Yes, Chef, page 20
I was one of the lucky ones. I was an immigrant, first of all, here by choice and not a refugee escaping persecution. Not only was I here by choice, but Håkan was sponsoring my immigration process, and because I had a particular professional talent, as a Swedish chef coming to work in a Swedish restaurant, I moved to the front of the line in terms of processing citizenship. Still, I’d have to wait more than a year for the papers to go through, during which time I wasn’t allowed to leave the United States, but my parents supported me and we agreed that missing a few holidays at home seemed like a small price to pay. Even though my own situation was relatively stable, many of my friends were on edge.
I remember going up to the Bronx late one night with a few of the African guys I’d met through Central Park soccer. One of them had arranged to pay $200 for a fake green card, and he’d gotten a call that it was ready for pickup. Three of us hopped on the Seventh Avenue express train and rode up into the Bronx to Grand Concourse, where we switched to another train. When we got out, it was about ten p.m., and we followed directions that led us to a small bodega with a red sign and blazing yellow light bulbs outside. The guy who had business to conduct went into a back room, and I hung by the counter, where a middle-aged Puerto Rican woman with hair pulled back into a ponytail perched on a stool, flipping through a Spanish-language version of the National Enquirer.
At the end of the counter sat a glass hot case, with three shelves inside. The top shelf held a tray of half-moon-shaped pastries.
“Excuse me,” I said to the woman. I pointed to the turnovers and raised my eyebrows.
“Empanadillas,” she said. Mini beef turnovers.
The second shelf had a tray of what looked like fried skin. I pointed at them.
“Chicharrones,” she said. Fried pork rinds.
The bottom shelf held a slow-roasted pork shoulder that had clearly been heavily rubbed with spices. Its skin was crispy and big chunks of it had been hacked off and sat next to it, the flesh looking tender enough to fall apart in your mouth.
“Pernil,” she said. Roasted suckling pork.
“Por favor,” I said, nodding at the roast. I dug into my pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill, and handed it over. She pulled out a Styrofoam container and, with a fork, began poking through the tray. From what I could figure, she was making me an assortment, equal parts crunchy skin and interior flesh, some fatty parts, some lean. I saw streaks of spices that had been pushed way down deep into the flesh. When the woman finished her careful selection, she reached for a bag.
“No, no,” I said, and pantomimed raising a fork to my mouth. For the first time, she smiled, and she rifled through a gray tub behind her, pulling out a white plastic fork.
Who knows how long that roast had been sitting in the warming case? I didn’t care. The skin still crackled between my teeth. The meat, tender and moist, fell apart in my mouth, and I instinctively started to break down the components of the flavors involved. Garlic, of course, right up there in the front. Cilantro, peppers, tomatoes, but what else?
“Que?” I said, pointing to the little deposits of seasonings that had sunk into crevices in the skin.
“Sofrito,” she answered, then pointed to herself, identifying herself as the chef. “Mi sofrito.”
THE YEAR THAT FOLLOWED the Times review was full of learning curves, none steeper than figuring out how to staff a kitchen team. I didn’t have a following like David Bouley or Daniel Boulud; Culinary Institute of America grads weren’t lining up outside my door, begging to work at Aquavit. No one was lining up outside my door, actually. On top of that, the pace Nils and I set was too much for some of the employees already in-house, and every Friday for six months, it seemed like I had to fire someone who couldn’t keep up. One ethnically stereotypical but true fact: I never had to fire any of the Latinos on my crew; they worked harder than I did.
The guys I booted from my kitchen were mostly the entitled culinary school types who thought they could pick and choose their tasks. One exception was a kid named Paulie from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He was an Italian American kid, big gold jewelry, Brooklyn accent, cursing in Italian, the whole central casting deal. But Paulie had an enormous love for food. He always stayed focused; when everybody else went down, he stayed afloat. Paulie was ready to work for me every day of the week and he hinted that he preferred the life of a restaurant kitchen to, as he put it, “the family business.”
