Spiced

For months after starting at Nobu, I was so consumed with the work details of my new job (and with school on the weekends) that I didn’t—couldn’t—consider the consequences my new job that I didn‘t—couldn’t—consider the consequences my new job would have on my social life. Slowly, though, as I became better versed in my daily responsibilities and my new environment, I came up for air and began to notice the toll it was taking. I hadn’t seen my roommates (and two closest friends) forever. We began to communicate via scribbled notes. Phone bill due . . . Drinks on Sunday . . . Drinks ever? By the time I got home from work, they were both in bed, and when I woke up late the next morning, they were long gone. Nearly every single friend from my former life (as I was beginning to think of it) was in the same nine-to-five boat. I feared I was destined to a personal life consisting of solo breakfasts and lonely late-night subway rides. I realized that if I was going to have any social life at all, I needed to fully embrace my new hours, my new coworkers, my new lifestyle.

After I’d been at Nobu just over two months, we received a three-star review from the New York Times. I didn’t yet understand the enormous importance of such an event and what exactly it meant for the restaurant, but the accolade was cause for great celebration and many congratulations. Every employee received a letter of thanks for his or her contribution to the success of the restaurant (my contribution!), and our sister restaurant hosted a post-shift party in our honor.

The party was my first chance to socialize with my coworkers away from the ticking printer. Outside of the nervous, urgent energy of the kitchen, the waiters became individual people rather than anonymous waiter drones, and they, in turn, discovered that I actually knew words other than pick and up. Even the cooks relaxed a little and treated me less like an annoying little sister they had to keep an eye on and more like just another member of the kitchen. I happily joined the party, clinking glasses, downing beer, making small talk. I was finally experiencing my first taste of a long-standing restaurant world tradition: the after-work drink.

After that party, the cooks lost their icy edge but remained uninterested in relaxing with me over a drink after work. And who could blame them? They worked doubles and had to be back at work the following morning by ten a.m. But the waiters were a different story, and waiters, in all honesty, were much more interesting to hang out with. They were, after all, mostly artists, writers, dancers, or actors, and much more like my other friends than the cooks. The waiters were almost always up for a drink or a late-night snack. And in New York City, the city that never sleeps, there was no shortage of bars or restaurants to accommodate us.

Like most of the waitstaff at Nobu, Kelly was Japanese. Early on, I knew her only as one more waiter whizzing through the kitchen, dropping off dirty dishes, and picking up freshly plated desserts. Over time, though, as my comfort level at Nobu grew, so did my friendships. Kelly gradually became part of my small circle of friends, and we often ended up in the same place for drinks or late-night meals. She’d given herself an American name (for simplicity’s sake, I guess) that was easier to remember than the rest of what were to me very exotic names. Her first choice had been Kiki, but someone else had told her it sounded too much like the name of a stripper.

After a while, our mutual friend, Misa, began dropping hints that Kelly liked me, which was great, since I liked her, too; she was easy to be with and eternally welcoming. But the hints continued, and Misa started relaying cryptic messages, even when Kelly was sitting right next to me: She hopes this candy will be like a magic, she said suggestively to me one late night after we’d just stuffed ourselves at a twenty-four-hour restaurant in Chinatown. Then she handed me a small candy that Kelly had given her. The two of them sat there smiling at me and then said something in Japanese. Magic? Magic love candy? I never knew if I was completely understanding correctly, or if something was getting lost in translation. I felt uncomfortable about coming right out and asking Kelly if she was flirting with me; I just ate the candy.

It wasn’t a complete surprise to find Kelly still in the dining room when I returned upstairs in my street clothes after finishing work one night. But this time, it was just her—no Misa, Hiroko, Jun, or Sunny. Just Kelly. We agreed to go for a drink.

“I only know girl bars,” she said, feigning apology, though I took it as a message, loud and clear. She had been flirting with me, and I had a decision to make. Do I put an end to the harmless flirting, or do I go through the door she was clearly holding open for me?

I’d always had boyfriends up to that point and had, in fact, just broken up with one, a casualty of my new hours and job focus. Outside of idle fantasy, I had never really considered the possibility of a girlfriend. Then again, I had never ruled it out, either. In fact, I prided myself on trying new things. As my mother was fond of saying when I was growing up, Wouldn’t it be boring if we were all the same? And since quitting my office job, my entire life was feeling full of possibility and exciting new experiences. Leaving that old uninspiring job and embarking on this new career had been scary and at times humiliating, but it had been nothing if not exhilarating and freeing. My old parameters had been blown apart, along with my barometer of social acceptability. Experience and adventure are good for the soul, I thought. I could—and should—try anything.

