Merkado Kitchen's Staff Toils for a Glimmer of a Better Life
By Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 29, 2005
Miguel Rosario grabs a NY strip and hurls a pinch of sea salt at the meat as he lays it on the fire. The flames leap, lighting up the face of one tired 34-year-old cook with tongs in his hand. Miguel is on his second pitcher of ice water, drinking like a man in the desert. The kitchen is chaos and Chef is all over him.
"More butter!" Chef shouts after tasting the broth Miguel has laded into a bowl. "And dude, your rice and beans are getting cold! Come on, bro."
Miguel is sweating. Down the line, the sous-chef unfurls a string of expletives because someone has left a bin of shrimp in his work space. Dinner tickets are coming in fast, and most are grill items, which means Miguel is receiving the brunt of Chef's shouting.
" Pollo . Shank. Two strip, mid-rare. All you!"
Only a week earlier, Miguel landed this job as a line cook at Merkado Kitchen, a new restaurant on P Street NW in the gentrifying neighborhood of Logan Circle. He learned to cook while serving time in prison -- "We made a mad veal parm at Lewisburg" -- and now he's searing foie gras for people carrying yoga mats.
Washington's economic boom is being driven by an expanding professional class whose incomes and desires are reshaping the city. The hot new monument in Washington is the $600,000 loft with granite countertops, smiling down on Caribou Coffee.
Less visible are the janitors, busboys, maids and cooks such as Miguel, whose lives are ruled by the same economic boom but in different ways. Instead of one job, they can work two. With the housing market untouchable on working class wages, they commute to $8-an-hour apron jobs, dozing and swaying on buses and Metro at 1 in the morning.
At Merkado, only a glass window separates the kitchen from the dining room, giving the cooks a nightly view of the other side. Everyone in the kitchen is trying to make a play. One of Miguel's co-workers, a former Salvadoran gang member, goes home at night and sits on the couch with his wife, who buses tables at another restaurant, and together they watch the Food Network for catering ideas.
Miguel says in a coda that could be the city's, "I been knowleging myself on transformation." He was born in Puerto Rico, raised in the Bronx and now lives in Anacostia, and his speech is dredged with all three places. He sports a wooly Afro and a fuzzy chin and has dark, intense eyes, like a Nuyorican poet.
Thirty people applied for kitchen jobs at Merkado, and Miguel was one of nine hired. Most are Latino men. They hustle side by side for 10 hours but don't know one another's last names. The work is hard. Feet go numb, legs go numb, knees blow out or turn arthritic. Restaurants are notorious for coke, speed, meth, Red Bull, espresso, any variety of stimulants to push the body beyond its limit. Miguel relies on two 16-ounce towers of Starbucks coffee.
The week before Merkado's opening, the kitchen is still learning the menu. Miguel hangs his cheat sheet in front of his station, trying to remember what sauce goes with what dish. The hipsters of Logan Circle crave more than mere crab cakes. Merkado's menu will feature Latin food with Asian touches.
Chef Edward Kim wants his $12- to $15-an-hour kitchen workers to feel the passion of his cuisine. He tries to bring them into his cult of perfection. "Refine your palette," he tells his crew. "Focus! Discipline your mind!"
When Kim, 36, apprenticed under the famous Jean-Georges Vongerichten in New York, Vongerichten would clap his hands twice and shout, "Super soigne !" if a dish looked especially elegant. At Merkado, Kim is using a variation of his master's cheer, calling out, " Soigne !" to signal his approval.
"Miguel, that's soigne !"
Miguel raises an eyebrow. He has never heard the word before. "What's soigne ?"
"That is soigne ," Chef says, pointing to a skirt steak with mojo sauce that Miguel has artfully arranged on a plate.
"Oh, for real?" Miguel asks. "Well, anyway, papi , here's your medium-rare right here."
Beneath the BoomChef tells the owner he would like to postpone the opening by a night so his kitchen staff can get some sleep.
"I'm not interested in sleep right now," David Winer says. "I'm interested in paying my bills."
Money is on everyone's mind. The force of Washington's economic boom, now in its seventh year, is playing out most keenly in two extremes: the professional class and working class. Between 1999 and 2003, the number of food preparation and restaurant workers in the District grew by more than 8,000, to 36,840, Bureau of Labor Statistics show. The changing aesthetic of the city also has magnified the difference between the dining class and the serving class: In 1980, Washington had 15 Zagat-rated restaurants. Today there are more than 80, according to the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington.
