Chefs and Cooks

I’d been working with Si-fu for a week at Ho Ho BBQ, a tiny shop in a nondescript strip mall in suburban Toronto, learning how to roast meats in the Cantonese style. It was work that was supposed to be steeped, for me, in flavors of childhood, in memories of Chinatown walks with my parents. But charming memories don’t get you very far when you’re pushing around carcasses hanging like heavy bags in a boxing gym.

The pig was done. It was a good one, meaning that the bubbles were all trapped inside the skin, making it crackly but also incredibly light, with a texture like Rice Krispies. It threw its heat around the room as Si-fu took a breath and hoisted, squeezing his bony frame through the narrow shop toward a display case. Ideally, he would have waited for it to rest, but the customers were wild-eyed and he came back to it with a big blade and intention. He knelt, only this wasn’t a devotional act. He performed an awkward upward stroke with grace, cleaving one half from the backbone, and began cutting off customers’ orders. The knife sailed through meat and skin, making a sound like walking on potato chips.

After the rush, he cut me a piece and I saw what all the work was for: crisp yet dissolving skin, tender meat, and lush, velvety fat. Textures in perfect balance and contrast. The flavor, too: Earlier, Si-fu had me cure the splayed-open pigs, massaging them with fistfuls of salt and sugar until the carcasses looked like snow at the moment you realize there’ll be no school tomorrow. The cure has only a few hours to penetrate, giving each bite a heavily seasoned side and a clean, juicy side. The flavor was sweet, salty, complex, and then mild and pure, as fascinating as it was delicious. Si-fu looked at me. “Quality,” he said.

When I was a kid, I’d ditch the TV and run to help my mother on the nights she brought home a Styrofoam box from Chinatown. Inside there would be duck like this, pork like this; half of it would be gone before the rice was cooked. It always felt like some kind of reward, but later I realized that it wasn’t about me. It was about convenience. It was about being cheap and easy for Mom.

But the taste of that barbecue is mostly a memory. The places my mother used to go to have all either gone away or gone downhill. One night a few months ago, my great-uncle shook his head as we left Ho Ho. “It doesn’t taste this good anywhere else anymore,” he said. He talked about China as it was a half century ago, a place where everyone knew how to roast ducks so that they were as rich as these, how to roast pigs so that they were as crisp as these. I am never careful enough around nostalgists. I went back inside and asked Jacques Wong, the owner, to let me work with him for a while. He said yes so casually I didn’t think he meant it. Then he said, “You know, it gets hot in here.”

I learned a lot cooking at Ho Ho, but maybe most of all this: Whatever it was for Mom, none of this is easy. Not learning to see invisible bubbles or hear inaudible noises. Not standing in the heat of an oven twice the size of a refrigerator. Not butchering and butterflying whole animals. Not scalding ducks and pigs with heavy kettles of boiling water to tighten up their skins. Not hoisting pigs up the stairs, your knee hitting the backs of their heads and them hitting you right back. But Jacques Wong has been doing these things nearly every day for almost 30 years, the last 10 in this shop. I called him Si-fu, Cantonese for “master,” at first out of convention, then quickly out of genuine respect.

Quality was the first thing Si-fu talked about when I arrived at Ho Ho BBQ. It’s an idea that has a grip on him. He insists on buying nothing less than the best ingredients, on doing things the hard way, the right way. He tells me about the steps others will skip, the cheaper meats others use. But he is fixated on quality, and I suspect it’s because his skills did not come to him easily.

When Si-fu fled China for Hong Kong, he learned to cook from chefs who kept secrets. For years, he plied them with food and drinks in return for lessons, sometimes spending a fifth of his meager pay. A sated cook would show him how to marinate meat; a hungry one would send him scurrying to scrub ovens. There was no complaint in his voice when he told me this, but he also said: “Of course, you have to end up better than your si-fu. You have to take what they teach you and add to it.” His dedication to technique, to quality, is fueled by a fierce pride.