Once we were at a small table at Henrietta Hudson having drinks, though, everything seemed more difficult and magnified. We no longer had the comfort of a group: no Misa to send secret messages, no Hiroko to fill uncomfortable silences. Conversation suddenly felt like a pretense, a necessary prelude to the business at hand. Or maybe I was just nervous?

“Jodie Foster,” I offered, the first name that came to mind. Stupid! I do like Jodie Foster, but why couldn’t I think of someone, anyone, who isn’t gay? I racked my brain. Ellen DeGeneres . . . Melissa Etheridge . . . I didn’t even like Melissa Etheridge! She’s not even an actor! It was useless. I stopped talking, and when I did, I received confirmation that we were not there for a friendly chat about movie stars; Kelly leaned in to kiss me, and I reciprocated. Easy as pie.

After the kiss, we had a few more drinks, and then she asked if I wanted to “see her apartment.” Of course I did. Once there, she offered me a massage (cliché of clichés), which I gladly accepted—I had been on my feet all night, after all. Before long and with the alcohol diluting any anxiety regarding the repercussions of doing that with a coworker, our clothes were off.

These words echoed through the restaurant at that time of day, the hour or so before service started when the waiters started to arrive. Good morning was the preferred greeting at Nobu, regardless of arrival time, and I heard the words often while in the thick of preparing the nitty-gritty components of the pastry station: picking mint sprigs, filling and refreshing squeeze bottles, shaving plums, slicing maki.

My response was instinctive. It was one of only a handful of Japanese words and phrases I had learned, but it was one of my favorites. Ohio! was a sufficient abbreviation for greeting a waiter since we were on the same (theoretical) level. I would use the full phrase to greet the sushi chefs, who were not only older than me but also at the top of the kitchen hierarchy.

The exchange was repeated over and over again in a singsong way, and it had a strangely soothing effect on me. Maybe it was all the long vowels. Oh-hi-oh. I welcomed its meditative quality. It helped me focus on the simple tasks at hand rather than on the flashes of memory from the night before.

I knew that Kelly was scheduled to work that day, but I didn’t see her until after service started, when she walked right by my station to drop off a stack of dirty dishes, looking like she always did. Her shortish black hair was neatly combed away from her face, her thin frame, maybe an inch or two taller than mine, was erect with superb posture. Her features were small—dark, narrow eyes, thin lips, petite nose—but framed by heavy, strong cheekbones. She was wearing the regulation waiter’s uniform of khaki pants and navy blue shirt, but all I could see was bare skin, hers and mine, against each other, smooth and soft. In a flash, I remembered the kissing . . . and the touching . . . and the everything.

I pretended to focus on the dessert orders that had started to trickle in and prayed that my cheeks had not turned visibly red. (I blush way too easily and it is a curse.) She didn’t look me in the eye when she passed me on her way back into the dining room, but I swear I noticed a hairline crack of a smile in her serious but kind face. She was working. I was working. We were too busy to acknowledge last night, but I could not stop thinking about it.

“Bull-ondie! ” came the welcome distraction from the other end of the kitchen. It was Hisa, one of the sushi chefs, sticking his head into the kitchen from the sushi bar, looking urgently in my direction, his eyebrows raised to the tops of his shaved head.

The sushi chefs were the proverbial kings of the Nobu mountain (unless, of course, Nobu Matsuhisa himself was in town on one of his monthly visits from California, in which case he was emperor). Though Nobu was known for its cooked food as much as its sushi, the sushi chefs were still the stars, performing in the dining room every night, and they knew it. They demanded full attention and usually got it. And if any of the sushi chefs had bothered to learn my name, it would have been news to me. To them, I was just the blond girl.

Just as I’d begun to feel like more a part of the fabric that made up the restaurant and less like one of its loose threads threatening to unravel at any moment, I succeeded in positioning myself back on the edge of the unknown. For me, the night with Kelly was casual fun, a sort of litmus test to find out if maybe I had been neglecting a huge pool of potential mates. And while I had enjoyed my night with her, there had been no “aha!” moment, no moment of glorious discovery about finally finding what I had been missing all those years. It had been just another hookup. But what had it meant for Kelly? Would she want me to be her girlfriend? Would she feel scorned when she found out my less than serious intentions?

It was Kazu frantically grabbing a ticket off my dupe slide. Or was his name Yoshi? I had trouble remembering all the waiters’ names, despite working with them every night; there were so many of them. It was humiliating and embarrassing.

