Carl

The first thing you should know about Carl is that he does not like his fake name. “Oh, it’s so lame,” he said upon reading about it. “I know only like, two Carls, and one of them is a gay hairdresser.  It is so not cool.” He would prefer his pseudonym to be something more suave, more mysterious.”Like Constantine,” he suggested without an air of irony.

“CONSTANTINE?” I said, almost spitting out the piece of dehydrated ham I was munching on.

“Yeah, it’s cool,” he said.

—

I may not think him the coolest cook in the kitchen, but I know with certainty that when I look back on my time at Aldea, I will consider Carl to be my greatest teacher. He was the first person to work with me on the Garde Manger station and he has been the most firm, consistent instructor I’ve encountered in my entire culinary career (and yes, that includes the French Culinary Institute.) I will always remember, with terrifying chill and excitement, the first time he yelled at me: I was slicing an apple with a Japanese mandoline, ignoring the cutting board for a more convenient spot on the counter.. “YOU DON’T WORK LIKE THAT,” he said in a tone of voice that implied extreme anger without raising a decibel. I blanched and blushed, moving a passing tray underneath the falling apple slices. I was embarrassed, but he was right. He is most usually right.

Carl is only 24 years old, but he is more accomplished than I ever hope to be in that he is married and actually goes home after work. (I, along with our other coworkers, drink myself into oblivion before stumbling into bed at 3:30 AM with a bag of pistachios.)

But Carl is different.  He bounds in every morning, swinging a bottle of Vitamin Water, ready to work. He’s well-rested, despite insisting he didn’t go to sleep until 4, and he is unfailingly smiling. He gets angry when production goes awry and he sometimes lets his cheeks turn a pinkish-red under the stress of service, but he never berates or belittles his coworkers. He just puts his nose down and pulls through. For Carl, working at the restaurant is somehow both just a job and his entire life.

Carl is from Chile, and though his English is not perfect, it is beautiful. I adore listening to him speak and always find myself wishing he didn’t shoo me off to make a vinaigrette or bake croutons in the oven or some other equally impossible task. Carl is the kind of person who lends himself to the term “character.”

On Friday, I arrived at the restaurant mad as all hell, ready to throw in the towel. After being greeted by Tyler, the sous chef, with a stern reprimand over my flailing, failing kitchen behavior, I began banging around pots and pans, throwing large legs of cured hams to the counter with unnecessary but impressive force.

“What’s wrong?” Carl asked, buttoning his whites.

“NOTHING,” I said, and in the same breath, more truthfully: “I don’t know. Everything. I’m breaking up with Aldea.”

“What, why?” he asked.

I didn’t know where to start, how to complain about the struggle each day was, how unbelievably tired I had become, how much I missed having clean fingernails. I just focused my attention on the presunto, unwrapping the plastic from around it.

He pressed a little further, but when I offered no details, he relented. “Oh, you should have seen me at my first job,” he said. “I was getting yelled at all the time.”

I, in classic fashion, ignored his generous outreach and chose to whine about the state of my affairs. “I feel like I fuck up everything I touch here,” I said, positioning the ham on the slicer.

“Well that’s okay,” he said. And after a short pause: “It’s when you fuck things up three, four times, that it’s a problem.”

I paused too: did he mean to accuse me with the pronoun “you,” or was he speaking in general terms? I’d grown so paranoid in my month at the restaurant that every comment made by my coworkers seemed to be dripping with disgust and frustration over my incompetence. “Besides,” he said, “our generation wants instant, instant … and we forget that this, that cooking is a craft.  It isn’t instant! It can’t be!” Carl looked at me and didn’t exactly smile, but his face was lacking the severe lines that everyone else in the business seemed to wear. I wanted to sit and talk more, to probe about his early falters and feel comforted by his stories but with the slightest wave he had bounded up the stairs and vanished into the main kitchen.

I began to slice the presunto into thin sheets, arranging them on parchment, portioned for individual orders. I tried to make my mind focus on performing the task as fast as possible, but a half-hour later, I was still unwrapping and slicing pork product. Carl came back down the stairs, in need of mirepoix. I use the slicer a lot, and it is stationed on a table directly above the onions and shallots. When my coworkers need one, they’ll ask me to move in varying degrees of politeness (Michael lets a hand brush the back pockets of my pants and grins widely, Roy will bark “BEHIND” and Chef simply stands stoically until I piddle on the floor and side-step to the right). But that day, Carl just reached underneath me. As his hand wrapped around his vegetable, he cozied the side of his face into the crook of my arm, smiling up into my face like a cat in sunlight.

He held the pose for mere seconds – he had work to do, after all – but I knew that it would be enough to brighten my spirits for the remainder of the 13 hours spent in the shits.

He left and the slicer whirred. A chunk of fat from the serrano went flying, landing just under my ear. It was then that I remembered Carl’s words a week earlier: always sharpen the blade before slicing the hams. I sighed, annoyed that I’d forgotten something so simple. I was already behind schedule and reluctant to eat any more time, but I removed the ham and adjusted the apparatus. It was what Carl would have done, and if I can’t yet tell him how much I respect him, I can, in the interim, try to make him proud.

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