The restaurant in Thiene was called Fermento, and after thirteen years at the burners, it shall go down in history as my one and only abysmal failure. The only restaurant that features in my nightmares.
Anthony Bourdain wrote years ago that the back of a restaurant is a subculture whose military hierarchy and centuries-old practices based on rum, sodomy, and the lash create a blend of tough and solid order together with chaos, able to put the resolve of just about anyone to the test. It is still true. Beyond the door of a professional kitchen, you have to prove what you are worth, there is no other way. You have to earn the respect first of those above you, and then of those below you. There are only so many feathers you can ruffle, and only when it is necessary to clarify that you will take only so much before lashing out and that you expect to be shown some respect. And you can do that only when you are sure your work is beyond reproach, because the respect you demand is not for you, it is for the tangible results of your efforts. If you don’t, you’re a loser. If you do it at the wrong time, if you flare up when you’ve been caught out, you’re a loser. And if you are known as a loser, then it’s over, life in a commercial kitchen will be unendurable.
I started out at the sink, washing dishes, then when I became a chef, kitchen hands became my best sounding boards. Foreign in every way, always slightly offbeat, marching to a different drummer, watching from the sidelines, but with some of the best stories ever told, as is generally the case with people who come from faraway lands. Maybe this was why things came crashing down in Thiene. Because there, the outsider was me, but no one was interested in hearing my stories. The rest of the staff were local, from the Veneto region, with the sole exception of Sofia, the Nigerian dishwasher. She struggled with Italian, although she understood the local dialect. The chef-owner was a master baker and an expert at anything that involved leavening agents; he was a genius when it came to cakes and pastries. A fascinating character, much better educated and knowledgeable than the average cook, a wizard who could make magic with gluten and sourdough starters, and a trickster like so many others.
Dishonesty, shoddiness, crass ignorance, and systematic lying to cover up all manner of misdeeds, along with the heartless bullying of the most vulnerable staff members, were the distinctive features of this restaurant, which clung desperately to a false perception of its own success. Before wishing they would all die a long and painful death, like kittens mauled by a pack of wolves, I did manage to have some good times. My plan was to acquire the skills I had neglected to learn during my Roman years; it was possibly the perfect place to fill in the gaps in my culinary education. The kitchen was equipped with sous-vide machines, plenty of fridges, spectacular fresh produce, blast chiller cabinets, and ovens that were precise down to a tenth of a degree. The only problem was that my opinion of myself was a long stretch from their opinion of me, and it didn’t take long to become mightily confused about who was right.
I had never plumbed the depths of cruelty that a kitchen brigade that doesn’t want you will go to. The pastry chef told me harrowing tales of her rootless existence, her inability to stay in one place, and her craving to challenge herself in new directions. She had worked in Cittadella, Borso del Grappa, then a stint on Lake Garda, Malcesine, and even Madonna di Campiglio before landing here in Thiene. But she had never ventured farther than about ninety miles in any direction. She rattled on as I waited for the punch line, the part of the story that says: Okay, you can laugh now. It never came. She had the serious, self-satisfied air of someone dangerously unacquainted with irony. A fearless traveler in an unmoving and stagnant world. She must have read my mind because from that day onward she declared war on me, and I stopped pretending that I liked the place.
The head chef had a knack for selling his cuisine like a country you swear allegiance and devotion to. He knew the food that came out of his kitchen was blue-ribbon quality and expected nothing less than overt gratitude from his staff. Every chef wants to gain enough experience and expertise to open their own restaurant and demands loyalty and dedication from those still learning the trade. None of that interested me, but I had no alternative. I was on a part-time contract, officially working thirty hours a week for €900 a month, and unofficially slaving away another forty hours, for an additional €600 under the table. This highly desirable condition of legality and security would arrive after the usual two-month trial period, paid entirely cash in hand. Starting from the bottom of the ladder at thirty-four years of age and with twelve years of experience under my belt made me sick to my stomach.
“Do you know how to put together a lasagna?” the head chef asked me.
