Here’s how my brothers, Bob and Marc, would eat their sugar cereal while watching cartoons on cold, housebound, midwinter Saturday mornings: They hoovered it up in one long inhalation, without using their lips. Chwwhchchhwhech…Liquid milk and bright pastel cereal bits flew into their mouths like dirt into a vacuum, their teeth clinking down on the empty spoon. Chwhwchchwech…I sat next to them slowly chewing my butter-logged bagel and wondered how they could manage to consume liquids such as soup normally but eat cereal like a couple of anteaters, and felt, just via my proximity, the perfect distillation of their joy of consumption. Immune in their happy bubble to all household responsibilities and family drama, they immersed themselves in the convergence of sugar and color, drawling out their pleasure in a trill of harmonic sucking.
That pretty much describes my first year of cooking professionally. I walked in the door of Danube and inhaled it in one long, knotty, seductive slurp. It was complete and total immersion. For once, I was not thinking about my role or what I should be doing with my life. I was just doing. I was moving—physically moving—and working far harder than I’d ever worked before. Eighty-hour weeks, and the hours flew by. By the time I’d finished my first month interning in a real kitchen in Manhattan, I felt like I had finally activated the entirety of my DNA. Maybe I was a fair mixture of my parents after all: the workaholic businessman dad meets the sauce-simmering, stove-bound mom.
When cooking school ended and it was time for me to find a restaurant to do my required six-week unpaid internship, I made a quick foot tour of the best fine-dining restaurants in the city—why wouldn’t you do your internship at the best restaurant possible? I naively reasoned—and decided on the one with the most enticing dining room. I walked past the fragrant vestibule with its display of fresh apples into the dimly lit Bouley, Chef David Bouley’s eponymous restaurant in Tribeca, and boldly asked the host if I could talk to the chef.
Looking back, it’s easy to see that I had no idea where I was. Quite literally. When I told my friends at culinary school about where I hoped to intern, I rhymed Bouley with “duelie” instead of with “Vouvray.” On my tongue, one of the city’s greatest chefs sounded like a dual-wheeled truck charging through a mud run.
It happened that Galen Zamarra, chef de cuisine at Bouley, didn’t need an intern and sent me to see Mario Lohninger, the Austrian-born chef de cuisine of their sister restaurant, who did.
Danube was Chef Bouley’s ode to the decadent cooking of the Hapsburg Empire, complete with a dining room washed in gold metallic paint and ringed with gigantic Klimt reproductions. The menu promised both haute historical and contemporary Austrian, as well as truffles and foie gras and rare bottles of wine, everything necessary to lubricate the downtown financial-district boom economy.
Both of Bouley’s restaurants were full-tilt fancy fine dining and considered to be among the very best in Manhattan. Yet everyone who worked there called it the Danube, a definite article slip that immediately put me at ease. Back home, people often tagged an extra the onto all their favorite haunts and restaurants. It was the Schwarzwald. The Park Drug. Our local grocery store, the Red Owl.
Tall and regal, but with a hipster’s stubble and greasy curls, Mario interviewed me thoroughly, as if I were applying to join the ranks of the military, and then gave me a sweeping tour through the wine cellar stocked with Austrian Zweigelt and Grüner Veltliner and the storeroom shelves glowing with ruby lingonberries and green pumpkin-seed oil. On that first day he was overly polite with me. Decorous. Impervious to the turmoil swirling around him. With ramrod-straight posture, he led me through the downstairs belly of Danube’s prep kitchen, stepping high over snaking vacuum tubes and puddles of water and flattened cardboard boxes. He strode past the prep cooks, who were calmly but deftly shelling fava beans and pounding out schnitzels and butchering fish, their eyes darting to me in small doses. I would soon know them as “the family”—Chef Bouley’s tribe. This steadfast band of Dominican prep cooks—who might or might not actually have been related—sized up new recruits with a loose interest, like members of a crime family who don’t want to get too attached before they know what’ll happen to the new one. They outlasted all of us.
“Such a mess here today,” Mario said politely, then turned around and shouted at the nearest porter, “Get this garbage out of here!” He shot me a look of mock outrage, as if this scene wasn’t the normal state of affairs. But it was. Danube, which had been open for three months, was a madhouse. The place operated with the kind of working dysfunction particular to so many newly opened New York restaurants, but of a sorely under-organized brand all its own. The classic Austrian dishes on the menu—veal schnitzel; goulash made with beef cheeks; boiled beef, here called kavalierspitz—were upgraded to fine dining by giving each ingredient the high-end treatment. Bread crumbs for the schnitzel were made by hand, from dried baguettes. Vegetable and fruit juices—beet juice, pineapple juice, carrot juice—were extracted fresh every day for sauces. The cucumber salad was made twice a day, right before lunch and right before dinner. None of the filled pastas were made ahead, as they are in so many restaurants; here they were assembled in the prep kitchen during the service itself. “Two veal tortellini!” the waiter would shout down the steps, and three minutes later a prep cook would charge up the steps with eight tortellini, their plump veal tummies visible through the thin potato-and-duck-fat dough. The only organizational principle here was the old kitchen adage, “Make it happen.” Bouley’s perfectionistic standards strained like an overworked muscle against his trademark creative lawlessness. Where the system failed, talent and sheer adrenaline made it all work.
The restaurant was so new that it still had no organized family meal, the typical 3:30 afternoon dinner for the staff. The cooks, working fourteen-hour days, scavenged what they could, shoving bits of their extra mise en place—their prep, raw tuna scraps or cold short rib trim—into buns stolen from the baking rack. I began to see how food, the kind we were allowed to eat, was currency. I noted how crafty line cooks bribed the prep cooks: They’d slyly hand over copper pots filled with surplus pasta or buttery lobster trimmings to a member of the family, who would nod and hand over the quart of peeled favas the cook so desperately needed.
At first glance I assumed that the line cooks outranked the prep cooks, but I quickly learned that winning over the family was crucial to mastering any station upstairs. Until I learned to amass my own scrap-ammunition and to speak a few words of kitchen Spanish, my battleship sank farther every day. With hand signals and gestures, I begged the Spanish-speaking family to split my blanched English peas or to please juice two quarts of beet juice for me each morning. During my first month, they grudgingly did my bidding while laughing at me and sighing, “Mami, mami…” It was a term that struck me as offensive until a fellow line cook told me that it was the feminine equivalent of dude. All the guys were papis, all the women mamis. The female members of the family laughed and nicknamed me “Yo quiero.” I want. It was the only thing I knew how to say.
