His father, who had come all the way from Mario’s hometown in rural Austria, smiled widely (for he didn’t speak much English), and motioned for the canister of hot paprika on the shelf above my head.
He took the paprika and sprinted away. Small and quick. That’s odd, I thought, he seems too young to be Mario’s father.
“Um, Chef, can I ask? How old are you?”
“Twenty-four,” Mario said, leaning over into my sink. He slurped up water with his hand, rubbed it all over his face, and casually wiped himself down with a brown C-fold towel as if mopping off from a shower. I thought for a second that he was going to dig out his ears with it.
“You and I are the same age?” I asked. I was shocked. He was so young and so…good.
“Yes,” he said, narrowing his eyes and smiling. “We are the same age.” He dropped the smile, tilted his head, and searched my face.
“Ahmy, you are so old.” Meaning so old to be working garde-manger, the cold appetizer station.
In any normal narrative, I might easily have spent nine months on that cold station. But as the fairy tale goes, someone quit. I remember that his name was Joel. He was a petite, quiet-spoken, sandy-haired guy, struggling on the line, sliding roughly around the station in an untucked uniform every night. Before that evening’s service Mario clapped his hands above his head and called us in for circle time. With theatrical formality he announced, “Everyone, Joel is leaving us. To become a food writer,” he said with a predatory smile. “His last day will be tomorrow. We wish him the best of luck in his future career.” This grandiose crew meeting was as effective as a snicker, as we never congregated to discuss someone’s leave-taking and certainly not for an early-out. In cases like Joel’s, the guy would usually just shove the contents of his locker into a white takeout bag after service and call the night his last. Joel, with a blanched face, nodded and blinked at the floor.
Mario came up to me and laid an arm around my shoulders. “You should come and eat in the dining room tomorrow night.” Did he mean I should go there for dinner? We couldn’t afford that. He felt the hesitation in my back.
“No, you and your boyfriend come to dinner on me. Taste the dishes. Come tomorrow.” He said it politely, but I understood; it was painfully obvious that I needed contextualizing, that I needed to eat this food in order to learn how to cook it. It also meant that I would be taking Joel’s place as meat entremetier on the hot line.
I was thrilled with the chance to bring Aaron into my world. We both dressed up—him in a suit, me forsaking my grungy sports bra for a real one and my clunky work shoes for heels. We walked into the dining room and were struck with instant, simultaneous fear. The lighting was womblike. There was a tiny door behind the bar that led to the kitchen and servers passed through it swiftly, letting out just flickering slivers of its harsh fluorescent light and none of its hot energy. In the dining room, the head servers—called captains—tracked around smoothly as if on rails. The bubbles in the champagne cocktail that Stefan the bartender handed me rolled up serenely on invisible filaments from the bottom to the top. I was shaking with the formality of it, uncomfortable being on the other side of the swinging door. Aaron looked similarly shivery.
The first glass of wine helped. My glass would be my crutch. First came the amuse-bouches, just as I had been making them: the crispy sardine in potato chips, the sweet-and-sour octopus salad, the little cup of spiced squash soup. They all tasted so much better in the dining room than they did in the kitchen. The second I finished my wine to accompany the first course, Didier the head captain was there to refill my glass. I didn’t realize that with a wine pairing, it was wise to pace yourself. Eric, another captain, smiled broadly.
“I recognize this smell,” Aaron said, eating the sardine, “from your hair after work.”
He looked around the room, at the gilded rafters, the glittering Klimt reproductions, the plush velvet banquettes, the grandmotherly fringed lamps. “This place is totally crazy,” he said, absorbing every facet of the room’s excesses with growing admiration, “over the top…” I knew he was thinking of performance and decadence, of David Bowie, of glam rock. The reason he had worn a glittery cape when performing with his band, Aaron America, had everything in common with this dining room. “They got the lighting right, though.” They had. It was soft and luscious, like the food, like my rapidly evaporating sobriety.
I let my head drop low over the new course and inhaled, rather dramatically. The monkfish with artichokes and black trumpet mushrooms, which had seemed to me the least exciting dish we made, surprised me the most. It expressed something dark: hidden corners and sweet earth and a weird candle-burning spice…that pinch of réglisse, or licorice root powder. In the kitchen I had tasted the sauce alone, droplets from the tip of my spoon, but never with the roasted fish itself. Knit together into one forkful, the monkfish was a soother in a tasting menu of dynamic courses, a low-buzzing romantic dish.
The captains hovered around our table, spoiling us, circling back to make conversation as I sunk into a loose state of drunkenness. Eric came over and dropped some complaint about Didier, and then Didier came back to pour more wine and bitch about Eric, and then before I knew it they were standing over us, whispering hotly, quietly fighting in the relative cover behind our corner table. I leaned back and smiled at Aaron, my eyes lost inside my high pink cheeks. I belonged. We belonged. My nerves fully unwound, I reached to grab his hand to punctuate whatever it was we were talking about…when my delicious Zweigelt, my chokecherry and plum and moss forest-floor wine, spilled in a moat around his pink lamb chops. The captains broke their huddle and Eric immediately laid a calm hand on Aaron’s plate.
“Let us replate this for you, Aaron.”
“Nah!” I bleated, not wanting to be a bother to my fellow cooks in the kitchen. “He’ll just eat it like that.” Aaron glared at me. He didn’t want to eat it like that. That’s when everyone, including me, knew that I was completely toasted. This was not so bright. The next day I was coming in early, to train with T1 on the hot line.
—
Thomas Kahl, the first of our two sous chefs named Thomas to arrive from Austria, had a shaved bald head and wore heavy combat boots and an expression of disdain. He bounced ever so slightly at rest, like a lion ready to pounce, which suggested to me that he’d experienced some serious kitchen combat and had exited it triumphant.