Jefferson Hughes, Chief Produce Officer, cuts fruit better than any living person, a talent that few outside this business would even think to acknowledge. When he unclasps his cuffs and rolls his sleeves in the presence of the hundred and fifty managers who come to headquarters every year for his continuing education seminar, all chatter in that sloped cavernous space, closer to an operating theater than a classroom, ceases, and all eyes turn to Hughes. He doesn’t have to do anything to silence them. He doesn’t have to speak at all. Somehow, the sight of him unclasping his cuffs and rolling his sleeves, the care he takes with each side, tucking and crimping like a master dumpling-maker, lets these managers know that the man in front of them does not accept half-measures in the completion of any chore, that he insists on perfection with each gesture, that his mind is present at all times for any task, and that they, the men and women who have risen to management in this once-glamorous industry, men and women who are used to being the most knowledgeable people in any room, even one so cavernous, should put aside their egos this morning and accept that there is someone in this room who understands their jobs better than they do, even how to cut a piece of fruit. At only fifty, Hughes has revolutionized industry practices by installing separate cool rather than cold storagefor berries and fruits, especially tomatoes, that contain volatile flavor compounds destroyed by suboptimal refrigeration. This idea, along with sourcing from farms that have bred produce for industrial handling and shipping but not quite bred out the flavor, has given the stores a reputation for above-average produce year-round, maybe not as good as produce from a farmers’ market, but still better than nearly every other chain in the region.
Before this job, Hughes explains in his lecture, he enjoyed a successful first career as a chef in another city where, a year shy of thirty, he earned three stars from the French tire company whose approval, he now says with some regret, chefs covet so much that they’re willing to destroy themselves in pursuit of them. Les etoiles, Hughes says, in a Pepe Le Pew baritone.He credits that early success to the ability that now makes him so good at cutting fruit, to that instinct for consistency, that ability to eyeball the dimensions of any fruit, no matter how tapered or oblong or asymmetrical or knotty, and know how to divide it evenly into any shape. Some people have this ability, he tells his audience, but most need to learn it. He explains that soon after getting that third etoile, Hughes’ pregnant wife convinced him to cede more day-to-day authority to his chef de cuisine, to wind down this insanely ambitious early part of his life and start focusing on family and fatherhood, maybe on developing a hobby that did not involve the preparation of food—what everyone was always telling him truly matters. But this plan lasted only a few weeks. Hughes started slipping out of the house, returning to his kitchen, day after day, measuring the dices of his prep cooks, tossing out gallons of subpar sauces, firing a line cook who Hughes caught testing the doneness of a ribeye cap with a metal cake tester on his tongue rather than the more reliable meat thermometers every cook at the restaurant is issued before their first shifts. The chef de cuisine complained that Hughes was micromanaging him. The wife complained that she saw even less of her husband than before. He tells the audience now that the restaurant retained its etoiles, which Hughes took as vindication that he should never again cede control, even for just a few weeks, and that if this place could by some miracle stay consistent without him there, if every carrot could be turned in the exact same dimensions, every ribeye cap could go out to customers at the exact requested temperature, every oyster foam rest as lightly on every scoop of caviar, whose every egg was as tensile and briny as any other egg in any other scoop of caviar served beneath any other oyster foam, then Hughes would still have to endure the torture of lying in his bed, seven miles away, listening to his wife nurse his newborn baby in the next room while he kept himself awake with thoughts of those asymmetrical carrots, that overdone ribeye cap, that deflated oyster foam on those deflated caviar eggs, hundreds upon hundreds of orders moving from one hand to another up to the pass, until reaching the hands of the once-trusted chef de cuisine, now, in Hughes’ mind, an incompetent hack lucky enough to be there on the day that his boss, weakened by love and impending fatherhood, had blurted out I’m stepping back for a bit.
