Talking with My Mouth Full (9 page)

I went to Sottha in his office and said I had to leave because of family issues and because it wasn’t a good fit. He took out my résumé. I hadn’t even known that he’d looked at it, much less kept it. And then he said to me, “I don’t think I know another food writer in this town, except for maybe Molly O’Neill, who’s spent any time cooking in a four-star kitchen. Few have even spent a night on the line, much less several weeks. If what you want is to be a food writer, you’re doing it right.”

I was blown away. He said he respected that I’d put in that time, in a way paying tribute to the industry and learning firsthand how hard it all really was.

Not that he remembers. Many years later, I met him again in the prep kitchen at Daniel, where he was helping cook for a large summer event. I reintroduced myself as having been a young commis in his kitchen several years before. He smiled and bowed politely, then went back to his
mise-en-place
.

I still needed to finish the hours for my culinary school externship, so when I came back to New York from visiting my family, I decided to find a different kitchen. I went back to my school career services department and was given a list of places looking to hire. The most appealing was Vong—partly because I welcomed the opportunity to cook food that was edgier than classical Italian or French. And also because I’d had one of the best meals of my life there two years earlier. And here I was cooking in the kitchen! How could I have imagined I would one day be in charge of making the duck rolls I’d savored two years before? It was an amazing feeling, like joining the cast of my favorite Broadway play.

As garde-manger, I made hundreds of tiny lobster rolls a day. I would peel countless large white daikon radishes and slice them long and paper thin on the mandolin. Then I would stick my hands in a big bucket of pickled ginger and scoop out a pile of it, placing it on the steel counter beside my workstation cutting board. Throughout my tenure at Vong I reeked of pickled ginger, which is why I now have an aversion to it. I always taste it when I’m at Japanese restaurants just to be sure, and each time I am unpleasantly reminded of being immersed in that massive bucket of acrid ginger juice.

The fish prep guys would boil dozens of lobsters and break down the knuckle and claw meat for me. The tails and shells would be used separately later for a main course prepared by the fish station. I would pick through the big pile and take out all the bits of shell, then wash and gently dry a large bunch of baby pea shoots. I would lay out the slices of daikon radish on the steel countertop, adding to each slice one piece of lobster meat about the size of my thumb, one slice of pickled ginger, and one pea shoot. Then I would roll them all up.

They were the size of a slender cigar and were served as one part of the “white plate” appetizer I had eaten on my first visit. They had a great crunch because of the daikon. The pea shoots made them herbaceous and fresh, and they were luxurious to eat because they had a piece of briny, buttery lobster in them.

Twelve years later, I was at a Jean-Georges restaurant in the Bahamas, shooting the finale of
Top Chef All-Stars
, and I saw that these rolls were still on the menu. I had a flashback to that vat of pickled ginger, shuddered, and ordered something else.

At Vong, I had the cushiest kitchen schedule in the world. I am still suspicious as to how I got away with it. I was on the lunch team, which was pure luck. I worked the Monday-to-Thursday lunch service, starting at seven in the morning and usually finishing by six at night. My days off were Friday and Saturday! It was unheard of. Then I worked dinner service on Sunday nights, starting only at one in the afternoon!

There, too, I was the only woman in the back of the house, including the pastry kitchen. There was a young Mexican cook positioned next to me, working prep and the dessert station. He didn’t speak much English, but I spoke decent Spanish from living in Spain and studying it at school, and I had picked up some kitchen Spanish along the way. He always helped out when I was “in the weeds,” or “in the shit,” as they say in a kitchen when you’re falling behind.

Everyone on the line was pretty generous, all things considered. The saucier was this gorgeous Dominican guy. The chef was Pierre Schutz, Jean-Georges’s right hand. He wasn’t around much at lunch, but when he was, he always gave me feedback and asked how I was doing. It wasn’t an open kitchen and we didn’t have to wear toques.

In some ways the kitchen was rougher around the edges. These were more of the hard-core hoodlum types, not as snooty as the ones with the CIA pedigrees. They were calmer and much less competitive, though. It was an easier place to ask questions. The guys had more fun, so I had more fun, too.

