I almost died, or was killed, really, three times, by three different girls, all of whom I loved, and probably still do, and even though they tried to off me, I wish them the best, because I’m not one to hold grudges. I’m not angry at them, and in fact, in some way, I can sympathize with their plights and emotional states, because at the end of the day, they only wanted to make sure that I wasn’t nibbling caviar off of anyone’s nipples but theirs. I can’t fault them for the laparotomy scar on my abdomen, dime-sized patch of baldness on my head, or aversion to being around anything plastic. By its nature, cooking professionally is a dangerous business, and when you throw someone like me into it, shit happens. I just have to chalk up these experiences as occupational hazards, part of the price I pay to do what I do.
+ + +
My mistake with Yessica was that I let her come to Ten whenever she wanted, and she came often, almost every night, which wasn’t, I have to admit, irksome in the least, especially since Ten was my first gig as head chef, and I enjoyed the attention. I fell into the position at Ten after the real chef quit on the owners six weeks after opening because of problems with his wife or ex-wife or girlfriend or someone like that. The owners, instead of bringing in a new guy to lead the kitchen, looked within, and handed the position over to me, which to them wasn’t that big a gamble, since the menu already had been set, and all that I needed to do was execute it. Plus, I was cheaper than an experienced chef, and after having spent most of their savings, almost half a million dollars, on setting up the place, they weren’t inclined or able to pour more money into someone who would want to retool the menu and put his own stamp on everything. I had a degree from C.I.A. and had worked as a line cook in a few well-known kitchens—I was qualified enough.
The first couple of months were hell. The wait staff never inputted the orders correctly, my three coworkers in the kitchen routinely came in hung over, and the owners, when they weren’t fighting with each other, bitched about how no one was doing his or her job correctly. I don’t know how I kept even one nostril above water during these first few months, but somehow I did, and somehow the place survived. Patrons came and ordered food, the wait staff bungled the orders over to us, we bungled the food back to the staff, and the staff delivered the crap back to the customers, who were too enamored with the hipness of the space and lateness of the hour to notice our general ineptitude. Over time, though, we got the hang of it all. The wait staff stopped fucking up so much, and we in the kitchen started cooking consistently. If somebody ordered the flat-iron steak medium rare, we delivered it medium rare. If the waitresses punched in two specials, their table had ordered two specials. If we had mustard greens on the menu, we had mustard greens in the kitchen.
Yessica popped into my life just as the place started to roll. On a slower than usual Thursday night in Los Angeles, I saw her standing in a short line for our single restroom, and, never one to shy away from a pretty chick, I stepped out of the kitchen, where I’d been yelling at my line cook for overcooking the pasta yet again, and asked her how the food was. She glanced down at her shoes, and let the secret out—she wasn’t here to eat. She was only here to use the bathroom.
I was taken aback and slightly insulted by the wrongness of her actions, but didn’t dwell on my indignation, because, like the owners were always saying, there weren’t such things as problems, there were only opportunities. And she was my opportunity—a cute, stacked, brunette one. By the time she’d finished her business, I’d already cleared a spot for her at the bar, and although she was reluctant to stay, especially since she still had another mile to go on her jog, I smiled, waved my hand at the empty barstool, and insisted that she be my guest. By then, the two appetizers that I’d already fired off to the kitchen—pan-fried dungeness crab cakes with a red pepper aioli and grilled asparagus with buffalo mozzarella and pesto sauce—were arriving, and her decision between exercising and eating was an easy one to make.
Once she sat down, she was mine, and from then on, that spot at the bar was hers. Four or five nights a week, when she would finish answering phones and filing and doing whatever else she did at that law firm in downtown, she would trek on over, park herself at the bar, order herself on the house a gin and tonic or iced tea and whatever that night’s special was, and immerse herself in what was essentially my nightly love letter to her. When she was done, she dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her napkin, and pushed the invariably empty plate back across the counter towards the bartender, before twisting in her stool and watching the staff fly about and deliver dishes to the other customers, the ones who weren’t receiving personalized attention from the chef.
