Give a Girl a Knife

by Amy Thielen

  That pretty much describes my first year of cooking professionally. I walked in the door of Danube and inhaled it in one long, knotty, seductive slurp. It was complete and total immersion. For once, I was not thinking about my role or what I should be doing with my life. I was just doing. I was moving—physically moving—and working far harder than I’d ever worked before. Eighty-hour weeks, and the hours flew by. By the time I’d finished my first month interning in a real kitchen in Manhattan, I felt like I had finally activated the entirety of my DNA. Maybe I was a fair mixture of my parents after all: the workaholic businessman dad meets the sauce-simmering, stove-bound mom.

  —

  When cooking school ended and it was time for me to find a restaurant to do my required six-week unpaid internship, I made a quick foot tour of the best fine-dining restaurants in the city—why wouldn’t you do your internship at the best restaurant possible? I naively reasoned—and decided on the one with the most enticing dining room. I walked past the fragrant vestibule with its display of fresh apples into the dimly lit Bouley, Chef David Bouley’s eponymous restaurant in Tribeca, and boldly asked the host if I could talk to the chef.

  Looking back, it’s easy to see that I had no idea where I was. Quite literally. When I told my friends at culinary school about where I hoped to intern, I rhymed Bouley with “duelie” instead of with “Vouvray.” On my tongue, one of the city’s greatest chefs sounded like a dual-wheeled truck charging through a mud run.

  It happened that Galen Zamarra, chef de cuisine at Bouley, didn’t need an intern and sent me to see Mario Lohninger, the Austrian-born chef de cuisine of their sister restaurant, who did.

  Danube was Chef Bouley’s ode to the decadent cooking of the Hapsburg Empire, complete with a dining room washed in gold metallic paint and ringed with gigantic Klimt reproductions. The menu promised both haute historical and contemporary Austrian, as well as truffles and foie gras and rare bottles of wine, everything necessary to lubricate the downtown financial-district boom economy.

  Both of Bouley’s restaurants were full-tilt fancy fine dining and considered to be among the very best in Manhattan. Yet everyone who worked there called it the Danube, a definite article slip that immediately put me at ease. Back home, people often tagged an extra the onto all their favorite haunts and restaurants. It was the Schwarzwald. The Park Drug. Our local grocery store, the Red Owl.

  Tall and regal, but with a hipster’s stubble and greasy curls, Mario interviewed me thoroughly, as if I were applying to join the ranks of the military, and then gave me a sweeping tour through the wine cellar stocked with Austrian Zweigelt and Grüner Veltliner and the storeroom shelves glowing with ruby lingonberries and green pumpkin-seed oil. On that first day he was overly polite with me. Decorous. Impervious to the turmoil swirling around him. With ramrod-straight posture, he led me through the downstairs belly of Danube’s prep kitchen, stepping high over snaking vacuum tubes and puddles of water and flattened cardboard boxes. He strode past the prep cooks, who were calmly but deftly shelling fava beans and pounding out schnitzels and butchering fish, their eyes darting to me in small doses. I would soon know them as “the family”—Chef Bouley’s tribe. This steadfast band of Dominican prep cooks—who might or might not actually have been related—sized up new recruits with a loose interest, like members of a crime family who don’t want to get too attached before they know what’ll happen to the new one. They outlasted all of us.

  “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 th
e 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.

  At around 10:30 each morning, I stiffened at Mario’s arrival. He’d walk in and without a word to anyone reach into a nook and grab his hidden box of cereal, pour an overflowing amount into a porcelain consommé bowl, and bend down deeply to it, his limp locks of hair brushing the pass. Then he’d wipe his stubbled chin, clap his hands, narrow his eyes, and start prowling the line for vulnerable-looking cooks.

  Not only was Mario one of the most technically precise chefs I’ve ever known, but his palate was savage in its accuracy; he frequently called out cooks for the slightest of deviations in the simplest of things. “This chestnut puree was made with milk and chicken stock, eh? It should be half milk, half veg stock.” As if to make a show of this superiority, the depth of his passion, when he tasted one of our sauces he didn’t just dip the tip of a finger or a spoon into it as other chefs did; he locked eyes with the cook and swiped two fingers through it repeatedly, lasciviously, slurping up full tablespoons while taking the measure of both the sauce and the cook’s character at the same time. He lapped up precious mise en place like a Great Dane. Those of us who often slid into service with just enough of this or that sauce feared Mario’s two-fingered taste.

