Chris Fischer - Food

 

I was born on this island. I got my first job in a kitchen when I was 13 years old in the same building where my grandparents met. I started out making salads, but quickly switched to washing dishes, because the dishwashers were much better fed. [audience laughter] 

 

My culinary education up to this point was pretty unique. My father taught me how to gather mussels from the bottom of rocks, and lure bluefish and set lobster pots at a very young age. He taught me how to skin a deer long before teaching me how to cook the tenderloin. I then went to preschool in a converted chicken coop. [audience laughter] 

 

My classmates and I would hunt and peck our way around the playground like chickens that preceded us. And I graduated onto a two-room schoolhouse in the center of Chilmark. Instead of class pictures, we took school pictures, usually 9 or 10 of us on the front steps. I liked to watch the seasons go by through the windows. When my dad would drive by with lobster pots piled in the back of his truck, I knew that it was spring and that summer would soon be there. 

 

And it wasn't until I moved to New York City that I realized how unique my childhood had been. I found myself in February on a Saturday night, a very cold Saturday night, with my best friend in Greenwich Village at Babbo restaurant owned by Mario Batali. It had recently gotten three stars from the New York Times. I had never been, I'd never heard of it. He'd been before. 

 

We slinked through the bar where people were just mobbed, and we got to the main dining room, and we sat at a banquet. Waiters danced around in vests and white shirts. It's an Italian restaurant, and we had pasta. But what I remember most is the steak. It was a ribeye. I'd never had a ribeye before. It was rich and juicy, and they finished it with rock salt and aged balsamic vinegar. I drank Barolo for the first time, and I thought to myself, I really need to know how to cook this food. I don't just want to-- There's something inside me that needs to learn how to do this. 

 

So, I went back to Babbo the next morning and asked them for a job. They must have been desperate, because they gave me one, [audience chuckles] and I started the next day. I showed up for work the first day without any knives. I didn't know you were supposed to bring your own knives, so I borrowed one from the chef. I was also wearing Nike running pants that were a little bit too tight underneath my apron. So, I got a nickname on my first day, Chirsty Pants. [audience laughter] It wasn't very flattering, but I didn't care. I felt so lucky. I was working in a restaurant beyond my wildest dreams, a restaurant I didn't even know existed a week before, and I had my first kitchen nickname. [audience chuckles] 

 

The first night on the line was terrifying. I stood behind the line with these other chefs as they got ready for service. They were duct taping their wounds, they were duct taping their burns, they were drinking copious amounts of coffee out of big plastic cork containers, they were dunking their headbands in buckets of ice water and wrapping their heads. It was like a scene from Braveheart. [audience laughter] And all of these warriors were getting ready for battle, and they knew exactly what to do, and I did not. 

 

So, I stood there, and I tried not to get in anybody's way. And the chef, Frank, started calling out orders, “Two branzino, three guinea hen. I need a squab, skirt medium well.” And I just froze. I had no idea what he was saying. And the guy that was supposed to teach me that night started throwing different chunks of meat from different animals on the flame, and it started spitting fire back at him. And then, he gently laid two fish on the grill, two whole fish, and it was so beautiful. And then, he threw more meat on and the flames spat back. 

 

It was total chaos to me. I didn't speak the language. It took me a long time to learn the language. I worked really hard, and I worked my way through the stations from satay to pasta. The pasta station felt like you were taking a bath in boiling water the first night. I became the sous chef after 18 months, and then I burnt out a year later, and I came back home. 

 

The day that I want to tell you about was a hot day in August. It was a Tuesday. I woke up on the farm. At this point, I was running my family's farm. I was the chef at a restaurant less than a mile away, and I was trying to write a book. I was doing too much. And I woke up on the farm, groggy, went to the fish market to see what was freshest, and then I went to work. 

 

At about 11:00 AM, we had our menu meeting for the day with the kitchen team. At this point, our menu was really small. It was focused on the ingredients that we were growing and the ingredients we could get from other farmers. But it was also influenced by the fact that most of our kitchen equipment was broken and we were only capable of cooking a few things a night, so we kept it very small. 

 

Everything was unraveling. I had a big beard. My truck no longer had reverse, [audience laughter] which made parking very difficult, [audience chuckles] or a group effort. So, we made our plan for the day, and we began to prep, organize, get ready. By 02:00 PM, the menu was pretty much solidified. We all felt good. And at 03:00 PM, the general manager, Dennis, came in. He was out of breath. He was almost hyperventilating, and he said, he told me he had just seen a black SUV with tinted windows, a Virginia license plate, come through the driveway and leave. I turned the radio back up. We kept dancing and prepping and generally happy, and I didn't think very much of it. 

