Free Heat by Bill Buford

been taped over the counters, where Andy was checking dishes before they were run out into the dining room. The long work area in the middle had changed as well. During the day, this was where I had put my cutting board, as had two of the Mexican prep cooks, Cesar Gonzalez and Abelardo Arredondo. Now it had become “the pass.” Andy, the man running the kitchen, was on one side, calling out the orders and receiving dishes that the line cooks “passed” to him. Behind them was the “line,” a wall of cooking contraptions. In one corner was the ornery pasta monster, a bubbling hot-water machine, obscured by steam. In the other corner was a grill, a steel square of yellow-blue flames. In between were three cookers in a row, each with an oven, turned up to five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. It was a lot of heat. I was standing next to Andy and could feel it. When I stepped closer, as when I peeked over to see how a dish was being put together, I felt the heat with much more intensity—a hit of heat, like a cloud, both a physical fact (it was in the roots of my neck hair) and an abstraction. But it was real enough: a hot wall, even if invisible, and I was happy to be on the other side.
    Nick was working over the pasta cooker—his face in the steam, sweat pouring off it—and was heating sauces in pans on a flattop. This was the pasta station. Dominic was at the stove and reheating things in the oven below. This was the sauté station. Between sauté and the grill was the swinger, the person who swings between the station on his left and the one on his right, helping out each cook, plating their dishes, on call in case of a meltdown. Mark Barrett was at the grill. He’d only just started. He was tall, bespectacled, watchful, unshaven, and, with rumpled wavy hair, looking like a very late sleeper who hadn’t been awake long.
    He was different from the others; so was Nick. They both came from affluent, professional families. They didn’t have to be cooks. I sometimes thought of them as middle-class interlopers, always having to explain their careers to concerned parents who regarded a job in a kitchen as tantamount to joining a circus. Nick had studied art history at Columbia University, where his father was a professor of Japanese literature. He had learned Italian, because mastering it was a requirement of his degree, and had spent a year in Europe, mainly in Rome. When he returned, he was no longer interested in the foundations of classic architecture or Renaissance painting or whatever it was he was supposed to have studied during his expensive, paid-for-by-his-parents year abroad. He had discovered pasta; he wanted to be a chef. Mark also has an accomplished father (a dermatologist), a liberal arts degree (English literature), and an analogous career epiphany disrupting an intellectual itinerary—in his case, a trip to Dublin, where he’d gone to see streets once walked by Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett and found instead the intense flavors of small-dairy-farm milk, cream, butter, and eggs, having subsidized his stay with a job in a café kitchen. When Mark returned, he abandoned Irish literature and went to cooking school. Mark had grown up in Ohio and had a small-town aw-shucks wonder of the world. Today, his face was covered with bandages and gauze. On his day off, he’d attended a rock concert and broken his nose when he threw himself into a mosh pit. This, too, seemed in character—of course that’s what a college-educated son of a dermatologist would do on his weekends.
    Until now, I had thought I was acquainted with the Babbo menu; I could recommend dishes: the pappardelle—to die for; or the so-called Two Minute Calamari, Sicilian Lifeguard Style—spicy, don’t miss it. I knew nothing. In the blue Babbo bible, I counted fifty pastas. I’d had no idea there were so many. There were sixty entrées. There were forty starters. I stared at the menu. It was pasted in front of Andy, above the pass and just below a