Customers came in spurts, and in the slower hours Si-fu had time to chat with them, handing out extra tidbits—a hock here, pieces of tofu there. Earlier I had watched him drop blocks of that tofu into the fryer with speed, showering his arms with hot fat. Now he’s just giving it away. A regular came in for some bright red cha siu pork and offered Si-fu a lemon cake she’d baked. Si-fu cut himself a slice and urged others to do the same. “You should try some,” he said to a customer who claimed not to like Western sweets. “You don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it. But you should taste someone else’s culture.” He offered to buy coffee for his staff, to go with the cake, and reached into a Styrofoam cup he keeps filled with cash for just this purpose. He reached in again for a little more to buy a lottery ticket.

Once, while waiting for a pig to start sizzling in the oven, Si-fu asked me why I hadn’t written a book about Chinese food to coincide with the 2008 Olympics, when everyone would be interested. I admitted I hadn’t thought of it. He shook his head with gentle disappointment. “You can’t be lazy,” he said. “You always have to be thinking if you want to make money.”

But his own numbers seem hard to figure out. He pays a lot for his pigs, he admits, but he likes the quality he gets. “The guy I buy from’s got a family to feed, too,” Si-fu said. “Hell, maybe he has a couple of them.” But after all the cutting and the curing and the scalding and the resting and the lifting and the roasting, if he manages to sell the whole thing, he nets $30.

It’s a cruel irony that people are increasingly willing to shell out for artisanal foods, and yet for so many cooks plying their traditional crafts in immigrant communities, the numbers don’t really add up. For Si-fu, it’s a brutal calculation, and it’s fine by him that his children don’t want to take over when he retires. He doesn’t want them to, despite his pride in his work. “You see how tired I am,” he said. “This is not what my children go to school for.” He just told the story of the immigrant in one sentence.

Still, I protested. What about all your hard-earned experience? Who will carry on this craft that you’ve learned? He smiled and pointed toward the notebook in my hand. “Besides, I learned to cook,” he said. “When I retire, I can just relax and cook for myself and my friends. Cooking for them is the most satisfying thing I can think of to do.” Then, I understood why he cut me good pieces from the pig all day long, why he hands out the tofu. His work is hard, but he also gets to give.

Back in the basement, I stared at 40 pounds of pork in the sink before pouring on the marinade that will turn it into cha siu. It was like a kiddie pool full of meat. I dug in with my hands, intensely aware of the cold pork, the salty grit, the slippery liquid. I tossed and folded at first, as if working a delicate dough, but then with an animal urge sank down to the elbow and stirred with my arm. I could feel my biceps warming, grinding through the resistance. I could feel my muscle working in this muscle, heard with satisfaction the sloshing and gurgling of so much meat and moisture. Behind me, Si-fu hauled out a massive propane stove and set water on to boil.

I ran upstairs to deliver a chicken and noticed that the case was nearly empty. There was hardly any pork left, a few bits and pieces, and I ran back down to report. Si-fu looked at the clock, a few hours from closing. He leaned on the table and thought. “Let them sell out. We’ll just close up.” He took a beer from the fridge and got back to work, showering hanging pigs with boiling water. Then he added, “It’s not worth the gamble.” By that he meant roasting one now and risking its not being sold. He doesn’t sell leftovers. “I only sell fresh. You have to do things ‘number one’ if you want people to come back,” he said. “That’s why every step matters. That’s why how you season matters. How you brush on the sauce matters. Sewing the ducks up so no marinade comes out matters.”

Just then, I noticed one of the ducks springing a slight leak from its braided flap and pointed it out to him. He took a swig of his beer, his eyes glassing over with tiredness, and aimed his kettle full of water at another pig. “To hell with it,” he said. No, I thought, his kids are not going to school for this.

Ho Ho BBQ 3833 Midland Ave., Scarborough, Ontario (416-321-9818)

For further stories on Si-fu Wong and his son, click here.

