In the military, basic training is meant to weed out the weak from the strong, those who cave under pressure from those who rise to the challenge. A fresh-eyed, soft-bellied grunt heads to Camp Lejeune or Fort Benning and emerges as a hard-bodied, steel-willed soldier. The runts wash out.
For chefs, at least for those like me who enter the profession through culinary school, basic training—in the “break you down to build you up” kind of way—doesn’t start until the second semester. For the first few months of our education, we were tested by demanding professors who did not tolerate an improperly turned turnip or a broken sauce. But this was not hell, or even heck. Our lessons took place at a leisurely pace, during daylight hours, on a scenic campus, and, importantly, without the pressure of paying customers. In fact, the only ones paying were us, coughing up $2,000 a month for the privilege of learning how to concassé, consommé, batonnet, braise, broil, and reduce. If something went sideways in the kitchen classroom, it wasn’t great but at least you could contemplate your failure sitting on a bench overlooking the Hudson, without hellfire coming down on your head from an angry guest.
But eventually, every student is required to get an externship, a word that seems like it should be the opposite of an internship but is really just the same thing. The position has existed in the form of apprenticeships in craft guilds since the Middle Ages. The idea of an externship is not only that we enter into the hustle and flow of a working kitchen, but that the knowledge we’ve been handed in the classroom is burned into us by the pressures of nightly service. We are in the weeds for fifteen weeks of toil with live ammo and real danger. Most of us will return to the Hudson Valley campus for the third and fourth semesters. But some will wash out—the weak, the wilted, the runts.
The difference between an amateur and a professional chef isn’t always a matter of skill or knowledge, and it’s rarely one of taste. What makes a professional chef is that he or she has had technique imprinted onto them with the permanence of a tattoo and that they have withstood the pain of the process.
For much of the first semester, the talk in the dining hall, the dorm rooms, and the classrooms was about where we might land for our externships. The institute has relationships with hundreds of restaurants around the world. Chefs from some of the most famous establishments, from L’Arpège in Paris to Pujol in Mexico City and all points in between, let the school know they are accepting externs, and a steady stream of applicants—supplicants, really—arrive like the faithful on a culinary pilgrimage. For restaurants, the appeal of an extern is clear. He or she is a body in a kitchen, one with some degree of training and a reverence for the industry. An extern will work to exhaustion over the course of four months. At the time I did mine and for centuries before that, before schools like the CIA monetized the educational process, and still in many other places today, externs aren’t paid. The belief was that experience was wage enough. Today externs make from minimum wage to $15 an hour but they are still ridden hell-for-leather for it. Even good chefs run externs like sprinters while they treat their employees like marathoners. The margins of a fine-dining restaurant are so narrow that chefs have come to rely on working externs until exhaustion, each one sinking after a brief moment of support.
Many of my classmates who were more interested in becoming banquet or institutional chefs found extern positions in respectable restaurants at big hotels and resorts, the kind of workhorse business that does a thousand covers a night with efficiency, competency, and at least a whiff of ambition. Others, the second-careerists and the easygoing, who viewed the CIA as something between a lark and a day camp, found work in smaller, less famous though often very good kitchens in the hinterlands. Neither route appealed to me. I swung for the fences.
Since I bought my first pair of Prada sneakers, I’ve always been someone who found the shiniest, flashiest, hardest-to-get thing and gone for it. When the best thing—doesn’t matter what it is, shoe, restaurant, accolade—is out there staring you in the face, I’ve never understood how someone could settle for less. Surround yourself with the subpar, and you can’t blame anyone for thinking you are too. Surround yourself with the best, and the best rubs off. My motto has always been to do better every single year. Don’t settle for a step down. So I saw my externship as a chance to move a level up.
For anyone, or at least any student with ambitions as high as mine, there were only a few kitchens worth externing in. Then as now, there was a simple way to find out which ones they were. For the past sixteen years an obscure trade publication in the UK sponsored by San Pellegrino, an Italian water company, has been issuing what it claims to be a definitive restaurant ranking, The World’s 50 Best Restaurants.
The year I was externing, the top ten restaurants were, in descending order: elBulli in Spain; the Fat Duck in the UK; noma in Copenhagen; Mugaritz and El Celler de Can Roca, both in Spain; Per Se in New York; Bras in France; Arzak, also in Spain; Pierre Gagnaire in France; and Alinea in Chicago. To me and my cohort, these were the only ten restaurants that mattered, and by the time the second semester came around, we were determined to be on the line at one of them.
