Embarking on what became a kind of culinary graduate school, I worked alongside each cook and recorded the separate parts of every dish in long, painstaking recipe form. Being a novice, I made a lot of mistakes. Mario and Bouley tasted every one of them.
I spent most of my time chasing one or the other of them across Duane Street as they hustled between the two restaurants and the office, toting small pots of parsnip puree, apple-horseradish sauce, or veal ravioli. Each individual component might have been an education for me, but divorced from their completed dishes, they stood out in odd isolation. Working on the meat station one day, I brought a small portion of beef cheek goulash, Danube’s signature dish, to the office for Bouley’s approval.
“How is it?” he asked, pulling a cleanish plate out from under a mountain of papers. I reluctantly handed him a fork, suddenly insecure.
“I wouldn’t make a meal out of it.”
“Mmmhhf,” he agreed, chewing. “There’s way too much vinegar. Next time, more pickle juice at the end to acidify, less vinegar in the beginning. Vinegar cooks out harshly.” This, I never forgot.
The cooking details I absorbed from Bouley and Mario stacked up so thick and so high I couldn’t access them until much later, but I did know one thing: I was seriously lucky to have this job. Unfortunately, however, without the military structure of line cooking, with no impending service, no real schedule, and no one charting my progress, and as befitting an undisciplined twenty-four-year-old coming off eighty-plus-hour weeks, I started coming in late. And then even later.
It didn’t seem to matter. It felt almost as if the chefs avoided me with my incessant foisting of small pots. I chased down Bouley at the entrance to Danube, trying to get him to approve my latest recipe, mushroom goulash with leek dumplings, made under T2’s guidance. It was a homey, stewy thing built on shallots, garlic, paprika, two kinds of chanterelles, black trumpet mushrooms, and crème fra?che, then garnished with a plush little leek dumpling, its browned face shiny with butter. T2 made it Austrian-housewife style, by vigorously beating eggs and smashed butter-fried croutons into a lump of room-temperature butter. The emulsion was surprisingly tricky. T2 perspired lightly as he whipped it, muttering, “My mother made it like this….I don’t know how you’ll make it a recipe, it’s really by feel.” I presented it to Bouley with two forks. We both dug in to taste.
“See, this is so straightforward,” he said. “So pure. So rustic. So good!”
He then launched into a tangent, as he was prone to doing—passionate descriptions tripped by the sight of whatever was right in front of him. He rarely said a thing directly, but always made you feel like you were entering midstream into some sort of ongoing narrative he was writing about the senses. He talked about the sweetness of the onions his grandma cooked in the ashes left after a wood fire; the softness of fresh homemade vinegar in comparison to the harsh commercial “battery acid” we used in this country; the intoxicating aroma of thousands of Frenchwomen passing by him in a crowded ballroom in some fancy chateau, every one of them smelling like a different exotic animal in her own perfume, yet somehow it’s not overwhelming, each one is really distinct, just a delicious parade of woman scent….
“This book really needs to be about home cooking.” He interrupted his daydream and looked at me directly. “Home cooking is different. It comes from the heart, not the head. It’s not refined in the way that we’re refining it here. Home cooking is simple. Every single part of the whole, every ingredient, needs to taste perfectly delicious. You can’t catch up to that later. Everything in this book should be stripped to its basic elements. That’s where home cooking is really powerful.”
What? I thought. Now he’s changing the book from whole recipes to separate components?
And then suddenly he was walking away with my pot. “And tell Mario let’s leave out the crème fra?che, make this in larger batches at the beginning of service so it can sit, and garnish it with the cream à la minute.”
Back in the kitchen, Mario swished this suggestion away. He leaned in close to me conspiratorially and said, “Ahmy. We are not going to do a home-cooking book here. Don’t make things simpler. It should be like a European book. A chef’s book. Don’t take away. If anything, add.”
So it continued with Bouley whispering in one ear, Mario in the other, and Melissa the coauthor sighing and saying she’d need to make the recipes more home-cook friendly.
That’s what I tried to do, but it was so much easier just to reproduce the restaurant dishes. For instance, it’s easier to slavishly replicate Foie-Gras-Stuffed Squab with Parsley Puree and Schupfnudeln—even if it did take me a full day to make all the components—than it is to trim it of its cheffiness. How should one conjure up the original Austrian grandmotherly inspiration for such a dish? Did Grandma have access to foie gras? How about the Vitamix blender required to make grass-green parsley puree? Did she have one of those? Mario said yes, yes, of course.
But then something turned over in me, and I knew that Bouley was right: good home cooking, the kind that’s both rustic and sophisticated, is so much harder to pin down. It reminded me of those days spent in my nineteenth-century-like garden-based kitchen back home, my struggles to elevate a freshly dug perfect potato. On the surface, complexity looked difficult, but in truth, simplicity was a lot harder to pull off.
When the time came for the cookbook photo shoot, Mario told me he needed me for the duration and then proceeded to speak urgently in German to T2 and the Austrian photographer (yet another Thomas) all day long, shutting me out of the conversation. I got it. I was lucky to be on the project: I was just supposed to help cook. We shot all of the food photos in the dark, raw-industrial lower level of the Mohawk building across the street, where creatures scurried in the corners. But taking away the sound, the sights were life-changing. There were no food-styling tricks at play on this shoot: no tweezers, no blowtorches used to make congealed cheese melt, no pots of hot water vaporizing behind the scrim. The minute we finished cooking in the kitchen, we ran across Duane Street with pots covering the pots, and pans covering the pans (because there’s no such thing as a lid in a restaurant kitchen), keeping everything hot. The steam was real. Everything was plated just as lovingly as it was for the guests, everything looked as ravishing as it did in the kitchen, and everything was delicious. Once a shot was called (“Fertig!”) we broke down the set and scooped the contents on the plates into our mouths with our hands, because we had no forks in the Mohawk. Striped bass stuffed with paprika-bacon-wine-kraut, cabbage rolls filled with foie-gras-stuffed dates, an entire suckling pig, the pan juices scooped up with shards of crispy skin. I promptly gained five pounds. Not a good move, because soon I was going to France with my mom, just the two of us, to eat. And also to locate the origins of her French-Canadian father’s people. But mostly to eat.