The Return

Chicago was something of a last hurrah. A sorely needed vacation before shit gets serious. A chance for me to return once more to the game of college ultimate. A game you would bleed and sweat for in the gym, a game you would endure cold and deluge for on a weekend you desperately needed to catch up on … life.

Ultimate has that unique ability to own your life without you really owing any obligation to the game. Sure, you would be letting down your teammates if you quit, but there isn’t exactly a scholarship for them to pull. Nobody's begging you to throw frisbees. Life would assuredly go on.

But yet I was there. Plugging away at a sport with barely any athletic promise to call my own, smoke-blackened lungs and a sports resume that consisted of lazy pick-up basketball and the very occasional "jog" (soft "j").

There’s a quote by Steve Martin to describe that kind of oblivious perseverance,

“Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity; naivete, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do."

I just played the game. I didn’t worry about my 40-yard dash, and forehand hucks (not yet anyway). I just played because I enjoyed it. Every time corpulence and smoking made me want to collapse on the Patten floor gym, the next day I would rise on the field stronger and faster. Athletic improvements come quickly and significantly when you start from zero. I was hooked, I had found love. What would I ever do without this game, for surely there could be no life worth living once this was over. I would cherish it, I would continue to strive, and every strong defensive play and goal thrown only further confirmed in my heart that me and ultimate were in it 'til the end; 'til death do us part.

But as is the case with young love, it is often foolish and unseeing. Things change, and events develop that you could never foresee coming. There would be a time where we were required to grow up, and make decisions in attempts to secure an abstract future. In short, I needed to find a career.

I never expected to find the restaurant business. I blamed it for costing me any semblance of a real family, and the freedom with which I ran about as a teenager nearly cost me any hope of a bright future. It was luck and luck alone that got me to where I am today, and I thank my personal gods of fortune every day.

I don’t think my mother would be as thankful for that. The most curious thing about her, being such a pragmatic woman, was that she was a believer. She believed that I was destined to be on a stage playing the cello. She believed in it so strongly that she spent nearly all of her adult life to give me a first-rate education in music, and a exquisite masterpiece of a cello I did not deserve. I squandered it. An acceptance letter in to Northwestern is the only thing I have to show for everything I put in to music. That would be the most important thing that ever happened to my life, but in the narrow spectrum of music … it was a failure.

I refuse to make the same mistake. Whereas I had little passion for the cello, the kitchen sings to me. While I felt suffocated in an orchestra (from the last seat, mind you) and desperately strained to let my individual sound be heard, I find some kind of strange enjoyment from being a very replaceable soldier in the kitchen. Obediently following orders and dicing carrots for the vision of the chef, slinging hot cast-iron pans to line his pockets and bolster his name makes sense to me.

I’ve taken a curious and winding road to the restaurant industry. Probably as confusing and convoluted as the preceding few paragraphs. I am reminded of this every time one of my mom’s customers asks me how I got into the family business. It cannot possibly be abbreviated if you want a coherent story. I have to talk about how I got from Juilliard to Northwestern, from cello to fooling around with ultimate, to selecting an East Asian History concentration and using that to land my first paid kitchen job. It doesn’t make much sense to me either. But I learned a lot of lessons on the road.

Frisbee taught me what it was like to love. To revel in the splendor of a thing and yet feel its occasional and fierce backlashes was crucial to my growth. It taught me how to endure pain, both physical and mental, and to resist temptation. Running suicides after smoking for seven years straight out sucks. Picking up smoking is and always will be my greatest regret. Not only will it pull the plug on my life quite prematurely, but it prevented me from ever achieving much of any greatness while I played the game. And for those of you who preach “just quit,” well I don’t want to hear it. You know nothing of resisting temptation until you have felt the alarm of nicotine deprivation, or until you’ve battled yourself from obesity to relative health.

And so these lessons have reappeared in the kitchen. No matter how much you like physical exercise, it’s never fun to be sprinting in a decaying gymnasium where the air is something like 100,000 PPM worth of dust and grime. And no matter how much you love cooking; skewering, steaming, shocking, cleaning, and shelling 100 lobster tails when you have five other dishes to get started, on a double shift as the chef begins his tirade and lecture is also … never that fun. Work will always be work. But when you’ve earned your first lay-out D because your engine is simply running on pure, unleaded determination, all of the pain tastes sweet. It was worth it. Likewise, when you’re rocking on eleven during a Saturday night service, motions smooth and plates clean, and you hit the window with your dishes three seconds early, steam wafting up in wispy clouds, and the chef gives you a nod with no eye-contact instead of his usual “Where the fuck are you!?” … all of it seemed worth it. Some kind of sadistic, self-administered pain seems to be my counterpoint to love. I cannot enjoy one without the other, and at peak business time I find myself thinking “I could dance all day to this tune.” You can endure anything as long as you can see how it will play in to your future, and as long as you find some kind of sick enjoyment in struggling at a craft.

But the music lessons reappear also. And I’m not referring to the hours spent listening to some pompous professor drone on about dictation and the tenets of harmony. I’m talking about the practical, school of hard knocks bullshit you learn from being in the world of classical music. There are a lot of talented people who are fighting for a very finite number of spots on top of the hill. There is very much a wrong way to do something. There is such a thing as a stiff price for failure. I had some strange talent that allowed me to remain at Juilliard when I most assuredly did not belong. That won’t be the case for cooking. It is far too competitive now for me to hope to coast on talent alone, talent which I sorely lack, by the way. I won’t let shortsightedness and laziness cost me what I deem to be my calling at the top of the mountain. I will climb, though I have started much farther behind than my peers.

And it all begins now. I admit, I missed writing. At times I felt that no one needed to hear me rant on and on about something for (now running on 3 pages, single spaced) such lengths of absurdity. But it helps me focus my thoughts, and what I’ve learned in the past few months has been unshared and chaotic without an audience for me to preach to. So I will return as best I can, and only hope that you are there to read.

Culinary school will start October 25, 2011. Fall will once again mean school, as opposed to a call to arms, all hands on deck approach to the holiday season. It will mean acclimating my brain to information reception in a classroom, instead of rapid-fire reactionary cooking. It will mean … fucking culinary school, something I have talked about for over four years but is finally becoming a reality.

There are a lot of things to get done until then. I can no longer be content to sit in the shadow of my mother and be nudged along like a seal pup in the water. It is time to be thrown from the nest, once again, to see if I can fly.

No doubt, I have learned a lot being buoyed along at Pearl East. This is an education few people my age could get elsewhere, knowing how and what it is like to be at the helm of the ship-of-a-million-parts that is a restaurant. I have a much better idea now of what it will take to do it myself. These will be the first drafts, a brief treatise on the philosophy of running a restaurant. Something for me to look back on so that I have tangible proof of how my brain worked in the infancy of my career. These will be rough drafts.

So next time, the theory of the kitchen. What it takes to get to the bottom line, that being … getting people to pay hard-earned money to eat your food, and making food worth eating.

Don’t call it a comeback.

EP6