Would I have liked to spend four months in Europe? Sure. But choosing an externship provided me with a lesson in balancing my ambition with the necessity to make money on the weekends. I was tethered to the city, to the real world, to the reality of having to hustle to survive. I still depended on Coterie Catering gigs to make enough money to pay tuition. Virtually all my clients were in New York so I needed to be near New York. There was, therefore, only one option for me: Per Se.
Since it opened in 2004 on the fourth floor of the Time Warner Center at the southwest corner of Central Park, Thomas Keller’s Per Se has become synonymous with the most extravagant, most ambitious, and most luxurious meal in New York City. Keller, a tall handsome guy with a cowboy lope and an air of quiet intensity, opened the restaurant after building his reputation as the undisputed champion of American cuisine at the French Laundry in Northern California. Per Se is his East Coast outpost, and there is nothing like it in New York. For starters, it is one of the spendiest places in the city. Back then, a seven-course dinner cost $300. That’s without wine, tax, or tip. A typical two-top doesn’t get out of there for less than a grand. For that price, diners can expect an hours-long feast presented with all the accoutrements of fine dining, from elaborate flower arrangements to exquisitely trained servers to, of course, brilliant and refined food. Over the course of a few hours, Keller pairs technical perfection with culinary imagination. He uses some of the most expensive ingredients in the world, from caviar to gold leaf. Even if Keller is using a humble beet, you can be damn sure it is the best, most perfectly formed, delicately flavored, most recently picked beet you can find. Keller knows the name of the farmer and probably his mother’s too.
Per Se isn’t a Rolex restaurant. It’s an Audemars Piguet, a luxury product at its most swaggering, inch-from-the-ground bravado. And the luxury isn’t restricted to the jewels and platinum. It’s in the way Keller and his team treat every ingredient as if it were precious, and by so doing make it precious. As I would discover, from the time a product enters the kitchen, it’s treated with reverence.
Many diners are so besotted by the views of Central Park that stretch beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows and the unbelievably luxury of the meal—foie gras from whole flocks of geese; enormous quantities of shaved truffles, black and white; caviar up the wazoo—that they don’t realize how ambitious and brilliant every dish is. But to a chef, Keller’s appeal is squarely that what he puts on the plate is not to be found anywhere else. Not in terms of imagination. Not at his level of execution. He and his team have inscribed their names among those of the greats by devoting intense scrutiny to every element on every plate, not to mention the plates themselves.
Keller’s reputation as a demanding, no-nonsense grinder was already well known to us in Hyde Park. The campus was deconsecrated, so Keller was the closest thing to a god we had, the savior of America’s bounty. Aside from Grant Achatz, the spritely chef of Alinea—a CIA grad himself and a Keller protegé—Keller was the only one of the top ten chefs in the world with an American accent.
Landing an externship at one of the best restaurants in the world was, naturally, a fiercely competitive process. The kitchens receive thousands of applicants yet select only a handful. By complete happenstance, I had an in. A former pastry chef at Per Se had taken over as head baker at Hot Bread Kitchen. We were never that close but we knew each other enough to share cigarettes and had kept in touch over the years. Knowing that I had to work as many angles as I could if I hoped to land a spot at Per Se, I shot him a text asking if he could hook me up. He offered to introduce me to the chef de cuisine, a brash guy from Brooklyn named Eli Kamieh, himself a CIA graduate. This is, by the way, how most jobs in kitchens are filled. It is relatively easy to get a space on the line to stage (in other words, to try out) or at least to trail (observe) when a trusted cook vouches for you. The presumption of basic competence is often given since, if you flame out, you’ll flame out quickly and publicly and be fired so fast your head will spin. I mailed off my résumé, and a few days later, word came down. Eli said I could come in for a stage.
So one crisp morning in the fall, I took the train from Hyde Park down to Grand Central, then the A train to the Shops at Columbus Circle. Per Se is perhaps the world’s best restaurant in a mall. I entered the shimmering glass shopping center full of things I could never afford and passed Colombian sculptor Fernando Botero’s large bronze statue of a naked man whose penis has turned shiny from all the lucky rubs. I walked past the Williams Sonoma, with its displays of dry rubs, selvedge denim aprons, and expensive shiny pans, and ascended a series of elevators, gliding past mannequins of handsome headless men in merino wool suits and windows full of sweet-smelling moisturizers. Though employees entered through the back, I wanted to check out the front of this hallowed restaurant. Turning northward, I followed the signs to Per Se until I reached what looked like a beautiful blue wooden door with a large brass knob in the center. I strode up to it and pulled on the knob. It was stuck. So much, I thought, for Keller’s famous attention to detail. I waited for a few moments, then somewhat sheepishly realized that the two glass windows on each side of the door were automatic sliding doors. I slunk away, happy no one had seen me, descended in the elevator, walked out, and reentered through the much more straightforward employees’ entrance around the corner.
