At last, the subject matter of art includes the simple intimacies of everyday life in its repertoire.
—LOUIS EDMOND DURANTY, The New Painting
THERE IS A LUNCH SPOT near my office that makes a decent stir-fry, but a couple of years ago you took your chances at the counter.
One of the guys who took the orders was an absolute pill. I don’t think he’s there much now, and this is why: you ruined his day just by walking in, and he let you know it with the kind of frostiness that makes the little hairs on the back of your neck prickle. When your order was up, he’d shove it across the counter to you and zip away before you could bother him for anything else. God forbid you ask for a fork, as I did once. He shot me a look that said he dearly wished he had something sharper than plastic cutlery to slam my way.
The guy didn’t just have a bad attitude, he was scrunched up, his shoulders visibly clenched under his T-shirt. He was so tightly wound you could feel his bitterness from a distance. He shouldn’t have been working with the public; any job dealing with people demands at least a little bit of grace. Perhaps he had long ago grown tired of waiting on people, and his resentment was boiling over. For some, being in service to the public is a chore, and the sooner they get out, the better.
For others, it’s a calling.
There is an art to good service. It’s a matter of choice—the choice to be excellent—and a dedication to others that is at the essence of grace.
I was in New York’s Guggenheim Museum not long ago to see an exhibit of California artist James Turrell, who experiments with light and space. His works are basically dim, empty rooms with maybe a little window cut into a wall. I walked around wondering what I was missing. People were waiting in line to enter one gallery, and I joined them. Only a few at a time were allowed to see the display inside, a projection of a dark shadow against a slightly darker wall. The far more interesting experience was outside, where the job of managing the line of visitors fell to a short, compactly built security guard with velvety ebony skin and a physical expressiveness to light up the sky.
He became the emcee of the waiting-in-line experience. Was he always this cheerful, or was he just having a good day? He used his arms as wings to wave us into position, spreading them in a wide embrace. “Two minutes,” he announced with a beaming smile and a rich, lilting accent. I was dying to know where he came from, as I watched him work the space, fluttering his fingers at newcomers to welcome them to the line, striding into the hallway to see who else might be coming and kicking a leg out with a backward tip of his torso. He moved to some inner rhythm, a silent music.
Seeing me scribbling in my notepad as my turn came to enter the gallery, he said to me nicely, purring his Rs, “Just finish what you are wrrriting; finish your wrrriting before going in.” And when I tucked away my pen, he swept me and my fellow linemates inside with that great, broad wingspan.
When I emerged from the gallery, I asked him where he was from. “Doesn’t my accent give me away?” he asked, smiling, eyes alight. “Well . . .” I said, silently scrolling through the possibilities. A Venn diagram of African dance traditions and geopolitics began forming in my mind. He saw I was about to guess and, in an act of charity, tossed me a hint.
“Kofi Annan . . . ?” he said, drawing the name out as if we were playing Password on TV.
“Um,” I stammered, wanting to join the game, hoping my memory was up for it. The encouraging look on his face must have eased open some dusty drawer in my mind. “Ghana?”
“You are rrright!” he said, rewarding me with an even bigger smile and another beautiful trilled R.
This man was joy in motion, and he knew how to use his body to make connections with others. I encountered him again in the rotunda, which was filled with Turrell’s shifting colored light, the best part of the exhibit. Or did it just seem that way because I’d been cheered up by the guard? The museum was closing, and in his preparations to head home, the guard whipped off his jacket with a single smooth action, sending a lasso of fabric whirling around himself. He extended his hand to me in farewell, with a royal bow, and I whooshed through the revolving doors onto Fifth Avenue with an exhilarating rush.
He’d made me feel cared for and invited me into his dance, which is what the graceful action does. We’ve all felt this: from the man who swings the door open and steps aside for you as you’re coming out of a coffee shop juggling a hot cup and a tote bag, or from the young woman on the subway platform who kindly plucks out her earbuds and looks up your destination on her phone to help you find your stop.
