no. 84: acts of cartography

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about the Italian word umarell. Per wikipedia, it literally means “little man,” but is also widely used to refer to retirees who stop in the street to watch construction, stereotypically with hands clasped behind their back. In my household it’s become a verb: to watch someone at work, usually while standing somewhere inconvenient, especially while peppering the worker with questions and exclaiming “fascinating.” The clasped hands are optional, though in practice they feature more often than not.

I also started watching S2 of The Bear last week. I was cleaning banana leaves at one in the morning while waiting for my seri muka to steam. It felt like the rare, right kind of moment to watch TV. S2 makes my head ring even louder than S1, because on some level I think of myself less as a chef and more as someone who opened restaurants. Building a new restaurant is less a construction project and more an act of cartography, a rewriting of peoples’ mental maps – but it still involves spending a great deal of time in a construction site. 

The first restaurant I worked on was this place in a back alley in a neighborhood called Union Square, in Somerville, Massachusetts. The previous tenant in the space was a pasta sauce company, and the building itself had been built around 1910, so turning this into a place where guests would actually want to eat was not a small project. Since I wasn’t a professional in the building trades, I was an umarell, in both senses of the word: I was there to observe what was happening – it was my project, after all – but I also frequently felt little, humbled by the scale of what had to happen, and powerless to help. 

So I patched the ceiling, four and a half metres high and made of honest-to-god horsehair plaster, complete with actual horsehairs. I’m not sure who I thought would come to our restaurant and spend time looking at the ceiling, but it felt good to effect actual, visible change.

And I reglazed the window, which really belonged in a cathedral of industry. It was four metres wide and three metres high, and had been boarded up for almost 30 years. 60 panes of security glass from five different decades, in various states of disrepair, gave it a stained glass aspect. Perfect, circular craters from BB gun pellets, each with a tiny perforation in the middle, provided extra ventilation in the winter. Every pane had to be re-sealed, and the broken panes had to be replaced, and scraping out the old putty was a perfect task to occupy amateurs on a worksite. We discovered that glazers used to mix portland cement into their putty – it required masonry chisels, or an orbital sander. We spent weeks restoring a window that would mostly be obscured from diners’ view by plants (and would, as things turned out, be demolished by an errant SUV a few months later). 

This was all dictionary-definition yak shaving – the kind of thing the characters on The Bear spend much of Season 2 doing – but it was also an almost inevitable reaction to my own feelings of helplessness. I don’t know how effective these activities were as therapy, and looking back I’m pretty sure I’d have been better served spending my time on other things, but they at least ensured that I spent a lot of time on the site, umarelling. I may not have been able to plumb a grease trap or fit a gas line, but I knew where the grease trap was and what we’d had to dig up to put it there, and I can still draw every gas line in the space from memory. I know that restaurant far better than I know my own apartment, where the drywall conceals dragons. I could have learned all this from the blueprints, but umarelling gave me proprioception, a sense for old wounds, first hand memory of scars.

Maybe this is why it’s worth spending time as an umarell – because knowledge and history aren’t the same, and they reinforce one another, pas de deux-ing deeping into your brain together than each could tread alone. This is a kind of spell only time and attention can work, a specific kind of magic, an understanding that only comes from spending minutes or hours observing. We don’t watch our children just to keep them out of trouble.

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The seri muka came out well – the first specimen I’ve been really happy with (Denise Fletcher’s black sesame version worked a charm). I was overthinking and over-optimizing previous attempts, because this kueh felt like a capstone project. As in so many things, just chilling out a bit and slowing down made all the difference.