Yes, Chef (8 page)

P
EOPLE WENT OUT ALL THE TIME IN
G
ÖTEBORG, BUT NOT TO EAT
. T
HEY
might meet for a beer after work or to watch soccer together at a bar, but food was never the center of socializing, the way it is in cities like Barcelona or Paris, where people live their lives in restaurants. Gburg’s blue-collar roots fed into this eat-at-home lifestyle. Factory workers had neither the time nor the disposable income to waste an evening over a leisurely meal. In truth, it wasn’t just about time or money: As a whole, Sweden was way behind the curve on fine dining. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, when I was starting at culinary school, that the first Swedish restaurants, Eriks and L’Escargot in Stockholm, received major recognition outside Sweden.

Despite the training ground of the forty-seat restaurant, Mosesson really groomed its students for institutional placements such as hospital and school cafeterias. Practically speaking, there was no local restaurant scene to provide jobs for the graduates, even if they wanted to. The result was an environment that didn’t foster much creativity or competition among those of us who had chosen to cook for a living. There were no customers to build a relationship with; the only people willing to pay for haute cuisine were foreigners and corporate diners with expense accounts, neither of whom offered the steady, loyal patronage that restaurants count on to survive. Without a fine-dining culture, it’s difficult to develop a palate that extends beyond whatever it is your family serves you.

My own family ate out two or three times a year, tops. We’d go out to celebrate the big events, like Anna getting into a selective school, Dad getting his PhD, or Linda landing a job at a record company. For the fanciest occasions, we would go to a classic Swedish place, where we’d order grilled pike with dill butter and boiled potatoes. For more casual celebrations, we went to La Piazza, a local pizza place where Linda and I would argue over toppings. I liked the exotically named Capricciosa: mushroom, artichoke, ham, and olive. Linda preferred the royally named Vesuvio, which was just a plain cheese pizza. Eventually, my father decided that we’d eat only foreign food when we went out because my mother would find any Swedish meal we were served in a restaurant lacking and, thus, would have a hard time enjoying herself. “Helga could do this better,” she would sniff disappointedly. And, probably because of its familiarity, Swedish food was never worth the price. “Look at what this costs!” she’d say, pushing the menu away.

The ultimate luxury for most of the people we knew was peel-and-eat shrimp. Most of the shellfish in the area had been caught in my father’s hometown, Smögen, where it was boiled right on the boat, trucked down to Göteborg, and served with white toast, mayonnaise, and lemon. Peel-and-eat shrimp was popular because of the method of eating it. Proper table manners in Swedish homes required
the use of a fork and knife for everything, from fruit to sandwiches, but peel-and-eat was a vacation from all that buttoned-up propriety. The shrimp came out on a big platter, pink and plump, with the heads still on, and each person took a handful to his or her plate. From there, you would peel about ten at a time, then dip your hands in a bowl of water to clean them off. Next, you smeared a piece of toast with the mayo, arranged your peeled shrimp on top, and finished it with a sprinkle of chopped dill and a squeeze of lemon. Once you finished, you’d start the routine all over again. It was that tasty.

Everyone in Gburg grew up on peel-and-eat, but my family had it more often than most because of my father’s Smögen heritage. Dad taught my sisters and me how to eat shrimp properly, sucking the meat out of the head, much the same way that people from New Orleans eat their mudbugs at a crawfish boil. My mother, Skånskan that she was, had a hard time adopting my father’s approach. She stuck to the tail meat instead.

Decades later, when I met one of my most treasured mentors, the legendary New Orleans chef Leah Chase, I know that the way I attacked her crawfish was one of the reasons that she took a liking to me. I wasn’t just a European-raised/African-born chef with a big profile and a big head full of highfalutin ideas. No, ma’am. Leah Chase saw me eat and knew that I was a brown-skinned boy who loved good food and also knew better than to waste any of it.

