But the romance of cooking—the low buzz I felt inside when I inhaled my favorite cookbooks, Paula Wolfert describing a chanterelle-and-walnut tart in France or Madeleine Kamman on the momentous cabbage and duck tourtes of the Savoie; or even when my mom pulled the heavy aluminum pan of swirling brown butter away from the heat and then threw a pile of chopped scallions into it, sighed softly, and walked away, knowing that half of the scallions would frizzle to delicious brown bits and the rest would give her spaetzle a bright chivey flavor, just as they always did, time after time—the part of cooking that ignited my senses and my imagination at the same time, I did not find at culinary school.
Gradually, via the endless repetitions, as I stirred crème anglaise and prodded pork chops with my finger, I found the entrance to my tunnel vision. Down in the dark bottom of my obsession, as I watched a sauce reduce and thicken, the fine round pebbles swelling into loose, gaudy baubles, time hung in suspension—and it stayed that way, just as I liked it, good and frozen and undisturbed, for the entirety of my schooling and throughout my required school externship, at the restaurant we called the Danube.
2
SUGAR AND COLOR
Here’s how my brothers, Bob and Marc, would eat their sugar cereal while watching cartoons on cold, housebound, midwinter Saturday mornings: They hoovered it up in one long inhalation, without using their lips. Chwwhchchhwhech…Liquid milk and bright pastel cereal bits flew into their mouths like dirt into a vacuum, their teeth clinking down on the empty spoon. Chwhwchchwech…I sat next to them slowly chewing my butter-logged bagel and wondered how they could manage to consume liquids such as soup normally but eat cereal like a couple of anteaters, and felt, just via my proximity, the perfect distillation of their joy of consumption. Immune in their happy bubble to all household responsibilities and family drama, they immersed themselves in the convergence of sugar and color, drawling out their pleasure in a trill of harmonic sucking.
That pretty much describes my first year of cooking professionally. I walked in the door of Danube and inhaled it in one long, knotty, seductive slurp. It was complete and total immersion. For once, I was not thinking about my role or what I should be doing with my life. I was just doing. I was moving—physically moving—and working far harder than I’d ever worked before. Eighty-hour weeks, and the hours flew by. By the time I’d finished my first month interning in a real kitchen in Manhattan, I felt like I had finally activated the entirety of my DNA. Maybe I was a fair mixture of my parents after all: the workaholic businessman dad meets the sauce-simmering, stove-bound mom.
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When cooking school ended and it was time for me to find a restaurant to do my required six-week unpaid internship, I made a quick foot tour of the best fine-dining restaurants in the city—why wouldn’t you do your internship at the best restaurant possible? I naively reasoned—and decided on the one with the most enticing dining room. I walked past the fragrant vestibule with its display of fresh apples into the dimly lit Bouley, Chef David Bouley’s eponymous restaurant in Tribeca, and boldly asked the host if I could talk to the chef.
Looking back, it’s easy to see that I had no idea where I was. Quite literally. When I told my friends at culinary school about where I hoped to intern, I rhymed Bouley with “duelie” instead of with “Vouvray.” On my tongue, one of the city’s greatest chefs sounded like a dual-wheeled truck charging through a mud run.
It happened that Galen Zamarra, chef de cuisine at Bouley, didn’t need an intern and sent me to see Mario Lohninger, the Austrian-born chef de cuisine of their sister restaurant, who did.
Danube was Chef Bouley’s ode to the decadent cooking of the Hapsburg Empire, complete with a dining room washed in gold metallic paint and ringed with gigantic Klimt reproductions. The menu promised both haute historical and contemporary Austrian, as well as truffles and foie gras and rare bottles of wine, everything necessary to lubricate the downtown financial-district boom economy.
Both of Bouley’s restaurants were full-tilt fancy fine dining and considered to be among the very best in Manhattan. Yet everyone who worked there called it the Danube, a definite article slip that immediately put me at ease. Back home, people often tagged an extra the onto all their favorite haunts and restaurants. It was the Schwarzwald. The Park Drug. Our local grocery store, the Red Owl.
Tall and regal, but with a hipster’s stubble and greasy curls, Mario interviewed me thoroughly, as if I were applying to join the ranks of the military, and then gave me a sweeping tour through the wine cellar stocked with Austrian Zweigelt and Grüner Veltliner and the storeroom shelves glowing with ruby lingonberries and green pumpkin-seed oil. On that first day he was overly polite with me. Decorous. Impervious to the turmoil swirling around him. With ramrod-straight posture, he led me through the downstairs belly of Danube’s prep kitchen, stepping high over snaking vacuum tubes and puddles of water and flattened cardboard boxes. He strode past the prep cooks, who were calmly but deftly shelling fava beans and pounding out schnitzels and butchering fish, their eyes darting to me in small doses. I would soon know them as “the family”—Chef Bouley’s tribe. This steadfast band of Dominican prep cooks—who might or might not actually have been related—sized up new recruits with a loose interest, like members of a crime family who don’t want to get too attached before they know what’ll happen to the new one. They outlasted all of us.