As Viewed from the Other Shore

Returning to the island where my culinary education began

Sep 04, 2024

A handful of island plums—purpose still TBD.

It’s an impossible task, to distill the first place you really learned about cooking into a 1000-word essay. It’s even harder when you know how many details you’ll have to leave out, or how many cliches you’ll be tempted to muster, to do the place justice. But last week I dragged my husband and daughter back to the first restaurant I ever cooked in, on Orcas Island off the coast of Washington State, and it’s a moment to consider where the limits of my culinary imagination ended and the beginnings of my real culinary education began. When I tell people about it, it sounds—and feels—like a dream, and in many ways it was. But visiting over ten years later, I can see how the dreaminess of that month-long stage shaped my views on food—not only what I can cook, but what I value about the commitment and imagination that making good food requires.

In many ways, I fantasized about food work before I actually did it. In 2011, I was barely a year into learning about food—I was working in book publishing, but my proximity to culinary culture came mostly from cooking my way through backlist titles for the Knopf marketing team and co-editing a few titles with the soon-to-be-retired editor Judith Jones. Despite my amateurism, I buried myself in the line-editing of unpublished recipes, participate in photo shoots, and become immersed in the endlessly self-referential logic of the cookbook marketplace—what was novel, what was beloved, and what demanded a fresh take and audience. I’d never gone to culinary school or worked in a restaurant (apart from one summer of robust waitressing), and most of what I learned was picked up via Judith’s generous tutelage and reading my way into the American cookbook canon.

On some level I knew that, in order to launch into the next phase of my food career, I’d have to consult with the people who actually lived their lives in professional kitchens. I asked everyone I knew to teach me about cooking, from the editors I shadowed to the authors I supervised to the suppliers and directors of the underground supper club I frequented (a story for another day). I even took a day off work to support the supper club on one of its biggest pop-up dinners, to peel parsnips and wash salad greens and generally get my hands into the work. I imagined myself as a foodie Barbara Ehrenreich, a fly-on-the-wall reporter getting my hands dirty to truly understand the complexity of culinary labor. Yet I was too busy keeping up with the dinner’s organizers—Geddes, the dinner’s guest chef, and his sous and pastry chef Annie, along with 100 expectant diners—to take any form of field notes. After the last plates had been served, Geddes asked if I’d like to come out to his restaurant and inn for a stage; I could stay for free, and in return I’d have a month to put in some serious cooking time. I thought about it, then asked my boss to pool my vacation days so I could do it. A few weeks later, I said a temporary farewell to my boyfriend and kittens, got on a plane to Seattle, and from there a ferry, to Orcas Island.

As Anthony Bourdain once said, “kitchen work is not glamorous,” and I wouldn’t dare disagree with him on that one. Just as even one viewing of The Bear suggests, it is repetitive, sweaty, tense work, a far cry from the often luxurious, reflective process of home cooking. And yet I could not have picked a more bucolic setting for my first experience in restaurant cooking than Ship Bay. As with other San Juan restaurants at the time, it was the heyday of farm-to-table cooking, and much of what we prepared was governed by what the inn’s kitchen garden and greenhouse had to offer, as well as what other island-based farms sold for our menus. Each time Geddes received a delivery of strawberries, tomatoes, or sea urchins by the kitchen back door, I quickly scurried to look, delighted by the treasures he would put to work. No task was too small to live in that seasonality: among my duties as a kitchen intern, I picked flowering herbs from the kitchen gardens for each station’s mise, carried buckets of waste scraps to the compost pile and the trough for the estate’s enormous Mangalitsa pigs, washed bag after bag of salad greens in a hand spinner designed for linens, and fed the starter for the restaurant’s complimentary sourdough bread (and its weekend wood-fired pizza picnics). I also made regular inventories of the low boys and the walk-in, restocked tasting spoons for the pass and ice for the oyster plates, and even prepared family-meal duty on one or two misbegotten occasions. (Successes: pizza with blue cheese, slivered beets, and roasted onions. Failures: pizza with the last batch of chicken liver mousse and minced cornichons.)

