Shea installed me at the fish station where, in addition to ripping and cooking thirty lobsters a day as I’d done at db bistro, I also made a fleet of tricky contemporary garnishes for the middle courses, most of which were on the longer tasting menu: sweet onion ice cream to go with the foie gras; liquid spheres of black olive juice to accompany the tuna tartare; a fragrant hazelnut praline to swipe beneath the lobster, its natural sweetness suppressed via a three-step caramelization process that relied on low-sugar sugars such as Isomalt. It was at Cru, finally, that I saw artistry and rusticity collide in the way I’d always dreamed of. Shea threaded cutting-edge techniques with traditional Italian-ingredient-centric garnishes, enrobing sweet farmer’s-market peas in reduced pea juice and blending pureed polenta with a heady amount of perfumed Italian olive oil. Our ingredients were tops. Fish came in on the morning flight from Japan, some still in rigor mortis. We paid top dollar for the world’s best chocolate, the best vanilla beans, the largest Umbrian truffles. We cooks shopped the Union Square Greenmarket before work on Saturdays. Shea ordered heirloom Carola potatoes from a farm upstate, kept them in a cool dark back room, and cooked them one by one for VIP tasting menus; he pushed the plain cooked potato through the wire mesh of a tamis until it stood up straight like straw-colored hair, then swooped it onto the plate, covered it with greenish olive oil, and sprinkled it with rough gray salt. The remnants I fingered out of the tamis on the way to the sink tasted as silky as butter. I had grown potatoes like these once, the very same variety, when we lived in Two Inlets, and I had squandered them.
When the New York Times review landed—a glowing three-star by Frank Bruni that immediately filled our reservation sheet—Shea still didn’t relent, and the overtime (for which no cook in New York City ever gets paid) marched on. To put the hours/numbers into perspective, there’s this: At the end of any regular night, empty bottles of Chateau Lafite Rothschild or Pétrus or Romanée-Conti regularly crowded the sideboard—bottles of wine that listed at tens of thousands of dollars each. After taxes, I took home less than $500 a week.
Not that I cared about the money. I’d long ago accepted that the economy of cooking did not compute to hours worked for dollars paid. My mind skips the details and instead recalls that time as a close-focus montage: the round blat of thick homemade almond milk on the toe of my shoe that I am too busy to stop and wipe away; the zippery shush of my muggy black work pants; the soft plundering of all the cooks’ rubber-bottomed orthopedic shoes on the tile floor; the polyester sheen of chickpeas pureed with wobbly chunks of cooked bacon fat; the cool fleshiness of the two fat Medjool dates I’d hidden in the breast pocket of my chef’s coat. Whenever I feel my energy lagging I reach for one, convinced that even one sticky date can give me a super-sonic boost.
As we cooks stand at our stations slicing shallots or filleting fish or searing short ribs, our chitchat bobs vigorously in the air. We’re pros; our verbal stream doesn’t pause as our hands continue to strip thyme from its stem, push lamb sauce through a fine chinois strainer, or cut carrots into brunoise. I have for my fellow line cooks the same fierce, teasing fondness I have for my own brothers—which makes sense, as we are members of an extended restaurant family, and as the sole woman there my role feels vaguely maternal. Clearly in their sleep deprivation they have forgotten my female origins, because these guys unleash all their freaky boyness on me. For instance, they quote movies all day long. (The women I know do not do this; we don’t quote dialogue or finish one another’s favorite remembered scenes complete with the action noises—not at age eight, not at twenty-eight, and not even if it’s Caddyshack.) They talk about their favorite songs as if they’re making a daily mixed tape. They guess one another’s first concerts. M?tley Crüe. Whitesnake. Red Hot Chili Peppers for the youngsters. “Amy,” Kyle the meat entremet speculates, “I bet yours was Heart.” Nope, AC/DC, but close. How could he know that my small-town-girl soul has always held a lighter in the air for Heart?
