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she burns?” He was whispering.
    No, I hadn’t noticed, although, it was true, there’d been a tray of burnt beef cheeks.
    “Precisely. It’s unacceptable. Ever notice the dullness of her knife?”
    I pondered the question. Actually, I’d experienced her knife firsthand and had not found it dull.
    “Let me put it this way. Ever notice her sharpening it?”
    “Sure,” I said. “A few times.” By then I knew the knife rituals. Frank Langello was especially proud of his. Frankie was the other sous-chef. He was about the same age as Memo, an Italian American, with wavy black hair, preternaturally long eyelashes, and the skinny good looks of one of those crooners from the forties and fifties, like a young Sinatra in the Hoboken years. Frankie and Memo had worked together at Le Cirque, a four-star restaurant then run by the famously fanatical Sottha Khunn, and they both felt they were among the few people at Babbo who understood the importance of kitchen discipline, which, evidently, included knife care. Frankie used only cheap ones, because he whipped them so ruthlessly against a sharpening steel that the blades wore out. Every now and then he used a whetstone, for even more edge: he tested the sharpness by shaving his forearms. (“When the hair grows back, I get out the whetstone again.”)
    Memo was shaking his head. “That’s my point—a
few
times. You’ve seen Elisa sharpen her knife a
few
times. Trust me. Her knife is a stick. The problem is this—she lacks the dedicated, serious approach. Great chefs,” he explained, “are born, not made. It’s in your blood, or it’s not: the
passion.
”
    I didn’t know what to say. It was a pretty small space for such strong positions. Memo didn’t like Elisa because she wasn’t serious enough. Gina didn’t like her because she was too serious. And Elisa didn’t like Gina because
she
wasn’t serious enough. (“Most restaurants have pastry chefs who actually work,” Elisa said most mornings when Gina was chirpily chatting on her cell phone.)
    The walk-in episode was illuminating in another way.
    When I’d started, I’d jokingly referred to myself as a kitchen slave. Now I had a new understanding. I
was
a kitchen slave. That was the role: morning kitchen slave. In effect, I had entered into a contract: I was indentured. In the mornings, I gave Elisa my time, and she gave me instruction, and the instruction was precious enough that it entitled her to my time, exclusively, and the Ginas of the kitchen had better watch how they talked to me.
    Others showed me how to do things as well. (“I am a great teacher,” Memo told me after showing me how to bone a wild boar shoulder, “and people always tell me this is what I should do, teach, but I have one problem—impatience.”) But most of my instruction was from Elisa. To my astonishment, she took me seriously. I was a project; I was being educated in how to be a cook.
    The truth is, I was grateful for the run-in in the walk-in, Gina and Elisa squabbling over me: there was so much work that even
I
was needed. I wanted to be needed. I longed for a day when my presence would make a difference. Ever since that first kitchen meeting, I’d imagined my putting in so much time that I’d be trusted to cook on the line—maybe to cover for someone in an emergency or during an unexpected crunch. I didn’t share these thoughts with Mario or Elisa or Memo, if only because I was still the guy who didn’t know how to cut an onion without slicing into the palm of his hand. And yet I was being taken seriously: I wasn’t allowed to leave.
    Or maybe the truth was much simpler: Elisa needed help, and instead she had me.

    S OMETIMES E LISA startled me. I’d be working at top speed, nervously waiting for her to appear and ask if I’d finished the five things she’d asked me to do so she could give me something else (and, invariably—and I
mean
“invariably”—I was still at work on the first one), when, out of nowhere,