Give a Girl a Knife

by Amy Thielen

  “I’m okay!” he shouted with an upraised palm, and bounced into the garage. “Could use another beer, though.”

  —

  By this time my résumé was as confusing as a Long Island Railroad timetable. It was riddled with exits and returns, mostly a lot of back-and-forth from the Bouley enterprise: Danube; back to Park Rapids for a couple of months; Danube again; db bistro moderne for four long months; home for a month for our wedding; back to Bouley again.

  Like most New York City line cooks who were cycling through top kitchens soaking up experience, I always intended my kitchen stints to last the required year. Twelve months was long enough to appease the chef and absorb the techniques and flavors of the job, but short enough to maintain both your sanity and your relationship, if you had one. Basically, the rule was a baker’s dozen: Twelve months were required, a good cook gave thirteen or more. My last stint with Chef Bouley—otherwise known as the time I returned to the dysfunctional family for one final helping—fell a little short of that.

  After our wedding, it appeared that Aaron and I had miscalculated and couldn’t quite afford the European honeymoon we’d planned to take. We had to forfeit the tickets to Paris his parents bought for us because we didn’t have the money for food or hotels once we got there, even if we scrimped. We spent our would-be honeymoon at JFK airport fighting to get vouchers, to no avail. Our hopes and wishes, as outsized as ever, had once again surpassed our practicality. It was classic us.

  As before, my feet beat a trail to the Bouley doors on Duane Street. I timed my arrival with the afternoon family meal and cornered Shea Gallante, the chef de cuisine, whom I’d known when I cooked at Danube, and begged for my job back.

  He rolled his eyes. “Again?” And then with a sigh he admitted that he could use another cook. He took me to the office where Chef Bouley agreed to my hire—on the condition that I’d take on the added responsibilities of recording all of his recipes and turning the kitchen into a more well-oiled machine. Bouley was juiced up; he wanted a total rehaul, and for some reason he persisted in thinking that I was some kind of a great systemizer. “Reorganize all of the mise en place on the stations,” he told me. “I don’t want cooks stacking plastic cups of mise en place into tubs of ice anymore, it looks so sloppy. All of that prep should be in refrigerated underpulls. I want everything off the counters. And let’s be neater. I want all of these cooks cleaning out their own blenders.”

  As we left Bouley’s office, Shea gave me a sidelong glance, a lowly line cook who had just been given a curious amount of responsibility. Embarrassed, I blurted out, “Wouldn’t this be your job? Why in the hell is he asking me?” He laughed, knowing exactly how difficult it would be to rewire the whole kitchen system. “I have no idea,” he said, taking the stairs to the kitchen two at a time. “But now it’s your job. You should get going on that.”

  I walked back into the kitchen and took a look at the mountains of dishes, a full day’s worth, in the basement; the lack of under-counter refrigeration in the kitchen to accommodate this new “no cups” situation; a line cook, frantic before service, throwing his dirty food-processor container onto the top of the dirty dish mountain; two pale externs frantically assembling canapés for an offsite party; Bouley due to rush in the door at 6:00 with fresh produce for new menu dishes; the family of prep cooks calmly running through their lists; my own heavy meat entremet workload. The two-floor kitchen was too serpentine, Bouley too prone to throwing unpredictable grenades, and the family, who actually held the keys to the system, too stuck in their routines.

  Overwhelmed, I failed to instate a new organizational system and after three months I gave notice—yet again.

  As if for punishment, my final day coincided with the aftermath of an extermination bombing—the most unsavory day in the life of any Manhattan kitchen. Roy the head butcher impassively brushed piles of insect bodies off the counters with a broom. As I pulled out a cutting board from the bleach water, the fast teenage roaches that had somehow survived ran wild like hoodlums.

  The day got worse. During that evening’s service, instead of closing out my tenure there with my usual proficiency, I collapsed into an epic fail. Nothing went right. My disks of wild mushroom duxelles, gelled with agar-agar and served hot under the rack of lamb—which I had been nailing for the past few weeks—were all inexplicably dissolving. My simple butter-emulsified green vegetables—entremet 101—overreduced and broke into beads of excess fat. My timing was cocked a good ten seconds off every table.

