Ivan Ramen Read online

  I wouldn’t say it was pleasant, but it was life affirming to be shocked out of my comfort zone. I became a regular, visiting the shop at least once a week for the three years I taught English in Shibuya. I learned to endure and eventually enjoy the heat, and appreciate the nuanced flavor behind it—intensely meaty and savory, but with subtle ripples of other tastes that kept me slurping curiously. It’d be a little too romantic to say that I was instantly obsessed with ramen, or that I knew I’d somehow found my life’s calling. At the time, that first bowl was just another in a long series of wonderfully bewildering encounters with Japanese culture.

  The most profound of these encounters occurred a while later, at the end of my second year in Tokyo, when I met a gorgeous and sophisticated Japanese woman named Tami. She was a student of mine at Berlitz, learning to speak English so she could sell computer chips in the States. I wasn’t exactly a playboy, but it wasn’t that hard for American English teachers to land dates with Japanese girls. My first date with Tami was in December of 1988.

  She took me to this club, essentially a big izakaya in the basement of an office building. I’d brought my English-to-Japanese dictionary and she had her Japanese-to-English one, and we sat there desperately trying to communicate with one another. I was definitely pursuing her, and I think she was intrigued, but all the nuance of flirting was impossible. In spite of the language barrier, we clicked. She was an extremely sophisticated Tokyo girl, but the charming awkwardness of the situation worked to my favor. We saw each other constantly for the next few months, and I fell in love with her.

  But by the time I’d met her, Tami was already preparing to move to San Francisco to help open a new branch of the computer company she worked for. The only upside to Tami’s leaving was that I finally landed a real job, working for her boss in Tokyo. With Tami gone, he hired me to help sell DRAM. To this day, I barely know what DRAM is, but I sold it for more than a year.

  I had finally met someone who made me feel like I belonged in Japan, and now she was gone. For the first time, I felt stuck in Japan. I grew restless. My boss would take me drinking with his clients, parading me around as his gaijin, but he sensed my discontent. One day he stepped in and saved me: “Why don’t you just go work with Tami in San Francisco?” I wasn’t done with Japan, but I wasn’t getting anywhere pining after Tami all day. I accepted the offer and just like that, nearly three years after it began, my first trip to Japan came to a close. I moved in with Tami in Mountain View, which wasn’t exactly something that she’d planned on, but thankfully she agreed to take me in.

  We quickly began building a pleasant little existence for ourselves in California, doing our best to maintain a Japanese lifestyle. We spoke a hybrid of Japanese and English, ate Japanese food and watched Japanese TV. Professionally, though, I was in a rut. I was still working for Tami’s company, selling computer parts I didn’t understand. I’d think wistfully, but not really practically, about cooking. And so, while I’d fled the monotony and restlessness of Tokyo, I was still just a rudderless young man—now in California.

  I was bummed out and irritable. I called my dad one day and moped, “I don’t know what to do with my life. I’m unhappy and I don’t know what I want to do—”

  “Get a hold of yourself—you’re a grown man,” he replied. “Get your shit together.” He then proceeded to dress me down for a while, until finally, almost out of nowhere, I blurted out, “You know, I was sort of thinking that maybe I should go to culinary school.”

  For years, my parents had been somewhat ambivalent about my fascination with food. Sometimes they’d see it as an attention-grabbing ploy of mine, an attempt to come off as interesting. Other times they’d indulge me, and suggest that if I liked food so much, I should find a career in it.

  My dad paused for a second and said, “Your mother and I had the same thought the other day. You should go.”

  A Cook’s Life

  It was the summer of 1991. I wasn’t anything close to a professional cook; I was just a guy in his late twenties who loved food. This was years before Kitchen Confidential made cooking seem like a badass—let alone respectable—occupation.

  To be fair, my parents would never have objected if I’d told them I wanted to go to culinary school straight out of high school, but back then, when I thought about the long hours and toil of cooking, I just wasn’t ready. But in California I found myself at a crossroads, and I felt like time was running out for me to commit to something. Why not bite the bullet and choose to pursue something I actually enjoyed?

