Jean-Fran?ois, db bistro’s chef de cuisine, assigned me to train with Julie, who was working the cold station but moving up to entremet. She was to be my handler, and she did not look real happy about it.
Upon first meeting, all cooks posture to each other to let the other know exactly at which level of the game they’re playing. Men in the kitchen generally do this subtly, dropping clues of their experience whenever they find it convenient. Women in the kitchen get right to the point. The serious ones generally play to win.
Julie let me know right off that she had cooked for so-and-so and so-and-so, and also at Café Boulud for years, and was only working the cold station as a favor to the chef. They were short-handed because some pisser—naturally, a girl—had quit.
“Ugh,” she said. “The last girl sucked. Let’s see if you can do better.”
I wasn’t sure. The prep list was serpentine.
At the time, db bistro moderne was Chef Boulud’s third restaurant. He shared a French cooking pedigree and initials with Bouley, but they differed in temperament. Boulud’s comments were delivered at a higher volume, and he was more briskly businesslike. And because he also ran two other restaurants—Café Boulud and his flagship, Daniel—he was also less likely to be hanging around during service.
db bistro was in the theater district, meaning it courted the hell horde of pretheater dining: tables in by 5:30, out by 7:15. Unlike at Danube, there was no gradual slide into the dinner slam. And being newly opened, the restaurant was also mobbed with the usual New York City scene-chasers; there was usually one at each table who ordered the $27 db burger, a high-end ground-beef blend stuffed with braised short ribs and a center chunk of foie gras, topped with two petals of tomato confit, and a tuft of pale green frisée. Dubbed “the most expensive burger ever” by the press shortly after it appeared on the menu, the db burger pretty much had its own public relations team and absolutely required its own cook. There was one guy who just made burgers all day long, pressing the tri-ply meat cake into the clean lid of a mayonnaise jar to mold it, filling sheet tray after sheet tray with burger pucks. The rest of us put hundreds of portions of tomato confit—peeled plum halves that shrank slowly overnight in a bath of olive oil—into low ovens every night before we left.
Apparently I had not learned my lesson at Danube and had not found a mellower follow-up restaurant, if such a thing even existed in Manhattan. The schedule in this newly opened place was after my dad’s own workaholic heart: It was thirteen-hour days if you were quick enough to finish your work and six-day weeks. And sometimes, if for some reason Jean-Fran?ois couldn’t finagle your day off, you lost that day and had to work fourteen days in a row. This happened at inopportune times, like during the Christmas holidays. Everybody got off for Christmas Day, though, because the restaurant was closed, and the lucky ones were even sent home with a Christmas capon from Daniel Boulud himself. I quietly shared my grumbling with my friend, the Scottish meat cook. He had introduced me to a special little snack of cribbed French fries shoved into a soft bun, “the chip butty” (pronounced “buh-hee”), and tried to raise our collective Christmas spirits by making an elaborate Scottish haggis out of lamb lights (lungs) and heart and tongue, assembled after he’d finished his significant prep list. Returning to work on December 26 at six-thirty in the morning, the Scot and I trudged up the steps together and he said, turning his cuffs back, his kind eyes drooping at the corners, “So I guess that was the ’olidays, then?”
Unlike the Scot, Julie didn’t seem to expect days off. She continued to ride me, following me around like we were twins, pointing out where I should have transferred my slightly-too-small amount of lobster mayonnaise into a container of a more befitting size, reminding me to cut my labeling tape with a scissors so that it had perpendicular corners instead of amateurish ripped ones, shrieking when I tested the artichokes barigoule for doneness with a meat fork, which left two small holes in the olive-green flesh. “Pinch them to test! Don’t leave holes!” (We sliced them and the holes wouldn’t even show, I thought, but whatever.) Whenever I appeared calm and in control—clearly not hustling enough—she ordered, “Come on, lady! Move your dick!”
I followed her around, too. For one thing, I was learning an invaluable amount of precious info from her, every bit of which was making me a better cook, but I also trailed her in the way that the abused cling to their abusers. She didn’t like it when I got too close, though, and when we were lined up in the tight alley behind the hot line she hissed, “I can feel your dick in my ass,” and bounced me back a step with a well-placed bump.
Dear Jesus. I could have complained and resisted her, but there was no point. Engaging would have just egged her on. So I decided to take that moment to internalize her teachings and truly improve. I heard her voice even when she wasn’t around, changing out containers, religiously rotating my mise en place to be FIFO compliant (first in, first out), stretching my plastic wrap neurotically over the corners of the metal containers until not a wrinkle in the plastic remained, until the taut top looked as see-through as glass and its containment was totally invisible. I ripped apart forty live lobsters every morning the same way she did: furiously. I screwed off the big claw and threw it into the big claw bin, the small into the small; I swiftly spun the tails apart from the bodies, then twisted and ripped out the middle fan of the tail, taking with it the ropy gray intestinal tract. Then, firmly holding the muscular clenching tail, I shoved a wooden skewer up that same poop chute to flatten it out and tossed it into the tail bin while its little arms were still waving good-bye. I didn’t stop to watch the arms stop fluttering; I moved on to the next one. And the next. Nor did I take a minute to clean the lobster juice spittle from my glasses in the middle of ripping lobsters, but instead waited until it piled up so thickly that I could hardly see, when I was done with all of them. I tried not to feel sorry for these creatures, as I knew that would slow me down. My lobster meat was fast disintegrating into a goo. It needed cooking, pronto.
If Julie’s predecessors, such as T1, had taught me to cook well fast, she taught me to cook well even faster, and for bigger numbers.
I was in the vegetable walk-in at the end of my shift organizing my day’s prep when she came in. She leaped up to the top shelves to grab a nearly empty box of watercress, then the last of the carrot carton and a half-gone box of limes, manically taking to heart her own advice to keep things neat, and pitched everything violently into the center like she was making a pile for a bonfire. Something was really stoking her.