Hello, Welcome back to The Recovering Line Cook.
This week’s post is the latest entry in my Memoirs of a Line Cook series. This series tells the story of when I changed careers to become a line cook aged 28.
Thanks for reading,
Wil
Memoirs of a Line Cook: Part 22
Morning, March 5, 2024 - A small city called Turku in Finland
I press my mouth to his cheek and a tear touches my lips. It is cold and it is salty.
It is his first morning back at daycare for almost two weeks, a consequence of the back and forth illnesses he and his sister have been exchanging recently.
He just isn’t used to it, I tell myself. It must get better.
I kneel in front of him. I can feel the daycare teachers, assistants, whatever they’re called huddling behind me. He hasn’t been so sad to say goodbye since he was tiny. I don’t know what to say to him.
And then something from his lips other than sobs and gasps for breath. “Can I have ten and a million cuddles?” he says. Heartbroken and heartbreaking.
Maybe I should take him home. Maybe that’s the modern, compassionate thing to do. I can’t just leave him here now, in this state. That can’t be right. I’d be no better than those uptight British parents I’m terrified of becoming one day, dropping their kids off at boarding school telling their kids to “buck up”, “stiff upper lip”, and to “stop crying William, you’ll wet yourself again and no one will want to talk to you.”
…
But what happens next, if I let myself take him home now? Do I never make myself bring him back? Do I try and shield him from every sadness and heartbreak and disappointment his entire life through? Where does it end?
I take him home now and before I know it he’s thirty, never left home, and he has my desiccated corpse in a Finnish basement somewhere decked out in an old lady’s dress while he’s knifing strangers through the shower curtain.
It’s all so bloody fraught!
And for all this anxiety he is still crying. Still asking for his 10 and a million cuddles.
He is 4 years old, almost 5, this thing my universe revolves around. Still there are days I just don’t know what the answer is.
Sometime in summer, 2018 - An island called Djurgården in Stockholm, Sweden
I’m trying to pretend my entire sense of self-worth, the sum of my purpose in this beautiful and hate-filled universe, isn’t contingent on the steak that is about to be sliced in front of me.
My head chef, a tall, dark-haired Swede, is on the pass today. He takes his elegant, walnut-handled Japanese chef’s knife into his hand, holding it with such dexterity that it looks less like an inanimate tool and more an extension of his own being.
I tell myself the small, inconsequential looking piece of meat, hanger steak the cut is called, is equally as beautiful as that knife of his. You’ve browned it perfectly, Wil. The elegant grill marks at perfect angles offset by the deep caramelization everywhere in between. It’s enough to render even the most evangelical of vegans loinally rigid. All I need now is for him to slice it for service. And if it isn’t a perfectly blushing medium rare from edge to edge I’m going to hate myself. I’m going to hate myself and everyone else working the line tonight is going to hate me and I’ll have deserved it because I’m a fucking 31-year-old who can’t cook a steak properly.
And then he slices through it as though this isn’t the most important moment in my professional life to date.
I give up on being subtle and for the 23rd time this evening lean in to see how it looks inside.
“Nice steak, chef,” he tells me. And I turn back to the many other steaks I have working that I’m certain to repeat this song and dance for throughout the rest of service.
Scenes such as this pretty much tell the story of my professional state of mind in 2018. I was 31, an age most cooks have either become head chefs or found the sense to get a job that lets them sit down more often. I, in contrast, was working my first permanent cooking job in charge of “the proteins”. It was a welcome change from frying edible imitation oyster shells and punching perfect circles out of nasturtium leaves until 3 in the morning. These being tasks I’d become familiar with at my job in a very fine-dining Michelin Star restaurant the previous year.
Oaxen Slip was one of Stockholm’s most popular and respected restaurants. It was special enough to have whole roasted turbot and rabbit on the menu, but casual enough to offer it with a nice bowl of fries. After months of clinical, pent-up tweezer work, it felt like therapy to be throwing steaks and fillets of fish on to the iron grills of a 500° oven for the first time.
It was hot, it was tough, but for the first time in my life I understood that phrase about finding a job you love and never working a day in your life. As a cook at Oaxen Slip, the days weren’t easy but, like going for a run, lifting weights, or spending a day with that handsy grandmother you only see at funerals, it didn’t quite feel like work either.
And that was largely down to the people I was doing it with.
There was Jokke, the sous chef. Judging by the quotes he came out with half-way through service, Jokke’s real passion was 19th century German philosophy. More than once when I asked for advice about a split sauce or a fish filleting technique, he’d come out with some nonsense about “forms of intuition” and that the key was to understand that the truth of the fish was “unknowable to us, Wil”.
I think he is back at university now.
The other sous chef, Marcus, would start a shift by showing us all pictures of the silverware bowls he had fashioned in his metalwork class the previous night. He was something of a skinny jean and winkle-picker wearing indie boy much like I was in my younger years, so I liked him immensely.
