Yes, Chef, page 12
“I can start right away,” I said.
“You speak German and you’re not afraid of work,” she answered. “OK, then. We’ll give you a try.”
MEMORY IS FUNNY AND, of course, comparative. In a matter of hours, life under Stocker and Giggs began to seem positively cushy. At Elisabethpark, fifteen people did the work of sixty and I worked six days each week, not five. I started at eight in the morning, worked straight through till four, downed a quick staff meal, and zipped up to my room to rest. By 5:30, I was back in the kitchen in a fresh uniform—which would be damp and dirty by the time the kitchen closed at midnight.
The payoff for those fifteen-hour shifts was that I jumped several rungs up the ladder. I was given the vegetable station right off the bat, which meant there was no one between me and Mannfred, the executive chef. I was Chef’s right hand and Heidi, a talented young woman from Berlin who worked the grill, was his left. By the end of the first week, our trio had established a rhythm: How much we spoke correlated to how fast the orders were coming in, and when Chef asked if we were ready—“Bereit?”—I could tell from his inflection whether he was cueing me up to fire a new order or asking me to step in and plate with him.
Frau Franzmaier was our bridge to the front of the house. She burst through the swinging door to the dining room a hundred times a night, plucking a white smock off a hook and putting it over her nice clothes as soon as she came into the kitchen. If it was slow, she’d have a few sips of wine from a straight-sided juice glass and gossip with Chef about this purveyor or that competitor. If it was busy, she would call out orders through the small microphone across the counter from Chef or dip into the back room to retrieve fresh napkins, then shed the smock and head back out to charm the guests.
At Elisabethpark, we did not look to France as the core of our cuisine. We didn’t bow down to truffles or put foie gras on a pedestal. Instead, we looked to Austria itself, to goulash and dumplings and noodles and freshwater fish like lake trout and perch. This was a revelation.
I learned the regional variations in Austrian cuisine, from Vienna’s beuschel ragout made from calf lungs and heart to the local krut-spätzle, a side dish of flour noodles made with sauerkraut, pressed through a strainer and sautéed with butter. Salzburger Nockerln became my favorite dessert: Its meringue peaks echoed the surrounding Alps, and the warm vanilla sauce spooned on top was said to be the melting snow. We put flecks of smoky Tyrolean bacon into dumplings and, of course, served loads of tafelspitz, the dish that all Austrians loved the way Swedes loved their herring. Tafelspitz was aged sirloin, preferably from a young ox, simmered with parsnips and carrots and spiced with paprika, dry mustard, and cayenne, then served over buttered noodles. I liked it instantly, but I couldn’t help wondering how much better it would taste if it had lingonberry sauce to cut through the rich, savory broth.
My shifts may have ended at midnight, but the buzz didn’t wear off for another few hours. Some nights I staggered back to my room to record the day’s menu in my journal. If I’d learned a new technique for poaching cabbage, I wrote it down. If I’d watched Chef roast a pork belly over potatoes until the drippings practically caramelized them, I wrote it down. If I saw him make button-shaped spaetzle noodles and wondered how they would taste with dill rather than caraway, I wrote down that idea, or made up the recipe and recorded it, step-by-step, amount by amount.
Of course, I was also a twenty-year-old guy, not a monk. I found a way to exist outside of this cycle of work and reflection. A couple of times a week I’d go out with my Austrian comrades to a local bar, drinking beer or most, a local hard cider, while we argued over whose job was harder, whose burns were more serious, and who almost went down during service. My story of the Aspic Massacre definitely won me a spot in the Fuck-ups Hall of Fame.
One night, I ran into a band of Swedish guys at Gatz, an après-ski spot on the ground floor of Hotel Gisela. I was not so interested in pounding schnapps shots the way my countrymen clearly had been doing all evening, but it was such a relief to speak in my native tongue that I hung with them for an hour or two. Some had come to work in the kitchen at Nordica and had, like me, arrived to find that the place wasn’t open. They were drinking through the two weeks before the restaurant was slated to open.
