by Scott Haas
“If you’d been here earlier,” Nate said, “I could have had you working on the cucumbers. Next time. I’ll want you to mandoline the shit out of them.”
As we worked, Nate talked about himself. He had all the qualities of a shy person, more interested in things than in communicating about things, but he talked a little about growing up with a father who was a career officer in the U.S. Navy.
“We moved around a lot,” said Nate.
Not forming attachments to a community may have had an impact on Nate when he left home to attend Ohio State.
“I was failing out at college,” Nate said. “I lasted one year and one semester. I didn’t go to class.” He laughed at himself.
“I watched cooking shows,” Nate said. “I sat around and thought: I gotta figure out what to do or my parents are gonna kill me.”
Eventually, returning home to Virginia, Nate got a job washing dishes, then doing prep, and, finally, becoming a sous chef.
“That’s impressive,” I said.
“It was basically a sandwich shop,” he said.
Nate put himself down at almost every opportunity.
He spoke blandly of visiting his brother, who offered him a place to stay. Nothing to do, feeling aimless, Nate saw an ad for a cook at Craigie and applied. “I wrote a cocky e-mail,” he said. “My subject line was, Willing to start at the bottom and rise meteorically.”
He said it in a way that was self-deprecating, as if to say, who was he fooling? He worked at Craigie about six days a week, from noon to one A.M., but he was still doing prep and garde manger, still lacking skills needed to work the line.
“You can get the spices we need for the pickle brine,” he said.
He handed me a list and directed me to shelves of jars and containers holding forty-eight different spices. Then he went off to another prep area to work on something else.
My list:
35 grams fennel seed
31 grams coriander
42 grams black pepper
42 grams yellow mustard seed
10 grams juniper
10 grams allspice
18 grams bay leaves
I took down each container and weighed the spices on a small scale. Their colors, aromas, and the silent precision of the task were mesmerizing.
Gabriel was peeling shallots next to me. Both of us started to cry.
When I had finished weighing the spices, I returned with them to Nate. He was engaged in a heated conversation in Spanish with Santos.
“It’s illegal in Boston,” said Nate.
“What are you talking about?” I asked Nate.
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
“I’m just curious,” I said.
“He’s talking about cutting my penis off,” said Nate.
Santos smiled a fake evil smile.
“I will do it for him,” Santos said.
“You asked,” said Nate.
“I did,” I said.
Next to Nate was a large tray of fresh, dark, gnarled horseradish roots. We began to peel them together and weigh the results. Then we chopped them up into small pieces.
“Working prep can be harder than the line,” Nate said. “It’s hard to stay motivated and focused. There’s no one telling you what to do.”
I took a small, wet towel and cleaned off the board where I had been cutting the horseradish. I swept the peels into the trash.
“When I make fresh horseradish at home,” I said to Nate, “I peel the roots and cut the pieces and pop them into a food processor. Why are we cutting them up this way at Craigie?”
“It brings out more flavor,” Nate said. “Also, because honestly that’s how Chef wants us to do it.”
I was struck by his lack of curiosity. It was not sufficient to say that it was how the chef wanted it done. Here was another difference between the cooks who advance and the cooks who don’t. Skills aside, cooks who ask questions are more likely to become chefs. The questions lead to a dialogue. By knowing more about what they are doing, the cooks engage more in the process.
“Sweet, sweet, sweet,” said Nate.
We were on to the next task: julienning purple onions. Slicing them in half, carefully removing the peel, snipping off the ends, and slicing thin pieces rapidly.
“We’ll make about three gallons of brine in a huge steam bath,” said Nate. “When it cools, we’ll add the pickles. Got to work on the pork skin, too. We’ll mise it out for Chef, then he’ll cook it because he doesn’t trust us to cook it. That’s the way a lot of chefs work.”
“What will he use the pork skin for?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” said Nate. “A braise? A ragu? I don’t know.”
