Eating for Beginners Read online

At six-thirty, pizza arrived in the office and we all went over there to grab slices to take back to the loading dock.

  "It's nice organic pizza!" Joe said with a sly look.

  "But it's local!" said the accountant, who had just stopped in to run some numbers.

  Back in the refrigeration building, before we even finished chewing, Randy yanked on a long rope that hung from the ceiling. A huge door in the wall slid open, revealing the cooler room. We put on our jackets and headed in, and Randy pulled another rope to make the door slide shut behind us.

  We were sealed into a vast, windowless concrete bunker, seven thousand square feet with a twenty-foot-high ceiling, filled with produce and dry goods stacked almost to the ceiling on wooden pallets or wooden shelving. It was cold, about thirty-nine degrees (fortunately I had several extra long-sleeved shirts in my bag, which was stowed in a camper parked in another one of the warren of unused concrete rooms that made up the building). I shivered a bit as I took in the contents of the room. There was a small desk in the middle for keeping the orders straight, and the rest of the space was filled with more food than I had ever seen in one place in my life. There were boxes of sauerkraut, yogurt, milk, grass-fed beef, chocolate bars, and numerous other items, but the produce was what interested me most. There was arugula and bok choy and three kinds of chard, at least a dozen varieties of apple, pears, cabbage, and not just white cauliflower but purple and orange, too. There were jewel yams and garnet yams and about ten different squashes, including one called Thelma Sanders, which seemed more like the name of a third-grade teacher than a squash to me. There were fingerling potatoes and blue potatoes and white potatoes. There were leeks and there were peppers, several dozen kinds, from serrano to cherry bomb to green bell. Next to them were seven varieties of eggplant and five kinds of radishes. There were plums and melons and turnips and rutabaga, and all of it had come from no farther away than Vermont. Surrounded by this abundance, I found it hard to believe that in a few months nothing would be growing in this part of the country but cabbage, potatoes, a few kinds of squash, and the occasional apple, turnip, or carrot.

  Heavy lifting seemed like the only way to warm up, so when Heather grabbed a pallet list, I followed her. We took an empty wooden pallet off a pile and put it on the floor, then started circling the room collecting the items in the first order. Boxes of preserves and other jarred items went on the bottom, then bags of apples and parsnips, a few boxes of squash, a bag of beets. On top went lighter boxes of kale, spinach, and dandelion greens. Then we started another order on the other half of the same pallet. When it was done, we moved on to the next order, wandering the aisles of bright orange squash and purple potatoes and neon-green apples with lists in our hands, calling for help when the boxes were too big for us to pick up on our own.

  As we were loading pallets and I was running in and out of the cooler room to add more shirts to my layers, Ambrosio, the driver whose truck had been stuck in the mud, appeared. After he unloaded his produce, Joe told him I would be accompanying him on the Brooklyn route that night. Then Ambrosio went home to sleep. "Regreso a las dos y media," he told me with a wave. Two-thirty? He'd pick me (and the pallets) up and we'd leave at two-thirty A.M.? I went back to my packing to avoid dwelling on this shocking news.

  Too many fifty-pound boxes of Adirondack Blue potatoes and twenty-five-pound bags of parsnips later, around eleven P.M., I said goodnight and went to the deserted camper to try to get a few hours of sleep before my date with Ambrosio. I felt I had barely closed my eyes (and maybe I hadn't—there are many less creepy places to sleep than an isolated camper in a mostly empty concrete-walled processing plant in the middle of nowhere) when my watch alarm went off just before two-thirty. Adding a hat to my collection of five shirts, fleece vest, and sweater, I staggered out to the loading dock, where Ambrosio—the same driver, I suddenly realized, who had come into the potato field at Lucky Dog to help us dig—was loading the last pallet onto the truck. He smiled and said, "Vamos?"

  It was pitch black outside and pouring rain as we pulled away. "Te gustas la música Mejicana?" Ambrosio asked, punching at the radio.

