Host: Meg Bowles
Meg: [00:00:33] The Moth Mainstage is returning to Santa Barbara on Wednesday, April 6th. Presented by KCRW. For tickets and information on all of our upcoming Mainstages, visit themoth.org.
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift]
From PRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. And in this hour, we'll hear stories about food. The pleasure, but also danger of food, the traditions surrounding food, the preparation of that special dish, and the sometimes awkward-feeling of formality when sitting down to share a meal with someone you've only just met.
Our first story comes from Chris Fischer. Chris is a farmer and a chef who grew up spending time on his grandfather's farm on Martha's Vineyard, the small island off the coast of Massachusetts. The island has always had a reputation for being a summer destination for America's rich and famous. But if you look beyond the celebrity, you'll find an island rich in history and a tight knit community of people who value their local traditions and hard work.
[applause]
Chris: [00:01:43] 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.
[cheers and applause]
Meg: [00:14:35] That was Chris Fischer. Like his father and aunts and uncles, Chris grew up on his grandfather's farm, learning how to tend the family cows and raise the vegetables and flowers that were sold at their farm stand. Chris is now running the farm. It's called Beetlebung Farm, along with his cousins and nieces and nephews. They're raising sheep, cows, pigs, and continuing the family tradition for another generation.
You can see a picture of Chris and the kitchen staff at the Beach Plum the night the Obamas visited and find out more about Chris's cookbook, appropriately named the Beetlebung Farm Cookbook, full of recipes and stories about growing up on Martha's Vineyard. That's on our website, themoth.org.
[Choppin Wood by Boris McCutcheon]
[00:15:27] Coming up, we'll hear just how dangerous a tomato can be, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
Jay: [00:15:47] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Meg: [00:15:56] From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. Back in 2011, we produced a StorySLAM in Los Angeles, and Evan Kleiman, who hosts Good Food, a radio show that airs on KCRW, introduced the night for us. She got the evening started by sharing her own story.
Evan: [00:16:13] First, I'm going to take you back to the Wayback Machine. We're going to go back to the early 1980s, when I was spending a couple of years asking anybody I had ever met for money for my unopened restaurant, and going through the process of raising the money, doing the legal stuff, finding an architect, getting it designed, and going through the building process. It took 18 months or so.
So, during this period of time, I met and got to be very acquainted with the project architect, who we'll call Joe. Joe and I had this courtship that happened over blueprints and the building department. And our fog of romance was so sweet that many people fell into it. Just to give you an idea, if you've ever gone down to the building department and tried to get plans passed, we managed to get plans for a restaurant passed over the counter. I don't know how we did that. I can tell nobody's here ever built anything in Los Angeles. [audience laughter] That was like akin to the resurrection. Seriously, amazing.
So, he thought he had met this really cool Los Angelena chick from Silver Lake, kind of hippie who cooked all the time at home and had a great sense of humor, who was really relaxed. [audience laughter] And then, that period of time of raising money and building came to an end. There was one day where actually it was done. It was all done. There was nothing else to do. My partner and I looked at each other, and we’re like, “Well, I guess the only thing we can do is open the door.” So, then I became this other person. I became this insane person. But I understand how people become like that.
I was working 100 plus hours a week in the kitchen. I was coming home every night progressively more pissed off. The more weeks went by. I would come home really, really late, stinking a fish with a new constellation of burns. It would get to the point where he would have to tell me to go park my truck, and he wasn't talking about my car out in the street. It was like, “If you want me to talk to you, you really have to park your attitudinal truck,” [audience chuckles] which also became progressively harder to do.
So, time went on the same where you just fall into this rhythm where you wake up late, you go into work, you work really hard. It was really a very successful restaurant. It had tiny number of seats. It was a huge amount of pressure. After you finally finish working the line, then you have to clean up, you have to order all your goods, you have to massage everybody's ego, make sure all the equipment is working for the next day. You have to think about what you need to do for long range planning, like, you need to train the staff, you need to teach them about wine varietals and pasta varieties. You have to call the Red Cross and have them come and teach everybody how to do the Heimlich maneuver and CPR.