“What could we do?” one of them said. “We went skiing!”
I was reminded again that while I may have shared a heritage and a language with my fellow Swedes, most of my countrymen lived much more luxuriously than I did. Maybe it was because of my race, maybe it was because I was adopted, maybe it was simply because I was Lennart and Anne Marie’s son and they suffered no fools, but all this talk about not working and no real plans struck me as kind of pathetic. I went back to the table with my buddies from the hotel.
A couple of Austrian girls eventually wandered into our crowd, and I recognized one from the workers’ entrance at Elisabethpark. Brigitta worked as a chambermaid. She was a few years older than me and lived above the laundry room. She didn’t seem to mind my kitchen German and, like everyone I met in Austria, she seemed intrigued by this black Swede who’d dropped into their midst. Brigitta was beautiful like an old-fashioned movie star; she reminded me of the women in my mother’s photo albums from the 1940s. She was from a tiny village in the part of the valley that grew apples and pears, and she paid attention to me as I struggled to make myself understood. We talked for a while, and then a band started playing and it was almost impossible to hear.
“Do you want to come over and listen to some music?” she asked.
I followed her back to her apartment and spent the night.
THE THREE MONTHS IN AUSTRIA instilled in me a deep appreciation for hard work, and the power of a regional cuisine. In some ways, those Austrian dishes were my first real experience with soul food. Elisabethpark may not have been a five-star restaurant, but I saw that warmth and camaraderie and dedication could produce outstanding food just as well as the cutthroat competition that fueled Stocker’s kitchen staff. With fewer resources, we pulled off a different five-course tasting menu each night, as well as a new à la carte menu, handwritten by Frau Franzmaier, every day.
In late March, on one of my last days off, I sat in a coffeehouse by the town’s waterfall, at a table by the front window. Swedes may drink more coffee than any other Westerners, but Austrians know how to serve it. Waiters bring a glass of water and a chocolate to go along with your order, and the coffee is always beautifully presented, served in a glass on a saucer, the foam peaked just so. A Franziskaner was a latte made with whipped cream and a double espresso was called a kleiner schwarzer. I could never order schwarzer without butting up against the memory of “schwarzkopf,” a slur I’d heard growing up from Swedish skinheads back home.
I had laundry to do and I was overdue to write a letter home, but I was there because Brigitta had left a note under my door that morning, asking me to meet her. I hadn’t seen her since the night we hung out at Gatz. We’d had a lot of sex that night and the next day, and when we finally left her room, we had to walk through a laundry room full of white-scarved women who giggled at us. They knew what was up.
Maybe she wanted to hang out some more, I thought. Maybe I was that good.
I didn’t see her come in, so I was startled when she put her hand on my shoulder. She was as pretty and elegant as I remembered: light green eyes and long brown hair with bangs that came down almost to her eyelashes. She had deep dimples when she smiled, but she was not smiling now. She didn’t even sit down.
“Ich bin swanger,” she said. “I am pregnant.”
If there was any conversation after that, I don’t remember it.
After Austria ended and before my second contract with Victoria began, I’d scheduled ten days at home in Sweden, and I now dreaded every one of them. I had gotten a girl pregnant, and as much as I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened, it had. This was, of course, a predicament that many of my friends back home had faced, but in Lutheran Sweden, abortions were more the rule than the exception. It usually played out like this: Once a guy found out his girlfriend was pregnant, maybe he’d go with her to the appointment or maybe not, but he always arranged a place for her to hang out for a few days afterward, maybe a friend’s apartment, and he’d stay with her there until she was OK to go home. It sounds harsh, but that’s usually how it went. That was the routine.
The mess I was now in was anything but routine. I had gotten a Catholic girl from a Roman Catholic country pregnant. The outcome was far less clear.
When she broke the news to me in that café, I felt hammered. I was stunned into silence. My brain worked overtime, trying to wriggle out of the reality: Why did this happen to me?
