TWENTY-THREE
Rolling with the Punches
For almost two years after leaving Tonic, I floated from consulting job to consulting job, helping out chefs in small restaurants who had neither the time nor the space to support a full-time pastry chef. Most chefs are too preoccupied with opening or running their restaurants to worry about coming up with desserts, and I discovered that my ability to relieve them of this worry was a great commodity. These restaurants needed simple but pleasing desserts that fit their food style and that their staffs could execute when I was no longer there. The money for these jobs was usually pretty good, and I had much more control over my own schedule: I could commit to a few weeks or a few months. After working with Joey for so many years, a tiny part of me worried about achieving success out from under his protective wing, but consulting for new chefs proved that I did not need Joey, that my talents were all my own. Consulting also introduced me to new chefs, new ideas, and totally new food styles, some of which were completely at odds with everything I’d grown used to.
I connected with Barton, an African-American chef who was opening a small West Village restaurant, because we had worked for the same restaurant group years earlier and knew a lot of the same people. My interview with him was casual, but it was clear he was totally committed to his career. I knew next to nothing about his food style, which he described as “American as influenced by the African Diaspora,” but I was fascinated by his seemingly endless knowledge of all kinds of food. Not only did he casually throw around words like calas, bolo de apim, and philpy, but he gave me their detailed definition as well as their anthropological background and the route through which they derived. He was a species I had not yet encountered in restaurant kitchens: the intellectual. It seemed he had vast stores of information about everything from jazz to art to history, and he was like a mad scientist in the kitchen, throwing what seemed to me way too many ingredients into a pot, taking too many steps, and combining too many ethnicities only to succeed in creating an amazing new flavor or dish. I’d gotten used to the simple elegance of French techniques and Mediterranean flavors, but Barton opened up a whole new way of approaching food. With the help of everything he taught me, I developed a recipe for calas, New Orleans fritters, using leftover rice, and a sweet potato crème caramel that was served with a lime gelée. Barton had suggested the unusual flavor combination, and, to my surprise, it totally worked. I was reminded that cooking and food provide endless opportunities to learn and grow. When my time at Barton’s restaurant was over, we remained friends, brought together by a love of food and an eagerness to learn new things.
In those years, Joey finally opened his very own restaurant in the West Village, Extra Virgin, which became an instant success. It was the place he had always dreamed of opening: an unpretentious neighborhood restaurant where the food is interesting, well executed, and delicious. He had neither the space nor the need for a pastry chef, but I did everything I could to make sure his desserts were easy to execute and delicious. Once we had the desserts set up, Joey no longer needed my assistance, and I knew that our eight-year work partnership had come to an end.
After two years of consulting, I was ready, once again, for some routine—at the very least, health insurance. But as much as I wanted the stability of a full-time job and the prestige of working in a restaurant of high repute, I had trepidations about returning to a six-day, sixty-plus-hour work week. I was older, and my life fuller. I was no longer interested in having a monogamous relationship with work. It was a dilemma, but before I could even start exploring my options, Barton called to tell me about a job he’d heard about, one he thought would be perfect. The hours are great, Barton told me, knowing my ambivalence about returning to a full-time restaurant job. You’ll have time for other things in your life. He claimed it was a pastry chef job with “bankers’ hours” at a three-star restaurant. This was unheard of. When Joey called a few days later urging me to look into the very same job, I had to take notice.
I sat across from the chef in the small basement office of Veritas. He leaned back in the office chair, relaxed, and slumped, his legs spread wide, his hair flopped forward over his face. His chef’s pants were rolled up well above his ankles. The office was crowded with stacks of boxes, endless bits of paper were stuck to the walls, and the drop ceiling was missing most of its tiles.
“So,” he said, in a thick Boston accent, “we’re a very civilized restaurant. The pastry chef wahks five days. For the most pahht, I’m very easy to get along with. There’s not a lot of yelling . . . as long as no one fucks with my service. I can’t have my service fucked with.”
“Right,” I said, nodding.
“I like simple desserts,” he went on. “Simple. A lemon tart. None of this architectural crap. Simple. The garde-manger guy has to be able to plate them at night so the plates can’t be too complicated.”
“Okay,” I said. He just looked at me. I’d never been good at interviews, at being put on the spot. I wished he would ask me something. He didn’t.
“Do you want to see my book?” I offered. I held out the large black portfolio I’d been building over the years. It held most of the press I had received, and had plenty of pictures. It was proof to both of us that I was, in fact, a real pastry chef.
“My stuff is pretty simple,” I said as he took the book and started flipping through it. “I like clean lines, more of a Scandinavian or Asian aesthetic. I really like things to taste good and look appealing. But definitely they have to taste good.” He handed the book back to me.
“The thing is,” he explained, “that if you take the job, I’d want you to commit to at least a year, because finding a pastry chef is a pain in the ass.”
I nodded.
“So, why don’t you think about it. Call me the day after to morrow.”
I left the restaurant, my mind already dizzy. A three-star restaurant, dinner only, and a five-day work week? And it was a prix fixe restaurant so I wouldn’t even have to worry about how many customers ordered dessert because every customer got dessert. With only fifty seats, the dining room was small, and the salary was decent. The chef seemed nice enough, not condescending or arrogant as a lot of chefs can be. The kitchen had a reputation for being nice, with cooks that stayed on for years—a sure sign of a good work environment. And I wasn’t even asked to do a tasting. The job had practically fallen into my lap.
“Well,” the chef said when I called back two days later, “the job’s yahs if you want it.”