There are more janitors -- 13,140 in 1999 to 16,520 in 2003 -- more landscapers and more construction laborers. Of the 9,300 jobs added in the District between April 2004 and this April, the largest number went to hospitality workers, according to Stephen Fuller, a regional economist at George Mason University.
Although their ranks have grown, their earnings have not kept pace. Middle- and upper-income earnings in Washington have grown by about one-third since the 1990s; incomes among the working class have grown about 15 percent.
As a line cook with four years' experience, Miguel starts at Merkado at $14 an hour, or $560 a week, or $29,120 annually if he were to work every week of the year. He has no health insurance, vacation time or sick leave. He's never known the white-collar comforts of ergonomically padded chairs, lunch while sitting down or surfing the Internet on company time.
Even in this grinding reality, Miguel has pride, studying cookbooks and culinary encyclopedias. "I make a very nice steak tartare with avocado and chipotle," he says.
He and his co-workers sense the buzz surrounding Merkado, with its industrial design and burnt-orange walls. George Nelson bubble lamps hang down in the dining room. The bar is long and sleek, with liquor bottles lighted like jewels. Miguel watches as people outside press their faces to the window, trying to see inside. Beyond them is the shiny street with Whole Foods, the organic grocer that opened in 2001 and spawned a mini-civilization of urban lofts, furniture stores and restaurants.
Miguel remembers when P Street was a rat boulevard. This was his turf in the 1980s when he ran with an organized drug crew on 14th Street. He was 16 and living the life with his shell-top Adidas and a pocket full of cash. In 1988, he was arrested at Washington National Airport with a half-kilo of crack and sentenced to 12 years and seven months in a federal prison. He worked his way up in the kitchen, supervising the bakery and then lunch for 800.
He served his time, day for day. He was 29 when he came out, hatched from his time capsule. "So many Spanish people," he remembers thinking, seeing the new Washington. His first job was at Red Sage downtown, where the chef didn't mind that he was living in a halfway house and fresh out of prison. Other restaurants would follow. A certain tension rules his survival. "Life is about struggle," he says. "But if you struggle too hard, you are gonna look for an easy way out."
For that reason, Miguel lives in a quiet condominium, away from the thump of the corner, with his fiancee, who works at the Department of Transportation, and their 2-year-old son, Miguel. Born with a too-small windpipe, the boy has a bandage around his neck that covers a tracheotomy. He whistles like a blue jay, and his father listens hopefully for vowels.
Miguel's two front teeth were busted out in prison. The bridge he had made started hurting his mouth recently, so he visited a dentist, who told him the teeth were full of mercury. A new bridge would run $1800. With no insurance, Miguel goes with the gap.
For the opening of Merkado, he gets his hair braided, and in his chef's whites, he pulls off a broken handsomeness.
The first night serving customers really is a practice run. The owners have invited 180 people to dine and drink. Everything is on the house.
An hour before guests arrive, the owner goes over last-minute details. "We are going to serve chopsticks with sashimi and ceviche," he says. "Duck will be served medium-rare unless otherwise requested. Tuna will be served rare. We never run out of anything. We never sell out. Something may become 'unavailable,' but we don't run out."
The grill is fired and all 12 flames on both stoves are blue and roaring. Someone passes a steaming plate of pork and rice down the line until it reaches Moises in the dishwashing room. Moises arrived in the United States only three months earlier from El Salvador. Now, he's making $8 an hour at Merkado. Small and wiry with a shaggy mustache and glaring white bobo sneakers from the flea market, his face is flecked with bits of splashed-back food. He nods in gratitude at the plate, takes one bite and shoves it on a shelf to get back to his clatter.
By 6:30 p.m., the dining room is full, and the grill is getting slammed. Chef rips the tickets from the machine and yells at Miguel. "Strip, rare, and pollo ! Shank with strip, well! Steak frites, rare! How long?"
Miguel's eyes narrow in concentration. Flames leap when the oily meat hits the iron. He uses his tongs to test for doneness and then whirls around to set up the side orders. Chef screams for Moises to come retrieve a bin of hot, dirty saute pans under the oven. "Moises, caliente !"
The machine keeps spitting out tickets. The cooks are crashing into one another on the line, all elbows and cursing. Chef is trying to maintain calm, but there's rising panic in his voice. "Miguel, you owe me five rib-eyes all day!"
Miguel spins toward Chef. "You confuse me because you jump on top of my head."
"It's my system, plain and simple."