His were not merely recipes; they were a delicate balance of physics and the molecular compositions of the senses that called for considerable effort to recognize the essential elements of food — sugar, fat, protein, water — and from there to understand how they all interacted when cooked, emulsified, or frozen, even in the simplest of dishes. Mayonnaise is an emulsion of fat, water, acid, and protein. When you look at it like that, you can make “mayonnaise” out of just about anything and create some truly extraordinary food.
His lasagna with radicchio was like that, put together the way you’d normally create a dessert. A dessert treated like a chemistry lesson. Quantities precise to one-sixteenth of an ounce, cooking times calculated down to the second. For example: 180 minutes at 113°, no caramelization of the béchamel sauce on top, a flawless alternation of white layers with purple. The time and attention to detail required by this kind of approach is in no way comparable to what it takes to make a regular lasagna. Ladles are out, your tool of choice is the spatula. And the scales aren’t just a platform, a spring, and a pointer, there’s this hi-tech electronic gizmo that any pusher would be proud to call his own. You could use it to cut cocaine with mannitol, it’s so precise, and some of them actually did.
“More or less,” was my reply.
“Well, follow this recipe,” he told me, handing me a sheet of paper. It was nearly two o’clock, the last lunch guests were leaving, and some of the cleaners were getting a head start. His recipes represented a wealth of knowledge that I respected deeply. So I stayed in the kitchen during the break and used the spatula, and weighed, adjusted, and double-checked everything, and waited the requisite three hours at 113°. Alvise was the sous chef, with the yellow-green eyes of a feral cat and nervous, twitchy hands. He approached the oven to look at the lasagna through the glass in the door as soon as the timer went off.
“That lasagna isn’t done yet, leave it in,” he said.
“Chef insisted I follow his recipe to the letter. I don’t think it’s done either, but …” I ventured.
“No buts, it’s undercooked and that’s that. Give it a blast at at least a hundred and forty-nine degrees for ten minutes, the béchamel has to cook.”
“Are you sure?”
“Listen, leave that lasagna in the oven and set the timer.”
Lasagna in the oven, 149°, ten minutes. I concentrated on tidying up the pass. When the oven timer rang again, I pulled the lasagna out and put it directly into the blast chiller. Temperature set to 3°, just to chill. Once it’s been portioned, then it can be frozen. (Does anyone still believe in fresh food made to order? No. No, they don’t.) The head chef returned to the kitchen and opened the blast chiller. Behind the puff of freezer vapor, the lasagna made its appearance. Slightly tinted around the edges, not crunchy, but the fats in the cheese and the béchamel sauce had turned pale gold. In here, the effect known as caramelization.
“What temperature did you cook it at?” he growled.
Speechless and confused, I looked over at Alvise.
“When I came in, he was getting it out of the oven. I have no idea how long it was in there,” Alvise declared primly.
Random thoughts were running through my head: What do I say? The truth? But what is the truth? Which version of the truth sounds truer?
“A hundred and thirteen degrees, just like you said, but maybe it was left in a touch longer, because I went to change my clothes and I didn’t hear the timer,” was the truth I decided to go for.
The head chef stormed out, ranting and raving about wasting time and work and food that’ll have to be thrown out. The lasagna was sliced into portions, frozen, and then served for the rest of the month. Like any other well-made fucking lasagna.
I waited for the right moment, boiling over inside. Then I took Alvise aside.
“You know perfectly well why the lasagna was the color it was,” I said to him.
With his face inches away from mine, he whispered, a little smugly, I thought, “It’s your own fault. The guy you call Chef is an asshole. His recipes are all theory. I told you to leave the lasagna in a bit longer because in here I’m the only one who really knows how to cook and when you got it out the first time it was undercooked. But you’re the one who burned it. You should have kept an eye on it when it was in the oven at a hundred and forty-nine degrees and not trusted the timer.”
Flecks of spit sprayed all over my face and my pride. I slowly cleaned myself up and went into the cold room. He stayed at the rotating pizza oven putting the finishing touches on the pizzas, and in that split second it hit me that I would never fit in here, where they didn’t follow any of the rules I knew.
In the cold room, I bumped into the head chef and told him that I had raised the temperature to 149° on my own initiative. End of story. But that rift could now only widen. Those bastards were waging a war of supremacy, and €1,500 a month, half of which was paid under the table, was simply not enough for me to engage in it. Defending your ideas to the death is not always a noble thing to do, and the sincerity of your faith is not necessarily a virtue. I started brazenly copying out every single recipe — desserts, appetizers, entrées, everything. It was only a matter of time before I quit, and I had to make the most of my time there.
