Yes, Chef, page 18
None of the Mesa guys was more critical to Jan than his forty-year-old Bronx-born sous-chef and right-hand man, Larry Manheim. Larry was a good cook, but he was also like the kitchen’s super: When the garbage needed to go out, Larry got someone to take it out. When the fish guy came by, Larry talked to him. This left Jan free to concentrate on developing new dishes. A growing buzz in the city about Aquavit’s new chef was starting to make everyone on the team hopeful.
I got hired on to join this ragtag band because Håkan had the wisdom to see through the naive bravado of my letter. I was talking shit for sure, but at least my goals were in line with his, my love for the city came through, and, underpinning it all, I had demonstrated my ability to contribute during my internship there the previous year; now that I’d been on the cruise ships and in France, I would be only a stronger worker, and my European training would be something neither Jan nor Larry could offer.
Jan didn’t come from a standard fine-dining point of view, and he didn’t give a shit about France. Instead, he looked to Latin America, the Southwest, and, to a lesser extent, Asia. He didn’t make classical stocks; as a go-to herb, he used cilantro instead of thyme. Avocado was a staple. If the best flavor was to be found in a jar, Jan took the jar. If he could have done Mesa Grill with a Swedish flair, he would have, but the problem was that those flavors were often too far away from each other. There were dishes where you could meld them, like a blue corn pancake with gravlax, but the balance he sought was a challenging one to strike.
What I loved about Jan’s food was that it was relentlessly flavor-driven. He might never have been to France, but the upside of that was that he wasn’t hamstrung by tradition. He relied on his palate, and he was gifted with a brilliant one. He loved the bold chilies of the Southwest, but he also embraced Asian flavors like miso and galangal, and those seemed to be a natural match with Swedish ingredients. Having been to the source countries for those ingredients while on the cruise ships, I often felt like I had a closer understanding than he did of the flavors he played with, but I was not there to challenge Jan, I was there to work for him. I came in early, worked hard, and kept my mouth shut.
Jan seemed to like me from the start. Maybe it was because I was black; before the end of our first conversation, he made sure to let me know that he was married to an African American woman. I smiled politely, but thought, So what? How is that relevant to me? You wouldn’t believe how often people say things like this. What really impressed me about his wife was not her color, but that she did the window displays for Bergdorf Goodman. I had passed that store almost every day the first time I lived in New York. For a broke but style-conscious guy, Bergdorf’s was a fantasyland, and I knew every inch of those windows, studying the fabrics and colors and silhouettes as they changed from season to season. One day, I’ll go inside, I thought.
Or maybe Jan liked me because he saw I was totally comfortable in my role as a supporter, and he needed support big-time: Jan hadn’t become a name yet, and that made it hard for him to draw experienced cooks. Aside from Larry and Jan and a few of their Mesa Grill friends, Aquavit’s line relied on recent culinary school grads, young guys who might someday be good cooks, but who came to the restaurant with no chops whatsoever.
In my first weeks, Jan regularly invited me out after work to party with him and the rest of the Aquavit crew. “C’mon, Marcus,” he’d say. “Join us for one round.”
I went out a couple of times, while I was still learning people’s names, but I cut that off almost right away. I liked the people I worked with, but I wasn’t into the expensive champagne or the coke that often found their way into late-night escapades. I wanted to be taken seriously, and going out to bars and clubs and strip joints and getting trashed seemed like a good way to end up in an unprofessional situation. Plus, the last thing I needed was to make an ass out of myself in front of my employer. It seemed particularly crazy to me when waiters and cooks would go out with Jan and get wasted. That promised way more downside than upside. If I went out at all, it was with my old crew of Mes and Sam and Teddy. If I acted the fool with them, so be it. They didn’t sign my paycheck.
I’m glad I drew that line, too. It made everything simpler. I liked where Jan was going with his food, and we talked a lot about how he was going to tweak the menu for spring, what dishes to start introducing in March. My classical training came in handy when we were figuring out how to put a new dish into production, and he was always willing to test a recipe that I’d come up with.
“Show me that duck dish you’ve been talking about,” he said one night after service.
