The Kodachrome Kitchen
I walk into the kitchen on Walnut Street, breezing past a few cases of Moet, ice coolers, and scattered packages. Pushing past the swinging doors, I’m wrapped in the womb of the kitchen, which thrums with its own unspooling energy. Abundio is singing in his throaty soprano to a Spanish love song, while Hector hoses down the dishes from last night, spraying the nozzle over a crate of 150 cocktail plates. It’s a little chilly here -- Chicago winter wind blowing in as the doors swing open for a cave, just unrolled from the truck. To my right, Mai is assembling 500 vegetarian egg rolls, to the left Moses is rolling dough for dinner rolls, and in front of me, Carlos, Juan and Juve alternate between vats of broth and sauce, the flames rolling towards the ceiling, shooting out from under the industrial grade saucepans.
This is the kitchen - my makeshift home.
I’ve made my way back to Chicago -- packing up my one bedroom in Carroll Gardens, the best brownstone a girl could ever ask for, complete with mini crucifixes, garden overlook, and protective landlord who never really fixes anything but is always sauntering around in dad sneaks and sleeveless tank. “Hey Remy,” he says, the dog crashing against the inside of his apartment. It’s here that I am often hungover, binging on Sunday afternoon Lucali and Peroni, slinging groceries from the local bodega, or Paisano’s -- the best butcher in BK. In this place, I realize that my destiny is food, and also that I am miserable. In between rinse and dry cycles of soapy laundromat clothing, I realize I’ve got to pack it up. Make a new start. Change my career and find a way to connect to the fire within, which is comprised of some mixture of nostalgia, food, anthropology, storytelling, family. And so I do. I sublet my apartment, quit my reputable agency gig and talk to my mom’s chef on the phone from a bench in Dumbo, overlooking the water. “How would you feel about me coming back, and hanging with you in the kitchen?” There’s a pause which I try not to take personally. “Absolutely.”
Flash forward to a year later. I’ve catered my best friend’s birthday, rolling pasta dough and shaking martinis till dawn; assembled tacos for 2,000, looking up to find that a) there is flour under my eyes and on my tee shirt, and Cee-Lo is standing in front of me (turns out everyone wants to be in the kitchen); styled and produced photoshoots with professional food photographers and emerging international brands, started dating a vegan and experimenting with plant-based recipes and styles; and enjoyed countless beautiful, potentially melancholy locations. A few include: early morning coffee at 4LW, various intricate and delicate buckwheat pastries at Cellar Door Provisions across the street, handmade pasta and negronis at Montiverdi, chopped and screwed salami and fontina salads at Club Lucky, oily bowls of goat consomme at Birrieria Zaragoza, slurped in the back room, clay bowls of lime wedges and ice cold cokes littering the table.
In between the projects and plates, I’ve started reconnecting with the Midwest. My boyfriend’s mother grew up in Owings Mills, Wisconsin and I love her memories of this wild country; eating whole sticks of butter and swimming wild in the freshwater lakes. My imagination is a twisted William Sonoma catalogue, filling steadily with visions of speckled eggs, roosting hens, arugula and pea shoot salads in rough olive wood bowls. I’m reading anything I can get my hands on, and I keep coming back to Midwestern cooks and storytellers, intrigued by the fact that I share experiences with a few of them, namely a larger-than-life mother who has instilled me with a love of food and eccentric hospitality, and an accidental pull back to this part of the country, thick as molasses, but not exactly expected.
They describe a psychological landscape I’m familiar with -- a deep rooted connection to food and craft, springing from family tradition -- which they try to ignore through other careers, relationships or adventures, finding themselves swept back against the current and into the arms of the kitchen.
Is this me? It is.