This one-on-one connectedness can offer a few moments of unexpected joy. The delight only grows when you witness it on a larger scale. There is a collective grace in busy workplaces where there is no room for error, where people are supremely good at what they do and they tune in to one another’s movements. You find this in a symphony orchestra, with the rolling, washing movement of the strings, and among well-oiled surgical teams, NASCAR pit crews, and waiters navigating a busy dining room at the height of service. Their movement coordination is a kind of dance, with its own hidden choreography that you can uncover if you look closely enough. You’ve heard of strength in numbers, and this is why that’s true: moving in rhythm is both soothing and energizing and bonds us more closely together.
It pleases our animal nature. Collective choreography is found all through the wild. As I write this, it is August in Washington, and thousands of bachelor cicadas are massing to give their annual mating concert in the trees. All in a bunch, they sing and fly and sing some more, in what has to be the loudest collective booty call in the insect world.
There is synchrony of movement in swarms of bees, schools of fish, and herds of horses running gracefully as one. Their synchrony is part of what we find so graceful about them. Horses move together seemingly effortlessly even over rugged terrain and long distances, coordinating their stride and spacing with one another through a sense of body positioning that any ballet master trying to get his dancers in a line would envy.
Flamingos are primitive birds whose fossil record dates back fifty million years; perhaps because of all this evolutionary rehearsal time, they are famous for their crowd consciousness. Whether they inhabit lagoons or lakes, their mating dance has the smooth precision of the Rockettes. Sweeping this way and that at the water’s edge, wing to wing, the birds strut, bob, and head-flick in unison. Researchers suggest that with this dancing ritual, flamingos are seeking to pair up in a way that anyone sensitive to grace can understand: they may be searching for a mate whose moves match their own.1
At the essence of all these displays, whether among birds or humans, is relinquishing yourself to the flow. The participants merge into a single living, breathing organism, where the group is emphasized over the individual. You forget that you are a separate entity. In the most harmonious corporeal teamwork, there is a transcendent quality, of connecting with something larger than your own ego.
Look at close-order drills in the military. In his book Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, historian William McNeill writes of the “muscular bonding” in this age-old practice, which has outlived its battlefield usefulness but is still employed as a way to tie recruits together on a deep level. In his own World War II–era army training, he recalls feeling a sense of well being, and “of swelling out, becoming bigger than life.”2
Throughout human existence, synchronized movement has served to pull people together and strengthen connections. And if most of us lack it in our lives, watching others is a window into its pleasures, and its grace.
Observing cadets maneuver through their drills on a parade ground is one possibility. But with open kitchens a growing trend in restaurants, you can catch a glimpse of collective grace over dinner. Great kitchens match drill-field precision with gestural art. The best cooks possess a soldier’s obedience and a dancer’s grace.
I saw this on a Saturday night at a restaurant called CityZen in Southwest Washington, DC, where alongside his risotto and rib eye, chef Eric Ziebold served up a quiet show of elegant efficiency.3
Before coming to Washington in 2004, Ziebold had logged eight years at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in Yountville, California, one of those revered foodie meccas that is spoken of in sighs. Ziebold held the top job of chef de cuisine there and also helped Keller open the ultra-high-end restaurant Per Se in New York.
Keller is painstakingly precise not only about his food but about the way it is served. “He frequently talked about the service as a dance,” said one of his former headwaiters, Phoebe Damrosch. Keller brought in French baroque dance specialist Catherine Turocy to train the waiters in the minuet. Why? Because it is all about graceful approach, Turocy told me, and gestures of offering and accepting are important. Originating under Louis XIV, the minuet exemplifies the courtly manners that were all the rage in France at the time. Its responsive, attentive spirit was what the waiters took away, Damrosch said.
“It was a message from the people who opened the restaurant that this is something incredibly important, we’re a team, we have to work together or it’s not going to work,” she recalled. “We talked about the center of gravity, where to hold the plates so our elbows were at a right angle, so if someone bumped into you, you could hold on to it. It was all about how to make sure your body was really comfortable and stable.”
