Chapter 1 Part 4/4: From Fryers to Functional Fluency

My friend Tom, who was studying Japanese at the University of Pennsylvania at the time, suggested I look into the summer course offered at International Christian University (ICU) in suburban Tokyo. The summer course at ICU lasted six weeks from the start of July through mid-August, and I took advantage of the French proclivity for extended vacations to head off to Tokyo.

I had really no presuppositions or expectations in visiting Japan for the first time – I simply liked to see different places and learn languages, and was far too busy with other school work and working in the restaurant to spend a bunch of time reading travel guides, an activity I associated with mere tourists and found to be inappropriate for street-savvy, worldly traveler such as myself. So I basically worked my ass off right up until the day of my flight and then hopped on the plane with every intention of returning to work at Le Bec-Fin six weeks later.

The plane ride to Japan is long, 16 hours long from New York’s JFK to Narita non-stop, which seems more like 16 days when you’re crammed into a coach-class seat. One of my co-workers had lent me Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, which I read when I wasn’t trying to sleep or fidgeting in my chair.

When we were a few hours from Japan, the young Japanese woman next to me, who had spent the previous twelve hours asleep, woke up and began to tell me about the time she had spent living in New York and working as a waitress. Part of my strong desire to avoid anything that seemed tourist-like was to not make hotel reservations, and after I revealed this to my newly acquainted travel companion, Yasuko, she seemed concerned and offered to help me locate appropriate lodging.

The most annoying thing about travelling from the US to Tokyo is that Tokyo Narita International Airport is not located in Tokyo but in Narita, an hour and a half from Tokyo in neighboring Chiba Prefecture. So after spending what seemed like an eternity on the airplane you still have a long, albeit picturesque train ride through the rice paddies and hamlets of rural Japan waiting for you.

I don’t recall talking with Yasuko all that much on the train ride into Tokyo – I think I ordered a soda from the refreshment cart pushed by a young, attractive Japanese woman who perambulated through the train cars hawking her wares in the flawless honorific falsetto that characterizes Japanese customer service, packed my last remaining bit of Skoal, and enjoyed the feeling of the warm afternoon sun, the slow release of nicotine into my bloodstream and the tingling anticipation of spending the next six weeks in a new country.

When taking the Narita Express into Tokyo, there is a good chance that you will get off in Shinjuku, one of the “wards” of Tokyo, somewhat analogous to the five boroughs of New York except that each is essentially a city center unto itself, so there is not one, but rather many “downtown” Tokyos, and there are many more than five wards, 23 to be exact. Shinjuku is one of the most congested, most heavily populated of the wards, and Shinjuku Station, where we would finally be alighting from the Narita Express, is the world’s busiest train station.

There are around 30 platforms servicing even more individual lines at Shinjuku Station, close to a hundred small shops selling everything from young women’s clothing to bargain travel packages to bowls of udon noodles sold through “food ticket” machines which dispense tickets corresponding to the picture of the food indicated on each of the machine’s buttons, which are then passed to a shop attendant over a counter onto which a few seconds later is passed a neat little bowl of noodles customarily engulfed by hurried business men at one of the standing counters in the few minutes between trains.

There is a Southern, a New Southern and a Southeastern Exit among numerous other exits, kilometers of sprawling underground concourses, and tens of thousands of Japanese people at any given time coursing through one of the main arteries of the world’s largest city. The station is said to service nearly three million passengers daily.

While this may seem overwhelming, and indeed the sheer number of people in one place is at first, what I was initially and strongly impressed by was how beautifully coordinated, controlled and orderly Shinjuku Station was despite the volume. To begin with, and this probably made a stronger impression on me having grown up in America, which is a relatively dirty country in my opinion, there is very little garbage to be seen in a public area trafficked by literally millions of people everyday.

There are recycling bins located throughout the station, in which people place their rubbish, and none is left on any of the platforms, thrown onto the railways or in any other way improperly discarded, with scant exception. The platforms and escalators are cleaned and maintained, not plastered with chewing gum or drenched in urine.

