How Not to Fuck Up In the Kitchen

It was 1984 and I was a clumsy imposter of a cook, my thoughts skittering like test droplets flung on a hot pan. I felt fresh from Berkeley, though for a couple of years I’d detoured into work as a reporter for a trade magazine on office products; I rewrote press releases about word processors, complicated adjustable ergo chairs, rolling-ball pens. I had a BA in English I knew I’d outgrown—it fit the ambitions of teenage me, but the world seemed bigger now than my senior thesis on Woolf’s use of the past in To the Lighthouse. I was on my own in San Francisco, a city I’d never even visited as a student, living just across the bay. But here I was, working (well, volunteering as a start) in one of its most talked-about restaurants. A Zen student named Karen, in a heavy denim skirt that swirled above her white ribbed knee socks and black canvas Keds, modeling the tender touch I’d need for separating and washing oakleaf lettuces so delicate and fresh, having been harvested hours before, that milky juice seeped from the cut bases.

Photo by Joshua Wickerham

It was my first job in a restaurant kitchen: Greens at Fort Mason, in an old military warehouse on San Francisco Bay. My boyfriend took me to lunch there and it had changed me: the small lettuce leaves that looked like they’d drifted onto the plate, sent on breezes that ruffled some nearby garden, the dabs of Stilton cheese and crisp-fleshed apple slices, pink flecks of shallot in the dressing.

Just below the dining room windows, which looked northwest beyond a boat harbor to the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin headlands, I watched small crabs scrabble in the tumble of rocks, beneath swooping, rust-stained gulls. I felt as if I’d arrived at the mystical core of California, sprung from bedrock, same as the bluffs across the shoals, beyond which the restaurant’s own farm grew those small lettuces, plus Swiss chard, crinkly spinach, Japanese pumpkins, and curious herbs such as salad burnet and blue-flowering borage.

I didn’t know anything about food then or how to cook. I knew nothing of the nature of ingredients or the traditions behind the dishes for which the head of the lunch crew asked me to slice onions and chop parsley. All I knew was that Greens made delicious vegetarian food, and that it was an oddball place to work, a kitchen where silence and an odd primness ruled. I thought I’d stay long enough to learn how to make balanced vinaigrettes and extravagantly flavorful soups without meat stocks, then graduate to some better, shinier kitchen. I didn’t realize I was being grounded in something else: a way of cooking not literally about soups or dressings. In three years of cooking, I learned to cultivate a sense of quietude in the kitchen, or at least resist distraction, or at least notice how my brain wanders; to know that distraction is the enemy of cooking.

I write this at a time when powerful corporations have monetized distraction. We’re conditioned to think of attention as brief times of rest between reflexes, pauses in a chain of text tones and Instagram scrolls. I know Alexa is listening, so she can deliver Leela James, Bud Powell, or Satie’s Pièces froides to satisfy one of my cravings, set the “mood” or capture my “energy”; or Lakshmi Singh or Giles Snyder or Windsor Johnston reading the news at the top of the hour, conjuring Trump and the Covid numbers; PPE, the unemployment rate, mass hurt. I drop a load of kibble in the dog’s bowl before dawn in the kitchen; lean on my AeroPress, silently rehearsing a sentence before sitting down to write. I react and evade in the kitchen, skim over cooking as if it’s nothing but the boilerplate language between harder and more imperative punctuations.

In the 1980s, Greens was a spiritual practice place. It was part of San Francisco Zen Center, a bare, incense-filled meditation center in a neighborhood where a roaring freeway sliced through. Greens sprouted from the Sōtō School of Japanese Buddhism, known for its plain style of sitting meditation, its striking austerity. Greens opened five years before I had my first oakleaf lesson from Karen. Zen Center’s roshi conceived it as a place of employment and spiritual practice for Zen students; also as an outlet for the harvest of its farm in West Marin. Deborah Madison, who now writes cookbooks in New Mexico, was the founding chef.

I wasn’t a formal Zen student when I started at Greens, though my boyfriend, Steve, had been one. He burned incense at home in our small street-level apartment in Cole Valley. The burned incense left fine, silken ash on the section of bookshelf he called his altar. He showed me how to meditate in Sōtō style, with my ass wedged onto a fat black cushion, trying in vain to watch my thoughts stream past without bolting up to fish them out. Steve had been a waiter at Greens, and since I was a Zen Center outsider and had never cooked professionally or been to culinary school, he convinced Ed Brown, the manager, to give me a shot.

It’s hard enough to cultivate mindfulness while sitting in a quiet room. Imagine doing it on the line in a restaurant kitchen: tickets for new orders cascading from an evil-sounding printer; heat, bodies, and emotions; misfires and chaos. At Greens there was no blasting of Eurythmics or Prince (it was the ‘eighties), but there were mandatory silent work periods, when we’d talk only when speech was necessary. We’d stop twice during a prep shift to offer incense and bow, everyone, together, facing the altar nailed to a wall in the kitchen. Even when things got stressful, another cook told me, I should try and feel my feet against the floor; I should consciously breathe.

It was impossible to do either for more than a few seconds, before some new distraction seduced my attention. The only reliable thing I found to hold my awareness—to blot out the noise and movement of the kitchen—was the food itself. I sucked at meditating in the formal way. Opening a wire and wood-slat crate of bundled sorrel, though, one that came off the farm truck that morning, and was still damp from the field, somewhere behind the headlands I saw out the windows in the dining room: It made me feel the ground beneath my feet, even if I didn’t always remember to feel the rubber kitchen mats under my sneakers. Ingredients so lately rooted in dirt—someplace nearby, where I had been to see the fields, smelled the nearby ocean in the air, and heard the pinging of bees in flowering rosemary—became my meditation. I felt I couldn’t dishonor them by being sloppy or distracted in the kitchen. They gave me a feeling of calm, and a reason to focus.

In a way, those harvested things became my cooking master. One day in late summer, after I’d been promoted to head lunch cook, we had a particularly hard service that destroyed me in body and mind. I was stressed about the things I needed to get ready for a fresh onslaught the next day. Overwhelmed, I took a break, walked up steep stairs cut into the hillside flanking a parking lot, and wandered through the park at the edge of the Great Meadow. I found a small community garden plot (big, spiny leaves sheltering zucchini blossoms, sunflowers on woody stalks) and sat down on the edge of a box planter. Worn out, upset about lunch, I cried. I noticed a weedy, feral scent; saw tomatoes in full sun one plot over: green fruit with ghost stripes, flat yellows, and deeply ridged reds with pinprick scab trails.

They were beautiful, alive with scent and possibility. It was clear to me that my practice as a cook was to preserve what was good about these tomatoes—all the growing things—not to fuck up others like them with bad or ill-conceived cooking, and definitely not kill them with laziness or because I couldn’t tether my thoughts. The scent seemed to radiate from every part of them, the fine-haired stems and curled, part-dry calyxes, and even the sense memory became a shield against distractions.

And even today, when I no longer cook for a living, and my attention is fractured in dozens of ways the 1980s couldn’t conceive of, all I need to find the calmness of cooking is the cool scent of bay leaves I pull from my tree, or the numbing bitterness in a sprig of lovage from the stalk. So that if the radio’s on, and a snarl of cell-phone data invisibly clots the air, and my thoughts ping from stimulus to like, as long as I cook aware of even one of my senses, I have a plausible sense of the ground through my shoes. I remember to keep the tenderest of touches.