I had visited New York a few times before we moved there, but I hadn’t bargained for the way it would smell on a daily basis. During my walk to and from work, I passed through shifting clouds of odors, some markedly sweeter than those at home (French bakeries) and some a whole lot fouler (rat piss, and lots of it). The atmosphere above the dirty sidewalks seemed to create a humid low-pressure environment, holding the scent fog down tight. Every once in a while a merciful gust of fishy sea air came in to flush the streets.
To my surprise, days spent plating tasting menus in one of New York City’s finest food churches required an immunity to the vile underside of the city. Any restaurant job, whether at a diner or a four-star restaurant, puts you into contact with a tremendous volume of refuse, and that discard pile is not pretty. At the fanciest restaurants, the contrast between the backstage grit and the front-of-the house opulence is especially stark.
It was often past midnight when we plated the last tables, the hour at which the night porters arrived and began to tackle the mountain of dirty dishes with determined faces. One table was just beginning their six-course menu: after I filled a metal ring with four-star potato salad, laying down overlapping nickels of cooked potato and flakes of shaved black truffle in a tight fish-scale pattern, the food runner picked it up and lifted it up high to avoid the porter, who was balancing a large garbage bag on his shoulder, trudging toward the street. As the bag brushed past me, a sour rush of rancidity ran smack into the truffle’s delirious damp perfume, giving me my first head-spinning lesson in the pungency of New York fine dining.
After a day spent handling such luxuries as fresh porcini mushrooms, top-flight bluefin tuna, and whole lobes of foie gras, I hit the street an hour later and walked a wide circle around the remnants of the night’s crime scene: the garbage bags that leaked soft-shell crab spooge onto the sidewalk, the rats that skated through the juices, and the steaming tubs of grease topped with constellations of fried spittle.
The polarity underscored my own divide, which was just as wide. Even though I’d had exactly zero experience with fine dining, on either side of the swinging door, the ingredients I was handling at Danube felt somehow familiar. Here I found echoes of the German-American food my mom had made throughout my childhood: spaetzle fried in brown butter until the undersides bronzed. The spicy horseradish she served with beef roast, now grated fresh over barely cooked salmon, the white flakes falling like fat January snow. Crisp balls of pale green kohlrabi like the ones my dad ate like apples while watching the Vikings game on TV. Poppy seeds going into the grinder and coming out the other side a skein of crushed soil, smelling like dank fermented fruit—correctly ground “as fine as snuff,” just as Grandma Dion had said they should be. The place whipped up my sleeping childhood taste memories to a froth.
But of course the food was much, much fancier. Snobbish, some people back home in rural Minnesota might even say, the kind of reckless high-priced frippery they would take as an assault to their ground-beef thriftiness. That didn’t register, though, because my mom had raised me to revere food. Food was beyond pretension. These Austrian plates were, in fact, the dreams of my Catholic mother, the perfect blend of her mixed French-Canadian and German lineages, the glitzy heights she’d always wanted for us. She harbored exactly these same illusions of grandeur when she served each one of her kids a rib eye and a full lobster tail with a sputtering candlelit butter dish for dipping. Compared with the piety of regular old Midwestern beef-and-potatoes, the food at Danube was positively papal.
If this was the Hapsburg Empire, Mario ruled the kingdom. He wasn’t just intimidating; he was also Austrian. Cultured, snappish, and prone to brutal honesty, Mario had begun his cooking apprenticeship at the age of fourteen, and he didn’t sugarcoat anything. When the young pastry sous chef came up with a new dessert for him to try—a fig wrapped in crumbly pastry—he inhaled it in three large forkfuls and then pronounced it “Dumpf,” crumbs falling from his mouth. I didn’t need a translation to understand that one. Dull, lacking in acidity, no oomph, just like it sounded. Dumpf was pretty universal.
At around 10:30 each morning, I stiffened at Mario’s arrival. He’d walk in and without a word to anyone reach into a nook and grab his hidden box of cereal, pour an overflowing amount into a porcelain consommé bowl, and bend down deeply to it, his limp locks of hair brushing the pass. Then he’d wipe his stubbled chin, clap his hands, narrow his eyes, and start prowling the line for vulnerable-looking cooks.
Not only was Mario one of the most technically precise chefs I’ve ever known, but his palate was savage in its accuracy; he frequently called out cooks for the slightest of deviations in the simplest of things. “This chestnut puree was made with milk and chicken stock, eh? It should be half milk, half veg stock.” As if to make a show of this superiority, the depth of his passion, when he tasted one of our sauces he didn’t just dip the tip of a finger or a spoon into it as other chefs did; he locked eyes with the cook and swiped two fingers through it repeatedly, lasciviously, slurping up full tablespoons while taking the measure of both the sauce and the cook’s character at the same time. He lapped up precious mise en place like a Great Dane. Those of us who often slid into service with just enough of this or that sauce feared Mario’s two-fingered taste.
When I first began on the canapé station, Mario paired me up with Nick, a guy with sweet eyes, a ripping-sharp knife, and severe cramping of the central nervous system. He was wound as tight as a pulley cord, taut with trying to get it all done. He’d be skating along, gliding through tasks with smooth movements, diving in and out of the reach-in fridge, until a moment of indecision paralyzed him. Faced with the problem of what to do with batons of foie gras that were graying at the ends from oxidation, he visibly shook, crumpled up the parchment, and tossed it—foie gras, which rivaled gold for the price per pound—in the trash.
I was no better. I left my crap all over the place: half-built beet terrines abandoned while I ran upstairs to take a pan of quince out of the oven; a cluster of herbs and garlic for a sachet left on the corner of a shelf while I searched for where I’d set the cheesecloth; my notebook, just four inches long, full of precious scribbled formulas, I lost and recaptured daily. Until the day that it fell into the evil hands of the sneering Austrian pastry chef, who wouldn’t give it back.
He stopped icing a Sacher torte to launch a screed in my direction: “This is the third time this week you’ve left your stupid little notebook in my pastry room! You don’t deserve to keep it!”
A middle-aged crank trained in the rigorous art of Austrian pastry, he had no tolerance for me. We scrapped as if on a middle-school playground, him holding the notebook high above his head, me lurching for it. And then I did my signature counter leap, one knee on the counter (turns out I can spring up suddenly like a cat), snatched the notebook, and stomped to the locker room. Huffing, I ejected all the shit from my locker in one bear-paw heave.
“Did you learn your lesson?” asked Harrison, the meat cook.
I stared at him, unable to speak. Did I?
Harrison kicked his locker shut. “You learned that the pastry chef is a major asshole. That’s a good lesson.”
