Like the rest of the crew, I worked on the Maine on a two-weeks-on, one-week-off schedule. I could have used the free flight I got on every week off to see the country, but instead I mostly headed back to New York to blow everything I had on food and clothes.
I’ve always cared a lot about how I look. It’s one of the few ways I can really control how I’m perceived. So I worked hard to save up enough money, then I’d head down to Century 21 to get my Gucci and Prada on. But that summer I was a straight-up Fifth Avenue cat. Walking proudly past the suspicious guards, I’d emerge with slim-fitting blazers by Christian Lacroix and sneakers by Yves Saint Laurent and crisp dress shirts from Maison Martin Margiela, all thanks to the sweaty hours I’d spent in the Gulf.
I’d go home, or rather to my sister Tatiana’s apartment in the Bronx where she let me crash, and Google “best restaurant in New York,” then meet a girl and ask her to dinner. We’d eat white truffles at SD26, Tony May’s Italian restaurant in the Flatiron, and salty tongues of sea urchin at Marea, and seasonal salads so beautiful they looked like paintings at Gramercy Tavern. I’d pore over the menus and the plates, enthralled by ingredients I’d never heard of, from puffed barley to ramps to guanciale, miso, kombu, and thumbelina carrots; proteins I had never tasted, like guinea hen and sweetbreads and squab; preparations I hadn’t imagined, from sous-vide to pickled to confited. It was a peek into the upper reaches of food I had never tasted. And it wasn’t just the food that was blowing my mind. It was the entire experience: the solicitous way the servers asked whether we wanted sparkling or still water, the way they recited the long nightly specials from memory, the way they referred to the chef as if he or she were the wizard from The Wizard of Oz. It was sitting on the same banquet as an old man in a nice suit trying to seduce a much younger woman who kept looking at me like I was the shit—because, frankly, I was. But mostly it was how eating in these restaurants made me feel: like I was taken care of, like there was a guy in the back very concerned that I was having a wonderful time, very concerned that everything that was put before me was to my liking, that my liking it mattered.
I’d fly back to Houma-Terrebonne well fed and well dressed, with a mind full of recipes and techniques to try out on the boys. Without Tex there to give me the stink eye, the kitchen galley of the Maine Responder became the Gulf of Mexico’s best floating restaurant.
When my contract ended at the end of the summer, I headed back home. Between eating in New York and cooking on the boat, the thought had wormed its way into my head that I could and should pursue cooking seriously. Before that summer, I had thought of working in a kitchen as simply a job. It was a job I knew well, but it was still just a job. What I gained that summer was passion. I realized that being a cook wasn’t only about providing people with food, but rather about providing them with the feeling that they were cared for. As soon as I got back to New York, I started looking for ways to get involved in a more serious way with food.
My first thought was catering. Of all the kitchens I had worked in, other than my own on the Responder, the catering kitchen seemed like the best setup. I was so scarred from working in those miserable restaurants in Baton Rouge, I didn’t want to be demeaned. As a caterer, I wouldn’t have to deal with the bullshit of a professional kitchen. Plus, I had watched my mom cater for as long as I could remember. Even though the income was unpredictable, I liked the idea that I could land gigs by hustling on my own terms and set my own schedule. In addition, working on the Responder wasn’t all that different from catering. I didn’t have to worry about orders coming in. I decided the menu and I served everything at once.
But as I so often did, I found myself broke yet again. Although my closet was bursting with thousands of dollars’ worth of clothing, my pockets were empty. If I wanted to become a caterer, I knew I’d need some funds. Running a catering company wouldn’t be cheap, something I knew well from watching my mom. The tools, spatulas, whisks, knives, chafing trays, serving plates, cutting boards, stockpots, side tables, and piping bags, not to mention side towels, uniforms, and aprons, would cost thousands of dollars. And that didn’t include a commercial kitchen space to rent, cash for ingredients to float before the checks came in, employees to hire and transportation to provide.
Also, I was a kid with no track record and no access to capital. How was I going to bankroll myself? The answer came to me one day on the subway.
“Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.” It was a kid no more than twelve years old—way too late for him to be out, I thought. “I’m not here selling candy for my basketball team,” he began, “I’m just trying to make some money to stay out of trouble.” He carried with him a case of Peanut M&M’s. I could tell from his bulging backpack he had plenty more. “I’ve got Peanut M&Ms, Welch’s Fruit Snacks, and Starbursts. Only one dollar a bar.”
I’d heard his soliloquy a thousand times. There are a few phrases anyone who’s ridden New York City’s subways knows by heart. There are the official kinds that crackle to life over the intercom: “Stand clear of the closing doors please.” “If you see something, say something.” Then there are panhandlers, who tug at your empathy, or at least try to, with calculated tales of woe, some of which might actually be true. Then there are the acrobatic pole dancers, the Norteño bands who don’t miss a note through the trains’ stops and starts, and the doo-wop quartets who sadly sing “Stand by Me” while shuffling through the car, the last man jangling a small bag with a few coins inside.
The candy racket, on the other hand, is neither straight-up panhandling nor pure performance. It’s a bit of both. It’s commerce, literally the underground marketplace in action. People have sold stuff on the subways since there were subways, from paperback books to penknives to batteries. But no one needs that stuff anymore. What they want is candy, and the market is happy to oblige.
As I watched this kid manage to move five or six bars in a pretty dead car, the candy game all of a sudden made a lot of sense to me. If I wanted to start a catering company, like any small-business owner I needed money. Sometimes capital comes in the form of a candy bar. I did some simple math. Say I bought a box of forty-eight bags of peanut M&M’s at Costco for $25. If I could sell through my inventory at $1 a bag, that’s an easy $23 in pure profit. It’s cash, so no taxes or withholding. If I sold three bars per subway car, spent three minutes in each, I could clear a box in under an hour. And hell, if a twelve-year-old kid could do it, so could I.
By the time I got off my mind was set, visions of Butterfingers dancing in my head.
“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I’m here selling my candy in order to launch my own catering company.” A few days later I stood in front of the mirror in Tatiana’s living room where I was still living. On my bed I had laid out my haul from a recent trip to BJ’s Wholesale Club. “I have Butterfingers, Peanut M&M’s, regular M&M’s, Nutter Butters, Oreos, Snickers, Nutri-Grain Bars, honey roasted cashews, honey roasted peanuts, gum.” I was nothing if not exhaustive. If I was going to do this candy thing, I was going to crush the competition. I worked on my cadence to emphasize the absurd abundance of choices I offered. I taped together eight boxes into what I called a Frankenbox, with all the labels pasted on the outside, and I was ready to go.
At first it felt strange entering the subway as a candy man. After years of being on the other side of the equation, of conditioning myself to block out the noise, now I was the one trying to get everyone’s attention. I couldn’t help but see myself through the eyes of the other passengers: “Just another kid selling candy to stay out of trouble.” But I knew it wasn’t trouble I was looking to stay out of but a new world I was looking to enter. Some of us have banks. Some of us have savings. Some of us have Snickers.
I stood with my back against a pole: “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen…” Most people ignored me. Some glanced up and quickly dismissed me. A few women chuckled as I recited the almost endless selection. “If you’d like to buy, please let me know,” I said. “I would greatly appreciate it.” I began pacing down the car, rotating side to side to better entice the passengers.
My spiel worked. It wasn’t as if people threw their money at me, but it also wasn’t not like that. “You’re starting a business, brother?” said one man. “Here you go.” He pressed a dollar into my hand. “I got student loans too,” said a woman buying a Snickers bar. “Good luck.” Groups of middle-school kids getting out around 3:00 p.m. were my sweet spot. A dollar wasn’t too much for them, and they loved candy. It was perfect for me. I got on the downtown train in the Bronx a little after rush hour. By the time I arrived at Fulton Street in Brooklyn, the Frankenbox was nearly empty and my pockets were full of cash.