Our relationship wasn’t complicated. I cooked—both at the restaurant and at home—she ate, and we made vehement, brisk love whenever we could. She poured an almost suffocating amount of passion into our relationship, and I hung on for the ride. Not only was she the first girlfriend of my new life as chef, but I was the first guy she’d been with who was able to satisfy her gastronomic cravings. We were a good match.
My mistake with her, though, was that I let her come to the restaurant too frequently, and in fact, encouraged her to do so, because like most chefs, I enjoyed having a pretty girl waiting for me at the bar. Because she was at the restaurant frequently, she became too familiar with the scene and staff, and noticed what women tend to notice: how the blond waitress with the nose job was too curt with her and how the skinny one with the tongue ring was too friendly. Sometime during the second month of our relationship, we were lying in bed, recovering from another bout of physical bonding, when she confronted me about those two waitresses, and my only surprise when she asked me whether I was fucking them, was that she’d taken this long to ask.
But as a cook, I was good at the art of deception—yesterday’s poorly selling tilapia transformed into today’s fish stew and the cheapest cuts of meat, such as shanks and short ribs, made into high-priced specials—and so I stared into her eyes, shook my head, and said, “No, never,” before kissing her nose and pinching her flank, and rolling off of the mattress. I headed to the kitchen so that I would have time to plot my excuses. She followed me, her body noticeably tense, and asked me again whether I was sleeping with those skanks, and again I shook my head, and shrugged my shoulders, and said that she was the only one for me. And because chefs communicate most effectively with their hands, I went to the fridge, removed some sashimi-grade ahi that I’d lifted from the restaurant, grabbed my chef’s knife, and went to work, dicing the ahi into perfect, five-millimeter cubes. She stared at me, unsure as to whether or not to believe my denial. I pretended not to notice her accusatory gaze, though, and continued on with my preparation, adding a touch of finely chopped fresh mint to the blood-red meat, before hitting the whole thing with a splash of sesame oil and soy sauce. I scooped a generous amount onto day-old brioche, and fed the simple but perfectly concocted treat into her doubting lips. As she tasted my dedication to her, we were okay again.
Or so I thought. When I came out of the bathroom after our impromptu but necessary snack, I saw her standing with my knife in her hand. Although I shifted to the side, she still managed to drive the ten-inch, German-forged, stainless steel blade into my belly.
Thankfully, she only damaged my spleen. The exploratory laparatomy and splenectomy kept me in the hospital for a week. Although she never visited me while I was holed up in a room with some expiring geezer in a ward on the third floor of St. Vincent’s, the cops did, and when they asked me whether or not I wanted to press charges against my girlfriend, I said, no, because I understood why she’d done what she had.
+ + +
With Samira, I was more careful in two regards: I rarely brought her around the restaurant, and never left my home knives unlocked and unattended. This second element, in which I hazard-proofed my apartment, was as important as the first. My chef’s knife, which had a ten-inch, laser-controlled, precision forged high carbon steel blade—yes, I’m aware of the phallic implications of this statement, but sometimes a knife is only a knife—was the workhouse of my cutlery arsenal. But it’d also been the taker of my spleen, and after having had experienced firsthand how my knives, when placed in the hands of a wronged woman, were as apt to cause me grief as they were pleasure, I wanted to safeguard my future, and so I stowed my home set—chef’s, boning, paring, steak, cleaver, and, just to be safe, bread knife—in the bottom drawer of a lockable, metal filing cabinet. When I cooked, I brought my knives out of hiding only long enough to complete my culinary tasks, and after I was done chopping and dicing, chiffonading and julienning, I made sure to stash them again.
When Samira entered my life, in the middle of March, during that time in Los Angeles when even the most lovelorn person becomes optimistic about his or her prospects, I was working at a different joint, Carve, a bright, airy steakhouse that, with its proximity to the Strip’s nightlife and emphasis on scene and liqueurs, seemed to cater to young, single women as much as it did to the typical industry types. I’d ended up at Carve six months after the whole Yessica incident. By the time I’d recovered enough to return to work at Ten, the restaurant’s cash flow problems had worsened, and the owners, rather than borrowing against their credit cards to make payroll again, had decided to halt operations and liquidate the restaurant’s assets instead. I’d popped up at Carve a few weeks later.