It was early spring and it was a dish very much of the moment, the bird served with wilted ramps, spring onions, pearl onions and a sauce of cream infused with onions. A few baby spring turnips. All things with bite, mellowed by youth and cooking. As I ate, I thought, “What makes duck more delicious than onions?” And also this: “In a few weeks, when spring is gone, this dish won’t be here anymore.”

Franey’s cooking is elegant, muscular and ephemeral. He refers to “microseasons,” like the part of the onion season when the onion is most delicate. As a result, his cuisine is ever-changing; it’s a cuisine of creativity and spontaneity; it’s a cuisine of what’s new. It’s about a sensibility and a philosophy more than it is a collection of established “signature” dishes. Of course, Franey’s not alone in this — it’s the prevailing ethos of most ambitious young American chefs. Which is why it seems a little strange that the wildly talented Franey’s first executive chef job is at Canlis — 60 years and counting of marriage proposals, anniversaries, and meeting the in-laws. It’s a vibrant restaurant, not a museum, but it’s still known for the signature dishes it started out with, dishes that include a twice-baked potato.

Here’s a snapshot of what American fine dining was like back in 1964. On the cover of “Famous Foods From Famous Places: Specialty-of-the-House Recipes From America’s Leading Restaurants,” there is a bowtied waiter wearing a bright red sportcoat, drowning bananas in orange glop. The big, wilty magnolia blossom on the table is passing out from the heat of the chafing dish, looking like a sea monster dying to crawl back to the water. Bon appétit!

Inside, there is a section on Canlis, then 14 years old. Restaurant years being similar to dogs’, Canlis was already an elder statesman, and the book describes its speciality-of-the-house dishes: broiled steaks, steak tartar, prawns sautéed with vermouth, and, daringly, a Canlis Salad that, “with no apologies to Caesar, contains mixed greens tossed with croutons, minced bacon and grated cheese,” prepared by “pretty Japanese girls wearing bright colored kimonos.”

The meaning, the very point of a signature dish is that it doesn’t change. Rarely do chefs themselves set out to create one; it’s a designation conferred by the public, and yet, once you accept it, it becomes a pact with your diners: If you come here, you can have this thing. It’s both an honor and a bind. So how do you deal with that if your entire culinary philosophy is based on change?

Through most of its history, Canlis was considered a steakhouse. And while the ’90s redesign of the stunning mid-century modern building left a gorgeous, sleek, muted space, there is no missing its history: A massive, copper-plated grill station juts into the dining room like the prow of a mighty ship, where the Chef-cum-Captain, be-toqued and grand, would stand at the helm, meat sizzling before him.

“Back in the day,” Franey said, pointing to the grill, “the chef would call into the kitchen on a microphone for his plates. They might have all had the same vegetable, the same potato, the same garnish. He’d just put the steak on and send it out from the grill.” Fifteen years ago, Canlis made the shift to being a modern restaurant under chef Greg Atkinson, focused on seasonal Northwest cuisine, but the first thing Franey did was change the structure of the kitchen. Literally. He personally sawed down all the racks in the middle of the line so he could have his own station in there, cooking with his crew.

And this is what I mean by cooking: curing venison in pine ash. Slicing opakapaka into sashimi, serving it with fennel pollen. Spherifying a Tequila Sunrise. And also searing steak teriyaki, sautéeing prawns in vermouth, and plating massive Canlis Salads that dwarf almost anything else coming out of the kitchen.

The classics are delicious, to be sure, but isn’t their unyielding presence frustrating for a chef so inspired by newness?

“I’m not driven by my ego,” Franey said. “I work for this family, and those legacies are part of this family. Mr. Canlis said to me, ‘My name is on the door, but this place is bigger than me. It’s bigger than all of us.’ I’m here to cook for the guests. If you’ve been coming here for 30 years, and you’re thinking, ‘Don’t mess up my steak teriyaki!’ I need to earn your trust.”