“If I’m not working here,” he told me after volunteering for two double shifts in a row, “then I just have to go work in my uncle’s butcher shop, which doesn’t sell much meat, if you know what I mean.”
Another kid I respected was from Saint Lucia, a guy named Nelly. More than one of Nelly’s brothers were drug dealers, but Nelly was clean, and he worked his ass off. For these guys, working in a kitchen was a relief, a refuge. I understood. I had never been a boy from the hood, but I’d found life in Göteborg to be stifling in its own way. Anyplace where people do exactly as their fathers and brothers have done, it’s hard to make your own way.
Over time, more Swedes came to work for us, and they almost never had an issue when it came to their work ethic. They were talented chefs and hungry to go beyond the narrow confines of Sweden’s fine-dining world, so they were game for whatever Nils and I asked. Like me, a number were the children of academics, but where many of them felt they were breaking the mold of their parents, I felt like I was simply trying to live up to being the man my father was, a man who pursued his deepest passion. Only one of the Svenskar was a bad apple, a kid from Stockholm who’d come across the Atlantic in search of the world’s biggest party. I followed Paul Giggs’s example and tossed him right away. The rest aspired to make something of themselves, to turn this experience to their advantage once they got home. Sure enough, a number of those guys have gone on to have great careers all over the world, starting restaurants in Sweden and cooking at great hotels throughout Europe.
Our crew took shape as a band of misfits who probably wouldn’t have fit in anywhere else. That, in itself, made us tight.
BY THE MIDDLE OF THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, I was starting to feel pretty well established. Our staff was solid, business was good. Paulie had worked super hard for me over the last six months, and I wanted to reward him by sending him out to stage. Stages are one of my favorite traditions in the restaurant world. First of all, half of who we are as chefs has to do with the chefs who came before us. So the stage shows respect for wisdom. Second, the fact that if you do well for your chef he’ll send you away still strikes me as one of the most generous professional acts I’ve heard of. If you were at a law firm and they wanted to reward you, they’d probably give you a bonus or some time off. But in cooking, serious cooks understand that there’s nothing more valuable than the chance to learn something new.
“How would you like to spend some time working for Bobby Flay?” I asked Paulie.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he answered.
I took that as a yes.
I called up Bobby and told him I had a young guy who was really good; would it be OK for him to spend a week in Bobby’s kitchen?
“Let me think about it,” Bobby said. “I’ll get back to you.”
A few days later, I got his answer. “No.”
I hung up the phone in shock. I thought I had pull. I had no pull. Not only did I not have pull, but I had to go back to Paulie and explain how much pull I didn’t have. It took me a long time to realize that a great review from Ruth Reichl had signaled only that I was a talent to watch. In order to be a fixture on the New York dining scene, to be able to call someone like Bobby Flay and ask him for a favor, I needed to show I had staying power. Sure enough, a year later, when Felicia Lee wrote a nice piece about me and my food for The New York Times, Bobby was the first to call and congratulate me. I was solidly on the scene now, he said. Only then did other chefs begin to approach me at events—including Patrick Clark, who’d always seemed to steer away from me before the article appeared—but Bobby had led the pack.
“You’re here, man,” he said. “You’re here to stay.”
I’ve gotten to know Bobby really well since then, and he is one of the coolest, best chefs in New York. He is honest about his food, takes a lot of pleasure from his work, and has been extremely helpful in guiding my career. I can’t fault him for thinking, back then, that I hadn’t earned the right to ask what I was asking for.
This was before Las Vegas had its mega–restaurant boom, where regional chefs could supersize their efforts in the Nevada desert with corporate backing and high-rolling customers. All Bobby had were a couple of restaurants in Manhattan. All David Bouley had was his place in TriBeCa. I’m not saying this to minimize their talents; I’m just pointing out that the world was smaller and, in some ways, the competition was fiercer. Making it in New York was The Shit. Capital T, capital S. And I had to work my way up, just like everybody else.
