34 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
aside from a summer job at a McDon-
ald’s in Enfield, Connecticut. The owner
praised my skill at frying fish fillets and
said I had a great future in his estab-
lishment. I discouraged customers from
ordering Coke, because the company
refused to divest from South Africa, and
I came home every day smelling like
cooking oil. I worked one final time
with Pangaud, on the opening night of
the Rainbow Room, where he was an
adviser, an experience that felt like a
beautiful last dance in haute cuisine. By
then, Pangaud knew that I wasn’t plan-
ning a culinary career, but he was fond
of me, and said that I was always wel-
come in his kitchen.
The last time I worked in a restau-
rant kitchen was in 1994, when I needed
a job after college. I wrote to the chef
of an acclaimed New American restau-
rant on the Upper East Side about my
food experiences. He invited me to spend
a few days in the kitchen on a trial basis.
My immediate supervisor was in his
fifties and had studied comparative lit-
erature under the Palestinian-American
literary critic Edward Said, one of my
heroes at Columbia, where I had just
got my bachelor’s degree. “I didn’t real-
ize they had a cooking school at Co-
lumbia,” one of the other chefs said when
he heard I’d gone there. They didn’t.
I was assigned to garde-manger,
where I chopped carrots, cleaned buck-
ets of squid, and fixed the occasional
salad. But my skills, especially my knife
skills, were rusty, and my supervisor
wasn’t fooled. He needed a trained chef,
not a former child prodigy. After a few
days, he took me aside, and said he didn’t
think he could hire me: “You obviously
have a real passion for food, and for
cooking, but your skills aren’t where they
need to be to work here.” If I was seri-
ous about a career, he said, I could work
in a lesser establishment, improving my
technique, or I could go to cooking
school. And if I wasn’t serious? I asked.
“You might give some thought to
graduate school.”
I
lost touch with most of the people I
knew in my cooking years. Armand
became a filmmaker, and his parents sold
Lameloise. Jérémie, the host of the party
in Noyon, killed himself. Rupprecht and
Walter died, and the Fort was sold to
new owners. Pangaud left New York to
open a restaurant in Washington, and
then became a private chef and a teacher.
Ruth Reichl, of course, went on to be-
come the chief restaurant critic for the
New York Times and then the editor of
Gourmet. I wrote to her when she was at
Gourmet, reminding her of the “tyke with
a toque” and suggesting that we meet,
since I’d joined her profession rather than
becoming a chef. She never replied.
Restaurant culture has changed pro-
foundly since the eighties. Food is glitz-
ier and more international but also more
politically conscious—militantly organic
and swirling with debates about cultural
appropriation. It’s arguably more dem-
ocratic, too. Celebrity chefs, competi-
tive cooking shows, and the collapse of
French hegemony have made haute cui-
sine seem like a relic of the past. My
daughter is less interested in the French
sauces I revered than in berbere, za’atar,
and dried rose petals. Perhaps one day
we’ll see the reign of haute cuisine as
yet another Eurocentric fable that
propped up unthinking assertions of
cultural superiority. The preparation of
high-end restaurant food hasn’t been
entirely democratized, but the best chefs
today often come from countries in
Asia and the Global South. An increas-
ing number of them are women, and
#MeToo has begun to challenge a cul-
ture of sexual predation that was wide-
spread in the restaurant industry. Restau-
rant culture is more worldly, and more
reflective of the revolutionary turbu-
lence of our world, than it’s ever been.
The notion that food can be art no
longer raises any eyebrows. When I was
spending all my free time in kitchens,
chefs could be artistic, but they couldn’t
be full-fledged artists, partly because
their “work” was, literally, consumed.
Today, this fact is no strike against them;
on the contrary, chefs are the signature
artists of Western consumer society, in
which what you eat and where are
defining marks of what the sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu called “social capital.”
In 2007, the contemporary art show
Documenta featured the “molecular
gastronomy” of Ferran Adrià, the most
innovative of today’s cooks. At his
restaurant El Bulli, in Catalonia, Adrià
had devised novel scientific techniques
to produce a “deconstructivist” cuisine
that centers on foams.
I don’t even know how to make a
foam, and so far I’ve resisted buying a
blowtorch, which Ella wants for mak-
ing s’mores and crème brûlée. The food
I make these days—like seemingly ev-
eryone in the age of Ottolenghi—is
Mediterranean, a mélange of Italian,
North African, and Middle Eastern in-
fluences. The French technique I ab-
sorbed during my culinary education
still comes in handy: I can chop onions
with a precision and speed that occa-
sionally impresses friends who don’t have
a culinary background. I know exactly
when egg yolks have reached the per-
fect texture for a sabayon, or egg whites
for a soufflé; I can whisk butter into a
reduction sauce in a way that imparts
just the right sheen. Small things, but I
am very glad to have remembered them.
Ella is not particularly interested in
my tales of the kitchen, and she loves to
remind me of one awful dish I prepared
for her: a botched experiment of roasted
salmon flavored with honey. But, watch-
ing me when we’re at the stove, she has
refined her skills, and taught herself
new ones. Her fresh pasta is enviably
delicate, her pastry crusts a sublime bal-
ance of firmness and crumbliness. I’m
still alarmed when I see how rapidly she
chops vegetables, until I remind myself
that she’s just doing what I’ve taught her,
and won’t cut herself. She has the “poise”
that I was mostly feigning and is a much
more relaxed and patient cook than I
was. For her, cooking isn’t a professional
ambition but simply a pleasure, and a
way of sharing her pleasure with others.
Recently, Ella made croissants for
the third time. Croissants are notori-
ously difficult: if you’re not careful as
you fold the butter into the dough, you
can easily end up with something stiff
and hard, rather than a flaky, airy, mul-
tilayered marvel. As Ella rolled the
dough after completing the first “turn,”
I thought I saw butter oozing. When I
started to speak up, she said I had to
leave the room, and I did as I was told.
Whatever she ended up doing, the crois-
sants were the finest she’d made. I’m
learning that the best thing I can do to
encourage her in the kitchen is to stay
out of the way. Becoming a cook is about
achieving mastery, independence, and,
if you’re lucky, originality. My role these
days, when Ella puts on my old toque,
is to step aside, taste something if she
asks, and wash the dishes.