  Finally the meat guy to my right threw his basting spoon clattering into the pan with the chunk of wagyu beef, raised his head to Bouley at the pass, and hissed to me, “I can’t fucking cook with you!”

  Bouley walked over and clenched a hand around my shoulder, not exactly kindly and without his trademark smirk, and whispered, “I thought you just got married? You getting too much, is that why you can’t cook anymore?” Then he looked at me quizzically, as if receiving a new idea. “Or maybe you’re not getting enough…”

  By this time I’d become accustomed to his carnal cooking metaphors—juice was juice!—and wanted to return the joke by saying that the temperature of my porridge was neither too hot nor too cold but just right, thank you very much, but felt muted by my poor performance. A captain called him back to the pass to greet some VIPs whose last private offsite party I’d worked with Bouley. The woman waved enthusiastically at me, calling me over, saying something inaudible to the chef. He looked at me with a false smile and answered, loud enough for me to hear across the room: “Yes, she’s here. For now.” I stood still halfway between him and the line, my plating spoon frozen to my pot. “Amy’s like a little bird,” he said, his fingers flickering in the air, “flitting from place to place.” The most manic, improvisational, restless chef in New York was calling me out as an itinerant flake, and he wasn’t wrong. I had to admit: I was a bird. A snowbird. A returning swan. I was always on migration.

  —

  Despite my flaming departure from Bouley, I decided to stick with the fine-dining scene and cycle through the next top New York City chef of that generation: Jean-Georges Vongerichten. At the outset his style seemed to lie somewhere between the two DBs: a bit modernized-French-classic like Daniel Boulud, a bit vegetable-juice-fueled like David Bouley. After my first night trailing at his flagship restaurant in Trump Tower, Jean-Georges, I found that his cooking also contained a thrilling streak of Asian brightness, pops of finely minced Thai chili, lime juice, and lemongrass. Greg Brainin, Jean-Georges’s chief creative officer, hired me to work the line, and then just before I started, he decided to transfer me to be a sous chef at 66, an authentic Chinese place they were opening in Tribeca. When I met with Catherine (not her real name) in management she dropped my title to junior sous, reducing my modest salary even more and marking yet another time that the women were meaner than the men.

  At this point, I had to laugh. Sexism was so predictable. Nevertheless, 66 proved to be the craziest, most transformative experience of my cooking career.

  The kitchen was huge, clean, white, and modern, and visible to the Richard Meier–designed dining room through a bank of very large fish tanks. The staff was composed of both Chinese- and American-trained cooks. The Western-trained cooks handled the cold appetizers, the hot appetizers, and the more fusion-style main courses, all cooked on gas ranges. The Chinese cooks (most of whom had lived in New York for years) were divided into teams: the wok station, led by Chef Wei-Chin; and the dim sum station, led by Mei (pronounced Moy), whom we called Mei One. Wei-Chin and a few others stir-fried entrees in the woks, and Mei One and his team made all the dim sum, ran the giant steamer, and made the noodle and rice dishes. And each was definitely a team. Collectivity was their thing. If the management threatened to can one of them—as they did when Mei One was caught bullying a tiny, effeminate male back waiter in the locker room—they’d all threaten to go. The barbecued meats in the restaurant, however—the crispy suckling pig, the Peking ducks, the
red-glazed pork char siu, all the stuff you see hanging in the window of a Chinese restaurant—were made by another Mei who worked solo. We called him Barbecue Mei. In all, there were four Meis.

  Everyone answered to Josh Eden, the chef de cuisine, a New York–born Jean-Georges veteran who went by the nickname of Shorty. And in the beginning Jean-Georges himself was always in attendance, as were Brainin and Master Chef Lam and Sun Tek, consulting chefs from Hong Kong.

  Right off the bat, this was the place the fashion and food worlds wanted to be. The music was thumping; the tiny string of airplane-size bathrooms quickly turned into long-term “powder” rooms. During the opening week, it seemed every scallion pancake I served was destined for Naomi Campbell or Martha Stewart or former New York City mayor Ed Koch or someone similarly famous. One morning I arrived to find a photo-shoot crew from Vogue swarming around a familiar-looking top model standing in front of the fish tanks holding a live lobster, her legs buffed to a classic-car high gloss. A prop stylist met me at my station, hysterical with the question of the morning: Would the lobster die after being out of the water for so long? It had taken them thirty minutes to get the shot. I assured him not, covered the lobster with soaked paper towels, and slid the lethargic crustacean into my cooler. I didn’t quite get his concern. The thing would meet its steaming end within a few hours anyway.