B
Y THE TIME MY SECOND YEAR
at Mosesson rolled around, my ambition for food was such that the curriculum seemed not only limited, but a waste of time. I didn’t know where I would end up or what I would cook, but I had a vague sense there was a world of amazing restaurants outside of Göteborg. Without classmates or professors to push me or encourage my dreaming, I feared I would become complacent. We continued to focus on the basic skills, everything from butchering to food-handling safety, and to split our time between lectures and hands-on practice. I enjoyed learning the classic preparations
of herring and appreciated the pride and confidence our older teachers took in teaching us how to lay out a proper smorgasbord, but most of my classmates had no real ambition and their attitude was distracting. They actually threw rotten tomatoes at each other when the teachers turned their backs. It was as if we were in junior high, not culinary school.

To keep myself sharp, I turned each exercise into a little contest. Could I fill the pastry shells faster than any of my classmates? Could I wash and chop that dill faster than the teacher? Could I finish each squirt of whipped cream with the exact same curl?

A few weeks into my second year, it was clear that I’d outgrown what the school had to offer. But if I left before the program was over, my father’s disappointment would be too much to bear. I’d already decided not to go to university, a big blow for a man with a doctorate and a deep belief in higher education. If I dropped out of culinary school, even if I dropped out because I wanted something more challenging, my father would see me as a quitter and see any future success as accidental, instead of being the result of the two things he valued most: focus and discipline. The only way out, as I saw it, was an off-site internship in a real restaurant. They came up frequently and were listed on a board at my school. For the next few months, every time I saw a new listing, I applied. Every time, I got no further than I had when I submitted my application to work at McDonald’s.

One afternoon early in the fall term, I took the bus to the opposite side of town, walked three blocks from the bus stop, and found myself standing in front of Tidbloms, which had posted a notice on the board. Tidbloms was housed in a stately brick Victorian that dated back to 1897, when it had served as a dormitory for Scottish craftsmen who came to work at a nearby lumber mill. Over the years, it had gone through tough times, operating as a warehouse, then a flophouse, then a deli. When I came along, it had just been renovated into a charming inn, and the restaurant had been made over accordingly.

I walked through the dining room and into the kitchen, where a shaggy-haired young guy, probably in his midtwenties, was picking
through a tub of oysters, smelling some, knocking on some others with his knuckle, and cocking his head to listen for something.

“These are good,” he said to the guy standing next to him. “You can accept the delivery.”

The guy said nothing, but turned and hustled toward the kitchen’s back door. I introduced myself. “I’m looking for the chef,” I said.

“I’m the chef,” he said. “I’m Jorgen. How can I help you?”

Every bit of buzz I’d heard about Tidbloms centered around what Jorgen had done in its kitchen. How he’d assembled a strong team of cooks, and how consistently he turned out high-quality food, a blend of Swedish ingredients with the sauces and attitudes of French cuisine. At lunch you could get the standard
husmanskost
fare—a plate of meatballs, cream gravy, and mashed potatoes for forty-five kroner, about two dollars—but for three times that price, Tidbloms offered an
affärslunch
, a business lunch, like a roast leg of lamb with mustard sauce and a potato gratin. Still meat and potatoes, but fancy meat and potatoes.

Dinner, I was told, was when the best ingredients came out: the morels, the cherry tomatoes, the fresh basil and tarragon. I wanted to be around this higher class of food, but I also sensed a seriousness about the work that would be an antidote to what I was getting at school. Even though late afternoon was the slow prep period, with no customers in the front of the house, no one seemed to be slacking off. Even the porter who brought in the oysters did his job as if a fire were lit under him.

“I’ll work hard,” I promised Jorgen, after detailing my Mosesson studies and summer jobs. He agreed to give me a four-week internship.