For a second, I considered “doing the right thing”—marrying Brigitta, this woman I hardly knew, and spending the rest of my life in Austria, not a place where many black Swedes from Ethiopia have been known to put down roots. I’d get a job as a line cook somewhere, maybe at Elisabethpark, and that would be it. But before I could even finish articulating that scenario in my head, I was past it.
I couldn’t do it.
I also couldn’t work up the guts to ask Brigitta if she had thought about terminating the pregnancy. She wasn’t asking for my opinion. Or, for that matter, my money or my time; she had a big family and they would be supportive of her as she raised the child.
“I thought you should know” was pretty much all she said.
“OK,” I said. “Thank you.”
By the time I got back to Gburg, I was no clearer than I had been in the moment. And I was pissed off: I’d done everything in my life not to become a statistic. I’d done everything I could to avoid the negative stereotype of an irresponsible black man, but there was no disputing my part in the situation. Or my stupidity.
“You seem so tired, Macke,” my mother kept saying. “I think they work you too hard.”
“What’s on your mind, son?” asked the father who usually welcomed my rare silences.
I tried to calculate the damage my news was going to cause, but I couldn’t. Brigitta could not have been more than ten weeks pregnant when she told me. She didn’t look the slightest bit heavier. This is what I told myself, to feel better.
“Maybe something will happen,” I thought. “Maybe she’ll change her mind.”
THIRTEEN SECRETS
SUMMER WAS ONE LONG PANIC ATTACK. SOMETIMES I FELT LIKE I WAS going to die … or at least that the career I’d worked so hard for was about to die and I was standing by its deathbed, watching helplessly. I said nothing about the pregnancy to anyone at Victoria, not even Mannfred. Not even Christina, who started her job at the same time I returned. She and I were given a small apartment in the dormitory—a step up over the monk’s cell I had during my first stint—but despite the daily contact and nightly intimacy, I kept mum.
The only way I managed to keep up the lie was that the restaurant kitchen was such a refuge. My job had changed, but everything else, including Giggs’s incessant sarcasm, was just as I had left it, and I happily dove back in.
As demi chef de partie for the garde manger, I now had more responsibility, more independence, and more of a public face. I not only butchered without Franz standing over me, I was now the one who stood over the new batch of commis and came down hard on them when they cut through muscle. I showed them how to fillet fish and how to prep oysters by slitting apart the shell without fully disengaging the flesh. When we had breakfast buffets, I worked the omelet station, taking orders directly from a long line of guests and cooking their eggs in front of them. This sounds simple, but we were cooking over portable gas burners that gave out uneven heat. Stocker wouldn’t hear of us using nonstick pans; he wanted us to use only the beautifully polished copper pans. He believed that an omelet should be cooked through but never, ever have “color,” which meant any omelet with a browned edge was to be immediately discarded. On this point, he was adamant. Finally, you had to have enough polish to be able to do all this while chatting up the guests, most of whom couldn’t have cared less if their eggs were a little brown.
After Stocker’s meeting broke up one morning, Giggs came back to our station and made a beeline right for me.
“He wants to see you,” Giggs said.
I hesitated, feeling a wave of panic rise up. What had I done?
“Now!” Giggs barked.
Stocker barely looked up from his desk when I walked in. I didn’t dare sit down in the chair across from his desk unless I was asked. I was not asked.
“You speak English well, Mr. Samuelsson,” Stocker said in German. I wasn’t sure if he meant it as a question or a statement, but I decided to answer in English.
“Next to Swedish, it’s my best—”
“I have a colleague in Gstaad,” he interrupted. “At the Grand Hotel, which is very busy in the summer. He needs cooks. Victoria is Switzerland’s leading hotel, as you know, and as such, we must also lead the way in staff. I am sending you for twenty-five days. You will go tomorrow and when you arrive, you will ask for Herrn Muller.”
I stood, frozen, while it sank in that I was not in trouble. In fact, to be sent away was a reward. “Thank you, Herrn Stocker,” I said. I prepared to launch into how much this meant to me, how honored I was, how grateful, and—
Stocker had no interest in compliments. “Do not embarrass me,” he said, and picked up his telephone, dismissing me from the room.