I was quickly accumulating enough money to cover at least some of the supplies I needed to launch a catering company. The first thing I did was buy a chef’s jacket, crisp and white. Before anyone would hire me, I knew I needed to look the part. Then I needed a name for my business. I decided on Coterie Catering. A coterie, I learned, was “a small group of people with shared interests or tastes.” That sounded about right. I chose a logo—a hand holding a cloche—from a uniform website and ordered a coat with that embroidered on the chest. I might not have had any clients, but I looked like a chef.
I re-upped my Frankenbox and headed back underground. This time, just as I was beginning my run in the Bronx, another candy-selling kid entered the car I was in. I guess this was inevitable, but I hadn’t counted on it happening so early. He stood on one side of the car and I stood on the other.
“Yo, man,” he said, “where you from?”
I didn’t know how to answer, but I figured the best response would be the one that instilled in my rival the most fear possible.
“Web,” I said, using the street name for the Webster Houses.
Immediately the kid’s demeanor changed. It was as if I had used a safe word.
“Oh, shit,” he said, turning meek. “I’m sorry, man.” He turned to face the door and got off at the next stop.
I thought this was interesting but chalked up the incident to the fearsome reputation Webster had in the city, especially in the Bronx. So I went back to selling and didn’t think much about it at the time. Meanwhile, using the money I had earned, I went about establishing my first-ever aboveboard small business. Unlike dealing, starting a small business entails lots of paperwork and forms. Thankfully, soon Coterie Catering LLC was born. And not a moment too soon.
The upside of selling candy on the subways is that it was a good excuse to explore the city. After I sold through my box, I’d fold it up, stash it in my bag, and just walk the streets. I spent a lot of time in the cookbook section at the Barnes & Noble on Fourteenth Street, and I spent a lot of time just on the sidewalk. One day, wandering in Soho, I came across a small fashion boutique near Prince Street. For some reason, mostly because I had nothing else to do, I wandered in. I asked the sales clerk, a black woman about my age, how long they’d been open. She told me they’d just opened, she was actually the owner, and that in fact she was planning a party to celebrate the opening.
My ears pricked up and my hustler sense began to tingle. “I’m a caterer,” I told her. “Do you need one for the party?”
She looked at me, at my baby face, surprised. “How old are you?”
“Ma’am,” I said, acting offended, “that’s irrelevant.”
“What can you make?” she asked.
“Anything you want,” I told her. “How do cheesecakes sound?”
I don’t know why I picked cheesecakes, which I had no idea how to make, but I guess I remembered the mini-cheesecakes my mom sometimes made in little graham cracker crusts for her Catering by Jewel gigs.
“You know how to make cheesecakes?” said the woman.
“Ma’am,” I said again, “I’m a chef. Don’t disrespect my knowledge.”
My haughty attitude paid off. She suggested we set up a tasting for the next day, and I agreed. I walked out with my first client within reach. I spent the rest of the day—and all of the night—in the kitchen. I planned out a menu for the tasting, channeling some of the ingredients and techniques I had tasted during my fine-dining adventures back when I had cash. I used what remained of my candy money to buy enough product for one tasting at the supermarket. The menu had four courses: a crostini made with shaved filet mignon with a bleu cheese foam; butternut squash wontons; chicken and waffles with maple butter; and, of course, the miniature cheesecakes. All of it was really straightforward but time-consuming to make. After I was done searing the filet and slicing it, frying the chicken, making the squash filling, and hand-whipping the cheese, it was already 8:00 p.m.
Now it was time for the miniature cheesecakes. The thing about cheesecake is you don’t know if the consistency is right until the whole thing is cool. So you have a good two hours per batch. I had to make only six miniature ones, but I just couldn’t get it right. No matter how many recipes I consulted, my filling was either too liquidy or too firm. The night stretched on, and I worked feverishly through it. For the first time in my life, I was completely laser-focused. No phone. No music. No texting. No jerking off. Nothing. The tasting was at nine in the morning, but it wasn’t until six that six small cheesecakes set perfectly in their graham cracker crusts. I had done it. I went to bed for a few hours, to the sound of birds and bus hydraulics, knowing that this would be the first step in a career.
