IN THE MAGAZINE

THE DESSERT PSYCHO

Punk Drummer Transforms Into World-Class Chef With Alarming Swiftness

Published November, 2009
(Page 6 of 7)



The creepy food-as-sex talk of male kitchen workers—a staple of my own food-service experiences—didn’t seem so prevalent in Brooks’s position. He agreed. “Being a line cook is like being a linebacker. Very macho,” he said. So the antipasti, the cold line cook, gets put down as “faggy,” which made the pastry line even lower. If it’d been a prison, he’d be in trouble.

“At times that has really made other people who I work with angry.” He switched to his imitation tough-guy cook voice; “‘Don’t you know? You just make desserts! You’re a fucking faggot!’ And I’m like, ‘All right, I’m a faggot. Cool.’” Del Posto, obviously, doesn’t cotton to such talk. Although there weren’t many opportunities for confrontation anyway. A new hire could start on the fish line, 20 feet away, and Brooks wouldn’t meet them for months.

He fired up the gelato machine. Freezing the base involved precision timing on the operator’s part, and there was a very real but entirely private satisfaction when it was gotten right. The machine disgorged a fluffy white mass: perfect gelato. He prodded and eyeballed the pale blob. I admitted my deep surprise at the tactile and visual elements of food preparation. Brooks admitted his surprise at my deep surprise.

He pulled a book off the shelf. It was hollowed out, as if to store cash or jewelry. Inside were a half dozen of his old cooking notebooks. These recipes had been gathered over many years, often as inadvertent compensation for low pay at other restaurants. He used to carry these with him everywhere and had no backups. One day, in DC, he realized that if he got mugged, he would actually have had to negotiate to keep these: They were, potentially, far more valuable than anything he could carry in his wallet. After that, he went to Kinko’s. I glanced over his shoulder. The pages looked prematurely weathered, oily and translucent. I was shocked at the sparseness of writing and complete lack of cooking temperatures. There wasn’t much here. Any mugger who nabbed these would have been sorely displeased.

Belying the paradox of slow days—or perhaps just to humor his visitor—Brooks did have one new experiment up his sleeve. I watched as he blendered a gray concoction, reworking a previous day’s licorice sponge cake with an almond base. He maneuvered around a seven-pound can of almond paste that smelled of marzipan and a one-pound, $200 container of milled vanilla beans that looked indistinguishable from coffee grounds. The end product was a light cake to be cooked in a microwave, a technique invented by chefs at Spain’s El Bulli, an establishment held, in many circles, as the best restaurant on the planet. (“Remember when every band sounded like Fugazi? El Bulli has the same encompassing influence in the current restaurant world.”) It was an overexposed recipe—“cornball” in Headley lingo—that had already been used on the savory side, to compliment a serving of goose liver. His research would determine if, and how, it could be incorporated into a dessert.

Mark Ladner arrived and jovially discussed the licorice cake. Ladner is a tall man with a quiet presence and an almost military bearing. Brooks had earlier compared him to drummer Chuck Biscuits, meaning: the unsung workhorse of a powerhouse organization. Mark tried some of the licorice cake and commented on its peculiar texture, likening it to cotton candy. Startlingly, he asked my opinion. I took a bite. The creation was so light and spongy that it flirted with nonexistence, tasting of molasses with a faint, ghostly licorice aftertaste. As we three stood there discussing the nuances of something far, far beyond my level of experience, I realized my hooded sweatshirt had a stray cat hair I’d pollinated from California, which I discretely palmed and dropped in the trash with a flush of shame.

I spoke with Ladner later. I asked him if any one particular item had grabbed his attention during those initial tastings.

“His use of fruit tasted really, really true,” he replied. This was the kind of sentence I would have rolled my eyes at years ago. Coming from Ladner’s deep, imposing voice—and backed with my own limited experience at Del Posto—it made complete sense. The word “true” is one of a handful of adjectives I could myself truthfully use to describe the samples I’d tasted in that kitchen.

“And he wasn’t scared to use salt. Until the point where it’s salty, it’s sort of enhancing the flavor of the other components. So he was able to get these hyper flavors out of some fruits that weren’t even necessarily that great. But with the addition of a little bit of extra acid and a little bit of salt, he was able to sort of make these things explode without manipulating them too much.” A lot of ground had been covered in those two demonstrations, and Ladner paused now to recall everything that had been served up.

“His world-famous bomboloni is also a showstopper,” he added, referring to the traditional Tuscan donut used to smooth over personal disputes in the Old World.

“Plus, I have a theory that all that sugar is what makes pastry chefs a little nutty. They just get too bipolar... He doesn’t have that quality quite as much, perhaps, because his desserts aren’t sickeningly sweet. I mean, he’s obsessed with pastry, but he’s not psychotic in the kitchen. People constantly comment how cohesive the meal is from start to finish, how much they love the desserts.”

I asked if Brooks seemed less mysterious now, 15 months after that night on the mezzanine. He laughed and then paused again.

“His mystery is becoming slightly more predictable,” he finally said. “But he’s still mysterious.”

The licorice-cake experiment completed, Headley carefully put everything back in its proper place. He meticulously cleaned several unknown utensils and returned them to the wall’s magnetic strip, alongside various knives, scissors, a microplane (for zesting), and a pair of needle-nosed pliers, used only for pitting dates (an idea he’d got from another chef, who in turn got it from another chef before him). The marble counter shone. We discussed the cookbooks on the shelf above the magnetic strip. Did he have any aspirations to write one? Maybe, someday, he said, although it seemed like the thought had never crossed his mind.


I hadn’t eaten lunch, so I stepped out and got a slice of pizza and a Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee Coolatta. I eat worse than normal when traveling, and I eat even worse than that when I’m in New York. Twenty minutes later, I could feel my stomach howling, and I thought back to all the countless similar meals I’d eaten in this city years ago. And yet even now, as an adult who has learned a few baseline cooking skills, there still seemed to be some strange kernel of honesty in such a self-abusive lunch: There’s no “plating,” no pretense, nothing to experience, just fuel. I recalled a quote in Heat, Bill Buford’s excellent 2006 book about working under Mario Batali at his West Village eatery, Babbo:


It is the best meat I’ve eaten. But it is not a painting by Michelangelo. It’s dinner. You eat it; it’s gone.


When I returned to Del Posto, I asked Brooks if the impermanence of food bothered him. He said that he thought most chefs weren’t bothered by it, and for the most part he wasn’t either, even though he came from an artistic background that placed a premium on documentation. “You have to be completely consistent with producing a plate of food on a daily basis, and it always has to be the same, and it always has to be good,” he told me. “So the impermanence is sometimes a hard thing to deal with, and sometimes a cool thing to deal with. Because it means that no matter what you do on Saturday, on Sunday you’ve got a clean slate.”

This was the lightbulb I’d been waiting for. My own lunch that day had been a mistake. Soon I’d have forgotten all about it. No one would ever have to know about this mistake, unless I wrote about it in my article. Certainly no one would ever bother me about this mistake. There would be no MP3s of this particular bad lunch, no photographs, no PDFs. Like any other professional mistake Brooks had made or would make in the future, it would, very soon, vanish into the New York City sewer system, never to be seen again. That sounded nice.

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