“Thank you, Dali-san.” He bowed his head quickly and turned away. I loved that the waiters sometimes addressed me with the endearing and familiar suffix of “san,” proof that I had been welcomed into the “family,” as a group of restaurant employees is called. Some friends whom I was closer to, like Kelly, even used “Dalia-chan,” an even more familiar term of endearment. I grabbed a plate and the cornet of chocolate. Following the arc of the round plate, I spelled out the birthday wish in smooth, cursive letters, looping the final y with a decorative flourish. I marveled at how well I was doing with my chocolate writing. I used to panic at the sight of birthday orders, rushing downstairs for Mika to do it for me. No more.

When I yelled for a pickup, Kazu came quickly, taking the dessert off my hands with a wink. A wink? I looked past him at two other waiters, who were talking quietly in Japanese by the green tea warmer. One of them glanced over at me, then went back to her conversation. Kelly passed by, and they smiled at her, too, though she kept on walking. I tried to listen in on their conversation, straining to hear my name or even haku-jin, which means “white person,” which could mean me, even if there was an entire dining room full of haku-jins. With all my concerns about last night, it hadn’t occurred to me that other people might know about it. But of course they would know, I realized with horror. Everybody would know that the new girl (because three months later I was still the new girl) had hooked up with a waiter. We were a family, and I had committed an act of lesbian incest.

Thankfully, the nightly stream of orders started rushing in, offering my mind something other than last night (and all of its potential repercussions) to think about. I tried to focus solely on plating the desserts, hoping to replace the flashes of last night in my mind with visions of the plates in front of me. The desserts had become so ingrained in my mind that plating them was almost second nature; I could actually work and obsess over last night at the same time. In between endless scoops of green tea and red bean ice cream, I remembered the lights turning off in Kelly’s tiny bedroom. As I sent chocolate cakes down the hot line to warm, I recalled waking up in the same small bedroom. I ran downstairs to get more maki, and every naked detail came to life. While I was screaming for pickups, torching ginger crème brûlées, and assembling fruit plates, I considered the numerous complications that might result from the night before.

Suddenly, I realized that something was terribly wrong, without full awareness of what that something was. A split second later I felt it, first the searing heat and then the involuntary snapping of my palm off of the freshly burned crème brûlée. Somewhere between the scooping, the fruit plates, and the replaying of the night before, I’d inadvertently let my palm rest on the still-gooey burnt sugar.

I’d been lucky up to that point, and any injuries I suffered at work had been minor. I routinely cut my finger while slicing plums paper thin on the mandoline, an oblong rectangle of plastic fitted with a sharp blade at its middle and sadistically embossed with a warning: Watch your fingers! I called it the tool of death. The burns I had gotten so far were superficial, the result of accidentally bumping my hand against a still-hot sheet pan of génoise. That night I crossed into another realm of cuts and burns: I had put my left hand on freshly burnt sugar, which had to have been at least 350 degrees. It was not going to be superficial. I was not going to be able to brush this injury off as I had done the others.

Instinctively, I rubbed my palm on my pant leg, trying to wipe off the browned sugar, but the relative cool of my body and the air had hardened it. Instead, I shoved my palm into my mouth in order to suck off the crusted sugar. Stunned by what I’d done and frozen by the stinging feeling that I knew would soon be searing pain, I felt like Herman, a line cook, who had simply stared blankly after realizing that he’d spilled smoking hot sesame oil onto the back of his hand. The cooks were used to accruing battle scars on a nightly basis, and they were covered, elbow to fingertip, in red marks of varying intensity. Herman’s blank stare wasn’t indifference, though. It was the anticipation of what he knew would be coming, knowing that it would be worse than any burns he’d gotten before.

And then I felt it: The pain was acute and searing and not at all limited to the large red amoeba that was forming on the outer third of my left palm. Ice. I needed ice. I grabbed a small tub of ice water and lowered my hand into it. This was a fine system, until I noticed the culprit crème brûlée sitting on my counter. I still had tickets to fill.

I removed my hand to have a look. It was just beginning to blister, but that was it—no blood, no missing flesh. No one noticed what had happened, and I knew from watching the cooks burn themselves daily that no one would care about my stupid burn. I would have to tough it out, but it was only a matter of seconds before the numbing effect of the ice water wore off and my hand was again searing with pain. With my left hand back in the tub, I filled a clean side towel with ice and awkwardly wrapped it around the burned area, trying to hold it closed with the same hand. At least I’m right-handed.

“You should be more careful,” he said before walking out the door. There is little sympathy for injuries in the kitchen. They are simply occupational hazards, commonplace and forgettable—things to accept and get past.

When my night was finally over, I left the restaurant quickly, not wanting to have to explain my stupid burn or, worse, talk to anyone, including Kelly, about what happened the night before. Though I could not afford it, I splurged on a cab, taking my bucket of ice water with me.