Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson

give you the guy’s number and if there are any forms, I’ll get them from the school. You don’t have to do anything extra besides letting me stay.” I took a breath. “What do you think?”
    Jorgen smiled. “Why didn’t you ask sooner?” he said.
    With the placement figured out, I took the idea back to my cooking teacher.
    “Why should we make an exception for you?” he asked. “This is not standard policy.”
    I responded with the confidence of a cocky teenager. Or the desperate. “You know I’m going to become a real cook when I leave here,” I said. “Unlike most of the kids here, I’m serious about it. And if I don’t get more real-world experience, I’ll fall behind in my chances of getting a good job after I graduate. Please?”
    “OK, Samuelsson, we’ll give it a try,” he said. “But you can’t miss any of your other classes. Remember: You’re still in school.”
    W HEN I ARRIVED IN S WEDEN , I was assigned a birthday of November 11. Each year, on that day, my mother or grandmother baked a cake, and at the end of supper, I opened a handful of presents. My grandmother gave me sweaters she’d knitted herself; my father gave me books; and my mother gave me clothes she thought I needed, usually more stylish than I would have picked out on my own. I could count on Linda and Anna to go in together on something cool. The year before, they’d cooked up the perfect Afro-Swedish gift: a Public Enemy album and a pair of turquoise Converse high-tops.
    That year—my seventeenth birthday—as my mother cleared the cake plates from the kitchen table, Anna leaned over to Linda and whispered something in her ear. Linda sprang up from her chair and ran downstairs to Anna’s room. She was back a minute later with a long rectangular box wrapped in paper I recognized from the previous Christmas.
    “Open it,” Anna said.
    I took my time peeling the tape off. The box seemed awfully similar to the ones we gave to my father on his birthday, the ones that held ties he promptly wore to the office for the next week straight and then buried in the sock drawer of his closet. With the paper off, I could see it was a box from Holmens Herr, the classiest—and least cool—menswear store in town. I tried to mask my disappointment and lifted off the lid, psyching myself up to show them only happiness.
    It was not a tie. It was a brand-new cook’s knife with an eight-inch-long carbon steel blade. This was the multipurpose knife every chef needs, with a blade thin enough to chop herbs, but a wide flat surface for crushing or picking up food. Better still, it was the Rolls-Royce of knives, brand-wise, made by the French company Sabatier.
    “I don’t know what to say,” I said, and when I hugged them, I meant it.
    I WORKED AT T IDBLOMS every day for the rest of the year, which made school bearable. My father might have known next to nothing about fine dining, but he had ingrained in me a flawless work ethic: I knew to show up on time, to listen to instructions, and never to talk back to my bosses. And the hard work paid off. I may have lost my place on the soccer team because I wasn’t as big as the rest of the guys, but in the kitchen, my size didn’t matter. All that mattered was the work.
    The cooks thanked me by letting me do more than simple prep work; I began to make
à la minute
sauces—those we cooked to order. For sole meunière, I’d step in after the fish had been cooked in butter, then add a few more tablespoons to the pan and watch until it turneda golden brown. At that point, I stirred in some minced parsley and poured in lemon juice, then took a half-teaspoon taste of it to see if it needed salt. Once I got it right, I handed the pan back to the cook, who checked my flavoring and drizzled the sauce over the plated fish.
    At Tidbloms, I learned the danger of complacency. Dialing it in is one of a chef’s worst habits. No matter how tired you are, no matter how stressed, you can’t take shortcuts. One