It was a lovely answer, but, frankly just a little too diplomatic. Pressed, he eventually admitted that it would probably be easier to start a menu from scratch. But then he smiled and added, “But what’s the fun in that?” Learning to make really killer Peter Canlis Prawns was, too, a form of change.

We got back to talking about the duck. Even just remembering it made me a little wobbly. “What did you … do to that thing?” I could only manage to ask.

In his modest way, he said, “Well, we roast it at 450 degrees for 16 minutes.” Then he added, “We rub it in honey first.” I asked about brines or injected marinades or sorcery — what gives it that crazy, amazing flavor? “Oh,” he said casually, “and we dry age it for 14 to 24 days first.”

The aging, for which he works exclusively with specialty butcher Tracy Smaciarz, gives the duck a wild flavor, flavor you can’t make in a lab or a kitchen, flavor that is the handiwork alone of enzymes and bacteria and time. Coming out of the oven, it’s a powerful scent: the unparalleled aroma of browned bird skin, the sweetness of toasted honey, the floral perfume of the herbs stuffed into its cavity. But the thing, the thing that you can’t miss, is the funk. The funk the bird casts off like a lure, a smell like the edge of a prosciutto. If you get close enough to be impolite, it’s a bit like the part of the cheese counter where only eagles dare to fly. Woven into the taste of the meat, the funk is subtle, a backdrop of complex, floating, lingering flavors you can’t really place. It tastes deeper than duck you’ve had before, darker, weirder, and yet also somehow lighter. Less bloody and mineral, sweeter, a cheese-rind-tang rising through the fatty succulence. It tastes like genius.

“How did you think of that?” I asked.

“Well, I learned it from Daniel Humm,” he said, matter-of-factly, referring to the chef he worked for at Eleven Madison Park in New York. “And he learned it from his mentor, Gerard Rabaey.” And he probably learned it from his, and so on. It turns out that the tradition of hanging game birds to age is, well, very, very old. Medieval. Franey smiled. “Daniel said to me once, ‘We don’t really make anything new. We just do it well.’”

After I left the restaurant, I tweeted about my incredible meal at Canlis. The tweets came flooding back: “Did you have the duck?” “The duck!” and “Please say you had the duck!” I laughed. Looks like Franey has a signature dish on his hands.

Still, even beyond the stunning creativity, intelligence and emotional expression in his work, it may be because of Grant Achatz’s biography that he will become a household name. Growing up in a diner family in small-town Michigan, he was cooking at 5, and in the diner kitchen at 11. By high school, he knew he wanted to be a chef, a great one. After culinary school, he wrote the then still-obscure chef Thomas Keller at the French Laundry in Napa Valley a letter every day for weeks, until Keller took him on as a cook — and under his wing — as that restaurant was becoming known as the “most exciting place to eat in the United States.” Four years later, Achatz was running his own kitchen, and a just few years after that, his own restaurant, Alinea, was called the best restaurant in the country by Gourmet magazine and its editor, Ruth Reichl — who put Keller on the map with that pronouncement years before. But then — and this is the movie stuff — Achatz was diagnosed with tongue cancer. Yes, tongue cancer, and bad; he was given just months to live.

His memoir, “Life, on the Line,” was published last week: a story of being utterly driven, of finding and focusing creativity, and of friendship and survival. He spoke candidly with Salon over the phone about how you can be a great chef and not enjoy food, his creative process while he lost his sense of taste, and on how his drive has burned and rebuilt bridges.

There’s often an assumption that chefs have to be obsessed with eating food. And so I was struck by a comment I read by a chef who cooked with you at the French Laundry, back when it was first hailed as the best restaurant in America by the New York Times. He said that you ate very little fat, only lean meat and egg whites because you were a health nut. How can you eat like that and be a great chef?