If the stutter-step of the blue door, the florist shop’s worth of flower arrangements, and the hushed dining room are meant to inspire awe for the diner at Per Se, the massive scale of the kitchen did the same for me. I hadn’t imagined anything could be more impressive than the one at Craft, but this was way beyond anything I had ever seen. And compared to the other kitchens—TJ’s Ribs, the galley of the Maine—this was another species entirely: a quantum leap in evolution, the ideal form of a kitchen. There are actually three kitchens in the back of house: the prep kitchen, the main kitchen, and the private dining room (or PDR) kitchen. On the morning of my arrival, morning prep was in full gear in the five-thousand-square-foot main kitchen, which was a symphony of gleaming stainless-steel hardware and immaculate white plastic working surfaces. Despite the constant bustle there were no spills or messy stations, no errant tongs or even sprigs of herbs left carelessly on the workspace. There was no shouting, just a murmur of activity. At each pristine station, butcher paper held in place by blue tape, a cook stood with his or her head bowed over their mise en place. Sleeves smartly rolled up, towel neatly tucked in their apron strings, they were as silent and focused as I had ever seen chefs be. In front of them sunchokes were turned into pints of perfect brunoise. A bunch of radishes, fresh from the farmer, were lovingly trimmed and cleaned until they were reduced to one single, almost cartoonishly beautiful radish. On one wall, a large television screen displayed a live video feed of the kitchen at the French Laundry, across the country, equally pristine.
The day of my stage, Eli supervised me. I didn’t know much about him at the time, and he didn’t say more than two words to me. One of the sous chefs put me on prep. Since none of the chefs knew (or trusted) me, the work was menial. No foie gras or, for that matter, proteins of any kind. I didn’t get anywhere close to a plate. Mostly Eli observed my kitchen demeanor from afar. Did I lean on the wall when I had nothing to do? When I finished one task did I hungrily seek out another? How did I move in the kitchen? Was I in control? Did I hold my knife right and say “Corner” when I turned a corner to avoid colliding with anyone coming the other way? Did I get the fuck out of the way when someone said, “Get the fuck out of the way!”? Could I hustle? Of course I could hustle. I was no stranger to busting my ass, and that turned out to be the most important qualification. At the end of the day, just before dinner service began, Eli nodded to me and said, “You’re okay, man.” And thus I was officially an extern at Per Se.
That April, with a few duffel bags of clothes, a winter coat, and my knife roll, I landed back in the Bronx, ready to start the next stage of my career. The next fifteen weeks would, I was sure, be some of the most intense of my life. I was eager to return to the city from Hyde Park, which while beautiful was maddeningly quiet. I moved in with Tatiana, crashing on the couch in her apartment in the River Park Towers, a sprawling housing project. In a weird way, it was comforting to be back among the bricks and courtyards and playgrounds, the hard surfaces of my youth. The apartment was an hour and a half away from Columbus Circle but rent was a few hundred bucks, so I wasn’t complaining.
For most of my classmates, their externship was the single most important thing in their lives, and they devoted themselves wholly to it. I, however, had to eat, and to do so I had to make money, so I was still booking Coterie Catering gigs on the side. By this time I had a pretty solid crew of guys from the CIA who helped me out. During my externship I deputized Greg Vakiner to handle the events while I was in the kitchen at Per Se and recruited Paz; Andrew; and a kid named Nick Molinos to be my prep cooks. When we had events in the city, they’d come down to my sister’s apartment and prep with me during the very early morning. My sister would wake up, with her toddler daughter Trinity, to find a crew of guys hunched over her little two-burner stove, brining chickens or passing purees through chinoises and tamises. Then I’d head to Per Se while they finished up behind me. For the actual event, I left everything to Greg. I had to. The only eye I could keep on things was to occasionally sneak into the bathroom to text him. But my man never dropped the ball once in the handful of gigs we had during my externship.