“I’ll have it for you tomorrow,” I said.
The next morning, I plunged a couple of duck breasts in salted water and weighed them down with a plate to keep them submerged, exactly the way my grandmother taught me to cure meat and fish. Six hours later, I took one breast out of the brine and sautéed it in honey and soy. I served a slice to Jan, and he chewed it, closing his eyes and frowning a little as he chewed.
“Nice, but let’s try adding another layer,” he said, and we sautéed the second breast, this time adding in lemongrass and Kaffir lime leaves. It was fantastic.
“This goes on the menu,” Jan said.
Things were going well for all of us. Jan posted every article that mentioned Aquavit on the bulletin board outside the changing room, and the mentions were consistently positive. Valentine’s Day fell on a Tuesday that year, but we were full to the gills, and that put everyone in a good mood. Two days later, Jan came into the kitchen carrying a curly piece of fax paper. “Check it out, man,” he said as he handed me the page. It was an advance copy of a New York magazine article about Jan and the restaurant, praising his leadership after only six months at the helm. His charisma had come across to the journalist, too, who dubbed Jan an “MTV-style” chef. Jan was glowing.
We had a big pre-theater seating that Saturday night, and our middle station cook called in sick at the last minute. This was a problem. Middle station is sometimes called the friturier or “fry cook,” and he not only does the frying but also helps out the guys on either side of him, who are usually meat and fish. We were short-staffed so Jan tapped a kid named Allen to take his place. Allen was a culinary student doing an internship with us. He was probably nineteen years old, and on a good day, he would have been the third-level helper over in the garde manger station. He probably saw this as his shot, and besides, how could he possibly say no?
“You can’t fuck up,” Jan warned him. “Not tonight.”
“I got it, Chef,” he said, a little too eagerly. “I got it.”
Allen did not have it. He was too young and inexperienced to hold it together, he got swamped, and he went down hard during our early service. He hadn’t done enough prep, and he was running out of supplies while diners started to worry about whether they’d make it to their seats before the curtain went up. Allen lost track of his orders, and if he stopped cooking to catch up on prep, a dice that would take a practiced cook three minutes took Allen fifteen, and that was twelve minutes we didn’t have to spare. The meat and fish cooks stopped asking for Allen’s help, and the rest of us tried to help dig him out, but it was no use. For a good half hour, we couldn’t get meals out the door in any semblance of order. Guests complained; pissed-off waiters brought dishes back that weren’t cooked right. When that seating finally cleared out, and we had a half-hour lull before regular dinner service heated up, Jan exploded.
“What the fuck are you trying to do to me?” he yelled at Allen, who stood in front of the walk-in with his shoulders bowed, trying to take up as little space as possible. Jan kicked at the refrigerator door with one of his Doc Martens. The handle of the walk-in broke off and clattered to the floor. That only unleashed a new torrent of curses, some now in Swedish, capped off by Jan grabbing fistfuls of Allen’s shirt and slamming him into the stainless walk-in door.
“Why doesn’t Chef just fire him?” one of the meat cooks muttered. “It would be a lot less painful for everyone.”
The rest of service was no less disastrous, and when we finally finished breaking down the kitchen for the night, I was more than ready to clock out. Our chef and the usual crew were headed out for drinks, but I politely declined. I was going to sleep.
“See you Monday,” I said to Jan on my way out.
Sunday was my day off and that Monday, I headed back into work, as usual. Aquavit was across the street from the Peninsula hotel, and on my way in, I said hi to my pal Joey, the hotel doorman.
“Yo, Marcus,” he said as I passed by. “I heard there was an accident at Aquavit.”
I didn’t pay him much attention, went in the front doors, and signed in. Two cooks came out of the service elevator, heading for the exit—the opposite direction from where they should have been going.
“Where are you clowns headed?” I asked.
“Jan died, man. The restaurant’s closed.”
Died? The words didn’t sink in. I kept moving.
