If he was already asleep, I would crawl in next to him and nestle close, my hair smelling deeply of fried sardines, not yet realizing that my exit routine desperately needed to include a shower.
I also didn’t yet recognize the hunger paradox particular to line cooks, the strange phenomenon that occurs the moment your feet touch the pavement, when your appetite surges back like a demon after a dinner service full of glorious tastes that have temporarily suppressed it. I thought of myself with multiple stomachs, a ruminant, albeit with two chambers instead of four—one stomach for flavors and the other for bulk. The flavor side turned out to be desire itself, which had been satiated; the food side, the actual fuel tank, began to ping hollowly every night around 12:30. And so before going home I hit the Pakistani cab stand on Church Street, where the middle-aged ladies dumped my choice of meat, two vegetables, rice or naan, and double cilantro sauce onto the plate with the same ennui as had the lunch ladies of my childhood—although the spicy, full-flavored food these women scooped was as powerful as kryptonite in comparison.
—
My family considered my internship a great coup. My mom fretted over my hours while encouraging me to put the recipes she’d taught me on the menu—as if I were a contributor. Grandma Dion, my mom’s mom, wrote to me in loopy cursive asking me how I liked working at “the café.” Aaron knew exactly where I was, and was happy for me, but he was also somewhat fearful of my unbridled enthusiasm: what devotions to this city it might inspire, what long-term commitments would keep us from returning to our house that summer to grow our garden. To my car-dealer dad I simply reported the numbers.
“It’s all six-day weeks, Dad, thirteen to fourteen hours a day.”
“Wonderful!” he boomed. He worked a long six-day week himself, so this was not considered excessive.
“Actually, Dad,” I corrected, “it was eighty-seven hours last week.”
“Even more wonderful!”
As the fifth week of my internship slid into its final one, Mario teased me as he watched me herky-jerkily dice some potatoes with my heavy German culinary-school-issued knife. “Ahmy,” he said, gesturing with the blade of his sharp Japanese slicer. “When you going to get a real knife?” The entire kitchen staff was obsessed with a Japanese knife shop within walking distance of the restaurant called Korin. Cooks on their day off regularly stopped by to show off their new knife candy, injecting a spot of cheer to our long days.
Mario had given me no hope that my tenure there would be anything but temporary. But for some reason I found myself boldly saying, “I’ll get a new knife when you start giving me a paycheck.”
It was true. I couldn’t afford one.
He looked at me through eyes slitted for seeing a distance.
“Okay. You start for real on canapé on Monday. By yourself.”
I knew the honeymoon was over. My marriage to the fine-dining brigade—which at times felt more like admission to an unfriendly harem—was about to begin.
—
I went to Korin and bought a very good Japanese carbon knife, soft and easy to sharpen on a water stone. It’s still the one I use most often, its brand forgotten, its dark charcoal blade swirled with a hot wind of orange rust.
The guys set about teaching me how to take care of it. Nick ran his knife frantically on the sharpening stone, like an adolescent taking matters of need into his own hands. Kazu did it slower, and taught me to sharpen the first side more than the second and to feel the roll of the burr on the underside before gently whisking it off against the stone. All of them gauged sharpness by reverently slicing against the grain of their arm hairs.
Not every cook in the kitchen was so neurotic about keeping their edges razor-sharp. Yugi, the young fish cook (nicknamed Eugene by the Americans), smiled and shrugged with Japanese modesty, saying, “My knife is sharp enough.” The Austrians were of the same mind. The other Austrian sous chef named Thomas, whom we called T2, used a heavy German cook’s knife, never sharpened it, and could cut a butternut squash into precise matchsticks in about three minutes, his knife powered not by a razor edge but by intention and sheer confidence. T1 constantly ran his long Japanese slicer against a honing steel, never on the stone, and could do the same.
I might have learned how to sharpen my knife, and how to cut a sheaf of chives into paper-thin rings, but I was still greener than a fern. And everyone knew it.
“J. Lo is in the bar! Her ass is on a barstool!” the guys hooted, and they could not believe that in the year 2000, at the height of her rise, I did not know who she was. Jennifer Lopez I might have faintly heard of, but not this bootylicious “J. Lo.” I had literally just spent much of the last three years in the woods, deprived of media.
In a lot of ways, my innocence saved me. If I had known exactly where I was or who I was knocking shoulders with, I would have been too freaked out to work, because this kitchen was stocked with the highest density of cooks who would go on to cook famously than any other kitchen I’d ever work in again. Gabriel would own three restaurants on Nantucket and appear regularly in food magazines. Harrison would helm a cultish small place in the East Village. Cesar would open Brooklyn’s first Michelin three-star restaurant. King would own a bunch of notable Filipino restaurants. Einat would open a couple of Israeli spots in the city and write a cookbook. Galen, next door at Bouley, would launch multiple restaurants of his own, and Bill, the Bouley pastry chef, would eventually become pastry chef at the White House. There was not a slouch in the bunch. It turned out to be a beautiful thing, that na?veté, because it gave me a blind courage. I’ve been dealing with the sad aftereffects of its erosion ever since.
I was twenty-four years old, ancient for a European cook, but average for Danube, an experienced kitchen. The head fish guy was in his midthirties and the meat guy was maybe pushing forty, and yet the three Austrians liked to point out how old we were. To their point, our knees were aging fast, scaling the steps between the upstairs serving kitchen and the downstairs prep kitchen at least fifty times a day.
In cook years, however, I was still a babe in the woods. After eventually moving up from canapés to garde-manger, even my salads were off, and Mario was not afraid to point it out.
“What are you doing, beating up my salad?” he scoffed, throwing the contents of my mixing bowl into the trash. He started with new greens, squirted them with vinaigrette, and tumbled them with his hands, as one might wash a delicate bra, and then lifted them in an airy heap onto the plate.
“Never break their ribs,” he said softly, guilting me as effectively as if I’d been breaking their bones.
We felt someone standing behind us and turned around.
“My dad is here!” Mario beamed, formally introducing us. “He is making us the goulash today.”