Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef

1.

The walls are all far away except for the one right in front of me. I’m wearing whites at least two sizes too big, instead of the usual blacks with my name embroidered in dark red over the left pocket: Leonardo Lucarelli. There’s nothing written on this uniform, I’m only a cook in a vast, anonymous commercial kitchen, puffing and panting, yelling and getting frazzled. All around me people are dashing about, blabbering in some thick dialect. I don’t understand a word. I know I’m in a kitchen in Thiene, up north in the Veneto region of Italy. The restaurant is packed. Orders are shooting out from the printer in front of me at such a rate that I can barely tear off and pin up the tickets. They’re getting all scrunched up, falling to the ground like streamers, and in the end there’s just a long strip of dishes I should already have prepped and loaded on the pass, bellowing Go! Instead, I don’t even know where to begin. It’s unbearably hot. The kitchen is too big. The uniform is too loose. The tickets are coming in too fast. Everything is wrong. I’m in the wrong place. I don’t like these people and they don’t like me, but the thing is that I can’t move my hands, get into the groove, utter a word. The chef arrives (I’m trying to remember — what’s his name?) and tells me what to do but I don’t understand him. I should know what to do. But I don’t and I can’t understand what he’s saying. So I move out of his way. I see hands opening and closing the oven, drizzling reductions and sauces over dishes. I see a perfect assembly line, timers going off, crockery clinking, a full pass, servers sprinting. I see the Nigerian dishwasher, Sofia, swamped under a heap of filthy pots and dishes. Hers is the only face I recognize. Her slop sink is tiny and I ask myself how she can possibly get everything washed in that woefully cramped space. She doesn’t look at me, she’s too busy. I return to my station, determined to pull myself together. I’m back in the game now, I understand what I have to do. Can I still save the evening? By now, we’re up to our necks in shit. And when you’re struggling to keep your head above the shit, there’s nothing you can do about it, the night is ruined. You work your knuckles to the bone and your only reward is frustration. You hope it will all end soon and that the machine on the counter will stop spitting out tickets and the waiters will stop yelling: Get a move on with table 36! Rush table 15 to the front of the line but without the lobster, the lady doesn’t want it now! Five walkins, no reservation. Fire the appetizers! I turn around and take a step back. If I’m no use at my station, the least I can do is give Sofia a hand.

I move toward the sink and start emptying and refilling the dishwasher, but there are too many plates, I can’t cope. Sofia sighs and rinses, and says, Be careful! while I grab another stack of plates. Maybe I can do something useful, put the dishes away and make space for others. Make space, leave space, take space: A kitchen is a bit like a video game, and I’m wondering if I’ll ever advance to the next level. The stack of plates sways perilously and crashes to the floor, smashed to pieces. It literally explodes. Everything stops. Time is a bubble and Earth is galaxies away from here. For a fraction of a second there is absolute stillness and silence. The dishwasher is the only thing that doesn’t react to the crash and continues sloshing away. Sofia covers her gaping mouth with both wet hands, scared they’ll take it out on her. I raise my arm and immediately shout out, It’s my fault, I picked up too many plates at once, it’s all my fault.

That’s what happens in a commercial kitchen: If you screw up, if you forget something, and above all, if someone is about to get the rap over something you did, you’ve got to own up immediately. But if you are blamed for someone else’s screwup and that person doesn’t speak up, you must not rat them out. In a kitchen, rot, like denatured protein in a good piece of boiled meat, rises to the surface immediately. There’s no faking it. You can sweet-talk other people, fool people outside the kitchen (with them you have to, it’s the other unwritten law), but not your kitchen buddies.