This is the atmosphere that Ziebold absorbed and in which he developed his own approach to running a restaurant. He is known for his quiet authority and for working insane hours seven days a week. He is also known for his moves.
“I fell in love with Eric when I saw him move in the kitchen,” confesses his wife, Celia Laurent Ziebold. She met Ziebold when they worked together at the French Laundry.
“I saw this man moving around very precisely in a very tight space, and everyone around him was well orchestrated, with very natural movements,” says Laurent Ziebold. “I thought it was beautiful.”
Those reality-TV chef shows may have you thinking that professional cooking is all about crazy creativity with vinegars and organ meats. Or that it’s a matter of egos, screaming, and jungle treks in search of Amazonian rodents. But what really matters in a pro kitchen is instant reaction, mindless repetition, and smooth, efficient maneuvers. Restaurants run on the French kitchen-brigade system, modeled more than a century ago after a military hierarchy. There’s the chef, a couple of lieutenants (the sous-chefs), and a platoon of line cooks—the kitchen infantry—manning stations assigned by menu category: appetizers, fish, meat, and so on.
It has to be this way. The restaurant kitchen is a highly physical place, and if the saucier lunging toward the stove collides with the meat cook slinging plated quail toward the waiters, there will be a pileup of disaster. Chefs, like generals, know they have two choices: discipline or chaos.
Wearing a starched white chef’s coat with his initials monogrammed by the collar, Ziebold could just as well have medals pinned across his chest. His trim physique and crisp appearance announce him as a man steeped in discipline. He has an easy smile and a friendly, boyish face, but something in his chiseled cheekbones and the set of his jaw brings to mind the solemn intensity of a pitcher throwing a no-hitter in the bottom of the ninth.
His staff will produce perhaps a thousand plates a night, but Ziebold has planned the menus so the preparation is evenly distributed among his cooks, there’s plenty of variety, and diners receive each course at a controlled, steady pace.
“I keep them focused on the repetition,” he says, nodding toward the line cooks as if he’s speaking of the corps de ballet. “Me and the sous-chefs, we’ll do the one-offs.” The proof of this comes as the first guests are shown to their tables. Show time.
In the kitchen, eight cooks are squeezed together like a submarine crew. Still, they swivel with graceful ease from slicing to stirring, swinging stockpots onto burners, bending down to haul meat out of the lowboy fridge, and springing back up to toss it into a pan.
These toqued commandos glide calmly through the same motions again and again. They’re a hairbreadth away from ruin, mere seconds from scorched shoat, lost lamb, overdone duck. All that separates them from expensive errors and trips to the hospital is timing, rehearsal, and reflexive grace.
Two sous-chefs oversee the meat and fish orders. The meat cook is the one with fingers full of bandages. The workhorses are the appetizer guys and a gangly fellow named Alex Brown, a one-man band of pots, whisks, spoons, and saucepans, who makes the hot starters—the soft-boiled egg with gourmet scrapple and gravy, the risotto, the soup.
Tickets roll out of a machine on the counter. Ziebold tears them off and calls out the orders. He has a calm, smooth way of moving, no rushing, no lurching. He wields a long spatula like a conductor’s baton.
“Three egg, three tartare!”
Steam is rising from the saucepans. Brown grabs a pan, stirs it, tastes it, sets it back on the flame, and swipes the counter. In a chain of swift, blurred motions, he’s swirling risotto, sautéing mushroom sauce, and heating up the cabbage soup. Like a shark, he never stops moving, and never loses his quizzical squint.
“Two tartare, one risotto!” Brown pirouettes with the stack of pots that he’s grabbed from the window into the dish room, spinning back to the stove. He slides a pan of bacon-wrapped quail on the counter just before Ziebold turns to grab it.
