“Perhaps the young man’s taste needs to develop a bit,” said the waiter.
I smiled at him. “Would you like me to show the chef how it’s done?”
The waiter turned on his heel and strode out of the dining room. Coe hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat and waited for what was to come.
From the back of the restaurant came the chef. He was still wearing his big hat and he looked as if he had just crawled out of a Dumpster. I didn’t think that was a very good sign. Good cooks don’t get dirty.
“Is there a problem?”
Coe nodded in my direction. I looked the chef straight in the eye and repeated what I had just said to the waiter.
“And you think you can do better?” He didn’t sound unfriendly, just interested. I nodded.
“Well, then,” he said. “Follow me. A bottle of wine from me to you if a random customer likes your food better than mine.”
“What kind of wine?”
The chef grinned. “Did you have one in mind?”
“There’s an Haut Brion on the wine list.”
Coe squinted and seemed to be thinking about something.
“And what’s your bet?”
I got up from my chair. When we were standing face-to-face I came up to his armpits. His stomach stuck out so far that we had to stand several feet apart. “The same bottle,” I said. The chef turned around and went ahead of me to the kitchen. “Are you sure you can afford it?” he asked over his shoulder. He pushed open the swinging doors and let me in. “Well?” I shook my head. “No,” I said.
In the kitchen, on an empty space on the steel counter, I had him set before me a cup of cream (there was no crème fraîche), a cup of potato starch, and a dish of stock. I asked for a saucepan and poured in some of the stock. I placed the pan over a low flame, stirred the potato starch into the cream, and when the stock was warm enough I poured the cream into the pan. Several people had gathered around us: two boys my age, a man in a suit, and the waiter. “I need a small whisk.” The chef nudged one of the boys. I was handed the whisk and I beat and stirred until the sauce was of the proper consistency. At my request I was brought thyme and a clove of garlic, which I crushed with the flat of a knife and added to the mixture on the stove, and then—I hadn’t been busy for more than three or four minutes—I fished out the garlic and the sauce was ready.
“That’s it?” the chef said.
I took the pan off the flame and nodded.
“Don’t you have to heat it through?”
“No, that would weaken the flavor and make the sauce watery.”
“Spoon!” yelled the chef.
One of the galley boys grabbed a spoon. The chef took some sauce and put it in his mouth. He closed his eyes. He tasted. He opened his eyes again. He looked at Coe, at me, and then at his apprentice. “Make a note,” he said. “You there!” He shouted to a waiter. “You got a lamb cutlet on order?” The waiter shook his head, “Too late, we just served it.” The chef pulled open the refrigerator and slapped two curling pieces of lamb down on the stainless steel countertop. He looked at me. “It’s all yours,” he said. And to the waiter, “Bring it back. There’s another one coming.”
I switched to another burner and cooked the cutlets au point, the way I had learned from the many books I had read over the years. I was slightly nervous—the kitchen was unfamiliar, the equipment was different, and I had never done lamb cutlets before—but I knew I could rely on my intuition. That was something I had discovered over the last few years. I could analyze a dish without tasting it, I could cook without measuring, and I could prepare any dish after only one reading of a recipe that described something similar. It wasn’t a talent, as Coe had said to my father earlier. It was intuition, imagination, or perhaps it was a talent after all, the talent to abstract a thing as organic and chaotic as cooking. When I was finished, the plate went out the door and Coe rested his hand on my shoulder. His round face was reflected in the gleaming metal of the rear wall of the stove. His eyebrows, which seemed to wriggle above his black eyes like caterpillars, gave him the appearance of a gluttonous Benedictine. He began to lecture the chef on what he called a “leveling of taste,” that dishes nowadays often had a kind of “surface taste” which could no longer be broken down into its various components. “Dutch chefs,” he said, “are afraid to let us taste the ingredients that compose a dish. When I eat hare, I want to taste hare, wine, thyme, and scallions, not some all-purpose herb mix.”
The waiter came back into the kitchen. He looked like an undertaker.
“Well?” asked the man in the suit.
“He asked what the hell was going on.”
I suddenly noticed how hot it was in the kitchen.
“What did he mean?” asked the chef.
“He said, ’Is this some kind of test, first I get served that greasy dreck and then I get the real dish?”
I avoided looking at the chef, who had raised his head and was staring at something at the back of the kitchen.
“Well well,” he said.
“What’s dreck?” asked the waiter.
The chef began smiling.
A waitress came in and after two steps shrank back in alarm.
“What’s up, Thea?”
She stood next to the swinging doors and looked suspiciously at the little group around the stove. “There’s nothing coming through,” she said. “Table Eight’s been waiting half an hour for two dames blanches.”
I shivered.
“Bet you can do that better too, huh?” said the chef. He signaled to one of his galley boys, who got out the ice cream and