I realized that the romance was starting to slip away from me, that this other person that I had become was not very nice to live with. We were getting to be like ships passing in the night. He would get up early in the morning, he'd go to his really amazing architecture job, and I would come home really late at night, and then I would stay up even later, because it took so long to come down from that adrenaline high of working the line. So, I knew we needed to have a date.
So, after refusing to be pinned down forever, I finally said, “Okay, okay, we'll go out. We'll go out. I promise, we'll go out. We'll go to an actual restaurant, we'll make a reservation, we'll go out.” I mean, the thought of going to a restaurant, can I tell you, like, ugh, [audience laughter] horrible. But I got ready. It was the 1980s. I had big hair, bigger than this. [audience laughter] Big earrings, big shoulder pads. I was ready. We had a reservation at a lovely restaurant that we really liked in the neighborhood on Third Street called Sofi, S-O-F-I, a Greek restaurant owned by a very lovely couple who seemed to host a lot of chefs. We would go there after work or on nights off. They were great.
It was an interesting restaurant, because the way you approached it was very non-Los Angeles. Like, you parked your car, you were on the sidewalk. But to get into the restaurant, you had to go through this concrete corridor that dumped out into a beautiful little brick patio, and then the door to the restaurant. So, we go, we sit down, we're seated, we're drinking wine, we're having a really, really good time. I order one of my favorite dishes, Greek salad called horiatiki. We're going to pause here for a recipe. [audience laughter] Horiatiki is made of-- [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause]
What can I do? [chuckles] Horiatiki is made of really good fresh tomatoes, which in the 1980s were in very short supply. Usually, cut into one and a half inch chunks or into wedges. [audience chuckles] You have thinly sliced red onion, you have some sliced cucumber, bell peppers, of course, really good feta cheese, which then probably wasn't that good, and covered with olive oil, and maybe a little hint of red wine vinegar and a copious amount of dried oregano. Just perfect for me. So happy.
We're sitting making goo-goo eyes at each other, laughing, talking, drinking, eating. The recipe I have since learned for choking. So, I felt it. I felt this piece of tomato go into my windpipe. Now, you know all the times that you've thought you were choking, but you really just coughed a little bit and moved from your windpipe to your esophagus, and then you chewed on it, and you swallowed it. [audience laughter] Or, you're coughing a little bit, and somebody comes up to you, gives you a couple hard thwacks on the back, and you're like, “[coughs] Thank you. Thank you. I needed that.” That isn't really what choking is. [audience laughter] Choking is when on the inside of your body, you hear a sound that's like a cork being put into a bottle. And you know that the minute that happens, that you are the walking dead.
So, this was before there was the international symbol for choking. [audience laughter] And so, what did I do? Did I turn to any of the lovely tables around me and gesticulate wildly? Did I turn to Joe and say, because I couldn't talk, because there was no breath? No, what I did was run out of the restaurant, run down that concrete corridor, out onto the sidewalk, where I was completely alone. [audience laughter] My heart was racing, like it had never raced before. I was much thinner, so I didn't have that reason. [audience laughter] So, my heart is racing. I'm sweating like a pig. I'm thinking to myself, I'm actually going to die from a piece of tomato that was cut in a very unfortunate size, [audience laughter] which has-- I mean, to this day become an obsession with me now.
But then, Joe comes running down the corridor. I see him arrive. My savior. But he has no idea what to do. He is very quietly hysterical. [audience chuckles] He's trying to hold it together, but I could see his face. He knows I'm choking. He doesn't know what to do. But because we had taken that Red Cross class, I knew what to do. This was like at the beginning of the Heimlich maneuver miracle. Now, oh, my God, we've saved hundreds of people in Angele.