Even as Annie patiently guided me through my tasks during service (at the dessert and “cold” (salad) station, as I couldn’t be trusted with costly proteins), I quickly learned how ill-suited I was to the rigor of kitchen work. It took a full month for me to speed up my oyster shucking to under a minute per oyster, and even longer to figure out how to quenelle a scoop of ice cream, or to slice a grapefruit into clean segments without a hint of pith. (Keep in mind this was the era before the ubiquity of YouTube technique videos—if only I’d had the wherewithal to lead the trend.) I made batches of vinaigrette that needed constant tweaking, forgot to wipe down counters fully post-shucking, and burned myself repeatedly when tasked with heating up servings of berry cobbler. To this day I still don’t trust myself around a mandoline, as an attempt to prepare a salad with slivered fennel benched me during service. (My fellow chefs chuckled and encouraged me to just “stick it in a cup of vinegar already. I wrapped it in several layers of medical tape and paper towel, then walked through the kitchen garden with my hand above my head, cursing and glowing red with embarrassment.) The bruising of my ego was only slightly cushioned by a note from the maitre’d, featuring a handwritten special: a “shaved prep cook salad,” featuring shaved cucumber, fennel, and carrot, tarragon thyme vinegar, and “house-cured crispy index fingertip” ($75.00; 1 available, 9 remaining).

I walked into that kitchen the cockiest of twenty-somethings, high on my burgeoning career in food, and with the distinct arrogance that only the very young and hopeful can have. After each day of kitchen madness, I breathlessly, floridly chronicled my journey on a Blogspot (which I titled “The Prep Cook Project”), certain that what I had was the makings of the next Julie & Julia. (Granted, it was the era of peak memoir, everyone had a bildungsroman in them, no matter how old they were.) But I also received daily reminders that what I learned couldn’t be easily intellectualized, nor could it be easily replicated by reading up on cookbooks new and old. Even though I felt useless almost every day in that, I also knew that what I was tasting, cooking, and watching in the kitchen was reshaping my appreciation of food. Even now, I can’t plant an herb now without thinking about whether it will be edible in flowering form, or smell a bottle of vinegar without thinking of it whipped into a mignonette for topping a bed of mixed greens or a just-shucked oyster. I’ve also stopped expecting every dish to “reinvent the wheel,” to present the experience of restaurant-going like the introduction of an anthropology paper. The food at the Inn was great without being earth-shattering, and that was the point. Why bother “deconstructing” a dish when its natural elements made so much sense?

Walking around the restaurant once more last week, seeing the abundant bushes of mint planted at a safe distance from the flowering thyme, rosemary, and borage. I no longer looked at it as a gastronomic panacea, but a place organized around what was in harmony with what people want to eat and enjoy. Slices of warm bread, served with tiny bowls of plum jam, salted butter, and smoky onion whipped lard, were the perfect precursor to a plate of seared pork belly and peaches over a herbaceous corn salad. Geddes sent us a lovely bowl of roasted figs, still warm and topped with teardrops of Lum Farm goat cheese, best eaten with one’s fingers. A featured dish on the menu, a dish of white King salmon with almost opalescent flesh, felt less like an exclusive offer of a rare delicacy and more of an instinctual tribute to the salmon’s all-too-brief run. We came away from our meal not talking about its novelty, but instead about the beauty of eating the right thing at the right time, in the most beautiful spot imaginable. The next day, I spotted Italian plums fruiting all over a tree at a local barbecue joint, likely the same type that we’d enjoyed in jam form at the restaurant, and immediately pulled down a few for tasting, cradling them in my hand like just-laid eggs. They were mouth-puckeringly sour, far from the sugar bombs available at the grocery store. But like much of the blackberries and apples that grow wild all over the island, and the education I had seized in that brief month, they were there for the taking, and meant to shake up my assumptions about what constituted good taste.

Bourdain reminds us that what we gain when we work in food is far more than a skillset; it’s a new state of mind. “You can always tell when a person has worked in a restaurant,” he wrote. “There’s an empathy that can only be cultivated by those who've stood between a hungry mouth and a $28 pork chop, a special understanding of the way a bunch of motley misfits can be a family. … The work is thankless and fun and messy, and the world would be a kinder place if more people tried it.” I still struggle to put it into words, but the lessons I learned during my Orcas stage, and the memories that resurfaced during this trip, clarify what restaurant work can offer: a different, new way of being present and paying attention.

During our dinner that night, my daughter tried her first oyster: a bright, briny Agate, perfectly shucked and presented to us on a bed of crushed ice. We told her long before this dinner that she didn’t have to try it, and even with her willingness to slurp it up, it still ended up in a napkin a few seconds later. Yet a few days later, as we made our way to Buck Bay Shellfish Farm, she lifted her nose, sniffed the air, and said, her eyes bright with recognition, “I smell oysters.”

French Fries and Martinis

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