“That's exactly what happened with John,” I said.
“John too. I was thinking about John today. I'm likeâ” he laughed his guttural laughâ“âDon't get an attitude with
me
.' And they always come
back later, âHey, I was wrong, sorry.' But I know what that's like. On the line, you're on the line of battle, you're on the
front
lines there. And it can get very stressful, and when, you know, you're behind and things are starting to go wrong, you just start to get a little more irritated and it's a lot of pressure. It's like the first chef I worked for, he used to say it's a battle. You against the clock, every day. Jeff Buben. He'd say that. You can't let the clock win, you have to beat the clock every day.
“I had a student a couple blocks ago; she was a nurse in an emergency room and I always used to say this is probably very close to working in an emergency room except it's not a life-or-death situation. Everything has to be done very efficiently, very quickly; you have to get it out quickly. You have to keep your head at all times. I think that's the hardest thing. It's time, it's time, let's go, everything has to be done as quickly as possible, and quality. That's why in lecture I say try to find the best possible people you can work with, work with three, four, five of those chefs. You're gonna pick up so many good things from each one, whether it be speed or efficiency or quality or sanitation. It's just amazing what you can pick up.”
The two most important chefs to Turgeon were the ones he worked for immediately after graduating. Jeffrey Buben and David Fye at the Nicholas Restaurant in the Mayflower Hotel set the course for his career.
“Day
One
, I was like, OH MYâscared to death,” Turgeon said. “I was scared to
death
. I was scared to death for eight months. I really was. Buben had me in tears.” Turgeon suddenly appeared weary, simply recalling all this. “He kickedâworst feeling for a cookâhe booted me off the line. âYOU'RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH!' I was slow, I was slow, I wasn't done, and I deserved it, I deserved it. I was like, âDid he fire me, did he not?'
“The sous chef at that time was David Fye and he actually said, âGive him one more chance.' And something clicked that day in me, and that was about eight months in. Something
did
click that day, where I came in that next day and I was
hustling
. I wanted to get to the point where he
yelled
at me a lot less. It was maybe once a week he'd say, ya know, âHey what's goin' on here, what
is
this?!' But he was always right; he never did it just to do it. Something wasn't right. He always had a reason. And I
needed
that. Not everybody can deal with that, but at certain points everybody needs just a little push. So I wasn't ready for that and not everybody can take that kind of atmosphere where somebody's on 'em. I certainly saw a lot of cooks come in and out the door, a hundred at least, last a day, two days. But that's where his expectations are and that's how he went about getting to that point.
“I know when I graduated from here,” Turgeon continued, “I was probably like these students here. I can't remember, certainly I got B's and A's, but I don't know if I was a good cook when I graduated from here. I don't know. It took a while. It was probably three to five years before I started to say, I think I'm starting to become a good cook. Things
happen
in your head.”
There it was again. I'd felt thisâin a crude and introductory wayâjust as he'd said it, with the halting surprise of realizing, suddenly, you are a different person. “Things
happen
in your head.” Structures form. Pieces of information and experience join, crystallize into a pattern and lock into place. A whole system of gears is gradually ratcheted in and, suddenly, it engages. And there it stays, in the kitchen and out, no matter where you are. The experience is difficult to describe. Turgeon said it was like a sixth sense. Something clicked and you knew everything that was happening in the kitchen. Some people called it kitchen sense. It's like something living that jumped inside you. A physical correlation might be this: you are carrying several heavy pieces of luggage through O'Hare Airport, walking as fast as you can to make a plane. You step onto an empty moving walkwayâyou are walking just as fast as you were, but, suddenly, space and time fly over you at double the rate and with ease.
What is it about this work, I wanted to know, what kind of person does thisâor rather, for what kind of mind and body is cooking the only option?
“Some of the chefs I've worked for,” Turgeon said, “have had a deep passion for what they do. Some of them are workaholics. That's all they want to do; they just want to be in the kitchen. Part of it is control, you're in control. I don't know how to explain it. You're in control. It's just a great feeling when all this stuff is going on around you and you're kinda controlling it. It's like a conductor to a symphony; when you pull it off nothing sounds better. Second, it's just liking to eat. Loving to eat, having an appreciation for food. I
love eating food
probably more than anything, and to get that sometimes you have to cook it yourself. You can't always afford to go out to eat. It's art too.”
“Is it?”
“I think so. I think plating, presentation, is where the art part comes in. There's art, there's chemistry, there's science, there's a lot of little different facets of it.
“I just think, the people I've worked with, there's just a passion about food, they just
love food
. They love it. Part of it is wanting to make people
happy. Certainly part for me is the physical nature. It sometimes feels like a workout and I like that. It's a sense of achievement too. There's just nothing like it when a service goes right, every plate, there's just nothing like it. It's probably like in baseball, pitching a shutout. That was it, that was the one. You're always trying to achieve that, you're always trying to get another no-hitter or another shutout. But then there are the negative things. It's really demanding, you're working all the time. You have to balance those things really well.”
“So can you teach it?” I asked.
“You can, you definitely can, yes. Eventually it's like being able to pick out different complexities of wine, it's about training your palate. And they can train their palates also, and eventually taste something so many times that if somebody makes it properly, wow, I see the difference each time, and, wow, that is really right on the money. Yeah, you can definitely teach this, no question about it.”
I asked him how I'd done.
“I thought you did well. I've kinda taken some of the pressure off. If you were on that station at night there would be one more item on there. Sometimes you guys had problems getting things done on time. I think you were probably a little bit nervous, first couple of days.