So, I positioned him behind me, and I molded his hands to do the abdominal thrusts, which compresses your diaphragm and causes the propulsive wind to expel the foreign object. [audience laughter] And the first time he does it, nothing happens. I think to myself, oh, this is just not good. And then, he says to me, “Your lips are blue.” And so, my legs, I just remember like, “Oh.” But then, he did it again. And this time, just as I heard that sound of it entering my windpipe, it sounded like Dom Perignon had just been corked. [audience laughter]
The piece of tomato flew, I mean, flew in this beautiful arc, [audience laughter] like 15 feet or 20 feet and hit a parked car. [audience laughter] And then, I puked delicately. [audience laughter] I looked at Joe. He was trembling, I was trembling, we both had flop sweat all over us. And then, we held hands, we walked back down that concrete corridor, went into the restaurant, we sat down, and we finished our meal. [audience laughter]
[cheers and applause]
Meg: [00:25:56] Evan Kleiman has been the host of Good Food on KCRW in LA since 1997. She's been called the fairy godmother of the Los Angeles food scene, because over the years, her show has helped bring together chefs and farmers, in fact, food makers of all kinds, with eaters and home cooks to create a food community. You can find out more about Evan and her show, and even a recipe for horiatiki by visiting themoth.org.
[Night of the Skeptic by Tin Hat Trio]
Up next, we have another high-stakes meal. Abhishek Shah told this story at one of our Boston StorySLAMs. The theme of the night was Do Overs. Here's Abhishek Shah, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Abhishek: [00:26:50] So, I graduated at a very good time, which was in 2008, [audience laughter] the peak of recession. I was on the student visa, and I had one year to find a job or I would get outsourced, [audience laughter] or deported back to my country. So, I had no option but to find a job. I tried all the options. I went tried any place I can get an interview. And after a lot of hard work, I finally got a call for an interview.
Now, it was really tough, because I had to all get dressed up and wear formals instead of T-shirt and pants instead of jeans. Like, I didn't even know how to iron my clothes. So, I decided to buy a new suit for my interview. But it came with a 14-day written policy, so I had planned that I return it the next day after my interview.
So, I wanted to make sure that the interview goes perfectly, because I didn't want it to screw up my interview. So, I made sure that everything is perfect. Like, my interview was here in Boston, so I learned everything about the football team, or the hockey team, and the women ice-skating team, like everyone. [audience laughter] I made sure. I even googled like how to shake hands like a man. [audience laughter] Because I didn't want to leave anything up to anyone. I just want to make sure that everything is perfect, and I get the job.
So, I went for the interview. There were like four interviews. First three interviews was by the colleagues, and the fourth interview was the most important interview, which was by my future manager. So, I gave all the first three interviews. I talked about weather, and football team, and everything, and I made sure that I impress everyone. And then, I went to the fourth interview. And by this time, I was very confident that I'll get the job. He asked me all the questions, I answered it. He looked very impressed, and I was very confident that I have this job. And then, he said, “Let's go for a lunch.” So I was like, “Okay, yeah, let's go for a lunch,” because I know how to use fork and knife. [audience laughter] I know how to put handkerchief while sitting. I made sure that I knew everything.
But as soon as we went there, it was a sushi restaurant. I did not learn how to use chopsticks. I was like, “How do we use--” I have never used chopsticks in my life. And he was like a pro. He was eating rice with chopsticks. [audience laughter] So, I was like, “What do I do? I have no time.” So, I just decided [audience laughter] that I'll just observe him. He had also brought the HR people and there were other colleagues as well. So, we were all there for the lunch. I was just observing everyone on how they were using chopsticks. Anytime I get really tensed up, I would always say one Mississippi, two Mississippi, and three Mississippi for some reason, [audience laughter] because that always helps me to calm down.
