For his first week he hustled around the kitchen muttering a single word: “Bullshit.” Later on his English would kick in, but in the beginning the hot, uncovered braised beef cheeks steaming on the lower shelf of the walk-in were bullshit. The dregs of Dijon mustard in the jar next to the newly opened one were bullshit. My bloody cutting board, smeared with the guts of so many badly butchered sardines, was really bullshit.
When Thomas Myer arrived, with a more sensitive demeanor, wearing loafers, his plaid pants tucked into his socks, smacking of the rural Michelin-starred auberge he’d just come from, we called the first Thomas T1 and him T2 (and sometimes Terminator 1 and 2). They both regularly pulled sixteen-hour shifts, keeping long hours on the bullshit patrol. Both Thomases and Mario spoke devoutly of their former kitchens in Europe, mostly of the restaurant they had all worked at together, Chef Hans Haas’s Tantris in Munich, which led the charge in Europe for contemporary Austrian cuisine. They spoke of Hans Haas with deep-bass-note reverence, much like the Jedi. Tantris. I imagined a shadowy dining room draped in black.
I knew that the Austrians clearly thought that we Americans all pretty much sucked, so I was curious as to why the newbie me had been plucked from the garde-manger and chosen to work the entremet. I asked T1, “Why me instead of one of the other guys?”
“None of you are that good, but your mom made the spaetzle, right?”
I blushed, caught gushing about my mother’s home cooking to this international crew. “Yeah, and noodles.”
“In brown butter, I know,” he said. “But let’s go, hey. Big list today.”
I crouched in front of the low-boy refrigerators below the station, expecting to see a menagerie of station prep but finding nothing but a quart of picked parsley leaves and a tub of plum jam. I fell back on my heels. Joel had left me nothing?
T1 smiled at me from above, tapping his knife on the board, keeping his beat.
“I threw it all in the garbagio. No fucking bueno.” This phrase was his new “bullshit,” more fitting to the Spanish patois of our kitchen. He motioned for me to grab an empty bus tub and hurtled down the stairs to the vegetable walk-in refrigerator.
In the cool walk-in he started loading down the tub: twelve endive, a vanilla bean, fourteen carrots, a bunch of celery, a bunch of chives, some thyme, rosemary, a handful of fresh bay leaves—“the Turkish bay leaves, like this,” he grabbed the fatter ones, “not the California ones, too much perfume”—two celeriac roots, a head of red cabbage, a few anchovies, ten lemons. “You get the micro greens. Just for garnish. Kohlrabi and beet only.” I reached up on tiptoe and opened the plastic lid to a dizzying array of plug trays of baby spouts. Kohlrabi, I knew that one. And there was the red-stemmed beet. Cool. I scooped them into two corners of a metal prep container.
He handed me another and gestured to a plastic tub in the corner. “Fill this with crème fra?che.”
As I was scooping up the white goo, he said, “Hey, Amy,” kicking off a routine that he would repeat every chance he got for the rest of my time there. “We need horseradish, too.” I turned around to find T1 waiting with an enormous rough-skinned horseradish root hanging from his fly, its rhizome top forked into two knobs. Horseradish schlong: so infantile and yet so absurdly apt I had to crack a smile. His head nodded with silent laughter. Real sexism in the kitchen I would later learn to recognize—it was a lot more underhanded and more insidious—but this obvious shit I found amusing.
Back upstairs, I tried to shake the image out of my head and get down to business.
“Let’s start with the purees,” he said. The vegetable purees, the backbone of the meat garnish station, were the down pillows of the plate. I dragged a rondeau to a hot spot on the wide steel flat-top, lobbed in a chunk of butter, and hastily rustled together the heap of flat parsnip coins between my hands.
“No, no, wait. You salt the vegetable first on the cutting board, so it can start to sweat.” He misted fine sea salt over the parsnips and muddled them with his hands. Almost instantly a mist of perspiration beaded up on each slice. “Now when you cook them in the butter, they’ll taste more like themselves.” He tapped his spoon on the metal piano—the outer ledge of the stovetop’s apron—and continued: “Use a lot of fat. Cook them all the way soft. If you add the stock now, when the vegetable is half-done, you’re not making a puree, you’re making soup.”
It seemed I did everything wrong. I oversalted everything that shrank upon contact with heat: mushrooms, spinach. He made a sour face and wordlessly threw the entire pan into the dish tub. I cooked the schnitzel too slow and it came out looking soggy. “Limp, like an old man.” I cooked it too hot so that its crust puffed properly into a toffee-colored balloon, but it wore bedsores of blackness on its bottom. He threw those out, too. Mostly, though, I was just too slow.
I reserved most of my attention for the more glamorous things I’d never seen before: foie gras cooked medium, fleshy pink at the center like liver putty; cherries braised in balsamic; endive cooked into a marmalade; wild mushroom confit; truffle sauce made with a quart of reduced veal stock, a bottle of fine Madeira, and a fifty-dollar jar of truffle pieces. I babied the truffle sauce, ignoring my potato stock boiling away on the flat-top.
“Hey.” He nodded toward the stock, which was going berserk. “Not so bueno.”
I quickly whipped my pot to the cool side of the stove, where its violent bubbles sputtered out.
His voice sharpened. “You know, this is not about the truffles and the fwaah,” he said with a forced American accent. “Good cooking is potatoes and onions.”
Danube’s kitchen didn’t look like one that ran on potatoes and onions. From what I could tell, it looked to be pretty well fueled by the foie, the engorged liver of a force-fed duck; we went through so much of it. But while flurries of truffles rained down on shiny butter-poached lobster claws, I saw that T1 was right. Many sauces relied on the potato stock for their base: an emerald-green chive sauce to accompany pan-seared scallops, a honey-colored horseradish sauce for beef.
The potato stock was a deceptively simple concoction, made by sweating onions, garlic, and sliced raw potatoes in butter, deglazing with white wine, and simmering everything in chicken stock until the potatoes were tender. Pushing it through a sieve yielded a soupy blond puree. It tasted a lot like my mother’s potato soup without the bacon. But the brilliance of this stuff belied its humble origins. It gave conceptual sauces a country backbone, pulled them from the clouds back to the terra firma. Banyuls vinegar and green pumpkin-seed oil were new to me, but potatoes and onions, these things I understood.