To my delight, I got the gig. It wasn’t a big party but it was my party, even if no one else knew it. And it marked my first official job as an independent caterer. Unfortunately, I had agreed to cater the party at cost, so although it built my résumé and boosted my confidence, I was no richer for it. Soon I went back to selling candy.
For a few days I was back in business, clearing $400 every day as I traipsed through the city underground. One morning I got on the A with my box. Things were going normally until I hit Jay Street–Metrotech in Brooklyn and was about halfway done and ready to head back up to the Bronx.
“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” I began. The doors opened and two kids got on sporting Giuseppe sneakers and designer jeans. They were older than me but not by much. They were holding boxes of candy too.
“Excuse me ladies and gentlemen,” started the shorter kid.
I looked at him in disbelief. What was he doing?
“What the fuck are you doing?” I called from my post a few feet away.
The taller kid made a beeline for me. “What the fuck are you doing?” he growled, his face an inch from mine.
“I’m selling candy, what the fuck does it look like I’m doing?” I responded.
“This is our cypher, motherfucker,” he said.
“Cypher?”
“Yeah,” he said, “it’s our territory, our route.” He took a step back and looked hard at me. “Where the fuck you from?”
It occurred to me to try the same trick from last time. Glowering at the kid, I said, “I’m from Web.”
I expected him to back off but he didn’t. In fact, he seemed more suspicious. “Oh yeah? You’re from Web? Nah, man. I’m from Web. Cliff put you on this cypher?”
I didn’t know who Cliff was, but I said, “Yeah, Cliff gave me this cypher.” I’ve never been so full of shit in my life.
By this time the entire car was looking at us, cellphones out, ready to throw this up on WorldStarHipHop if it went south.
The other kid came up to see what was going on. “I haven’t seen you on the block,” he said. “You said you were from Web?”
“Thirteen hundred block.”
“Oh yeah, who you hang with there?”
“Urkel’s my boy,” I said. “I’ve known him for years.”
Their eyes lit up. “You know Urkel?” They were on the cusp of believing me but didn’t fully. “Okay, who’s Urkel’s best friend?”
That was easy. It was Ruger from B.A.B.Y.
“Ruger,” I said. That did the trick. Any trace of malice left their faces, replaced with a huge smile of recognition.
“Shit, he is from Web!” said the shorter one.
After that the three of us got off at the next stop and these two kids explained everything to me. The whole city’s candy game, it turns out, was run out of Webster, but in the 1400 block, where a guy named Cliff controlled the entire operation. It occurred to me that I had actually met this guy before, a slightly older dude who came into the McDonald’s I worked at near the projects. I remember him because he wore an expensive gold watch and because his arms were covered in tattoos of M&M’s and Skittles. Cliff set kids up on predetermined routes called cyphers, and took a cut—a large cut—of their sales. I had no idea the thing was so organized, but looking back, it makes sense. How did all the kids know the same script by heart? How come there weren’t more candy-selling turf wars? Cliff was, according to Jaquan, not a guy to mess with. He was connected and ruled his boys with the threat of violence. He took most of their money and paid them hourly and beat the bejeesus out of any that complained. Freelancing, like what I was doing, was the worst crime you could commit in Cliff’s eyes.
Looking over my box the tall kid said, “That’s at least a four-hundred-dollar flip. You’re lucky we know Urkel,” they said. “But you gotta be careful.”
I wasn’t looking to get killed over Butterfingers. I took the rest of my candy bars, stashed them in my backpack, and tossed the Frankenbox in the trash. I had dodged a bullet, it turns out. That was the last time I ever sold candy on the subway, but man, was I grateful now for the time I had spent at Webster.
Without that revenue stream and with Coterie still just a side hustle, I needed a job fast and figured I may as well look for work in a restaurant. One day I found myself in Union Square, walking north on Broadway. I peered down the cross streets looking for opportunities. Close to Park Avenue on the north side of the street, I caught sight of the warm glow of Edison bulbs shining through large plate-glass windows. I crossed the street hoping it was a restaurant and not a high-end interior design store. The space was awash with earth tones, warm leathers, and wood. There was no sign on the window but there was a menu, illuminated in a glass box mounted on the wall.