I remember we all got our lunch, I had tofu. I was only concentrating, like from the bowl to my mouth. I just want to make sure that nothing falls off the chopsticks. I was so concentrated on that at one point, my manager was talking that we had lost $3 million last quarter. I was like, “Mm-hmm, nice.” [audience laughter] I ate the first tofu. It went directly in my mouth, perfectly. Then second one, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. And one after another, I ate and I started gaining confidence. And just when I was at the last tofu, it came here and the chopsticks flipped, and the tofu went up in the air, [audience chuckles] and the wasabi sauce got detached, like the satellite detaches from the rocket. [audience laughter] And then, the tofu did four somersaults in the air. It was going to land on the chicken soup where my manager was eating. [audience chuckles]
So, I thought, [audience laughter] let me take it before it falls there. But by mistake, I hit this chicken soup, and the whole soup fell on his clothes. There was a complete silence. [audience laughter] And then, I was like, “Sorry.” [audience laughter] I know I had messed up everything, because the next interview is like, “Oh, these chopsticks.” And I realized that I have now messed up the whole interview. I knew that I had messed up because the rest of the conversation while we were going back to the interview room, anything I said, he was like, “Mm-hmm.” That's all he said every time.
So, I knew I had messed up my interview. But I wanted to make sure that I don't lose this opportunity, because I got it after a lot of hard work. So, I wanted to make sure that I don't miss the opportunity. So, while I was waiting in my interview room for the last interview, he came in the interview room. Before he could say anything, I was like, “Give me one more opportunity. I'll confirm two things. One, I'll never have sushi with you again. And second thing, I can bring lot to the table and I can offer a lot of things.” And he was like, “Okay, what can you offer?
I was like, “Well, I can bring diversity in your group. All your clients are from India, so I can talk to them in my local language, and we can really work this out.” So, he said, “We will think about it. But you have to give me $3.50 cents.” I was like, “Why?” He was like, “Well, I have to laundry my shirt and my pants and also dry clean it.” I was like, “Well, I don't have $3.50 cents.” He was like, “Well, don't worry. Bring it when you come here on your first day of your job.” Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Meg: [00:34:38] That was Abhishek Shah. Unlike our other storytellers in this hour, Abhishek is not a chef, nor a food critic. But he's known amongst his friends as a food finisher, because he doesn't like to see food wasted and believes he should always finish his meal completely.
Coming up, a chef gets an education unlike anything he ever learned in culinary school, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
[pleasant guitar music]
Jay: [00:35:31] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org.
Meg: [00:35:44] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Meg Bowles. And our last story comes from celebrated chef Roy Choi.
Roy was born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in Southern California. His parents owned a restaurant for a time, and he says one of his happiest memories is from being eight years old and helping to make dumplings in the kitchen there. A word of caution, this story includes a description of the way meat is butchered and prepared for the kitchen. Here's Roy Choi, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Roy: [00:36:18] I was 28 years old, and I was just about to graduate from the Culinary Institute of America. I was on a crazy high, man. I just had worked at two of the best restaurants in New York at Le Bernardin and Oriole at the time. I was doing really well at culinary school. I had never done well in school before, and I was graduating towards the top of my class, I was cocky as shit. I was full of just complete confidence, and even just ordering people around out of nowhere, just like strangers, [audience laughter] telling you what to do.
I got recruited for this job out in California. I had these dreams of just going back to Cali. So, I took the job. I wasn't ready for this job. It was a job to run a resort and be the chef. But when I got offered the job, I just thought and I dreamed, because out of my cockiness, all I thought and dreamed about was the white chef coat and putting my name on my left chest and riding executive chef underneath and wearing the long crisp apron. So, I took the job. It was in Borrego Springs, California. It was a resort called La Casa del Zorro Desert Resort. It was a beautiful resort, cabanas, five star everything. I was there running the kitchen.
I have this weird thing in my life where I end up always becoming friends with people that maybe I don't speak the same language of, or I didn't grow up in the same way, and especially in the kitchen with a lot of Latino cooks and dishwashers and waiters and bussers. There was this man, Salvador. He was our dishwasher at the time. He had this body almost like Jack Black. [audience chuckles] Just red, beautiful face, and always a grin on his face. No matter how hard his job was, every day, he always seemed to be looking at us like, “Yo, everything is good.”
