SUNDAYS WERE OUR BIG NIGHTS for going out, but we often hit the town Fridays and Saturdays after work to experience “real people weekends.” The Clerkenwell, a British gastropub, had just opened across the street and was quickly becoming one of our regular watering holes. This Saturday, when I walked out of the restaurant to meet everyone, I realized I was the last one.
“Let’s go,” said Tom. “Without the stage!”
“Oh, Tom, you’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” I replied. Only a few weeks of my stage remained at wd~50, two full months having whizzed by.
Claire whispered to me, “You know, he really will.”
At the bar, I grabbed a stool next to Spencer, who said, “What’s your poison? Whiskey? It’s on me.”
“You don’t have to buy me a drink, but thanks.”
“Ugh, Wylie is going to hate me soon. I just don’t know when is the best time to tell him about leaving,” he said after taking a big swig of his drink. He had just finalized his decision to move back to Chicago come summertime and was holding off telling Wylie.
“You need to do what’s right for you. If Chicago’s where you need to be, you can’t feel bad about that. Plus that’s where your lady friend is, right?” I said. Although I had initially considered Spencer as a potential prospect for a kitchen romance, I abandoned the idea when he told me that he had decided to give his relationship with his ex-girlfriend in Chicago another try.
“Yeah, all true. And I’ll have my own apartment there, and I’ll make more money,” he said.
“Do you think that they’ll bring Jared upstairs to replace you?” I said.
“Jared’s put himself in a tough position because he runs the prep kitchen so well that there’s no one really who can replace him. I mean, he could be good upstairs, but he needs to spend more than one day up there,” said Spencer. During my time at wd~50, Jared had worked upstairs only once, and even though I was a stagiaire, I wondered if maybe Jared was jealous of my being up there so frequently. Jared had told me he was hurt when Patrick was hired to replace Tom on garde manger even though Jared had worked at wd~50 for over a year and was ready to move upstairs.
“Yeah, for sure,” I said.
“When he was up there, he was so bad he didn’t know how bad he was. He was constantly joking around with Tom and didn’t know how anything was plated.”
“It must be tough, though,” I said, wanting to defend Jared. “I was just thinking about how long it would take to train someone to run the prep kitchen.”
“You know, Brian asked me and Jared the other day if you’d be interested in that job. But we said we didn’t think you were, or are you?”
I was thrilled to hear this but replied, “I don’t think wd~50 is the place for me. It’s been great working here, but I want a restaurant that focuses more on taste.”
This was true, and by now I had decided to head to Vietnam, to apprentice under Didier Corlou, who (at least from what I’d read and heard) valued flavor and spice first and foremost in his cooking. Was it ridiculous to turn down a job offer to pursue another unpaid stage? No, I reasoned. Although wd~50 could teach me technique until the sun came up, that wasn’t all there was to cooking. Sure, I was learning about esoteric combinations—eel and Campari, octopus and pine nut, miso and sunflower—but these pairings didn’t always impress me. For the most part they worked, but sometimes they just tasted odd. I wanted to immerse myself in cooking by taste rather than chemistry.
“Did you get a lot out of working here?” asked Spencer.
“Sure. I feel like I can walk into any restaurant kitchen and hold my own. I can’t believe I didn’t know how to hold a knife properly before. How do you graduate from culinary school not knowing how to hold a knife?”
“I remember that. It was like your first or second day and you were holding it like this—” Spencer twisted his knuckle awkwardly around an invisible knife.
“I’m still slow, but not nearly as slow as I was,” I said. “And yes, sometimes I wish I had done more cooking, but you guys don’t even do that much cooking. It’s all measuring out the same ingredients day after day and making the same things over and over.”
“Oh, so you’ve learned the sad, unglamorous truth of restaurant cooking,” he said.