It was still hard physical work. Believe it or not, the only time in my life I’ve ever lost a substantial amount of weight was working in a kitchen. If you do eat a meal, it’s standing up at your station. You never really sit down, and you expend so many calories on your feet all day. At least I was a woman, and I could sit down for thirty seconds or so to pee twice a day. The thing about being a young line cook is you don’t use your mind much. You’re taking orders. You’re not thinking or creating—you’re executing. I never thought—ever, ever, ever—that I wanted to be a chef. But after some time there, I realized I needed to go back to using my head.

One day, the cute saucier asked if, on a day off, I would like to go to Jean-Georges with him for lunch. We trekked over to the four-star restaurant on Central Park West, widely believed to be one of the best restaurants in the United States, if not the world.

I had been out for fancy meals before, but this was the first time I was treated differently because I was an insider. They gave us champagne and extra courses. We ate a nine-course meal. One of the standouts was this checkerboard of
hamachi
and bluefin tuna, crisscrossed to make a perfect block of pale pink and deep fuchsia, with herbs, oil, and coarse sea salt on top.

I was drunk on the experience. I got home from lunch at 5 p.m., in shock over how good the food was, and that I’d just spent $111. For lunch! And that included an employee discount. I would have to eat spaghetti for a few weeks because of it. And yet I knew it was worth every penny.

At the time, no one except Jean-Georges at Vong was really doing Southeast Asian–inspired food at that high a level. Spending time in that kitchen, I was exposed to so many new and unusual ingredients. There were bright green sheets of paper made from pea shoots that we used to make duck rolls. We garnished plates with sea beans—salty, crunchy little sprouts from the sea.

And it was there where I first tasted
calamansi
. The small Asian citrus look like limes but are often orange inside. In Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand, they’re everywhere. You don’t sit down without
calamansi
at your table to squeeze onto your meal. Some stalls on the street have
calamansi
trees in pots right there.

You still can’t get the actual fruit in the United States, probably because of rules about importing citrus into the country. But you can get frozen
calamansi
juice. There’s a company called Les Vergers Boiron from France that sells frozen tropical fruit juice, and we would order it by the case for the restaurant. It has a subtle taste, somewhere between a lime and a clementine, bright, lovely, and balanced.

But there usually isn’t time to savor such things. Most days working in a kitchen, you taste as you go. You feel like you’re eating, but you’re not. You reek of food. It’s in your hair, your skin, your clothes. When I got home, I didn’t want to eat much. Of course you can’t go to sleep when you finish working a shift, because you’re still hyped up from all the adrenaline. So what would I do? I read. Food books, mostly. Anything I could get my hands on.

One of the books recommended to me was
The Man Who Ate Everything
by Jeffrey Steingarten,
Vogue
’s famed food critic of over thirty years. Little did I know it would change my life.

In the book, Steingarten often mentions his assistant: one day she’s on the hunt for a rare ingredient in Chinatown, the next she’s running off to the library, the next she’s testing recipes from his latest exotic trip.

I blew through chapter after glorious chapter, and each time his assistant appeared I would think,
This is it. This is the job I want. The job I have been trying to articulate for years but didn’t even know existed.
I realized it was the perfect way to keep my hands dirty but still use my brain.

So I went back to my culinary school and spoke to the career services director, Steve, again. With the book in my hand for dramatic emphasis I explained: “This man Jeffrey Steingarten has an assistant who gets to do everything I want to do. Can you find me a job like this?”

I had never read
Vogue
in my life. I knew nothing about fashion. I just knew this was my calling.

Steve burst out laughing. “This is crazy,” he said, “but I just saw Jeffrey last week, and he’s looking for a new assistant.”

The sun burst through the clouds. I swear somewhere culinary angels started singing. Steve sent over my résumé that Friday. I spoke with Jeffrey directly on Monday and set up an interview for Wednesday evening. When we spoke briefly over the phone, Jeffrey told me to come over after my shift at Vong, around six. And in his cryptic way, he said, “Don’t they have some kind of fried duck roll at Vong?”

I understood that to be a take-out order. So before I left the kitchen I made an extra order of duck rolls and smuggled them out in my backpack.

