SPRAWLED ON THE FLOOR was not how I’d envisioned myself during my first week of work at wd~50. But there I was, in my crumpled white chef’s coat, houndstooth pants, and egg yolk-stained apron, while everyone’s eyes shifted their focus to me. I tried to ignore the tingling sensation in my left forearm, which I had slammed against the oven after slipping on a small puddle of oil. My cheeks blushed bell-pepper red, and my arm matched. Miraculously, though, the paper-thin Canadian bacon I had just fried was still on the metal sizzle platter I was holding and not on the floor. At least no one could yell at me for ruining the food.
“Are you okay?” asked Brian, the restaurant’s sous-chef, from a few feet behind me.
“I’m fine,” I mumbled, and jumped up to deliver the bacon to the garde manger station, where all of the appetizers were prepared and plated for service. Spencer, one of the garde manger cooks, strode by me and said, “Ohhhhh, you don’t have nonskid shoes, do you?”
Guilty as charged. My black slip-on clogs, which I’d worn throughout culinary school without any problems, were no match for this kitchen. “It’s hard to find them in my size,” I said in a tremulous voice. A plain old “No” sounded too lame. And I did wear a size five shoe. Spencer raised a skeptical eyebrow and returned to his station.
Lesson #1: Before working in a professional kitchen, make sure you own nonskid black leather shoes.
“YOU’RE THE ONLY PERSON I would do this for, Shock,” said Chase a few days before the bacon incident. He stood in my apartment’s tiny kitchen, gently pouring water over a small brown whetstone and trying not to spill it all over my cracked granite countertop, my landlord’s one concession to “gracious living.” He continued, “Do you have any paper towels I can use to put under this?”
“No, sorry. How’s toilet paper?”
He rolled his eyes at me and then smiled, his brown hair flopping over his forehead as he lined up my knives in a row. I had met Chase in graduate school, where we were both hoping our eventual master’s degrees would complement and make our culinary school backgrounds more marketable.
Although we knew each other socially, our friendship had accelerated when we enrolled in “Theoretical Perspectives in Food Studies.” The course was much more about theoretical perspectives than food studies, and as a result, we spent most of the time sitting in the back of the classroom writing notes to each other, as if we were in middle school. Chase quickly became my go-to person for any food-or restaurant-related question, because in addition to attending culinary school, he had worked in several restaurants, for a catering company, and as a private chef. He had recently completed a two-month stage at the celebrated restaurant Momofuku Ko, run by chef and media darling David Chang, who was also a good friend of Wylie’s. So when I complained to Chase that the kitchen staff at wd~50 would think I was inept if my knives weren’t sharp, he generously volunteered to sharpen them before my first day. I didn’t refuse, especially since he was cute.
I sat on my purple love seat watching him as he carefully rubbed the knives back and forth on the whetstone. He explained that he first needed to create a burr, the technical term for the flat line on the bottom of a knife etched into the metal.
“Here, let me show you,” he said as I got up and stood behind him, peering over his shoulder at the knife, which was now covered in dark brown residue from the stone. Placing his hands on my shoulders, he stepped behind me and instructed me to hold the knife. He positioned his palms atop my hands and guided them gently up the stone. “Just press your fingers on the blade and push at a twenty-degree angle,” he said. Like every chef I had met so far, Chase was convinced that whetstones were the only way to sharpen knives, since they actually rub off part of the blade to create a sharp edge rather than just smoothing out the existing blade the way a steel rod will.
“Why don’t you just finish it? You’re much better than I am,” I said, sure I was doing it all wrong.
“You’re doing fine. Just press hard with your two index fingers against the knife and rub up and down. Pretend you’re using the knife to smooth down the crease of a folded piece of paper. Just go up and down the stone about fifteen times, then move your knife over and repeat the same motions on the next part of the blade until you’ve done the whole knife. And then do the same thing on the softer side of the whetstone to smooth everything out.”
“I’m so nervous! What if they yell at me at wd~50?”
He patted my shoulder. “You’ll do great. Just keep quiet and work hard, but be yourself. They’ll love you.”
DESPITE ITS CUTTING-EDGE reputation among foodies in New York City and beyond, wd~50 is marked only by a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sign in red and blue neon lights in its window. Formerly the location of a dilapidated deli, wd~50 helped pioneer the transformation of the once gritty Lower East Side into a playground for hipsters (and opportunistic real estate agents).