Hughes, while giving his practical fruit-cutting demonstration, starting with a honeydew and moving on to crates full of every type of fruit sold at this supermarket chain, explains to his audience that the pressures of the fine-dining world are similar to the pressures of the supermarket world, but only more so. He tells the audience that caught between the torture of his job and the torture of staying home and not doing his job, he finally gave in to his wife’s suggestion that he attend a meditation retreat, by himself, and decide once and for all if he wanted to sacrifice what truly matters for the fleeting pleasures of professional success. At the retreat, he tells the audience, he woke up at dawn and drank decaffeinated tea steeped with hallucinogenic mushrooms. He starved himself until evening, then gorged on bland oatmeal that took on the flavors of every food he had spent the day fantasizing about. Under the influence of hunger and hallucinogens, he felt for the first time in his life, while masticating this bowl of goopy porridge, the minute transfers of energy in his brain, the click of nerve signals to the outer reaches of his body, the stripping of glucose from food molecules and the surge of fresh new oxygen through his bloodstream. He understood, for the first time in his life, that beautiful plates presented the same way to hundreds of people over thousands of nights, fixed in that moment for all eternity, were tiny monuments to death and stasis; that food is a process, a continuum, and he was expending so much time, energy, and worry on thwarting this continuum, on damming up the natural flow of life as it moved from organism to organism. It was one thing to kill an animal or even a plant for consumption—he had no ethical qualms about his role in the supply chain—but one had to retain that life, that energy, between the slaughterhouse and a diner’s stomach. This revelation, a call to action from beyond the material realm, was difficult to put into words, and he stayed quiet about it on the retreat or when discussing the retreat with his wife. He returned home a new man, going days, even weeks, without checking on his restaurant, but that lasted only until the next year, when the French tire company released its new edition and the restaurant, for a third year in a row, retained les etoiles, confirming for Hughes that nothing had changed since the meditation retreat. His restaurant, his pride and joy, was still in the business of stasis, still peddling death. He was failing to keep a promise he had made to himself. So, right before his son’s first birthday, Hughes announced that not only was he returning to the kitchen and letting his chef de cuisine open up another restaurant in another wealthy beachside town, but he was also creating an entirely new menu, an entirely new concept. No more fixed menus. No more caviar and oyster foam. No more monitoring the pass for stray dollops of sauce or overcooked ribeye cap. No more hovering near a stagiaire’s cutting board and pulling out any carrot turned a few millimeters too thin. He wanted to open the first fine-dining restaurant in the world that pledged inconsistency to its customers, the first restaurant where, under the theory that no single carrot or steak or caviar egg was the same, people could go, drop a few hundred dollars, and never know exactly what they would be served, the first restaurant whose goal was to ensure that every diner got his or her own unique meal. When Hughes sat down with his business partners, though, he again could not communicate this concept. He felt as if neither he nor his partners were native English speakers, and that he was translating his ideas into English for them, and they in turn were translating it into their own native language in order to carry on this conversation with Hughes in a tongue that none of them spoke fluently. Every strategy that Hughes employed for communication—metaphors, comparisons to jazz or abstract expressionism, restaurant-industry buzzwords like seasonality—slowed the conversation down even further, no more so than when his business partners thought they actually did understand Hughes, when they started nodding and writing down notes and texting their own business partners, the people who actually controlled the money, and Hughes left the meeting with the promise of extravagant new investment. For the first months of his new venture, Hughes saw little of his family, and suspected that his wife was secretly hunting for a divorce lawyer, but he didn’t care; he spent more time in the kitchen than ever, creating new menus every night depending on what his purveyors brought him, and making sure that each dish that went out to customers had a different garnish or was paired with a second sauce or came to the table in a cruet rather than a bowl—and yet feeling more unsatisfied than ever with the result, especially when he again retained les etoiles, when the reviews lavishly praised what they called a new concept but that he knew, deep down, was just the same shit that most of the other fine-dining restaurants in the area were doing. If he couldn’t communicate through food what he had failed to communicate through words, then what good was this vocation? What three-star restaurant didn’t pride itself on nightly menu changes according to the quality of their products? What did it matter if one diner got chives on his plate and the other chervil?
