I work for a chef. He's a good man. He has broad arms that can easily carry 20 pounds of boiling water in each, without a drop falling. He has a belly, perfectly round, that, when he carries a glass of wine and a piece of bread around with him in the kitchen, makes him look perfectly at home; as though he is the lord of all that encompasses his vision and he will slowly consume it all. He is the kind of man, as a cook, I hope to be. He is hard and difficult, never easy to approach. His knowledge is apparent in his face and it's at once encouraging and terrifying to me. He is a good cook. That, to me, is all I hope to hear in return.
I recently took a trip to Chicago, a city I'd never been to before. I'd read a magazine given to me by a friend showing all the restaurants that were run by decorated chefs and the restaurants themselves looked more like temples than they looked like places to find food. They are the kinds of fashionable and hip places, with their slightly seventies-looking decor that your parents would take their friends to, if they happened to belong to that particular sect of the upper-classes that used adjectives to describe themselves like "worldly" and "cultured".
The other places they showed; the dingy soul food restaurants, the ones that are eerily reminiscent of my high school cafeteria and the barbeque joints, whose pit masters harbored their recipes to them like you would imagine Ahab would hold a spear. These are the places I wanted to visit. This is how I would judge the city, a city I have been considering moving to in the near future.
The city itself was cold, it being December. The lake was frozen at parts and its bank was covered by more bird shit than I can lay claim to seeing in quite some time. For most of my stay I walked uncomfortably in poorly constructed tennis shoes that had little traction on the slowly melting snow that covered the sidewalks. And I walked a lot. Miles, in fact. Everyday. I would walk from a friends' house to breakfast at Lula Cafe, which was perhaps only a quarter mile away. I would then walk to the polish neighborhood to buy homemade sausages for me and my friend, the one whose magazine had gotten me here in the first place. Then, it's another walk to try caramel corn that has purported to be the best in the country and finally, with what little effort my legs had left to give me, I would walk to dinner; wherever that might be depending on my schedule.
Every day was just like this one, but with different neighborhoods, restaurants and faces filling the same schedule. In that time alone during the days, when I would walk and think about the food I had eaten and all the food I had seen others eating I felt the urge to just keep going. It was no great epiphany that made this feeling creep up in me, it was the simple fact that my own culinary skills are so dreadfully meager, but my desire to become better had grown and there seemed, in those three and a half days, no end to what I could learn or experience: the short ribs, the sausages, the korean kitchens, the hot dogs, pizza, beef, pork, vegetables. I wanted everything out of the city. I wanted to turn it upside down and shake it by the ankles to take what I could from its pockets.
More than that though, I want to hear that I'm a good cook. Hopefully I will hear it from the chef I work for now in Richmond, but I doubt it. I'm not there yet. By my estimation, I probably still have a good 5 years to wade through before I can look at an acorn squash without tensing up with fear. That's okay. I have no plans of quitting anytime soon. It's possible I'll move to Chicago to learn more there. A bigger city. More restaurants. Who knows. Either way, I here that there's an amazing sandwich shop in Seattle.