Wylie Dufresne, its chef and owner, graduated from Colby College in 1992 with a degree in philosophy and the dream of, but not the physique for, a career in baseball. Like me, he enrolled in the French Culinary Institute soon after graduation. Afterward he worked at JoJo, celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s place to be seen in the 1990s—and still a safe bet to take a visiting great-aunt afraid to leave the safe and sterile confines of the Upper East Side. Wylie continued as Vongerichten’s shining star, this time at his eponymous restaurant Jean Georges. However, Wylie struck gold when he ventured out on his own (with the financial backing of both Vongerichten and Dewey Dufresne, his dad) at 71 Clinton Fresh Food, where he became a key player in making the then up-and-coming Lower East Side a culinary destination. My mouth still waters when I think about the seared scallops over lentils that I ate there on my eighteenth birthday. Even then, I could tell that Wylie was special.
In 2003, with the help of his business partners, Wylie opened wd~50, a small restaurant whose name is an amalgam of his initials and the spot’s address, 50 Clinton Street. The name is also a riff on WD-40, the household water displacement spray indispensable in any technological setting. Fitting indeed.
As I walked the short distance from my apartment on Essex Street to the restaurant, I reread the confirmation letter I had received: “You will be expected to arrive at work promptly at 1:00 p.m. on each day of your stage, and to work until the end of service, which may be as late as 2:00 a.m. You are expected to bring a baker’s hat, a set of knives… and a pair of shoes suitable for kitchen work.” Although the letter stated the restaurant would provide me with a full set of uniforms, I packed my own just in case.
“Hi, I’m here for a stage,” I said to the receptionist once I arrived. Because the restaurant served only dinner, the dining room was empty except for a uniformed janitor mopping the floor beneath a row of small square tables.
“Okay, go back to the kitchen. Someone there will help you,” she said, motioning behind her.
I looked around, thinking this was not the sort of place that looked like it sold $30 entrées. There were no tablecloths or chandeliers or fancy artwork, except for a large marble slab spanning nearly the entire length of one wall. A communal red leather banquette divided the room in two, separating the three private booths used for larger parties from the main part of the dining room. Each wall was painted in a different shade of red, blue, and green, illuminated by whimsical, multicolored hanging glass light fixtures. The fireplace in the corner and the exposed ceiling beams added a touch of faux rustic, and I thought that the decor would be right at home in a place like Santa Fe. Not that I’ve ever been to Santa Fe.
I walked into the modestly sized rectangular kitchen, which was partially open to the dining room, and stood next to a large, custom-built stove engraved with the wd~50 logo. A tall, broad-shouldered chef with a full mop of curly hair and an elaborate tattoo creeping out from under his jacket sleeve introduced himself as Drew. “I’ll give you a tour,” he said.
As he showed me around, he explained that Wylie and Claire, the only female cook who didn’t work in the pastry kitchen, ran the fish station on the left side of the stove, while he and Brian worked the meat station on the right. Each side had a dedicated space on top of the stove for cooking. To the left of the fish station was an aisle where the servers deposited dirty dishes for dishwashing in the back corner without getting in the way of the cooks. And along this aisle was the pièce de résistance: the “spice shelves”—rows of white plastic containers with screw-off lids were stacked on top of one another, displaying labels demarcating chemical formulas and names like hexophosphate, N-Zorbit, sodium alginate, gellan low, and methylcellulose. Though I spotted regular kitchen staples like steel-cut oatmeal, dried pasta, cornstarch, and kosher salt, this part of the kitchen resembled a college chemistry lab more than a restaurant.
Of course, this was what made wd~50 unique and why I’d wanted so much to be here. These bizarre ingredients allowed the cooks to transform mayonnaise into a fried food and yuzu juice into a thick gel and to glue skirt steaks together into a single filet. I admired Wylie’s mastery of these powders, but I was also personally apprehensive. Science was never my strong suit; how on earth was I ever going to remember the difference between Ultra-Sperse 3 and Ultra-Tex 3?
After showing me around upstairs, Drew led me down a staircase at the back of the room to another kitchen, this one enclosing a small pastry kitchen in the middle.