W
HAT A RELIEF IT WAS
to work in a real kitchen, serving real food made by real cooks to real paying customers. I was assigned the most basic of tasks, just above dishwasher, but from my first shift, working side by side with a professional restaurant staff, I felt the camaraderie
and effort I knew on the soccer field. I turned the plate warmer on precisely at 11:00 each morning. I stocked the walk-in refrigerator as soon as the chef cleared each delivery. I set up the station for the
saucier
, replenishing his
mise en place
, which meant chopping, shredding, and slicing every herb, condiment, and flavoring ingredient the chef would need during his shift, and putting each one into small plastic containers that lined the perimeter of his counter work space. I did more than peel potatoes by the hundreds; I washed them, peeled them, and tournéed them, cutting them into identical shapes, two inches long with seven equally wide sides. For this task, one of the cooks would lend me his own tourné knife—real cooks owned their own sets of knives, which they carried in long, soft cases, and the tourné had a curved blade that looked like a bird beak, the name often used to describe it. I was always careful to wipe down the blade and handle before giving it back, another sign of care and respect. There may have been clear lines of status in the hierarchy of the kitchen, but we had a common goal, and everyone understood that his contributions mattered.

Bengt, one of Tidbloms’ cooks, lived near my parents in Sävedalen and gave me a ride home whenever we worked the same shifts. He was only a couple of years older than me, but he drove his ten-year-old Volvo like a fogey, slow and cautious, both hands on the wheel. As we puttered along the E20 highway, we talked about our plans to conquer the cooking world.

“My next step,” he announced one night, “will be to work for Leif and Crister.” Leif Mannerström and Crister Svantesson often worked as a team and were currently helming La Scala, Göteborg’s most upscale eatery. Leif had an eye for opportunities: He was well connected to politicians and businessmen, and typically served in more of a management role. Crister was a creative type, with a reckless flair in everything he did, but no one would dispute that a talent for cooking was in his DNA. Despite the name, the menu at La Scala was French, with the finest wine list in town, and its location near the city’s concert hall ensured a steady flow of well-heeled guests.

I had a little trouble swallowing Bengt’s confident pronouncement and let him know. He was competent, but I didn’t think he was that much better than me. I really believed I could get there.

“Listen,” he said, ignoring my lack of enthusiasm, “if you do well at Tidbloms, if you impress them, I’ll see what I can do about getting you into La Scala down the line, too.” He didn’t even have his own job yet, but he was promising to bring
me
along? I would soon learn that this was the way among chefs and their tribes: You follow a great chef anywhere he might go.

I learned something with every shift. My first week, I learned how a proper fish stock was made. Where my grandmother threw a mishmash of bones into a pot with water and chopped red onions, mixing salmon and haddock and letting it cook at a furious boil, Tidbloms used only finer, more delicate fish, like turbot and sole. They added fresh thyme and parsley, peppercorns, white wine, and the white part of the leek, cooking it slowly, barely simmering, coaxing out flavors rather than bludgeoning them. I learned how to fillet fish faster and without wasting any flesh. I learned how to slice just under the tough, pearly silver skin when cleaning a tenderloin of beef so that I could pull it away from the bone more easily, and how much simpler it was to fillet a tenderloin than a rack of lamb. Most of all, I learned what it meant to never gear down, to work with a constant sense of purpose. In school, we’d do only one thing at a time: Today, we’re going to make whipped cream. Today, we’re going to make veal stock. At Tidbloms, everyone had five things on his plate, and all of them needed to be done right then.

After four weeks, when my time with Tidbloms was just about up, I couldn’t bear the thought of going back to Mosesson full-time. I went to see Jorgen between lunch and dinner services. He had no office, so any clean stretch of counter could become his desk. That day, I found him at the salad station, writing out a menu for the next week. I waited for him to notice me, but his head remained bent over his task. I cleared my throat, and he looked up.

“Hey, Marcus. What’s going on?” Jorgen asked.

I was so afraid of him saying no that the plan I’d hatched came tumbling out in one nonstop flood: “Chef, I can’t go back to that rinky-dink school restaurant when I could be here working with you. I have to do a certain number of hands-on cooking hours for school, and if I did all my cooking hours for free here at Tidbloms, do you think you’d be able to sign for them so I can get school credit? You’d have to let my cooking teacher know it’s OK with you and then sign off on my hours at the end of each reporting period. I can give you the guy’s number and if there are any forms, I’ll get them from the school. You don’t have to do anything extra besides letting me stay.” I took a breath. “What do you think?”

Jorgen smiled. “Why didn’t you ask sooner?” he said.

With the placement figured out, I took the idea back to my cooking teacher.