By the end of the second eighty-hour week, I was exhausted. That night I’d made 189 orders of potato chips threaded with sardines, and just as many portions of octopus-pineapple salad and cured mahi with beet-fennel slaw. Blitzed with fatigue, I stood in the bright basement prep kitchen completing my last task of the evening, making a sachet to drop into the overnight braised oxtail, wetting a clump of cheesecloth and slowly fanning out its damp corners as if smoothing open petals to press a flower. With my dad’s baby face and my mom’s small stature, I looked more like a self-serious twelve-year-old than a cook in a professional brigade. My hair was pinned back from my face with a bunch of barrettes and I was basically wearing oversize pajamas: loose black pants, black comfort shoes, and a size 44 chef’s coat, which was at least four sizes too big. The chef coat assortment at Bouley was always mostly extra-larges, making me look like I was playing dress-up. (The smaller guys nabbed all the 36s and 38s, took them home, and washed them themselves, but I didn’t know that yet.)
The coat situation pointed to the obvious gender gap in Danube’s kitchen, and throughout much of fine dining at the time. All women cooks dealt with it differently. Some of these lone females fought back by excelling in aggressive sexual innuendo—by talking even dirtier than the boys. I combatted my ladyness by stomping out of my sweaty pants in the coed locker room and letting everyone have their fill of my saggy briefs and graying sports bra as much as they liked—in other words, by pushing my femininity all the way to the way-back. I’d spent my college years stalking patriarchal dominance in literature, but when I found myself immersed in a testosterone world, I no longer cared for the social argument. I didn’t want to talk my way into this kitchen; I wanted to prove myself on their battleground, through my cooking. Most of these boys, I thought, were completely unaware of the feminine roots of their culinary art. I doubted they could imagine what strength and skill it took to assemble a proper pantry arsenal back in the old days, but I could, and I knew the work had been much the same.
Never much of a girlie girl anyway, I figured there would be time later for pedicures. As it was, my toenails were broken and stained purple from rubbing against my black socks, as anyone looking on could see: the locker-room situation at the Danube spelled out the ratio of the gender dynamic. There was only one. An open box of cornstarch always sat next to the sink, free for anyone who needed to powder his balls. (Key to preventing crotch bite, you know.)
After cutting off the plastic-wrap belt I used to hold up my chef pants and openly changing into my street clothes, I trudged up the steps, slipping the thick strap of my messenger bag over my head. If Aaron ever hinted that he was jealous of my boy-filled workplace he never let on—and needn’t have, either. The only thought on my mind was getting home to him. I hoped that he’d still be awake and would want to sit up with me. I wanted to unwind amid the wood shavings from his carvings and the long panoramic photos of home he’d pinned up on the walls, a sort of shrine to our rural life back in Minnesota: our rock-garden flower beds, the trees draped in fog on Indian Creek, his fading 1973 Buick Centurion that was still parked in our yard. All I really wanted was for him to open a bottle of wine in that amazing way he did, by unscrewing the cork with a cordless drill running backward—rrr-wrrrrrr—and to conserve my evaporating energy long enough to bring it to bed.
If he was already asleep, I would crawl in next to him and nestle close, my hair smelling deeply of fried sardines, not yet realizing that my exit routine desperately needed to include a shower.
I also didn’t yet recognize the hunger paradox particular to line cooks, the strange phenomenon that occurs the moment your feet touch the pavement, when your appetite surges back like a demon after a dinner service full of glorious tastes that have temporarily suppressed it. I thought of myself with multiple stomachs, a ruminant, albeit with two chambers instead of four—one stomach for flavors and the other for bulk. The flavor side turned out to be desire itself, which had been satiated; the food side, the actual fuel tank, began to ping hollowly every night around 12:30. And so before going home I hit the Pakistani cab stand on Church Street, where the middle-aged ladies dumped my choice of meat, two vegetables, rice or naan, and double cilantro sauce onto the plate with the same ennui as had the lunch ladies of my childhood—although the spicy, full-flavored food these women scooped was as powerful as kryptonite in comparison.
My family considered my internship a great coup. My mom fretted over my hours while encouraging me to put the recipes she’d taught me on the menu—as if I were a contributor. Grandma Dion, my mom’s mom, wrote to me in loopy cursive asking me how I liked working at “the café.” Aaron knew exactly where I was, and was happy for me, but he was also somewhat fearful of my unbridled enthusiasm: what devotions to this city it might inspire, what long-term commitments would keep us from returning to our house that summer to grow our garden. To my car-dealer dad I simply reported the numbers.
“It’s all six-day weeks, Dad, thirteen to fourteen hours a day.”
“Wonderful!” he boomed. He worked a long six-day week himself, so this was not considered excessive.
“Actually, Dad,” I corrected, “it was eighty-seven hours last week.”
“Even more wonderful!”
As the fifth week of my internship slid into its final one, Mario teased me as he watched me herky-jerkily dice some potatoes with my heavy German culinary-school-issued knife. “Ahmy,” he said, gesturing with the blade of his sharp Japanese slicer. “When you going to get a real knife?” The entire kitchen staff was obsessed with a Japanese knife shop within walking distance of the restaurant called Korin. Cooks on their day off regularly stopped by to show off their new knife candy, injecting a spot of cheer to our long days.
Mario had given me no hope that my tenure there would be anything but temporary. But for some reason I found myself boldly saying, “I’ll get a new knife when you start giving me a paycheck.”
It was true. I couldn’t afford one.
He looked at me through eyes slitted for seeing a distance.
“Okay. You start for real on canapé on Monday. By yourself.”
I knew the honeymoon was over. My marriage to the fine-dining brigade—which at times felt more like admission to an unfriendly harem—was about to begin.
I went to Korin and bought a very good Japanese carbon knife, soft and easy to sharpen on a water stone. It’s still the one I use most often, its brand forgotten, its dark charcoal blade swirled with a hot wind of orange rust.
The guys set about teaching me how to take care of it. Nick ran his knife frantically on the sharpening stone, like an adolescent taking matters of need into his own hands. Kazu did it slower, and taught me to sharpen the first side more than the second and to feel the roll of the burr on the underside before gently whisking it off against the stone. All of them gauged sharpness by reverently slicing against the grain of their arm hairs.
Not every cook in the kitchen was so neurotic about keeping their edges razor-sharp. Yugi, the young fish cook (nicknamed Eugene by the Americans), smiled and shrugged with Japanese modesty, saying, “My knife is sharp enough.” The Austrians were of the same mind. The other Austrian sous chef named Thomas, whom we called T2, used a heavy German cook’s knife, never sharpened it, and could cut a butternut squash into precise matchsticks in about three minutes, his knife powered not by a razor edge but by intention and sheer confidence. T1 constantly ran his long Japanese slicer against a honing steel, never on the stone, and could do the same.