In a flash, I feel the adrenaline surging to my temples, my heartbeat quickens, my mouth dries up, and I shriek like a wounded animal in a forest of glass shards. Flushed, the veins in my neck bulging, I have no idea what I am screaming. I hear the words only after they have left my mouth. I scream at the chef and at all those freaking frustrated hypocritical brownnosers. I scream at Sofia too, who should know how to stand up for herself but doesn’t. I keep screaming and start waving my arms about, angrily, incoherently. I scream and flail as if in the throes of some bizarre exorcism. But inside, my thoughts are calm, deliberate, tuned to the soft sloshing of the dishwasher. This is no way to behave, what the hell am I doing? This is so wrong. In the meantime I hurl a plate at the wall. Open and slam the oven door a few times. You have to buckle down, I tell myself, show them the stuff you’re made of. I throw a punch at the fridge. Then I open it and start flinging its contents onto the floor. Thoughts course through my brain: I will not let them screw with me, I will show them I can rise above everything and deal with whatever comes my way. I stomp on milk cartons, showering the kitchen in white rain. I have come out on top, I win, I am the best, I have nerves of steel. A slab of beef slams against the door separating us from the dining room. Because if it weren’t for me in here, everything would just hit the fan. I throw pans on the floor and thump the exhaust hood. Because, I’m thinking, you’re the only one who can keep his cool after slaving over a hot flattop for ten hours, the only one who can find a solution — a quick one — to unforeseen calamities. Now I start taking my clothes off. I’m screaming, tossing everything to the floor, slapping the air around me. I peel off the white jacket that is way too big for me, popping the buttons. But my thoughts are calm. I am the Incredible Hulk on weed. I’m thinking, if you can’t be convincing, at least bamboozle them. So now I’m grabbing the chef’s head and pushing it in the sink, thinking, this is the only way people will recognize who’s the boss, the alpha male in the kitchen, whether or not you really are. Now I’m kicking the fat pastry chef’s ass. It’s not enough to be hired as the chef; you have to be acknowledged as one by your peers. Otherwise, there’s absolutely no point. My mind is calm. Now I go to the sink and turn the hose on everyone in sight, soaking them. I’m screaming, throwing punches, nearly naked. But inside I’m completely serene. I’m thinking, a crew that doesn’t look up to you and respect you when things fall apart will turn against you, and you will sink to the bottom of the heap because a leader alone is nothing but a man alone. Now I start sobbing, screaming that they all make me sick, that this is no way to work, that I don’t give a shit about the restaurant, about Rotzo potatoes or Borso del Grappa peas, that they can all go to hell. I am the Incredible Hulk when he was a little boy and lost his way home. I’m weeping. Exhausted. Enough already.

I open my eyes suddenly, and it’s dark. It takes me a few seconds to collect my thoughts and realize I’m in bed. I swallow hard. My throat is parched. I hear the central heating pumping hot water through the radiator. Someone is snoring. I’m covered in sweat but I’m shivering. My pillow is on the floor. I start by whispering my name: Leonardo Lucarelli. I say it again. And yes, I am a chef. Height five foot seven, weight 160 pounds, and I’ve never bitten my nails.

2.

I’m in a hotel, room 204. It’s winter, January 4, 2013, about six o’clock in the morning, up in the mountains. Yesterday it snowed heavily, and a few miles from here, on the Asiago plateau, there’s the little house my girlfriend and I have rented. The house is empty, she’s pregnant and living down south in L’Aquila. Chef is a French word that simply means leader, chief. Asleep in the other bed is Federico, my second in command. What a relief. If Federico is there, then I must be me, no ifs, no ands, no buts. It’s always the same nightmare, and once again I am safe, my head bursting with crap and a powerful need to share the highlights of my dream. Sometimes the dream is less violent, there’s no one shrieking or shattering things, and I am simply a minor cast member. There’s a feeling of total emptiness, of having crossed an unwritten line beyond which you can be as great as you like, but you are an outcast, unwanted and useless. These are not just recurring work-related nightmares, they’re intolerably frightening, given the state I wake up in, distraught and alone.

What could be simpler than a kitchen? There are certain fundamentals that need to be learned and respected, no fifty shades of anything, it’s all either black or white and nothing in between. Years ago, Orlando, my chef in San Pietro a Sieve, used to say, There are only two ways to do things in the kitchen: the right way and the wrong way. He was talking about food and recipes, but the same rule applies to social and professional relationships. There are some things that you have to do and others that you must never do. If I have been able to get myself back on track, it is because I reset my dreams, my plans, my vision of the future to this kitchen-based belief in absolute right and absolute wrong. Is your mise en place never ready at the beginning of service? Wrong. Does someone always have to keep an eye on you, fix your mistakes, settle your skirmishes with colleagues? Wrong. Are you anything less than absolutely self-assured as you bark orders to your staff or manage your cool rooms? Very wrong. Did you call in sick on a Saturday night? Oh, so wrong. Did you flip off the chef in front of the whole kitchen brigade? Totally wrong.