I remember thinking it had to be a good restaurant because the paper stock for the menu was so thick. The dishes were listed in plain English. The offerings were divided by techniques—braised, grilled, and roasted—and under each were proteins, from rabbit and sirloin to monkfish, with only a few accompanying ingredients listed. Amish chicken, I thought, that’s funny. They don’t say Jewish lamb or Episcopalian pork loin. Then I came to the bottom of the menu: Chef / Owner: Tom Colicchio.
Beside the door was a buzzer for deliveries. I pressed it, and a woman’s voice crackled through, “How can I help you?”
“I’m looking for a job. Can I fill out an application?”
“Come on up to the office,” said the voice, and the door clicked open.
I walked past the coat check, past a massive floral arrangement, and peered into the dining room. I clambered up a flight of stairs into the restaurant’s office, where I found Renée sitting behind a desk.
“Hello,” I said, “I’m Kwame Onwuachi.”
“Hello, Kwame,” Renée said in a friendly, businesslike way, “Do you have a résumé?”
I handed her one of the crisply folded copies I’d been carrying around with me all day and she gave me a form.
“We ask all our potential new hires to fill it out,” she said.
It was a standard application, but aside from biographical information—name, address, age—the last question was, “If there was one dish you could eat right now, what would it be?” Two things about the question checked me. First, I was excited that this was an important enough question that they put it on the job application. Clearly, they cared about food here. That was a good sign. But I also knew it was a loaded question. What did I want to eat, and how honest did I want to be about it? What I really wanted was the comforting warmth of my mom’s gumbo. The last time she cooked for me was a farewell feast the night before I left Louisiana. Her small apartment kitchen in New Orleans was filled with the pepper-tinged seafood smell of gumbo, the faintly chlorinated scent of shrimp, and the spicy meatiness of andouille. But that’s not what I wrote.
Instead, I came up with the most sophisticated and fancy-sounding combination of ingredients I could. Drawing on the knowledge gleaned from years of watching cooking shows and reading food magazines, from the menus of the places I had been that summer, I wrote “Foie gras crostini with white truffle and black garlic.”
When I handed Renée the form, I saw her eyes toggle between my address—Bronx, NY—at the top and my answer at the bottom.
“How do you know about this dish?” she asked obviously impressed.
I explained that my mother was a chef—which was true—and that I had always been interested in fine dining—which was vaguely true. But I left unsaid, of course, that I had never acted on this interest.
“Wow,” she said, “you’re hired!”
I was hired as a server. But at Craft even front-of-house staff trail for a day in the kitchen since it was important for us to understand what we were serving.
Craft was totally different from any other kitchen I’d been in. Unlike at TJ’s, all the chefs were young white tattooed guys intently focused on what they were doing. They moved with an intensity that might have had to do with youth but was likely to do with passion. These guys wanted to be there, you could feel it. They listened carefully to the chef, James Tracey, responding to everything he said with a quick “Oui, chef.” In the kitchens I had been in before, the ranges were coated in grime and the hoods practically fossilized. Here everything was spotless, from the tidy work areas to the small saucepans and bain-maries. There were tools I’d never seen in real life before, like offset spatulas and long tweezers. The crew wrapped and rewrapped foie gras torchons, carefully made rabbit ballotines, and seared off steak, and I stood there transfixed. Only reluctantly did I leave to learn about the sidework for which I’d be responsible as a server.
There was a real camaraderie between front of house and back of house that I had never felt before. It was the first restaurant job I had where everyone wanted to be there, from the hostess to the chef to the servers to the porters. Craft was, and is, one of the best restaurants in New York. And we all took a lot of pride in the food we put out and the atmosphere in which it was served. We were a team, and though Tom rarely showed up, he was our leader.