I might have learned how to sharpen my knife, and how to cut a sheaf of chives into paper-thin rings, but I was still greener than a fern. And everyone knew it.
“J. Lo is in the bar! Her ass is on a barstool!” the guys hooted, and they could not believe that in the year 2000, at the height of her rise, I did not know who she was. Jennifer Lopez I might have faintly heard of, but not this bootylicious “J. Lo.” I had literally just spent much of the last three years in the woods, deprived of media.
In a lot of ways, my innocence saved me. If I had known exactly where I was or who I was knocking shoulders with, I would have been too freaked out to work, because this kitchen was stocked with the highest density of cooks who would go on to cook famously than any other kitchen I’d ever work in again. Gabriel would own three restaurants on Nantucket and appear regularly in food magazines. Harrison would helm a cultish small place in the East Village. Cesar would open Brooklyn’s first Michelin three-star restaurant. King would own a bunch of notable Filipino restaurants. Einat would open a couple of Israeli spots in the city and write a cookbook. Galen, next door at Bouley, would launch multiple restaurants of his own, and Bill, the Bouley pastry chef, would eventually become pastry chef at the White House. There was not a slouch in the bunch. It turned out to be a beautiful thing, that naïveté, because it gave me a blind courage. I’ve been dealing with the sad aftereffects of its erosion ever since.
I was twenty-four years old, ancient for a European cook, but average for Danube, an experienced kitchen. The head fish guy was in his midthirties and the meat guy was maybe pushing forty, and yet the three Austrians liked to point out how old we were. To their point, our knees were aging fast, scaling the steps between the upstairs serving kitchen and the downstairs prep kitchen at least fifty times a day.
In cook years, however, I was still a babe in the woods. After eventually moving up from canapés to garde-manger, even my salads were off, and Mario was not afraid to point it out.
“What are you doing, beating up my salad?” he scoffed, throwing the contents of my mixing bowl into the trash. He started with new greens, squirted them with vinaigrette, and tumbled them with his hands, as one might wash a delicate bra, and then lifted them in an airy heap onto the plate.
“Never break their ribs,” he said softly, guilting me as effectively as if I’d been breaking their bones.
We felt someone standing behind us and turned around.
“My dad is here!” Mario beamed, formally introducing us. “He is making us the goulash today.”
His father, who had come all the way from Mario’s hometown in rural Austria, smiled widely (for he didn’t speak much English), and motioned for the canister of hot paprika on the shelf above my head.
He took the paprika and sprinted away. Small and quick. That’s odd, I thought, he seems too young to be Mario’s father.
“Um, Chef, can I ask? How old are you?”
“Twenty-four,” Mario said, leaning over into my sink. He slurped up water with his hand, rubbed it all over his face, and casually wiped himself down with a brown C-fold towel as if mopping off from a shower. I thought for a second that he was going to dig out his ears with it.
“You and I are the same age?” I asked. I was shocked. He was so young and so…good.
“Yes,” he said, narrowing his eyes and smiling. “We are the same age.” He dropped the smile, tilted his head, and searched my face.
“Ahmy, you are so old.” Meaning so old to be working garde-manger, the cold appetizer station.
In any normal narrative, I might easily have spent nine months on that cold station. But as the fairy tale goes, someone quit. I remember that his name was Joel. He was a petite, quiet-spoken, sandy-haired guy, struggling on the line, sliding roughly around the station in an untucked uniform every night. Before that evening’s service Mario clapped his hands above his head and called us in for circle time. With theatrical formality he announced, “Everyone, Joel is leaving us. To become a food writer,” he said with a predatory smile. “His last day will be tomorrow. We wish him the best of luck in his future career.” This grandiose crew meeting was as effective as a snicker, as we never congregated to discuss someone’s leave-taking and certainly not for an early-out. In cases like Joel’s, the guy would usually just shove the contents of his locker into a white takeout bag after service and call the night his last. Joel, with a blanched face, nodded and blinked at the floor.
Mario came up to me and laid an arm around my shoulders. “You should come and eat in the dining room tomorrow night.” Did he mean I should go there for dinner? We couldn’t afford that. He felt the hesitation in my back.
“No, you and your boyfriend come to dinner on me. Taste the dishes. Come tomorrow.” He said it politely, but I understood; it was painfully obvious that I needed contextualizing, that I needed to eat this food in order to learn how to cook it. It also meant that I would be taking Joel’s place as meat entremetier on the hot line.
I was thrilled with the chance to bring Aaron into my world. We both dressed up—him in a suit, me forsaking my grungy sports bra for a real one and my clunky work shoes for heels. We walked into the dining room and were struck with instant, simultaneous fear. The lighting was womblike. There was a tiny door behind the bar that led to the kitchen and servers passed through it swiftly, letting out just flickering slivers of its harsh fluorescent light and none of its hot energy. In the dining room, the head servers—called captains—tracked around smoothly as if on rails. The bubbles in the champagne cocktail that Stefan the bartender handed me rolled up serenely on invisible filaments from the bottom to the top. I was shaking with the formality of it, uncomfortable being on the other side of the swinging door. Aaron looked similarly shivery.
The first glass of wine helped. My glass would be my crutch. First came the amuse-bouches, just as I had been making them: the crispy sardine in potato chips, the sweet-and-sour octopus salad, the little cup of spiced squash soup. They all tasted so much better in the dining room than they did in the kitchen. The second I finished my wine to accompany the first course, Didier the head captain was there to refill my glass. I didn’t realize that with a wine pairing, it was wise to pace yourself. Eric, another captain, smiled broadly.
“I recognize this smell,” Aaron said, eating the sardine, “from your hair after work.”
He looked around the room, at the gilded rafters, the glittering Klimt reproductions, the plush velvet banquettes, the grandmotherly fringed lamps. “This place is totally crazy,” he said, absorbing every facet of the room’s excesses with growing admiration, “over the top…” I knew he was thinking of performance and decadence, of David Bowie, of glam rock. The reason he had worn a glittery cape when performing with his band, Aaron America, had everything in common with this dining room. “They got the lighting right, though.” They had. It was soft and luscious, like the food, like my rapidly evaporating sobriety.