In the kitchen I keep dreaming about, the one who’s always wrong is me. Same name, same height, same weight, same well-groomed nails.

A quick glance at the phone: 6:34. There’re a couple of hours before I have to get up. Federico is still snoring, louder than before. I hold my cell phone over his mouth and record him. Tomorrow, I’ll turn down the radio and play it back at full volume in the kitchen.

I get up in silence, stepping over the sheets that are in a damp, crumpled heap on the carpet. I go into the bathroom that stinks of smoke, and drink straight from the faucet. I swallow an aspirin, my first of the day. The dream starts to fade away into a niggle in the center of my chest that won’t let me go back to sleep. It’s not the nightmare that’s worrying me, it’s the party of 150 people who are arriving in a very short while. They only told me about it yesterday afternoon. The bastards. They think that everything will somehow work itself out, that the pantry is stocked and that the chef is on top of things, plus he makes a heap of money. In the distance, I can hear the noise of the snow plows. I have to prepare the menu du jour, check the inventory sheets, find someone to replace Xiong, the Chinese dishwasher who has to take his wife to the airport, make sure that the freezer isn’t acting up again and, while I’m at it, go down to the kitchen and remove the strudels we made yesterday from the blast chillers: They should all be frozen by now.

Outside, in the distance, mountain peaks are etched against the morning sky, ski trails are turning pale pink. I put on my black uniform. It fits perfectly. The corridor lights are on, the hotel is silent, the carpet’s dusty and so are the walls. Feeble light filters through the windows, and the world is bewitchingly frozen. I breathe in the ’80s-style atmosphere of this hotel. As it is, empty and eerily silent, it reminds me of The Shining, and there’s something about it that I like. It’s my kingdom, I can wander down to the bar, go into the kitchen, turn on the computer at Reception. Nothing out of the ordinary. I don’t eat or drink, but I take pleasure in not having to worry about anything. Because even if this is the asshole of creation, it’s mine and I’m in charge here.

I’m thirty-six years old. I started working in kitchens alongside nutcases and geniuses, people with troubled pasts and present lives wasted by drugs and alcohol. Characters with irresistible charm, especially when handling a knife or a pan like master jugglers. I have lost my temper dozens of times. I’ve had to swallow many a bitter pill. I’ve washed hundreds of pans hurled violently into sinks, and the same thought would go through my mind, over and over again, my scorched hands stinging inside sodden, worn-out gloves: Sooner or later I will be a chef and my kitchen hand will have it better than this. Screw it. That’s what I would say to myself, with a precise plan of revenge all mapped out in my mind.

These days, the food service industry has cleaned up its act. Growing up right smack in the middle of these profound professional and social changes, has, in some ways, allowed me to get ahead fast.

I relished watching my profession gradually turn into entertainment for the masses. Nouvelle cuisine came on the scene in 1972, signature dishes began appearing, and over the last fifteen years or so, everything has snowballed to the point that you now see naked women clinging to Carlo Cracco on the cover of GQ and Matias Perdomo starring in Benetton ads, not to mention the hordes of cheftestants on ready, set, cook shows and nightmare kitchens and recipes packed into every damned glossy magazine on the shelf.

These days, chefs are hip, they’re top guns. Those big glass windows and open kitchens are there to give naïve and gullible diners the impression they are seeing what actually goes on inside. But what’s cool about this profession, even now that it’s in the spotlight, is the blend of cockiness and complicity that lies behind the swinging doors.

Even in outdoor cooking events, some very heavy shit goes on behind the scenes.