  Nowadays, there are hundreds and hundreds of cooking schools to choose from, and more than enough has been written about what it’s like to be a culinary student, a cook, and a chef. When I was looking to get into the business, however, there were only a few options. I applied to the Culinary Institute of America in New York, got in, and moved back east with Tami. We got married on May 10, 1992.

  The curriculum at CIA was focused almost exclusively on French, Austrian, and German technique. Back then, as far as cooking schools were concerned, the only people who knew how to cook were French and German people. I sucked at cooking school, just like I sucked at regular school. As exciting as it was to be thinking about and tinkering with food every day, I was still the same obstinate student I’d always been. I irritated my classmates (a bunch of rednecks, I thought), and after a few weeks almost no one was speaking to me. I didn’t even attend my own graduation. But I’m still glad I went. It gave me my first taste of cooking in professional kitchens, and I loved it.

  Top left: Cooking Thanksgiving dinner at my sister’s house, with my son Isaac looking on. Top right: Becoming a cook generally means you absorb all the home-cooking duties, too. Bottom left: Me, with a massive basket of chanterelles that I found behind my house in Woodstock, where I lived during my CIA days. Bottom right: I was too cheap to buy school portraits at CIA, so I stole the outtake shots. This is the only photographic evidence I have that I went to cooking school.

  While I was still in school, I got an externship at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill, and for a brief time I was part of the hottest new restaurant in New York. Flay was a superb manager, working with his staff in a way that made a huge impression on me. He never yelled, and when he was angry he took care of it privately. He had good advice for me: “Keep your mouth shut, pay attention, help out wherever you can, and everyone will want to teach you.” The cooks were all tremendously talented. It wasn’t until I was in that kitchen that I really began to understand the fundamentals of cooking—seasoning, grilling, roasting, braising, sautéing.

  After graduation in 1993, most of my classmates sought out jobs at fine-dining places in Manhattan. I had a friend who went to Le Bernardin, another who went to Daniel. I got a dream job: Lutèce, one of the greatest French restaurants in the United States—a Times four-star restaurant for almost thirty years, with virtually no turnover in staff. When I was a little kid, my parents told me that Lutèce was the best restaurant in New York. Whenever they’d take us out to eat, without fail I’d say, “Can we go to Lutèce?!” Of course, we never did, but it still felt like I was coming full circle when I got the job there. Nobody in my family could believe it.

  At Lutèce, I was surrounded by outstanding cooks who were mature and confident enough to share their wisdom and advice. My job was to assist the sous chef, Bill Peet (who remains a great friend and source of inspiration). But the most important lessons I learned at Lutèce were about hospitality. Lutèce was like no other restaurant in the country for one simple reason: André Soltner, the chef and proprietor. Soltner was king of the New York fine-dining scene. Heads of state, movie stars—they all flocked to Lutèce. Every day, at the beginning of both lunch and dinner service, he would be waiting at the door in a stark white chef’s jacket, a neckerchief crisply knotted around his neck, greeting customers as they came in. Every morning he was in promptly at nine, without fail. At early morning sessions, he would check the reservations and make sure we were prepared for hi
s regulars: Mrs. S loves steak tartare; Mr. Head-of-a-Large-Corporation wants apple tart—be sure to have one ready.

  I spent two transformative years at Lutèce. When it was time for a change in scenery, I started cooking all around Manhattan. All the stories that had made me apprehensive about the restaurant business were true: the grueling hours, burns and cuts, screaming chefs, coming home greasy and stinking of fish. But I also acquired a skill that I had sorely lacked my entire life: I learned how to suck it up. The Japanese refer to this notion as gaman, and it’s a skill that is absolutely necessary to survive more than five minutes in a professional kitchen.

  Most surprisingly, I found that I loved it. I loved the intensity. I loved having to do twenty things at once. I loved the pace. Pushing through pain was exhilarating. I’d traded in my confused, meandering days for ones filled with purpose. That’s what’s great about cooking: you focus on the task at hand, and then you move on to the next one. You’re too busy to get lost in your own thoughts or feel sorry for yourself.