In the absence of fellowship, people will always do what’s in their best interest, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It isn’t a question of cynicism or cunning, just survival. It’s what the others were doing, except they had more time.
The head chef was hardly ever in the kitchen. He would turn up only to make some implausible request or whip up some showstopping dough for a panettone, the Italian Christmas cake, or to try out different glazes. Alvise never moved from his station and had the last word on everything. The pastry chef shamelessly buttered up Alvise for more perks and the chance to bully the apprentices, the commis chefs, and all the newbies. She was probably planning to wait until Alvise hung up his apron and left and then take his place and revel in her newfound power. Alvise was there to learn how to manage all the different sections of the kitchen, and to make sure that the clients knew who was doing all the cooking so they would follow him when he eventually opened his own place. The head chef was angling to get on TV and maybe even earn a Michelin star. The others were only bit players using every cigarette break to let rip a stream of profanities but otherwise dutifully bowing and scraping.
The head chef didn’t trust Alvise and trusted the pastry chef even less, though he knew he would be lost without them. He constantly quizzed me about what they were saying in the kitchen, calling me into his office as often as three times a day. They would nod their heads in agreement and follow his orders when he was present, only to describe him later with the same two words: useless asshole. Alvise had less than no respect for the head chef and expected me to follow his lead in the kitchen. I, however, had been employed by the head chef, not by Alvise, and I was still in my fucking never-ending trial period. In other words, I was still under special surveillance and couldn’t let on that everything the chef said was bullshit. As well, I was an all too frequent visitor to his office, and in the eyes of the neglected bastard descendants of the kitchen, I was a spineless spy. Definitely not one of them.
Everything was going downhill. It was there that I made the mother of all mistakes, a gigantic fuckup: I blabbed to the chef that those two snakes in the grass called him an asshole behind his back, adding that he should watch whom he left in charge of the kitchen, because I, a relative newcomer, was starting to think he was indeed an asshole, and it’s not at all good for a newly employed member of staff to think his employer, the head chef, was an asshole. It’s not good for the company and it’s not healthy.
Where I really fucked up was trusting him and snitching on the others before getting to know him well enough. I gave in to my childish ego and started whining about how bad they were and how good I was. I chose to side with management when I was still on the bottom rung, an act of high treason toward the entire profession. I identified him as the All-Powerful One and curled up at his feet, licking my wounds and yelping like an abandoned puppy. Only the chef wasn’t as powerful as I thought, because no one in the kitchen looked up to him as the head chef — they saw him as a kind of necessary tyrant. I behaved like a real novice and confirmed all the brigade’s suspicions. I never found out what was said and by whom. But from that point onward I was undeniably on a slippery slope.
The only person I could still talk to was Sofia. A disarming smile, perfect teeth, a short, thick neck, strong hands, and beautiful brown skin over a stocky body, she had arrived from Libya as an illegal immigrant together with her husband and son. She had regularized her legal status following the amnesty in 2009 for domestic workers and carers. In Nigeria she had earned a degree in economics; here in Thiene she cleaned the house of the chef’s mother and washed the dishes in his restaurant.
Since then she had had two more children, who now spoke the Veneto dialect. The oldest was a parking attendant at the restaurant on weekends, and at 11 p.m. earned the right to eat a plate of pasta, with or without sauce. Store-bought pasta, not freshly made, the head chef had insisted. I would cook it for him. I was bitterly ashamed to be cooking bought pasta, while leftover handmade tortellini stuffed with culatello, Italy’s most prized and expensive prosciutto, was getting thrown in the garbage.
The more I hung out with Sofia and her son, the more suspicious people became of me. It wasn’t just the visits to the boss’s office; now I was shooting the breeze in English with the dishwasher. Who knows what they thought we were saying to each other. Sofia was on an on-call contract, fifteen hours a month, but she ended up putting in more than two hundred. This wasn’t a case of her paying her dues; there were no promotions in sight for her. Front of house had swarms of waitstaff, mostly students (all paid under the table or with on-call contracts) and three part-time professionals. All of them earned between €400 and €700 a month, cash in hand, and they’d laugh heartily at jokes told in the local dialect I pretended to understand. The insults and jokes tossed back and forth between the kitchen brigade and the waitstaff are what help you make it through the day. To be left out of the game stinks like rotten fish, and when the stench sticks to your clothes and hands, it doesn’t wash away.