There is always a commander at the helm who, besides knowing how to create delicious food, knows how to manage a crew of shady characters with vastly diverse and seldom entirely transparent backgrounds: illegal immigrants, runaway kids, fifty-somethings looking for a sea change (or being forced by unemployment into one), inexperienced and arrogant (but occasionally, also enlightened) restaurant owners, and scheming suppliers. The chefs are the ones who have to think on their feet and solve emergencies, pronto; the ones who, amid the crashing of plates, the swearing, and the beeps of the oven timers, must always have a ready answer, because every single question is addressed to them. Chefs need to stay unruffled and clearheaded during service, but at the end of the night, they can drink like a fish, heat up cocaine in the microwave on porcelain dessert plates, cultivate a colossal ego, clown around or withdraw into depression, and maybe enjoy the favors of a waitress or barman.

But well before being overwhelmed by the allure of the chef’s almightiness, when those stacks of greasy pans were well and truly pissing me off, above all — and I mean absolutely all — I was driven by the emotional power of good food. I was captivated by the thought that behind those kitchen doors was this sweaty chaos from which dishes would emerge with the perfect crunch, the perfect color, the perfect aroma, the sprig of marjoram set at just the right angle, and that all of this made perfect sense. I discovered the tenderness, the joy, and the attention to detail of cooking well for our own satisfaction, even before that of our customers.

Food deserves respect. Food is both a friend and a catalyst, food tells no lies. If you know how to cook well, all is good with the world. One night as a cook is more healing than any priest or psychiatrist or aspirin. I cook because I love to, because people say I’m good at it, and because over time I have depleted the resourcefulness you need to make up lies. I have opened and closed that door so often there’s very little I believe in anymore, other than that I know how to cook.

Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and wondered whether the life you’re living is worth it all? I have, of course, but that’s not the point, is it?

3.

I’m just another chef. A pretty good chef who has been at it for so long now that at this point, I can honestly say that being a chef is my whole life. And you know what? It’s a life I love.

I was born in 1977, the year of uprisings and repression in Italy, the appearance of left-wing sidewalk tribes like the Metropolitan Indians, the shenanigans of the murderously brutal Magliana Gang, the spate of movies starring the Cuban-American actor Tomas Milian, and Elvis Presley’s last concert. The popular Italian TV ad show Carosello ended in 1977. Not long ago I was struck by a headline in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera: Italy’s unemployment rate is the same as it was in 1977. It must have been a shit year. The world lost Maria Callas and Charlie Chaplin that year too. And turtleneck sweaters, the ones that made your neck itch, were all the rage. How can anyone possibly have warm, fuzzy memories of that year? My parents probably knew nothing of Maria Callas or Charlie Chaplin, let alone the Carosello show, or maybe they did but just didn’t care. They were living in India at the time, and as far as my mother is concerned, that year never ended, with her and dad’s revolutions, counterculture, and kids born during their travels. She genuinely cherishes warm, fuzzy memories of 1977. So initially, before I became a cook, I was the son of two real-life flower-power-love-is-all-you-need hippies, who gave up Rome and Italy’s economic boom to live in India. And that is where I was born, in Dalhousie, Himachal Pradesh, the tip of Himalayan India squeezed in between Kashmir and Pakistan. After that, back in Italy, I was a teenager growing up in the boonies, one of those kids who cared far more about living (on and off their motorbikes) than school.

In 1981 Franco Battiato was topping the Italian charts with "Cerco un centro di gravità permanente—which translates as, I’m searching for a permanent center of gravity." My parents, having returned to Italy after seven years in India with a four-year-old in tow and my brother on the way, could no longer endure living in a big city. They found an old neglected schoolhouse nestled in the rolling hills of Umbria, one of those buildings with a huge central room that housed all the classes and a smaller room off to the side with a bed for the teacher when they were snowed in. The local council rented it out for 20,000 lire a month and it was okay for a while. It would be okay, my parents said, until they decided to move on. Meanwhile, we could grow a few vegetables. Dad turned down a job in a bank and started to paint, channeling an urge to commit his stories to canvas, and coaxing the world into accepting who he was.

At the end of the day, it’s how people recognize the difference between an artist and a sociopath. The difference between a chef and a sociopath? I don’t believe there is one.

