At this point, I had to laugh. Sexism was so predictable. Nevertheless, 66 proved to be the craziest, most transformative experience of my cooking career.
The kitchen was huge, clean, white, and modern, and visible to the Richard Meier–designed dining room through a bank of very large fish tanks. The staff was composed of both Chinese-and American-trained cooks. The Western-trained cooks handled the cold appetizers, the hot appetizers, and the more fusion-style main courses, all cooked on gas ranges. The Chinese cooks (most of whom had lived in New York for years) were divided into teams: the wok station, led by Chef Wei-Chin; and the dim sum station, led by Mei (pronounced Moy), whom we called Mei One. Wei-Chin and a few others stir-fried entrees in the woks, and Mei One and his team made all the dim sum, ran the giant steamer, and made the noodle and rice dishes. And each was definitely a team. Collectivity was their thing. If the management threatened to can one of them—as they did when Mei One was caught bullying a tiny, effeminate male back waiter in the locker room—they’d all threaten to go. The barbecued meats in the restaurant, however—the crispy suckling pig, the Peking ducks, the red-glazed pork char siu, all the stuff you see hanging in the window of a Chinese restaurant—were made by another Mei who worked solo. We called him Barbecue Mei. In all, there were four Meis.
Everyone answered to Josh Eden, the chef de cuisine, a New York–born Jean-Georges veteran who went by the nickname of Shorty. And in the beginning Jean-Georges himself was always in attendance, as were Brainin and Master Chef Lam and Sun Tek, consulting chefs from Hong Kong.
Right off the bat, this was the place the fashion and food worlds wanted to be. The music was thumping; the tiny string of airplane-size bathrooms quickly turned into long-term “powder” rooms. During the opening week, it seemed every scallion pancake I served was destined for Naomi Campbell or Martha Stewart or former New York City mayor Ed Koch or someone similarly famous. One morning I arrived to find a photo-shoot crew from Vogue swarming around a familiar-looking top model standing in front of the fish tanks holding a live lobster, her legs buffed to a classic-car high gloss. A prop stylist met me at my station, hysterical with the question of the morning: Would the lobster die after being out of the water for so long? It had taken them thirty minutes to get the shot. I assured him not, covered the lobster with soaked paper towels, and slid the lethargic crustacean into my cooler. I didn’t quite get his concern. The thing would meet its steaming end within a few hours anyway.
Mostly, I cooked the hot apps, much-improved versions of Chinese-American favorites: egg rolls, shrimp toast, gingered barbecued ribs, corn-and-crabmeat soup. I also made a few more authentically Chinese dishes: a whole stuffed blue crab covered with a lid of delicate, fried-lotus-seed paste; frog’s legs marinated in egg and potato starch, deep fried, and showered with a light snowy pile of crispy egg and garlic topping; wild mushrooms steamed with sake and ginger and spooned over a disk of sticky rice. It was the best Chinese food I’d ever had.
Chef Lam, who was staying in an apartment over the restaurant, was the first one to show up for work in the morning, and he sported three strands of long curling hair from his chin. They said that he had invented Shrimp with Candied Walnuts and Chili, the dish knocked off in hundreds of Chinese restaurants around the world and at 66 as well. He spent his evening service cooking dozens of whole crispy-skinned garlic chickens in the wok, passing them between two wire spiders in the hot fat until the skin turned uniformly caramel brown. Then with his cleaver he reduced each blistering hot bird into bite-size pieces and adroitly reassembled them on the plate into the shape of a turtle. This chicken was a marvel of Chinese engineering, a balloon of juice contained inside a shell of brittle brown skin. My proximity to his chopping station drove me crazy, the crispy shards flying tantalizingly close to me but hitting the floor. Once in a while he passed me an odd-shaped divot of meat and skin, one that didn’t fit into his turtle puzzle. I tucked it into my mouth, swallowed it as unobtrusively as a snake sharked down a tidbit, and nodded my thanks.
When it got slow, which it was wont to do in a restaurant with a menu of such breadth, its items spread out among so many cooks, I squatted behind my station next to the enormous Chinese dim sum steamer, downed extra dumplings on the sly, and contemplated drinking sake out of a teacup, as some of the other cooks were doing. I had never drunk anything but water on the job before and wasn’t really interested in starting. I had never squatted on my heels before, either, but I tried to mimic the deep, comfortable-looking pose of the line of dim sum guys to my left. They laughed at me and passed a plastic prep container down the line until it got to Jacky, the impassive kid who ran the steamer next to me. He had introduced himself proudly as an ABC, American-born Chinese, different from the rest of them.
“They want you to try the chicken feet,” Jacky said, handing over the container. The Chinese cooks snacked on chicken feet all day long as if they were potato chips, spitting out the tiny bones into plastic containers.
Mei One got up and came down the line brandishing a cup of dark liquid.
“Saucy,” he said, beaming.
“He says you need to try it with the sauce,” Jacky duly repeated. I picked up a foot and nibbled on the gelatinous joint. Through the thick coating of sweet soy sauce, it tasted like a chicken back without the crisp, but fattier. The pop of the cartilage in my mouth felt oddly foreign, and I thought I could feel the toenail in my mouth. I could tolerate the chicken foot but wouldn’t be craving them. But I smiled down the line, raising my empty plastic cup.
They howled and slapped their knees, knowing I didn’t really love it.