For the first time I was happy to be part of a group. For the first time on a job, I showed up early and stayed late. I rushed through my own sidework, rolling up silverware, carefully polishing thin-stemmed wine glasses, setting tables, so I could help out the others. I listened intently to every preshift meeting, attended every optional workshop on wines, and looked forward to our family meal every day. As long as the restaurant was open and I was working, I was happy. But after we closed and locked the doors, switched off the lights, and the team disbanded, that happiness began to fade. My life was a lot different, a lot farther away, than the comfort of Craft and the people there. I wasn’t content to be just a server; that wouldn’t be enough to drastically alter my life circumstance. I needed to be in control. I needed to get Coterie off the ground.
I hustled any way I could. This was in 2011, and Steve Stoute’s book The Tanning of America had just come out. Stoute is a prominent black businessman who is legendary in the music world, having worked with everyone from Jay-Z to Nas. I thought he’d help a brother out. So one day I went to a reading of his at Barnes & Noble. Afterward, I bought a book, waited in line for him to sign it, and when I got up there I told him I was a caterer and that he should let me cater one of his parties. “I know you have a lot of parties,” I said.
Stoute laughed and said, “Sure, man. You have a card?”
I actually did, having invested a few hundred dollars in my first business card: “Kwame Onwuachi, Chef,” it read. I handed one to him and he said he’d get in touch. Naïve as I was, I held him to it. In the next few weeks I waited in vain for an email from Stoute or one of his people to set up what would be essentially the launch of Coterie. But no call or email came, and I was furious.
I found out he was having another reading in a few weeks, so I went to that one, bought the book again, and waited in line. This time when I reached Stoute, I said, “Yo, man, It’s me, Kwame, the chef. Remember you said you’d get in touch? Well, you haven’t. What’s up with that?”
Stoute didn’t remember me, and, even if he did, was pissed off that I was so aggressive.
“Get the fuck outta here,” he said. “What the fuck’s your problem?”
I stormed out angrily and was about to toss his book when I heard someone say, “Excuse me.”
I turned around and saw a beautiful woman with light brown skin and nice hair. “I was standing behind you in the line. I couldn’t help but overhear you. Did you say you were a chef?”
“Yeah, I did,” I said. “I mean, I am.”
“I’m Liz,” said the woman, offering me her hand to shake, “and I think I have an opportunity that’s a perfect fit for you.”
Liz Bacelar was the executive producer, she told me, of the Singularity Summit, a conference of global thought leaders that was taking place that October in New York. She was looking for a caterer for the entire summit. That consisted of 1,600 people over the course of the four nights. I have no idea why she would ever take a chance on me, but she did. When she asked if I was interested in preparing a tasting for the gig, I said of course I was. I was terrified, but I didn’t—couldn’t—let on. I told her I’d email her with details of the tasting, the location, and time. She seemed pleased and said it would have to be soon. The summit was the next month.
I was so excited about the opportunity I didn’t think about all the challenges I’d face. For instance, where to meet my potential clients. When you’re a caterer, it’s common practice to cook a sample meal. Sometimes, as I did for the boutique gig, it can be at a store or a venue, but for this, I felt like I needed a show kitchen of my own. It’s an audition not just of your kitchen chops but of whether or not the two parties get along. I was confident in my skills as a chef and a schmoozer but I had nowhere to entertain. I couldn’t very well invite these prospective clients to River Park Towers, the dank sprawl of building and flickering fluorescent lights where I still lived with Tatiana, her boyfriend, and her baby. Nothing is a turnoff like a New York City Housing Authority kitchen. People want to hear about that once you’re successful, not when you’re living it.
Luckily, my mother came through as she had so many times before. She called up a couple of old friends of hers in the music business who lived in a brownstone on Striver’s Row, a group of elegant nineteenth-century town houses on 139th Street in Harlem that has long been home to black luminaries from Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to W. C. Handy. She explained that I was looking for a kitchen to call my own, at least for an evening and they were only too happy to help out. They said they’d stay upstairs and that I could use the ground floor.