“This is Lauren. She’s going to be staging with us,” Drew said as we approached another chef, tall, tanned, and lanky like a California surfer.
“Hi. I’m Brian, the sous-chef. You’ll be with us for five days?” he said.
“No, three months,” I said, surprised that wd~50 would take on an apprentice for such a short stage. From what I was told in culinary school, the average stage is about one to three months, but I figured that maybe a one-week stage would cater to seasoned chefs wanting to learn a few of Wylie’s tricks to add to their own repertoires.
“Great. Well, Wylie’s out of town this week, but you’ll meet him when he gets back. This here is the prep kitchen, where you’ll be spending most of your time,” he said. Then he led me into a narrow walk-in refrigerator housing the restaurant’s produce, meats, and perishable foods.
“Mise en place for meat, garde manger. Fruits and vegetables in these bins. In the Lexans here, we have fish, and in the bus tubs, meat,” he said, pointing to the large ice-filled white containers and then the smaller black plastic ones. Closer to us were pint and quart containers filled with sauces, sliced vegetables, cut herbs, and liquids in a chaotic parade of color.
Every plastic container in the walk-in was labeled with green painter’s tape, denoting its contents and the date it was packed. Above the meat shelf was the family meal shelf, denoted by the small label “Familia,” where the components of the quick dinner made by the cooks and eaten by the whole staff before the evening service were stored. Brian explained that the staff also kept leftovers from family meals here so that they could sneak a snack when they were hungry. As he talked, I made mental notes of what went where, but I knew I’d forget it all by tomorrow.
Next Brian walked me to the dry storage closet, which held the real spices. Plastic containers bulging with coriander and yellow mustard seeds stood beside smaller quart containers of curry powders, cinnamon, and poppy seeds and rarer flavorings like house-made lime powder and shichimi togarashi, which was a Japanese spice blend the restaurant used to season octopus before it was made into a terrine appetizer. The air in the closet smelled earthy and complex, like the pages of an old and well-worn recipe book. Nuts and grains were grouped in smaller clear plastic containers called Cambros, along with ingredients like tomato powder, deviled egg powder, amaranth, pale green bamboo rice, dried white figs, and chicory. But I noted with a smile that alongside the argan oil and dried buttermilk powder sat Heinz ketchup, Tabasco sauce, and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce. And as I learned early on, no matter what, the refrigerator always held Wylie’s favorite food: blocks of sliced processed American cheese.
After the tour, Brian steered me back into the prep kitchen and introduced me to a pubescent-looking cook whose wiry brown curls peeped out from underneath his white cap. “This is Jared, the man who runs the show down here. You’ll be spending a lot of time together,” he said.
“So you’re in school?” asked Jared, sizing me up
“I’m at NYU, getting a master’s in food studies,” I said.
He frowned. “No, are you in culinary school?”
Oh, right. Obviously. “I graduated from FCI last year.”
“Chef went there, too, you know.”
I nodded, unsure if I was supposed to ask him about his life and background. Chase had told me to keep quiet, after all.
“Let’s get started, then. Take out your chef’s knife and a paring knife, but leave the rest of the stuff in your knife roll. You can put it on the shelf above the meat slicer,” he said, pointing to a heap of three knife bags. I did as he said and took a deep breath. I was ready to cook.
OF COURSE, I didn’t start out actually cooking; my first task at wd~50 was separating eggs. Jared told me to get five flats of eggs from the walk-in refrigerator, which I knew meant that I’d be separating 150 eggs. As instructed, I placed a layer of plastic wrap on my work surface and set out three metal bowls—one for whites, one for yolks, and one as the separator bowl so that if a yolk broke while I was separating it, it wouldn’t taint the whites. Because plastic covered the counter, cleanup was easy: Just lift up the plastic wrap and throw it all away. Genius! I made a mental note to do this when I made messy cake batters that required lots of bowls at home.
“You can either crack the eggs individually into your hands, or you can crack ten whole eggs into a bowl, and then just scoop out the yolks with your hands and put them into the other bowl. I like doing it this way, since it saves you time if you’re doing a lot of eggs,” said Jared, deftly plucking out the yellow orbs. After he’d returned to his station, I mimicked his motions but ended up breaking several of my yolks and decided it would be safer for me to separate eggs individually.
“Oh, and you want to be wearing gloves for this,” Jared added from across the room.