He asked me to go upstairs and get him a few containers. It was the middle of service and the atmosphere was potent and frenetic.
“How long?” Matt was saying. “How long? Someone please say something.”
Matt’s style was different from Danny’s, more deliberate, tighter, and derived from his huge physical presence. He did not have to shout to be heard.
“Two minutes,” said Jill.
Jill moved quickly between the grill and garde manger.
“Thank you,” said Matt.
“Fish is down,” said Jill. “Let’s go, guys.”
I returned downstairs with the containers. Nate was pouring the contents of a “foie gras kit” into a bowl.
For the remainder of the evening, I helped Nate out on small, manageable tasks within the limits of my ability. Nate had a home at Craigie, that was clear: more intense than ordinary family life and better defined. It was, I could see, preferable to the chaos he faced outside the restaurant. Here he got things done.
It made up for earlier failures.
Then it hit me: Danny had asked me what my nickname had been as a child because we were all starting over in the restaurant. We were kids again with a second chance.
Before leaving, I asked Nate to give me his e-mail address so that I could confirm with him when I would be in next to work with him.
“Destroyallrobots at gmail dot com,” Nate said.
“Wow,” I said.
“I wish I could be more entertaining,” he said, “but I’m a super awkward person to begin with.”
When I came in the next morning, I walked over to catch up with Tony at the chef’s counter.
“Dakota’s sleeping on my couch. He called me up and said that he had to get out of his place,” Tony said. “He had no place to go.”
“Karolyn doesn’t mind?” I asked.
“She’s okay with it,” Tony said. “This morning Charlie gave Dakota one of her brownies. Loved it. Now he’ll never leave!”
“How long is he staying?”
“I don’t know.”
“And you say this isn’t your family,” I said, gesturing to the cooks who were showing up for prep.
Tony laughed, and I went downstairs to find Nate. He was writing down a list of what was in the walk-in. We stood next to two white tubs of huge split bones being brined.
Nate finished writing and we went back upstairs.
“Chef,” said Nate, “one last thing. Are there any projects I should know about for tonight? I know I should get pork neck bones roasted and I’ll double-check, but I’m pretty sure there’s also a whole pig. Anything else?”
“Why don’t you make a list of everything you’re doing and e-mail it to me?” said Tony.
“Got it,” said Nate.
We went back downstairs. Being with Nate involved a great deal of going from one place to the next.
“My father said that he’d be happy with me flipping burgers,” Nate said, “as long as I could support myself.” He laughed. “But I don’t know if he meant it literally.”
Before he sent the e-mail to Tony, Nate and I opened a UPS Next Day Air box from Blue Moon Acres in Buckingham, Pennsylvania, that held two and a half pounds of small containers of microgreens, including wasabina and tatsui. He stacked the cont
ainers, brought them into a walk-in, and then broke down the box.
Then we went back to the laptop so Nate could write the e-mail.
He titled it Brines and Cures. Then he just sat there for a while and looked at the screen.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“It’s only the second e-mail Chef has had me send him on inventory,” Nate said, “so I don’t know exactly what I’m doing.”
“Ah. You have to make note of the brines, though, right? Dates when they were started?”
“Right,” he said. “It’s crazy, but from what I’m seeing, it looks like the way we’ve done the brines, all of them will be done on the same day!”
“That’s not good.”
“No,” he said. “They should be spread out.”
He finished the e-mail, sent it, and said, “Okay, I have a big prep list, we’d better get going.”
The list had been written by Matt. Nate copied it into his small black notebook.
“Wait a second,” Nate said to me. “Can you read this word? How good are you at reading lousy handwriting?”
“Good,” I said. “I work in a hospital.” I looked at the word. “I think it says fennel. As in fennel broth. Does that make sense?”
“It does,” said Nate. “Thanks.”
I had assumed that we would next try to find a clean place to work, but Nate went back upstairs. This time it was to get three knives and a rod for sharpening them. He handed me a knife and a cutting board and we set to work, side by side, in garde manger, in the open kitchen.
