Of Mussels, Potatoes, and Queer Resistance

Things that grow sweet in the dark.

Natasha and I alternate on the salad station. Some days I follow her on the dinner shift, other times she follows me. On nights when the kitchen’s expected to be slammed—opening night at the opera, say, or New Year’s Eve—we work the line together.

She’s the coolest cook I’ve ever known, and beautiful: thick, dark shag like Chrissie Hynde’s, fuchsia lips, bangle bracelets, high-top Cons. And she’s a lesbian, or maybe bi but she’s seeing a woman now, which everybody here knows, and in any event we’re allies: figures on the edge of the restaurant power chart. We bitch about the state of the kitchen, about the lack of respect for Robbie the gay chef de cuisine, I guess you’d call him (though nobody did). About the asshole straight guys who work grill and sauté.

After lunch one day, she’s breaking down the station. I’ve just clocked in. She helps me write my prep list for the evening: Cuise¹ more breadcrumbs for the baked goat cheese . . . start a pot of beans as backup for the marinated salad . . . check on how much squid came in to poach for the yum pla muk . . .. She’s already cooked the mussels for the new special.

Joseph, the nighttime expediter, calls Natasha over to his station. Natasha used one of his burners to steam open mussels for a marinated salad. Apparently, she left one in the strainer basket. She tells Joseph she’s sorry.

I just want to show you something, he says.

I watch him put his arm around tight her neck in a kind of half nelson.

I think you’ll like this, he says.

I can see something’s not right. I go see what’s up.

In his open hand, Joseph holds out a cooked mussel, the purple-gray-black shell sprung open like a locket. With the tip of a finger from his other hand, from the arm forcing Natasha in place, he strokes the lobed, orangey, labia-like flesh of the mussel.

You like this, right? Tell me you like it.

Natasha struggles to get free.

Joseph. Let me go.

Just tell me you like it, then you can go.

I’m paralyzed.

I say, Joseph, come on, but he ignores me—doesn’t even look at me.

Tell me you like it, Natasha.

There’s fear in Natasha’s face.

I like it, Joseph. Okay? I like it. Is that what you wanted?

Thatta girl, he says, and lets her go. Why did you have to make that so difficult?

Natasha and I return to our station.

Fucking asshole, she says, loud enough for me to hear but not Joseph or the other two guys prepping on the hot line, almost like she’s letting us both—me and her—save some face. But I see the shame on her, shame mixed with anger.

My shame is that I made a weak-ass pretense of intervening. I didn’t do shit to stop it.

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I came up gay learning the smell of violence and to know fear. I was never physically thrashed for giving off the scent of gayness. I was verbally and non-verbally warned, through looks, gestures: eyes that scoured and judged, mouths that sneered. This was a universal sort of taste of being queer, universal for my generation and no doubt others.

To come out in San Francisco in the early 1980s was to exist in a ghetto surrounded by the regular potential of violence. You’d be yelled faggot from a moving car on 24^th Street. You knew better, say, than to take the N Judah farther than the Inner Sunset in an unguarded state, by which I mean presenting as queer (tee-shirt messages, button pins, makeup): holding your boyfriend’s hand or forgetting to modulate how you talked or what you said. We all wore whistles around our necks or clipped to our pocket keys—we were supposed to blow them when we saw someone getting bashed, or if we were harassed by the cops, whose assault on queers was constant.

So, to witness an assault at work, in a restaurant kitchen where being queer made you marginal: This was part of workplace culture, no matter how cool, how enlightened, the restaurant’s owners might be. Complicity was an unwritten rule of keeping your job. Maybe keeping my job was an ongoing expression of cowardice, maybe not.

I’m thinking about this now because of the recent election, and how attacks on queer and especially trans people will only intensify in the next four years. And I’m thinking about it because I’ve just read a galley of Laurie Woolever’s forthcoming memoir Care and Feeding, due in March. Laurie was assistant and book collaborator for Anthony Bourdain and, beginning in the late 1990s, for Mario Batali, years before allegations of Batali’s sexual assaults became public. I’m not going to spoil Laurie’s book, the conclusions she closes with, because you should read Care and Feeding for yourself (it’s grim and hopeful; sharp, funny, and unvarnished). She suggests, though, that toxicity, in workplaces and other public realms, is merely the dark side of a human nature also giving empathy and caring.

I mean, yeah. Still, we have to do something to resist.

The bitter irony of the restaurant story I opened with is that the only reason Natasha had to steam open mussels in Joseph’s space was because of a salad special I’d worked out. As an act of rebellion, I guess I’d call it, against the homophobic tenor of that kitchen, when one of the owners asked me to come up with some ideas, I adapted a recipe from The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, one of the queerest food books I knew.

I turned Alice’s mussels cooked with potatoes—a warm dish—into a cold-weather salad of poached mussels, earthy little potatoes, and curly frisée, dressed with sherry vinegar, puréed roasted garlic, and weedy, pungent leaves of savory. It’s a dish of underground flavors, of flesh growing sweet in the dark places, either earth or ocean. Cooked and unified by vinaigrette with a somber sort of brightness, mussels and potatoes might become a single expression of tenacity and cunning, but mostly of sensuality. Because if queerness were forced to temper its voice, on the cold line, Natasha and I would make it fucking speak.

1. In kitchenspeak, to cuise is to process something in a Cuisinart.