They talk about their girlfriends. A good one waits up and is a game companion for the unwinding process, including the requisite midnight snack; a tough one is already in bed and offers no sympathy.
“When I got home last night,” Rich the pasta cook says, each word heavy, “she made me a sandwich.”
“Aw, really? What kind of sandwich?” asks Kyle.
“Dude, it was great. It was piled with roast turkey and Swiss and spicy pepperoni and pickled peppers, with mustard and mayo, and she fried it in butter. It was three inches tall. The best sandwich I’ve ever had.” Says the guy who’s curing an inside barrel muscle of pork butt to hang in the downstairs walk-in cooler—homemade coppa, the most high-brow of lunch meats.
“Wow, that sounds so good,” Kyle says, honestly impressed, as he stands at his station plucking the tissue-paper skins from shrunken roasted cherry tomatoes and dropping the squishy peeled fruit into a pint cup labeled TAISINS—his nickname for tomato raisins. “I can’t believe she fried you a sandwich.”
“I know,” Rich says, blinking back emotion.
Making a sandwich for a line cook after work at one in the morning, even one composed of the kind of crappy deli turkey breast their professional palates would otherwise never touch, elevated these unseen girlfriends to beatific levels. It had never once occurred to me to ask Aaron to make me a sandwich. He would have, happily, had I requested it. I just had no idea that a sandwich made by other hands meant so much.
—
My feeding impulse overflowed into my off hours. I never grew sick of cooking. I desperately wanted to cook Thanksgiving for Aaron and our friends, and begged Shea for the day off.
“Please,” he said. “We all want Thanksgiving off. We’d all like to cook. We’re open that day.” And then he reconsidered: “Tell you what. You make pie, right, in Minn-a-sow-ta? You can have Thanksgiving off if you make me twenty-four pies. Not for service, just for us.” That worked out to at least half a pie per cook. But I came in early and stayed late that week and made twenty-five pies: ten buttercup-bourbon, ten of my grandma’s macerated apple, and five maple-pecan. I copped a buttercup-bourbon for my own Thanksgiving at home the next day. When I took the pie home and sliced into it, I was crushed to discover that the crust was overly sturdy, not nearly as delicate as the piecrusts I’d made when I was a teenager. My recipe remained the same, Grandma Dion’s, but she would have been appalled. Clearly, hopping the fence from home cook to professional had turned my luck with the piecrust of my Midwestern youth. I might have mastered olive oil sablé and duck-fat pasta dough, but I was now on the dark side of pie.
Yet a few weeks later, when Shea asked me to take over the recently vacated pastry chef position, I wasn’t surprised. The pastry chef’s last day was coming fast and we had yet to hear who would take his place. I sat with Shea in the front bar room watching the rushing daytime crowd on Fifth Avenue and considered it. I had no experience in pastry, no bank of essential recipes—the formulas that are like gold to pastry chefs. It would mean more money, but with just a hundred-dollar increase, it was not bona fide pastry-chef money. I burned inside at the “girl salary.” Still, as head of the sweet side, I would finally be a chef, in charge of my own menu. This was my chance to create original dishes. I thought of my recipe notebooks, heavy with ideas.
I looked out at the enormous waterfall of apple blossoms sitting on the bar and ran my thumb over the crop of bumpy pink eczema between my fingers, my permanent worry stone, and tried to think. After many months of eighty-hour weeks, I couldn’t imagine how I would explain to Aaron that I was going to start over in a new, higher-pressure job, that I would need to work extra hours to assemble a menu, and that the small percentage of time we spent together would actually decrease. Every slurp from my takeout coffee cup echoed weirdly in the room and sounded about ten times louder than it should have, as if the cup were having trouble clearing its throat.
“I know you’ve never worked pastry, but that savory edge is where pastry is headed. I think you could do it. Nothing too flashy. A chocolate cake. A panna cotta. Five desserts total.”