  But line cooking is a young man’s game. I was in my thirties. I was married. And in 1996, I became a father. Tami gave birth to our son, Isaac, in February of that year, on what turned out to be the most wonderful day of my life.

  While Tami was pregnant with Isaac, I interviewed for a line-cook job at Union Square Cafe. The chef was also fascinated with Japan, and we had an interesting conversation. I did a trial and he offered me the main sauté position. The pay was $400 a week gross, meaning $250 take-home, with no benefits to speak of. I wanted to continue moving up the cooking ladder, but now I had a family to support. I thanked the chef, but told him I just couldn’t live on $250 a week.

  So I went corporate.

  I started working for Restaurant Associates, a well-known restaurant company that also provides corporate dining services for businesses and museums. Cafeterias ranging from upscale to downscale—that sort of thing. I became the executive chef for a boutique investment firm. My work schedule went from long nights, weekends, and holidays, six days a week, to a predictable 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., Mondays through Fridays, with insurance, bonuses, and an expense account. My little café served breakfast and lunch to 250 every day, and was a safe zone for a lot of stressed-out people. In that environment, it dawned on me how much food means to people. I listened to complaints, I built trust, and I did my best to make everyone happy. I nurtured a feeling of warmth in the dining room, and served the most delicious food I could.

  Isaac was born a month or two after I started at the firm. Fine-dining restaurants don’t ordinarily have enough money to take care of their staffs—it’s just a fact of the business. Many chefs and owners would love to pay a guy for paternity leave, or let him stay home to watch the kids while his wife is sick, but they just can’t; there’s enough money for one salary, and if you can’t come in, they have to find someone else. But Restaurant Associates gave me a week off when my son was born, a luxury that most restaurants would balk at, especially for a new hire.

  Sometimes I think back and wish I’d sucked it up a little longer and taken that job at Union Square Cafe, or worked at another place and built up my cooking chops a bit more. I wonder if I could’ve used another year or two of toughening up. There are a lot of wonderful things about working in a premier restaurant in New York. When things are clicking, you’re turning out great food and the newspapers are all singing your praises. If you’re on a good team, there’s an inimitable camaraderie. Like any fine-dining cook, I daydreamed about running my own kitchen and cooking my own food. As a chef now, I still feel defensive about my decision to leave the grind for a corporate dining job. But I made a tough choice for my family, and ultimately, it was the right one.

  Things were humming along. Life was never better. I was settled at work and at home. Isaac had turned two, and Tami was five months pregnant with our second child. We’d just sold our apartment and were preparing to move into a cute three-bedroom house with a backyard in Mamaroneck. My immediate family all lived close by. Our apartment was stocked to the ceiling with boxes in preparation for the move.

  Then, in three short days, my entire world crashed down around me.

  On a Tuesday, Tami went to a trade show at the Javits Center and came home with a chill. Over the phone, the obstetrician recommended she just try to get some rest, but her condition continued to worsen. We finally talked the doctor into seeing us at the hospital. When we got there, they admitted Tami into the obstetrics department rather than emergency—which turned out to be a tragic mistake. By noon on Friday, she had miscarried—we lost our daughter. Within another hour, Tami’s condition had deteriorated even further. One after another, her organs began shutting down. She went into a coma at three in the afternoon. The inexperienced obstetrician hadn’t recognized the signs of toxic shock, and now it was too late. I went home and held Isaac and cried myself to sleep. Tami passed away the next day.

  The worst day of my life. Isaac and me, asleep after Tami’s funeral.

  She was the first woman I’d ever loved, and I think she was the first to ever love me. Until we met, I had always been rebellious, immature, and unsettled. She was powerful, decisive, and focused, and she made up for all the things that I lacked. In the ten years we’d been together, I’d gone from being a confused, aimless kid in Tokyo to a husband, a father, and a chef. Losing Tami was devastating. In a horrifying flash, I’d become a single dad grieving the loss of his wife and unborn daughter.