Besides catering and cooking, the last third of my time was spent waiting for my fifteen minutes of fame. Let me explain. Because I had grown up watching Iron Chef, and because a $10,000 cash prize was for obvious reasons appealing, that spring I had signed on as an understudy for Chopped, a reality show on the Food Network. Even before I went to culinary school, I had applied a score of times. With each rejection came another excuse from the casting director—“You’re not the right fit” or “We’re looking for a different demographic”—but eventually the producers took pity on me. As a consolation, that spring they offered me an understudy role. Just like on Broadway, it would be my job to step in if someone hurt themselves too severely to continue. Catastrophe wasn’t an unheard of occurrence. There’s a lot of dashing around on the show, and injuries were fairly common. Under time constraints and with the addition of adrenaline and a new kitchen, chefs do crazy stupid stuff they’d never do on their own. They run with knives. They grab burning-hot pan handles without a towel. They reach into still whirring food processors.
Being an alternate was a pretty cushy gig. All I had to do was show up at the Food Network studio in Chelsea Market in Manhattan at 6:00 a.m. a few times a week during production and sit in the green room waiting to be called. Barring any kitchen TKO on behalf of the contestants, I’d be out of there by 8:30. I had just enough time to hop on the A train and make it up to Per Se by 9, that is, if there were no delays or track fires or sick passengers. For this I got $100 two times a week. That was enough to cover rent at my sister’s.
I had no idea what I’d do if someone had been injured. It would have been the end of my time at Per Se for sure. Flaking on a shift with notice is pretty bad; ghosting the day of that shift earns immediate termination. Still, I prayed that Marc Forgione, who was a contestant that season, would accidentally amputate his thumb and that Cat Cora, whisking egg whites to stiff peaks, would dislocate her shoulder. Thankfully (unfortunately) it was an injury-free season. So I never made it onto TV but I did keep my job at Per Se.
As an employee, of course, my approach to Per Se was much different. Employees enter through a nondescript door on the south side of Fifty-Ninth Street. There are no fancy retail opportunities, just a warren of linoleum-and-cinder-block offices and hallways with industrial-strength lighting. On my first day I made my way along the corridors behind the Shops at Columbus Circle, wending my way through the unglamorous guts of the luxury retail experience, until I passed through a plain white door into the Per Se locker room. Like everything else within Thomas Keller’s orbit, it is kept spick-and-span. Somewhere between a gym changing room and a sacristy, the narrow space was lined with rows of gun-metal-gray lockers with a communal bench between them. Silence greeted my arrival. I found an empty locker, threw in my backpack, and unrolled my newly laundered chef’s coat. As I was buttoning it up, a young guy, all bones and nerves and burns on his arms, walked in to grab a pack of smokes. He glanced over at me. “Is that the fucking face you’re going to walk into Per Se with?” he asked. Apparently, jittery and scared was not the preferred facial expression here. I stared back at him, wondering which Kwame would respond. On the one hand, I thought, if this was some alpha-dog show of dominance, he’d picked the wrong dog to tangle with.
On the other hand, his tone was hard to read. Perhaps this was an incognito pep talk? Maybe this is what friendship looked like at Per Se? I didn’t know. This wasn’t the vibe on the line at Craft, from what I had seen. And a macho pissing contest certainly wasn’t the norm at the CIA. On the other hand, this dude looked like he’d stepped out of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential or sprung from the loins of shouty chef Gordon Ramsay. I knew Angry Hard-Ass Chef was a thing, and usually they had a heart of gold somewhere under their shell. But still, what a weird come-on. I just narrowed my eyes and contorted my face into an exaggerated grimace, pantomiming determined bad-assery. He seemed satisfied. “All right,” he said, “let’s go.”
Having learned the basic workings of a kitchen, at least in theory, at the CIA, I knew what to expect at Per Se. As an extern—or an apprentice, as the restaurant chooses to call its interns—I occupied the lowliest position in the complicated and extremely regimented kitchen hierarchy. This hierarchy, called the brigade de cuisine system, had been around for more than a century, first developed in 1890 by the legendary French chef Georges Auguste Escoffier. Escoffier was looking for a way to ease the chaos, waste, and inefficiency of the traditional kitchen, which had stayed pretty much unchanged since the Middle Ages. That system—in which one cook was responsible for an entire dish from start to finish—may have worked in a castle, but it sure didn’t work in a restaurant. Escoffier, who had served as a military chef, based his new system on that of the French army, and it is as structured as you’d expect from a soldier. The first innovation was a division of labor. Turning out hundreds of dishes a night, each with multiple components, in a timely fashion and upon request, would be impossible if each plate were thought of as a whole. Instead, Escoffier saw the professional kitchen as an assembly line, in much the same way Henry Ford did with the automobile a quarter century later. In the new brigade, the tasks of preparing a meal are divided up between workers, each specialized in their own discipline and concerned solely with the task before them. This increased not just efficiency but expertise. It’s a high-stakes system, since if one cook fails, the entire system fails, but if every component in the kitchen works as it is meant to, a perfectly plated dish appears at the pass minutes after the order comes in.