I emailed Liz the address and said to meet me at my home the following night. When she and her business partner arrived, I welcomed them to the town house like it was my own. I led them through the living room, past the crowded bookshelves, original art, and family photographs, desperately hoping they wouldn’t ask who the smiling faces in the frames were. I could tell they were impressed with the place and with me as lord of the manor. I was like the black Count of Monte Cristo, and I wanted to keep it that way. For the entire night I was on a high frequency tuned to the charming Kwame station, unleashing a constant flow of words to forestall any uncomfortable questions.
I led them back to the spacious kitchen, with its marble-top counters and an eight-burner range. I opened up a bottle of $50 cab franc, worth a hundred candy bars of profit. I told stories about my mother, about my time spent in Africa and New Orleans, carefully leaving out the untoward parts. As I spoke, I prepared the dinner: tagliatelle with pesto and marinated tomato, roast chicken with a pomegranate gastrique, a vinegar-laced reduction sauce. Liz and her partner ate it up. Not just the food, but the whole scene: me, my chef’s coat, the kitchen. When I led them to the door later that night, I had landed my biggest gig. It was going to be a trial by fire for sure, to make 1,600 meals over four days. I didn’t even have staff, let alone a kitchen to cook in. But I’d figure all that out. I was a legit caterer now, that’s what mattered. The hustle was working.
The conference took place over four days at the 92nd Street Y. I was responsible for dinner each night for four hundred people. It’s fair to say I had no idea what to do. The first thing I did was fly my mom and a few of her crew from New Orleans up to New York. She came straight from the airport to meet me at a restaurant downtown and I showed her the menu I had in mind, a version of which I had cooked during my audition. With her help, we calculated quantities and broke everything down into a prep list.
“Always trust the prep list,” my mom said to me. “You’ve made it in your sanest moment. In the kitchen you’ll be crazy.”
On a few sheets of paper she scribbled down how and what we’d need to do in the next few days in order for me not to crash and burn. She converted each dish into ounces and portions, then multiplied that by four hundred. I was shocked by the sheer amount of food we’d need: Twenty-five pounds of pistachio pesto. Four cases of zucchini. Five hundred whole chickens.
We took a car out to Restaurant Depot, a huge warehouse of a store on Hamilton Avenue in Brooklyn. Walking down the aisles, pushing a flatbed cart like you’d get at IKEA, I couldn’t believe the size of the products: Ten-gallon drums of ketchup, barrels of soy sauce, every type of food you could imagine. We picked up some supplies there and returned to Tatiana’s with a trunkload of stuff.
So I had chefs; now I needed a kitchen. There was no way I could prep from Tatiana’s tiny apartment. Traveling from Manhattan to the Bronx, I frequently passed a place called Hot Bread Kitchen, on Park and 113th Street. Hot Bread is a culinary incubator for start-up businesses with an emphasis on those that are minority owned. Sounds perfect, I thought.
I called them up and said, “Hey, I’m a small business. I see you have an incubator program for small businesses. How can I get in there?”
It turned out that their application process would take a few weeks at the very least. I needed to get in that day. I explained that I had a $30,000 job feeding 1,200 people—exaggerating, but just a bit.
“Well,” said the woman I spoke to, “you can definitely turn a profit.”
I asked how much it cost to get in. She said I’d need a $2,000 deposit, then I’d pay hourly. I told her I’d be there in fifteen minutes with a check, and I was.
I don’t know how many guys roll into an incubator kitchen with ten chefs and $17,000, but it felt pretty good for me. Fifteen minutes after I hung up, I was there with a check and my crew. For four days we worked, heads down, methodically crossing off tasks from the pages-long prep list. And almost magically, the meal began to take form. On the first night of the summit, I was quaking with fear but tried not to let on. We transported sheet tray after sheet tray to the venue, each covered in reams of plastic wrap. We set up a line in the back of the banquet space and began to plate in batches. We were all hard at work. My mom and I and the other guys, sweating it out together. When there was a question, I was the one who answered. I was the chef. Finally.
Before my mom returned to New Orleans, I took her out for breakfast to thank her. Chatting over pancakes and coffee, we were both exhausted and spent but happy. My mom isn’t one to dole out praise, but I could tell she was proud of me. The little bird she had pushed from the nest had finally learned how to fly.