I got in the elevator, went down one flight, and walked numbly through the dining room. The seven-story atrium was as beautiful as ever, with water purring down a sculpted copper surface against one wall and a giant mobile suspended above, a colorful smattering of kites borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art. Once I stepped into the subbasement, I saw Adam, the restaurant manager and one of Jan’s closest friends, sitting on a stool, alone. Adam never sat still, but there he was, staring blankly, holding a cup of coffee in both hands but not drinking it, tears running down his cheeks. Then I got it. Jan was gone.
EIGHTEEN LIFE AFTER DEATH
“VI SITTER ALLA I EN KNEPIG PLATS HÄR,” HÅKAN SAID AS THE TWO OF us sat in the empty restaurant. We are all in a difficult place here. It was only late afternoon, but grief and winter’s dark blanketed the room. Someone had brought us a basket of crispbread and a ramekin filled with caviar spread. Håkan dipped a knife into the putty-colored roe and smeared it across a cracker, then left it on his plate, untouched. I pulled the napkin from the place setting in front of me, folding it and refolding it.
Håkan didn’t waste words: No one in-house was in a position to take over. It was enough to have gambled on Jan, a thirty-two-year-old first-timer, so Håkan would be going to Sweden in search of someone to fill the position. Could I deal with a new boss?
“Yes.”
In the meantime, Larry was going to hold down the fort. He was older, and a natural manager. As for me: Jan had come to Håkan only a few days before his death to say he wanted me to become his sous-chef. They hadn’t gotten around to telling me, but now, here it was. I could take the promotion, but only if I were willing to take marching orders from Larry.
“No problem.”
We reopened the next day. Larry, who was probably Jan’s best friend, tried his hardest to set aside his feelings and work as if nothing had happened. He kept the team together by writing up the shift schedule, ordering the food, and showing everyone that it was OK to keep pushing forward. For the first couple of days after Jan’s death, the rest of us were in shock, distracted, going through the motions. The food suffered.
“Get your shit together!” Larry shouted. “We’ve got people to feed.”
I honestly believe the restaurant wouldn’t have survived if Larry hadn’t stepped up and taken charge. He was so steady that Håkan worried he was in some kind of unhealthy pattern of denial, and suggested he take a few days off so he wouldn’t crash and burn. Larry brushed off Håkan’s suggestion, reminding him that when you come from a rough neighborhood like he had, tragedies happened.
“Listen,” Larry said. “Most of my friends from growing up are dead or died when we were kids. This is bad, but I’ve been through it before. I need to keep working.”
Larry was a rock, but there was no way to completely smooth over the loss of his talented, charismatic friend. Without Jan at the helm, the other Mesa guys started heading back to Bobby’s kitchens—slowly at first, then like rats fleeing a sinking ship. We lost people every week, and we didn’t have the pull in the job-hunting market to bring in anyone new. The staff grew leaner and leaner, and we eventually turned every dishwasher and porter we had into a line cook. I spent a lot of time teaching people how to chop onions without hurting themselves.
To any visitor passing through over those next couple of months, it would have looked like Larry was running the show with me as his right hand. But there were three of us heading up the kitchen, the third person being the ghost of Jan. We’d be working on the spring menu or trying to streamline the workflow, and somebody would always bring him into the discussion.
“But Jan would never …”
“I don’t think that’s where Jan was going.… ”
“Jan didn’t really like …”
Larry ran the show and talked to the press and the fish guy and the dishwashers; I worked on the menu and filled in wherever he needed me to. We fell into a good groove, but even though I respected him tremendously, I sometimes felt he didn’t understand Swedish cuisine. In fact, he’d never been to Sweden, which made it hard to come up with new dishes. Larry would go on years later to have a great career in Las Vegas, but it wouldn’t be in a Swedish place. Sweden wasn’t in his soul.
Larry’s reference point was New York, and after a month or so, it was clear he was headed back to work for his fellow born-and-bred New Yorker, Bobby Flay. Larry said he’d stick with us until Håkan found the new guy, but then he would be gone. I could have left, too, but I didn’t want to quit on a place that had been so good to me. Plus, what would I go back to? I didn’t have a green card yet, so I would have had to head back to Sweden. I was here, why not try to make it work? Håkan had tremendous business smarts and a huge passion for the restaurant, and I wanted to see who he came up with to fill Jan’s spot. I kept my nose to the grindstone, working with the younger cooks, developing a menu with Larry, and solving problems as they came up.