“I think your best experience in there was when John was absent that day. You're the man, you're in charge, now you have to do it. I saw a difference the next day in you, you were much more efficient, you knew exactly what had to be done.
“If you think what's the speed that's involved with thatâyou're clearheaded at all times, and you're movin' so fast. I know, put me on the line, sometimes I get in the weedsâI know I'm in the weeds when I start doing three-sixties, start going around in circles! It's just like, âStop, I have to stop here.' It happens to the best.”
Â
Â
J
ust as knife skills and sauce work must be taught, how one behaves in the weeds is something that likewise can and should be taught. If you cook, somewhere down the road you're going to be in the weeds; if you're attempting to be a great cook, you're going to be in the weeds a lot. Here was what Turgeon did when he was in the weeds.
It was shortly before Saturday's service. Chen, on sauté, looked at me during prep and made a shaky motion with his hand.
“Nervous?” I asked. I was medium-dicing butternut squash. He nodded. “Why?” I asked.
He said, “Nervous.”
“Is language hard?” I asked. “During service, people talking too fast, things getting crazy?”
“Yes, sometimes it is difficult.”
Chen was behind on his prep; his mise en place was everywhere but en place and his station was a litter of kale and spinach scraps and shallot cores and burnt paper towel that he'd been using to light burners. It was easy for this to happen. When you were swamped, you could not rationalize spending time to clean up what was just going to become a mess again.
But Chef Turgeon walked by and said, not for the first time, “Chen, you gotta keep your station clean.” Turgeon saw that Chen was frustrated and didn't feel that he could take the time. Turgeon, knowing Chen had no time to spare, stopped to chat.
“You know in the weeds, in the shits?” Turgeon asked Chen. Chen nodded. “When I was in the weeds, when I was
really
in the weeds, I'd stop. I'd say, âGimme a second.'” Turgeon had looked up at an imaginary expediter and put his hand up like a batter asking the ump for time to step out of the box. Turgeon had an actor's body language. He was on stage; his movements were big, a caricature of what they were meant to portray. “Gimme a second,” he said, hand raised, head down toward his station. Then he reached below, pulled a blue Handi Wipe from the sanitation bucket, and again, slowly, exaggerating with large round shoulder motions, he wiped down Chen's station, thoroughly and methodically, till it was a clean open field of stainless steel, saying, “And I'd wipe down my station.” Somehow he managed to convey service swirling around him, as he ignored it to methodically polish the stainless-steel station.
His demo over, Turgeon tossed the wipe into the bucket, stood straight, and said to Chen, “'Cause when you're in the weeds, this clutter starts to build up.” He put his palms on the station and then lifted them slowly to chest level. “And if they cut you open,” he said, “that's what your brain would look like.”
When I heard this I laughed. It was exactly right. I thought of Chen's station, with all the scraps of food and burnt paper towel, littered with salt and pepper, spilled sauce hardened to crustâthat is what your brain
does
look like when you're in the weeds. Two things are happening in your brain during service. The first is what you are imaginingâhow long you'll cook
this piece of meat, how long you will cook this sauce down, what it will look likeâhow big the bubbles will be when it hits the right consistency, how low in the pan it will have reducedâwhen you're ready to plate it; you're thinking ahead to imagine each item that's going on every plate in its finished form. The second thing is what your eyes are actually recording, the moment and sight at hand, each passing second. Service can become so intense that what your eyes see and what you are imaginingâthat is, what your eyes will see in a few momentsâmelt together into one. And when your station is a mess, scraps everywhere, dirty tasting spoons all over the place, burnt towel, scraps sticking to your shoes, this mixes with what is about to happen and all but literally gets into the food. And the sensation of this is that the mess is coating the insides of your brain, making it hard to think. When you clean your station, you clean your brain; you can work more efficiently in your head just as you can work faster at your station when it's neat and organized, nothing in the way, nothing unnecessary in view.
So when Turgeon said, “If they cut you open, that's what your brain would look like,” he'd described weeds so succinctly that it made me laugh out loud. When Turgeon heard me, he laughed at his own cleverness. Rose Ann had already appeared, saying, “Chef, Chef,” with a food order in her hand. Turgeon wanted to enjoy what he'd said a little longer and continued to laugh hard. Again Rose Ann said, “Chef.”
Turgeon stopped laughing on a dime, and shouted at Rose Ann, “HEY! I'M TALKING TO MY STUDENTS!” Rose Ann rolled her eyes. Turgeon paused, smiled again, then said to Rose Ann, smiling at her and at his own uncharacteristic silliness, “O.K., what?”
It was Saturday, the kitchen was rolling along smoothly now, and the chef could relax a little.
During service, Chen kept his station clean, but he was having a problem with the chicken. They were huge breasts, with the wing attached and frenched. The method was to sauté them fast and hot and finish them in the oven on the fire command. Chen looked at me when the chicken still wasn't done and said, “Honky chicken is big.” The chef came to Chen's station. They both squatted at the oven, cranked to 500 degrees, and the chef poked at one, poked at another. “That one's just about there, that one's pretty good.” Chen poked at each himself and nodded at the chef.
Meanwhile, I was reheating wild rice with medium-diced apples and butternut squash in reduced chicken stock. On the previous Thursday, during lecture, I had been fading in and outâstressing over the brown
sauce I hadn't begun to make yet, trying to shake the morning fog out of my head. The chef was talking about the soups. “Turkey stocks are awesome,” he said. “They're really flavorful. I'll never go back to making chicken consommé.” And “I like that soup sampler. I tell ya, put that on the menu, you raise the average check.”