I did several oddball jobs making my way through college. One semester, I was an “Instructional Aid Assistant” for a class called the Science of Cooking. Once a week, some swanky chef from a swanky restaurant came as a guest to talk about their craft — the chemistry, the art, the psychology of it — and to show their signature style, all in an enormous lecture room typically reserved for premed math classes and occasional improv shows. My job was to prep the teaching material which included a stove, propane tanks, plates, knives, and a minifridge with ingredients. I then operated an industrial camera in the backroom to record the class. I had to follow every word of the lecture, while panning the camera smoothly back and forth between frying pans and PowerPoint slides. I did this twice a week. One lecture paid eighteen dollars, and by the end of the semester, I had enough to buy a winter jacket and to go on a few dates. The class had another perk. I got to clean up after the class, which meant carting the leftovers into the backstage where I would lick the plates clean. But I wasn’t the only one scavenging. One student usually stood behind, Lucas. The very first day of class, he followed me backstage, I offered him a plastic fork and we ate with relish any edible leftovers.
Lucas told me he had started college late and was too old to live with the undergraduates. He had spent two years as a linecook in San Diego and had the oil burns and kitchen scars to prove it. Unlike me, who at that point was floundering like a plastic bag, he had a calling: he had discovered pastries and was going to be a pastry chef. He was getting an accelerated degree in chemistry and anthropology, after which he hoped to finagle an apprenticeship at some famous European shop. The next two years, we grew closer over our fearless love of sweet things and the occasional science class we shared. By the time he graduated, he had also swindled a hefty travel fellowship under the pretext of studying the cultural role of honey across the world. He spent all that money gallivanting around the world, living with beekeepers, and eating mangoes and coconuts.
We didn’t stay in touch after. I graduated, did a couple of jobs, finished another degree, and moved to New York. Once I saw his name on the credits of a Netflix cooking show, and I assumed he had made it in the world of cooking, which made it all the more surprising when he replied to one of my Instagram stories telling me he was also in New York and that we should meet up.
To be sure, Lucas never had the tortured look one expects of a closeted talent — he always had chubby cheeks, a mild belly, was always on the verge of giggling, but the last two years, he had also grown out his hair. His life had gone just as he had planned — he had worked in not one but two famous places, in Spain and then in France, and he was back. He told me there was a dessert renaissance going on. You, of course, had names like Cedric Grolet and Albert Adria in Europe, Will Goldfarb and Janice Wong in Asia. In New York itself, dessert bars were popping up every other block. Then he tells me, “You can’t industrialize this good stuff, you know what I mean. The wait and the crowd and at what point does it become a spectacle?” I ask him if he was planning something. “Yes, yes, something short. Maybe a one-man show, with a pastry component to it. I am still brainstorming.” I told him it sounded a little tacky, but he promised me that he knew tacky and this wouldn’t be one.
We then headed to Queens, where he lived in a basement with his longtime girlfriend and had set up a space for his experiments. He had made one discovery during his travels to study honey: that all honey tasted the same when you had a runny nose, and that most of taste actually came from the fragrance, the aroma, the sounds you hear while eating, which the brain channeled into a dormant memory or a delectable fantasy. He told me the last few months he had spent trying to understand smell, he had gone around department store floors purchasing the latest hits of the last twenty years — Chanel No 5, Black Opium, Sarah Jessica Parker’s Lovely — trying to understand why some molecules were so sought after, had spent weeks with florists and in gardens, and had gone around sniffing subway riders he thought looked pretty. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this descent into madness. I merely said I looked forward to what trying out what he came up with.
I didn’t hear from him for six months. I got busy. I was always moving around, always staring down an interminable list of things I had to do but never had the time to. By the time he called me, I had almost forgotten about him. He had found the perfect place for his show. In Queens, close to the E line but far enough from the noisy train tracks, at a private lounge run by a man who went by the name Grumpy Japanese. There would be a total of four Saturday performances where he would introduce six dessert items over two hours, for about fifty people, after which he was going to pack everything up, move back to San Diego, marry his girlfriend, and raise a family next to the Pacific. I was to show up at an address wearing something respectable. Before he hung up, he says, “Look, I have kept you in the first group. I know you will be honest, and that will mean something to me.”
The venue was above a pottery studio, up a staircase lined with neon outline of the Kanagawa wave, at the top of which a smiling man, presumably the Grumpy Japanese, greeted us with very warm hands and guided us to our assigned seating. The amber lights were dim, and a light fog enveloped the room. A string quartet was tightly squeezed into a corner. All the chairs, fifteen or so, faced the counter of a bar behind which stood Lucas in a black blazer.