Right. I spotted a cardboard box of gloves on a shelf and grabbed a pair. As I put them on, they bunched up instead of squeezing against my skin. Unlike Jared’s hands, mine were not made for size “large” gloves.
Tom, who ran the garde manger station along with Spencer, was standing next to me, filling metal molds with foie gras.
“Are there any smaller gloves?” I asked him.
He looked at me and then down at my hands and answered brusquely, “No. Why don’t you just get bigger hands?”
“Oh, okay,” I said, unsure how to read his tone as I tried my best to juggle the yolk in my palm.
After I had spent thirty minutes meticulously transferring the yolks into one bowl and the whites into another, Jared glanced over my shoulder and into the bowl. “Don’t worry about the whites. They just get thrown out,” he said nonchalantly.
“You can save a quart or so for pastry, but just throw the rest of them out down the drains in the storage room where we pour out the used oil,” he said.
Oh. Now you tell me. “You really don’t need the whites?”
“Nah, just the yolks. We go through hundreds of egg yolks each week for the tasting menus, since we use them for the carbonara and the eggs Benedict, which is one of Chef’s signature dishes. We season the yolks with salt and a dash of cayenne pepper, and place them in a machine called a Cryovac to remove any air bubbles, and then transfer them to either long narrow bags or large square bags and re-Cryovac them to vacuum-seal them shut.” He then explained that the egg-filled bags were cooked sous-vide— meaning for a long time at a low, controlled temperature using a thermal circulator in a pot of water—until they turned thick and custardlike. The yolks in the long bags were then unwrapped and cut into cylinders using a knife, forming the “egg” component of the eggs Benedict. The yolks in the square bags, meanwhile, were transferred to a pastry bag and piped directly onto the plate, forming the “pasta” in the pasta carbonara, a play on the traditional pasta dish in which the egg yolks are used to create a creamy sauce to coat the pasta. How clever, I thought, wondering what the end result would taste like.
The next day, while we were rolling out Parmesan dough into little balls that would be baked and used as a garnish for the carbonara dish, Tom examined my hands, again submerged in baggy latex, as I struggled to shape the dough into uniform spheres. “Didn’t I tell you to get bigger hands?” he said without a smile, and walked away before I could reply. Ouch!
The wd~50 kitchen was certainly not built for anyone with a small frame. On a daily basis, I had to stretch to see what was cooking in the salamander, the overhead broiler located on a metal shelf a few feet above the stove. I jumped up to reach the quart containers located on the mounted shelf above the garde manger station. I needed Jared to help me carry the plastic Lexan containers of meat because I lacked the strength to do it alone, and I nearly threw out my back carrying a fifty-pound container of thawed octopuses. Jared had to unscrew parts of the meat grinder for me because I was too weak to pull them apart on my own. When I had to transfer a boiling hot brining solution from the stove to the sink to pour it into a plastic container, I couldn’t hold the heavy pot’s long handle with both hands and instead held one hand on the handle and another on the rim. As soon as I started walking, the salty liquid splashed up like a tidal wave up against the side of the pot and onto my wrist, scalding it puffy and bright red.
The only time I relaxed was during family meal, a precious thirty minutes in the grueling twelve-hour workday when we ate a cross between lunch and dinner. It was a collective effort: Brian prepared the meats; Drew did the vegetable and starch dishes; the garde manger boys put together a salad; and Celia, the pastry sous-chef, who worked under Ed, the pastry chef, made desserts, which were usually sheet cakes or cookies. While some restaurants serve their staff whatever is on its last legs, family meal at wd~50 was generally delicious. Over the next three months, Brian whipped up juicy lamb meatballs with tabouleh, spaghetti with tomato sauce and garlic bread, beef Bourguignon over parsleyed noodles, franks ’n beans, fish and chips, and beef tacos with all the fixings and two kinds of salsa. Sure, we also ate lots of stews and curries, which were quick and easy to throw together. But because duck breast was often on the menu, we also devoured duck confit in one form or another each week: duck confit Thai curry over rice, duck confit hash with pancakes and creamed spinach, duck confit barbecue sandwiches with coleslaw, and garlicky duck confit over polenta. Best of all, though, was smoked-chicken salad day, which was greeted with particular exuberance by the staff. “Of all the dishes I created on the menu here, it’ll be the chicken salad family meal I’ll be remembered for,” Brian joked. It was true; there were never leftovers for post-shift snacking on days he served it for family meal. The wd~50 signature ingredients and techniques—crumbles, tuiles (thin, crunchy shards), sprigs of microherbs, or pieces of “glued” meat—were nowhere in sight. And the other ingredients you’d be hard-pressed to find at a wd~50 family meal were raw tomatoes, dill, anything overtly spicy, and onions. Why? Because Wylie didn’t like them. And what the boss wants, the boss gets.