I let my head drop low over the new course and inhaled, rather dramatically. The monkfish with artichokes and black trumpet mushrooms, which had seemed to me the least exciting dish we made, surprised me the most. It expressed something dark: hidden corners and sweet earth and a weird candle-burning spice…that pinch of réglisse, or licorice root powder. In the kitchen I had tasted the sauce alone, droplets from the tip of my spoon, but never with the roasted fish itself. Knit together into one forkful, the monkfish was a soother in a tasting menu of dynamic courses, a low-buzzing romantic dish.
The captains hovered around our table, spoiling us, circling back to make conversation as I sunk into a loose state of drunkenness. Eric came over and dropped some complaint about Didier, and then Didier came back to pour more wine and bitch about Eric, and then before I knew it they were standing over us, whispering hotly, quietly fighting in the relative cover behind our corner table. I leaned back and smiled at Aaron, my eyes lost inside my high pink cheeks. I belonged. We belonged. My nerves fully unwound, I reached to grab his hand to punctuate whatever it was we were talking about…when my delicious Zweigelt, my chokecherry and plum and moss forest-floor wine, spilled in a moat around his pink lamb chops. The captains broke their huddle and Eric immediately laid a calm hand on Aaron’s plate.
“Let us replate this for you, Aaron.”
“Nah!” I bleated, not wanting to be a bother to my fellow cooks in the kitchen. “He’ll just eat it like that.” Aaron glared at me. He didn’t want to eat it like that. That’s when everyone, including me, knew that I was completely toasted. This was not so bright. The next day I was coming in early, to train with T1 on the hot line.
Thomas Kahl, the first of our two sous chefs named Thomas to arrive from Austria, had a shaved bald head and wore heavy combat boots and an expression of disdain. He bounced ever so slightly at rest, like a lion ready to pounce, which suggested to me that he’d experienced some serious kitchen combat and had exited it triumphant.
For his first week he hustled around the kitchen muttering a single word: “Bullshit.” Later on his English would kick in, but in the beginning the hot, uncovered braised beef cheeks steaming on the lower shelf of the walk-in were bullshit. The dregs of Dijon mustard in the jar next to the newly opened one were bullshit. My bloody cutting board, smeared with the guts of so many badly butchered sardines, was really bullshit.
When Thomas Myer arrived, with a more sensitive demeanor, wearing loafers, his plaid pants tucked into his socks, smacking of the rural Michelin-starred auberge he’d just come from, we called the first Thomas T1 and him T2 (and sometimes Terminator 1 and 2). They both regularly pulled sixteen-hour shifts, keeping long hours on the bullshit patrol. Both Thomases and Mario spoke devoutly of their former kitchens in Europe, mostly of the restaurant they had all worked at together, Chef Hans Haas’s Tantris in Munich, which led the charge in Europe for contemporary Austrian cuisine. They spoke of Hans Haas with deep-bass-note reverence, much like the Jedi. Tan-tris. I imagined a shadowy dining room draped in black.
I knew that the Austrians clearly thought that we Americans all pretty much sucked, so I was curious as to why the newbie me had been plucked from the garde-manger and chosen to work the entremet. I asked T1, “Why me instead of one of the other guys?”
“None of you are that good, but your mom made the spaetzle, right?”
I blushed, caught gushing about my mother’s home cooking to this international crew. “Yeah, and noodles.”
“In brown butter, I know,” he said. “But let’s go, hey. Big list today.”
I crouched in front of the low-boy refrigerators below the station, expecting to see a menagerie of station prep but finding nothing but a quart of picked parsley leaves and a tub of plum jam. I fell back on my heels. Joel had left me nothing?
T1 smiled at me from above, tapping his knife on the board, keeping his beat.
“I threw it all in the garbagio. No fucking bueno.” This phrase was his new “bullshit,” more fitting to the Spanish patois of our kitchen. He motioned for me to grab an empty bus tub and hurtled down the stairs to the vegetable walk-in refrigerator.
In the cool walk-in he started loading down the tub: twelve endive, a vanilla bean, fourteen carrots, a bunch of celery, a bunch of chives, some thyme, rosemary, a handful of fresh bay leaves—“the Turkish bay leaves, like this,” he grabbed the fatter ones, “not the California ones, too much perfume”—two celeriac roots, a head of red cabbage, a few anchovies, ten lemons. “You get the micro greens. Just for garnish. Kohlrabi and beet only.” I reached up on tiptoe and opened the plastic lid to a dizzying array of plug trays of baby spouts. Kohlrabi, I knew that one. And there was the red-stemmed beet. Cool. I scooped them into two corners of a metal prep container.
He handed me another and gestured to a plastic tub in the corner. “Fill this with crème fraîche.”
As I was scooping up the white goo, he said, “Hey, Amy,” kicking off a routine that he would repeat every chance he got for the rest of my time there. “We need horseradish, too.” I turned around to find T1 waiting with an enormous rough-skinned horseradish root hanging from his fly, its rhizome top forked into two knobs. Horseradish schlong: so infantile and yet so absurdly apt I had to crack a smile. His head nodded with silent laughter. Real sexism in the kitchen I would later learn to recognize—it was a lot more underhanded and more insidious—but this obvious shit I found amusing.
Back upstairs, I tried to shake the image out of my head and get down to business.
“Let’s start with the purees,” he said. The vegetable purees, the backbone of the meat garnish station, were the down pillows of the plate. I dragged a rondeau to a hot spot on the wide steel flat-top, lobbed in a chunk of butter, and hastily rustled together the heap of flat parsnip coins between my hands.
“No, no, wait. You salt the vegetable first on the cutting board, so it can start to sweat.” He misted fine sea salt over the parsnips and muddled them with his hands. Almost instantly a mist of perspiration beaded up on each slice. “Now when you cook them in the butter, they’ll taste more like themselves.” He tapped his spoon on the metal piano—the outer ledge of the stovetop’s apron—and continued: “Use a lot of fat. Cook them all the way soft. If you add the stock now, when the vegetable is half-done, you’re not making a puree, you’re making soup.”
It seemed I did everything wrong. I oversalted everything that shrank upon contact with heat: mushrooms, spinach. He made a sour face and wordlessly threw the entire pan into the dish tub. I cooked the schnitzel too slow and it came out looking soggy. “Limp, like an old man.” I cooked it too hot so that its crust puffed properly into a toffee-colored balloon, but it wore bedsores of blackness on its bottom. He threw those out, too. Mostly, though, I was just too slow.
I reserved most of my attention for the more glamorous things I’d never seen before: foie gras cooked medium, fleshy pink at the center like liver putty; cherries braised in balsamic; endive cooked into a marmalade; wild mushroom confit; truffle sauce made with a quart of reduced veal stock, a bottle of fine Madeira, and a fifty-dollar jar of truffle pieces. I babied the truffle sauce, ignoring my potato stock boiling away on the flat-top.