  "Sí," I replied, as the wipers swiped and the salsa music blasted. I noticed he had a Coke in the drink holder and wondered again why I was so often caught without either coffee or enough clothing.

  An hour later we made a stop, still in utter darkness, at a gas station for Krispy Kreme donuts (again, not organic, but probably local, at least in terms of where they'd been baked) and a Coke, neither of which was enough to keep me from dozing.

  We made it to Brooklyn at five-fifteen A.M. At our first two stops, small groceries, the stores weren't open so we snoozed in the truck each time until they were, then Ambrosio spent about forty minutes unloading at each one.

  At our third stop, a small gourmet market filled with young families and hipsters buying coffee on their way to work, I had the odd sensation of viewing my own life from the outside, as if it were a movie. Normally I would have been one of those people dawdling over pastry with a stroller or grabbing a cup of coffee on the way to the subway. Now I was in the truck, wondering if they even noticed we were there. I had never paid the slightest attention to any of the delivery trucks in my neighborhood. The fact that Joe's trucks brought food no one else cared to distribute made me wonder about the stories behind all the other trucks out on the street, dropping off crates and boxes.

  But even if those work-bound urbanites didn't know we were there, someone else did. Ambrosio finished unloading, and before he went in to settle the bill he handed me his cell phone through the truck window.

  It was Joe.

  "You're a trouper!" he said upon learning I was still along for the ride. (Though, really, where else could I have been?)

  Recalling that Joe had done this every week for years—pickup, pack, drive, collapse—made me determined to survive the rest of the stops in good humor. We went to a food co-op I didn't recognize, then to the butcher four blocks from my apartment where I often shopped without ever considering where their products came from, then to a market two blocks from my apartment, and finally to the main drag in my neighborhood.

  I was almost home free. After just one more stop, at applewood, I would be able to stagger home to bed. It was nine-thirty in the morning and I couldn't believe how alert Ambrosio seemed after sleeping five hours, driving two and a half, and lugging heavy boxes all over Brooklyn. Unlike him, I wasn't lifting anything or even moving from my seat in the truck cab, and all I wanted to do was to quietly pass out somewhere.

  Naturally, there was no parking. We circled the block several times, Ambrosio muttering under his breath in Spanish. I was getting desperate. Then, as we turned down the street to the avenue one last time, a beacon appeared.

  It was Frank, whom I had come to think of as applewood's "fixer." Short and stocky, with a crew cut and a sweet face, Frank had worked in two other, much lower-scale restaurants before landing at applewood. He had biked up to the door the summer before it opened, while David and his father were building the kitchen, and been hired on the spot. He had two young sons named Joshua and Brian (Joshua and Jules were about the same age), and it was obvious to me that he was one of the magicians behind the scenes who made applewood run so smoothly.

  Frank's official duties included tasks like laundry and inventory, but if you had any kind of emergency—beets needed to be peeled in record time, you had spilled vast quantities of oil on the floor, you couldn't find the chives, or anything else—Frank was your man. He knew where everything was and how to extract it from its hiding place in seconds. He was also a crack gnocchi maker and in charge of butchering all the fish, both skills he had learned at applewood.

  That morning, apparently, he was also in charge of valet parking. He had seen us circling the block and now, dressed in his chef's jacket and pants, waved us into a parking space he had saved for us by stepping into it when he saw someone pull out.

  "Hi, Melanie!" he said cheerfully as I hurled
myself from the truck, as though he was used to seeing me arrive with the produce every Thursday morning.

  "Hi," I managed to say. "I'm going home."

  "Sleep well," he said with a beatific smile.

  "You, too," I mumbled, turning up the block as he shook his head and went through the restaurant's green doors and back to the kitchen.

  10. Rich in Imperfections

  AS WINTER NEARED, the produce turning up at the restaurant began to range in color from brown to yellow to beige. There was an occasional dash of red or purple from beets or red cabbage or a red wine reduction in a sauce, but mostly we were in the land of root vegetables. It was getting so cold outside that it actually felt good to enter the kitchen in mid-afternoon (though by the middle of dinner service I was still drenched with sweat, which froze to the back of my neck on the way home). I went back to prep in the afternoon and garde manger during service, which by this time felt profoundly familiar and comfortable. I could knock out a beet salad like nobody's business, and I'd even learned to mince chives into the required paper-thin bits.