The second feature of the brigade, and a direct requirement of the first, is an iron-clad chain of command. Like the military, a kitchen is set up to function as one brain with many hands. The chef is the brain and the cooks are the body. Messages must be relayed precisely, with no room for individual ideation and certainly none for insubordination. Any and all measures will be taken to maintain this system.
The general of the kitchen is, naturally, the chef. Although Thomas Keller was the boss, the guy who had absolute control of the day-to-day was the chef de cuisine, Eli. Eli had graduated from the CIA in 2000 and had joined Per Se shortly after it opened, moving quickly up the ranks. Like his mentor Keller, he was famously demanding. But unlike Keller himself, who is famously soft-spoken, Kamieh had a volcanic rage.
Reporting to Eli were three sous chefs, each of whom led a team of their own: a morning, an afternoon, and a prep team. That two of those teams—the prep and morning team—were devoted solely to preservice preparation gives an idea of the sheer amount of labor needed to present the seven to nine courses, most no more than a few bites, offered to the hundred guests who dined at Per Se on an average night. Apart from those three battalions, there were two other teams, pastry and baking, headed by a chef patissier and a chef boulanger, respectively, who also reported to Eli. But they functioned largely independently from the rest of us and moved like powder-covered phantoms in our midst.
Beneath the sous chefs were the chefs de partie. While a sous chef holds overall command responsibility, he or she is not tied to a specific task. Chefs de partie, on the other hand, are assigned clearly defined areas of responsibility known in kitchen parlance as stations. At Per Se, stations include roast, which is responsible for all the sauces and meats, and is one of the most esteemed positions in the kitchen; poissonier, responsible for fish; canapé, the station devoted to the VIP appetizers; fromagier, whose job is all things cheese; entremetier, who takes care of vegetables; and garde manger, who oversees the cold appetizers. Reporting to each of the chefs de partie were three or four prep cooks who serve as the infantry of the kitchen.
And the ground on which everyone walked were the apprentices. There were four of us working at a time when I was at Per Se. Through the four months, we would rotate between the morning, afternoon, and prep teams, getting a taste of each as we went through the entirety of the Per Se kitchen structure. The majority of our work took place far from the hours of service and away from the main kitchen. We were assigned the monotonous but essential labors of mise en place. For every gesture a line cook makes during service, there are hours of preparatory work performed by lowly staff in the commis—or prep—kitchen.
I started my time at Per Se on the morning prep team. Though impeccably kempt, that kitchen is much smaller and more cramped than the main one. There were four large stockpot burners, a walk-in freezer, a reach-in freezer, a reach-in fridge, and a couple of lowboys. It always seemed crowded in that windowless room, even if you were alone. And I never was. The standard cast in the commis kitchen consisted of a sous chef, who was my boss; two commis; and an apprentice. It fell to the apprentice to dice thousands of pounds of vegetables for stock—the Culinary Fundamentals courses finally paid off—and then strain and restrain those stocks until they ran silky smooth. It took hundreds of gallons of veal, chicken, and lamb stocks to create the richly flavored reductions that appeared as precisely placed dots and swooshes on the plate. A stock is like a toddler. It doesn’t take tremendous skill to raise one, just constant attention and patience. Cooking at the scale Per Se needed—about ninety covers a night—it also took a strong back and biceps to tip the massive pots into the strainers dozens of times throughout the shift.
Veg prep, another of our main responsibilities, took more fine-motor skills and, though the cuts were basic, immense mental focus. We brunoised absolutely everything. Before our blades, rounds of parmesan and pounds of olives were turned into mounds of identically sized cubes. It could be mind-numbing work, but the temptation to let your mind wander was quickly corrected by a clean slice through the finger. Unlike on Chopped, there were no alternates at Per Se, and I quickly got to know where the first aid kit was.
It was up to us in the prep kitchen to prepare ingredients for the hands of the more experienced senior chefs in the main kitchen. So we cracked and peeled walnuts to reveal their brain-like kernels. We separated each petal of pearl onions, laying them on parchment paper like gold leaf. Using tweezers, we picked endless sprigs of microgreens, separating from the already precious stems their perfect miniature leaves.