“Hey.” He nodded toward the stock, which was going berserk. “Not so bueno.”
I quickly whipped my pot to the cool side of the stove, where its violent bubbles sputtered out.
His voice sharpened. “You know, this is not about the truf-fles and the fwaah,” he said with a forced American accent. “Good cooking is potatoes and onions.”
Danube’s kitchen didn’t look like one that ran on potatoes and onions. From what I could tell, it looked to be pretty well fueled by the foie, the engorged liver of a force-fed duck; we went through so much of it. But while flurries of truffles rained down on shiny butter-poached lobster claws, I saw that T1 was right. Many sauces relied on the potato stock for their base: an emerald-green chive sauce to accompany pan-seared scallops, a honey-colored horseradish sauce for beef.
The potato stock was a deceptively simple concoction, made by sweating onions, garlic, and sliced raw potatoes in butter, deglazing with white wine, and simmering everything in chicken stock until the potatoes were tender. Pushing it through a sieve yielded a soupy blond puree. It tasted a lot like my mother’s potato soup without the bacon. But the brilliance of this stuff belied its humble origins. It gave conceptual sauces a country backbone, pulled them from the clouds back to the terra firma. Banyuls vinegar and green pumpkin-seed oil were new to me, but potatoes and onions, these things I understood.
It would be weeks on the hot line before I had a real conversation with Chef Bouley himself, the ghostly, swift-moving presence responsible for this machine. I soon learned that his unpredictability was the hallmark of the Bouley kitchen. To his cooks, it was the unfortunate consequence of his insane creativity. All night long Bouley cooked personally, off menu, shuttling between his side-by-side restaurant kitchens, for countless VIPs—friends, celebrities, known gourmands. He’d show up at 6:00 P.M. in the middle of the first seating rush toting a case of Concord grapes, throw it on someone’s cutting board, and say, “I want you to clean these and steep them in the lobster-port sauce,” totally kinking the cook’s flow. Or he’d drop a box of scallops in the shell onto the cold app station and say, “Shuck them, save the coral roe, sauté it, and put it in small dice under the ceviche,” forcing that cook to wedge himself onto the hot line to find space on the flat-top dining service. This put all the cooks on edge and constantly in the weeds—but it kept Bouley’s own improvisational inner demon on track. Even without the last-minute arrivals, not a single night went by without Bouley throwing a wedge into the gears of dinner service. I thought this was how all kitchens were.
I didn’t know what to expect of a chef with one three-star and one four-star New York City restaurant, but I suppose it was something more distantly managerial: I didn’t expect him to cook the fish or plate the food himself. Or to wear formal dress shirts and cuff links beneath his chef coat, like he was playing 007, a Bond masquerading as a chef. Or to talk to me.
“You’ve got the orange powder over here?” he whispered steamily in my ear.
I quickly dropped the piece of schnitzel I was breading back into its crumb bath and started flipping through my tiny ring-bound notebook as his impatience mounted. Orange powder?
“She doesn’t have the orange powder?” he said to Mario. “Where in the hell is my orange powder? It was in a little foam cup…” And he started to ransack my station.
I’d come to learn that the orange powder—made by grinding candied, dehydrated orange peel to a dust—was one of the many extra things I was expected to have on my station for these moments when Bouley decided to come in and go rogue, which was nightly. In addition to the regular printed menu, he had a running list of dishes that he was constantly changing, working on, reinventing.
He’d tell the fish cook, “Give me the garnish we did for the axis for that guy.” (Axis being the kind of Texas venison we used.)
“Which was that, Chef? The lobster beet setup?” Reduced beet juice, red wine, and truffles.
“No, no.” Bouley sighed, basting sturgeon with foaming, browning butter. He threw his spoon into the metal spoon bin. “Go ask Shea, he’ll know.” Meaning the dish he did next door at Bouley. Meaning that the cook should leave his station, walk outside, go into the kitchen next door at Bouley, and ask Shea, the meat cook, for the “axis setup Chef did for the guy.” Shea, deeply weeded in service himself, would just laugh and send the cook back with a saucepot of celery puree, sautéed wood ear mushrooms, and a pot of mushroom réglisse sauce. Most of the time he guessed right.
As Bouley cooked and plated, you could see him juggling proportion and generosity: what was just enough, what was just a hair too much, what degree of excess would sink the diner into a kind of delirium. Trained in cutting-edge kitchens in France in the late 1970s, he absorbed his mentor Roger Vergé’s preference for light vegetable-based sauces over the old-school meat reductions and then took it one step further; his culinary mind tripped on the sauces. Some of them seemed to have been devised by plumbing the depths of the color itself. The mango-curry-saffron mixed far-flung flavors, but tasted like a totally natural fusing of the elements that make yellow. Ocean herbal sauce—composed of three herb oils as well as fennel, celery, and garlic purees—mined the color green. His sauces were so vivid they were almost libidinous—virile and romantic at the same time, like him. One look at his plates identified the guy whose eyes conquested all female passersby to be the same one who had also personally picked out the dining room’s gaudy tasseled velvet pillows.
His food was precise, but not so tight that it blocked out artistry. There was a looseness, a drunken glee for cooking that was very pronounced here. A Bouley consommé wore a technically incorrect shimmer of fat on top, as thin as gold leaf, which effectively lubricated the happiness going down. It was the industry norm to gently shake off the juices that erupted when you cut into a filet of medium-rare meat, so as not to dilute the sauce, but when the meat cook did this, Bouley shot him a look and said quietly, “I want that venison juice.” The cook complied, his eyes transfixed to the translucent bloody dome that grew by the second on the venison’s cut edge, threatening to flow a river through his pale celeriac puree. It made little sense until you just accepted the fact that juice was juice. Cooking was about sensation, about carnality, and Chef was certainly no prude.
This kind of cooking required real knowledge—cooks who could hit the outer edge of perfection, who trusted themselves enough to color right on top of the lines, not inside them. When the service was bumpy and we weren’t hitting it, Bouley slipped down the line and whispered hotly into the space between me and the meat guy, “Don’t give me what I ask for. Give me what I want.”
“What the hell did he say?” my comrade hissed, but I just shook my head. There was no time to answer. Hot plates were hitting the steel piano. Bouley threw his cautions as effectively as a ventriloquist, shooting whispers across the line. He had a way of mumbling a criticism so that it hit its intended recipient right in the basket. The one I often caught was “The potatoes are too loose.” He was right, of course. They were supposed to flop softly, but mine looked like they were melting. When I looked up, Bouley was onto the next thing, gently pinching one of six plated langoustines on the pass. He hesitated for a minute and then punched his thumb through the ivory flesh. And the next one. He angrily crammed all six langoustines into a rough ball and started stacking the brittle porcelain Bernardaud plates, one on top of the other, making it sound like a stack of poker chips. The captain who was waiting for the course moaned and steered his head out the door.
