by Amy Thielen
The potato stock was a deceptively simple concoction, made by sweating onions, garlic, and sliced raw potatoes in butter, deglazing with white wine, and simmering everything in chicken stock until the potatoes were tender. Pushing it through a sieve yielded a soupy blond puree. It tasted a lot like my mother’s potato soup without the bacon. But the brilliance of this stuff belied its humble origins. It gave conceptual sauces a country backbone, pulled them from the clouds back to the terra firma. Banyuls vinegar and green pumpkin-seed oil were new to me, but potatoes and onions, these things I understood.
—
It would be weeks on the hot line before I had a real conversation with Chef Bouley himself, the ghostly, swift-moving presence responsible for this machine. I soon learned that his unpredictability was the hallmark of the Bouley kitchen. To his cooks, it was the unfortunate consequence of his insane creativity. All night long Bouley cooked personally, off menu, shuttling between his side-by-side restaurant kitchens, for countless VIPs—friends, celebrities, known gourmands. He’d show up at 6:00 P.M. in the middle of the first seating rush toting a case of Concord grapes, throw it on someone’s cutting board, and say, “I want you to clean these and steep them in the lobster-port sauce,” totally kinking the cook’s flow. Or he’d drop a box of scallops in the shell onto the cold app station and say, “Shuck them, save the coral roe, sauté it, and put it in small dice under the ceviche,” forcing that cook to wedge himself onto the hot line to find space on the flat-top dining service. This put all the cooks on edge and constantly in the weeds—but it kept Bouley’s own improvisational inner demon on track. Even without the last-minute arrivals, not a single night went by without Bouley throwing a wedge into the gears of dinner service. I thought this was how all kitchens were.
I didn’t know what to expect of a chef with one three-star and one four-star New York City restaurant, but I suppose it was something more distantly managerial: I didn’t expect him to cook the fish or plate the food himself. Or to wear formal dress shirts and cuff links beneath his chef coat, like he was playing 007, a Bond masquerading as a chef. Or to talk to me.
“You’ve got the orange powder over here?” he whispered steamily in my ear.
I quickly dropped the piece of schnitzel I was breading back into its crumb bath and started flipping through my tiny ring-bound notebook as his impatience mounted. Orange powder?
“She doesn’t have the orange powder?” he said to Mario. “Where in the hell is my orange powder? It was in a little foam cup…” And he started to ransack my station.
I’d come to learn that the orange powder—made by grinding candied, dehydrated orange peel to a dust—was one of the many extra things I was expected to have on my station for these moments when Bouley decided to come in and go rogue, which was nightly. In addition to the regular printed menu, he had a running list of dishes that he was constantly changing, working on, reinventing.
He’d tell the fish cook, “Give me the garnish we did for the axis for that guy.” (Axis being the kind of Texas venison we used.)
“Which was that, Chef? The lobster beet setup?” Reduced beet juice, red wine, and truffles.
“No, no.” Bouley sighed, basting sturgeon with foaming, browning butter. He threw his spoon into the metal spoon bin. “Go ask Shea, he’ll know.” Meaning the dish he did next door at Bouley. Meaning that the cook should leave his station, walk outside, go into the kitchen next door at Bouley, and ask Shea, the meat cook, for the “axis setup Chef did for the guy.” Shea, deeply weeded in service himself, would just laugh and send the cook back with a saucepot of celery puree, sautéed wood ear mushrooms, and a pot of mushroom réglisse sauce. Most of the time he guessed right.
As Bouley cooked and plated, you could see him juggling proportion and generosity: what was just enough, what was just a hair too much, what degree of excess would sink the diner into a kind of delirium. Trained in cutting-edge kitchens in France in the late 1970s, he absorbed his mentor Roger Vergé’s preference for light vegetable-based sauces over the old-school meat reductions and then took it one step further; his culinary mind tripped on the sauces. Some of them seemed to have been devised by plumbing the depths of the color itself. The mango-curry-saffron mixed far-flung flavors, but tasted like a totally natural fusing of the elements that make yellow. Ocean herbal sauce—composed of three herb oils as well as fennel, celery, and garlic purees—mined the color green. His sauces were so vivid they were almost libidinous—virile and romantic at the same time, like him. One look at his plates identified the guy whose eyes conquested all female passersby to be the same one who had also personally picked out the dining room’s gaudy tasseled velvet pillows.