The work itself was by nature boring, but I was new to a kitchen operating at this level and still in awe of it. I couldn’t believe I was there, so it was hard not to simply marvel every once in a while. But one of my first encounters with Eli quickly made me realize that wide-eyed wonder was not on the menu, at least in the back of house at Per Se. It was a day or so in, and I was meant to be picking rainbow lucky sorrel. I remember thinking, “Ha, that’s funny. I’m lucky too!” I paused for a moment—maybe it was longer—unbending my spine from my station to look around at the other chefs. Through a small window in the wall, I could see the main kitchen with its heat-lit pass, the sign over the door for which Keller is famous that reads “Sense of Urgency,” and the video screen with its feed to the French Laundry. Suddenly Eli was right next to me, and he wasn’t happy. His black eyes narrowed and sparkled with anger.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he hissed at me. “Your herbs are dying. You’re looking around? Do you want to be here or not? I need you to fucking move! MOVE!” He screamed that last word, and the veins bulged over the collar of his chef’s coat. Later I would wonder if they soundproof the walls at Per Se so that diners can enjoy their opulent evenings without hearing the screaming in the kitchen. But at the moment all I said was, “Yes, Chef.”
I was humiliated, ashamed that I had so quickly foundered and been called out. Well, part of me was humiliated, the soft tissue, the part that was wilting over my rainbow sorrel with flecks of Eli’s spittle lodged in my ear. But in my bones, even then I could see that this was madness. I knew it was unreasonable that such a minor offense would cause such an abrupt and angry reaction. In what other workplace would that be accepted? Perhaps Eli wasn’t nuts, but he was part of a system that was. Now I was playing a role too. He yelled, and I was yelled at. Simple, really.
Perhaps then and there I should have walked out. But there was some part of me, some angry rebellious part of me, that wanted to tough it out. I wanted to beat this asshole at his own game. And at the same time this dynamic—him yelling, me being yelled at—was very familiar to me. As a kid, there was no escaping my dad and his rage, and nothing I could do to soothe it. But in the kitchen it was a different story. If I worked hard and kept my head down, if I hustled, did my prep work, listened, hustled harder, and made no mistakes, well, then there was the possibility of earning the respect of these guys. That was better than the odds I had growing up. At least it was a possibility.
After a month of morning prep, I rotated to afternoon prep. It was in the same kitchen but different tasks with a different taskmaster. The good news was that I didn’t need to be there until 11:00 a.m. The bad news was that since I was up at the crack of dawn anyway, freezing my tits off in the unheated green room of the Food Network studios, it didn’t really matter. The even worse news was that it was up to the afternoon apprentice to tackle the dreaded eggshells.
One of Per Se’s signature dishes is a white-truffle-oil-infused custard served with a ragout of black winter truffles. It’s presented about midway through the chef’s tasting menu, arriving on a silver platter, a small amount of silken custard in a hollowed-out hen’s egg. The custard is made from egg, Keller’s thinking goes, so why not serve it in an eggshell? At Per Se, the egg is held in a silver coil, with its top neatly cut off. A translucent tuile—a play on a potato chip—juts up from the opening like a jaunty geometric feather. The wonder of the egg is meant to hit the diner on multiple levels. First of all, it’s just nice to look at it. Second, the egg-in-an-egg plating is conceptually clever. Third, of course, is the taste. The softness of the custard as it dissolves on the tongue releases the fragrant truffle oil, while the black truffle in the ragout hints at earthiness. It’s no wonder that Keller never takes it off the menu: it’s his masterpiece. But someone has to hollow out and clean the eggs, and for a month that job fell to me.
A tower of cardboard flats awaited me every morning. These were my eggs. Unless you’ve ever needed to clean the inside of an egg—and there’s no reason in the world you would, because it’s an insane thing to do—you might not know that it isn’t only eggshell, white, and yolk. Between the shell and the liquid inside, there are two thin membranes made of keratin, the same substance from which our hair and our nails are formed. In order to prepare the eggs, both membranes need to be removed. It’s a tricky operation. The first step is to score a circle with a tourné knife (the smallest in a knife roll) a third of the way down the eggshell. Then score it again, to cut the top off cleanly, leaving the shell looking like a trepanned head. Then you carefully empty out the yolk and the white, separating them into bowls to be used later. To loosen the membrane, you use a mixture of vinegar and hot water that must be poured carefully into the now empty egg. It takes one minute and nine seconds. Any less and the membrane will stick. Any longer and the shell becomes fatally fragile. After pouring out the water, you have to use your finger to scrape the membrane from the shell until it peels off like a snake’s skin. This is where my troubles began.