Christmas was approaching, and our working hours were getting longer and longer. My trial period had morphed into a four-month contract, and the only visible difference was that my first official wage was late. I was beginning to come undone. I had to keep reminding myself who I was, how I had ended up in this place, and what I wanted to achieve — not only first thing in the morning as soon as I woke up, but even when I was toasting the demi-glace in a pot that was taller than I was. Orlando, years before, used to say to me, “When my fingers ache from filleting the umpteenth frozen yellowtail, when I just can’t take it any longer, I visualize my paycheck and the restaurant I’ll open one day, and I keep on going.” Even he was being paid cash in hand at that stage, but he could visualize €2,300 cash on top of the €700 in his pay packet. In the end it boiled down to the money, as usual. A mere €1,500 a month was barely enough to stop me setting fire to the place.
I liked the kind of kitchens I’d worked in before: noisy, debauched, bursting with testosterone, and with a clear moral compass. Ass lickers and hypocrites are bad for your health. I could see no way out, and there were no more recipes for me to copy. The office was in semidarkness as usual, and the head chef was in his immaculate uniform as always, but this time I’d gone in on my own initiative.
“Chef, I’ll do the New Year’s Eve dinner and work New Year’s Day, and then I’m through. As of the second of January I won’t be coming back and here’s why: You are a slave driver and the way you run your restaurant is criminal. On top of that, you’re relying on a bunch of lying, cheating wimps, and I don’t know whether to blame you or them. It pains me because the food you produce here is sheer art and poetry, and you’ll get your star, for sure, but the way you’re getting it is unconscionable.”
New Year’s Eve we all busted our asses, and if I thought I would be feeling so much lighter for having put an end to my Kafkaesque loneliness, then what was this nagging sense of anxiety? I was retreating from the battlefield, and who cared if I was in the right or in the wrong. No one would miss me, I felt utterly defeated. Maybe I could have stuck it out and become inducted into the merry band of people who would earn a star (because sooner or later they would), set out on a proper career path, and turn into a real asshole. Instead I was cutting and running.
The text message arrived late at night, when I was with Giuliana and a couple of friends of hers, in some crappy club, getting sloshed. “Our business relationship ends here, don’t bother coming in to work tomorrow.” A lousy text message to settle a lousy score. Checkmate.
For the rest of the night I couldn’t shake off the disturbing suspicion that maybe I was the one at fault, for raising the white flag after only six months and without winning anyone’s respect. With the exception, perhaps, of Sofia.
What now? I was leaving Thiene battered and bruised, with my tail between my legs. Decked and dazed. Maybe if they had paid me more or if I had told Alvise and the dessert bitch to piss off with a smile on my face, it would have been just another job like all the others. Daily battles with diners and waitstaff, cash-in-hand wages, a life not too far removed from the rest of the world’s.
I had spent half of my life (the part that started in a restaurant in Rome) roaming from place to place, sometimes taking friends along for the ride, but life in a professional kitchen hadn’t suited them. I had persevered and this had become my calling. That first of January when I should have gone to work but instead spent the day at home was painful beyond belief. Maybe I was just hungover from the shitty wine of the night before. When you’re hungover you tend to mistake tiredness for unhappiness. That fucking restaurant had hung me out to dry. When I went in to collect the money they owed me (my last wage and severance pay), they told me the cash was a bit less because the severance pay had to be deducted.
After all, our agreement had been for €1,500 a month, and €1,500 was all I’d get. A few days went by and I sent them an e-mail with my membership number in CGIL, Italy’s largest trade union federation.
They gave me the rest of my fucking money and treated me like a piece of shit. I didn’t say a word because I had all but exhausted my reserves of belief in the usefulness of anger.
Moral of the story: Working for a chef who doesn’t cook and with a brigade that doesn’t want you is not a good idea.