During family meal, I joined two pastry stages, Mathias and Min, and the entire front-of-house staff: the hostesses, managers, waiters, and bar staff. We sat in the wd~50 dining room and savored every bite, regaining energy for the next eight hours we’d spend on our feet. The pastry kitchen was kept pretty separate from the regular kitchen, so I didn’t interact much with Mathias and Min outside of family meal, but they were good (if quiet) company. While the stagiaires and front-of-house staff chilled out, the cooks, who never had time to sit down at the table to eat, hastily dumped their food into plastic quart containers and ate it standing at their workstations, usually in no more than four bites, while simultaneously finishing whatever needed to be done before service. For the cooks, it was the beginning of the storm. Occasionally, Wylie stole a minute to sit in the dining room at one of the restaurant’s private booths, but usually he, too, was busy putting the finishing touches on his latest experimental dish.
My first few days were a blur of chopping and picking, and I had never been so exhausted. When I was in my office job, I twirled in my ergonomic swivel chair, thinking about how boring it was sitting in front of a computer screen all day. But after standing on my feet for twelve hours a day, I understood just how hard kitchen work was. I had to take an aspirin each morning to relieve the constant pain in my back from standing and in my forearms and shoulders from lifting heavy crates of meat and trash bins filled with ice. When I received an e-mail from Chase asking me how my first few days were going, I had time only to dash out a hasty, “Good. Exhausted. Gotta go to work now.”
TOWARD THE END of my first week, Jared gave me a bag of confit lemon quarters to cut into a brunoise, meaning tiny, tiny, tiny (no more than a millimeter wide) identical little cubes. I first filleted off the pulpy flesh from the lemon quarters to reveal the sweet-salty rind. Then I gripped my knife and began slicing, the sliminess of the confit residue making a clean cut difficult, if not impossible.
“Let me see how you’re holding the knife,” said Jared, his kitchen antenna on alert.
I clasped the handle and sliced into the lemon.
“Yeah, you’re holding your knife wrong. You should be holding it so that your knuckle rests against the blade,” he said.
I looked at my hand wrapped around the handle of the knife. I moved it farther up the knife, grasping it so that the side of my index finger was flush with the blade. I instantly gained a new sense of control over the knife.
“Like this?” I said, astounded that my culinary school curriculum had skipped this lesson. Or, if it had been covered, that none of my instructors had noticed the error of my ways.
“And you want to rock back on your knife. It doesn’t matter for something like this as much, but when you’re dealing with herbs, you’ll bruise them if you don’t,” said Jared.
He demonstrated this a few days later while I was cutting chives. I had been attacking them with a downward slicing motion. He held up one of my chives, then sliced another and offered it in comparison. I squinted at the two, not sure I could identify the difference, but I nodded because I didn’t want to appear stupid. But then, after practicing for an hour, I saw what he meant. The chives cut with a forward-backward motion were darker where they had been sliced, whereas those cut using a rocking motion were uniformly green. Yet another thing I hadn’t learned in school.
Jared was a good teacher, and even though he was two years younger than me, I began to solicit his advice. He was reserved, a hard worker who knew a lot more about food and culinary technique than you would think upon first glance. His long, disheveled hair curled out like corkscrews under his white baker’s cap, and he always appeared lost in thought. He was like the kid who sat in the back of algebra class looking stoned, then surprised everyone by graduating at the top of his class.
Jared and Tom were best friends in the kitchen, but while Jared patiently explained and demonstrated things to me, Tom took the opposite approach, shaking his head or glaring at me to signal a mistake or that I was too slow. It didn’t matter that he, too, was once a wd~50 stagiaire, who had worked his way up to garde manger after two years.