I hadn’t asked him about health insurance or vacation or any of the other things I was supposed to ask a potential employer at that stage of my career. I simply reacted, as I had so many times in the past, based on gut feeling.
Three weeks later, I started working at Veritas. I knew it would take some time to change the six-item dessert menu, but I was determined to do a special on my very first day. I decided on a dessert I’d done before with much success: a lemon tart, something the chef had mentioned during my interview. Why not let him know I was willing to take his suggestions to heart? Too many pastry chefs tried too hard to establish their independence, but I was used to a collaborative relationship with Joey. I wanted to make my chef happy.
I pressed a dark brown sugar crust into the bottom of a shallow ring mold and baked it. When it cooled, I filled the ring to the top with lemon curd that had just the barest amount of gelatin added to keep it molded. Once the curd set up in the fridge, I unmolded the tarts by heating the outside of the metal ring mold with a propane torch, warming the curd just enough to allow the ring mold to be smoothly lifted off. Then, I piped thick spikes of Italian meringue (egg whites and sugar cooked to 240 degrees Fahrenheit) to conceal the entire top of the tart. Just before the dessert went out to a table, the meringue would get “torched,” gently toasted with the propane torch so that it looked, and tasted, like a toasted marshmallow. Joey had always referred to the dessert as the Don King because of its spiky top. I had just finished the crusts when Felix, my new assistant, who came with the job, arrived at work.
“Hi,” he said. He was pale, with thick, dark hair. He seemed like the kind of guy who had a permanent five o’clock shadow. He had a thick Slavic accent and smelled like cigarettes and after-shave. “So, I need the last Sunday of the month off.”
It was bad enough that he had arrived fifteen minutes late, but now he was telling me that he needed one of my days off. In the restaurant business, Sunday is the day off, the best day, and the day that nearly every chef and pastry chef takes as his or her own. I was no exception, and I had every intention of maintaining my schedule. I just looked at him.
“You don’t have to give it to me,” he explained, “but my friends are taking me out drinking for my birthday the night before, so I’m just telling you that I am not going to be in on that Sunday.”
Though he had graduated recently from a local pastry arts program and had been at Veritas for almost a year, he didn’t have much of a reputation. Chef had given me permission to get rid of him if I wanted, even saying that he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box. He hadn’t said anything about him being a jerk.
“Let me just look at my calendar,” I told him coldly. “I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”
As much as I wanted to deny his absurd sense of entitlement, set a precedent, and show him who was boss, I decided to bide my time. He’d made a terrible first impression, but I didn’t want to make too rash a decision. It could take weeks to find a decent assistant, and in the meantime I would be left to do all of his work and mine, and I wouldn’t have any days off. I left Felix setting up the station in the upstairs kitchen, which had all the stoves and ovens, and went downstairs to finish my special, already imagining how I’d phrase my Craigslist ad for a new assistant.
At Veritas, the chef gave me only a few guidelines to work with. Aside from wanting the desserts to be kept simple, he also disliked anything that sounded too “homey” or American. So, I could make my golden pineapple upside down cake, but I had to call it “golden pineapple financier,” which sounded perfectly reasonable to me. He had only two requirements: that I make some sort of cake batter that could be piped into small madeleine molds, baked to order, and used as petits fours, and that the chocolate soufflé remain on the menu. It was Veritas’s top-selling dessert, and the recipe had remained unchanged since their opening seven years earlier.
The chocolate soufflé was not a soufflé at all but a variation of chocolate molten cake. It was the one dessert I had avoided my entire career, the dessert I had for so long despised, if only for its sheer omnipresence and lack of imagination. But after nine years of detesting it, I came to appreciate its one undeniable strength: People loved it. It was warm and oozing and chocolate, and it was served with ice cream. With the mandated chocolate soufflé on my menu, there was no pressure to come up with a rich, chocolate dessert, the one that had always been trickiest for me. Knowing that customers wouldn’t be denied their gooey-chocolate desires, I was free to make less intense chocolate desserts, cool chocolate desserts, chocolate desserts with more interesting flavor combinations.
Slowly I phased in all my new desserts. Some, like a pumpkin crème caramel with coconut cream and rum raisins, were very successful. The customers loved it, as did the cooks and waiters, who were happy to gobble down any leftovers. Others, though, like the lemon tart, which I had added to the menu, did not go over as well. I was devastated when the chef suggested I change my tart because it “looked too similar” to another dessert (they were made in the same mold).
Thankfully it was the first and only time that any of my desserts got knocked down by the chef. Over time, I figured out what kinds of desserts worked, what matched the food: French-inspired but with some license taken and, for the most part, quite rich. Veritas has one of the best wine lists in the country, and so the food, as well as the desserts, had to complement the wine. I took my lead from the savory food: I toned down the whimsy of my desserts and kept my plates simple, I used mostly seasonal ingredients, and most important, I kept my flavors delicious and un-fussy. As I grew more confident, I began adding less obvious, more adventurous flavors: white pepper ice cream, for example, with an apple-rhubarb crisp, saffron cream with a coconut panna cotta, Thai coffee ice cream with the chocolate soufflé. I wanted diners to be happily surprised to discover the unfamiliar flavor.
Since Veritas had received three stars from the New York Times years earlier and had long since gotten rid of their public relations company, I didn’t have to worry about impending reviews, and I’d gotten far enough along in my own career that I no longer yearned for press the way I once had. I was happy just being a pastry chef in a stellar restaurant with steady business. But other challenges lay ahead of me, and Felix was just the beginning.