2000s Archive

Movin’ On Up

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It wasn’t until recently that Guardado, accomplished cook though he is, knew anything of that fire.

Dressed in his crisp white chef’s jacket, Nicolas Guardado keeps his pen poised over his notebook and scribbles notes as his instructor, Gerardo González, speaks in a measured manner, all the time whisking egg yolks over a double boiler. He pauses, glances at his notes, then picks up his lecture again while his students study his movements in the tilted mirror above.

For Guardado, as for many of the students here tonight, the hollandaise González is making is nothing new. His own chef has shown it to him before. Yet he listens as if he is hearing of hollandaise for the first time.

González lectures for 45 minutes, reviewing the salsas principales—the mother sauces—that he had introduced the week before: salsa velouté, salsa béchamel, salsa espagnole, salsa demiglace. While he speaks, the bowl of freshly made hollandaise is passed around so that everyone can taste. When the hollandaise reaches Guardado, he stops the teacher and asks him how to spell it.

The 17-member class then moves into the teaching kitchen. In pairs, they begin preparing their own hollandaise. Guardado, curious yet tentative in the classroom, is now in his element. He quickly finds the ingredients, along with a whisk and a bowl. He tells his partner to put water on to boil. He separates his eggs and measures the butter he needs to clarify.

In class, with his black hair tucked inside his Jaleo baseball cap, only his calm and his quiet confidence give Guardado away as the kitchen veteran that he is. But watching him with his classmates, who come from all over Latin America—looking over their shoulders to make sure they are stirring their risotto, holding their knives properly, or using a clean cutting board—it would be easy to mistake him for their teacher. He laughs when he hears this.

“I’m learning how to make a sauce,” he says. “That’s new to me.”

He exaggerates. What Guardado is really learning, says Andrés, is how much he already knows. “He didn’t want to be sous-chef because he didn’t think he was ready. I had to tell him he was ready. Sometimes they need to believe that.”

It’s hard to tell what Guardado believes about himself. He admits he’s shy and nervous, still scared of the idea of running his own restaurant one day. But at the beginning of the class, he thought that all he knew was Spanish food—French and Italian, no way. He is starting to realize now, as he effortlessly prepares a white stock or arranges potato slices in a sauté pan for pommes Anna, that he can probably cook anywhere he wants.

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