Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson Page B

midnight, there was hardly a minute of downtime for the staff, fifty men and also a few women scattered in the traditional female kitchen roles of salad-making and pastry. I came in at the level of
köksnissen;
the only ones who ranked below me were the
garçons
, or interns, young guys who worked in the basement doing thankless prep work and cleanup. On my first day, I was issued my first chef’s jacket and houndstooth kitchen pants and told to report immediately to the fish department.
    Gordon was my boss. He was a fortysomething former rugby player from Australia who seemed to have a perpetual sunburn, even in winter. He was the
boucher
, the butcher, and his job was to process all the meat and fish when it came into the kitchen. Gordon was physically powerful, with a personality to match. He was quick to laugh at a joke, but he didn’t hesitate to shut you down if you were wasting time. He taught me everything I know about cleaning fish. Not just cleaning the fish, but what you could do with the bones, how you stored each piece, and what the different fish were for. I understood the difference between herring and mackerel, but now I was looking at exotic stuff like turbot and sole, learning in a tactile way about the different qualities of each species, which types could hold up under poaching versus grilling, and whether a fish’s flavor stood up to a flavoring of lemon or a particular herb.
    My main tasks were to unload fish orders and keep the refrigerator clean. The box, as we called the walk-in refrigerator, was lined with shelves and had four tall rolling trolleys in its center. Keeping it clean was the most physically difficult job I’ve ever had in a kitchen, not just because the fish came packed tight in large, cumbersome crates, but also because I had to haul hundreds of pounds of ice each shift to keep it from spoiling. You knew you’d done the job right if you didn’t smell anything when you walked into the box; even fishthat had been in-house for two or three days shouldn’t give off the slightest odor.
    I started every morning at six a.m. I emptied out each shelf and trolley, transferring the fish temporarily to the produce refrigerator. I poured hot water over each shelf to melt any stray ice, then wiped it down with a diluted bleach solution. I scrubbed the floor with a steel scrubber, and refilled the à la carte trolley with the fish that had been butchered for that day, so cooks could come and grab what they needed as soon as it had been ordered. Deep plastic bins filled the shelves along the wall. They, too, needed to be wiped out and re-iced, and they held some of the longer-storage items, like the caviars and roes; the crabs, lobsters, and shrimp; the gravlax and smoked salmon. By ten a.m., my time in the box was done.
    Between lunch and dinner I restocked the fish station’s
mise en place
, so that the chef could fill any order during meal service without having to hunt down an ingredient and chop it. In Sweden, dill was a principal seasoning, but chives, fennel, and other spices were also important.
    In the beginning, I couldn’t see past my mountain of tasks to absorb the approach and creativity of the lead chefs, but I tasted the food and saved the menus, and noticed when the maître d’ and servers seemed especially excited about a particular dish. I saw decanters for the first time and asked my
commis
buddy Peter why they poured wine from one bottle to another before drinking it. Peter didn’t know, so I went to Herved Antlow, the older chef who was in charge of banquets and didn’t make fun of my naive questions. He was old enough to be my father; maybe he saw me as a son rather than a competitor. When I was working with him on an event, he always saved a small piece of meat or a taste of a sauce for me.
    “Marcus,” he would say, “this is quail.”
    “This is the rouget fish from France—see how sweet and nutty it is?”
    “This is how you taste wine,” he would say,