Miguel angrily grips his tongs. "You don't let me breathe, man."
Chef only presses harder. "THAT RIB-EYE IS DYING RIGHT NOW."
Miguel will later curse the Culinary Institute of America that trained Chef, but for now he works in sullen silence. A manager stands in the corner of the kitchen, timing the orders. Sweating in his flame-retardant white jacket, Miguel steals a glance into the dining room. He studies their faces. None of his orders have been sent back. This is a good sign.
But even on a night when everything is free, expectations remain impossibly high. Out in the dining room, at a table with two trim young men, a server is going over Merkado's exotic list of cocktails, which includes a ginger cosmo with Japanese plum liqueur.
"Does it taste like pomegranate?" the dark-haired man asks. "Kind of a grassy flavor to it?" And then, "What kind of vodka are you doing tonight?"
Absolut, the server explains.
The man makes a face. "Can you use a different one, like Ketel One?"
The server returns with bad news. Gravely, the man closes his menu. "Absolut," he says. "That's the only one ?"
Back in the kitchen, Miguel's rubber clogs are slipping in the grease, but he's moving steaks with precision. A prep cook named Carlos can't keep up. He works construction all day. He and his family were evicted from their Columbia Heights apartment building that was going condo in the rush of gentrification. His eyes are red and stinging. At the stove, he cheats, tossing flour into a pan to thicken a sauce. Another cook sees him. "What are you doin' with that hotel [expletive]?" he asks, referring to the shortcut that some hotels use on sauces.
The next day, Carlos is fired.
Miguel survives.
An Exhausting RealityThey are like beat-up linemen when they arrive the next morning. They stagger into the kitchen between 10 and 1, bleary-eyed and clutching backpacks, aprons, knife sets and travel mugs of coffee. Restaurant kitchens are competitive and macho. What Merkado's cooks lack in polish, education or income they make up for in determination. And yet most know their bodies won't last forever in the kitchen.
Joel, a sous-chef, has bandages wrapped around his knees, and he's hobbling from a callous on his foot that needs a doctor's attention, but when? Tonight, the restaurant opens to the public.
Moises had worked 19 hours the day before, not leaving until the last pan was washed at 5 in the morning. That demonstration of stamina brings additional work today when he is shown how to clean squid. Chef sees the expanded duties as a reward. "He's gonna say to me in three months, 'My other Spanish friends tell me I can make 50 cents an hour more at another restaurant,' and he's gonna leave," Chef says. "Maybe he will. But maybe he'll think, 'Should I really leave to go to P Street Bistro for 50 cents more an hour when they are empowering me at Merkado, from doing dishes to prepping squid?' That's nurturing. It's all perception."
Reality is that Moises is still being paid dishwasher wages.
Reality is also that he's smiling as he cuts the squid.
Miguel shows Moises how to slice more efficiently. "I got a lot of respect for these people who are coming from overseas," he says. "These are humble people, man. They are swallowing."
Miguel goes back to stuffing poblano peppers with goat cheese. He hums Hector Lavoe, an old salsa king from Puerto Rico. Miguel grew up in Cayey, where the scent of the mountains drifted down. He came to the United States when he was 8, stepping off the plane at John F. Kennedy International Airport in winter with no jacket. A burned-out part of the Bronx replaced the scent of the mountains, but the island inside him looms large. When the cooks make small talk about where they want to be buried, everyone knows Miguel's answer. "I'll be in the sky, I'm like a bird," he says.
"Back to the homeland, eh?" Chef asks.
In the FireThe grill is off, and the air is cool. In the early afternoon, the kitchen is sanguine. There's a looseness and ease as the staff prepares for battle. Miguel and Joel discuss the disgrace of ordering steak well-done. "It's not right," Miguel says. "Why do they do it, man?"
Miguel and Joel have been friends since they were kids living in the same Puerto Rican neighborhood in the South Bronx. Both served time in prison, and both ended up in the District. "One day, I was walking down the street near the train station and I bumped heads with Joel," Miguel says, and ever since, they have worked at the same restaurants. Miguel is dark-skinned and Joel is light-skinned, but they are South Bronx all the way.
"You takin' my buttah, man?"
"No one takin' yo buttah."
Sometimes Chef, who has a Korean accent, tries out his Spanish.
Miguel and Joel stare blankly. "What the [expletive] is he sayin'?" Miguel says.
Chef laughs. The hour is still young.