Two weeks after my initial slip and tumble, I was shelving some quart containers filled with bagel-flavored ice cream base when I skidded along the painted red floor of the prep kitchen. As my arms flew out in front of me, Tom demanded, “When are you going to get some proper shoes?”
“I know,” I said with a meek smile.
“Don’t smile. You’re going to slip and break your fucking face. I had those shoes for a day and I threw them out. They were a piece of crap.” He walked away, shaking his head in disgust.
When I got home that night at a quarter past one in the morning, I immediately ordered a new pair of shoes online, even paying extra for express shipping. I wasn’t going to spend the remaining ten weeks of my stage tiptoeing around pools of water and oil and hiding my feet from Tom. My new shoes prevented any further literal slipups in front of Tom, but he continued to comment on my other mistakes.
“Cryovac these,” he said a few days later after the dinner service had ended and I was cleaning the prep kitchen. He handed me three quart containers filled with foie gras that had been melted down but had now cooled and solidified. The Cryovac machine was one of the crown jewels of wd~50, since it vacuum-sealed pouches of food, a requirement for sous-vide cooking. The sous-vide technique enables consistency and a tender, full-flavored product, unlike cooking foods in boiling water or in a hot skillet.
Vegetables, too, were cooked sous-vide, though often with the addition of other flavorings, since the vacuum-sealing of the bag guaranteed that any flavoring would be pressure-forced into the vegetable. Turnips were vacuum-sealed with turnip seed oil, imbuing each turnip with extra turnip oomph. Lentils were cooked in a bag with orange juice instead of water, so the lentils took on a pronounced citrus flavor instead of being earthy and bland. The machine was also used to help meats last longer in the refrigerator by avoiding exposure to air.
Since I figured that the foie gras would be melted down again, I began scooping it out of the container with a large metal spoon, until Tom suddenly barked, “What are you doing?”
“I’m putting the foie gras in the bag. Isn’t that right?” I said.
“If you don’t know how to do something, ask,” he said, and stomped away in a huff.
Well, I thought, maybe if you had told me how to do it at the beginning, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
“Jared,” I said, “how am I supposed to Cryovac this?”
Jared grabbed a quart container and placed it under hot running water, turning it around frequently until the cylindrical block of foie gras slipped out in one neat piece into a new bag. I took another quart container and mimicked his actions, pressing the container to jiggle it free, but the foie gras didn’t budge. I held it under the water longer, still to no avail.
Tom marched back into the kitchen and seized the quart container from my hand. “Stop! See, it’s breaking down now that it’s been under for too long. And make sure you use a spatula to get out all of the remaining foie from that first container. This is an expensive product, you know,” he growled.
“Yes, Chef,” I mumbled. I slunk over to the Cryovac machine, head hanging in shame. I’d been an A student in college and had so far maintained a perfect GPA in grad school, yet I was unable to fill up a plastic bag properly.
The prep kitchen was deserted when I returned, and I leaned against the counter, playing with my cell phone, waiting alone in silence. We weren’t allowed to leave until Brian confirmed that the kitchen was spanking clean, with everything in its proper place. Only once Brian gave the okay would the keg of beer—which I learned was a permanent fixture of the walk-in refrigerator—be tapped into a six-quart plastic jug to be distributed to us kitchen serfs. No cups, though; we drank the beer from individual quart containers—yes, the same ones we used to store food in the walk-in.
This was a major staff perk. Anyone who has ever worked long hours on her feet knows there’s nothing like a cold beer at the end of the day. It didn’t matter that the beer was always flat and frequently tasted like dishwater. We relished the reward, the acknowledgment of a hard day’s work. Sometimes we talked if the evening’s service had gone well, but if it hadn’t, we drank in numbing silence. While we peons nursed our beers, Brian slowly sipped his yuzu cocktail from a martini glass while Ed and Celia clinked gin and tonics in the pastry kitchen. At wd~50, the executive chefs and sous-chefs drank whatever cocktails tickled their fancy after the dinner service ended.