EIGHT

Alone with Rotting Meat: The
Vogue
Years

I’M TWENTY-FOUR
.
On my boss’s advice, I’m eating at Pierre Gagnaire in Paris, one of the best restaurants in the world. We’re at one of eleven tables in the main dining room. There’s a blue Miró-esque glass screen on one wall. Each course seems to arrive with countless components, in an endless parade of tiny plates. Delicate gnocchi in red pepper sauce. Flavors of autumn: wild mushrooms with seaweed and figs. And then: tomato sorbet
en gelée
;
ris de veau en pappiotte
; risotto with white truffles and butter; turbot on braised leeks and herbs; baked pear with cherries and shallots; venison wrapped in seaweed with endive, ginger, and candied passion fruit; chocolate with orange blossom sorbet
en gelée
; veal fillets on a slice of veal liver; kidney on foccacia; beetroot; braised lettuce and spinach juice. . . . And the cheese! Epoisse, Livarot, Rocquefort emulsion; celery crème; chevre; and a hard cheese whose name gets lost in the flurry of it all. To finish, the Grand Dessert Pierre Gagnaire: fraise de bois on shortbread; marshmallows made with rose water; fruit tartlets; three different chocolates stuffed with
eau de vie
; citrus; passion fruit
feuittes
; a shotglass of raspberry mousse; a slice of pineapple over aquavit sorbet; stewed pear with cherry compote; a quivering mousse on poached apple, papaya, and pomegranate; hazelnut and artichoke on pastry with crème fraîche; caramelized plum in raspberry puree with black tea caramel . . . I can’t help but weep from pure joy.

It was more than a decade ago now, but I can still taste that meal. My parents and I were attending a friend’s wedding in London and decided we’d take a week to visit Paris, too. Jeffrey Steingarten had armed me with a list of the best bread bakery (Poilâne), the best cheese shop (Barthélemy), and the best patisserie (Pierre Hermé). He also instructed me to strong-arm my parents into taking me to my first French three-star Michelin restaurant, Pierre Gagnaire.

At most upscale restaurants where tasting menus are common, the standard multicourse meal can be anywhere from five to twelve courses, depending on where you are. Of course, they’re not full portions. If a main course consists of a six- to eight-ounce piece of meat and an appetizer is four ounces, a tasting portion is more like two ounces.

The courses usually proceed from light to heavy. Sometimes there’s also a savory
amuse-bouche
to get your mouth in the mood. Then typically the meal follows the same general order, give or take a few:

1. Seafood appetizer (usually raw or very light)

2. Vegetable course (such as a composed salad)

3. Pâté (foie gras or another meat that has been pureed, placed in a mold, and poached in a terrine of fat; served with a sweet or acidic wine or fruit to cut the fat)

4. Seafood course (perhaps a seared scallop)

5. Cooked fish course (like roasted sea bass)

6. Poultry course (maybe pheasant or duck)

7. Pork or veal or offal course (read: belly or innards, the good stuff )

8. Meat course (such as beef, lamb, or venison)

9. Cheese course (a selection of three to five, or sometimes just one in a specific preparation, with accompaniments)

10. Palate cleanser or fruit dessert course

11. Chocolate dessert course

12. Petits fours or
mignardises

At my urging, my father made us a lunch reservation at Pierre Gagnaire. I didn’t realize what I was getting him into. This place was as holy as a temple, as quiet as a library. It was the first time anyone gave me a stool for my purse. They even offered me a cashmere pashmina to keep my bare arms warm in the cool dining room.

My father’s menu was the only one with prices on it. He quickly grew pale as my mother and I happily ordered away, choosing the season’s specials instead of the multicourse tasting menu, which would allow us more choice, and more dessert. It was October, truffle season, so there was a separate truffle menu in addition to the regular offerings. For my appetizer, I chose a bowl of loose, creamy risotto. The waiter grated white truffles over it. It could have cost $400. My father swallowed hard and focused on his breathing.

I had venison for my main course. Pierre Gagnaire’s signature style is that every course has many accompaniments, plated individually. With my venison, there were four or five different plates, each with another bite or taste that played off the meat. It had a deep fuchsia-colored, savory sauce made of wine and chocolate. Rich, earthy, divine.

Then came dessert. I did not hesitate to order the famous Grande Dessert Pierre Gagnaire, still a staple at his restaurants. It included a dozen or so different plates, each more exquisite than the last. When it came to our table, I inspected it thoroughly, then I looked up at my father and burst into tears.

