THREE
Melting Point
I abruptly stopped cutting my pineapple, crossed my fingers, and headed toward the oven.
“Behind you!”
From my position at the pastry station, which sat perpendicular to the end of the hot line, I declared my intention to enter the area of Nobu’s kitchen that was lined with dangerously fiery ovens, broilers, fryers, and stovetop steamers on one side; refrigeration, cutting boards, and countertops on the other; and four cooks, elbow to elbow, down the narrow middle corridor, one per station, mediating and mastering their respective areas. During lunch and dinner service, the line was the belly of the kitchen beast, a fury of activity bulging with dervish-like cooks, flying sauté pans, and food in various stages of preparation. But dinner service was still more than an hour away, and the line was in a state of relative calm as the cooks readied their stations for the impending battle: 298 reservations that night. I’d been a full-time, paid employee of the restaurant for more than five weeks, but I was still intimidated by the line: its power, its muscle, its cloud of testosterone. Its sheer foreignness. I hated going there, but the only oven in the restaurant sat midway down its path, and I had to check my génoise, the sponge cake we used for the chocolate maki.
“Behind you!” I announced again, edging down the line as the cooks responded to my voice by leaning over their counters in order to let me by.
“Behind you!” I went on, trying to increase the volume of my voice. You have to speak loud! Yuki, an older Japanese cook, had said. People have to know where you are, when you are coming, what to expect! Maybe someone gonna bump into you! If you don’t tell them, maybe you gonna get burned! Yuki was the de facto leader of the hot line, and he scared me.
I had yet to suffer any physical injury, but the heads shaking in disappointed disgust and the harsh looks I’d received—especially from the sushi chefs, the stern, quiet commanders of the kitchen—had been injury enough. Speaking loudly and often did not come naturally to me, but then again, getting fired and allowing a golden opportunity to slip through my fingers wouldn’t feel very good, either. I tried my best.
“Open oven!” I continued loudly, lowering the heavy bottom-hinged door of the hulking oven that, when open, almost fully blocked the path of the line, dividing it in two.
I grabbed the first of the two wide, flat sheets of chocolate génoise from the oven, holding each side with a folded kitchen towel to protect my hands from the hot metal. Resting the sheet on the stovetop, I futilely checked the cakes for doneness, more for show than anything else. The génoise barely resisted the gentle press of my finger, confirming what the cake’s darkened edges (and my earlier panic) had already told me: I had overbaked the chocolate génoise. Again.
Quietly swallowing my disappointment and hoping that the cooks would not notice my failure, I pulled the other sheet from the oven and set it on top of the first slightly askew so that I could carry them both down to the basement to cool in the pastry prep area.
“Hot!” I yelled, balancing the large sheets of cake on one flat, upturned hand over my right shoulder, using my left hand to steady the edges. “Coming through!”
“Hot!” I insisted every few steps.
“Caliente! ” I barked in Spanish, one of the kitchen’s other languages, trying to keep my volume up, ignoring the inevitable response of “Como yo!” that came from someone in my path.
“Funny,” I said back. My usual response. I had yet to come up with a better comeback. Revealing any irritation or indignation, I knew, would only encourage or, worse, amuse.
“Hot behind!” I continued on my way.
“I’ll say!” came the answer. It was an exasperating, losing battle, and I hadn’t gone more than a few yards.
I turned the corner past the pot-washing station, taking a deep breath as I started down the precariously narrow stairway that felt to me, with two hot sheet pans awkwardly balanced over one shoulder, more like a death trap: the final obstacle before having to announce my failure to the two pastry chefs who had, in a moment of probable desperation, hired my wholly inexperienced ass. Whatever honeymoon period I’d enjoyed those first few exciting days was soon overshadowed by my ineptitude. What I did quickly learn was that nothing was easy in my new world, a world into which I’d so eagerly and happily jumped. Something as simple as walking through the kitchen required a specific vocabulary and a new attitude. And that was just the beginning.
I didn’t just make cakes anymore; I made génoise. To do this, I separated eggs and whipped the yolks with sugar until they reached ribbon stage. I sifted AP flour (not to be confused with bread or pastry flour) with cocoa powder before folding it into the yolk mixture. Virtually everything was weighed in grams, not measured in cups or teaspoons. After dividing the finished génoise batter between two parchment-lined sheet pans, I smoothed it as evenly as I could, given my rudimentary skill level, with an offset spatula. Finally, I baked the cakes. For how long? And this is where things really got tricky. Until they were done. That’s what Jemal said. Use your internal clock. Timers, I found out, were frowned upon as crutches used only by home cooks—loser amateurs in the outside world. Meanwhile, my own internal clock was in some serious need of calibration, as was the quickly eroding state of my ego.
“Coming through!”