A FEW DAYS LATER, while waiting for the rest of the cooks to finish getting dressed after service, I went outside to enjoy the cool spring breeze. Jared was leaning against the brick wall, smoking his ritual after-work cigarette. “Lauren, I have to say I’m going to miss you when you’re gone. You do good work.”
“Thanks, it’s really nice to hear that. I definitely feel like I’ve improved,” I said.
“If this is the kind of job that you want, I think you could do it. You just have to really want it,” he said.
“Yeah, we’ll see,” I said, wondering how much Jared wanted it and how much I did.
“But don’t do it here.”
Jared was alluding to the greatest problem with molecular gastronomy and the reason I had decided I couldn’t work full-time at wd~50: It was simply too focused on technique. While the restaurant had innovated some great technique-based dishes—fried hollandaise and mayonnaise, barbecued lentils, aerated foie gras, shrimp noodles—molecular gastronomy is a lot like a party trick: exciting the first time you see it, but far less mesmerizing once the initial novelty has worn off.
Throughout my time at wd~50, I often questioned the lasting impact of this type of experimental cuisine and wondered if most diners preferred an experience that comforts and soothes with flavor or one that surprises and shocks with technique. Which experience is more memorable and which is more meaningful?
I think the answer is that diners do generally prefer a meal that comforts and soothes; when you’re paying a significant amount of money on dinner, you want to walk away satiated and pleased. I mean, we’re biologically conditioned to enjoy food that tastes good. However, going to a place like wd~50 will certainly be a more memorable dining experience than going to a restaurant to eat seared tuna steak followed by chocolate cake. It’s true that not everything is delicious at wd~50, but I don’t think that’s the restaurant’s sole purpose. Wylie pushes boundaries and intellectualizes the meal; his cuisine engenders a timely discourse about food and restaurants.
“I know,” I said to Jared. Indeed, the wd~50 experience isn’t one that you want every day—as a diner, certainly, but also as a cook. I had wanted so much to work at wd~50 that I waited six months to work twelve-hour days for free. Now I was ready to move on and find a kitchen experience that would constantly excite me and that allowed for a different kind of creative expression.
ON MY FINAL DAY at wd~50, I arrived in the prep kitchen to find it buzzing with people. Jared was breading sticks of “mayonnaise” (similar to the fried hollandaise cubes but log-shaped and less eggy) for “the Wylie Dog,” an homage to Wylie in hot dog form consisting of a fried hot dog with fried mayonnaise, tomato molasses, and freeze-dried onions. These would be served at PDT, a nearby bar where Wylie had a standing weekly reservation. Because the bar didn’t have the capacity to make the fried mayonnaise or tomato molasses, we sent them over every week. Mathias, the pastry stagiaire, had transferred over to the savory kitchen to take my place and was cutting melon into a tiny dice, while another new stagiaire was cleaning the never-ending supply of ramps. Hector sliced cauliflower on a mandolin to make into chips, while Tom cleaned fish for an amuse he was preparing. Not a single work space was free.
“Go upstairs this week. See something new. Tell them to teach you some cool shit,” said Jared.
I did it. Finally. After three months of sunless days that transitioned seamlessly into nights without my noticing, I was going upstairs. For the whole day.
It turned out that working upstairs was much like working downstairs, except that the ingredients were different and we listened to docked iPods blasting The Band or Tom Waits instead of the La Mega radio station’s hit list of Spanish-language music (somehow, the top ten songs hadn’t changed during my three months at the restaurant). Upstairs, instead of chopping endive, I sliced Asian celery into thin strips and soaked them in ice water so that they magically curled up like Rapunzel’s ringlets. I quarted up buttermilk whey instead of long beans. But Patrick and Spencer had me doing some “real” cooking, too, or at least creating components of dishes from start to finish. Using the gram scale (nicknamed Pablo since it was frequently used to measure tiny amounts of white powders), I weighed out the chemical Ultra-Sperse 3 and added it to cucumber juice to form the gel-like sauce served with the lamb belly. I made the Asian celery financier cake from start to finish without a stitch of help, and I learned my way around the wall of chemicals, now fully understanding the difference between gellan high, xanthan, and methylcellulose. (In case you ever get this question on a quiz show: Gellan high helps turn a liquid into a gummy gel, like when we turned the hollandaise base into a gel so that it was easy to coat with bread crumbs but would melt into a liquid when fried; xanthan helps to thicken sauces or foods like the carrot puree, which can stand up on the plate without running all over the place; and methylcellulose turns a liquid brittle and paperlike, such as in the cream cheese paper on the everything bagel dish.) As it turned out, there wasn’t much difference between Ultra-Sperse 3 and Ultra-Tex 3; both are just tapioca starches, though the latter is used more when a glossy, smooth, and creamy end product is desired.