I met Samira in standard fashion. Paco, the waiter, relayed a table’s commendation of the food to me along with a description of the table’s demographics: young, attractive, females. I raised an eyebrow at him in routine inquiry, and he delivered the most important part of his evaluation: “No, boss,” he said, “they don’t look like the stabbing type.” Satisfied with his assessment, I draped a kitchen towel over my shoulder, and followed him out to the dining area.
I hadn’t dated much since Yessica, because I’d wanted to avoid the complications of commitment, but when I approached Paco’s table, which like many in Carve, was drunk off of wine, sated off of beef, and giddy from the anticipation that accompanied girls’ night out, I saw Samira, and knew that my self-imposed respite from women was over. I fell for the way her thick, silhouetted lips curled around her filet and how her delicately angled nose took in the scent of the garlic fries and how her impossibly gray eyes came to life with joie de vivre each time she bit into a mound of hash browns.
Thankfully, when you’re the chef at a restaurant, especially a decent one, drawing a customer out of the booth and into your life isn’t difficult. Tell the table that dessert—preferably something chocolate—is on the house, bring it over yourself, flirt a little in the process, and invite the desired party to drinks after closing. This is what I did with her, and that is how we started dating.
Whereas my relationship with Yessica had been quickly paced, passionate, and orgiastic at times, my relationship with Samira unfolded slowly. Because she was at the restaurant infrequently, we had to set dates, both initially and even when we’d reached some level of commitment, in order for us to find time to see each other. Getting our calendars to mesh was difficult, though, because I wasn’t getting out of the restaurant until midnight or later, and she always had to be at work at 8 a.m. But we made time for each other nonetheless. The dentist’s office at which she worked as a hygienist was closed on weekends, and I was off on Sundays, so we spent Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons and evenings together. We made love often on these afternoons and evenings, and after we united our bodies, we either stayed in, and I made dinner—following my previously mentioned knife protocol, of course—or we went out, and hit up an ethnic hole in the wall, or when I could afford to do so, one of those restaurants, which, unlike mine, actually had a starred review.
But sex is different than love, and because I was spending too many weeknights alone and Carve was filled with young, attractive, female patrons, I fell into old habits. Once a week or so, Paco, when he wasn’t commandeering the customers for himself, would come into the kitchen, and give me the lowdown on the clientele, and I’d yell at the grill cooks to keep their shit together, before following him into the dining room to greet another group of girls. Sometimes the ultimate subject of my attention resembled the girl next door, and sometimes she resembled someone more than that, and sometimes less, but always she was obviously interested: gaga eyes and constant licking of her lips and maybe fingers as well. (I want to say, though, that Samira had done none of these things. She had no chef fetish whatsoever—I’d won her over with well orchestrated charm and wit, and maybe that was why I liked her.) Oftentimes, I was too tired from standing on my feet for twelve hours to muster up genuine interest in this girl, but because I was worried that someday my good luck would run out and I’d be just another peon in a kitchen, impressive to no one, I invariably asked her if she would like to come back to the restaurant just before closing for a drink or maybe a cup of coffee, and most of the time she would agree, and then a couple of hours later, a tick before one in the morning, we would be creating stories—hers much different than mine, I imagined—on stainless steel carts in the restaurant’s dark, deserted kitchen as slabs of beef dry aged around us.
I don’t know how Samira found out about my indiscretions, but she did, because on a Tuesday night at 3 a.m., six months into our relationship, I heard her pounding on my door and shouting for me to open the fuck up, and because she wasn’t the cursing type, I knew what was up. I thought about ignoring her, maybe pretending that I wasn’t home, but realized that this strategy wouldn’t work, because my truck was parked outside on the curb. I had no choice but to let her in. I went to the door to open it, and as I made my way over, I glanced at the filing cabinet to make sure that my knives were locked away. They were.