Well, it was more of a half giggle, half cry. My father could not help but laugh along with me. My senses were so overwhelmed that tears rolled freely down my face as I sat there. It was all so painstakingly beautiful. Someone had thought up all of these combinations, then carefully, meticulously brought them to life. The artistry of our meal had far surpassed satisfying our expectations and our stomachs—it had struck a deep emotional chord.

We walked around all day burning off that meal. And no, we couldn’t bear the thought of eating dinner, even six hours later. We ate a simple salad and called it a night.

I could never have imagined that an assistant job would expose me to such extraordinary food.

The job description of Jeffrey Steingarten’s assistant was legendary in the industry, but it wasn’t a joke:

Interviews have begun for the incredibly sought-after job of assistant to Jeffrey Steingarten, the feared and acclaimed food critic for
Vogue
magazine. . . . The ideal candidate is equally skilled at library and Internet research, cooking and shopping, repairing Xerox machines,
mise-en-place
, keeping office and kitchen organized, writing clearly, doing errands, eating in fabulous restaurants and possibly traveling. . . . The ideal candidate does not exist, but Jeffrey is looking for someone who comes close.

Translation: “You will spend two years alone in a house with a food obsessive, making goose, after goose, after pizza, after goose.”

I smuggled those duck spring rolls out of Vong and showed up at Jeffrey’s house at six thirty in the evening. I didn’t quite understand how important he was in the food industry, having only read his first book and having never read
Vogue.
Jeffrey lives in an enormous loft on Union Square. The elevator opens on the third floor right into his apartment. I got off the elevator and came face-to-face with never-ending shelves, stacked floor to ceiling with books. And clutter everywhere.

There were three sections to the apartment: the office, the kitchen and dining area, and Jeffrey’s giant bedroom in the back. There was a harpsichord that Jeffrey built himself. There was a never-used treadmill. A printer, a fax machine, and—at the dawn of the twenty-first century—an
answering machine.
Stacks of books everywhere. A huge collection of Roto-Broils—a 1950s tabletop spit-roaster, perfect for fitting one chicken or two little poussins for lunch. Ice-cream machines. Piles of chocolate. Mountains of wine bottles. Filing cabinets. Dust.

We sat down at his dining room table together and talked for more than three hours. I lost track of time.

He read my résumé and asked, “You speak French and Spanish?” He pulled books off his shelf in both languages and had me sight-translate recipes and text. He wasn’t joking around.

I fought my way through it.

He opened a bottle of wine and poured me a glass. “What kind of grape is that?” he asked me. “Give me your tasting notes.”

I stumbled and guessed.

He was making Brazilian ribs. He pulled them out of the oven and said, “What do you think? What did I do wrong?”

I suggested they were a little tough and could stand to be braised instead.

Then he asked, “What are your favorite restaurants in New York?”

I had no money. I was a lowly line cook, living in my friend’s closet. I was certainly not eating like I do now. But I had just eaten at a tiny sushi place in the Village called Tomoe for the first time just a few weeks before. The fish had seemed impeccably fresh. I had never eaten sushi like that in Toronto, and I had splurged on it. So I mentioned Tomoe, and that I had tried bluefin tuna belly (
toro
) for the first time.

He burst out laughing. “You must not read
Vogue.
”

“Why?” I asked, knowing he was right.

“Because,” he said, “I just wrote a column about how much I hate Tomoe sushi.”

I shrank a little but kept going.

Then we talked about Mexico. He had just come back from judging a tamale competition. I didn’t know much about Mexican food. My experience with it in Canada didn’t include much more than fajitas. I thought a tamale was a plant, perhaps? Or a vegetable? I certainly didn’t know it was masa (a cornmeal mixture) baked in a corn husk. Whatever I said, he realized I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Have you cooked with Szechuan peppercorns?” he asked at another point in the conversation. By now I had completely lost my senses.

“Yes!” I said, happy to finally have a right answer. “We cook with them at Vong.”

“Real ones?” he asked.

“I suppose so?” I answered, not totally sure.

He had recently been to China and returned with a small bag of genuine Szechuan peppercorns. He handed one to me. It didn’t look at all like what we cooked with at Vong.

I put it in my mouth.

My tongue went numb. My lips were now made of pins and needles. My sense of taste was totally wiped out. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, but it was one I had never experienced before.

“
That’s
a real Szechuan peppercorn,” Jeffrey said. “They’re why Szechuan food is so spicy.”