Spencer even entrusted me with the task of cleaning the oh-so-expensive lobes of shiny foie gras, showing me how to massage out the bloodlines from the liver with my thumbs. The trick to cleaning foie gras is to first separate the lobes at the natural breaking point, then massage the lobes with your fingertips, pressing around the ruby red bloodlines until they reach the surface. Then you gently place your finger under the bloodline and run it along the bottom until you can lift out the whole bloodline while leaving the lobe intact (albeit somewhat smushed, like Silly Putty under a school desk). If you break the lobe into several pieces, it’s more likely that little bits of the bloodline will get trapped inside, which will impact the dish’s final flavor and be unsightly for the diner. It took me several tries, and even Wylie himself had to demonstrate how to do it properly. But finally I mastered it, deftly plucking out the unseemly red strands and placing the lobes on a baking sheet, where I seasoned them with cognac, salt, and pepper and placed them in the oven.
Best of all, I cooked on the wd~50 stove, making a sunflower seed brittle for the new cold miso-sunflower soup. Patrick explained the procedure as I took notes, and then he let me be. My kitchen nerves weren’t completely gone, but I took my time and double-checked my actions to ensure that everything would go smoothly. I poured isomalt, which is similar to sugar, into a large pan over high heat to melt it. When it formed a clear syrup, I added the sunflower seeds and quickly stirred the mixture, then poured it into a rectangular-shaped pan. The trick with the brittle is to flatten it quickly before it hardens by pressing down on it with another pan so it’s uniform in shape. I pressed down hard on the pan, but my brittle wasn’t flattening.
“Just stand on it,” said Patrick, who was sautéing garlic and onions in a pot next to me.
So I placed the pan on the floor and stood on it, shifting my body weight back and forth as though I were surfing on the kitchenware. Wylie laughed across the kitchen.
“What? Patrick told me to do it this way,” I said.
“Patrick, you pick the lightest person in the kitchen for that job?” he said, shaking his head in amused disbelief. But it worked: The brittle came out perfectly. After it had cooled to the touch, I chopped it into small pieces and tossed it in a mesh sieve with a dust made from ground shiitake mushrooms. When finished, the pieces of brittle resembled scraggly rocks and tasted nutty and earthy, with just a touch of sweetness.
My last service was so hectic that it flew by, with two parties of eleven guests each, but it didn’t feel any different from any other. The nightly “‘Order in, foie, octo, benny,’ ‘Service, please, two bagels to table eleven,’ ‘One up on twenty-two,’ ‘Order in, four tasting,’ ‘Start plating those scallops and then go on to the eel,’ ‘Another four, eight all day,’ ‘Service, please, table thirty-two, benny one, shrimp two,’ ‘How’s table twenty-seven doing with their foie?’ ‘Start setting up for six scallops,’” played as it did every night in the kitchen, a seamless if chaotic song and dance among cooks and servers. And then it was over, and I found myself wiping down the kitchen for the last time.
While I scrubbed caked-on egg yolk off the counter, Jared appeared and asked, “Do you have a cocktail?”
The keg had been tapped, and plastic quart containers of flat beer were lining the countertop, waiting to be drunk. “A cocktail? No,” I replied.