I descended the stairs into the basement, a small crowded factory of preparatory movement. The sushi chefs dominated the basement until service started, at which point they had to take their places in the dining room behind the sushi bar. Until then, they lined up at long cutting boards stretched across deep stainless steel sinks, where they swiftly inspected and butchered fish and pummeled open par-cooked lobsters in order to remove their tender flesh, which, much to Jemal’s dismay, inevitably led to an indiscriminate spraying of milky lobster juice around the prep area. They sharpened their expensive knives often, sliding them swiftly back and forth across a small rectangle of a two-toned stone, swish-swash . . . swish-swash . . . swish-swash. For the most part, the sushi chefs kept to themselves, pausing in their private conversations only to bark out orders at Kim, the sushi commis, a low-level apprentice, who seemed to me more of a whipping boy. He did any and all of the sushi chefs’ dirty work, waiting for the day he would be deemed “ready” even to touch the fish, let alone begin learning the precision cuts. Clearly miserable, Kim was usually downright unpleasant with me. I got the feeling that his one joy in life was having someone in the kitchen who was lower down the totem pole than he was. When he did, on occasion, offer a rare friendly word, I was suspicious. As for the rest of the sushi chefs, they hardly ever acknowledged me with anything more than a sniff.
“Hot!”
Jemal and Mika looked up as I made my way toward them. I was still trying to figure out the hierarchy of our small pastry department. Both Jemal’s and Mika’s names were printed at the bottom of the dessert menu and both held the title of pastry chef, but I was confused about who was ultimately in charge. Jemal certainly assumed that position, with his air of confidence and absolute opinions, and it had been he, not Mika, who had officially offered me the job. But Mika had all the knowledge of traditional Japanese desserts, and it was she to whom the waiters, and sometimes even the sushi chefs, turned when they wanted to treat special customers to dessert, especially Japanese customers. I didn’t want to risk embarrassment or offend either one by making any assumptions, and there wasn’t anyone else I could ask. Linda, the woman through whom I had initially gotten the interview with Mika, still worked at Nobu, but she had little time for me now. It turned out that the job opening that she had told me about, the job I currently held, was actually her old job. She’d been cooking for years, a veteran of high-end restaurants like the River Café in Brooklyn, and had taken the lowly entry-level job of pastry cook just to get her foot in Nobu’s enviable door. The only way she could move onto the hot line, where she really wanted to be, was to find someone to take her position. Once my arrival facilitated that, she became focused on proving herself in the all-male kitchen and quickly began to make her mark. The few pointers she gave me were sporadic and, at the time, cryptic: Always stir a cooling pot . . . anticipate your chef’s next step . . . it’s all about timing. She might as well have been speaking Swahili. I navigated the hierarchy of the pastry department on my own.
Mika and Jemal were aesthetic opposites. Mika, Japanese and diminutive, was quiet and calculated in her movements and had a voice that cooed, never betraying even a tiny trace of arrogance. Jemal, on the other hand, multiply pierced and tattooed, towered above both of us and had a booming voice that he was not shy about using, despite frowns from the more reserved Japanese chefs in the kitchen, who kept their chatter to a minimum while prepping in the basement. He had a flop of hair that alternated between electric blue, platinum, and clown red. Before Nobu, the chef/owner of the eponymous restaurant, offered Jemal the job of pastry chef, he had had one final question: But why do you do this to your hair, your ears? Jemal was resolute and unapologetic with his answer: I’m a creative person. Despite having such diametrically opposed personalities, Mika and Jemal had an identical response to my overbaked génoise: an exasperated sigh. What are we going to do with her?
“Just put them on the rack,” said Jemal dismissively.
“I’m sorry,” I said, sliding the sheets onto the short cooling rack in the corner of the pastry area. What else could I say?
“Should I make another batch?” I offered. Jemal glanced at his watch.
“Just do the mise-en-place,” he said. “We have enough maki for tonight.”
“I’ll make it tomorrow,” offered Mika, inspecting my overdone cakes to see if they could be salvaged at all, maybe reincarnated as miniature rum balls as she’d done before. It was a small consolation.
“Is my chocolate melted yet?” asked Jemal, not looking up from the plastic stencil he was creating using an X-Acto knife and the top to a tub of sour cream.
Oh no. My eyes widened. The chocolate!
“I’ll check,” I said, trying to hide my panic. I had completely and utterly forgotten about the chocolate he’d asked me to melt. I was supposed to stir it often, making sure the heat remained low. Pastry items left unattended on the stove among the cooks’ many pots had the potential to get messed up, I’d been warned. Cooks don’t care about pastry. They don’t appreciate what we do. How long had it been? I cursed my faulty internal clock.
“Behind!” I yelled as I raced upstairs, back to the inside of the line. The dark chocolate was right where I’d left it: melting in a stainless steel bowl, resting on top of a large pot that had a few fingers of water in it . . . over high heat. Always melt chocolate gently, over low heat, Jemal had said. Getting it too hot changes the way it tastes, the way it acts. I was supposed to lower the heat to a slight simmer as soon as the water came up to a boil and then periodically check on it. How long ago was that?
