MIDLIFE SPICES
“We are drenched in cynicism, psychologisms, explanations, but life is still there, its essence quite beyond spin, its cycle as surely set as it always has been,” the late, great novelist and gourmand Jim Harrison once wrote. I was thinking a lot about this line last fall. I was mired in what you’d have to call – what I had made every attempt to avoid calling – a midlife crisis, that sad cliché of impulsive purchases and extramarital affairs.
I had assumed that the midlife crisis had passed from parody to fantasy, seeing as it signified enough existential stability to become bored. Existential stability has seemed rather elusive for a while. According to a recent study by something called the Thriving Center of Psychology, 81% of millennials “can’t afford a midlife crisis.” I’m not a millennial, but after more than 20 years of trying to survive as a novelist, my daydreams had traded ferment and adventure for predictability and ease.
And yet here I was, soldered by the routines of rural home ownership (don’t you dare say suburban), marriage, and two small kids: changing diapers, painting the deck, battling our utility bill, and trying not to lose it with two darling children who, at 5 and 2, couldn’t do much for themselves. I was writing, sure, a little, but I was also dying, a lot. It was 2024. I was progressive. But I might as well have been a character in Cheever.
One day, I was opening my son’s yogurt squeezie when my phone dinged with a text.
It was a friend telling me that Cal Peternell, the long-time executive chef of Chez Panisse, the iconic Berkeley restaurant, was returning to our pastoral corner of western New Jersey, where Cal was born, to open a new restaurant. The labor situation being what it was, Cal was badly in need of line cooks.
Food has a complicated history in my immigrant family; my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, went nine months without a real meal during the war. So I love making food and serving it to people; it feels like the highest form of hospitality. For years, I’ve done it at home every night, and since long before “The Bear” made restaurant kitchens everyone’s concern, I couldn’t stop wondering what it would be like to do it for people I didn’t know, amid the pageantry and crush of a restaurant.
I stared at the phone in my hand while trying, uselessly, to open the squeezie with the other. My son was annoyed, whining – I’m sure he would have preferred to do it himself already; he was forever sharing me with my phone, the stove, my daydreams. Unwilling to let go of that phone, with its message of fulfillment and freedom, I opened the squeezie with my teeth.
I wrote Cal a suck-up letter listing my qualifications, such as they were. He plays things close to his chest, so I didn’t get a proper answer until several months later, during those dog days of winter when probably I would have agreed to scrub bathroom floors in a prison just to get out of the house. Starting date: February 15th. I looked at my wife. Suddenly, the always-there dad would be gone four nights a week. And though there are few professions that earn less than writing, I’d managed to find one: $18/hour with tips. But I had just sold a new novel. We could make do for six months, my wife said. That’s the way she phrased it, but what she may have been really saying was: Get out of this house or I’ll kill you.
I’m fit and exercise regularly, but within a week of starting at Finnbar, Cal’s restaurant in Frenchtown, the picturesque town on the Delaware River that separates New Jersey from Pennsylvania, I couldn’t feel my lower back. Rather, it was all I could feel, in radiating rainbows of pain. I had to roll into and out of bed; one day, my wife had to tie my shoelaces before I left for work.
Finnbar had a large, airy kitchen, and its community embraced it with the kind of enthusiasm that makes it all feel worth it, but laboring on the line, it was impossible to avoid a painful revelation: That someone surrenders their days, nights, and weekends to stand on their feet for a dozen hours in a hot room to make food for less than $20/hour feels feudal. It’s a sign of how much our culture longs for the physicality of artisanship and the intimacy of genuine camaraderie that “The Bear” has such a fanatical following despite this aspect of kitchen work. Then again, “The Bear” doesn’t emphasize it. I didn’t understand this until I moved behind the line.
The physical pain, however, was nothing next to the shame of being so bad at my tasks: Pounded green garlic was the start of many of our dressings, and it was some time before I realized I was pounding the wrong part of the stalk. Salting at restaurant volume defied me. I couldn’t figure out the burn point of rosemary and sage. And I always seemed to save my mistakes for when Cal was walking past my station.
When I came home, I was very tired – and very frustrated. Nothing in life, even parenthood, had been as hard as the two decades I had spent earning a modicum of skill and stability with writing; now it was as if I was back in my twenties, trying and failing to understand why this short story worked and that one didn’t. The mastery, or at least competence, some of us get to feel in middle age can be life’s compensation for the indignities of aging and the partial erasure of one’s self that comes with parenthood. I wasn’t prepared to be so bad at something I cared so much about.
And I was paying dearly for it at home. I was even more distracted than usual – always late, always weary, always insufficiently attentive to my children, who were always asleep by the time I got back. I hadn’t changed a diaper, brushed any tiny teeth, laundered any tiny shirts, in months, a massive part of my life suddenly gone. I didn’t miss it, exactly, but without it, I also felt partial, as if a limb had been lopped off. I wondered how anyone could work in restaurants year in and out, the family always elsewhere.
In the kitchen, little by little, I got better. I learned how to make mayo, crème fraiche, beurre blanc, and gribiche. (The most radical lesson was that the greatest flavor enhancer in the kitchen is… water. Yes, try finish caramelizing your onions in water next time. It’ll be the purest onion flavor you’ve ever tasted.) Like Cal, Finnbar was, in very unshowy ways, revolutionary: Only one out of the four mains was non-vegetarian, and accordingly priced, because of its impact on the planet; the rest were under $20. Let me say that again: In 2024, when a mediocre bolognese in a New York restaurant goes for $35, we were serving grilled locally-grown lion’s mane mushrooms with fried polenta made from local corn, sauteed local greens, and Rancho Gordo beans (Cal’s one sourcing concession to his time in California) for $18. I was proud to work there, even as it continued to humble, if not humiliate, me every day. But I couldn’t figure out how to stop. After my family sacrificed so much for my lark, I couldn’t help wishing for a larger lesson to take home along with scraps from family meal.
It arrived one Saturday as I was hurriedly packing my knife bag, late for the restaurant as usual. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my two-year-old pull a footstool to the wall. He climbed it, tottering, and reached for the light switch. He couldn’t reach it. But he wouldn’t stop trying. His pudgy little fingers flailed for the light, unwilling to accept, or understand, that he couldn’t do it.
Three months before, I would have gone to the light, switched it on for him, and returned to whatever I was doing. But I just stood and watched him, my swirling mind momentarily still. It was so obvious that I’d never bothered to notice it: His whole life, there had been a vast space between us. He couldn’t, and I could. But now I couldn’t, too – couldn’t salt, couldn’t fry, couldn’t blanche. How often do adults get to feel what their children feel when they can’t reach the light or tie their shoelaces, even though we’ve shown them many times? Had I always been patient – as patient as Cal had been with me – in return?
That day, I went to work feeling humility rather than humbling. That day, I understood the difference, and the recipe: To make humility, combine humbling with grace. My son taught me the dish.
Soon after that, I gave my notice, and I came home.