The restaurant’s kitchen hierarchy was as rigid as that of any blue-chip investment bank, white-shoe law firm, or crack military unit. Wylie, the executive chef, was followed first by Ed, the pastry chef; then Brian, the sous-chef; and then Celia, the pastry sous-chef. Next in line was Claire, who ran the fish station with Wylie; followed by Drew, the entremetier, responsible for the accompaniments to the meat dishes. Then came Tom and Spencer, who ran the garde manger station; trailed by Jared, who headed the prep kitchen; and then Hector, a prep cook. Then us stagiaires. Our number varied from week to week, but there were usually four or five at any given time. Pastry stagiaires and culinary stagiaires were equally low on the totem pole, but I frequently stole glimpses into the pastry kitchen, where Mathias and Min were often making an ice cream or brioche batter or pouring steamy liquid nitrogen into a container. Pastry stagiaires executed far more dishes from start to finish, while culinary stagiaires almost exclusively did prep work for other members of the kitchen staff.
However, I quickly grasped that while on an economic level we represented free labor, Wylie took staging at wd~50 seriously. A high percentage of his cooks started as stagiaires, and Wylie favored those with little experience so that he could mold them and teach them properly, cultivating them with the wd~50 culinary sensibility. Even though Wylie had attended FCI, he didn’t require or even seem to prefer to hire people with culinary school degrees. Brian was self-taught and had honed his craft at well-known restaurants like New York City’s Aquavit. Jared and Tom were both culinary school dropouts who had started as stagiaires at wd~50. Even Drew, who was an accomplished cook before he began working at wd~50, staged for a short period of time there before coming on board full-time, and Claire had worked her way up from stagiaire to fish cook.
But hierarchy reigned in more ways than one, and notably in our choice of headwear. While I didn’t always see Wylie, Ed, and Brian wearing cotton baker’s caps, I was required to wear one at all times, and the one day I forgot mine, I was forced to don a disposable paper one that made me look like a waitress at the Duluth Dairy Queen.
Wylie was also never called “Wylie.” He was always “Chef.” “Yes, Chef!” or, “Right away, Chef!” we responded whenever he asked us to do something. Celia and Ed were also called Chef. In some professional kitchens, everyone calls everyone else “Chef,” no matter their rank, but when I called Spencer “Chef” one night during service, he laughed and told me never to call him that again. During my first week of work, I even avoided conversations with Jared, my direct supervisor, because I wasn’t sure if I should call him “Chef” or “Jared.” Until I realized that no one else called him “Chef,” I began every conversation with “Um” or “Hey” to avoid another faux pas. Of course, no one called me Chef, except a facetious Tom when he explained the proper way to do something I had screwed up (“See, Chef, this is how you do it”). Usually, I was just “Stage!”—a term everyone used for both the person and the position.
As the minutes ticked by, I remained perched on the countertop at the end of the evening, waiting for the okay to go home. Finally, Brian came into the prep kitchen, cocktail in hand. He sat on the countertop opposite me and said, “So, how are your first few weeks here going? Are you liking it?”
“Good. I mean, I know I’m not very good at things…,” I said.
At this, his brow furled. “What do you mean?”
“I know I’m slow at doing things and I don’t have any experience,” I said, keenly aware of how defensive I sounded.
Smiling, he said, “The only way you’ll get experience is by getting experience. And you know, Claire said the Brussels sprouts have been the best they’ve ever been.”
“Really?”
He nodded and patted me on the shoulder.
After Brian left, I reflected on his words. I had done something right in the kitchen. In order to obtain two quarts’ worth of Brussels sprout leaves to last throughout the dinner service, I had sliced about six pounds of Brussels sprouts in half, removed the central cores, and plucked off all the leaves before rounding them into perfect circles, just so they could be a garnish for the tasting menu’s dish of lobster legs with banana kimchi. It took me two hours, which was a long time, I knew. But after hearing Brian’s words, I grinned. Okay, I was slow, but my Brussels sprouts were the best they’d ever been. Ever.
I love making these meals at home, because even though I’m unable to reproduce most of the “creative” dishes served at wd~50, these are what I think of when I recall my time there. Our dinners were good, flavorful, filling food—just what you need to keep you going.
We ate lamb meatballs with cucumber-yogurt sauce, but they are also great with spicy tomato sauce over pasta, or you can mold the raw mixture into a meat loaf and bake it. Panko are Japanese bread crumbs, but you can use regular bread crumbs if unavailable. And to save time and energy, mince the onion and garlic in a mini–food processor. I regularly do. Just don’t tell Wylie.