I’d overreached with Bobby, but I’d made Paulie a promise and I intended to make good on it. I had no choice but to throw a Hail Mary: Georges Blanc. I wrote a letter, sent it off, and to my amazement, they said yes. Small problem: Paulie’s dad didn’t want him to go. He wasn’t about to cough up the three thousand dollars so his son could go poach chicken. So I took matters into my own hands: I decided to host a fundraiser. I took over an Ethiopian place I’d been to a bunch of times and put on a forty-dollar tasting dinner: roasted duck salad with sweet potatoes; jam and hazelnut vinaigrette; crispy salmon with orange roasted fennel and purple spinach; and for dessert, warm chocolate cake with balsamic sorbet and candied pecans. I won’t say I leveraged my boss status to get Aquavit staff to come, but I did strongly encourage attendance. The house was packed, and we got Paulie’s money for him.
TWENTY THE FUNERALS WE MISS
ON AUGUST 11, 1996, MY FATHER, LENNART SAMUELSSON, PASSED AWAY. He was at home in Göteborg; I was at work in New York. He’d been struggling with the aftermath of a stroke, but then he took a sudden turn and was gone. I couldn’t leave the States to go to his funeral without jeopardizing my immigration status. My mother said she understood, my sisters said they understood, but honestly, it would take me years to say that I understood the choice I made. All I know is that I did what, by now, came naturally: I crammed my grief and fear into a little box and closed it up until I was ready to deal. There was no time, I told myself, to make a meal out of this misery. Nothing could get in the way of my cooking.
That night, I pulled out a copy of the letter my father had written, before he knew me, to the adoption agency:
April 3, 1972
Dear Maj-Britt!
Adoption Center in Stockholm, which helps us with the adoption of Fantaye and Kassahun, has asked us to write you and tell you about our family and our living situation. We do it here and with the help of some photographs. First, however, we want to thank you for the work that you perform and wish you success!
We are three people in the family. Father, Lennart, born on Smögen in Bohuslän in 1932, first studied to be a public school teacher. Then studied further for a master’s degree. He has had employment as an elementary school teacher, teacher, lecturer, and is since 1969 a state geologist and director of the Geological Survey of Sweden, Göteborg Branch. During three months in 1971, I was a UNESCO expert at the Center for Applied Geology in Jeddah.
My work consists of the production of geological maps and my work for the next ten years will be in western Sweden. I also conduct lectures and classes in geology at the University of Göteborg. My income is between 5,000–6,000 kr a month [$1,041–1,250 USD].
Mom, Anne Marie, was born in Hälsingborg in 1928. After practical school, she was employed as clerk and cashier until 1964. At that time we bought a house and she has since been a housewife.
In December 1965, we had a foster child, Anna, who was then fifteen months and now is seven and a half years. Her father is colored and mother Swedish. Both live in Sweden but live apart. We have good, although somewhat sporadic, relations with both. We wanted to adopt Anna, but the biological mother has hesitated and we have allowed things to be. The biological parents, however, both expressed their desire that Anna should grow up with us. Anna is a healthy and happy child and looks forward with great expectations to some smaller siblings! She has always found it easy to have good friends and playmates.
As a family, we are also a good dog (collie) and an equally nice cat, both very friendly toward children.
We live in a child-friendly residential area, Puketorp, of about three hundred families. There is a surrounding forest, where we hike in the summer and ski and saucer in winter. A couple of small lakes with crystal-clear waters are also in the woods, where we go skating and swimming. Puketorp is in Partille municipality, one mile east of Göteborg.
Our site is about seven hundred square meters and a mostly flat lawn with a playhouse and sandbox, so children tend to gather with us and tumble about properly, jumping and playing with balls and croquet.