  Mostly, I cooked the hot apps, much-improved versions of Chinese-American favorites: egg rolls, shrimp toast, gingered barbecued ribs, corn-and-crabmeat soup. I also made a few more authentically Chinese dishes: a whole stuffed blue crab covered with a lid of delicate, fried-lotus-seed paste; frog’s legs marinated in egg and potato starch, deep fried, and showered with a light snowy pile of crispy egg and garlic topping; wild mushrooms steamed with sake and ginger and spooned over a disk of sticky rice. It was the best Chinese food I’d ever had.

  Chef Lam, who was staying in an apartment over the restaurant, was the first one to show up for work in the morning, and he sported three strands of long curling hair from his chin. They said that he had invented Shrimp with Candied Walnuts and Chili, the dish knocked off in hundreds of Chinese restaurants around the world and at 66 as well. He spent his evening service cooking dozens of whole crispy-skinned garlic chickens in the wok, passing them between two wire spiders in the hot fat until the skin turned uniformly caramel brown. Then with his cleaver he reduced each blistering hot bird into bite-size pieces and adroitly reassembled them on the plate into the shape of a turtle. This chicken was a marvel of Chinese engineering, a balloon of juice contained inside a shell of brittle brown skin. My proximity to his chopping station drove me crazy, the crispy shards flying tantalizingly close to me but hitting the floor. Once in a while he passed me an odd-shaped divot of meat and skin, one that didn’t fit into his turtle puzzle. I tucked it into my mouth, swallowed it as unobtrusively as a snake sharked down a tidbit, and nodded my thanks.

  When it got slow, which it was wont to do in a restaurant with a menu of such breadth, its items spread out among so many cooks, I squatted behind my station next to the enormous Chinese dim sum steamer, downed extra dumplings on the sly, and contemplated drinking sake out of a teacup, as some of the other cooks were doing. I had never drunk anything but water on the job before and wasn’t really interested in starting. I had never squatted on my heels before, either, but I tried to mimic the deep, comfortable-looking pose of the line of dim sum guys to my left. They laughed at me and passed a plastic prep container down the line until it got to Jacky, the impassive kid who ran the steamer next to me. He had introduced himself proudly as an ABC, American-born Chinese, different from the rest of them.

  “They want you to try the chicken feet,” Jacky said, handing over the container. The Chinese cooks snacked on chicken feet all day long as if they were potato chips, spitting out the tiny bones into plastic containers.

  Mei One got up and came down the line brandishing a cup of dark liquid.

  “Saucy,” he said, beaming.

  “He says you need to try it with the sauce,” Jacky duly repeated. I picked up a foot and nibbled on the gelatinous joint. Through the thick coating of sweet soy sauce, it tasted like a chicken back without the crisp, but fattier. The pop of the cartilage in my mouth felt oddly foreign, and I thought I could feel the toenail in my mouth. I could tolerate the chicken foot but wouldn’t be craving them. But I smiled down the line, raising my empty plastic cup.

  They howled and slapped their knees, knowing I didn’t really love it.

  Jacky was my informant. He told me all kinds of things about the dim sum team. They liked to gamble in Atlantic City, for example. They headed out en masse on Saturday nights for the AC bus, returned early in the morning to take catnaps on the puffy laundry bags in a dark basement break room, and woke up just before service to make a restoring vat of congee, which they decorously shared with the crew. They cursed Shorty for making them use sea salt instead of “chicken powder,” their prized salt-and-MSG mixture, and had hidden the forbidden canisters deep beneath their stations. They preferred Korean brothels.