There are armies of elderly Japanese men and women working with wheeled trash bins replete with an arsenal of cleaning supplies holstered to their side, taking such pride in the level of cleanliness that they vacuum the steps and stand at the top or bottom of the escalator holding a disinfectant towel on the rubber balustrade as it infinitely revolves along with the throngs of passing Japanese people.

And the most amazing part of it all is the surprising order in which the multitude of passengers move from elevator and escalator to platform and train. Naturally there is conversation and noise from the trains, but the station is not raucously loud. People form actual lines behind the yellow lines and Braille blocks, and when the train arrives, the passengers crammed into the individual cars are allowed to alight completely before the waiting passengers board the train, the order of the waiting lines maintained as the boarding passengers step onto the train.

I witnessed very few arguments over the relatively small number of available seats in the literally thousands of times I travelled by train throughout Tokyo, and not one fight or physical altercation in almost seven years. This would be inconceivable with this volume of passengers in the United States, which would often make me wonder what it really meant to live in a "civilized" society.

The trains in Tokyo and most cities in Japan are color-coded, which seems convenient, except that there are so many trains that I remember reading in a manga once that telling someone new to Tokyo to take the “green” train would leave them wondering whether they should take the lime-green, Kelly-green, blue-green train or any of the other greenish-colored train lines available. But with the rail map always posted in the station with the color-coding and most of the station and line names now printed in their Romanized form, Tokyo public transportation is easily navigable if you take your time and relax despite the multitude of people.

That particular day we would be taking the lime-green train, the Yamanote Line. Yamanote (yah-may-no-tay) means "toward" or "close to the hills," which in the otherwise mostly flat Tokyo refers to the small concentration of slightly more elevated land including the imperial palace and more affluent neighborhoods, which the Yamanote line circumscribes, passing through each of the major city centers of Tokyo on its way.

I knew that I needed to be in a place called Mitaka, which I knew was in Tokyo, four days after my arrival for the start of my six-week study abroad program, but had no particular place to go or stay until then, and accepted Yasuko’s offer to help me find someplace to stay until then.

We ended up at the Toko Hotel in Gotanda, the closest thing to a middle-class neighborhood of all the stops on the Yamanote line. The Toko Hotel was in no way remarkable, but the fact that I as a foreigner would choose to stay there seemed to be somewhat remarkable to the staff, who responded with the wonderful Japanese-style hospitality that makes the country such a great place to visit and stay. The Toko Hotel was also located right next to the station, which worked for me as I didn’t plan on spending the next for days in my hotel room when I had all of Tokyo to explore.

For the next day or two Yasuko treated me to a tour of the city. We hit the clubs in Shibuya and Roppongi – Tokyo’s urban fun centers where I would later spend many nights and the occasional early morning bathed in neon and the attention of Japanese girls thinking that whatever I had to do the next day couldn't be better than right now. We took a $200 taxi ride through the ultra-modern, high-speed thoroughfares of Tokyo, crossing Tokyo’s Rainbow Bridge and looking out the window over the black water of Tokyo Bay at midnight, illuminated by moonlight and by the combined glow of millions of volts of fluorescence and hundreds of pulsing red aircraft warning lights.

We sang karaoke, and then the next day I had the somewhat strange pleasure of meeting her heretofore unannounced husband. That would be the last time I would see Yasuko.

I was able to find the train to Mitaka with the help of the hotel staff, and arrived for the start of the summer session.

Chapter 1 Part 3/4: From Fryers to Functional Fluency

In kind consideration of my culinary interests, that year my aunt and uncle took me out for a birthday dinner at Philadelphia’s Le Bec-Fin. Le Bec-Fin was for a time considered to be the best restaurant in the United States, and while this effectively ceased to be the case once George Perrier, the restaurant's founder, relinquished everyday control of the kitchen, at the time it was one of the best examples of French haute cuisine in the country. It was certainly the best food I had ever eaten.