Jared called out to Scott as he was leaving the manager’s office, located in the hallway next to the prep kitchen. “Scott, get her a cocktail. It’s her last day,” he said.
Scott said, “What would you like?”
“Something delicious,” I said, intrigued by the expertly prepared signature cocktails, which used intriguing ingredients like beet juice, yuzu, and Cynar.
Scott returned and handed me a martini glass filled with light brown liquor. “A perfect rye Manhattan,” he said. It was perfect: clean and smooth, with a tiny brandied cherry resting at the bottom of the glass.
Patrick held up his quart container of beer and clinked my glass. “It was great working with you.”
“Thanks,” I said, well aware that not all the stagiaires got acknowledgments or thanks. Most got slight head nods and a “See you around, man.” Some simply got shown the door.
Brian joined us in the kitchen, holding an ice-filled tumbler that held his yuzu cocktail, one of his favorite drinks he had once let me taste.
“Whose is that?” he asked, looking at my half-drunk Manhattan on the counter.
“Mine,” I said.
“Who gave that to you?”
“Um, Jared said I could have it,” I said, nervous I was going to get in trouble on my last night.
But Brian smiled. “It’s already your last day?”
“Time flies in the kitchen.” I refrained from mentioning that it’s especially true when you’re in a windowless basement with no frame of reference to the actual time of day.
Overhearing us, Wylie left his office to shake my hand and bid me farewell. Seeing his outstretched hand, I said, “I wanted to thank you for everything. I know I was really green when I started out, but I’ve definitely learned a lot. A whole lot.”
“You’re still green. I’m just sorry you had to work with some of these crazy boys,” said Wylie, smiling.
“It’s cool. They were the brothers I never had,” I said. I took a final look around the kitchen and said to Wylie, “I’m a hugger. Let’s hug good-bye!”
After three months, Wylie didn’t scare me anymore. Well, maybe I was still afraid of unleashing his ire, and I remained in wondrous awe of his culinary innovation, but I wasn’t afraid of him as a person. He was just a dude who cooked for a living. A highly talented dude, of course, but still an average dude. Although I’d spent my first weeks in the kitchen trying to avoid him and praying he wouldn’t have an opportunity to point out my errors, I now stood on my tiptoes and flung my arms around him. Working at wd~50 had been a trial by fire, but I had made it through relatively unscathed. And now, no longer intimidated by Wylie—or, even more important, of the restaurant kitchen—I wanted more.
What makes wd~50 a great restaurant is that it offers you food and an experience that you cannot create at home. Not unless your home includes an army of assistants, a bevy of chemicals, and specialty equipment ranging from dehydrators to immersion circulators. And truthfully, at the end of the day I don’t want to be measuring out .6 grams of xanthan to add to my carrot puree. The recipes that follow use the flavors and the simplest techniques employed in some of wd~50’s dishes and are ways in which I can bring a bit of wd~50 to my kitchen table.
Making a gelatin clarification is a laborious process compared with the traditional technique of using egg whites, but the end result—crystal-clear liquid with no trace of egg flavor—is worth it, and you can basically make a consommé out of anything. Anything. Even Doritos. Smoking is another popular technique at wd~50 (Wylie once even made smoked mashed potatoes), but for the home cook who doesn’t have a smoker, adding a bit of smoked paprika to whatever you’re making will give it that outdoorsy, barbecue flavor.
SERVES 4
8 cups Doritos Cool Ranch–Flavored Tortilla Chips
10 cups water
½ teaspoon powdered gelatin
cup fresh corn kernels
½ cup water
2 teaspoons smoked paprika
4 jumbo shrimp
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon microcilantro leaves (or regular cilantro leaves)
In a large pot, combine the Doritos with 8 cups water. Bring to a boil, mashing the Doritos with a wooden spoon until the mixture looks mushy. Turn off the heat and let steep for 30 minutes. Strain the soup using a fine-meshed sieve, and discard the solids. You should have about 4½ cups of thick liquid. Wipe out the used pot and return the soup to it. Bring to a boil.