The next day, I did in fact go to the spice rack at work and put one of their peppercorns in my mouth. The effect was totally different. I faxed Jeffrey a thank-you note for the interview, admitting he was right about the peppercorns.

I remember saying to myself as I left his house that night, sometime after nine:
Well, I blew that.
But I just got three hours with Jeffrey Steingarten. That’s my New York moment. I can go back to Canada and die happy. He ridiculed me for an entire evening, and I was thrilled about it. Talk about foreshadowing.

If nothing else, it confirmed how much I had to learn and what a genius he already was. I had learned about tamales and Szechuan peppercorns. Brazilian ribs and where not to eat sushi in New York. It was worth the price of admission.

A couple of days later, Jeffrey called and hired me. I was speechless.

Later on, I realized that by the time I went in for that interview, he was desperate. He goes through a classic cycle. After about two years, his assistant gets exasperated and quits. At first, he won’t let her leave, even though he always knows it’s coming and, to be frank, is exasperated, too. He makes such a fuss that she sticks it out a little longer.

Then she gets truly incensed and walks out, never to return. Despite the myriad of résumés that he receives, he cannot make a decision on whom to hire next. No one is perfect enough. He fumbles along for a little while and his life starts falling apart. There’s no one to get the mail, check his answering machine, or return his calls. No one to pick up his made-to-measure shirts from the cleaners or do his extensive recipe testing. So, in a last-ditch effort before he expires, he hires someone very quickly. At least that is how it all looks from the outside.

On closer examination, I learned that the women he hires in a fit of despair are actually very specific. He gets hundreds of applications. People send him homemade bread and desserts, wine and chocolate truffles. He is quick to judge them, but ultimately right. It’s all about chemistry, and he knows in an instant. Over the last fifteen years or so, Jeffrey has amassed a small army of loyal and feisty female assistants. The women who came before and after me, who helped me navigate the darkest corners of his apartment and his mind, served as my first group of trusted, bold, foodcentric girlfriends in New York.

Over the years, our little crew has grown, and we have all moved on to completely different jobs. But we remain closely connected, getting together regularly to celebrate milestones or misery, over cocktails and, always, good food, passing our wisdom and our sympathy down to the next girl in line. It’s no coincidence that each one of the women who has lasted with Jeffrey for their tenure has also fit beautifully into the fold of our friendship. It’s also no coincidence that each and every one of us has come out of the position with the help of another, more grounded male relationship in our personal lives (an equally impressive small army of very patient husbands and boyfriends), as well as an even stronger sense of self. It makes me think this is all part of Jeffrey’s master plan: to create these wonderful friendships for his former assistants. I call us Jeffrey’s Angels.

Speaking of boyfriends, it was around this time that I came to know my future husband, Jeremy.

When we met, I was still with my Toronto boyfriend. We were dating long-distance, even though it was quickly becoming clear that I had no intention of leaving New York and he had no plans to move.

The great irony, of course, is that Jeremy and I grew up in the same small corner of the world, in Canada, with dozens of mutual friends, and didn’t meet until we both found ourselves hundreds of miles from home, in New York City. How we had not met to this point is a mystery to me. Canada basically has seven people in it. Two of them are Jews. Jeremy and I had led parallel lives.

The high school boyfriend with whom I went to Israel had a friend, Seth, who lived in LA. They met at summer camp in northern Ontario. Through the boyfriend, Seth and I became good friends. During college, Seth would come up to McGill to visit a group of us from time to time. Among the group of friends Seth came to see was a guy named Brandon, whom I had known for years, in high school and college, but never well. He had also attended that same summer camp. Through Seth, Brandon and I became fast friends.

Seth and Brandon both ended up in New York around the same time I did. The three of us were part of a small group of Canadian expats, which also included my roommate, Jamie, and a third guy from this same summer camp posse: Jeremy.

He had grown up in Montreal but attended college in a town just outside of Toronto, so our lives had crisscrossed. He had moved to New York about three months after me, for graduate school, a master’s degree in music and entertainment business at NYU. One day, Jeremy came by my apartment to visit my roommate. He claims to remember the first moment he saw me: I was wearing my thick tortoiseshell glasses and my usual culinary school ponytail and was poring over a stack of books. He remembers thinking I was cute, if a bit of a nerd. True.