  Then one chilly afternoon I arrived to find something unexpected at garde manger. A box of lettuce. Lettuce in winter.

  "Where is this from?" I asked David.

  "I just had this conversation with one of our regulars," David sighed, looking slightly aggrieved.

  The lettuce was from Florida, and apparently someone had pitched a small fit at dinner a few nights earlier about the fact that it was not local.

  "So what did you tell him?" I asked. By this point I had my own ideas about why it might make sense to buy lettuce from a small farm a little farther away than Lucky Dog, but I was curious to hear David's take.

  As if reading my mind, David said, "It's localish, "—he meant East Coast instead of West Coast, so at least closer to home if not all that close—"and it's biodynamic." Then he reminded me of the difference between buying as a single shopper and buying as a restaurant owner. "The business outweighs it. People won't come if all you serve is rutabaga. Nothing grows in the Hudson River valley at this time of year. Nothing. You'd have garlic."

  "True," I said. "And I guess you wouldn't eat just garlic at home. You have to tempt your family sometimes the way you tempt your customers." (I felt qualified to say this as by this time I was a master at efforts to tempt a certain person to eat.)

  "Yeah," David agreed. "I bought the kids those little grape cherry tomatoes yesterday because it works. You put it in their lunch and they eat it." This was sounding oddly familiar. "We're buying Mexican avocados from Angello's," he went on, "because they vouch for the farmer and said these are good people who are making a commitment and will you please buy some. But then, I'm a sucker." (David often referred to applewood as the "sucker account"; basically, he would buy anything anyone he trusted needed to get rid of, animal, vegetable, or other, figuring they needed to sell it and he could think of something interesting to do with it.)

  "We're as local as possible," he continued, "and the important thing is that you think about it." He was at the stove, braising red cabbage in red wine. "But you can't think about it all the time. It's the same thing as with Jules. You know it's a huge pain in the ass to think about every meal, so you can't do it all the time. Sometimes you have to say, 'You know what? I'm going to have the gyro platter from the dirty diner and I'm going to enjoy it.' But you still have the thought process."

  (This little speech may have been partly inspired by that day's family meal, deliciously crispy chicken wings with buffalo sauce, which David had picked up frozen at the restaurant supply store where he was buying necessities like sponges and trash bags, then thrown into the deep fryer to everyone's delight.)

  Even people who patronize a restaurant like applewood, apparently, sometimes have trouble with the concept of seasonal produce. For every diner arguing about the food miles involved in transporting lettuce from Florida, there was someone who liked the idea of local and seasonal but didn't quite get it. The previous April, a month that everyone in the Northeast pretends is warmer than it actually is just because we're all so sick of our winter coats, someone had written on a comment card: "Loved the meal—but I would like more opportunities for green vegetables as a side." In May, when some greens were available, what Laura referred to as "the nightly salad fight" began with diners who didn't think what the restaurant was calling a salad—often pea shoots or some other early spring green—qualified. "If the farmers don't have it, we don't have it," Laura would say (the Florida lettuce being a rare exception made, again, because Joe had vouched for the farmer).

  Like David, I was far less draconian in my produce choices at home because I had no alternative if Jules was going to eat anything fresh. California was plenty close enough for me. Noah and I had figured out by this point that Jules's tastes leaned toward the crunchy. This had led to the realization that he wouldn't try pasta because it jiggled on the plate. We accepted this, but began biting into various foods demonstratively to indicate their crispness in order to get him to try them. Since it was winter and he would only eat raw vegetables that crunched noisily, we bought him organic carrots and red peppers grown thousands of miles away and turned a blind eye to the local issue. I knew David understood, and I was pretty sure Richard and Joe would understand, too.