Around the end of April, Larry decided he couldn’t wait any longer, and officially left to go back to work for Bobby. Håkan still hadn’t found Jan’s replacement.
“Can you keep it together for another month?” Håkan asked. “Even without Larry?”
“Yes,” I said, not knowing how in the hell I would live up to that answer. Håkan flew over to Sweden, Larry left, and I kept the kitchen going, counting heavily on two young guys, Nicholas and another Marcus. Somehow, we kept the walls from crashing down around us.
When Håkan got back, he called me into his office.
“Have you found your chef?” I asked.
“I believe I have.”
“Who is it?”
“You, Marcus. I want you to be the new executive chef of Aquavit.”
WE NEVER TALKED ABOUT it with the press but Jan’s death was drug related. He had had a heart attack and he was only thirty-two years old. In many New York restaurant kitchens, the nineties still felt very much like the eighties. Jan’s crew partied hard.
In France and Switzerland, we went out drinking after work, but nothing like what these guys did. Giggs wouldn’t have tolerated us not being clear the next day. But with Jan and some of the people he hired, the late nights and drugs brought with it the usual tolls: mood swings, spotty attendance, forgetfulness; sometimes a guy would totally blank on the specials. So I had to not only rebuild the kitchen but send a message that Aquavit was no longer a party kitchen.
My one condition for accepting the job was that I be allowed to hire the sous-chef of my choice. I took inventory of everyone I’d ever worked with, thought about where they were and how well they’d blend into the somewhat chaotic picture at Aquavit. In the end, there was only one person who fit the bill: a Swede named Nils Norén. He was a couple of years older than I and an up-and-coming chef in Stockholm. He worked at an excellent restaurant called KB, the first Swedish restaurant ever to earn a Michelin macaron. Nils had come to stage at Aquavit earlier that year, and in the two weeks he spent in New York, we developed an unusually good rapport; I knew we’d be able to work together. We not only had Sweden in common, we were both classically trained, so Nils understood how to use France as a reference point but not the end game. We also shared a frustration with the Swedish attitude toward fine dining, which generally hadn’t opened up much beyond traditional French and traditional Swedish.
A stage usually entails observation and schlepping, but Aquavit was short-staffed, so Jan put Nils on the middle station right across from me while I held down the fish station. That proximity gave us a chance to observe each other under pressure. Nils was controlled and specific in his work habits and he was extremely dedicated, but he was also a free spirit; he listened to reggae and had traveled to many places, including Asia and South Africa. That balance struck a chord with me, so as soon as Håkan gave me the thumbs-up, I placed the call. I expected Nils to give a measured, Swedish response, to thank me and tell me he’d consider the offer and get back to me shortly, but he said just one word.
“Absolutely.”
It was my first hire and it turned out to be a great one; we worked together for ten years. We never once fought. Nils shared my desire to bring new flavors into the restaurant, and yet we both knew we had to do it without freaking out Håkan or the regular customer base. One of the burdens of taking over the kitchen was that Aquavit was known for many classic Swedish dishes: Herring, gravlax, and meatballs were never going to come off the menu. I hadn’t cooked this kind of classic Swedish cuisine since Belle Avenue, and as I spent more time with these dishes, my fondness for them returned. I also felt a need to bring them up-to-date.
The liberation of being in New York was that the customers who made up our base didn’t have extensive knowledge of traditional Swedish food—they just knew what they liked. I saw that as my opportunity to turn the menu around. I could make the herring less salty; I could add a peppery heat to the smoked salmon; and even in the case of the hovmästarsås—a sweet dill mustard sauce, served with gravlax, that was almost a religion in Sweden—I made adjustments, aiming for a deeper, nuttier flavor. Adding actual nuts would have been costly and introduced textural challenges, so I used brewed espresso instead. I started testing out the sauce in dining-room specials, and the response was strong. Eventually, it became the sauce we used for both herring and gravlax. Later, I even took away the chopped dill that had always been a given on the plate. I felt it was a cliché.