 

Half an hour later he came back. And now, he looked like he was going to have a heart attack, and he was sweating through his shirt, and he said, “There are three SUVs and they are parked in the parking lot and they're not leaving.” [audience laughter] I think tonight's the night. So, I checked the reservation book for D.C. area codes, pseudonyms, any clue. We couldn't find any. 

 

At 04:30, we sat down for family meal and we went over the menu for the night with the wait staff, the kitchen crew. I looked out the window, and there was a swarm of Secret Servicemen inspecting our stone walls and our sheds in the grounds. And I thought, this is probably the night. [audience laughter] So, I went to the kitchen. People started to trickle in, filling in first outside, and then our long communal table that stretched the length of the dining room. They filled up every seat. The restaurant had a lot of energy. It was very loud. We left a two top empty by the window. 

 

As all of our tables were set, with some flowers that we'd grown, napkins, silverware, paper place mats, some crayons. [audience laughter] And around 06:30, a mob of Secret Service come through the front, and they go to the bathroom, they go to the kitchen, they go to the dish room. They're everywhere. They were probably in the basement, although I didn't have time to check. One of them walked straight up to me. He seemed to be the person in charge. He had a cooler in his left hand, and he extended his right hand and he introduced himself. 

 

And I thought, there must be something so cool in that thing. [audience laughter] And he said, “I understand it's a dry town. The president's brought a bottle of wine for the first lady and the fixings for his martini for himself. Where should I put them? We forgot an ice pack.” So, that broke the ice a little bit. [audience laughter] And then, he said to me, “This is how it's going to go. Nobody can leave, come or go when the president is eating. They're going to order off the menu like normal. You'll show me every ingredient before you cook it. If I tell you to throw something away, do so and start over. Any questions?” [audience laughter] “No.” 

 

So, our team huddled up, our kitchen team. At this point, we had one line cook, two teenagers, and a pastry chef who had come back, gotten through the Secret Service roadblock, was wearing sweatpants and was probably stoned. [audience laughter] [audience applause] 

 

I told them not to do anything different and to ask me if they needed help. I went back to expediting, and the orders kept coming in and their order came in. They had two salads to start. Sadie Dix was working the salad station that night. She's a chill mark kid like me. She was one of the teenagers. She'd never worked in a restaurant before that summer. So, she’s proceeded to dress these beautiful little lettuces with a puree of the same greens, salt, a little lemon juice, olive oil. She tossed it, and she finished it with sautéed shiitake mushrooms. They were all Ingredients that her family had grown on their farm just down the road. 

 

She plated them beautifully, with nice architecture, nice and soft, just as I taught her. She looked at me and I tasted them and they were perfect. And I told her, “Now, you should bring them out to the president.” [audience laughter] So, she had an Orioles cap cocked to the side, which the Secret Service had already given her a hard time about. [audience laughter] She walked past me and she walked past her parents who were eating at the bar with a naive gracefulness that only a 16-year-old can have. She delivered the food to the president, came back, smiled. I smiled at her. 

 

And the Secret Serviceman with the cooler, who had been taking pictures all night, was snapping away pictures on his camera phone. When their main course came up, the president had a lobster and the first lady had steamed mussels. He took pictures of that. The food went out, and he continued to take pictures, and I said, “Do you have to document everything?” And he said, “No, this is fucking cool.” [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause] 

 

He said, “Your food is beautiful.” He started showing me pictures of prawns from Africa, fish from the Caspian Sea, and the president's favorite pastas from Italy. They finished their meal with a blueberry coffee cake that Olivia made. and at this point was quite envious of. [audience laughter] And he had a cup of coffee. They paid the bill. He had a firm handshake. She complimented the mussels, which a friend of mine had grown off the coast of Menemsha, the same friend that had actually convinced me to leave the salad station at the feast at [unintelligible 00:13:46] and join him in the dish pit. I watched Sadie, as she swept the floor that night after service, happily. 

 

I was reminded that we are the privileged ones to be born here, to be proud of where we're from. She and I both shared the same things growing up. We shared strength and sunburns and tan lines that don't come from afternoons spent on the beach. And Sadie put it best, she said, “I wasn't just raised on a farm, but a farm raised me.” Thank you.