Toward the end of the seven-course dinner, probably close to the salad course, I noticed George Perrier making his rounds of the dining room introducing himself to the diners. When he came to our table, I asked him if I could have a look at the kitchen, and he led me back. When I crossed through the tiny server station and into the kitchen, it was as if the cooks sensed the presence of an intruder as they all immediately looked up from what they were doing and glared menacingly at me as if I had encroached on their territory. Chef Perrier introduced me to the chef du cuisine, Frederic.

Frederic was an enormous guy, around six feet six inches with huge meat-hook hands who spoke broken English with a heavy French accent. Although obviously extremely busy overseeing the kitchen, he took a brief minute to talk to me and I told him that I was working as a cook and said something intelligible to him in French. I must have felt that I was in midst of a very rare opportunity, and I asked Frederic if I could “volunteer” in the kitchen on weekends.

As I had apparently left him with the impression that I could both cook and speak French, both of which were true to probably a much more modest degree that he believed at the time, he was immediately sold on the idea and told me to come in at one o’clock on the coming Saturday.

I went back to the table, told my aunt and uncle “I got the gig,” and was immediately confronted by who I believe was George Perrier’s brother, who asked me extremely condescendingly, “So, you will be working for us?”

I showed up early on the day of my “audition” at around noon and sat in a coffee shop across the near Le Bec-Fin to mentally prepare myself for the day ahead of me. I had been told to come in through the back entrance, and so at about 12:45 I walked around the back of the Walnut Street entrance to a back alley where I figured said entrance must be. Restaurant back entrances are uniformly disgusting, surrounded by overflowing dumpsters of food waste, stagnant pools of greasy water, smoking cooks, homeless people -- and the alley to the back entrance of Le Bec-Fin was no exception.

I located the brown door in a series of many identical brown doors with the ornate cursive “Le Bec-Fin” stenciled in fading white paint, and thought it would be proper to knock before entering. After about ten minutes of knocking like an idiot, one of the dish washing crew opened the door and told me that the chef usually got there around two and to just come in.

I didn’t really know where to go so I walked up the stairs at the rear of the service kitchen and ran into a cute and therefore approachable pastry cook, who asked me if I was “auditioning” that day. I told her I was, and she showed me the cooks’ changing room, where she said I could wait for the rest of the cooks, who usually showed up a little before two.

The cooks did start to show up at about ten of two and one of them asked me in an accusatory tone, “What, did you get here early?” and I took this to mean that showing up early was not something I should continue to do.

The cooks at Le Bec-Fin at the time were as stereotypical a bunch as one could imagine. Greg, the American sous-chef, was as big as Frederic, nice to the cooks that worked for him, but had very little tolerance for screwing up in the kitchen and would yell at people in a second for doing so and was very scary when he did. Kenny and Chris followed Greg in the kitchen hierarchy and formed the core of the cooking line.

Kenny was short like me, about five foot eight, and extremely serious to the point of being an asshole, which is exactly what one has to be like to become a chef, which I believe was his plan. Chris was another big guy, with an amazing amount of energy and a genuinely kind attitude to everyone in the kitchen. Kenny ran the fish station and Chris the vegetables and garnishes.

Mai, one of the many ethnic Haitians that worked at Le Bec-Fin at the time, was a tall, lanky, soft-spoken and also serious guy who worked the meat station, one of the hottest and hardest stations in the kitchen. Then there was Anne, a shorter blonde girl who worked garde manger, and Maria, also short, and mixed race, who worked both garde manger and the fish station.

This was an incredibly fun group of people to work with. We got along well and had fun with each other, which was good because the work was extremely hard. Before I started working at Le Bec-Fin, I had created in my head the idea that the pace of the work must be slower and more deliberate to produce the quality of food the restaurant put out.

This was of course stupid. People still expect to eat in about the same amount of time no matter how much money they are paying, and cooking times don't get longer just because you are making nicer food. The pace was the same -- the people were just way more talented.