But we never really talked. We always just exchanged whistles, to be honest, you know, “Let's go. [audience laughter] I got you. [unintelligible 00:38:47] let's go.” That was like our whole relationship. But he would always look at me and then he approached me one day, and he asked me if I could help him out with something. His family couldn't help him the next day, and he asked me if I could help him. There was no one that I was with in the desert. I went there all by myself. So, I said yes. And then, I remember the next morning, he came to my doorstep. It was really early. It was 05:30 AM. I don't know if any of you have been to the desert or lived in the desert, but it gets bright really, really early in the desert.
And where we lived in Borrego, it was in the middle of the Anza-Borrego Desert, which is the northeast end of San Diego County. It's an amazing, amazing place. It's sand everywhere, beautiful ocotillo cactus. He pulled up to my house that morning-- I still remember it. I looked out the window, and he rolled up, and there was this cloud of dust. He was standing there like the Tasmanian Devil. [audience laughter] He was holding two cups of Nescafé coffee. He was just there, and he had this red pick-up truck. He looked at me, he's like, “Listo.” And I said, “All right, yeah. Yeah, Listo. Let's go.”
And then, got in the truck and we headed east. We headed east through the desert, through an area called Fonts Point, which is like a canyon and a bunch of dry lakes. We headed towards the Salton Sea, towards Coachella. We went around and under the south bend of the Salton Sea, and cut across to this town called Mecca, which is on the eastern end of the Salton Sea, where a lot of farms, a lot of migrant workers, a lot of immigrants that come directly from Tijuana and Mexicali, and this is their first stop for many of them.
We followed this road down, and there was this crooked sign that said Chivo. A bunch of goats were just prancing in the field. There's a bunch of dudes there, and Salvador got out. The crazy thing about Latino culture sometimes that I see, is even if you don't know each other, you seem like you know each other. I don't know, it's obviously the language, but I think there's a common and shared experience, especially in America, where almost everyone had to come through the country in the same way and in the same experience. So, there's this silent understanding. And then, the language itself lends itself to move itself away from any type of foreplay and go right into it and just be like, “Yo, what's up?”
So, he was talking to the guy, and then they made the exchange, and they put the goat in the back. It was a beautiful little goat. I remember, it was a white coat with little spots of brown and beautiful small head and small little horns. I had no idea what the heck we were doing. [audience laughter] I was just going along for the ride, drinking a free cup of coffee. I mean, I was very naive. I didn't really think about what was going on. I thought were picking up a pet, to be honest. So, then we put the goat back, and we drove back to Borrego, back through the desert, and we went to his house, and he let the goat out.
Again, I'm thinking everything's okay. But then, there's that moment where you start to see clues. [audience laughter] And then, as we walked into his backyard, I looked to my left and I saw a table, a small little table, with knives on it. And then, I saw a rope hanging from a hangman's kind of noose. And then, I saw him go over and start to fill a bottle, a Corona bottle, empty Corona bottles with water and salt. Again, we didn't really talk, we're just chilling. [audience laughter] But it's still really early. By this time, it's only like 09:30, 10 o'clock. The sun is really hot. He looks at me again, and he asked me, again, “Listo?” And I said, “Yeah, I'm ready.”
And then, we started running after the goat. [audience laughter] It was like Rocky with the chicken. And then, we were running after. I remember Salvador went from the left and I went from the right, we couldn't catch him. And then, all of a sudden, I felt something, and Salvador came from like up in the clouds, like a La Lucha Libre, [audience laughter] and jumped right onto the goat, and got him in a headlock. And then, he started yelling at me. [speaks in Spanish] And then, he told me to get the bottles. And then, I gave him the bottles, and then he just took the goat and started feeding water, the solution to the goat. It looked really, really beautiful for a moment. [audience laughter]
And then, once the goat drank all the salted water, he pulled the goat over. At that moment, I started to see things change very rapidly. I’d cooked at this point for a while and I butchered a lot of meat, but I had never killed animal before. He was just so natural about it. He wrapped the rope around the hind legs, pulled the goat up. The goat's horns were maybe a centimeter above the dirt. I remember that goat. I remember it every day of my life now, right at that moment, that goat was looking straight at me in the eye. I don't know if it was really looking at me or if it was my imagination or that feeling when you have when you think that every baby is looking at you, recognizes you. But I remember that moment, those eyes were staring straight at me, and almost crying out to me to say, “Yo, man. The fuck, dude.” [audience laughter] Like, “Fucking help me, man.”
