By this time my résumé was as confusing as a Long Island Railroad timetable. It was riddled with exits and returns, mostly a lot of back-and-forth from the Bouley enterprise: Danube; back to Park Rapids for a couple of months; Danube again; db bistro moderne for four long months; home for a month for our wedding; back to Bouley again.
Like most New York City line cooks who were cycling through top kitchens soaking up experience, I always intended my kitchen stints to last the required year. Twelve months was long enough to appease the chef and absorb the techniques and flavors of the job, but short enough to maintain both your sanity and your relationship, if you had one. Basically, the rule was a baker’s dozen: Twelve months were required, a good cook gave thirteen or more. My last stint with Chef Bouley—otherwise known as the time I returned to the dysfunctional family for one final helping—fell a little short of that.
After our wedding, it appeared that Aaron and I had miscalculated and couldn’t quite afford the European honeymoon we’d planned to take. We had to forfeit the tickets to Paris his parents bought for us because we didn’t have the money for food or hotels once we got there, even if we scrimped. We spent our would-be honeymoon at JFK airport fighting to get vouchers, to no avail. Our hopes and wishes, as outsized as ever, had once again surpassed our practicality. It was classic us.
As before, my feet beat a trail to the Bouley doors on Duane Street. I timed my arrival with the afternoon family meal and cornered Shea Gallante, the chef de cuisine, whom I’d known when I cooked at Danube, and begged for my job back.
He rolled his eyes. “Again?” And then with a sigh he admitted that he could use another cook. He took me to the office where Chef Bouley agreed to my hire—on the condition that I’d take on the added responsibilities of recording all of his recipes and turning the kitchen into a more well-oiled machine. Bouley was juiced up; he wanted a total rehaul, and for some reason he persisted in thinking that I was some kind of a great systemizer. “Reorganize all of the mise en place on the stations,” he told me. “I don’t want cooks stacking plastic cups of mise en place into tubs of ice anymore, it looks so sloppy. All of that prep should be in refrigerated underpulls. I want everything off the counters. And let’s be neater. I want all of these cooks cleaning out their own blenders.”
As we left Bouley’s office, Shea gave me a sidelong glance, a lowly line cook who had just been given a curious amount of responsibility. Embarrassed, I blurted out, “Wouldn’t this be your job? Why in the hell is he asking me?” He laughed, knowing exactly how difficult it would be to rewire the whole kitchen system. “I have no idea,” he said, taking the stairs to the kitchen two at a time. “But now it’s your job. You should get going on that.”
I walked back into the kitchen and took a look at the mountains of dishes, a full day’s worth, in the basement; the lack of under-counter refrigeration in the kitchen to accommodate this new “no cups” situation; a line cook, frantic before service, throwing his dirty food-processor container onto the top of the dirty dish mountain; two pale externs frantically assembling canapés for an offsite party; Bouley due to rush in the door at 6:00 with fresh produce for new menu dishes; the family of prep cooks calmly running through their lists; my own heavy meat entremet workload. The two-floor kitchen was too serpentine, Bouley too prone to throwing unpredictable grenades, and the family, who actually held the keys to the system, too stuck in their routines.
Overwhelmed, I failed to instate a new organizational system and after three months I gave notice—yet again.
As if for punishment, my final day coincided with the aftermath of an extermination bombing—the most unsavory day in the life of any Manhattan kitchen. Roy the head butcher impassively brushed piles of insect bodies off the counters with a broom. As I pulled out a cutting board from the bleach water, the fast teenage roaches that had somehow survived ran wild like hoodlums.
The day got worse. During that evening’s service, instead of closing out my tenure there with my usual proficiency, I collapsed into an epic fail. Nothing went right. My disks of wild mushroom duxelles, gelled with agar-agar and served hot under the rack of lamb—which I had been nailing for the past few weeks—were all inexplicably dissolving. My simple butter-emulsified green vegetables—entremet 101—overreduced and broke into beads of excess fat. My timing was cocked a good ten seconds off every table.
Finally the meat guy to my right threw his basting spoon clattering into the pan with the chunk of wagyu beef, raised his head to Bouley at the pass, and hissed to me, “I can’t fucking cook with you!”
Bouley walked over and clenched a hand around my shoulder, not exactly kindly and without his trademark smirk, and whispered, “I thought you just got married? You getting too much, is that why you can’t cook anymore?” Then he looked at me quizzically, as if receiving a new idea. “Or maybe you’re not getting enough…”
By this time I’d become accustomed to his carnal cooking metaphors—juice was juice!—and wanted to return the joke by saying that the temperature of my porridge was neither too hot nor too cold but just right, thank you very much, but felt muted by my poor performance. A captain called him back to the pass to greet some VIPs whose last private offsite party I’d worked with Bouley. The woman waved enthusiastically at me, calling me over, saying something inaudible to the chef. He looked at me with a false smile and answered, loud enough for me to hear across the room: “Yes, she’s here. For now.” I stood still halfway between him and the line, my plating spoon frozen to my pot. “Amy’s like a little bird,” he said, his fingers flickering in the air, “flitting from place to place.” The most manic, improvisational, restless chef in New York was calling me out as an itinerant flake, and he wasn’t wrong. I had to admit: I was a bird. A snowbird. A returning swan. I was always on migration.
—
Despite my flaming departure from Bouley, I decided to stick with the fine-dining scene and cycle through the next top New York City chef of that generation: Jean-Georges Vongerichten. At the outset his style seemed to lie somewhere between the two DBs: a bit modernized-French-classic like Daniel Boulud, a bit vegetable-juice-fueled like David Bouley. After my first night trailing at his flagship restaurant in Trump Tower, Jean-Georges, I found that his cooking also contained a thrilling streak of Asian brightness, pops of finely minced Thai chili, lime juice, and lemongrass. Greg Brainin, Jean-Georges’s chief creative officer, hired me to work the line, and then just before I started, he decided to transfer me to be a sous chef at 66, an authentic Chinese place they were opening in Tribeca. When I met with Catherine (not her real name) in management she dropped my title to junior sous, reducing my modest salary even more and marking yet another time that the women were meaner than the men.