His food was precise, but not so tight that it blocked out artistry. There was a looseness, a drunken glee for cooking that was very pronounced here. A Bouley consommé wore a technically incorrect shimmer of fat on top, as thin as gold leaf, which effectively lubricated the happiness going down. It was the industry norm to gently shake off the juices that erupted when you cut into a filet of medium-rare meat, so as not to dilute the sauce, but when the meat cook did this, Bouley shot him a look and said quietly, “I want that venison juice.” The cook complied, his eyes transfixed to the translucent bloody dome that grew by the second on the venison’s cut edge, threatening to flow a river through his pale celeriac puree. It made little sense until you just accepted the fact that juice was juice. Cooking was about sensation, about carnality, and Chef was certainly no prude.
This kind of cooking required real knowledge—cooks who could hit the outer edge of perfection, who trusted themselves enough to color right on top of the lines, not inside them. When the service was bumpy and we weren’t hitting it, Bouley slipped down the line and whispered hotly into the space between me and the meat guy, “Don’t give me what I ask for. Give me what I want.”
“What the hell did he say?” my comrade hissed, but I just shook my head. There was no time to answer. Hot plates were hitting the steel piano. Bouley threw his cautions as effectively as a ventriloquist, shooting whispers across the line. He had a way of mumbling a criticism so that it hit its intended recipient right in the basket. The one I often caught was “The potatoes are too loose.” He was right, of course. They were supposed to flop softly, but mine looked like they were melting. When I looked up, Bouley was onto the next thing, gently pinching one of six plated langoustines on the pass. He hesitated for a minute and then punched his thumb through the ivory flesh. And the next one. He angrily crammed all six langoustines into a rough ball and started stacking the brittle porcelain Bernardaud plates, one on top of the other, making it sound like a stack of poker chips. The captain who was waiting for the course moaned and steered his head out the door.
“Come on, people,” Bouley muttered sarcastically. “Oh, let’s just hurry up and make shit.”
The entire weight of the diner’s experience hung in the balance as the long minutes ticked off to the table’s refire and replate.
One day, during a calmer lunch service, Bouley stood on the fish line cooking halibut and started talking to the cook nearest his elbow about the fish, who happened to be me.
“You guys need to cook the halibut more slowly, give the fibers a chance to unwind. Halibut’s a tight fish,” he murmured. “You want to slowly bring out its natural sugars.” Never did he press his spatula on top of the fish to suture it to the pan and improve its browning, as the regular fish cook did. No, he laid three flat fingers on its bulging middle to urge it to settle down—more like the way a mother rubs a sleepy kid’s back. He looked up to see who was listening and took in my girlish barrettes holding back my bangs, my intent expression, my smooth, glistening pane of bleached-white indoor skin, and gave me a rakish smile, because he could spot the latent female in anyone.
“What’s your name?”
“Amy,” I said, “not Ah-my.”
He laughed. “Where are you from?”
I hesitantly said, “Rural Minnesota,” knowing th
at the mere mention of my home state conjures up its own brand of wholesome hickness from which I couldn’t hide.
“What do your parents do?”
“My dad’s a car dealer. My mom’s a teacher.” I wondered, Why is he asking me this? “When we were younger, she stayed at home with us. She cooked a lot.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, tasting a sauce. “What did you go to college for?”
I never said I went to college. “English,” I said. “American literature.”
“And what is it you want to do?” he said, setting the fish on a tuft of parsnip puree.
When I grow up? He doesn’t assume I want to be a cook? “I want to cook, Chef!”
He wiped the edge of the plate with a damp cloth, looked me in the eye, and smiled crookedly. “Are you sure?”
I nodded. Oh god, I was in for it.