There’s something to be said about that whole hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-woman-scorned thing, because Samira, who was usually calm and understated, was anything but. When I opened the door, she shoved me against the wall. She grabbed my shirt. She called me a liar and cheater and asshole and whore. She beat at my chest with her bony fists. I retreated towards the kitchen, in hopes of putting some distance between the two of us, but she followed me. She grabbed cans of vegetables, jars of ungrounded spices, wood and acrylic cutting boards, and even kitchen towels, and hurled them at me, and when she saw a 12-inch cast iron skillet lying on the stovetop, she seized it as well, and in impressive fashion, slammed the ten-pound behemoth against my head.
I wound up in St. Vincent’s again, but this time I ended up in the SICU on the second floor. I suffered a subdural hematoma and underwent emergent surgical decompression. I needed two weeks in the hospital to recover from the surgery, and during this time, Samira, like Yessica before her, didn’t visit me. When I was able to have a conversation again, the nurse informed me that my girlfriend had told the ER doc that I’d sustained the injury by slipping on a wet spot in my kitchen and banging my head on the counter. Accordingly, the cops never came. Not that it mattered, though, because I had no intention of refuting the story in the medical record. Again I understood that I had only myself to blame for what had happened. Keeping secrets from women was difficult to do.
+ + +
When I left the hospital, I replaced my humble, two-drawer filing cabinet with a five-drawer, shiny, polished steel monster, and clamped down on my home kitchen even more: knives stored in the bottom shelf; cast iron, stainless steel, and anodized aluminum cookware in the next three; and miscellaneous odds and ends, such as blades for the food processor and blender, manual meat grinder, and waiter’s corkscrew, in the top one. Cooking at home became expectedly laborious, and often I yearned to return to my familiar mise en place, but whenever one of these moments of twisted confusion came on, I ran my fingers along the jagged scar on my belly or the surgically induced patch of alopecia on the left side of my head to remind myself that cooking was a potentially dangerous business, and I was better inconvenienced than incapacitated. Expectedly, I dated casually during this time, avoiding anything that had the potential to last longer than two weeks or progress beyond three dates, which meant that I went out with a lot of girls with issues.
When I did find myself in another relationship, almost a year after my run in with Samira, I was working at Zen de Ojos. Carve had ended up doing well—steak paired perfectly with alcohol, and alcohol, with its 300% markup, is a great cash cushion—but unfortunately, the restaurant succeeded without me, because although I’d left the hospital after a couple of weeks, I hadn’t stopped feeling woozy and lethargic until two weeks after that, and by the time I’d been ready to return to work, the owners had promoted the main grill guy to head chef.
I struggled with Zen de Ojos in ways that I hadn’t with any restaurant previously. The place was typically cursed: in the past seven years, it’d had three different names and served three different cuisines in a space that housed three different styles and was owned by three different groups. Zen de Ojos, with its Latin-Asian bent, and dark-paneled, candlelit, feng shui-inspired design, aspired to go against history. I was brought in to set up the operational aspect of the kitchen, hire the kitchen staff, and design the menu to the owners’ personal philosophies, which meant that I was supposed to make the food “enlightened” and “harmonious with all people.”
Accordingly, the menu was shit: duck confit with wasabi foam, mango and papaya infused leg of lamb, melon marinated and habanero dusted short ribs, and a dozen other culinary atrocities. I tried to place simple and profitable fusion dishes on the menu, such as chipotle grilled strip steak and whole sea bass in banana leaf, but whenever I did, the owners frowned and scratched their heads and told me that not only had those dishes been done elsewhere, but that they didn’t embody the appropriate amount of pratitya-samutpada. So I came up with outrageous dishes, took solace in my health insurance, and waited for the restaurant to fold.
But it didn’t. Even though we served fewer than thirty dinners nightly, and rarely had repeat business, the owners, a married, semi-retired, wealthy couple from the Valley, didn’t have much else to do except support their dream, and they did so not only spiritually, by holding impromptu meditation sessions before service at least a couple of times weekly to motivate and guide us, but financially as well. I never saw the books, but figured that we were losing ten grand a month. I felt my career sliding away from me, and the fear that I would have to regress to line cook became more pronounced each time I served another dish of monkfish in seaweed curry or sugar cane rack of lamb with pomegranate sauce. I was about to bail and try my luck at anything else when I met Abby.