For anyone who has the mistaken conception that cooking is glamorous and dainty, know that it's only that way on the cooking shows on TV. Restaurant cooking is hot, physical and fast-paced, while requiring extreme precision and an artistic attention to detail. It is like being a construction worker, floor trader, watchmaker and floral arranger all at the same time.

And almost all of the people that do it do so out of love and for very little pay. I have always felt that one of the biggest legalized rackets is restaurant pay systems. Wait staff, whose job skills include speaking limited English and carrying things, are paid multiples more than people who work much harder at much more difficult work.

I certainly wasn't paid much. While I legally couldn't "volunteer" (In my 20-year-old head I felt this was my best shot at an otherwise unrealistic opportunity...), I got paid close to minimum wage. But I learned an amazing amount about food in the short time I was there, and the extreme challenge of the work environment was something that would benefit me in future jobs.

The pace was unrelenting, and even the simplest of tasks that were assigned to me were not easy. Take the mashed potatoes, or pomme puree. First there was a precise balance between yellow and white potatoes. They could be left in water after being peeled to keep them from oxidizing, but only for a certain amount of time, or they would retain too much water to be smooth enough when prepared. The water had to be salted to the exact saltiness of sea water, if there were in fact an exactitude in such a measurement. They needed to be boiled just long enough to come apart when poked with a fork, but not so they crumbled from being touched. After they were boiled, they needed to go back into the empty pot with the fire on to boil off the excess water so they wouldn't be runny. Then they got pushed through a food mill while still hot. To the milled potatoes I would add about a third of the volume of the potatoes worth of butter (the good French butter used for sauces, not the regular butter) and then blend in whole milk infused just long enough with thyme sprigs. Once the mixture had the right puree consistency, it got passed again through a fine sieve to remove any bits of peel or thyme. And this was one of the easiest things to make in the kitchen.

Layers of processes to produce complex deliciousness. This was the French cooking I learned at Le Bec-Fin. I made mashed potatoes, boiled haricot vert, made crab galletes, broke down lobsters, and blended cauliflower puree for long, long shifts at breakneck speed for little pay while getting screamed at. I think the most colorful thing I ever heard out of the chef's mouth was "Move your fucking dickhole!" but there were stories of worse...I apparently missed a near knife fight on the line. This is kitchen work, and the people that do it love it, including myself for the time I was there.

But summer is also the season of vacation for the French, and the tradition extended to the American members of the staff also. After having sweated in the kitchen of Le Be-Fin for nearly four months, a strong and unanticipated wanderlust overcame me, and I began to look for a language study program in Japan for the summer of 2001. This was where my journey to Japan would begin.

Chapter 1 Part 2/4: From Fryers to Functional Fluency

Shigeki was probably between 50 and 60, but looked more like 45, had two wisps of gray hair on each side of his otherwise bald and fairly large head, sunken light-brown eyes, and wore a pressed chef’s coat, clean chef’s pants (unthinkable among cooks) and black Reebok high-tops, and smoked lots and lots and lots and lots of Marlboro Lights. He was like a hip mix between the Buddha and a Japanese Yoda, except raunchier.

Shigeki spoke understandable but accented English in a stern but deliberate tone that made me think he felt he had to be a hard-ass because he was Japanese and the chef. He seemed to have money and was close enough to retiring that he really didn’t care whether the restaurant succeeded in the long run, but was going to at least do a good job while he was there.

He, like many chefs, was an alcoholic, and made a habit of sitting at the sushi bar after closing with a bottle of Jack Daniel's chain smoking, telling dirty jokes in funny English, and sexually harassing the female wait staff. He often would rub leftover raw fish on himself before leaving at night so he could tell his wife he had been fishing when he went out to cheat on her. This always seemed dumb to me because he already smelled like raw fish anyway from the whole working in the sushi bar thing and because there really was nowhere to fish in Wilmington late at night, but what did I know.