Meanwhile, dissolve the gelatin in the remaining 2 cups of water. When the soup reaches a boil, add the water and stir until the gelatin is dissolved. Pour into a container and freeze until solid, about 6 hours to overnight.
Unmold the frozen soup from its container and place it in a colander lined with two layers of cheesecloth. You may need to break up the block of frozen soup into several pieces. Place the colander in a bowl so that the frozen liquid can drip out. Leave in the refrigerator until the soup has melted completely, about 2 to 3 days. The gelatin will trap all the particulate matter in the cheesecloth, and the resulting liquid will be clear and Doritos flavored. If desired, you can let the colander rest for a few hours at room temperature to help speed up the melting process, but you don’t want to exceed more than a few hours since the gelatin may melt as well. Return the consommé to a pot and heat until almost boiling.
Place the corn, water, and smoked paprika in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Drain the corn and set aside.
Peel and devein the shrimp and season them lightly with salt and pepper. Heat the vegetable oil in a small skillet over high heat. When the pan begins to smoke, add the shrimp and sear on each side for about 2 to 3 minutes. Blot off any remaining oil on a paper towel.
To serve, place one shrimp each in the center of four serving bowls. Fill with the hot consommé, then add a few spoonfuls of corn to the consommé and garnish with the cilantro. Serve immediately.
This recipe uses wd~50’s technique for pickling ramps but substitutes the more readily available scallions. These are great on sandwiches or burgers or as a distinctive canapé at a summertime party. The pickled scallions should keep for several weeks covered in the refrigerator. Feel free to substitute your favorite pickling vegetables for the scallions.
SERVES 4 TO 8 AS A GARNISH
2 cups water
1 cup rice vinegar
1 cup sugar
4 teaspoons kosher salt
2 cloves
2 teaspoons yellow mustard seed
2 teaspoons black peppercorns
2 teaspoons minced fresh ginger
1 teaspoon chile flakes
2 teaspoons coriander seed
1 pound scallions, bottom roots trimmed off (about 3 bunches)
In a large pot, combine all ingredients except the scallions and bring to a boil. Turn off the heat and let steep 1 hour. Strain, discard the spices, and return the liquid to the pot. Bring back to a boil.
Place the scallions in a container and pour the boiling liquid over them. When cool, cover and refrigerate until ready to eat.
This recipe plays on the flavors in the scallop dish served on the tasting menu but simplifies the process for the home cook. Pork rinds can usually be found in the potato chip aisle at major supermarkets or corner delis.
SERVES 4
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 onion, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 shallot, roughly chopped
1 clove
1 bay leaf
1 cup white grape juice
1 cup chicken stock
1 large bunch parsley, stems chopped off
Kosher salt for seasoning
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound sea scallops
1 cup pork rinds
1 Meyer lemon or regular lemon
In a saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter. Add the onion, garlic, shallot, clove, and bay leaf. Cook for about 5 minutes, or until the vegetables have softened (but don’t let them brown). Add the grape juice and chicken stock, and bring to a boil. Cook until only ½ cup liquid remains, about 30 minutes. Strain and discard the solids.
Bring a small pot of water to a boil, then add the parsley. After a minute, strain and submerge the parsley in ice water to stop the cooking process. Remove the parsley and squeeze out any excess water. In a food processor, combine the grape juice liquid with the parsley and puree until smooth. Season with salt to taste.
Heat the olive oil in a skillet until smoking. Season the scallops with a little salt, then add to the pan and cook until nicely seared, about 1 minute. Flip and cook on the other side. You may need to do this in two batches so as not to crowd the pan.
Spoon a small pool of parsley sauce in the center of each of four plates. Place a portion of the scallops onto each plate, add 2 to 3 pork rinds next to the scallops, and zest the lemon atop each plate.