Gstaad was only forty-five miles away, still in the Bernese Alps and so similar to Victoria in its no-nonsense professional atmosphere that within two days, I felt like I’d been there forever. The Grand Hotel had half as many rooms as Victoria and its banquets didn’t serve more than a hundred people, so the pace was manageable, and I never felt overwhelmed. As an extra hand, I worked in the garde manger and also helped out in the meat station. Because the staff was more Swiss and less international in its makeup, people were even more formal in their interactions with me, but I also noticed that I was treated with more deference and respect, as if the Stocker stamp of approval bumped up my status automatically.
WHEN I GOT BACK TO VICTORIA three weeks later, my status went right back down to its previous level; in fact, it almost seemed like the sous-chefs and line cooks above me were now determined to keep me from getting a swelled head. They loaded me down with grunt work and, whenever the opportunity arose, reminded me that I was not out “in the country” anymore, but back in the real world. I didn’t care. I knew I had held my own in Gstaad, I hadn’t embarrassed Stocker, and I’d successfully added one more notch to my chef’s belt.
But the better I got at my job, the less I liked it. Let me rephrase that: I loved working for Giggs and Stocker. Stocker’s innovation with technology and technique made all of our lives in the kitchen easier, and his expectation of peak performance was one I admired and aspired to. Giggs, despite his crankiness, was a great teacher, and he rewarded effort and talent with extra attention and time. Even Victoria itself had a personality—of grandeur and tradition, all of which was anchored in a beautiful landscape that I was taking full advantage of, thanks to the hiking, biking, and skiing I did with Mannfred and his friends. But I longed to work in a kitchen where the chef’s passions ruled. Stocker and Giggs held to the highest standards in the industry, but they worked from a playbook set in stone. French stone.
Giggs, who had traveled so widely on his cruise ship days, offered clues about his own palate preferences when he added lemongrass to staff meals or threw together fried rice between service. He’d talk at great length about the difference between Thai and Indian curries, but I never saw him developing his food while on the clock. He followed the script. The potential of our kitchen seemed so vast, too. That’s what killed me. We had dozens of foodways within reach, from the Portuguese and Spanish dishwashers to the northern Italian and American waiters. And the more I mastered the basics, the more I longed to shake up the routine.
Sprinkled throughout the international kitchen staff were the rich kids who were never going to cook as professionals but wanted the Swiss hospitality pedigree. You could tell this group instantly: They strolled along when the rest of us dashed. Their hands were baby soft—no calluses, cuts, or burns. You’d never see them pull something out of a deep fryer with their fingers, as seasoned line cooks did. And they didn’t want to help, either—they were completely up front about having come to Victoria with no hands-on experience, and also clear about the fact that their futures as hoteliers or managers wouldn’t include any cooking. The rest of us watched in awe as they said hello to Stocker when he passed by. They actually looked him in the eye, which seemed to confuse him, and he usually just grunted in response and kept walking. Still, we also had interns from Tehran and Colombo and Seoul who loved to eat, and even more, loved to entertain. They rented small houses around town, and the big benefit for me was that those houses had kitchens. Those of us who lived in the dormitories would get invited over for meals, and we’d have Indian naan bread, Chinese fried rice and glazed spareribs, Japanese nabemono. The foods we’d eat at those informal dinners were alive with heat and flavor; they had a vitality that spoke to me instantly and far more persuasively than the thrice-reduced cream sauces that took days of careful tending to render just so. Why was there no room at Victoria for those tastes?
I wrote in my food journal almost every night. I tracked what I was learning, but I also started to ask questions, to play with the what-ifs of dishes that were taking shape in my mind. What if you matched turbot with a miso-based stock? What if you put seared salmon into crisp spring roll wrappers? It was not my place to suggest these things openly, but the ideas kept coming, so I kept scribbling them down.
Meanwhile, Christina and I got along on the surface, but we were mismatched, too. She wanted to see us as having a future; my cooking dreams and my secret threw up a wall that couldn’t possibly be broken down.
