The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

For a while I fit right in, finally at home amongst my
fellow geeks, reveling in the fascinating subculture and
learning more than I’d ever learned before (mostly about
such scientific puzzles as precisely how many whiskey-and-
Cokes it takes before the next morning’s hangover will
prevent you from attending an 11 a.m lecture). But slowly a
grim reality dawned on me: I loved biology and science, but
I hated working in biology labs. It was the slowness of it all,
the months and months of experimenting that would finally
reveal results that showed you were wrong all along—and
could you please repeat those tests? I got restless. I got
annoyed, and I did what all heroes should do in a time of
crisis: I ran away.
That’s right.
That summer, I made the conscious decision not to take
another job in a biology lab. Here I was, in the prime of my
youth, pissing it away playing with pipettes and DNA
sequencers. I set out with the goal of taking as nonacademic
a job as I possibly could. Waitering seemed like a good gig.
Meet cute girls, eat good food, hang out with cooks, party
every night because I don’t have to show up to work until 3
p.m. Basically, a repressed college kid’s dream. As it
happened, the first restaurant I walked into—an abysmal
Mongolian grill-style joint in Harvard Square—wasn’t in
need of waiters, but it was desperately in need of cooks.*
Without hesitating, I signed on. And that was the
beginning of the end for me. Like a head-injury patient who
suddenly develops a brand-new personality, something
snapped the moment my hand touched a knife in a
professional kitchen. I was no longer in control of my own