“Come on, people,” Bouley muttered sarcastically. “Oh, let’s just hurry up and make shit.”
The entire weight of the diner’s experience hung in the balance as the long minutes ticked off to the table’s refire and replate.
One day, during a calmer lunch service, Bouley stood on the fish line cooking halibut and started talking to the cook nearest his elbow about the fish, who happened to be me.
“You guys need to cook the halibut more slowly, give the fibers a chance to unwind. Halibut’s a tight fish,” he murmured. “You want to slowly bring out its natural sugars.” Never did he press his spatula on top of the fish to suture it to the pan and improve its browning, as the regular fish cook did. No, he laid three flat fingers on its bulging middle to urge it to settle down—more like the way a mother rubs a sleepy kid’s back. He looked up to see who was listening and took in my girlish barrettes holding back my bangs, my intent expression, my smooth, glistening pane of bleached-white indoor skin, and gave me a rakish smile, because he could spot the latent female in anyone.
“What’s your name?”
“Amy,” I said, “not Ah-my.”
He laughed. “Where are you from?”
I hesitantly said, “Rural Minnesota,” knowing that the mere mention of my home state conjures up its own brand of wholesome hickness from which I couldn’t hide.
“What do your parents do?”
“My dad’s a car dealer. My mom’s a teacher.” I wondered, Why is he asking me this? “When we were younger, she stayed at home with us. She cooked a lot.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, tasting a sauce. “What did you go to college for?”
I never said I went to college. “English,” I said. “American literature.”
“And what is it you want to do?” he said, setting the fish on a tuft of parsnip puree.
When I grow up? He doesn’t assume I want to be a cook? “I want to cook, Chef!”
He wiped the edge of the plate with a damp cloth, looked me in the eye, and smiled crookedly. “Are you sure?”
I nodded. Oh god, I was in for it.
He grabbed a large metal prep spoon and said, “You know, back when I was starting to cook, we didn’t use small spoons for plating. We used these big catering spoons.” I marveled at the absurdity of this. We often plated with the tiniest spoons we could find; my uniform’s breast pocket concealed two espresso spoons I’d cribbed from the coffee station that very day. He dipped the wide spoon bill into his small pot of ocean herbal broth and ladled it deftly onto the plate, then picked up a miniature corona of sautéed squid legs by the tip and gently dropped it into place.
He threw his arm around my shoulders and then tightened it around my neck in a friendly choke hold, and squeezed my opposite shoulder with a masseur’s precision. I stiffened, not because it felt flirtatious, but because it felt possessive. “Amy, can you run downstairs and get me two toes of garlic. And a bunch of chevrille.” (He had his own culinary language: toes for cloves, chevrille for chervil.)
“Oui, Chef.” I sped off. Holy crap, this was not a job. Bouley wanted to know who the hell you were, if you had any taste, any culture, any education, a good family. Basically, he wanted to know what the fuck you were doing in his kitchen and if you were worth his time to teach you. Cooking wasn’t just a job; it was a life—what looked to all outsiders, including my own boyfriend, like a pretty terrible life. It was, as Aaron feared, a real affliction. And possibly, a dysfunctional relationship.
Initially, I mistakenly thought that my attraction to this job was due to my reunion with the browned butter and ground poppy seeds and spaetzle of my youth, but the truth was, it was something greater than the flavors of my childhood that drew me to the Danube. It was more about the way the two captains sprang into a fistfight with each other the second they bridged the marble threshold into the kitchen, bursting into fire behind closed doors. It was the way the throbbing, merengue-blaring downstairs prep kitchen brushed up against the silent, methodical upstairs service kitchen, matching each other in intensity. The way an imperfect crew functioned perfectly, channeling all their hopes and wishes and ambitions into the center of the plate, letting their liquid emotions fall off the sides, the food always beaming in the eye of the storm. It was the simultaneous agonies and thrills of the job. It was the unrelenting syncopation of the merengue and of the clacking plates. It was the threshold itself.
I knew I’d found my people. Crossing lines, jumping the boundaries between rural and urban, high-flung and low-down, garbage juice and black truffle juice, felt right to me. Fancy and shitty, that was to be my loop. Cooking, I’d found, contained the multitude I sought. It was the kind of work that spanned worlds, that could knit the two sides of a hungry, home-seeking, dramatic sort of person back together.
In no time at all, I had entered the belly of the ship. I was a convert, to all of it, and would cook on the line in fine-dining kitchens in Manhattan for the next seven years.
Give or take a gardening summer or two back home.
A few months later, on April 5 to be exact—I will never forget the day—I was setting up my station for lunch when I got a call on the kitchen phone.
Aaron was on the other end, and I could hardly make out what he was trying to tell me. Finally I understood that his brother Matt’s three-passenger plane had gone down. Matt hadn’t made it.
It took me a minute to make the jerky progression from imagining his brother as hurt to gone; the brain struggles with moves like that. I repeated what he said to the guys around me and the sous chefs began yelling at me to go, go, go!, and suddenly I was throwing the gray messenger bag over my shoulder and flagging down a cab to Brooklyn.
Back in our apartment in Fort Greene, tears were spraying from Aaron. I had never seen him cry. We huddled on the couch, our limbs curled into a knot, and through my hand on his back I felt him heave and deflate, his body trying to process the news like a spider struggling to take in something big. I pictured his sister, Sarah, my childhood friend, in her Peace Corps apartment in a small town in Latvia; her return would take days. I could see his parents in their gold-wallpapered kitchen in Park Rapids, our hometown. I knew Aaron was probably thinking of the last time we had seen Matt, kind of a long time ago, in the kitchen of the khaki-colored house in the suburbs he shared with his wife, Evon. He had made us a chicken hotdish, she an apple crisp for dessert. I closed my eyes and felt frozen, as if the minutes kept ticking but went off the rails, setting us on an alternate course. I repeated “I’m so sorry” until I felt the empty bottom in this phrase and there was nothing left to say. We sank into the couch, David the renter’s horrible dirty couch. My exhausted body released its tension hold and our breathing found its deep together pattern. I wanted to lose consciousness, to make this news go away.
“Are you falling asleep?”