Those eyes were huge, like the sun. And then, right at that moment when the eyes open, Salvador came up with a knife and slit that neck, and then the goat's neck snapped back and the blood fell from the neck. And then, he went right to work on the belly and split the hide, opened it up, pulled out the guts. He looked at me, and he reminded me about the bottle. He was teaching me. He was teaching me what was going on. He explained to me that the solution didn't make the gut-- When you cut the belly open, that the guts wouldn't smell. I realized that there was no smell.
So, we went to work from there. He showed me how to pull the hide off. We moved it over to the table, broke it down into primals and sub-primals, packed it up, and wrapped it. We had music going. We were playing-- At that time, this was the late 1990s, so we were playing music from Joan Sebastian, and Grupo Limite and Banda El Recodo, and all that music was going on. The sun was creeping up, and we were packing and wrapping it in Ziploc and plastic wrap, putting it in glues and ice. Took a moment, had a cigarette and a beer, and it was like 11 o'clock. [chuckles]
And then, we jumped in the car, put everything in, and then we went down to Mexicali. We drove and it's about an hour south. You can find some of the best Chinese food in the world there, which you may not know, but you can. We went through into town, and we went to his mom's restaurant, and we went through a screen door, and there were a bunch of ladies in there. You know that feeling when you're made to feel like you're late when you weren't even late? [audience laughter] Especially when mothers do that to you, like, “Where you been?” But it's like there was no time you were supposed to arrive in the first place. [audience laughter] So, they were there, and it was like, “Oh,” all of a sudden when you arrived. And all of a sudden, it's like, “Oh my God, you wasted my whole day, and now I can get to work.” [audience laughter] But they were already cutting the cilantro and the onions and the garlic.
They brought the goat. She brought me over, and I have this weird connection also with mothers and grandmothers, when I walk in, they pull me over always, and then they want me to cook with them. It's really weird. So, she showed me how to make birria, basically. They were wearing flower aprons, and all the knives were really worn. There was wrinkles on their faces, and they were tasting with their thumbs and their fingers. I sat down and then helped them. They fed me the most wonderful bowl of goat stew in my life. And then, we got back in the truck and we headed back over the border.
Across the border, a different man. I felt like I knew everything about cooking when I went to that town, this small town, I looked down on him in a way, I was just like crazy chef, amazing young chef from New York City. I was going to show this desert town how to cook, but I came back a different man. We went back to work. About a month later, Salvador called me again and asked me if I was ready, and I told him, “Vámonos.”
[cheers and applause]
Meg: [00:48:50] Roy Choi became known as the godfather of the food truck movement. After he found success with his Korean taco truck Kogi, which is famous for mixing Mexican and Korean flavors and dishes. His book, L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food has more stories and recipes that have influenced his life and his cooking style.
[Fear of the South by Tin Hat Trio]
One of the ways we find stories is through our pitch line. If you go to our website and click on Tell a Story, it takes you on a step by step how to, so you can record your two-minute pitch. We realize two minutes isn't a long time, so just give us the highlights of your story. And don't forget to tell us where you're located, because we might just be producing a show near you.
You can find all the stories you heard in this hour at the iTunes store or on our website, where you can also see pictures and find out more about our storytellers. That's it for this hour. Thanks so much for listening, and we hope you'll join us again next time for The Moth Radio Hour.
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift]
Jay: [00:50:14] Your host this hour was Meg Bowles. Meg also directed the stories in the show. The rest of The Moth’s directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jenness, and Jenifer Hixson. Production support from Whitney Jones and Mooj Zadie.
Our radio partners in Boston are WBUR and PRX. And on Martha's Vineyard, WCAI. Our thanks also to Bliss Broyard.
Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the Storytellers. Most Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from Boris McCutcheon, Tin Hat Trio, and Catbirds. You can find links to all the music we use at our website.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Viki Merrick, at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.
The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.