The Reach of a Chef (11 page)

Frank intended to finish a year’s fellowship here, then continue in the bachelor’s program, for two more years of study. He’d been a line cook through high school, and it was hard for me now to picture him out of his whites, out of a kitchen. He was a genuine cook—you could see it in his eyes—he had that aged look already. When I asked about how the CIA was changing, he said immediately, “It’s getting kind of touchy-feely,” adding, “I need someone yelling at me to motivate me.”

He and Chef Le Roux got along well. Le Roux had been a new skills instructor when I was in Pardus’s Skills class, but whereas Pardus was now nearing forty-seven, Le Roux was fifty-nine. He was a veteran of some of the great classical kitchens of New York—Le Pavillon and La Côte Basque among them—a man of few words and infrequent smiles, dark eyes, gray hair, a sweet man, who I suspected was a really good cook. Married with two daughters, he noted with evident regret that his girls had been all but completely raised by their mom, because he was always working so hard as a cook. He had been at La Côte Basque when a major shift in French dining occurred in the United States in 1980: formal tableside service—big racks of roasted meat carved, served, and sauced tableside—became contemporary plates constructed by the kitchen brigade. Le Roux remembers it as a kind of trauma, suddenly everyone plating everything in the kitchen. “After the first day, I was exhausted,” he said. “And
I
was
fast.
” He went home thinking,
I don’t know if I can do this
—
I’ve got to reevaluate the way I run my station.

Frank now did certain tasks the chef entrusted only to the Fellow, such as make the consommé, make the chicken-mushroom farce for the sautéed chicken dish, and cut the foie gras.

Xavier Le Roux, who emigrated from France in 1966, had risen through the cooking ranks apprentice-style, as is customary in that country. He was an old-fashioned chef, well respected at the Culinary. I tasted some of the sauces for his fish entrées as he was instructing the poissonnier on Day 1, with service a few hours off, how to make them and how they should taste—sorrel sauce and a fresh “herb jus” using tarragon, chives, sage, basil, marjoram, and parsley. They were superb, colorful, light, and bright. I spent most of my time there just watching and talking to this French chef, mainly focusing on changes here. Yes, the students did seem to be getting younger, he said. He didn’t think it was a kinder, gentler kitchen today; it was what it was. “I’m here to introduce you to restaurant cooking,” he would tell his class during the hour lecture that preceded dinner, prep, service, and cleanup. “I’m not here to teach you how to sauté.”

He did note that the number of European chef-instructors here had diminished markedly. At one time, Germanic accents predominated here, or seemed to, but the new ranks replacing the old were more likely to be young American chefs than European ones.

What did the French chef of the Culinary’s classic French restaurant think of the new style of experimental cooking popping up here and there? What, for instance, did he think of Ferran Adrià, the groundbreaking Spanish chef and poster boy for the avant-garde movement? “Why do you need to freeze foie gras and turn it into powder?” was his response. Give him a nice, thick piece properly sautéed and he was happy.

But most food wasn’t that way today, he noted. “It’s still classically based,” he said. “The name has changed; it’s fashion. Instead of ‘red wine sauce,’ they name the wine and the region.” That is, it’s still about the basics.

Nor was Le Roux narrow-minded. He often let students put specials on the menu. One student recently made a beef consommé and infused it with tarragon so that it was clear but tinted green. The student gelled this consommé with agar, a seaweed-based carbohydrate that will keep a liquid gelled even when hot. When the consommé was poured onto a sheet pan and set, it could be cut into noodles. The consommé noodles became a main garnish for a lobster bisque special.

Frank, a traditionalist, obviously thought it felt “weird” to eat hot gelatin. Le Roux shrugged and said, “That’s the cooking of tomorrow,” apparently happy to remain in today. Le Roux was old-fashioned, too.

“He didn’t speak to me for the first three months,” Frank said fondly, quenelling the chicken-mushroom farce for the stuffed chicken breast into simmering water. “He was just makin’ sure I knew he was the man.” Frank tasted a quenelle, then brought one to the chef. As the chef raised the quenelle to his mouth, Frank said, “More cream, more salt.”

Chef Le Roux tasted, then nodded, and as Frank turned to leave, Le Roux said, “Kick it up a notch!” and he looked at me and chuckled.