After these first few months, he started to run out of variations on his menu and for the sake of his exhausted staff he began cycling through variations he had already performed. By the sixth month, the inconsistency of the food had become routine, standardized, consistently inconsistent. Unwilling to give up, he implemented more changes, gathering his staff and instructing them to throw out every menu they had concocted over the previous months. He said that he was no longer going to stand there and add a new dollop or smudge or sprinkle to an already composed plate. He wanted chaos. He wanted vandalism. Although he had once lectured his employees that any chef can make a great plate of food, but the best chefs make that same great plate of food every single night, now he insisted that each of his cooks, from the sous down to the externs rinsing leeks in a far corner of the room, had license to fuck up anything Hughes made. He explained that he didn’t want to buy fresh greens in the morning, prep them before noon, chiffonade them at two for some line cook’s mise-en-place, and then cook them from five until eleven p.m. in exactly the same way, pretending that this was the same vegetable over the course of the entire sixteen hours. He wanted a diner who came in at six to have a completely different experience of eating those greens from the diner who came in at nine. And he didn’t want to throw away the leftovers. The person who came in at six needed to get not only the peak freshness of the greens, but also the wilted leftovers of the night before, perhaps now pickled or maybe crisped in the dehydrator. In theory, each minute that passed should present a new set of products for each chef. Freed from re-enacting Hughes’ vision on plate after plate, he expected an explosion of creativity from these young cooks, each of whom claimed that they wanted one day to open their own version of a three-star restaurant. The investors again wrote him large checks. The reviews again were incandescent. Reservations quickly filled up for months in advance, with most of them booking multiple seatings over multiple weeks, hoping to show up dozens of times and receive dozens of unique dinners, an unexpected boon that fellow restauranteurs suspected had been Hughes’ intention all along, a concept that ensured not only new customers, but also more repeat business than the usual fixed-menu tres etoiles restaurant. There were now, in theory, an infinite number of restaurants inside this one restaurant. Raw at six, grilled at seven, roasted at eight, braised at nine. Or maybe unripe at six, starchy and tannic at seven, softening and ripe at eight, and rotten at nine. An entire lifecycle of product and technique. The first seating would get a living creature to eat, often a scallop still quivering to the touch of a fork. The last seating would rarely get whole proteins at all—just the rich, dense liquid remains of a full day’s cooking. As before, Hughes reveled in the chaos, in the inconsistency, in the ways in which his young chefs rose to the challenge. But the satisfaction this time lasted barely more than a few months. One night, he sat with his glass of Calvados at the end of service, reviewing his inventory, and tried to summon the feeling that had seized him on that retreat, more than a year ago; tried to figure out if what he was now achieving, in this restaurant, matched what he felt called to do while starved and tripping on mushrooms at the seaside cabin. He let the Calvados burn his lips but he didn’t drink. In some abstract sense, yes, he thought, this latest conceptresembled what he had wanted up at the retreat, though it seemed so crude in practice. He was starting to notice that regular customers no longer booked for different times on different nights; now, these regulars were booking for identical times, down to the minute. Online advice told customers how to hack the menu, when to show up and what to order so that you could get the same thing that you liked the previous time you were there, essentially creating a fixed menu by timing reservations to the precise minute. Hughes had failed again, though he could hardly blame his staff; there are only so many combinations and recombination of products within the range of even the best cook’s skills.
After a few more months, Hughes notified his investors that he wanted to step away permanently. His wife took him back without much fuss. At this point in this story, Hughes, the young chef burnt by his own ambition, the charred husk on the side of a road littered with the charred husks of countless other young chefs, had two options: he could follow the path of other burnt-out chefs and lose his mind, like the one chef who was arrested for poisoning a random diner with lye or the other chef who started refusing to put any kind of meat on his menu unless it was served alongside only items that animal would have eaten, a monomaniacal insistence that ended with him firing his staff on a day when his beef supplier informed him that he had started finishing his cows with a little corn and none of the cooks agreed to changing up the menu at the last minute, or Hughes could have moved toward a more casual concept, maybe a higher-end version of the soul food he had grown up eating, a cash-grab even the best chefs make but one that didn’t interest Hughes, who liked sweet-potato pie and collards well enough, just not enough to devote his life to them. Instead,he broke open his retirement savings, with his wife’s blessing, and started driving around all week visiting farmer’s markets, buying up fruits and vegetables, and working on new recipes. After a few weeks, though, he started to realize that he didn’t care about recipes. He didn’t have any desire at all to create a new menu, to hit up investors for more money, to go back to the dreary life of a restauranteur. He just liked chopping produce. Every morning, he would buy the fruits and vegetables. Every afternoon, he would stand in his kitchen, turning the produce end to end, side to side, mastering the most consistent dices on each one. Some people get into cooking because they like to feed people. Some get into cooking because they yearn to recreate the flavors of a lost past. But Hughes, he now explains to his audience, realized that he only got into cooking because he likes to cut produce. Does it give him pleasure? he asks, scooping out a mango lobe and slicing it into one-inch planks. Does it fulfill a spiritual need? he asks, chopping the planks horizontally. Is that even, he asks, revealing the perfectly uniform mango chunks to the crowd like a sleight-of-hand artist revealing an audience member’s randomly selected card, something we should demand from mere food?
Joel Gordon lives in Los Angeles.
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