“I think I’ll have you working on the ketchup. Take these,” he said, handing me four onions, “and dice them.”
I diced one, and Nate showed me what I had done wrong and how to make it right.
“You’re chopping, that’s wrong,” he said. “Dice them.”
When that was done, Nate handed me two inch-long pieces of ginger root and a spoon.
“Use the spoon to peel these,” Nate said, “and when you’ve done that, dice them, too, and add them to the onions.”
This did not take long.
“Good,” said Nate, “now since you seemed to enjoy working on the spices the other day, I’ll have you go downstairs and grab the spices for the ketchup.”
We returned to the cellar.
He handed me a list, divided into three parts, with fourteen ingredients on it.
“Get two Cambros,” Nate said, “and double batch them.”
“Cambros?” I asked.
“That’s the brand of the containers,” he said, and returned upstairs.
The ketchup, made in-house, contained mace, clove, yellow mustard seed, agave syrup, turbinado, and many other fresh and powdered ingredients. To suggest using the bottled stuff would have been anathema to Tony’s philosophy of cooking. This was only the ketchup; I could easily imagine the complicated steps, precision, and focus needed to do everything in this kitchen. I thought of a favorite quote from one of my favorite books, Akenfield: Bell ringers coordinate church bells to ring in an elaborate sequence over dozens of miles, from village to village: “We attempt the difficult, but there is no virtue in what is easy.”
Standing there, measuring liquids, powders, and seeds, felt complete. The ceiling was low, the space was a narrow corridor dimly lit, but I was part of the crew making ketchup!
Nate came back downstairs as I was finishing up.
“How often do you make ketchup?” I asked.
“About once a week,” he said. He began to stir. “It’s very cool, isn’t it? All the ingredients we put into it.”
“What do you do with the onions, ginger, spices, and liquid?”
“We sweat it, grind it, turn it into sauce, and reduce it until it’s sticky. Then we add four big number ten cans of tomatoes, reduce everything by a quarter, and then buzz and pass it.”
“Buzz and pass?”
“Blend and chinois.”
“This is all a ton of work. I mean, this is only the ketchup!”
Nate nodded in agreement. We began to set out the next set of tasks when Santos came over.
“What’s up, buddy?” Santos said to me.
He had altered his voice to sound as if he had been born and raised in Boston.
“Hey, Santos,” I said.
“What’s with this guy?” asked Santos.
Santos motioned to Nate.
“Santos,” said Nate, “any time you need something, you ask me, but otherwise you give me a hard time.”
Santos laughed.
“Why are you a son of a bitch?” he said to Nate. “Is that right? Help me with my English, Nate.”
“See what I mean?” Nate said to me.
I heard the slight clatter of wheels, and Dakota appeared a few feet away on a skateboard.
“Doctah Haas,” he said, mimicking Danny. Fist bump. “How are you doing?”
He looked pale and as if he had just tumbled out of bed, hair all over the place, unshaven.
“Good,” I said. “You?”
“Good,” he said.
Nate smiled in wonder at Dakota’s apparent social ease.
“What time are you in tomorrow?” I asked Nate.
“Day off,” Nate said. “Every Wednesday.”
“What will you do?” I asked.
“You know,” Nate said, and he quit stirring, “you have to take care of yourself. Your body? It’s like a spaceship: It requires care, it’s the only one you’ll ever have. So: I’m probably gonna join a gym.”
“Good idea,” I said.
“I need more balance in my life,” Nate said, and went back to stirring.
SIXTEEN
A Chef in the Making
IT TOOK A FEW WEEKS BEFORE TONY’S TALK TO THE COOKS ABOUT TAKING more responsibility had any effect. Things began to turn around slowly, related to what he had said, but also due to emerging talent. Tony’s two new hires, Patrick and Orly, were demonstrating top skills. Jill had taken a position of authority on the line. Tony got himself an assistant from New York City who doubled as a new GM: Carl.
