Free Heat by Bill Buford Page A

shelf crowded with Italian clutter—a double magnum of
vino rosso da tavola,
a bottle of olive oil, some balsamic vinegars: a still life of an Italian kitchen, as though depicted in a travel magazine, and the only thing customers saw when they peered through the portal windows of the swinging kitchen doors on their way to a toilet. (Ah, the romance of Italy, the still life said to anyone peering through the windows, even though the wine had gone brown from the heat, the olive oil was rancid, and the real kitchen, which didn’t seem either Italian or romantic, was out of view.) The menu was four pages long—” Humungous,” Andy conceded. The line cooks were moving so fast I couldn’t follow what they were doing. Orders were coming in on a ticker-tape machine, a long paper stream, one after another, Andy calling them out, and, without my knowing when or how, I became aware that everyone had simultaneously increased the speed of their preparations. There was a new quickness in their movements, an urgency. At the end of the evening, I wouldn’t be able to say what it was I had seen: a blur and food being tossed in the air and radically different ways of being—an aggressive forthrightness as cooks dealt with the heat and fire, long flames flaring out of their pans; and then an artistic-seeming delicacy, as they assembled each plate by hand, moving leaves of herbs and vegetables around with their fingers and finishing it by squirting the plate with colored lines of liquid from a plastic bottle, as though signing a painting. It amounted to what? Something I didn’t understand. I could have been on Mars.
    I was at a go-forward-or-backward moment. If I went backward, I’d be saying, Thanks for the visit, very interesting, that’s sure not me. But how to go forward? There was no place for me. These people were at a higher level of labor. They didn’t think. Their skills were so deeply inculcated they were available to them as instincts. I didn’t have skills of that kind and couldn’t imagine how you’d learn them. I was aware of being poised on the verge of something: a long, arduous, confidence-bashing, profoundly humiliating experience.
     

    M ARIO, MEANWHILE, was examining the plates going out. It was one of his surprise visits.
    He eyed a skirt steak and addressed Mark. “Grill guy, your salsa verde is breaking up. You’ve got too much oil in it, and the plate is too hot. Replate.” Mark replated the dish, his movement miraculously accelerated, like a video on fast forward. “I’m counting. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven…If I can hear you talking, you are talking too loud.” The kitchen was like a library. Mario studied a dish from the sauté station, the duck, stuck his finger into it, and tasted. “Dom, take down your sauce.” It was too salty, needed diluting. “And the duck,” he said, picking up a slice of the breast. “You want to give the fatty side an extra minute. The meat is fine.” It was verging on rare. “But render more of the fat.” For fifteen minutes, I’d been watching Dominic’s cooking the breast over a low heat, the fatty-skin-side down. This was what Mario was asking Dominic to do a little longer, so that the skin would be especially crispy.
    Then, flustered by the attention, Dominic let a plate slip, and it fell into his sauces and dropped to the floor and broke. There were sweetbreads in the tomato sauce, and tomato sauce in the chicken stock, and broken glass on the floor. Dominic tried to scoop out the sweetbreads, but in his haste he fumbled them, and they fell into another sauce. Mario said nothing but squared up in front of Dominic, spread his legs, and crossed his arms and openly stared. “Dom takes criticism very personally,” he said to me. Dominic was sweating. The open stare, I would learn, was Mario’s way of expressing concern—in other places, you’d hear shouting. (Memo, coming from a French kitchen, recalled a practice called “plating”—when the chef takes