At around 10:30 each morning, I stiffened at Mario’s arrival. He’d walk in and without a word to anyone reach into a nook and grab his hidden box of cereal, pour an overflowing amount into a porcelain consommé bowl, and bend down deeply to it, his limp locks of hair brushing the pass. Then he’d wipe his stubbled chin, clap his hands, narrow his eyes, and start prowling the line for vulnerable-looking cooks.
Not only was Mario one of the most technically precise chefs I’ve ever known, but his palate was savage in its accuracy; he frequently called out cooks for the slightest of deviations in the simplest of things. “This chestnut puree was made with milk and chicken stock, eh? It should be half milk, half veg stock.” As if to make a show of this superiority, the depth of his passion, when he tasted one of our sauces he didn’t just dip the tip of a finger or a spoon into it as other chefs did; he locked eyes with the cook and swiped two fingers through it repeatedly, lasciviously, slurping up full tablespoons while taking the measure of both the sauce and the cook’s character at the same time. He lapped up precious mise en place like a Great Dane. Those of us who often slid into service with just enough of this or that sauce feared Mario’s two-fingered taste.
When I first began on the canapé station, Mario paired me up with Nick, a guy with sweet eyes, a ripping-sharp knife, and severe cramping of the central nervous system. He was wound as tight as a pulley cord, taut with trying to get it all done. He’d be skating along, gliding through tasks with smooth movements, diving in and out of the reachin fridge, until a moment of indecision paralyzed him. Faced with the problem of what to do with batons of foie gras that were graying at the ends from oxidation, he visibly shook, crumpled up the parchment, and tossed it—foie gras, which rivaled gold for the price per pound—in the trash.
I was no better. I left my crap all over the place: half-built beet terrines abandoned while I ran upstairs to take a pan of quince out of the oven; a cluster of herbs and garlic for a sachet left on the corner of a shelf while I searched for where I’d set the cheesecloth; my notebook, just four inches long, full of precious scribbled formulas, I lost and recaptured daily. Until the day that it fell into the evil hands of the sneering Austrian pastry chef, who wouldn’t give it back.
He stopped icing a Sacher torte to launch a screed in my direction: “This is the third time this week you’ve left your stupid little notebook in my pastry room! You don’t deserve to keep it!”
A middle-aged crank trained in the rigorous art of Austrian pastry, he had no tolerance for me. We scrapped as if on a middle-school playground, him holding the notebook high above his head, me lurching for it. And then I did my signature counter leap, one knee on the counter (turns out I can spring up suddenly like a cat), snatched the notebook, and stomped to the locker room. Huffing, I ejected all the shit from my locker in one bear-paw heave.
“Did you learn your lesson?” asked Harrison, the meat cook.
I stared at him, unable to speak. Did I?
Harrison kicked his locker shut. “You learned that the pastry chef is a major asshole. That’s a good lesson.”
—
By the end of the second eighty-hour week, I was exhausted. That night I’d made 189 orders of potato chips threaded with sardines, and just as many portions of octopus-pineapple salad and cured mahi with beet-fennel slaw. Blitzed with fatigue, I stood in the bright basement prep kitchen completing my last task of the evening, making a sachet to drop into the overnight braised oxtail, wetting a clump of cheesecloth and slowly fanning out its damp corners as if smoothing open petals to press a flower. With my dad’s baby face and my mom’s small stature, I looked more like a self-serious twelve-year-old than a cook in a professional brigade. My hair was pinned back from my face with a bunch of barrettes and I was basically wearing oversize pajamas: loose black pants, black comfort shoes, and a size 44 chef’s coat, which was at least four sizes too big. The chef coat assortment at Bouley was always mostly extra-larges, making me look like I was playing dress-up. (The smaller guys nabbed all the 36s and 38s, took them home, and washed them themselves, but I didn’t know that yet.)
The coat situation pointed to the obvious gender gap in Danube’s kitchen, and throughout much of fine dining at the time. All women cooks dealt with it differently. Some of these lone females fought back by excelling in aggressive sexual innuendo—by talking even dirtier than the boys. I combatted my ladyness by stomping out of my sweaty pants in the coed locker room and letting everyone have their fill of my saggy briefs and graying sports bra as much as they liked—in other words, by pushing my femininity all the way to the way-back. I’d spent my college years stalking patriarchal dominance in literature, but when I found myself immersed in a testosterone world, I no longer cared for the social argument. I didn’t want to talk my way into this kitchen; I wanted to prove myself on their battleground, through my cooking. Most of these boys, I thought, were completely unaware of the feminine roots of their culinary art. I doubted they could imagine what strength and skill it took to assemble a proper pantry arsenal back in the old days, but I could, and I knew the work had been much the same.
Never much of a girlie girl anyway, I figured there would be time later for pedicures. As it was, my toenails were broken and stained purple from rubbing against my black socks, as anyone looking on could see: the locker-room situation at the Danube spelled out the ratio of the gender dynamic. There was only one. An open box of cornstarch always sat next to the sink, free for anyone who needed to powder his balls. (Key to preventing crotch bite, you know.)
After cutting off the plastic-wrap belt I used to hold up my chef pants and openly changing into my street clothes, I trudged up the steps, slipping the thick strap of my messenger bag over my head. If Aaron ever hinted that he was jealous of my boy-filled workplace he never let on—and needn’t have, either. The only thought on my mind was getting home to him. I hoped that he’d still be awake and would want to sit up with me. I wanted to unwind amid the wood shavings from his carvings and the long panoramic photos of home he’d pinned up on the walls, a sort of shrine to our rural life back in Minnesota: our rock-garden flower beds, the trees draped in fog on Indian Creek, his fading 1973 Buick Centurion that was still parked in our yard. All I really wanted was for him to open a bottle of wine in that amazing way he did, by unscrewing the cork with a cordless drill running backward—rrr-wrrrrrr—and to conserve my evaporating energy long enough to bring it to bed.