We all got copies of the menu, and headed immediately back to the kitchen to learn to cook Japanese food. We started with various soy-based sauces, salads, tempura, miso soup and appetizers, and took notes while we learned each dish. During this process, which lasted around two weeks of a hundred hours each for certain members of the staff, Shigeki attempted to indoctrinate a mostly non-Japanese sushi bar and kitchen staff in the fundamentals of Japanese cuisine and knife skills. This was evidently a frustrating task, and on several occasions he walked through the kitchen summarily firing people.

Some of this was because some of the people were lazy, some of it was because some of the stuff was just hard. Take julienned daikon (Japanese radish), sengiri daikon in Japanese. The way this is done at the sushi bar is to take a razor-sharp 12-inch sashimi knife, cut the daikon into hand-length segments, hold one of the segments in the non-cutting hand, and rotate the blade around the segment using only the tension of the thumb in the cutting hand to produce a translucent-thin band of daikon which is then layered on top of itself and finely julienned. It was in detailed tasks like this learned through prolonged dedication (not in a ten-day crash course) that I first gained an appreciation of Japanese craftsmanship.

Shigeki also had a wonderful collection of Engrish tag lines he used to yell at people: "When you make, always make nice one!" "When you cut, cut smooooth!" and the his favorite, "I told you!" Not at least half smiling while getting yelled at was always a chore.

The only other Japanese member of the staff was an another Japanese guy who acted as the sous chef of the sushi bar. He spoke next to no English, and as none of the rest of the staff, including myself at the time, spoke any Japanese to ask him his name, everyone called him “the old guy.” He was a little more than five feet tall, wore the sushi chef get-up and paper hat cocked to one side of his head, and was the second Japanese person with whom I became acquainted.

I still remember his reaction when I read to him out loud some of the ingredients listed on a can of the Japanese spice shichimi -- like something had bitten him in the ass. This would be a reaction I would come to grow used to over the coming years.

The old guy would occasionally venture back into the kitchen from the sushi bar to make the tamago, the sweetened fried egg that accompanies sushi platters. The cooking of the tamago was the most difficult individual culinary skill I witnessed in my two years as a line cook. It involves heating a square, inch-deep copper pan to a high enough temperature to cook a thin layer of egg without having it stick to the pan but not so high as to brown the egg, folding over exactly half of the cooked layer with chopsticks, re-greasing the pan and repeating the process while maintaining the same temperature, until you are left with a half-pan "mille–feuille" of egg which is then cooled and sliced for service.

The less brown in the finished product the more skilled the chef, and tamago is traditionally ordered at the sushi bar to judge the overall quality of the establishment. I tried making it once when no one was around, and the overall quality of the establishment would have been judged to be quite low had it been served.

I spent probably close to six months working as a line cook at Mikimoto’s, and it was quite enjoyable. I again made friends with all of the Mexican kitchen staff, watched the Chinese cooks fight over the eyes when they made ginger-steamed fish heads for staff lunch (the cheek meat actually is the best part of the fish, apparently) and hooked up with at least one of the waitresses in the side parking lot.

I learned from Shigeki how to cook Japanese food, the Japanese no-nonsense approach to work, and, in retrospect, exactly what not to say to Japanese girls. And while I continued to take Japanese classes and annoy Shigeki with questions on Japanese grammar, at this point I still enjoyed cooking as much or more than my language major. As I couldn’t settle on which direction to go in, for the moment I decided to keep going in both.

Chapter 1 Part 1/4: From Fryers to Functional Fluency

My first encounter with the study of Japanese was during my sophomore year of college, around the time I was 18 or 19. I say encounter because at the time I was more actively involved in fraternity life than the actual act of studying anything, and wound up dropping Japanese 105 along with all of my other courses and pretty much the proverbial ball on my entire sophomore year.

I took nearly a year off school, during which time I cut grass, cared for plants and acted as basically a lackey on the estate of certain members of the DuPont family in northern Delaware. The work was neither fun nor rewarding and had no promise of anything better, but I was happy to be doing something substantive for which I got paid and to have a regular schedule. It also gave me the chance to consider what to do with my life with my head removed from the haze of sleeping half the day and spending the nights making blender drinks and jungle juice for "pimps n hoes" themed greek mixers.

