This is the final entry in the “chef memoir” project this newsletter began with in January 2023.
But that definitely doesn’t mean the end of my writing here.
The closing of this chapter coincides with some pretty big changes in my working life. I’m so excited about what’s coming next, particularly as it will give me more time to write the kind of things that make this newsletter unique.
But I’ll tell you more about that next week.
For now, whether you’ve been here from the start or are a new subscriber, thank you for reading.
Wil
Part 23: Empty Handed and Nothing Left Behind
“You come in with empty hands to the kitchen. You walk out from the kitchen with empty hands. There's no evidence of you being there. Everything is consumed and gone.”
Magnus Ek - Owner/Chef Oaxen Krog and Slip
It started the way I always knew it would.
I was at the restaurant. It was 9:04 pm on an unusually busy Thursday and we were in the shit because more turbot had been sold than we’d gutted and cleaned for service. This is why, instead of being at the grill station, my hands were wrist-deep in a fish the size of a dustbin lid. My fingers stained red, brown, and every shade of purple in-between.
My pocket vibrated and I quickly peeled off one of my oozy latex gloves and fumbled for my phone. A text from my wife.
“Nothing happening,” she wrote.
Hardly a love poem, I admit. But she is Finnish, after all, and getting unsolicited love letters from a Finn is like getting, if not blood from a stone, then at least blood from a severely overcooked chicken breast.
Besides, “nothing happening” was precisely what I wanted to hear.
My wife was 8 months and 3 weeks pregnant at that point. Earlier that morning she’d been certain something felt different. And, much as I’d wanted to stay with her and not miss anything, I was scheduled to help feed a couple of hundred people at a restaurant called Oaxen.
She’d promised to keep me updated until I was home from my long double shift.
And then another vibration.
She was wrong.
Something was happening.
Of the many differences between office life and that in a restaurant kitchen, the most significant to me was how my colleagues changed one day to the next. I don’t mean because of people quitting, though this does happen often in kitchens, I simply mean because of our changing shift patterns.
Some colleagues, of course, I preferred working with over others. This could be because some were faster, more helpful, more generous than others. Sometimes it was just because someone was so damn funny. Whatever it was, a favourite colleague could make even a 16 hour Saturday double, full of tables with endless dietary requirements and “sauces on the side”, go by in a flash.
Well, if not quite a flash, maybe something that felt more like 14 hours.
I want to list them here, the people that made my working life so joyful during my years at Oaxen. But that would take an essay in itself.
Being a restaurant cook gave me the chance to work with more people, and more types of people, in a few years than I would in decades in my former office life. I would say I was lucky. But, if I’m honest, looking back on that endless cast list of funny, intelligent, creative people I toiled side by side with, I don’t feel lucky.
I’m left feeling that the world is simply full of good people. All we need to do is get out there and cook with them.
Two hours later we were in a private room in Stockholm’s biggest hospital. The midwives had told us they were concerned about our boy’s heartbeat and had placed a wire inside my wife to keep him monitored. When I asked how it worked, a nurse told me the wire was attached to the top of my son’s head. I found it comforting that someone with me, someone I myself could touch had themselves touched him already. The distance between this world and the one he was in already getting smaller. It was almost enough to put me at ease.
I quickly learned to hate that monitor. Listening to every fluctuation of his heart. Every dip. Every drop in connection between the wire and monitor was enough to send my own heart into a panic, as though it were making up the missing beats of my son’s heart. For hours we listened to those beats. I hope I never have to listen to his heart through a machine again. Anyone’s heart.
And then we waited for hours with nothing happening until the point everything happened. His heartbeat had started fluctuating too much. One of the nurses told my wife it was time to go. With the next contraction it would be time to push. My wife took my hand, and I told her she could do it. And, scared as I was, I knew she could.
I’m a sentimental guy. And, at 37 years old, not even the harsh storms and tempests of adult life have weathered away the My Chemical Romance-loving, emo-kid sensitivities from me fully. That said, one of the consequences of kitchen colleagues changing from shift to shift is that, when they eventually do quit, they just don’t tend to be missed for very long.
This might sound callous or suggestive of the fact those “good people” I mentioned didn’t mean much to me after all. But I don’t look at it that way.
Life “on the line” in a restaurant kitchen is a fast one. Friendships are made fast as well. You spend 16 hours sweating next to someone and a very particular social barrier breaks down quickly.
It’s a bit like making love with someone special for the first time that way.
And thing’s move fast when a person leaves as well.
I was fresh out of university when I first read John Berger’s And our faces, my heart, brief as photos. In one section he reflects on the French phrase Partir est mourir un peu. In English it means something like “to leave is to die a little”.
I was reminded of this when I’d see workmates leave the restaurant a final time. People I sweated with and laughed with and relied on. But not just in the simple sense that they were gone. It’s more that it reminded me of how we can only go on without those we lose by forgetting something of them, forgetting the part of ourselves that so needed them. Until, eventually, the hole in our lives is filled by someone else.
It happens quickly, that process, in the kitchen.