Well, there are so many ways to look at food. In all honesty, there was no pleasure in eating like that. Boneless, skinless, boiled chicken breast? It’s really not that good. But what that afforded me was pleasure in something else — I was a workout freak. I was competitive in that area. You set a goal, you achieve it, goal, achieve, goal, achieve. Eating like that wasn’t about flavor, it was about the pleasure of attaining a different kind goal.

But you can still approach cooking and food in an evaluative, focused way. I could still taste and evaluate that sauce I was making. I didn’t necessarily enjoy that spoonful of sauce while I was pouring sweat cooking on the line, 95 degrees, but I could taste it and tell that somebody three minutes later, in the dining room on their anniversary, would really enjoy it.

My food has to be delicious, first and foremost, but so much of the experience is about other things. If Heather and I come across some figs, she might eat it and think, “Oh my God,” and I might be thinking, “Yeah, it could be better with a little salt, crack of black pepper, and balsamic vinegar.” But if we’re in the Napa Valley, taking a walk, find them on a tree … the figs are just going to be better than if you seasoned them “perfectly.” Ultimately the perfect meal is when those things come together – circumstance, the food, ambiance, and you’re with the person that you want to be with.

It’s one thing, though, to be eating bland food by choice, but you later lost your sense of taste for months during your cancer treatment. In your memoir, you wrote that you grew to almost hate eating, not just because it was physically painful, but because when you couldn’t taste the food, the sensation was just full of loss — what you couldn’t do. How did your cooking and your creative process change at that time? How did it feel different?

Well, the sense of satisfaction was much different. Once, we got some amazing artisan shoyu [Japanese soy sauce]. I smelled it, and could detect coffee and chocolate, and said, “We’re going to make a dessert with this.” Jeff [Pikus, who was Achatz's second-in-command during his treatment] was like, “He’s lost his freaking mind. Way too much Vicodin.” So I made him smell the sauce and the chocolate. I had to talk him into why it might taste good. And then when we put it on the plate, I had to ask him, “Does it taste good?” You’re never really in that position as a cook, not knowing.

So the satisfaction was intellectual, but the big payoff moment of putting that first spoonful in your mouth isn’t there.

In some ways, it was more satisfying, because you’re tuning into something that you didn’t before. And we developed far more collaboration, far more trust.

Another thing, too. When I was just getting my sense of taste back after treatment, I can probably say that the food at Alinea was too sweet.

When my taste was gone, I was hyper, hyper, trying to tune into it. My taste eventually came back in stages: first sweet, then bitter, then acid, then salty. But when that was starting to happen, I noticed myself using a lot more bitter flavors. I was never a bitter flavor lover, but post treatment, just because I could discern it, I was putting it in everything. I yearned to have the satisfaction of tasting something, anything, so I used a lot of sweet and bitter flavors, just so I could taste it. But eventually, it really, really made me understand taste, and the way components come together. Because we never normally have the opportunity to isolate taste.

There’s this old cliché that the Chinese have a proverb, “May you live in interesting times,” and you can never tell if it’s a blessing or a curse. So you’re young, you’ve reached the heights of your field, survived life- and career-threatening cancer, but you write in the epilogue of the book that coming back to “normal” life after treatment was the hardest part. Why?

My personality was always such that I always look straight forward, never behind or to the side. I compartmentalized. Anything that could ever prevent me from achieving a goal, I put in a box, tape it up, throw it over my shoulder. You aim for a goal and attain it. Then you look to the next one.

Then something like this happens, you get incredibly lucky with a great medical team. You make it. Then you come back to work and you’re like, OK. When I was at Trio [Achatz's first kitchen], the goal was to get a four-star review in the paper. Done. At, Alinea the goal was to get Ruth Reichl to call you best restaurant in the country. Done. Then it’s to be in the Restaurant magazine top 50 in the world, and you get that. And then you might die, you beat that … and then what? What do those stars mean now? What do you have to achieve?