  When I first began on the canapé station, Mario paired me up with Nick, a guy with sweet eyes, a ripping-sharp knife, and severe cramping of the central nervous system. He was wound as tight as a pulley cord, taut with trying to get it all done. He’d be skating along, gliding through tasks with smooth movements, diving in and out of the reach-in fridge, until a moment of indecision paralyzed him. Faced with the problem of what to do with batons of foie gras that were graying at the ends from oxidation, he visibly shook, crumpled up the parchment, and tossed it—foie gras, which rivaled gold for the price per pound—in the trash.

  I was no better. I left my crap all over the place: half-built beet terrines abandoned while I ran upstairs to take a pan of quince out of the oven; a cluster of herbs and garlic for a sachet left on the corner of a shelf while I searched for where I’d set the cheesecloth; my notebook, just four inches long, full of precious scribbled formulas, I lost and recaptured daily. Until the day that it fell into the evil hands of the sneering Austrian pastry chef, who wouldn’t give it back.

  He stopped icing a Sacher torte to launch a screed in my direction: “This is the third time this week you’ve left your stupid little notebook in my pastry room! You don’t deserve to keep it!”

  A middle-aged crank trained in the rigorous art of Austrian pastry, he had no tolerance for me. We scrapped as if on a middle-school playground, him holding the notebook high above his head, me lurching for it. And then I did my signature counter leap, one knee on the counter (turns out I can spring up suddenly like a cat), snatched the notebook, and stomped to the locker room. Huffing, I ejected all the shit from my locker in one bear-paw heave.

  “Did you learn your lesson?” asked Harrison, the meat cook.

  I stared at him, unable to speak. Did I?

  Harrison kicked his locker shut. “You learned that the pastry chef is a major asshole. That’s a good lesson.”

  —

  By the end of the second eighty-hour week, I was exhausted. That night I’d made 189 orders of potato chips threaded with sardines, and just as many portions of octopus-pineapple salad and cured mahi with beet-fennel slaw. Blitzed with fatigue, I stood in the bright basement prep kitchen completing my last task of the evening, making a sachet to drop into the overnight braised oxtail, wetting a clump of cheesecloth and slowly fanning out its damp corners as if smoothing open petals to press a flower. With my dad’s baby face and my mom’s small stature, I looked more like a self-serious twelve-year-old than a cook in a professional brigade. My hair was pinned back from my face with a bunch of barrettes and I was basically wearing oversize pajamas: loose black pants, black comfort shoes, and a size 44 chef’s coat, which was at least four sizes too big. The chef coat assortment at Bouley was always mostly extra-larges, making me look like I was playing dress-up. (The smaller guys nabbed all the 36s and 38s, took them home, and washed them themselves, but I didn’t know that yet.)

  The coat situation pointed to the obvious gender gap in Danube’s kitchen, and throughout much of fine dining at the time. All women cooks dealt with it differently. Some of these lone females fought back by excelling in aggressive sexual innuendo—by talking even dirtier than the boys. I combatted my ladyness by stomping out of my sweaty pants in the coed locker room and letting everyone have their fill of my saggy briefs and graying sports bra as much as they liked—in other words, by pushing my femininity all the way to the way-back. I’d spent my college years stalking patriarchal dominance in literature, but when I found myself immersed in a testosterone world, I no longer cared for the social argument. I didn’t want to talk my way into this kitchen; I wanted to prove myself on their battleground, through my cooking. Most of these boys, I thought, were completely unaware of the feminine roots of their culinary art. I doubted they could imagine what strength and skill it took to assemble a proper pantry arsenal back in the old days, but I could, and I knew the work had been much the same.

  Never much of a girlie girl anyway, I figured there would be time later for pedicures. As it was, my toenails were broken and stained purple from rubbing against my black socks, as anyone looking on could see: the locker-room situation at the Danube spelled out the ratio of the gender dynamic. There was only one. An open box of cornstarch always sat next to the sink, free for anyone who needed to powder his balls. (Key to preventing crotch bite, you know.)

  After cutting off the plastic-wrap belt I used to hold up my chef pant
s and openly changing into my street clothes, I trudged up the steps, slipping the thick strap of my messenger bag over my head. If Aaron ever hinted that he was jealous of my boy-filled workplace he never let on—and needn’t have, either. The only thought on my mind was getting home to him. I hoped that he’d still be awake and would want to sit up with me. I wanted to unwind amid the wood shavings from his carvings and the long panoramic photos of home he’d pinned up on the walls, a sort of shrine to our rural life back in Minnesota: our rock-garden flower beds, the trees draped in fog on Indian Creek, his fading 1973 Buick Centurion that was still parked in our yard. All I really wanted was for him to open a bottle of wine in that amazing way he did, by unscrewing the cork with a cordless drill running backward—rrr-wrrrrrr—and to conserve my evaporating energy long enough to bring it to bed.

  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.