Everyone's Got to Start Somewhere

The sous chef startled me with his tap on the shoulder. “Why you hiding back here? Afraid of the line?”

Actually, I was feeling pretty brave. Earlier that morning, I had put on a pair of ill-fitting chef pants (too short), a jacket (too huge), and bandana (blue) before looking at myself approvingly in the mirror. This was my first day in a restaurant kitchen, and I certainly looked the part.

My morning and afternoon were spent helping out the pastry chef. I carefully followed his instructions—painting tuiles into plastic stencils and shaping them into dainty leaves when they were still hot from the oven (ouch), cracking countless eggs and making a goopy soufflé base with their yolks, chopping up peaches and roasting them with blueberries in the wood-burning oven until their skins split and juice oozed.

Dinner service was about to begin, and I was happily rolling the sticky cookie dough I had churned earlier in the big KitchenAid between my palms into pingpong-sized balls, coating them in sugar and plopping them onto a baking sheet, feeling competent and useful.

“A little afraid,” I told the sous. “Where should I go?”

I had worked in plenty of restaurants before, as both a hostess and waitress. And I have certainly always loved to cook. But the back of the house had held for me—until this summer—total mystique. I never knew what the cooks were up to back there in their secret little world. The only evidence were the plates that came shuttled in runners’ linen-protected hands out of the kitchen and into the dining room: sea urchin panna cotta studded with caviar, butternut squash and duck risotto, soufflés that threatened collapse with a wobble of the wrist.

What I had known about life in the kitchen came from reading books and talking to cooks whom I worked with and befriended. They all sang the same tune—“It’s brutal back there—you couldn’t cut it. And if you could, you wouldn’t want to.” So, besides my love for the smell of onions sizzling in sweet butter, of running a knife back and forth across the greenest cilantro, of the alchemy of turning raw meat into juicy burgers, I took the job because I wanted to prove—mostly to myself—that I could hack it back there.

When I sent a résumé to an established two-star restaurant, they unexpectedly called me back despite the fact that I had never gone to culinary school or worked in a kitchen other than my own. Everyone has to start somewhere. And besides, I was free labor.

My first night on the line was, like most subsequent nights, a sweaty, frenzied blur. Beacon Restaurant, where I was now a extern, does all of its cooking for service in an open kitchen. It serves as a kind of stage for the guests dining in the big back room of the swanky Midtown restaurant. “This is a performance—cooks don’t shit or eat or drink,” the chef told me when I went to swig from my container of water, a cue that I needed to turn my back to do so.

I stood behind Joel, master of the wood-burning oven, and watched him for about three minutes before he was barking “Plate my salmon,” “Grab me an amuse bouche.” Sure, I put the chervil vin on the plate for the wrong dish, forgot the horseradish, burnt the trout, and subsequently got berated by Chef and cooks. But here I was, cooking nonetheless. A sprig of rosemary, a ladle of béarnaise, and my wood-fired chicken arrived in front of a paying diner.

By the end of the night, my throat was parched, my arm was burnt badly by a hurried cook with a hot pot, my legs were sore from bolting up and down stairs for more lemons and lamb chops and oysters from the walk-in, and fennel frawns swam in my now-murky water. But I felt surprisingly good. Really good.

I learned a lot this summer—how to make that béarnaise (by reducing egg yolk, tarragon, shallots, and vinegar down to nothing and furiously whisking in a few pounds of butter), how to chiffonade without bruising my basil, how to suavely toss the contents of a pan full of sautéing lardons or carrot. Despite multiple lessons, I never got the knack of breaking down duck, my finely diced onions were unfailingly sloppy, and I can’t count the times Chef got in my face to scream, “Hurry up. I need the asparagus now, this moment, not for lunch tomorrow.” I did learn not to cry on the line—and to duck into the walk-in when I felt it coming.

But here I was, cooking with the boys, dancing the dance of a busy professional kitchen. Or at least clumsily attempting the steps. Chef called my garlic soup, which I topped with a fried egg and garnished with toast and truffle oil, beautiful. I seasoned the spinach. We did two hundred covers. Tears and all, it felt good.