no. 68: old words

I am a somewhat unusual cook. My main qualification for the profession is that I was born and raised in Singapore, where food is both secular obsession and national religion. I didn’t learn to cook at my mother’s side, or my grandmother’s, and though my grandfather had been a cook for some years, we didn’t speak of it in the family. In Singapore, good sons do not learn to cook. They study hard and go to college and get jobs in nice clean places with climate control.  

By a stroke of luck that left both my parents and teachers dumbstruck, I was allowed into an American university. On the plane ride home after graduating, one of the most heartbreaking journeys I’ve undertaken, I read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. It was 2002, I was 22, and utterly lost. But I can do this, I thought.

I spent the next two years shuffling papers in a government office, keeping my head down and my hair short. We did nothing. Or rather, we spun our wheels with remarkable honesty – we all knew we were spinning our wheels, and no one pretended to have any higher goal than trying to direct where the mud we kicked up landed. To keep myself sane I went, four or five nights a week, to peel vegetables in restaurant kitchens.

The first place where I did this was a French restaurant, Salut. The entire staff, from the chef to the valet, was Malaysian Chinese. The chef was an eternally smiling Buddha of a man named Bright. The sous chef, who looked like a better-fed version of Fu Manchu, was a kid named Ken who was my age. With great patience, they taught me absolutely everything, from how to hold a vegetable peeler, to how to fold a kitchen towel, to how you should never try to cook for your mother. They were able to do this because Salut had seen better days, and the dining room was largely empty. I held down a station for the first time there, without realizing I’d been dragooned to save on labor costs, plating desserts for New Year’s Eve. Afterwards I walked up a nearby hill, where two friends and I drank till morning, talking about the future. 

Not two months after, Salut closed for three days, as is the custom, for Chinese New Year. On the fourth day, I returned to find it still shuttered. This was my first lesson in how to close a restaurant.