  ***

  Not long before the Florida lettuce appeared, when there was still a little bit of colorful produce on the menu, David had asked me if I wanted to go back to the fish station—with him on backup, of course. About two hours into my first shift after this conversation, when the skills from my first stint on fish were coming back to me and everything was going along just fine, the New York City Department of Health sent someone out for a surprise inspection. Clipboard in hand, the official appeared in the kitchen—a dark presence in his navy blue cap and official city-issued windbreaker among all the white-jacketed chefs—at around seven-thirty, just as the dinner rush was starting and just as I was putting my third order of scallops into the pan.

  While two servers ran downstairs to cover the whole animals in the walk-in—each carcass was required to be forty degrees inside, which they were, but David was worried about getting an inspector who had never seen one before and might decide that even though they were completely legal and being stored properly, they were unappealing and thus a violation—everyone in the kitchen tried to behave as though nothing unusual was going on. We pitched our quart containers of water (no drinks allowed in the kitchen, for some reason none of us understood). We checked the temperature in our lowboys (they, too, had to be forty degrees). The man with the clipboard was making notes, and I imagined his report as I hovered over my scallops: "Restaurant employing fake chef."

  I counted it as a mark of my growing competence that in spite of the various distractions, when I next looked down at my pan the scallops were perfectly done and ready to plate.

  The scallops, in fact, were the least of my problems; now the canister of clean spoons in water that usually sat on the counter had disappeared. (Was there some kind of ordinance against this, too, or had someone just panicked and made a clean sweep?) My fish spatula was now in the sink to the left of the stove, where the stick blender was usually kept, in another canister with water running on it constantly. Every time I needed the spatula I instinctively reached to the counter, then wasted time turning around and fishing it out of the sink. I was whipping around so much I felt slightly dizzy. No one else had what they needed at hand, either; the kitchen slowed to a crawl.

  "Go out there and tell your tables what's going on," David said to the servers, who were getting antsy waiting for their plates. "Buy them a drink if you have to."

  It was unusually quiet in the kitchen. Only the swishing of the dishwasher and the infrequent clattering of plates in the busing tub—if very little is going out, very little comes back in—broke the tense hush.

  The mood was grim. The dining room was full.

  And I cooked. I just kept working, and David, busy running up and
down the stairs to be sure everything was okay in the basement and trying to chat up the inspector, left me on my own.

  I made two red radish-jalapeño salads with grilled melon. I made two foie gras appetizers with grape reduction, basil oil, and grilled walnut bread. "Chef, can you grill this?" I asked Sarah over and over, handing her melon or walnut bread. And when she handed them back the third or fourth time with "Here you go, Chef," I was not too stressed to miss the moniker—I was in!—even though she was probably just too distracted to realize she was using it. I made two celery soups and a lobster broth; four orders of trout with spiced chickpeas, Italian peppers, and apple-cilantro relish; five orders of scallops with grilled red onions, tomatillo salsa, and sweet corn soup; nine orders of halibut with rapini and chanterelle mushroom ragout and a mushroom-onion purée; and three groupers (all of which I remembered to remove from the oven in time) with collard greens and sautéed green onions. Somewhere I found the time to dip the cut sides of a dozen tomatillo halves into buttermilk and then cornmeal and fry them, cornmeal side down, for an appetizer being put together at garde manger.

  It was by no means a perfect performance. I burned myself five times, as I learned later by counting the angry red hash marks on my forearms. I also dropped a pot of rapini with chanterelles on the floor, where it splashed up onto my legs. David, passing by at that exact moment, said, "Are you okay?"

  "Yes! Yes!" I barked, brushing him aside. Who had time to talk? I was a chef!

  Slowly the bottleneck eased, the man with the clipboard moved to the bar to write more notes and be ogled by the diners (David heard the following week that the restaurant had passed the inspection without a hitch), and when I next looked at the clock, it was eleven-thirty. The shift was over. Sarah and I, as was the custom for whoever was on the line, cooked pieces of fish and meat and served them, with whatever sides we had left over from dinner, to the dishwashers, who would be cleaning the kitchen long after we left.