SERVES 4 TO 6
1½ pounds ground lamb
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
¾ cup panko
2 egg yolks
3 cloves garlic, minced as small as possible
1 small to medium-sized onion, minced as small as possible
1 tablespoon minced fresh rosemary
2 teaspoons minced fresh thyme
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup Greek-style yogurt
1 cup roughly chopped cucumber (preferably an English cucumber)
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Prepare the meatballs: Combine all ingredients except for the olive oil in a large mixing bowl. Using your hands, mix until thoroughly combined. Shape into balls about 2 inches in diameter. Using some force and throwing the balls from hand to hand will help release any air pockets and maintain the shape of the meatballs. You should end up with about 15 to 20 balls.
Heat the olive oil in an ovenproof skillet over high heat. When the oil begins to smoke, add half the meatballs and cook until browned. Turn and cook the other sides. Remove from the pan and add the remaining meatballs, cooking until browned on all sides. Return the other meatballs to the skillet and bake in the oven for about 10 to 12 minutes, or until fully cooked on the inside.
While the meatballs are cooking, make the sauce. Combine all ingredients in a food processor and pulse until the cucumber is in small chunks. Serve the meatballs with the sauce.
Kimchi stew was a popular dish on the days when Wylie wasn’t in the kitchen, because it is spicy and often studded with tomatoes. Kimchi, a pungent combo of pickled cabbage and chiles, can be found at most Asian grocery stores. If the kimchi is made of very large leaves, you’ll want to cut them into smaller pieces. This recipe is pretty basic; to jazz it up, feel free to add cubes of tofu after you uncover the pot or add bite-sized pieces of raw chicken breast when you add the garlic, ginger, and onion and then continue with the recipe as directed.
2 tablespoons vegetable oil or olive oil
4 garlic cloves, sliced
1 tablespoon chopped ginger
1 medium onion, halved, then cut into thin slices
1 tablespoon tomato paste
¼ teaspoon cornstarch
3 Roma tomatoes, cored and cut into chunks
1 bunch scallions, cut into 2-inch pieces
1 pound kimchi (about 2 cups’ worth)
1 cup water
Kosher salt as desired (about ½ to ¾ teaspoon)
In a large pot, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add the garlic, ginger, and onion, and sauté until the onion has softened somewhat, about 3 minutes. Combine the tomato paste and cornstarch until smooth. Add to the pot, along with the tomatoes and scallions, and sauté until combined. Add the kimchi and water, and bring to a boil.
Lower the heat to a simmer and cover. Cook for 5 minutes, then cook uncovered for an additional 10 minutes, then season with the salt. The stew should be thick but with some liquid remaining. Serve in bowls or accompanied by white rice.
Hot dogs are easy to prepare, so we often ate them for family meal. But a hot dog family meal wasn’t merely franks on a bun. No, the cooks went all out, making spicy chili, gooey beans, coleslaw, and pickled jalapeños (and, of course, American cheese) to add to the franks. It’s great for feeding a crowd of forty, but when I’m cooking at home, I like to keep things a bit simpler, so I make a quick chili. For hot dogs, I personally like Hebrew National brand. I broil them in the oven since I live in New York and am sadly grill-less, but use whatever you’ve got available.
SERVES 4
2 cloves garlic
1 small to medium-sized onion
1 jalapeño pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
½ teaspoon cumin
½ teaspoon chile powder
¼ teaspoon ground coriander
½ pound ground chuck
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 tablespoon molasses
½ teaspoon cornstarch
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ cup beef stock
Kosher salt
4 hot dogs
4 hot dog buns
Finely chop the garlic, onion, and jalapeño. Heat the olive oil in a small pot over medium-high heat. Add the garlic, onion, and jalapeño, and sauté until softened, about 4 minutes. Add the cayenne, cumin, chile powder, coriander, and chuck, and sauté for a minute or two until the beef is no longer raw. Add the tomato paste, molasses, cornstarch, and salt, and stir until combined. Add the beef stock and raise the heat. When the mixture reaches a boil, lower the heat to a lazy simmer and cook for 15 minutes or until thick. Season to taste with salt, if needed.
Meanwhile, preheat a grill or broiler to high. Cook hot dogs until they begin to wrinkle and the edges brown slightly, about 5 minutes. Lightly toast your hot dog buns, if desired.
To serve, place hot dog inside of bun and top with lots of chili.