It shorted my system, and I went into a panic, like, “Whatever happens at this point, will I ever get satisfaction from it?” The competitive side of me felt like there would never be a great challenge anymore. Then I got into this weird place mentally, where all the sacrifice, all the work, guys grinding it out — for what? So what? Everything I ever believed in, everything that was important, completely got lost. And all I saw was the grind of it.

After I hit that low, I spent a couple weeks at that low. Pikus quit. The guy was the ultimate soldier. He worked at Trio, helped us make the “best restaurant in the country,” led Alinea through the most difficult time. He soldiered through all of that. Then one day, after my treatment was over, we were working on developing a new dish together when he imploded and walked out. He looked up at me, said, “I can’t do this.” Our eyes met for a second and I said, “OK.” After that, I just looked back down on the dish and thought, “I gotta get this on the menu tonight.” But then I was invigorated by the challenge. It went on the menu that night. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not about achieving, it’s about trying to achieve. Now I realize that it wasn’t until I saw someone else lose focus that I realize how much I’d lost focus too. During that low period, I was like, “Screw this, screw them.” And when I saw him have that attitude, I finally saw it in myself too. And the first time I talked to him, two and a half years later, was a month ago.

Speaking of strained relationships, there’s a lot been made of your chapter about working briefly for Charlie Trotter, the other Chicago chef whom many have long considered to be among the best in the world. You idolized him from reading his books, worked with him for a few months, but had a couple of icy exchanges during that time. And when you tried to talk to him about wanting to leave, he basically said, “If you leave without working here a year, I don’t know you.”

Well, a lot of what people reading the book are like, “Oh man, I bet Trotter is pissed off.” For me, as a young cook, that experience was disheartening. But it’s not like he’s a monster! He’s a perfectionist who won’t let anything get in his way. And I told those stories to draw parallels to my own personality. His “If you leave now …” was really just like my, “Fuck Pikus. You walk out the back door, you’re gone.” I’m not trying to get back at the guy. I was a 22-year-old cook. A lot of people are trying to pit the two of us against each other, but that’s not what it’s about. He’s on an all-out assault to make the best restaurant in the world. If there’s one thing I regret in the book is that I don’t show enough that I respect him, as a chef that’s completely driven.

And then there’s another story of strained relationships that doesn’t necessarily get resolved in your memoir. You tell the story of being 14 and building your first car with your dad. Later, we find that there are problems in your family, and you don’t talk to him for many years. So why is the story of building the GTO so prominent in the book, and in your mind? I’ve heard you tell the same story to aspiring chefs.

Well, there are so many parallels between that experience and being a chef. Putting the car together is like organizing a kitchen. I didn’t know that then. But when we were building Alinea, I kept drawing back on that experience. The most important thing is that it’s hard work. You want something that’s great? Build it yourself, actually reap the tangible benefits of it. I was 16 years old, and I had the coolest car in town from a $1,400, literal piece of junk to something great. That’s the critical thing.

My dad and I built that thing from scratch, over two years, to show condition. But when my parents got divorced for the second time, I said to my mother, “I don’t really give a shit what you do with the car.” So she sold it to my cousin. It totally went out of my consciousness.

Then in the book, there’s a story about your father coming into Alinea randomly one day, but we don’t get to see how that meeting goes.

That was the first time I’d seen him in 10 years or something, and you have all that residual resentment. Part of me thought it would even take too much effort to repair a relationship at that point. So he agreed to come in for dinner, but I said, “Oh, he won’t get it, he won’t even like it.” That was me emotionally protecting myself: “If he doesn’t understand this food, he won’t understand me.” But he had dinner, had my food, and he got emotional. He got it. We talked about it for a long time after his meal. And that … that was the starting point of our relationship again.

Postscript: For the release party of “Life, on the Line,” Grant’s business partner (and co-author) Nick Kokonas found the old GTO and had it rebuilt as a surprise. Grant’s father was at the party, too.