Someone eventually decided that my father’s paintings were worth money, and so Dad stopped being a dabbler and became an artist. That was his job, while Mom took care of selling his paintings to fancy art galleries on Via Margutta in Rome and raising me and my brother. I just didn’t get it. Or more to the point, I couldn’t explain it. What does your dad do? they used to ask me in elementary school. And I, a bit ashamed, would say, He’s a painter, after having heard the likes of farmer, mechanic, and policeman. When I was in junior high, I discovered that a classmate of mine was the mayor’s son and fell into a silent depression that lasted a whole week. Every now and again they wouldn’t quite understand, and would say, C’mon, a painter? or Great, we’re painting the house right now, we might call him, and I wouldn’t clear up the misunderstanding. At least that kind of painting was a real job. In the meantime, the old schoolhouse we were living in felt more and more like home, and my parents would end up never leaving it. In 1992, while Italians were singing along to Giorgio Gaber’s Qualcuno era comunista (Some of Them Were Communists), they bought it for 20 million lire. They bought their permanent center of gravity and lost a piece of their wandering hearts. It was the year before Dad died, on the day of his fortieth birthday, of leukemia. My dad died as he had lived, a hippie to the bitter end.

Coming from a family of Italian hippies can produce one of two consequences: either you become a second-generation Italian hippie or you rebel, albeit lovingly, against your past. Well, I ended up in the latter category, so alongside school, girls, booze, travel, and drugs, work has always been my way of seeking independence, freedom, and prospects for the future. I have always felt that I was working to make it on my own and, if possible, to support whoever was with me — not least my flower child of a mom.

My mom had all the shortcomings, but also the strengths, of a sweet, unabashed egomaniac, and she was that way with food too. When my brother and I got home from school, she would greet us enthusiastically: Guess what we’re having for lunch today, boys! Pasta with a tomato and cream sauce! or Fried eggs! and we’d both be ecstatic. Her absolute and utter joyfulness was so contagious she managed to convince us that she really was a good cook. The only dessert she ever made was sponge biscuits soaked in red syrupy Alkermes liqueur and alternated with layers of custard cream. She would serve it at every birthday as something new and exciting, maybe because she’d made the custard using the egg whites as well as the yolks that time, or replaced the Alkermes with a different liqueur. I thought you could buy real custard cream only in pastry shops and that was why it was so good in my friends’ homes, because they bought it. My mom’s was the way it was because it was homemade. In fact, I think she gave me this explanation herself. Mom simply didn’t know the first thing about cooking. Dad cooked only on special occasions, but he put a great deal of care into preparing dishes. He loved mixing things, baking bread or maybe pizza in a wood oven; he loved tending the fire and looking after the vegetable patch. I was always quite happy with whatever my mother made for us, but I so admired the way my dad was able to turn cooking into pleasure. Mom fed us; Dad delighted us.

The day of my dad’s funeral, Mom was wearing one of her long flowing skirts, her hair tied back with a colorful scarf, and she was smiling. In the years that followed, whenever anything worried her, she would chant, "Om Namah Shivaya! a Hindu mantra that translates as I bow to Shiva, or May the Lord’s will be done, or simply (as this pissed-off son might put it), Whatever!"

She was often out, sometimes returning home late at night, but she always left something for me and my brother, Francesco, to eat. But without her there to make a rousing presentation, the food became monotonous and boring. And so I would add my own touch. I had free rein, and what drove me was the fervor of a sixteen-year-old and memories of the food fests prepared by my dad, whom I wanted to emulate. I would sauté something in a pan, add a sauce here and a caramelized crust there. I got hooked on simple dough made with flour, water, and yeast, the basic elements in any good restaurant. Mixing flour and water, and turning those simple ingredients into complex food, left me in total amazement — and bliss. I discovered the potential of discerning flavors and learning how to reproduce them. Then I began inviting friends home for lunch, first just guys and later girls too. I was the only teenager who cooked for friends when they came over. Right there it hit me that food was power: An empty house and knowing how to cook meant there was an astonishing chance I might just learn what sex was all about.

The first present I gave my first real girlfriend was a loaf of still warm freshly baked bread wrapped in a napkin with the four corners tied together, like something out of a Mickey Mouse comic strip. Her name was Michela. She was petite, wore her black hair in a bob, and was painfully shy even when we stole kisses far from prying eyes. The loaf