His parents were the last to arrive, and once they were seated, he began his performance in booming voice, his cadence now matching the quartet. There would be no menus, and each item would tell a story of his culinary adventures. He started with his early days as a line cook, the tedium of cleaning the dishes, the times he almost chopped his finger in a daze, and his bedazzlement at watching pastries rise through the oven door — and more importantly, his newfound of love organic chemistry, of all the magical compounds Nature had up her sleeves. Immediately after college, he had gone to Laos where he worked at a sugarcane farm. Once, he had let down his alertness in the field to watch a flock of soldiers chase an elephant with rifles and had bitten by a venomous snake. The villagers had shoved a stick of cane in his mouth and, with the help of a pocketknife, had sucked the venom out. That, he said, was the inspiration behind the first dish, which he served in dainty plates, twirling between the tables in shiny black shoes.
On a shamrock-green plate, were what looked like two fluorescent cubes of sugarcane. You placed a cube in your mouth and pressed it with your palate. The cube resisted, it pricked the palate like tiny needles, and it suddenly collapsed, as if with demolition charges, releasing a mildly sweet but cold liquid, which made your heart sink, as if you were freefalling through the floor, and then into a soft bed with velvet pillow shams sprayed with rosewater. People turned their head around and saw everyone had a similar reaction. He explained the mechanics: the cube was a bundle of edible glass capillaries he sourced from a microelectronics supplier; the capillaries were filled with a floral sap, in which were suspended atomized particles of molasses which melted upon release. The basic chemistry, he had intended would trigger the themes of trepidation, danger and then sweetness and comfort, but each person would sense it uniquely.
Then he went on to describe his trek through the Mediterranean coast, from the turquoise waters of Lampedusa to the flying balloons over Anatolia, at the end of which he had dined with a group of locals in an Istanbul bazaar and had been roofied and robbed clean. To mark this occasion, he had made a version of baklava and served it on a bed of sauce which overpowered the room with the aroma of shish kebab. He had crystallized the basic composition of pistachio, walnuts, and butter into paper-thin wafers, and had stacked them into a dense Napoleon cake with innumerable layers. This you ate with your finger, and it felt like biting into a lot of marzipan, surrounded by old friends and grilled lambchops.
I decipher very little from the faint scribbles in my notepad of my immediate impressions of his slow. There was a philosophy behind these creations: the item should surprise, but not confuse, it shouldn’t overstay its welcome, it should not rouse memories, only gently nudge them awake, and importantly it shouldn’t give the resolution one usually expects of desserts, no, it should create anew a longing that made you reach out to old friends or turn to the person next to you. My notes trail off soon after.
But I remember the last item. Three chocolate-crusted domes, arranged in a row, on a plate with a raspberry-sauce arrow and a tiny script, also in sauce, that read “Eat This Way.” In your mouth, the thin crust dissolved, exposing a filling that tasted of burnt cheesecake, and suddenly something popped, and a current passed through your entire body, you felt an eruption of silence, your body temperature dropped a degree or two, and then you woke up in a purple field of rhododendrons holding an empty bottle of wine, and then your eyes welled. This happened two more times, you found yourself lost in two different places, each intimately more familiar than the last. “This is the only piece I have a name for. I am calling it ‘fireworks’, and the technical secret is something I distilled from a special honey, the mad honey.”
The music quietened. That was it, that was the event.
We all got up, it didn’t feel appropriate to burst into an applause, but we queued to shake his hands anyway. When my turn came, I hugged him instead, and as soon I wrapped my hand around his frame, I burst out crying. I sobbed uncontrollably, in front of strangers, my tears soaking the lapel of his blazer. I apologized profusely; he said it was all good. He passed me a box of tissues and then bid me goodbye with both hands, with the clasp of a brother, and I came out yearning for more life and more beauty and more restlessness.
Outside, I followed a group to a nearby bar. Lucas’s dad was there, and I sat at the counter a few spots from him. He was twirling a glass of drink, and he kept on twirling until all the ice melted, all the while talking to himself: “I get it. I get it now.”
I called Lucas recently. I wanted to ask for his permission to write about it. A friend was leaving New York, and there was going to be farewell party where were all reading something out loud, no exceptions, no word limit. Could I talk about his show? He said sure, he didn’t care. He then asked if I had been back to the Grumpy Japanese’s lounge. I told him, yes, I had. What’s going on there? He asks. It’s just a speakeasy, nothing new. I told him it was such a pity more people didn’t know about what he’d done, that he was squandering his life and, worse, his talent working at a hotel chain. He chuckled and then hung up.