Brigade+de+Cuisine+AP

"Brigade de Cuisine"

Andrea Peters

Wow........So I just read 50 something pages about fish, pastries, grocery shopping, cook books, family history, and the woes and joys of cooking. Absolutely fascinating! Sitting here trying to think about how I’m going to give this piece justice in the form of a reflection kind of brings about a bit of anxiety. I must also admit I am a bit stunned that I managed to read that much on...well, food. I obviously got a bit bored at times, but I soldiered on nonetheless, and it’s puzzling to think about why I’m still not sure I know how it is exactly that McPhee obtained, and then kept my attention on the topic at hand. 50 something pages, and I can usually hardly get through a 10 page article without needing a power nap!

Okay. So McPhee begins the piece by talking about the top five meals he has ever had, and as the story and its details unravel, we learn that all of the meals had been consumed at the same establishments, which he describes as a “sort of a farm-house inn that is neither a farm or an inn”, located somewhere in New York City. The first thing that caught my attention is the amount of detail McPhee manages to squeeze in while painting a very delicate portrait of the man’s clothing, general physical appearance, and finally, his kitchen. The reader is slowly familiarized with the sort of slightly anal, kind-hearted, perfectionist, and highly meticulous man this artist is, and as McPhee takes us wit him through his “kitchen-life studying” sessions, the reader gets a phenomenal sense of how much of a careful and unimposing journalist is really is.

Just by his choice of words, it is clear that McPhee has decided to bare his feelings about food and their comfortable friendship, and he shares some personal thoughts and feelings on many side topics as well. Somewhere around page 20 out of 55-ish, McPhee alludes to the fact that he has been hanging out in the kitchen and dining there for a bit over a year; and though Otto is a very private and solitary man, a special bond seems to have developed between the two men, and it’s refreshing to see McPhee in this light. I think one of the main reasons he has chosen to do so might be because in some ways he is similar to Otto when it comes to doing what you do with such mastery and love, that it becomes a one-man show in order to remain existent.

A great deal of attention goes towards maintaining a complete anonymity of this chef and his wife’s real names, as well as the name of their restaurant so that people who come to dine come here for the high-quality food, and not because they heard or read about his restaurant in a glossy magazine. Otto says to McPhee he knows the day he has too many people in his restaurant will be the day he closes his door, because he pretty much would rather be poor than to serve food that isn’t up to his standards. It is exceptionally incredible to read about how in one average-sized kitchen staffed with less than 10 people, Otto alone manages to serve something like 600 different appetizers and entrées, without ever cooking or serving the same dish the same way twice. A favourite bit of mine is when Otto, Anne, and McPhee talk about what would be a good name to call Otto in the article. Otto says

“I like Otto”, he said. “I think Otto is a sensational name. It’s a name you would have to live up to, a challenging name. It suggests aloneness. It suggests bullheaded, Prussian, inflexible pomposity. Someone called Otto would be at least slightly pompous. Intolerant. Impatient. Otto”. Yet his wife and McPhee kind of whisper on the sidelines that Otto is actually very gentle and unaggressive in almost all his moods and demeanor, so it felt like I was let in on his secret personality, the one people out of his kitchens don’t see.

The next 30-ish pages jump from one topic to another, passing in great depth from early market shopping, to driving out miles and miles just to get small amounts of ingredients, to a hatred of electronic cooking instruments, to lengthy discussions on how a ton of dishes are made and what’s in them, not neglecting how to pick all sorts of sea creatures and vegetables... McPhee seems to have followed Otto in all aspects of his love for cooking, giving long, detailed descriptions of _every_ aspect of this man’s life. Of Anne as well, although a bit less. I think McPhee organizes this section of the profile in this way to keep the reader reading, even if he knows it all gets a bit heavy after a while. McPhee talks a lot about Otto and Anne’s childhood, education, side jobs, anecdotes, extended family members, vacations they took over the years, odd habits, dishes breaking marital feuds in the kitchen, daily diets, cookbooks, cooking instruments and techniques, all the different dishes and pastries they make, interactions with clients, visits to other restaurants, their children and previous marriages, facts about their waitress and dishes boy...And so much more! Much of what the reader is presented to makes it seem like they are such ordinary people who have lived through wars and discord, and who somehow rose out of the dust to become the most gifted individuals. Peculiar, as they willingly admit more than once in the piece, but undeniably gifted and kind. As well as super intelligent. This style of writing makes them so easy to relate to, that is almost feels as if I’ve known them personally for a really long time..

The last few pages take on a slightly nostalgic tone as the reader discovers that after 11 years at the “inn”, and I don’t even know just how many years of marriage, Otto and Anne are packing up and moving someplace else to cook. They don’t know where yet, but Otto is confident he will be successful wherever he goes in the region because he says “All my friends will know where I am”. The last few paragraphs are so beautiful and revealing of this man and woman's character as well as relationship that I will quote because there’s no way I can say this better than McPhee does when quoting a late-night conversation alone with Anne

“ What we have is simple food. Simple food if it is good is great. If you understand that, you understand him. You may have grasped this, but I don’t know him very well. If you’re close to a screen you can’t see through it. He doesn’t know me, either. We’re just together. People are unknowable. They show you what they want you to see. He is a very honest person. Basically. In his bones. And that is what the food is all about. He is so good with flavour because he looks for arrows to point to the essence of the material. His tastes are very fresh and bouncy. He has honour, idealism, a lack of guile. I don’t know how he puts them together. I don’t know his likes and dislikes. I can’t even buy him a birthday present. He has intelligence. He has education. He has character. He has integrity. He applies all these to this manual task. His hands follow what he is”.