But, like I said, things move fast on the line.
The first push came, went, and our son still hadn’t arrived. The nurses were telling my wife something, but they were all talking Swedish. Nothing but words that held no meaning to me. After nine months of Google searches, pregnancy tracker apps, interrogating midwives and cross-referencing my wife’s symptoms with my mother, the big day had arrived and I didn’t know what was happening. All I could do was keep holding her hand, waiting for the push, then squeezing it with her. Willing her to push and keep on pushing.
And then the next contraction came, she pushed. She pushed so hard. And our son was there. Our filthy, wrinkled, goblin-like son. So delicate. So endless. A nurse brought him up to us and he nestled perfectly into my wife’s breasts. A jigsaw piece that had spent a lifetime waiting to slot into its place. I leant over to kiss him and, in that moment, it was as though the feeling of his untouched skin didn’t fill just my entire body, but every memory and experience I had ever had. The feeling that everything I had ever done, every joy and every fear, led me to this moment and to him.
One of the qualities I admire in all great restaurant cooks is never accepting something can’t be fixed. There’s always a way. Screwed up a steak? Give it to the dish washer, and fire a new one. Managed to put the sauce on top even though you’ve been reminding yourself for 10 WHOLE FUCKING MINUTES the ticket says “on the side”? Straight to the dish washer and try again. Service waits for no one. We move on, we try again, and we try again fast.
No waiting.
One of my very favourite colleagues, a man named Rune, had a habit of saying “I fixie” whenever there was a problem to be solved or job to do. It became a kind of mantra for me. Whenever I need to push myself on, even now, I hear it repeated somewhere inside me.
I fixie.
By the time my wife and I started trying for a baby, this habit, this compulsion to “fixie” things fast was scored deep into me.
I think this is why it was so difficult to see her disappointed face each month when the test came back negative. For all her sadness, and for all the folic acid I was eating, loose underwear I wore, and beers I didn’t drink, I couldn’t fix the tears.
Only wait.
With my wife and our son Sam sleeping in our private room, I took a moment to go outside the hospital doors for some air. It was March 15. The last of the snow was melting and the perfume of spring had just awakened. I gave up smoking when I met my wife. She hates the things. She had even forbidden me from using the little pouches of snus that are so popular among cooks in Sweden. But seeing another young man pop one in his mouth next to me outside the hospital, I turned to him and asked for one. He offered it without words. I sat down on a metal bench and placed the snus between my top lip and gum. The hit of nicotine sent a wave of calm and peace through my body.
I thought of Sam in my wife’s hands, then my hands. Hands that will never not be holding.
I took out the snus. I put it in a bin beside the hospital door. And then I walked in from the cold.
I had never been a better cook, and I had never loved being one more. But to hear about new and wonderful things our son had done during a Saturday brunch shift or his bedtime while I was working the grill, made me realise cooking was a priority that no longer made sense to me.
My last day as a restaurant cook in Stockholm, Sweden was in May 2020. It was a day shift and, as everyone did on their last shift, I made dessert for the family meal. I made Finnish Dallaspulla.
After we ate them, the owner, a chef called Magnus Ek, gave me a copy of a book he had written years earlier called Oaxen Adieu. It is a beautiful thing full of recipes and stories from Oaxen’s history.
It is signed by my colleagues and I treasure it still.
I can’t remember what was said that day or the goodbyes. Knowing me and my aversion to ceremony, I probably kept them as few as possible. What I remember is looking briefly back at the dance-like motion of cooks that had already begun in my absence. My stove station being run by someone else. The rhythm and song of the kitchen in full chorus. I felt then, without sadness, that I was as good as never having been there. One line cook on the cold section, a young and eager sort who barely ever stopped for lunch, had one of my buns to take bites from while he got on with set-up. It felt like the only thing of myself that remained. Soon it too would be gone.
I turned from the kitchen and walked out from the service entrance. The door was propped open by that evening’s grill chef. He was loading up a large, grey plastic bin with black, sooty coals for use that night. The air sparkled as the dust caught the warm afternoon sun.
I stopped a moment. Just to check I had my keys, my wallet. Through the open door, I could just hear the song of the kitchen again. The clang of pans and yells. I then walked on. As long as I kept walking I didn’t hear it anymore, because of the footsteps. But as soon as I stopped again, I heard the kitchen once more, a little fainter each time.
I can hear it, sometimes, still.
The below is a video I first watched in 2017 when I learned there was a job going at restaurant called Oaxen Slip. This video alone gave me a sense it could be the place for me.
Oaxen closed in December 2022 and I’m proud to share this here. Not only does it introduce my old boss Magnus Ek, but I hope it also gives you a sense of how special that place was.
It was very special to me.
Video credit IAM production, Sweden
That was lovely, Wil. And funny that as you were describing the scene in the hospital, I knew EXACTLY what day of the year it was.
Have thoroughly enjoyed these chapters and stories Wil. What a beautiful video. So nice to hear about the birth of your son too. Thank you for writing and sharing. 😊