She was the owners’ daughter, and worked at the restaurant during her summer break from college. She came aboard to ease the operational difficulties in the dining room that had inevitably surfaced after three of our four waitresses had quit due to the lack of tips that came with an empty restaurant. Accordingly, she was different from most girls in the industry in that she wasn’t waiting tables so that she could support her aspirations for an altogether different life path: she had no kids to feed; no headshots to pay for. Rather, she was here because her parents’ dream needed help, both in terms of manpower and emotional support. I fell for her.
I didn’t know how to express myself around her, though. She wasn’t classically my type, and more important, I didn’t think that I was hers. I was hesitant to use my old techniques, the ones I’d used on Yessica and Samira and a dozen other girls, to draw her into my life. Not only didn’t I want to end up in the hospital again—even though the nurses were pretty, they couldn’t make up for the low fat, low sodium, high fiber crap that passed for food in that place—but I didn’t think that she would fall for them. She was too intimate with the restaurant on a daily basis to be impressed by my stunts.
By the end of summer, she was getting ready to head back up north to finish her last year of college, and as the date for her departure drew nearer, I became tense. Although I’d thought of her constantly, and had come to work during the summer mostly so that I could see her, nothing had happened between the two of us. Sure, she was genial and conversant with me, but she was pleasant with everybody, even with my two short, horny, leering line cooks. I couldn’t glean any insight from our abbreviated, mostly professional interactions.
A couple of weeks before she was supposed to leave, I worked up the courage to ask her out on a real date, and she agreed, as if she’d been waiting for the invitation all along. We went to a pizzeria off of Ventura Boulevard, which was her choice, and ordered a large meatball and onion pie and a couple of fountain sodas. I was a wreck that Sunday evening, and fumbled through dinner, botching the conversation, but she was relaxed and engaging throughout. To my surprise, at the end of the night, when I dropped her off at her parents’ place in Encino, she leaned over the center console of my truck, kissed me on my lips, and told me that she’d had a good time.
We started hanging out together outside of the restaurant. After we got off from work, we would head to a bar or club to dance and drink, or to a late night diner to eat and talk, and somewhere in between, we would make love in my truck or an alley or the walled off corner of wherever we happened to be. The owners—her parents—raised their eyebrows at us—or at me, actually—but never intervened, likely because she was leaving soon and they saw the romance as nothing more than a condensed summer fling.
It wasn’t. Even though she left for Palo Alto at the end of September, we held on to each other through phone calls, emails, and text messages, and because we were in love and happy and separated by only a six-hour drive or forty-five-minute flight, we stayed together.
Despite what Abby thought, I was faithful throughout. My eye wandered, but my heart and penis never did. Although the lack of women and waitresses around Zen helped me stay focused, it wasn’t the sole reason for my fidelity. I’d learned that certain activities, such as banging the hostess after hours in the stock room or London bridging a couple of female patrons with one of the more suave waiters, were incompatible with a healthy relationship. I’d almost died twice, and didn’t want to find out if the third time really was the charm.
Abby was suspicious nonetheless. As weeks turned into months and fall morphed into winter, she became increasingly interrogative: phone calls at 2 a.m. to see where I was; girls who were obviously her friends coming to the restaurant to deliberately tempt and test me; my line cook always asking me what I did last night before heading outside with his cell phone. The longer our relationship went on, the more uncomfortable she became with our routine physical separation. By the time December rolled around, I was ready to call it quits, because for once in my life I was faithful, yet I wasn’t receiving any recognition for my fidelity. But then we spent four weeks together during her winter break, and whatever reason I’d had for ending the relationship faded, because the conversation was good, the lovemaking was fierce, and most important, I actually loved her. By the time she left again at the beginning of January, I was motivated enough to ignore her jealousy and distrust.