Steps away, in the candlelit dining room, elegant body language is everywhere—in the way lanky sommelier Andrew Myers glides tableside the instant the waiter has left, to pour the Barolo without further interrupting the guests. Ask for the powder room and a waiter will lead you there with a kind of sideways crab walk, so as not to turn her back on you. With a flourish of her arms, she’ll land you right at the door.
The kitchen sings with activity. Over at the fish and meat station, Kerwin Tugas, one of the sous-chefs, threads his way through the channel between the backsides of two line cooks. He floats with a kind of weightlessness, balanced and controlled. Doesn’t touch anything as he goes by, agile as a cat, darting back to his station. He spins on one foot to reach around the other men for a pan. Slips between the two cooks before the gap closes.
They’re all adrenaline junkies, these aproned aces. They thrive on the buzz. Brown jolts his sauté pan with a hiccuping motion, flip flip flip. Reaching for a pile of shiitake to crown his veal tartare, another cook glides like an ice skater, launching himself from one counter to the other.
“It’s like Chef says, ‘There’s no perfection, it’s the pursuit of perfection,’” Tugas says. “So it’s just repetition, repetition, repetition.”
Toward midnight, as the dining room empties, the cooks turn to wiping off their counters and gulping water from plastic deli containers. Ziebold, looking as fresh as the minute service started, heads over to the bar to chat with Myers as he polishes wineglasses. The chef starts to talk about how he got swept into cooking.
Scrapple and red-eye gravy come out of Ziebold’s kitchen because they’re fixed in his emotional root system. He grew up in Ames, Iowa, where his father worked at a newspaper and his mother was a teacher. After the three o’clock bell, she went home to cook dinner, which was served promptly at six.
“God help you if you showed up late,” he says.
Her cooking was the original slow food: she did her own canning and her own corned beef, brining it in the root cellar near the shelves of Mason jars.
Now Ziebold is especially proud of his corned beef tongue, a reference point to his past. “Some people are looking for blow-my-mind cooking,” he says. “Some people are looking for the emotional tie. That’s what inspires me.”
Memory is a large part of his arsenal, and so is longing. Eating became a highly charged event, thanks to another formative part of Iowa culture: wrestling. Ziebold wrestled in junior high and high school, making the state team and earning a college scholarship. Cutting weight was as much a part of the sport as grueling workouts.
Food cravings haunted him. With his teammates he’d “walk around the grocery store saying, ‘After the weigh-in I’m gonna have that and that and that,’” he recalls. He’d come home from practice so weak from exertion on an empty stomach that he’d be shaking.
After high school, he was burned out. Instead of taking the wrestling scholarship, he headed to culinary school, where he could indulge his food fantasies. At five foot nine—and with a father over six feet tall—Ziebold believes the years of food deprivation stunted his growth. The sport left its mark on him in other ways, too. You see it in his intensity, focus, and militaristic discipline.
And you see it in his moves. The athlete’s grace remains in his capacity for endurance and consistency, his easy pivot from counter to counter, his confident legato in the midst of the hustle.
The beauty of the dishes, the carefully orchestrated flavors—it all starts with what lives in the minds and muscles of the chef. The hungers, the memories, the appetite for labor. Add the grace of the kitchen, and what ends up on your fork is the outcome of a string of sweet moves. From the cook’s body to yours.
Being a graceful waiter is not all about stamina and memorizing specials. The grace is in quietly anticipating desire.
“You have to stay on the floor and just be around,” said Damrosch, who was part of the waitstaff at Per Se. “Visiting the table, being close, pouring water, pouring some wine. You don’t have to say anything.” But if the customer needs something, you’re there, before he’s said a word: “You have a sense of the other person in the space and you’re communicating all the time in a physical way.”
