“Such a mess here today,” Mario said politely, then turned around and shouted at the nearest porter, “Get this garbage out of here!” He shot me a look of mock outrage, as if this scene wasn’t the normal state of affairs. But it was. Danube, which had been open for three months, was a madhouse. The place operated with the kind of working dysfunction particular to so many newly opened New York restaurants, but of a sorely under-organized brand all its own. The classic Austrian dishes on the menu—veal schnitzel; goulash made with beef cheeks; boiled beef, here called kavalierspitz—were upgraded to fine dining by giving each ingredient the high-end treatment. Bread crumbs for the schnitzel were made by hand, from dried baguettes. Vegetable and fruit juices—beet juice, pineapple juice, carrot juice—were extracted fresh every day for sauces. The cucumber salad was made twice a day, right before lunch and right before dinner. None of the filled pastas were made ahead, as they are in so many restaurants; here they were assembled in the prep kitchen during the service itself. “Two veal tortellini!” the waiter would shout down the steps, and three minutes later a prep cook would charge up the steps with eight tortellini, their plump veal tummies visible through the thin potato-and-duck-fat dough. The only organizational principle here was the old kitchen adage, “Make it happen.” Bouley’s perfectionistic standards strained like an overworked muscle against his trademark creative lawlessness. Where the system failed, talent and sheer adrenaline made it all work.
The restaurant was so new that it still had no organized family meal, the typical 3:30 afternoon dinner for the staff. The cooks, working fourteen-hour days, scavenged what they could, shoving bits of their extra mise en place—their prep, raw tuna scraps or cold short rib trim—into buns stolen from the baking rack. I began to see how food, the kind we were allowed to eat, was currency. I noted how crafty line cooks bribed the prep cooks: They’d slyly hand over copper pots filled with surplus pasta or buttery lobster trimmings to a member of the family, who would nod and hand over the quart of peeled favas the cook so desperately needed.
At first glance I assumed that the line cooks outranked the prep cooks, but I quickly learned that winning over the family was crucial to mastering any station upstairs. Until I learned to amass my own scrap-ammunition and to speak a few words of kitchen Spanish, my battleship sank farther every day. With hand signals and gestures, I begged the Spanish-speaking family to split my blanched English peas or to please juice two quarts of beet juice for me each morning. During my first month, they grudgingly did my bidding while laughing at me and sighing, “Mami, mami…” It was a term that struck me as offensive until a fellow line cook told me that it was the feminine equivalent of dude. All the guys were papis, all the women mamis. The female members of the family laughed and nicknamed me “Yo quiero.” I want. It was the only thing I knew how to say.
—
I had visited New York a few times before we moved there, but I hadn’t bargained for the way it would smell on a daily basis. During my walk to and from work, I passed through shifting clouds of odors, some markedly sweeter than those at home (French bakeries) and some a whole lot fouler (rat piss, and lots of it). The atmosphere above the dirty sidewalks seemed to create a humid low-pressure environment, holding the scent fog down tight. Every once in a while a merciful gust of fishy sea air came in to flush the streets.
To my surprise, days spent plating tasting menus in one of New York City’s finest food churches required an immunity to the vile underside of the city. Any restaurant job, whether at a diner or a four-star restaurant, puts you into contact with a tremendous volume of refuse, and that discard pile is not pretty. At the fanciest restaurants, the contrast between the backstage grit and the front-of-the house opulence is especially stark.
It was often past midnight when we plated the last tables, the hour at which the night porters arrived and began to tackle the mountain of dirty dishes with determined faces. One table was just beginning their six-course menu: after I filled a metal ring with four-star potato salad, laying down overlapping nickels of cooked potato and flakes of shaved black truffle in a tight fish-scale pattern, the food runner picked it up and lifted it up high to avoid the porter, who was balancing a large garbage bag on his shoulder, trudging toward the street. As the bag brushed past me, a sour rush of rancidity ran smack into the truffle’s delirious damp perfume, giving me my first head-spinning lesson in the pungency of New York fine dining.
After a day spent handling such luxuries as fresh porcini mushrooms, top-flight bluefin tuna, and whole lobes of foie gras, I hit the street an hour later and walked a wide circle around the remnants of the night’s crime scene: the garbage bags that leaked soft-shell crab spooge onto the sidewalk, the rats that skated through the juices, and the steaming tubs of grease topped with constellations of fried spittle.
The polarity underscored my own divide, which was just as wide. Even though I’d had exactly zero experience with fine dining, on either side of the swinging door, the ingredients I was handling at Danube felt somehow familiar. Here I found echoes of the German-American food my mom had made throughout my childhood: spaetzle fried in brown butter until the undersides bronzed. The spicy horseradish she served with beef roast, now grated fresh over barely cooked salmon, the white flakes falling like fat January snow. Crisp balls of pale green kohlrabi like the ones my dad ate like apples while watching the Vikings game on TV. Poppy seeds going into the grinder and coming out the other side a skein of crushed soil, smelling like dank fermented fruit—correctly ground “as fine as snuff,” just as Grandma Dion had said they should be. The place whipped up my sleeping childhood taste memories to a froth.
But of course the food was much, much fancier. Snobbish, some people back home in rural Minnesota might even say, the kind of reckless high-priced frippery they would take as an assault to their ground-beef thriftiness. That didn’t register, though, because my mom had raised me to revere food. Food was beyond pretension. These Austrian plates were, in fact, the dreams of my Catholic mother, the perfect blend of her mixed French-Canadian and German lineages, the glitzy heights she’d always wanted for us. She harbored exactly these same illusions of grandeur when she served each one of her kids a rib eye and a full lobster tail with a sputtering candlelit butter dish for dipping. Compared with the piety of regular old Midwestern beef-and-potatoes, the food at Danube was positively papal.
If this was the Hapsburg Empire, Mario ruled the kingdom. He wasn’t just intimidating; he was also Austrian. Cultured, snappish, and prone to brutal honesty, Mario had begun his cooking apprenticeship at the age of fourteen, and he didn’t sugarcoat anything. When the young pastry sous chef came up with a new dessert for him to try—a fig wrapped in crumbly pastry—he inhaled it in three large forkfuls and then pronounced it “Dumpf,” crumbs falling from his mouth. I didn’t need a translation to understand that one. Dull, lacking in acidity, no oomph, just like it sounded. Dumpf was pretty universal.