He grabbed a large metal prep spoon and said, “You know, back when I was starting to cook, we didn’t use small spoons for plating. We used these big catering spoons.” I marveled at the absurdity of this. We often plated with the tiniest spoons we could find; my uniform’s breast pocket concealed two espresso spoons I’d cribbed from the coffee station that very day. He dipped the wide spoon bill into his small pot of ocean herbal broth and ladled it deftly onto the plate, then picked up a miniature corona of sautéed squid legs by the tip and gently dropped it into place.
He threw his arm around my shoulders and then tightened it around my neck in a friendly choke hold, and squeezed my opposite shoulder with a masseur’s precision. I stiffened, not because it felt flirtatious, but because it felt possessive. “Amy, can you run downstairs and get me two toes of garlic. And a bunch of chevrille.” (He had his own culinary language: toes for cloves, chevrille for chervil.)
“Oui, Chef.” I sped off. Holy crap, this was not a job. Bouley wanted to know who the hell you were, if you had any taste, any culture, any education, a good family. Basically, he wanted to know what the fuck you were doing in his kitchen and if you were worth his time to teach you. Cooking wasn’t just a job; it was a life—what looked to all outsiders, including my own boyfriend, like a pretty terrible life. It was, as Aaron feared, a real affliction. And possibly, a dysfunctional relationship.
Initially, I mistakenly thought that my attraction to this job was due to my reunion with the browned butter and ground poppy seeds and spaetzle of my youth, but the truth was, it was something greater than the flavors of my childhood that drew me to the Danube. It was more about the way the two captains sprang into a fistfight with each other the second they bridged the marble threshold into the kitchen, bursting into fire behind closed doors. It was the way the throbbing, merengue-blaring downstairs prep kitchen brushed up against the silent, methodical upstairs service kitchen, matching each other in intensity. The way an imperfect crew functioned perfectly, channeling all their hopes and wishes and ambitions into the center of the plate, letting their liquid emotions fall off the sides, the food always beaming in the eye of the storm. It was the simultaneous agonies and thrills of the job. It was the unrelenting syncopation of the merengue and of the clacking plates. It was the threshold itself.
I knew I’d found my people. Crossing lines, jumping the boundaries between rural and urban, high-flung and low-down, garbage juice and black truffle juice, felt right to me. Fancy and shitty, that was to be my loop. Cooking, I’d found, contained the multitude I sought. It was the kind of work that spanned worlds, that could knit the two sides of a hungry, home-seeking, dramatic sort of person back together.
In no time at all, I had entered the belly of the ship. I was a convert, to all of it, and would cook on the line in fine-dining kitchens in Manhattan for the next seven years.
Give or take a gardening summer or two back home.
—
A few months later, on April 5 to be exact—I will never forget the day—I was setting up my station for lunch when I got a call on the kitchen phone.
Aaron was on the other end, and I could hardly make out what he was trying to tell me. Finally I understood that his brother Matt’s three-passenger plane had gone down. Matt hadn’t made it.
It took me a minute to make the jerky progression from imagining his brother as hurt to gone; the brain struggles with moves like that. I repeated what he said to the guys around me and the sous chefs began yelling at me to go, go, go!, and suddenly I was throwing the gray messenger bag over my shoulder and flagging down a cab to Brooklyn.
Back in our apartment in Fort Greene, tears were spraying from Aaron. I had never seen him cry. We huddled on the couch, our limbs curled into a knot, and through my hand on his back I felt him heave and deflate, his body trying to process the news like a spider struggling to take in something big. I pictured his sister, Sarah, my childhood friend, in her Peace Corps apartment in a small town in Latvia; her return would take days. I could see his parents in their gold-wallpapered kitchen in Park Rapids, our hometown. I knew Aaron was probably thinking of the last time we had seen Matt, kind of a long time ago, in the kitchen of the khaki-colored house in the suburbs he shared with his wife, Evon. He had made us a chicken hotdish, she an apple crisp for dessert. I closed my eyes and felt frozen, as if the minutes kept ticking but went off the rails, setting us on an alternate course. I repeated “I’m so sorry” until I felt the empty bottom in this phrase and there was nothing left to say. We sank into the couch, David the renter’s horrible dirty couch. My exhausted body released its tension hold and our breathing found its deep together pattern. I wanted to lose consciousness, to make this news go away.