  But I was also in the best situation one could hope for under such terrible circumstances. The truth is that much worse things happen to people who are less well equipped to cope with loss. I still had a beautiful, healthy son and owned a nice apartment. I worked a steady job for a company that gave me time off to sort out my life. I could afford a nanny, and my parents lived down the block. I would walk over there every day and have meals with them, and they would help with the kid.

  I was brokenhearted, but tried to remain grateful and strong for Isaac, who had just lost as much as I had, if not more. I like to think I rose to the occasion. I reinvented myself for him and, thanks to my supportive family, we both slowly recovered. Learning to adapt after Tami’s death made me into a man. Being a single father beat any lingering irresponsibility out of me. After a couple of years went by, I began to feel the rhythm of life as a single parent.

  The one thing I couldn’t replace was our family’s cultural connection to Japan. With Tami gone, I missed the Japanese part of my life. We had spoken Japanese in the house, and our home had a Japanese energy to it. I wanted Isaac to have that culture in his life. So six months after Tami passed, I made my first extended trip back to Japan in almost ten years.

  The Obsession

  Over the next few years, I continued to visit Japan every nine months or so. I’d bring Isaac to see his grandparents, and we’d stay with Eric in Tokyo.

  On one of those trips, four years after Tami died, a friend wanted to introduce us to her friend Mari, who was also raising a son on her own. When Tami died, I’d spent a year single and completely uninterested in dating. After that, I began easing back into things. Dating after your wife dies is not exactly easy, especially when you have a little kid. In the year before I met Mari, I’d been dating a lot, meeting a lot of women, but failing to make any sort of real connection. A few months before the trip to Japan, I decided to stop casually dating, and wait until I found someone I really liked. So it was with that in mind that I cautiously agreed to meet Mari and her son, Alex.

  Isaac and I met them at a park in Tokyo. After a few hours of chatting while the kids played in the park, I asked Mari and Alex to dinner. The first meal we had together was at a famous garlic tonkotsu (fatty, sticky pork broth) ramen shop. It’s still around. These days, I find the soup there too garlicky and fatty, but back then I thought it was really great—intense and rich and porky. Plus, I was there with Mari and Isaac and Alex; our afternoon blind date had bled over into the night.

  Isaac and I ended up spending
the rest of our time in Tokyo with Mari and Alex. When we returned home to New York, I was miserable. I couldn’t stop thinking about Mari. I called her, and we talked about how ridiculous it felt to let distance keep us from being together. I decided that I had to go back to Japan. My parents thought I was insane. I told them I’d met someone. “You were just there a week ago,” they said. I told them I needed to see her again.

  A few days later, I dropped Isaac off at their house. They were furious. I was being reckless, impetuous. My mom told me she refused to take care of Isaac just so I could go meet some girl halfway around the world. But I didn’t back down. This was my first real glimpse of romantic love in four years. Mari and I had chemistry, and I’m big on chemistry. I told my parents the same thing I’d been telling them all my life: “I’m not asking for your permission—I’m just letting you know.” Eventually, they relented and I left for Tokyo.

  I spent four days in Japan. I met Mari’s parents and brother and professed my love for her. We were together the entire time, and made plans to see each other the next month in New York. On August 10, 2002—a little less than three months from the day we met—we were married. Mari decorated my parents’ house with flowers she bought in the flower district, and I planned the menu and cooked the food with the help of some friends. We crammed seventy people into the house, and it was a truly joyous day. I was surrounded by friends and family who had stood by my side through the low moments of the previous four years. To have them with me as I came full circle was immensely moving.

  After the wedding, we tried to settle into life in New York. Thankfully, our kids got along right away—Alex, who was two years old, worshipped his new older brother. I was in my seventh year working for Restaurant Associates. The first four or five years had been wonderful. I didn’t have to worry about profits or losses; I just had to make customers happy, and there were no corporate games to play. Then a big conglomerate bought the company, and the warm, fuzzy feeling began to dissipate. The economy started to tank, and suddenly I had to get with the program, work different hours, and cook whatever they asked me to. It began when they’d given me a hard time about taking a Sunday off for my wedding, and continued with my boss squeezing me into doing stuff I didn’t want to do—special events like taco day and Mardi Gras day—along with more and more paperwork.