“No!” I jumped. I knew, given how much I’d let the insanity of my working life warp my perspective, that I could say nothing in my defense. I reeled in the entire length of my failings, the long rope of my shitty girlfriendness, and gathered it all up against my belly. It was true, what Aaron’s eyes were saying: I don’t understand—because Matt was only thirty-one years old and this was surreal. I don’t understand—because I have not lost a brother. I don’t understand—because I am a terrible girlfriend who had not paid my boyfriend two minutes of attention since I started this job. It hit me bleakly that if it weren’t for Danube, we would be at that very moment packing up the car and driving to Minnesota.
Oddly, Aaron already had plans to drive back to Minnesota with his friend Rob the following day to set up his show at an art center in Minneapolis. The evening hours seeped away nearly silently as we got him ready to go.
The next day at work Mario was sympathetic. “I hear you need to go to a funeral?”
Yes. I explained that I needed at least five days off because it would take me a day to get there, then a day for the wake, a day for the funeral, a day to be with Aaron, and a day to come back. I might as well take the week, I said. I could tell he was puzzled and that he wouldn’t take off that much time to bury his own grandmother.
“There’s no direct flight to my town,” I told him. “It’s really small. Like a village.” I was breathless. “I’m going to take a plane to Minneapolis and then a much smaller plane” —my hands swerved in the air— “to a small town north of mine, and then drive an hour south.” By the time I finished my long-winded description he was waving me off and telling me to give my boyfriend his condolences. He gave me three days.
Two days later I was set to leave from JFK airport at 3:00 P.M. This also turned out to be the day that Hans Haas, everyone’s favorite Austrian mentor, came for a visit. It bears noting that when chefs “visit” each other they do not hang out and catch up in the traditional sense. Sometimes the visiting chef will sit down to a tasting menu in the dining room, but generally, if they’re close, the visiting chef simply suits up in his work duds and joins the kitchen. They commune by working.
So it was that when I came in that morning Hans Haas was down in the basement, breaking down salmon. One fish after another, swiftly, wordlessly. He was doing the mise en place for the slow-cooked salmon with Styrian wurzelgemüse (wurzelgemüse: overstuffed German for julienned vegetables), the menu dish that Mario and Bouley had copped from his Tantris menu in apparent tribute.
Chef Bouley had heard that I was leaving early, before dinner service, and had been looking for me. “Amy,” he said, grabbing me by the wrist and pulling me next door, where he was in the weeds with one of his own projects, the last-minute production of hundreds of glutinous rice cups for a large party of Thai dignitaries. (I had just finished making a batch of German potato salad to go underneath the sturgeon for an offsite catering gig for President Clinton; was it possible that both of these events, in addition to Hans Haas’s dinner, were on the same day? Yes, in New York, it was.) Bouley pushed me in front of three cast-iron pans with golf-ball-size round divots in them, the kind I’d seen used to make Danish aebleskivers, those little pancake spheres. I started out pouring lightly sweetened glutinous rice batter into the twenty-four holes, all of which promptly stuck—until I learned to work the cups by swabbing each one with clarified butter. As the rice batter cooked, I topped each one with a spoonful of sweet coconut pudding and then rode my offset spat around the brown cooked-lace edge to tugboat them out of the divots. Twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight rice cakes stacked up on a paper-lined half-sheet pan. Bouley dropped lightly hot-smoked cubes of sea trout on top and garnished each with a thatch of miniature basil sprouts. It was a thrilling canapé, one I wish I’d written down. Sixteen more, twenty-four after that. I didn’t look up for hours. Then a glance at the clock on the wall revealed that it was time for me to go, but I hesitated: I’d customized this job so much that it was hard to abandon it. But I was going to be late for my flight. So I handed my spatula to the guy standing nearest to me on the line and took off running, leaving behind a jagged opening that missed me for about thirty seconds before sucking firmly shut and going on just fine without me. I realized then that my bond to this kitchen might have felt strong but was in fact impermanent; I needed it more than it needed me.
The plane I took from Minneapolis to Bemidji turned out to be a prop plane. As it started its approach to land, like a piece of paper wavering to the ground, I quaked with mounting anxiety. This plane was way too small.
It seemed like all of Park Rapids attended the funeral, which passed by in a dirge of minor pipe-organ chords. I held tight to Aaron, but he was in another world. He and his family grieved the way you do when the universe steals away your firstborn child, your tall, ambitious, golden-haired thirty-one-year-old son, your admired older brother—down through their toes and into the glacial bedrock.
Members of Aaron’s family sat at a table and shuffled old pictures like decks of cards. I couldn’t leave, and yet my ticket tugged, insistent. How much do I regret not pushing Mario for four days or more? Deeply.
Aaron stayed back home with his family. When Matt died, along with him went the other half of Aaron’s childhood imagination, the commitment to fantasy and play that fueled so much of his work. He told me it would be for a few weeks, but I knew it might be longer.
I returned to Brooklyn, and to Danube, whose challenges no longer seemed so amusing. I floundered my first day back on the line, Mario shouting at me while I tried to stopper my weepiness and plate the schnitzel with some sense of precision. The many jocular details of my day, formerly organized in situ for retelling to Aaron, didn’t seem to matter. They weren’t so funny anymore.
In Brooklyn without Aaron, I realized how much our fields of vision differed and how much I had been relying on his to supplement mine. He was more panoramic, more long-sighted; he saw our New York stint as temporary, a time to build the skills we’d need when we eventually returned home to live out our days in the woods and ply our crafts. My view was more near-sighted: I saw a flood of shapes and colors, a world of vivid, moving plates. I saw my shoes, sturdy and flour-dusted against the tile floor. But outside of work my mind continued to churn with the sights of the kitchen and I didn’t see much but the clouds; I could hardly cross a street safely without him there to pull me back to the curb.
That level of spaciness works when you have someone by your side looking out for you, but now, alone, I am forced to pay more attention. New York, chameleon city, with streets that can look like gold when you’re up, looks darker now, as if it had recently flooded and the mud just receded. Stranger exchanges on the street that usually fade off into the din sound bright and ominous, dangerously emotional. After work, I stop at the Pakistani cab stand, and when I get home I sit in our grungy window well overlooking Fulton Street and methodically eat all of my chicken korma, all of my green-velvet palak paneer, and all of my spicy chickpeas.
The constant stream of trucks on Fulton Street honk at one another as rudely as the swans do back home on the creek in front of our house. One bleats, another answers. Like migratory birds inhabiting the same old familiar waterway, they’re all just verbalizing to make conversation, blaring to communicate their gripes, their wishes, and their warnings—but these here in the city with a greater sense of urgency and way more out of tune.