Cooking is both simple and infinitely complex, and so is a cook’s relation to it. When I’d been at the CIA, learning skills, I’d had lunch at the Escoffier, and it had been my favorite restaurant of all. I loved the formal tableside service, a lost art in America. I loved the classic food for its high craft. But I had changed. This kitchen, which I once stood in awe of, now seemed overly busy and awkward. The food was not as good as I thought it should have been. The sautéed sweetbreads were sliced too thin, and so were impossible to cook right. The foie gras terrine was also sliced too thin, shorting the sense of luxury that made foie gras special in the first place, and it was oxidized around its perimeter, a quarter-inch border of unappealing gray. Escoffier was a teaching kitchen that restaffed every seven days, granted, but these little things, which I’d never have noticed when I was first here, now bothered me. The food showed me just how much I’d changed since I’d first arrived eight years ago as a journalist.

I still got a chill when I entered my old skills kitchen, K-8, where Mediterranean cuisine was now taught and served. This very kitchen—with its two banks of ranges on each side, three gigantic steam kettles, and central aisle—was the spot where my life pivoted, and it was filled with the ghosts of my former classmates: Adam Shepard, a cook in the artist-monk tradition, the best in our class, with a knife hand damaged in a carpentry accident. He now lived in Brooklyn with his wife and toddler son, and had just opened his own restaurant, a Japanese noodle house called Taku, near his apartment. The
Times
had given him one star, and he was delighted to have been reviewed. Adam is the kind of cook who would make a duck pâté at home, chopping the meat by hand (which he’d done shortly before I’d last seen him).

Ben Grossman had left accounting in his midtwenties to pursue cooking. He’d been our group leader. A bit before my return to the CIA, I’d been sitting with some friends at an outdoor table on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, around midnight, when I heard my name called, incredulously. Ben was walking his dog. He was a chef at the Cub Room, in SoHo, but would leave soon after, upon the birth of his first child.

Paul Trujillo had been cooking on a clipper ship.

Erica Norman was a cook in Philadelphia.

I’ll never forget these people. Learning to cook changed my life. They are a part of me, forever imprinted on my brain as associations with the trauma of learning to cook.

Thus I walked through this particular kitchen one day with Dan Turgeon and experienced quite a bit more than one would normally experience. He’d asked me if I wanted to grab some lunch while I was in his class, and this was the kitchen he chose. But the ghost of Turgeon was there, too, and this ghost and the chef-instructor beside me were different people. I felt hyperaware, as if the kitchen tiles in K-8 were charged with this lost time—Lola and Travis and Paul and Erica and Ben and Adam were still there. Here I was, moving through my first CIA kitchen along with the chef from my last CIA kitchen. I carried a plastic tray, and a beautiful student named Carlie carved lamb for me from her station. Her smile was bright, and, like an angel who knew I was tripping on this experience, directed me to a fellow student, who’d made some excellent duck rillettes. This student smiled vividly, too, and I felt time moving slowly, but as Turgeon and I headed toward the door, I recalled the oxidized foie gras. Dan Turgeon, the man beside me, was inert to me now. I continued to admire him as a cook, a chef, and an instructor, but it was Turgeon the ghost—most vivid and most valuable to me when I hated him, when he could make my life a misery—who made me feel that I was losing something by returning to the CIA as a writer and not as an aspiring cook.

As if to underscore this point, the cooking gods sent a fiasco my way. I’d chosen to spend my final days back at the CIA in Pardus’s Cuisines of Asia class. On Day 4, the first day of Korean cuisine, five groups moved through their day’s food assignment: a spicy beef soup called
yukkaejang,
various kimchi preparations (Pardus liked to ferment his own), stir-fried glass noodles (
jap chae,
based on sweet potato starch), and others, including a fried trout dish, ingenious from a sales standpoint. In Asia, serving and eating whole fish on the bone is common, but it’s hard to sell in America—we don’t like fish bones in our fish. So Pardus stole an idea from his friend Michael Huynh, chef and co-owner of New York’s Bao 111. Huynh, a native of Vietnam, wanted to serve fried fish with the bone, as they do in his country, but knew it wouldn’t sell. What he decided to do was to take the fillets off the fish and run a skewer through the fin, spine, and head, so the fish would be shaped like an
S,
as if swimming. He then breaded and fried the fish skeleton along with the fillets, and put the whole fish on the plate, the bones separate. Pardus did his dish with trout and it looked really cool, the fish swimming on a bed of julienned red peppers, julienned nori, sliced scallions, julienned egg crepes, and toasted sesame seeds, served with a sauce of soy, ginger, vinegar, and Korean pepper paste.