In February, she popped into town the weekend before President’s Day, which was a week before she was scheduled to come down. She didn’t tell her parents about her impromptu travel plans, though, so that she wouldn’t have to spend the weekend in Encino and could hang out at my place instead. When I got off of work on that Saturday night—a paltry twenty dinners served—and returned to my apartment, she was sitting at the counter, poring over one of my recipe journals. Her hair was tied back in a bun, an unused apron was wrapped around her torso, and the counter was littered with groceries. I kissed her on the head.
“What’s up, babe?” I said. “What’s all this about?”
“I’m going to cook,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yes. I just need you to open up the cabinet.”
I glanced at it. I’d cooked for her occasionally, but not often, because we hadn’t spent much time together in my apartment. My work situation was linked to my personal one, and both of us had understood the potential ugliness of having the owners’ daughter fail to return to her room at her parents’ house at the end of the night.
I was expectedly nervous about cracking the cabinet. But I took a deep breath, and reassured myself that I had nothing to worry about. I reminded myself that I wasn’t sleeping around. I headed to the closet, withdrew the key from its hiding place, returned to the kitchen, and unlocked the cabinet. She smiled, and motioned for me to have a seat. I dutifully sat on the edge of the counter. I found myself rubbing my head as she withdrew the twelve-inch iron skillet from the cabinet, and realized that I was gripping the counter and tensing my abdomen as she reached into the bottom drawer to take out my knives. I waited for something to go wrong, but except for her cooking, nothing did. I forced myself to relax, and even offered up a few culinary pointers along the way. A couple of inefficient hours later, she had dinner—some type of beef goulash, I think—on the counter, and we sat next to each other, and ate. I forced the crap down, wondering how much worse dinner would’ve been had she not made it with love, and when we were done eating, we made cleansing, invigorating love on the floor of the kitchen amongst scraps of vegetable peels and discarded trimmings of meat. When we were finished, we did the dishes together. Then I made to sure to lock everything back in the cabinet, before heading to the closet and stashing the key in its usual spot. I saw no reason to be careless.
That night I didn’t sleep well, maybe because the food didn’t agree with me, or possibly because I was still hungry, or perhaps because I still suspected something. For whatever reason, I tossed about, and kicked at the comforter, and rolled onto one side and then the other. When I finally did fall asleep, a couple of hours after first sliding into bed with Abby, I had vivid, hypnogogic dreams, one of which was that I was receiving a neck massage and the other of which that was I was suffocating. I struggled to wake up from this second one, and when I did, I felt pressure around my waist and burning in my chest. I heard Abby verbally wondering in a high-pitched, shrieking voice why she’d gone out with a goddamn chef in the first place and yelling that I was goddamn cheater. It took me a moment to realize that she was straddling me, and then another second or so to appreciate that I was having difficulty breathing. I reached for my face, and found it wrapped in layers of plastic wrap. I was too confused to do anything but stare at Abby. Then I faded.
I spent only one night in St. Vincent’s this time. I’m not sure who called the ambulance or what the official reason for my admission had been, because the moment I figured out where I was, I left the hospital against medical advice. Accordingly, I never had the opportunity to ask the nurses about what was contained in the medical record, although, even to this day, I hope that Abby, and not some random neighbor who might’ve overheard our tussle, had been the one who’d called the medics.
I didn’t try to return to Zen de Ojos, not even to pick up my work knives, and the owners never called. When I was mentally and physically recovered–the physical part was easy, the mental wasn’t–I pushed Abby out of my mind, and started looking for a new gig.
+ + +
Sometimes I wonder about these girls: where they are, what they’re doing, whether they’ve forgiven me. But most of the time, I don’t dwell on them. I’ve moved on. I’m still a cook, and still hope to open my own joint someday, but in the meantime, I continue to operate as head chef in a borrowed kitchen, dealing with clueless owners, changing menus, and cash flow issues. I’m not the most lauded chef out there, but I pour my sweat into my work, and people enjoy my food. I’m making my mark.
For a short while after the incident with Abby, I gave up on women completely, but the monastic life didn’t last long. I didn’t see the point. Cooking for people professionally is a pleasure business, and as a chef, I’m right in the middle of it. I see no reason as to why I shouldn’t indulge in a waitress or customer or two along the way. It’s life in the kitchen.