Granted, my love affair with food started decades ago. It’s in my DNA. The film reel begins click-clacking, the Kodachrome carousel clicking past grainy images; my grandfather (nannu) frying up zucchini pancakes in his low kitchen in West Virginia, patting them dry and hitting them with a fleck of shaved parmigiano, salt and pepper, before padding back to his wine cellar for some Mario Rossi jugs cleaned, sterilized, and filled up again with his homegrown wine (some years bubbly and effervescent, other years cool and crisp); dad standing at the stove braising oxtail ragu over a two day period, serving it over al dente rigatoni with sliced carrot and celery; mom and I barrelling through the suburbs of Chicago to Fresh Farms, cycling through the never-ending imported cheese aisle; stopping at the fish counter where the scrappy chefs gut mackerel, tossing their spines to the side, hitting the buzzer with their sleeves rolled up, revealing Bulls and Biblical tattoos, Jesus soaring towards the heavens.
The moments are all there, once you put your finger on the pulse. Allow yourself to do so.
The first pin prick of love comes to me in D.C. I’m in the shallow end of the pool, at my then-boyfriend’s aunt’s house. The house is very beautiful, hovering somewhere between Laura Ashley daydream and Indian antique. The aunt and her husband are intellectuals, writers, bon vivants, beyond chic. I love being around them, and seeing the world they’ve spun in their home -- here it is always cocktail hour, time for dinner, chaat, an egg frying in olive oil, a gin and tonic about to be served.
The boyfriend and I are not doing well -- the space between us growing rapidly -- and this weekend is only magnifying the cavern as it expands. He wants to stay in, I want to go out; he’s tired and wants the shade, my Italian blood calls for the hot sun. And so I find myself, alone, in the shallow end, reading “Blood, Bones and Butter” which is blowing my mind. I don’t know this yet, but it will be one of my favorite books, and a staple of every apartment I live in thereafter. I’m drawn into the world of the novel, equal parts magic and self-effacing food memoir. I love the descriptions of her meandering adventures in and out of the kitchen, to a black and white tiled tabaccheria in France, rustling up umami salads for the countryside French cowboys (who enjoy a beer before 9am), Gabriel’s soigne French mom driving up to buy milk in heels and full eyeliner in the middle of farm country. It’s enough to kickstart my imagination -- a rambling, elegant and mysterious adventure I like being pulled into. I will find Prune later to be as sensual as the book -- with its oversize cocktails, cramped spaces, and oily-perfect-nostalgic dishes (I go there for my 29th birthday).
As it turns out, the boyfriend and I don’t make it much longer, but that book stays with me, its pages curled from travel to bath tubs, pools, and beaches around the world. When I need to remember that it’s okay to be sad, curious, on my own journey — I come back to it.
As time goes on, the stories keep accumulating, and I find myself in the midst of a revelation. I’m supposed to be working in food. This hits me like a ton of bricks.
It should — of course — come as no surprise. I grew up in my mom’s industrial strength catering kitchen on Walnut Street. I learned to crack an egg here, separating the yolk from the white over the deep free-standing sink, before moving onto lighting matches. A young pyromaniac, I light about 1,000 tea lights before I’m dispatched to the coolers to reorganize the dairy. This is the backdrop of my childhood. The capstone is convincing Mario - one of our faithful delivery drivers - into letting me take over the company van before soccer practice as an 11 year old, trucking around the parking lot doing figure eights.
It was always here that my soul could rest, my creativity expand. So where do I find myself now?
Working in the kitchen nights and weekends, experimenting in my apartment with afternoon honey-butter-light pouring down, roaming around for the next delectable bite, consulting for brands and businesses on food media and storytelling, writing my story everyday.
I see everything now, the kodachrome carousel clicking again — how hard people work in this industry, driven by perfection, families to feed, a relentless love of what they do. I see the deep cuts too - the repression of a minimum wage paycheck in an ever-inflated economy, the health issues that some of the cooks, porters and waiters struggle against; cancer and heart-problems, MS and children who are sick, drug and smoking addictions, surviving in America in the age of Trump, where legalization and paperwork are hard to come by. There is so much beauty here, so much raw talent, so many problems to fix, so much joy that is shared. Nothing is seamless. And the only currency is teamwork.
So I zip up my coat a little tighter, wave hello to Shawn who is bumping to some 90s hip-hop, the speaker balanced on a wire over the open flame.
Will I stay? I will.