  And these guys could really cook. I watched Wei-Chin flipping the iron wok over its jet of blue fuel, controlling the heat with the lever at his knees. He rocked the wok line like a stadium drummer on the trap set: with raised knees, mad precision, and regular bursts of flames. I saw that stir-frying was not a process of addition, as I had previously thought, but a careful orchestration. I watched as he briefly fried the beef in oil, then scooped it out with a wire spider and set it to drain on a railing above the line. He poached his Chinese broccoli (gai lan) in water, then set that to drain as well. He whisked his hot wok clean with water and a stiff bamboo brush, then sizzled his aromatics—ginger, garlic, and whole red chilies—in a little oil, returned the beef and broccoli to the pan, and tossed the mixture in one-two-three high-rising waves in the air. With one hand he seasoned it with salt (a little) and sugar (a little more) and with the other added a pinch of cornstarch slurry from the pot at his side. The mixture turned immediately glossy, each separate piece wrapped in a thin vellum of sauce. This operation took about two minutes, start to finish. When it hit the plate, gleaming, I thought it was one of the most glorious things I’d ever seen.

  I stood at the hot app station in the sweaty heat at the end of the night, when my defenses were down, and I let the movie stream of new techniques and textures wash over me. Chinese food seemed to contain so many more of them than Western food. The Chinese don’t just have crisp: they have wet crisp (stir-fried lotus root, for instance) and they have dry crisp (the crispy pile of fried egg yolk crumbs I gently squeezed into a peak on top of the frog’s legs). There was moist soft (tofu and steamed fish) and dry soft (the cloudy-white steamed bao buns). I wondered why we Western-trained cooks had so few ways to describe textures.

  And the Chinese guys cooked brilliantly in a way that felt counterintuitive to me. To make lemon chicken, they dredged a flattened chicken breast in egg and fluffy white potato starch and then deep-fried it for at least ten minutes, about eight minutes longer than flattened chicken breasts usually need to cook through. Greg, the other sous chef, yanked it up from the fryer after a regulation three minutes, and Wei-Chin came over in alarm, motioning him to drop it back down. Implausibly, after the full ten minutes, when we sliced into it, the interior still ran with juice. They dumped tubs of liquid maltose, as clear and sweet as corn syrup but thicker, right into a vat of boiling peanut oil—sugar in oil, which seemed like a surging grease fire in the making—added piles of skinned walnuts, and then calmly ran their spider through the foaming head of oil. A few minutes later, each browned walnut emerged from the sugared fat painted with a thin layer of sweet lacquer. They were so delicate and crisp that they clicked lightly on the sheet tray as the cooks swiftly ran their chopsticks through the mass to separate them. When we ran out of suitable vegetables for family meal, they stir-fried a case of green leaf lettuce and somehow made it taste like cabbage. They ran water for hours through colanders fu
ll of shrimp, which we feared would bloat them and sap their flavor, but instead restored their original clean ocean snap. They resuscitated what smelled to us like soured fresh water chestnuts the very same way, chasing Shorty with the containers in their hands to show how the running water had brought them back from the dead.

  The ways in which the Chinese cooks deviated from the script of my French-based training was confounding to me, but also revelatory. Years afterward, holding a pack of frizzle-ended supermarket green beans in my hands, I remembered how to fry them hard in oil until they shriveled and to top them with a porky black bean sauce. From these guys I knew that these dead beans held some possibility. The produce we used at 66 was always top-notch, but the Chinese dishes held clues to a past rooted in deprivation and resourcefulness. Like a Midwestern farmhouse cook and her April sack of storage carrots, they could wring sauce from stones.

  —

  Some of the Western chefs were getting sick of Chinese food; not me, but some. We put up two different family breakfasts each day, one Western style and one Chinese. Given this choice, I always ate the Chinese one. Greg, the other sous chef, asked me, “How can you eat that gloppy stir-fry for breakfast every day?”

  What, this? Chicken with bamboo and vegetables? I loved it.

  But one day Shorty, our Jewish, Manhattan-born chef, said, “God, I can’t eat any more Chinese food. I need some chicken liver pâté.” So he called for takeout from Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side: smoked whitefish, lox, smoked sturgeon, sour pickles, chicken liver pâté, and pickled herring, its silver skin as shiny as stainless steel. He arranged this spread carefully on the pass. The Chinese cooks looked on in amusement.

  “Pickled herring,” Shorty said. “It’s fish! Try it!” Dao, one of the dim sum cooks, took a piece and bit off one end, then spat it into his cup of tea in horror. The others tried it and all had the same reaction.