I flicked off the burner. Using side towels, I grabbed the large bowl of chocolate and noticed that the edges of the chocolate looked dry and crusted over.
Oh no.
With horror, I noticed that the pot underneath was completely out of water and must have been for some time. For so long, in fact, that a tiny hole—an actual hole!—had been burned through its blackened and ashy bottom. I was in a stupor, holding the bowl of chocolate. This was worse than overbaking the génoise. Much worse.
“Oh . . . my . . . God!” said Herman, a line cook, looking over my shoulder and into the pot. He lingered over each word, accentuating his disbelief. He bit his lower lip and sucked in a long breath. I just stared at the pot.
“You made a hole?” asked another incredulously. I nodded. I had. I had made a hole. I really had. Not only had I burned the chocolate (failed task number two of the day), but I had actually burned it so successfully, forgotten about it so completely, that I had etched an actual hole in a metal pot.
I carried the bowl of chocolate to the pastry station at the end of the line, then went back to the pot where the rest of the cooks had gathered to witness the seemingly impossible.
“It’s ruined,” someone said, stating the obvious. Someone else whistled in disbelief. It was as if all the cooks, who until that point had tolerated the new girl, the girl with no experience who had to be taught everything, even how to speak up, were suddenly saying We knew it. I was frozen with humiliation. I was a tiny speck of dust on the filthy kitchen floor, where discarded scraps got swept aside and stepped on. Worse, I was going to be fired.
Not all my days had been that bad. Sure, I made lots of mistakes, most of them small, like forgetting to chiffonade the shiso leaf, one of the garnishes for the pastry station, or not slicing the Asian pears uniformly. Mika and Jemal had been patient, assuring me that with time, practice, and repetition I would be unable not to improve. And I was pretty good at doing service, quickly composing plates of already completed pastry items for anxious diners. My fruit plates still needed a fair amount of work, as did my chocolate writing, but by then, I was yelling at waiters—some of them by name, even—and getting them to pick up their orders. I still had some trouble with the more advanced production tasks (obviously) and with timing. But burning a hole through a pot? This might cancel out whatever minute strides I’d made. The dangerously thin ice I’d been on that day might have just cracked.
Mika appeared upstairs, noticed the circle of activity around the pot, and came to inspect the scene.
“You made a hole?” she said, looking at the pot, eyebrows raised in disbelief. Her accent made it sometimes difficult to discern the meaning of her tone. Was she amused? Accusing? Infuriated? I braced myself and nodded, waiting for the inevitable: my invitation to the door.
But then she began to laugh. She grabbed the pot with a side towel, brought it to the pot sink, and ran cold water over it before dropping it into the trash. She giggled quietly, shoulders shaking the entire time.
“I’ll pay for it,” I said sheepishly, finally looking her in the eye. She shook her head and let out a full laugh.
“You know,” she said smilingly, ignoring my offer, “everybody does something.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. I certainly had done something.
“When they start,” she explained. “Everybody does something. Makes some mistake.”
I just stared at her.
“It’s okay,” she assured me. She looked at her watch. “You finish setting up the station for service.” She set her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll tell Jemal. Don’t worry.” She took the bowl of ruined chocolate downstairs.
Still wary of the security of my position in the restaurant but thankful, so thankful, for the encouraging and ever-supportive Mika, I returned to the pastry station, which contained nothing I could burn or overcook. I finished cutting the pineapple I’d left sitting in a juicy pool, then picked through a bouquet of mint, plucking out the small, perfect sprigs for garnish—two tasks I could perform with relative confidence.
Even though I was the lowest member of the kitchen staff and felt like a complete failure, I reminded myself that I was working, unbelievable as it seemed, in one of New York City’s best restaurants. Even the really bad days, and they couldn’t possibly get any worse than today, were worth all the humiliation and failure.
Once the station was set up completely and I’d triple-checked everything, I made a small cornet out of parchment paper and filled it with melted chocolate. After folding over the top edges of the paper cone to seal its wide opening, I snipped a small hole at the bottom and spent the next fifteen minutes practicing my chocolate writing so that I’d be able to write “Happy Birthday” and other messages that customers sometimes requested with their desserts. Holding the cornet about an inch above a sheet of parchment, I tried to apply even pressure as I wrote the alphabet in cursive as a single continuous word: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. I needed to get used to the feel of the chocolate, the way it flowed and responded to the movement of my hand—the key to good chocolate writing, according to Jemal. Repetition breeds improvement. Over and over I practiced, waiting for the small printer on my station to spit out dessert orders.
It was Friday, and I looked forward to a two-day break, determined to return on Monday revitalized, more focused, more capable. I looked forward, as well, to my weekend at culinary school, where, after only a month, I had been comforted to find that I was one of the better students in the class and one of the very few working in a high-end restaurant, already gaining real experience. It was a small consolation.