The head chef Rune… well. I don’t know what his passions outside the kitchen were. But he did enjoy squeezing my arse whenever he walked behind me. I know this kind of behaviour might raise eyebrows but, quite frankly, it gave me a real sense of being back at boarding school again in leafy England. I’m not saying it’s right but, being so far from leafy England, I rather appreciated him for it.
These were cooks who cared about their work. They never cut corners or necked booze in the walk-in or turned up hungover off their tits like caricatures of restaurant cooks you might expect from the Anthony Bourdain memoir you’ve read. For all the unprofessional arse grabbing and philosophical diversions, the food itself was never compromised.
It was 3 years into my life as a restaurant cook when I started at Oaxen. For all the steaks I managed to send out medium rare and fish with a mother of pearl shimmer, I knew I wasn’t the great and powerful “chef” I’d dreamed of being when I first started out. I didn’t think I was fast enough for one thing. I certainly couldn’t remember a 10 table rundown of orders the way some cooks seemed to manage.
But my time at Oaxen helped me realise that being all and everything wasn’t necessary, that trying to be a great “chef” was irrelevant. And it all came down to the fact the restaurant was open 7 days a week.
Being open 7 days a week, lunch and dinner, your station didn’t belong to you alone. It was something you shared with three or four other people. This demonstrated itself in the strangest way when we would “handover” the section to the next line cook on shift.
For example, when I was finished with the lunch shift handing over to the guy running it for the evening, we would go through “The List” of jobs that needed to be done the next day. The person handing over would always say “you” need to do this, “you” need to do that.
And it would always be “you” even if the ”you” in question had the next day off. The point I’m making is that the “you” wasn’t ever really you at all. “You” in this sense really meant “the team”. And in knowing I was relied on by others as part of this team, I understood I could rely on others as well.
If I could go back and tell the version of me who was scared off his tits walking into a restaurant kitchen for the first time, it’d probably be something along these lines.
Sometime about halfway through my two years at Oaxen, Marcus started to worry he was coming down with sepsis.
It was early in the evening one Saturday (at least, I’m guessing it was Saturday, most eventful things happened on a Saturday at Oaxen. The time a fellow line cook’s finger got mangled in a meat grinder, the time Rune dropped his phone in the deep fryer, always a Saturday). Marcus turned to me from the pass he was running and calmly said he needed to go to the hospital. That he thought a weird mark on his arm was a sure sign of blood poisoning and that he needed to get to an emergency room.
I told him we’d better be safe than sorry, that I’d take care of things, and for him to text us that he was OK.
The following hour until Rune arrived a little tipsy from his night off to cover for Marcus wasn’t easy. The fry-cook didn’t understand a word of the orders I bellowed at him in my accented English, and the front of house were doing a singularly bad job of pacing the tickets. But, to my surprise, two things were undeniably true:
I was not hiding in the mop cupboard, crying and curled in the fetal position massaging crème fraîche into my chest.
I was very nearly managing to actually run the pass for the first time.
I hadn’t proven I was a great restaurant cook. I didn’t know all the tricks. I don’t think I ever will. But I had stopped convincing myself that was the be-all and end-all. What mattered was I was there, I showed up, and that when the team had a problem, I could sometimes offer an answer for it.
Sometimes, I was allowed to believe, was enough.
Evening, March 5, 2024 – Still a small city called Turku in Finland
The sky is the kind of orange and blue normally reserved for lava lamps or badly designed football jerseys. My son’s hand is in mine and we walk, fast as his little legs will take him, to his Tuesday evening dance class.
“It’s quiet”, my son tells me. “There are no birds.”
I love the melancholy observations he comes up with sometimes.
The melancholy of this morning at daycare, however, is as good as forgotten. The weather has just started to warm and, instead of his huge winter mittens, he is wearing thin cotton gloves. For the first time in months I can feel his hand in mine as his hand, not a mass of padded nylon and I love it.
He goes on to describe how far away home now is (it is literally a 30 second walk behind us) and that he wants to go to the moon and maybe Australia when he is older.
“I don’t want kids,” he then says, and I’m shocked he has any concept of such things at 4 years old.
“Why not?” I ask.
“They take too much time. I want to go to London to see Nanna and also Australia and that’s far.”
“You’re not going to stay with me forever?” I say.
He is silent a moment.
“You can come to London, too,” he says.
We walk on to the sound of his shuffling footsteps, the silence of the birds, and his many, many questions.
Some of them I have answers for.
This is wonderful, evocative writing. I’ve read large sections of it out loud to two people already and I only read it myself 20 mins ago.
"I take him home now and before I know it he’s thirty, never left home, and he has my desiccated corpse in a Finnish basement somewhere.."
LOL, but also true.