First of all, even in the best-case scenario, you lose about 30 percent of your eggs. Sometimes they crack funny, chipping at the point of incision. Some eggs are just not pretty enough to make the cut. Often, digging in to remove the membrane, you’d catch the edge of the shell and the thing would chip. And, since this was Per Se, one chip was one chip too many. Into the trash it went. The vinegar, meanwhile, is great at softening the bonds that bind the membrane to the inside of the shell but also at softening skin. The repetitive action of scraping the membrane off with the softening effects of the vinegar meant that halfway through the stack, my fingertips were pinkish and cracking. Three-quarters done, droplets of blood had begun to form. This I noticed with some alarm and, admittedly, some pride. Looking down at my perfectly clean eggshells, I saw each one speckled with blood.
Because I was on egg duty for a month, my fingerprints vanished. I looked like a serial killer trying to escape the law. Basic training was working. Who I was before I walked into the kitchen at Per Se was gone. Even the knowledge I thought I knew, I didn’t. There was the way everyone else does a task and the way it was done at Per Se. For instance, one day a tattooed Tennessean sous chef asked if I knew how to torch peppers. I said I did, of course, since torching peppers is a pretty basic skill. But when I said, “Yes, Chef” he asked if I had ever done it at Per Se. “No, Chef.” His reply? “Then you don’t know how to do it. Got it?”
He took me aside and showed me how to use a butane torch and a 3M scrubby to turn charred peppers perfectly soft and smoky while not losing any of the flesh. He was right. I didn’t know how to torch peppers the Per Se way.
I also realized that the rhetoric of a restaurant is vastly different than what actually happens in the kitchen. When I first arrived, I took at face value the stated philosophy of only accepting the best. The anger I had witnessed, I thought, wasn’t justified but could be understood in part as a sort of intensely discriminating standard of excellence. Passion for the best, perhaps, overflows into uncontrollable passion. But one morning while I was in the prep kitchen, I became painfully cognizant of how what happens in a kitchen differs from what is said about what happens in a kitchen. We had just received a shipment of mandarin oranges. We used them to make demi-sec rounds that we served as an accoutrement to a fish main. It was my job not only to take off the membranes but to peel the segments, scrape off all of the pith, and dehydrate them. Even though they’d eventually be dried, it was important to use only the ripest, most flavorful mandarins since the dehydration doesn’t take away flavor, it intensifies it.
The batch I was working with that day was clearly off. The oranges were already desiccated, their flavor paler than what I was used to. Part of my responsibility wasn’t just to prepare the oranges—or whatever ingredient I was using—but to taste them too. I knew that if a diner sent back a dish, or if it made it to the pass and Eli kicked it back, it was my ass that was on the line. So when I saw these oranges and tasted them, I knew I had to say something. When the sous chef supervising the commis kitchen at the time passed by, I told him I didn’t think we should use the oranges. I told him they were much drier than what we usually used.
He grabbed a mandarin and looked at it. “We can still appreciate its beauty,” he said, which was a very Per Se way to say STFU.
“I just don’t think it tastes good, Chef,” I replied.
“What the fuck did you say?” the sous growled, his cheeks flushing with anger. “Nobody asks your fucking opinion.”
“Are you going to question my taste buds?” he went on bellowing. “Nobody wants you to be here!”
By this point I had recovered enough to realize I’d just driven into crazytown.
“Why the fuck would you tell me that? I’m not your fucking friend. We don’t have fucking conversations,” he continued.
There were other moments too, when I felt like I was being called the N-word with no one actually saying it. No one had to and maybe they were too smart to. So it was left to me to decide whether it was because I was black or because I was just me that I was the only one greeted with a growling “Get the fuck back in the prep kitchen!” when I ran food out to chefs on the line. From that point on, I took those words to heart. I didn’t have conversations. I came in and did my job, getting better and better each service, but I didn’t look for friends or colleagues. I had my mask on and shield up. It was that old familiar feeling of being confused, scared, unsafe. And as I did as a boy, I did now as a man, cutting off the wires of my emotions. When the other chefs yelled at me I was no longer there. But I felt foolish to have imagined that I could ever escape the power dynamic I had first experienced at TJ’s. If it was alive and well at Per Se, would I ever find a kitchen in America not poisoned by racism?
When service began in earnest, around five o’clock, the afternoon apprentices either continued prep in the commis kitchen or, if you had proven yourself, you were allowed to assist the garde manger in the main kitchen. There are seven to nine official courses at Per Se, but Chef Keller padded these out with amuse-bouches, small bites sent out to, as the French indicates, make the mouth happy. These are like the culinary equivalent of those first few throat-clearing bars from Jay-Z or ‘Ye: half warm-up, half taste of what’s to come. And totally fun. They take only one bite to eat but hours of work to make.