The house consists of three rooms, hall, kitchen, bathroom + basement with 2 rooms, hall, combination toilet-shower room, laundry room, boiler room. We plan to build a new house next year, on forest land ten min. down the road from us.
Anna’s paternal grandmother has houses on Smögen, so we usually go to the archipelago and the sea when we wish to change from the forest.
Her maternal grandmother and grandfather live in the same residential area that we do, just five minutes away, and they are very good with small children and are retired, so they have plenty of time and also help us if we need babysitting or care of animals when we cannot take them with us.
I do not know if this data is sufficient, if not, please let me hear from you and we will respond again.
Our dearest greetings
Our dearest greetings. That letter marked the beginning of our life together—my father and I—and it did not seem right, nor possible, that the journey was over before I had become chef of my own restaurant, before I had proven to him that I could do it. My father and I were meant to taste the world together. I wanted to take him to Jackson Heights in Queens so he could see why they called the neighborhood Curry Heights. I wanted him to try real fried chicken in Harlem. I wanted to chow down on po’boys with him in New Orleans. I imagined us eating hot dogs and beer at Yankee Stadium and conch fritters in Florida. My father was sixty-four when he died. Maybe that was why I took the news with what must have seemed like cold resolve: The numbers simply did not add up. I thought, I hoped, that we had as much time ahead of us as we did behind us. It seemed unfathomable to me that we did not.
When Mormor died, it had been easy to feel connected to her at work. Any kitchen could invoke the spirit of Helga; the smell of chicken roasting, the smell of fresh herbs, the sound of onions sizzling in the pan could conjure up my grandmother and make her seem close. My father, though, had been an academic, a bit of a taskmaster, a conservative Swedish man who had nonetheless crossed continents to find a son and love him. My relationship with my father was more complicated and the sweetest parts of it—fishing at the summer house in Smögen—felt outside of my reach. My father’s death left me rudderless; I’d guided myself by him for as long as I could remember. He was the one who taught me how to read a map, bait a hook, make a fire, fix a bike, pitch a tent. He taught me, by example, that some principles, no matter how clichéd they sound, really do mean something. Hard work is its own reward. Integrity is priceless. Art does feed the soul.
I went to work at Aquavit the morning after he died, and told nobody about what had happened. I had responsibilities to the restaurant, to Håkan, to my staff and my customers. This is the way restaurants work. No matter what happens in the course of a day—death, birth, celebration, love, ruin—you show up for your next shift. For some people this becomes a burden, but that constancy over the years has kept me grounded. And it was Lennart who taught me how.
I talked to my mother every couple of days, worried she would fall apart without Lennart in her life. But she did not; she turned out to be a lot stronger than I’d given her credit for. She kept on, so I kept on. For six months after my father died, I didn’t stop working. If anything, to avoid dealing, I picked up the pace. I was working fourteen, fifteen hours a day. I was numb. By then, I’d changed apartments. I still lived in Hell’s Kitchen, but Magnus had moved in with his boyfriend—his brother-in-law, technically—and I’d moved in with Mes. One night I came home from work. It was late, but Mes was still up. We sat on our couch, watching MTV. We were talking about nothing in particular and, suddenly, I just lost it. I cried, for the first time since my father’s death and for the first time since I was a child. Mes sat with me, listening as I tried to repeat every single wise word, funny story, and lesson in manhood that my father had shared with me. When I finally went to bed, it was almost dawn.
NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE, whether you’ve got a small town Italian restaurant or you’re an Iron Chef, you want to create a signature dish—one you create or execute in a way that becomes forever associated with you. All chefs put our own twist on the food we serve, but a signature dish requires more than merely customizing. I considered many of the changes I’d implemented at Aquavit to be mere tweaks, whether it was changing the size of the meatballs, pulling back on the smoking of the salmon, or updating a mustard sauce by adding the nutty accent of espresso. The truth is, most chefs will never come up with a signature dish because it takes luck and time and the ability to look at things in a fresh, new way.