Business, too, was picking up. Fall going toward Christmas and then the New Year were the busiest times for Craigie, next to college graduations in May and June.
I attached myself to Jill and told her that I wanted to shadow her. I was ready for the line.
“You’re gonna learn a lot with me.”
On my first day with her on the line, Jill had me observe her preparing the sweat for the mussels. She sliced celery stalks very rapidly.
“This involves carrots, fennel, celery, onions, and white wine,” she said.
When she was done with the sweat, she said, “Produce orders are coming in. Want to learn how to do them?”
“Sure,” I said.
We ran downstairs and joined all the other cooks who were opening boxes, filling plastic trays with product, and breaking down the cardboard. It was frantic, but there was a great deal of laughter and joy. Abundance!
“You put paper towels on the bottom of the trays,” Jill explained, “then put the product on top, and then put another paper towel over it.”
We dumped a big bag of green leaves into a tray.
“Spinach?” I asked.
“Fava leaves. Want to have one?”
I had never tasted anything quite like it. It does not make sense, but the texture enhanced the flavor.
We worked on other boxes—beets, thyme, rosemary, Belgian endive, carrots, pea shoot greens—and as the cooks passed by Jill, each one asked her, “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” Jill said. “Better, thanks.”
“Can I ask?”
“I had mono. I have mono. But I’m not contagious any longer. Last week was tough because I was completely exhausted from the work and then after work I had to drive to Providence, Rhode Island, three nights a week—that’s where I live with my girlfriend. I hoped to find something closer, but that’s not gonna happen for a while. Or maybe never.”
Matt came run
ning by, and he saw the beets.
“Golden beets!” Matt exclaimed. “Ask and you shall receive!”
After all the product was divided up, Jill and I wrote labels and the date on masking tape, affixing these to each container.
“Can I bring them to the walk-in?” I asked.
“Definitely,” Jill said. “Take these three containers in. The herbs go on the middle rack on the left.”
I went into the walk-in and then noticed that I had rosemary, thyme, and endives. I put the herbs where I had been told, but where did the endive go? I did not want to go back to Jill and ask her. I looked around and found more endive and put my tray there.
When I returned to her and told her what I had done, and why it had felt like a problem at the time, she said, “Oh, you got it!”
Everything we did in the kitchen was part of a larger process and, when things worked, the smallest activity had meaning.
“We get at least one delivery a day,” Jill said, “and sometimes four a day!”
By the end of our first day together, she was promising to start me on grilled cheese sandwiches.
“We use pork belly. The sandwiches are amazing.”
Then she put out her right arm, made a fist, and beckoned me to do the same so we could bump.
WHEN I RETURNED TO THE RESTAURANT TO CONTINUE WORKING WITH JILL, I checked in with Tony, who was at the chef’s counter. He looked glum.
“Where’ve you been?” he said with a big smile.
Maybe he wasn’t glum.
“Busy writing,” I said.
“It’s been, what? Five days? A week? Lots gone on since you’ve been in,” he said. “I want to be sure you get it all.”
Tony’s outlook was puzzling to me because it was so unlike most of the other successful chefs I knew who spent time planning or opening new restaurants, on the road doing promotions, or shilling for products. Tony found resonance and identity in one restaurant, at the pass or behind the stove, and it was an environment over which he had control. The world, with its variables, is much more perplexing. Things went wrong at Craigie, every day and every night, but what really went wrong?
A batch of stock got ruined, cooks did not work as a team, a customer sent back the food, the cooks fell behind in prep. These were all important problems, but compared to the stresses outside the restaurant? These were problems that could be solved. Hence, the appeal. Unlike the unpredictability of the world outside, there was control inside Craigie. Beets needed to be peeled properly, knives sharpened, chicken cooked at a low temperature, and so on. It was nothing like being stopped for driving under the influence, failing a physics exam, leaving a marriage, arguing with your landlord, or missing a flight.