Ever since he opened the French Laundry, Keller has been making these salmon cornets. They’re often the first bite of food a guest has, and so set the tone for the rest of the evening. The cornets are small sesame tuiles wrapped, while still warm and pliant, into tiny cones. These cones are then filled with similarly dainty scoops of salmon tartare with tiny bits of chive, to resemble ice cream cones with sprinkles. Thomas Keller, Dad Joke king of the kitchen. Having proved myself, my job during service was to man the cornet station, which was tucked right by the door to the kitchen, next to the garde manger.
For an apprentice to be on the line during service at Per Se was an honor. And to have even a small role in the flow of dinner service was a big deal. Though the hierarchy of the kitchen can be cruel, there’s still a sense of togetherness on the line during service. As soon as a waiter puts in an order and a ticket is generated, we became one body. We’d brace for whoever was expediting that night—usually Eli—to call out a number, and as soon as he did the assembly line would spring into action. Me with my cornets, while at other stations other chefs began the beautiful and intricate dance of world-class cooking.
From my station on the line, I grew to understand what Keller meant by “sense of urgency” and understood why the overbearing chefs bore down so hard on all of us. If the intricate rhythms of the kitchen are interrupted by even one beat, the whole thing topples dangerously into cacophony. The sloppy mise of a morning commis, uneven knife cuts for instance, translates into vegetables of varying doneness at dinner. Even a moment of laziness in a line cook during service exposes the entire kitchen to disaster. Food dies under the heat lamps. Foams collapse. Meat grows cold. Yet none of this justifies the abuse.
By the time four months were up and I was approaching the end of my apprenticeship, I was ready to leave. My skin was bulletproof by this point but I hated that it had to be that way. At the end of service one evening, we were all sitting around the pass discussing the menu—well, I was standing, because as an apprentice I wasn’t allowed to sit. Every single night we had to create a menu for the next day. It didn’t matter what time it was or how long it took. We’d gotten to the main course and everyone was dog-tired. It was 2:00 a.m. and we had started work at 11 that morning.
Eli looked at our exhausted eyes and asked, “What are we going to do for tomorrow? No one knows? What is the fucking main course?”
I took a chance: “Why don’t we do Wagyu, Chef?”
Everyone looked around to see who had spoken up. I stood there with a blank face, no emotion, but at the same time not backing down. I had my Per Se game face on, a face I now donned automatically every day when leaving the locker room to approach the kitchen. And as the rest of the kitchen turned toward me, I noticed maybe for the first time that they were all hiding behind similar masks.
“What did you say?” Eli demanded, his voice cutting into me.
Keeping my tone as steady as I could, I responded, “Why don’t we do Wagyu, roasted. With hakurei turnips, hen of the woods, and a Marsala veal jus. Maybe we can put a quail egg on it and make it like a riff on ‘steak & eggs.’ ”
The chefs de partie looked at each other, shook their heads, and rolled their eyes. Everyone, including me, braced themselves for an epic verbal assault. Which approach will he take this time? I wondered. Maybe it would be Eli’s usual riff when he got mad: “You fucking scum, you don’t even get to sit down and you think you can put a dish on this menu!” Perhaps he would go with, “Do you know how hard and long I’ve worked to be in my position? To put my blood, sweat, and tears onto this menu? Do you really think you can spew some off-the-cuff ‘dish’ and think you can make it onto the menu of the best restaurant in North America?”
To my surprise, Eli stared down at his notes, scribbled something, and looked back up at me. “Sounds fucking good. We will run it tomorrow.” My dish, on the menu at Per Se. I should have been overjoyed. I suppose that somewhere inside of me, I was. But by this time nothing could get through the game face. I was too afraid to smile, too exhausted to rejoice, and too beat to celebrate. I left Per Se a few days later, returning to Hyde Park and to the soft landing of the classroom. There was no teary goodbye, nor was I expecting one. The kitchen at Per Se was a clean place but hard and heartless too. The hierarchy was a necessary one but the weight of it was crushing to those on the bottom. The brigade system ensures that food gets to the plate looking pretty; it also gives free range to rage-inclined pricks to indulge their worst impulses. The anger was like black mold in the air ducts, infecting everything. As I’ve opened my own kitchens, at times I’ve certainly been guilty of regurgitating the habits I learned at Per Se. But when I grow enraged, I also try to remember how it made me feel to be yelled at on the line. From Per Se, I try to extract the sense of urgency without the poison of anger.