Of Onions and Confit
On a wide plastic counter in a food court somewhere downtown is a 12 dollar slab of duck confit on whole grain bread that proves there is no ceiling to what people will spend on a sandwich. 300 S. Grand St., One California Plaza, Lower Level, to be exact: an address that suggests very large buildings. On the way there, I narrowly avoided a moving violation—“Bikes stop at red lights!” a motorcycle cop had shouted at me while stopped in oncoming traffic—then hopped the curb and headed down a ramp to a granite patio where manmade geysers spouted from a pool. Beyond it, to my left, I glimpsed a life-size plastic Holstein calf painted white and blue, taking pasture on a patch of astroturf in the food court. Nearby on the plastic meadow were a menu board and a metal milk pail. Welcome to Mendocina Farms: green marketing for the corporate lunch crowd.
It was a hot, muggy day after three days of rain when I went to interview at the Farms, and before I approached the entrance, I walked to a corner of the plaza to swap my sweaty tank top for something a little more presentable, finding instead that my bag was completely empty. I went ahead in the tank top.
“Hi,” I told the woman at the counter, standing beneath inflected mirrors that showed a bird’s eye view of the sandwich making surface. “I’m here for the open call?”
“Sure!” she said cheerily, handing me an application. She gestured towards a set of round tables outside. Brown faces sat glumly at each one, looking at the glass front wall of the restaurant as if it were a display case full of half-eaten food. The application was short, and used unusually simple English. It asked about “your last job” rather than your “employment history.” It was full of leading questions about the sort of obvious moral dilemmas I remember from elementary school whenever kids were expected to craft their own rules: “If you are finished cleaning up your station and someone else still has a lot of work to do, do you punch out and go home or stay and help them?” One question asked you to describe yourself as “Always 5 minutes early”; “Always on time”; or “Always 5 minutes late.” All in all, the application seemed something like an ethical literacy test, full of scarecrow questions that demanded a clear position on right and wrong more than honest answers.
A minute after I turned in my application, a tall, matronly woman came out of the restaurant and asked one of her co-workers, “any more English interviews?” Then, facing the group of us, said “Rowan?” in that tone of voice we reserve exclusively for reading off the names of strangers.
Judy had very little to ask me. “Do you have kitchen experience?” she wanted to know, and I was proud to tell her I’d spent a summer making (gourmet) sandwiches in San Francisco.
“So, let me give you a heads up about this kitchen,” Judy said. “It’s 90% Mexican and 10% Guatemalan.” Judy appeared neither Mexican nor Guatemalan. “There are one or two Mexican women, but it’s, uh, pretty bro in there. So, if you’re familiar with that, you should be fine.”
Judy beckoned me into a back corner of the kitchen where piles of red onion lay neatly spread on several cutting boards. “I want you to take a quarter of an onion and cut it for me.”
I went for the knife and one of the onion halves on the counter. “This,” Judy said, “is what other people did for me,” fingering a mound of uneven slices. “And this,” she said, letting paper thin slivers fall from her hand in a steady stream, “is what I want.” Clutching my fingertips like a knot on top of the bulb as I am told that prep cooks do, I cut the quarter of an onion in a heartbeat. The result was somewhere in the middle of Judy’s two piles, but she didn’t seem displeased. On my way out, she introduced me to the kitchen managers, Nelson and Alejandro. “Guys—this is Rowan. He has kitchen experience.”
They nodded blankly. “Are those the guys who do the next round of interviews,” I asked?
“No,” Judy said. “Those are the guys who decide.”
