With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
Basura
The next day, I set my plate in front of Chef Ayden and he turns it round and round. I wait for him to pick up his fork and knife.
“Trash it,” he says without looking up at me.
“Ex-excuse me?” I stutter out. Is he kidding? I look around the room but none of the other students meets my eyes. They are all standing, waiting to present their dishes, but our usually noisy class is suddenly very quiet. Malachi is the only person not pretending he’s not all in my business, and his eyebrows quirk in confusion, as if he’s stuck on Chef’s command as well.
“Trash it,” Chef says again, but this time he looks at me straight on.
“What’s wrong with it?” I ask. I know the twitch in my jaw is probably showing. I can’t believe he would tell me to throw away something he hasn’t even tasted!
“It’s not the recipe I gave you. It doesn’t have the same ingredients, and the cut on these is wrong.”
“It tastes good, it’s well-balanced like you tell us to do, and the presentation is flawless,” I say through my teeth.
He grabs a fork, stabs the dish, and pops it in his mouth. He’s quiet for a long moment. And I can tell he loves it. He shakes his head. “Cumin, basil, oregano.” His eyes pop open. “None of those ingredients were in the recipe. This isn’t the same dish at all. I can’t grade something that is more about creativity than execution. That wasn’t the point of today’s evaluation. So I won’t say it again: trash it.” He sets his fork down.
My eyes sting but I bite my lip hard and grab my dish. I slap the plastic plate against the side of the trash bin and the food slides off. With my hands shaking, I unbutton my chef’s jacket, tug off my scarf. When the bell rings, I wait for everyone else to leave. Malachi is the last student left besides me and he touches my arm on his way to the door. “Come with me, Santi. Let this one go.”
I shake his hand off.
Chef is behind his long metal table entering the last of the grades in his laptop. He lifts his head slowly. “Yes, Emoni. Can I help you with something?”
I know my anger is like graffiti tagged onto my face and I don’t care if he can see. “Why’d you make me do that?”
Almost as if in response to the bite in my voice, his voice gets even calmer. “You didn’t prepare the dish correctly.”
“So what? It tasted good.”
“I told you before, sometimes following directions isn’t about stifling your creativity, it’s about showing respect. You have a complete disregard for the rules. That’s all well and good, when you’re a professional. But when you’re learning, you need to know the rules before you break them.”
“That doesn’t make sense. What if the rules are stupid? What if that wasn’t a great recipe to begin with? Why should I learn to make a bad recipe well?”
He shakes his head. “It’s not about my rules, Emoni. Or my recipes. A customer walks in and asks for a flank steak, medium rare. At what internal temperature do you pull the steak off the grill?”
I pause and think.
“It’s burning, Emoni. The steak is burning because you can’t remember the temperature or timing and now the customer is upset that it’s too tough and they won’t be coming back. And it was only a small, technical rule. What if a customer is allergic to cayenne, and it doesn’t say that’s in the ingredient list, but you wanted to express yourself at the last minute and now the customer is sick. I could come up with a hundred scenarios.”
He holds my gaze one second longer, then goes back to his laptop. He doesn’t have to say that I’ve been dismissed for me to know it.
I slam his door behind me, knowing exactly how much it annoys Chef when students do that. It doesn’t matter. After today, I don’t think I’ll be his student much longer.