careful with this when you’re presenting yourself as a luxurious restaurant. It’s a fine line between leaving them feeling good and appearing stingy.

As I developed my foie gras dish, I played with the seasonings. I adjusted amounts of butter—although it’s fair to say there is always plenty of butter involved—shallots, white pepper, cloves, and cardamom. Foie gras works well with a good wine, so I reduced some port, steeped tarragon in it, and then added that reduction into the batter. Then I added in a little garam masala, one of my favorite spice blends at the time, to give it a hint of heat.

Finally, I made a test batch. Nils was there to try a first bite when I pulled the tray of ramekins out of the oven, and when we put those first spoonfuls in our mouths, we looked at each other and didn’t have to say anything. We just smiled. I had it at last: foie gras ganache.

Over the years, I’ve served different versions of this dish, infusing it with sea urchin or corn, serving it straight from the hot oven alongside tuna or cool cubes of salted watermelon. I’ve cooked it all over the world with everything from orange marmalade to truffle ice cream. What stays constant is the texture, the temperature, and the quality of the ingredients. Once I got it right, meaning that it hit all the marks I cared about, I knew I had my first signature dish. I’ve served my ganache to kings and starlets and three-star chefs and people who simply love food. Everywhere I go, the dish is a hit.

My success in creating signature dishes wasn’t just about what I was doing; it was that what I was doing found an audience of people who were curious about the flavors I was chasing. They were willing to chase them, too. As chefs, we definitely are in the memory business: We are creating a memory with ingredients. I wanted my customers to leave my restaurant satisfied but also curious about what
made their experience so great. I wanted them to turn to each other during the cab ride home and ask, “What
was
that?”

Another signature dish started with a trip to Boston. I was driving along the Massachusetts coast on the old scenic highway, and every five minutes I passed a seafood shack promising the best lobster roll in the state. I’d never had one, so I pulled over and had lunch. For months afterward, the memory of it stayed with me. I’d loved the straightforwardness of it: Take some fresh lobster and mayo, put it on a soft, buttered roll, and boom. That’s it. In Sweden, lobster is called “black gold,” but at Belle Avenue, we drowned it in the cream-laden French sauces of Newburg and Thermidor.

I wanted to celebrate the richness of the lobster, not obliterate it. Even the American seaside version struck me as a bit heavy-handed when it came to the mayonnaise used to bind it. I wanted a creamy texture, but not all that oil. At the same time, I didn’t want to just plop a pile of naked lobster onto a plate and let it fend for itself. How could I introduce the experience of discovery? I’m a big believer in the negligee, that nearly invisible screen standing between you and the object of your desire. I wanted to create the sense of before and after. With the lobster, I had to figure out what that screen could be. Since I was always looking for ways, at Aquavit, to filter food through Sweden, I turned to the idea of pickling, a flavor counterpoint to the richness and sweetness of the seafood.

As I had with the ganache, I went through a trial-and-error process until I hit it: lobster rolled in a skin of thinly sliced pickled Japanese plums, a homemade mayo on the side, and a topping of diced bacon and glistening red caviar. This, along with the ganache, became a fixture on the Aquavit menu. I think if they were ever taken off, there’d be a riot, at least among the regulars.

S
O MUCH OF WHAT DREW ME TO
N
EW
Y
ORK WAS THE CHANCE TO BLEND
in, to
not
stand out for once because of the color of my skin. In my personal life, I found a chosen family. On the subway and streets, I found my deepest, truest community. I was still playing soccer on the weekends with other Swedish expats. We called our team Blatte United because we were a multicultural tribe of guys who had all grown up as outsiders, in one way or another: our patois of Swedish, English, and soccer slang felt as good on my tongue as a cold beer at the end of a long, hot shift.

Yet, professionally, I struggled to overcome the constant subject of race. I didn’t want it to go away. Color is not just what I see in the
mirror, it’s how I cook and how I live. But inevitably when people bring race into the professional arena, it’s never as rich, complicated, or tasty as I would like. I was never
the chef at Aquavit
. I was
the black Swedish guy from Aquavit
. What does that mean?

In 2000, three years after I became an American citizen, I’d come a little closer to accepting my inevitable role as “the black chef” or “the black Swedish chef” mostly because I was confident that with enough success and exposure, I’d eventually get people to look past the easy racial stuff and address the cultural complexity of my cooking. One huge step in that direction came my way in 2000, when I was invited by the Lanesborough hotel in London to guest chef for a promotion they did each year celebrating the world’s top up-and-coming chefs. I was asked to represent America. This felt like a big moment for me.

I’d landed in New York, but I’d always had my sights on London. Although the term
British cuisine
can still raise an eyebrow in some circles, by the time I had started my career, the London restaurant scene was exploding and the influences of immigrant populations were making themselves known in the flavors. You could walk across the city and taste Chinese fish with black bean sauce, an amazing array of Indian curries, Caribbean rice and peas, or a yummy
suya
, a Nigerian meat kebab coated with peanuts and chili pepper. London was a city where cooking and culture had come together in powerful ways. For months beforehand, I fielded calls from British media. A couple of the reporters asked me to name some British chefs who had inspired me. I mentioned the Roux brothers, Albert and Michel, and I named Marco Pierre White, not as much for his food as for how—by virtue of becoming an apron-wearing rock-star bad boy—he had broken the mold of whom a chef could be, which was something I could relate to.

I got to London to find the Lanesborough dining room packed each night, a general excitement shared by everyone involved, and incredibly posh digs from which I could step out each morning into Hyde Park and take a good long run around Buckingham Palace.

On my second day, I was cooking when a phone call came into the kitchen. The executive chef answered and, with a puzzled look, handed me the receiver. Trouble at Aquavit, I figured. I put the phone up to my ear, expecting to hear Håkan’s familiar
“Hej, Marcus.”

Instead, there was screaming.

“How the fuck can you come to my fucking city and think you are going to be able to cook without even fucking referring to me?”

This went on for what seemed like five minutes; I was too stunned to hang up.

“I’m going to make sure you have a fucking miserable time here. This is my city, you hear? Good luck, you fucking black bastard.”

And then he hung up.

I had cooked with Gordon Ramsay once, a couple of years earlier, when we did a promotion with Charlie Trotter in Chicago. There were a handful of chefs there, including Daniel Boulud and Ferran Adrià, and Gordon was rude and obnoxious to all of them. As a group we were interviewed by the Chicago newspaper; Gordon interrupted everyone who tried to answer a question, craving the limelight. I was almost embarrassed for him. So when I was giving interviews in the lead-up to the Lanesborough event, and was asked who inspired me, I thought the best way to handle it was to say nothing about him at all. Nothing good, nothing bad. I guess he was offended at being left out.