I was helping the group saddled with the vegan dish, which Pardus was asked to offer, a request he agrees with. Chefs and cooks, myself included, too easily dismiss vegans—they can’t truly care about food, the reasoning goes, given how they limit themselves. For a chef running a business, this was bad policy, and Pardus knew it. When Pardus got the vegan crowd on a packed Saturday night at the Swiss Hotel in Sonoma, he’d tell them, “Can’t help you tonight, but listen, you come back Tuesday—bring your friends—and I’ll do a whole vegan menu for you!” The vegans loved the special treatment, and Pardus filled his restaurant on what would otherwise have been the slowest night of the week.

Pardus had played up in lecture the night before an extra dish that was on our station, something called
bibimbap
—a dish that’s fun to see, fun to make, fun to eat (it’s even fun to say): a warm salad with stir-fried julienned skirt steak, spiked with the Korean pepper paste (which has, Pardus said, “an effusive fruitiness before the heat kicks in”), and topped with a fried egg. A spicy Asian version of the French bistro staple frisée salad with lardons. In Korea, the dish is a catchall—
bibim
meaning “thrown together” and
bap
meaning “rice.” Anything thrown together with rice can justifiably be called
bibimbap.
But it’s an important part of Korean culinary culture, and some cities, such as Chonju, are noted specifically for their
bibimbap
.

The members of my group were organized; they had an extra set of hands—mine—and I pressed them to do the intriguing
bibimbap
because it was my last day at the CIA, maybe forever. This was going to be fun, I thought, little bites of skirt steak marinated with ginger, garlic, scallions, and pepper paste; crunchy matchsticks of daikon and red radish, carrots, and cucumber; a chiffonade of iceberg lettuce and shiso leaves (a mint relative). Michael Grenko, a guy in his early twenties who hoped to open a restaurant with his dad, got to work on cutting veg while I did the marinade and cleaned and cut the skirt steak.

From 2:00 to 6:00, everyone’s pretty much just prepping for service, much like any restaurant kitchen. The difference between here and a restaurant was that here service would last only twenty minutes and feed between forty and sixty people. Also, at a restaurant, you wouldn’t expect a lecture after service with the possibility of a quiz. But it was a good routine and not difficult; there was time to think about your food and to poke around and see the other group’s food, to break away to watch Pardus demo the scallion pancake or to discuss how much salt was used to ferment the kimchi.

Shortly before six, Grenko asked what I wanted to do at service. I told him whatever he wanted to do, I’d do the other. “I really like to stir-fry,” he said. I said, “OK, I’ll fry the eggs.” I didn’t really care what I did—I just wanted to produce the dish. We’d prepped about ten orders, and I’d cracked fifteen eggs into ramekins to be ready and had four clean sauté pans hot in the oven. Pardus said, “We’ll sell five and keep five for family meal.”

Pardus voiced his annoyance at the way Grenko was set up, with his mise en place in awkward spots of our station. Grenko fixed the problems, and Pardus got a small steel pan with plenty of oil smoking hot and dropped in an egg. “That’s a little too hot,” he said. The egg white deep-fried puffy around the outside and then turned crisp along the edges before the egg was done. “Pay attention to how you regulate your heat,” he said. He put down rice in a bowl, then the hot stir-fried salad, then slipped the egg out onto the top, and moved on to the next station to demo their Korean dishes. At service,
bibimbap
orders came quickly. Michael had his stir-fry done before my pan was completely hot. I dropped the first egg in—there was just barely enough oil and just barely enough heat. The egg stuck a little, but I managed to finesse it off without breaking the yolk.

The idea, when cooking an egg on a plain steel surface, is to have enough of a film of oil that’s hot enough to cook the egg white before it sinks through the film of oil and touches the steel, where it
will
stick if it hasn’t coagulated in that fraction of a second. Also, the pan has to be perfectly clean or the egg will stick no matter how hot the pan.