“Are you falling asleep?”
“No!” I jumped. I knew, given how much I’d let the insanity of my working life warp my perspective, that I could say nothing in my defense. I reeled in the entire length of my failings, the long rope of my shitty girlfriendness, and gathered it all up against my belly. It was true, what Aaron’s eyes were saying: I don’t understand—because Matt was only thirty-one years old and this was surreal. I don’t understand—because I have not lost a brother. I don’t understand—because I am a terrible girlfriend who had not paid my boyfriend two minutes of attention since I started this job. It hit me bleakly that if it weren’t for Danube, we would be at that very moment packing up the car and driving to Minnesota.
Oddly, Aaron already had plans to drive back to Minnesota with his friend Rob the following day to set up his show at an art center in Minneapolis. The evening hours seeped away nearly silently as we got him ready to go.
The next day at work Mario was sympathetic. “I hear you need to go to a funeral?”
Yes. I explained that I needed at least five days off because it would take me a day to get there, then a day for the wake, a day for the funeral, a day to be with Aaron, and a day to come back. I might as well take the week, I said. I could tell he was puzzled and that he wouldn’t take off that much time to bury his own grandmother.
“There’s no direct flight to my town,” I told him. “It’s really small. Like a village.” I was breathless. “I’m going to take a plane to Minneapolis and then a much smaller plane” —my hands swerved in the air— “to a small town north of mine, and then drive an hour south.” By the time I finished my long-winded description he was waving me off and telling me to give my boyfriend his condolences. He gave me three days.
Two days later I was set to leave from JFK airport at 3:00 P.M. This also turned out to be the day that Hans Haas, everyone’s favorite Austrian mentor, came for a visit. It bears noting that when chefs “visit” each other they do not hang out and catch up in the traditional sense. Sometimes the visiting chef will sit down to a tasting menu in the dining room, but generally, if they’re close, the visiting chef simply suits up in his work duds and joins the kitchen. They commune by working.
So it was that when I came in that morning Hans Haas was down in the basement, breaking down salmon. One fish after another, swiftly, wordlessly. He was doing the mise en place for the slow-cooked salmon with Styrian wurzelgemüse (w
urzelgemüse: overstuffed German for julienned vegetables), the menu dish that Mario and Bouley had copped from his Tantris menu in apparent tribute.
Chef Bouley had heard that I was leaving early, before dinner service, and had been looking for me. “Amy,” he said, grabbing me by the wrist and pulling me next door, where he was in the weeds with one of his own projects, the last-minute production of hundreds of glutinous rice cups for a large party of Thai dignitaries. (I had just finished making a batch of German potato salad to go underneath the sturgeon for an offsite catering gig for President Clinton; was it possible that both of these events, in addition to Hans Haas’s dinner, were on the same day? Yes, in New York, it was.) Bouley pushed me in front of three cast-iron pans with golf-ball-size round divots in them, the kind I’d seen used to make Danish aebleskivers, those little pancake spheres. I started out pouring lightly sweetened glutinous rice batter into the twenty-four holes, all of which promptly stuck—until I learned to work the cups by swabbing each one with clarified butter. As the rice batter cooked, I topped each one with a spoonful of sweet coconut pudding and then rode my offset spat around the brown cooked-lace edge to tugboat them out of the divots. Twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight rice cakes stacked up on a paper-lined half-sheet pan. Bouley dropped lightly hot-smoked cubes of sea trout on top and garnished each with a thatch of miniature basil sprouts. It was a thrilling canapé, one I wish I’d written down. Sixteen more, twenty-four after that. I didn’t look up for hours. Then a glance at the clock on the wall revealed that it was time for me to go, but I hesitated: I’d customized this job so much that it was hard to abandon it. But I was going to be late for my flight. So I handed my spatula to the guy standing nearest to me on the line and took off running, leaving behind a jagged opening that missed me for about thirty seconds before sucking firmly shut and going on just fine without me. I realized then that my bond to this kitchen might have felt strong but was in fact impermanent; I needed it more than it needed me.