After about six months at this job, I decided to apply for a job as a line cook at a Ruby Tuesday in The Concord Mall in Wilmington. Cooking was something I had always had an interest in and wanted to pursue. This job, although not any better paying and with not much more upward potential than the assistant groundskeeper job, turned out to be more interesting for two reasons. The first was that I was good at it – I had a natural ability for cooking and became quite competent at the job very quickly. The second reason was that two thirds of the kitchen staff, like the kitchen staff of all ten-dollar-a-plate, all-you-can-eat-salad-bar joints in the United States, was Mexican, and I could speak Spanish with them.

I had an excellent high school Spanish teacher, Mr. Cornish, and an ability with languages. I could speak mostly fluent Spanish, including plenty of expletives, from the time I was around sixteen, and so the Mexicans took to me quickly.

Almost all the Mexicans spoke very little or no English; almost all the managers all spoke very little or no Spanish, and the handful of second-generation Hispanic immigrants on the staff seemed to think that speaking Spanish would somehow compromise their hard-earned American identity and as such did so only when absolutely necessary.

So I became friends with Oscar, Jorge, Lucio, and Fermin, with whom I worked the fryer, made salads, ran the dishwasher and drank beers on the weekend. In the meantime I picked up Mexican Spanish and a deep respect for the Mexican people and their work ethic.

I continued to work the grounds keeping job during the day, coming into the restaurant every weekday night and all day on Saturdays and some Sundays. Experiencing working two jobs for dog-crap pay began to make me better appreciate the value of higher learning, and I made the decision to quit the grounds keeping job, keep the restaurant job, and begin to take classes again for elective credits.

The experience of speaking Spanish with my Mexican friends and co-workers at Ruby Tuesday made me realize that I should probably major at what I was good at, which was foreign languages, and so I decided to pursue the Three Foreign Language major offered by the University of Delaware.

The major was structured with a primary, secondary, and tertiary language with a descending amount of credit hours required for each. Spanish, which I already spoke and in which I already had a few credits from my freshman year study abroad program to Spain, was naturally my first choice. Since I figured studying three languages while working pretty much full-time would be somewhat of a challenge, I thought a language similar to Spanish would make a good secondary language, and so French was the natural choice.

But because the tertiary language didn't require too many credits, and I still had an interest in the novelty of learning to speak a language very unlike Spanish and French which not many Westerners spoke, I decided to give Japanese another go.

At around the exact same time, a restaurant offering “Pacific Rim-inspired cuisine and sushi bar,” Mikimoto’s, named after the Japanese cultured pearl merchant, Mikimoto, opened fortuitously a few blocks from my home in Wilmington. Mikimoto’s was hiring kitchen staff, and I walked down to put in an application.

When I arrived the chef was nowhere to be found, but there were a number of Asian kids in cook pants and aprons milling around the back entrance to the restaurant and construction workers finishing work on the dining room. I was told by one of the kitchen staff that the chef was not available but that the owner might be around in his office in the other restaurant he owned next door.

I was guided up the stairs to the owner’s top-floor office where he greeted me and offered me a seat. The owner was a somewhat overweight yet not bad looking and friendly Greek guy probably in his late 30’s who was polite yet clearly had more important things go do than interview a line cook.

There really wasn’t that much to the interview. Cooking jobs in general are poorly paying and the hiring standards correspondingly low, and so the fact that I had some amount of experience, had combed my hair, could speak coherently and was sober at the time of the interview was enough for the owner to guarantee me a spot on the line. I was given a date and time to come in and called Ruby Tuesday to let them know that I was moving on to bigger and better things.

On the day of the orientation all of the hires gathered in the main dining room and were separated into cooks and wait staff. There were about 15 cooks altogether including the sushi bar staff, three or four Vietnamese and Chinese guys around my age, several Mexicans, and a few American guys.

The chef that the owner had hired to run the sushi bar and kitchen was named Shigeki, who was the first Japanese person I knew.