ABOVE THE TABLE

I’m ambivalent about my work, always have been. In the ten years I’ve been a cook, I’ve quit twice––first during the pandemic, when I left to work with a theater company; then last winter. Since then I’ve started a periodical, a journal of plays called Plinth. I’d always wanted to be a dramaturg, and after overdrafting on a highball this week, I believe the dream’s been realized.

With the magazine in the red, I’ve returned to the kitchen. I’m cooking in wine bars with my new pop-up, making fresh pastas and Sicilian holiday pies. It’s a way to stay afloat (I hope), and the truth is that I don’t hate it.

Last Saturday, I hired a cook for the first time. He was recommended by a friend and handled himself well, moving nimbly through our Airstream trailer-cum-kitchen. We stood hip-to-hip for most of the night, drinking wine, and I was grateful for the company: it had been months since I’d worked with anyone, and months since I’d spoken Spanish.

I’ve been described in the past as an “unserious cook.” I had bouts of focus––monomania, even––but I mostly used the kitchen to delay maturation. The odd hours protected me from commitments, and the seclusion engendered a culture of whims. I slept late, I read till dawn, and at work I practiced Spanish.

My insistence on learning the language, my constant waylaying of its native speakers, was seen by the chefs as open rebellion. It rankled them to hear me practicing on the line, inquiring about syntax and diction and, my favorite of all, regionalisms. Chefs in the main run jackboot brigades. They are hostile to dissentients. In my case, they rebuked me as a goof, a transgressive on-the-fencer, out of step with the herd and the noble aims of leadership.

But if I transgressed as a cook, it was not by learning Spanish. In New York, it is common to meet young cooks from Latin America, many of whom do not speak English. They arrive hungry, eager to acculturate, and as you make your way into management it is important that you understand them.

It is also important that you get to know your coworkers––that, at the very least, you meet them halfway.

These days I will speak Spanish with anyone who allows me, no matter my lack of fluency. As a teenager in the kitchen, I was exhorted to practice. The cooks taught me all sorts of swears and lewd slang, some kitchen-themed basics, and while I was entertained––as any teenager would be––it was ultimately some Socratic nudging which did the job.

“Do you suppose there is another way?” asked one of them.

“I guess not.”

“Aha! And is that not the way we all learned, when we were babies, by speaking and improving, day by day?”

We can see the events of our lives in dramatic progression––thesis, antithesis, synthesis––as in the three-act play. In the course of my time as a cook, learning Spanish was the archetypical second act: the introduction of new and contradictory ideas.

The language I heard in the kitchen was a mellifluous dialect of the Mexican South––rapid, reedy, sung from the nose. It was of no use to me in high school, where I was courting disaster and a Spanish grade below freezing. The school system teaches Castilian, the “proper” tongue of the Gachupíns, intelligible to Latinos though often mocked as too genteel.

The cooks’ speech was less self-conscious, unencumbered by decorum. They were good with a phrase, fond of humor and nobody’s fool. During lunchtime, they told stories of home––everything from girlfriends to the narco-state––and spoke in earnest about their new lives, in Harlem and the outer boroughs.

When I finally saw Jackson Heights, an immigrant enclave in Queens, it was with one of them. We walked down Roosevelt Avenue in the gloom of the overhead train, vendors wailing and smoke drifting across the crowds. It was the kind of place where anything was for sale, keychains to flautas to sex––the kind of place to make a fatalist of anyone. My mind was so crammed with plays then that they seemed my only point of reference; to wit, a line from O’Neill: “We’re all poor nuts, and things happen, and we just get mixed in wrong, that’s all.”

At a small restaurant a few blocks down, we ordered enchiladas and beers and, despite my faltering Spanish, talked for hours at the bottle-filled table. In Spanish, they call this sobremesa: the time after a meal when you dawdle and chat indefinitely. It has no English analogue, its literal translation being “above the table.” It is an idea unto itself, a plug in a lexical gap.

Learning new languages is the act of self-revision; in the kitchen these days I keep this in mind. I’ve come to see my pop-ups for what they are: forward momentum, an open exchange. In a word: synthesis.