Her memoir, Service Included, chronicles the year she spent under Keller’s exacting eye, rising to become a female captain in the male-dominated world of four-star restaurants. She describes a good waiter as akin to a social worker, someone who can intuit needs, pick up on anxieties and relieve them, and make the guests feel cared for but not cramped. The reason behind every action is “to put the guest at ease,” and mindful use of the body is part of that: perfecting a smooth, gliding stride that is neither too slow nor too fast, reaching beside a guest rather than across her, and never approaching from behind.
There is also an art to tailoring your demeanor to different diners. “You’re being different people simultaneously,” she told me. “A single diner might need more companionship. A table of rowdy gentlemen might need more gentle ribbing. . . . What puts one person at ease won’t be the same for another.”
Damrosch no longer works in restaurants; she married after leaving Per Se and is raising a family. She may have slightly lost her touch at pouring champagne with finesse, in a slim golden stream without sloshing, she said, but more important skills have stayed with her from her time in service. Waiting tables, she believes, is good training for life. It teaches you about unspoken communication, body language, carrying yourself and responding in a way that makes others feel comfortable. And about the power of simply being present.
“I think there’s something innate about being a good waiter, someone who can pay attention and be a good listener. You have a feel for making someone happy. I remember one waiter stopped me in service once and told me I always needed to let the guest go first. No matter what is happening, however busy I was, I had to stop. The guest’s movement is more important than my movement.
“I’m a big advocate of waiting tables,” she said, “and to elevate it and to be really good at it requires a lot of attention and study. It’s not something we think about too much in this culture, and that’s sad.”
ONE SUMMER, curious about how roadies load in a rock concert, I visited the sports arena in downtown Washington. It was Saturday morning, before dawn. High above the cement floor, crew members called upriggers had started hanging lights and other equipment for the Jennifer Lopez concert that evening.
On a catwalk one hundred feet up in the air, the abyss rose all around me.4 The only thing between me and the concrete far below was an open metal handrail on either side of what felt like a footbridge to a heart attack.
But the upriggers, trussed up in harnesses that stretched around their hips, traversed the bridge and walked out onto the narrow beams with forbidding ease. Up in that smoky air, grace was pretty much what kept them alive.
As I stood clinging to the rail, my insides gurgling in fright, a man the size of a linebacker strolled jauntily across the catwalk as if he were ambling down the street on the happiest day of his life. No hesitation, nothing tentative, just joy. He was draped in coils of rope, and the harness around his crotch forced his legs wide, which gave him a bouncing, rolling motion, as if he were a plus-size rodeo cowboy who’d just hopped off a bull. He had Jackie Gleason’s lightness, a tightrope walker’s balance, and a power lifter’s strength, and he plowed all these qualities into a series of graceful steps that propelled him over the handrail onto one of the beams.
Other upriggers dotted the beams with the equanimity of birds on wires. One man, straddling his beam with his tattooed calves and work boots dangling freely, stretched out in one smooth taffylike motion to grab a length of cable rising up to him on a pulley. He was part Peter Pan, part aerial gymnast—with no net.
The men up there—along with one quietly focused, ponytailed woman—didn’t just rely on might. There was a smooth, elastic quality of movement, and a delicacy of footwork that’s necessary where the stakes are so high. Though I couldn’t bear to, they had to look down, for each uprigger was in a push-pull tango with a downrigger on the arena floor, as hanging motors, cables, and chains made their ascents. But my eye was on the upriggers, for their acrobatic grace and also—surprisingly, considering how perilous their job looks to mere mortals—their grace of mind. Serenity mingled with their minutely calibrated coordination.
There was even sweet hospitality. “You’re not leaving the best office in the city, are you?” a man lugging armfuls of rope called out to me as I groped my way along the handrail of the catwalk toward the safety of the elevator. He looked me in the eye, smiled reassuringly, and went bounding by, into thin air and cigarette smoke, glancing back to toss me another welcoming grin (or was it understanding, mixed with pity for the landlubber?).
Through the grace of these superheroes in cargo shorts, I met danger and peace at the same moment. My fear was soothed by the jolly example they set, and it turned to wonder, all the more exhilarating given the risk.