But as the opening nears, the chopping quickens, and the talking stops. Dirty aprons are traded for clean ones. "Okay, everyone, this is what you've worked for," Chef says. Actually, they work to survive, month by month. But they are nervous with anticipation. The owner enters the kitchen. He watches costs like a hawk. In the garbage, he discovered that a tin of $80 caviar and several kitchen implements mistakenly had been thrown out. He puts them on a table the next day for all to see, a reminder to the kitchen staff to be more careful, but implicit in the quiet display is that he misses nothing.
"Are we ready to unlock the door?" the owner asks the cooks. Then he checks on Moises in the dishwashing room. "Moises, cansado tu ?" he asks. Moises beams cheerfully and nods his head. Yes, he is tired.
Miguel watches from the corner of the grill. He likes this owner.
At 5 sharp, the doors are unlocked. A button is pressed, and Cuban music fills the dining room, wiping away all memories of the P Street that Miguel used to know. Outside, a truck lets off a handful of Latino laborers who still use P Street as a pickup spot, though the Duron Paints store they clung to has been razed for condos. In the waning Friday afternoon sun, they slump against the curb and sidewalk, bleary-eyed from exhaustion or the beers they start to drink, and watch the passing parade, much of it streaming toward Merkado and the fresh $8 pineapple margaritas now being served.
By 8, there's an hour's wait for a table.
"We got pollo workin' hard, right?" Chef calls, turning to the grill, where Miguel is turning tuna and flipping steaks.
For the next four hours, they go full-tilt. Their break consists of a mad dash to the men's room once or twice. Tony the prep cook is not moving in synch with the rest of the line. He's dragging from his day job at the Wyndham Hotel. Earlier, Chef asked him whether he was able to work a full schedule at Merkado. "Of course I am," Tony said. But tonight, he's error-prone. When he makes a pork empanada instead of chicken, Chef gives a look of disgust. The others smell death.
"Focus," Chef yells.
For sanity, Miguel divides his mind in parallel tracts. Part of him is cooking and the other part is somewhere else.
"I'm thinking about my son," he says, anxiously, about the boy's upcoming surgery to reconstruct his windpipe, a high-risk procedure.
"I think about my friends in the penitentiary," he says. "Are they watching TV or writing letters or drawing?"
The flames of his grill grow higher. "I'm thinking about Venice, because I'd like to go there."
Looking UpwardMerkado is up and running. On the one-week anniversary, a rainy weekend night, customers order mussels and martinis, it's two-deep at the bar, and the wait is an hour. In the kitchen, the glow of the opening has worn off. The repetition of cooking the same thing over and over has begun.
Miguel's effort to drum up catering gigs on the side has paid off: A job comes in for a bridal shower for 40 in Maryland. He designs the menu -- petite filet mignon sandwiches and shrimp with tomatillo sauce, for starters -- shops for all the groceries, and in one brutal all-nighter after getting off from Merkado, prepares everything in his postage stamp-sized kitchen at home and delivers the food in a pouring rain the next morning.
"I need something on the side so I'm not just making somebody else rich," he says. He dreams of opening his own restaurant in Southeast, with good food and nice service. "People need to be respected and pampered," Miguel says. Last year, he took his fiancee to the chic Ceiba downtown for her birthday. Sitting in the suede chair, spending a half-week's wages on one dinner, he enjoyed himself fully. "Oh, no question, it was wonderful," he says.
Back at Merkado, the heat of the grill blasts him. Moises the dishwasher had his first day off and slept 22 hours. Now he's at the far end of the kitchen, delicately trimming a container of bright green things. " Como se llaman ?" Moises asks a sous-chef.
She turns to him and carefully enunciates: "Snow peas."
Two young new dishwashers have joined the crew, Ermis and Geraldo. Geraldo, who wears an FBI cap flipped backward and has a mouth of silver teeth, is covered in piquillo slop and empanada detritus. Joel shows him how to prep squid, saying in Spanish, "Watch what I'm doing. That way you won't have to stay a dishwasher forever."
Before the dinner rush, Joel dishes up two plates of chicken and rice and calls to Miguel, "Ask the kids, they are hungry in there?"
Miguel looks back toward Ermis and Geraldo in the dishwashing room. He smiles. "They hungry."
When the last of the orders are in at 11:30, Miguel and Joel step out into the alley for a smoke. They squat to relieve their knees. Their skin glistens from grease. They are damp with sweat. Above them are new lofts, glass and steel. "Just look at the way they got 'em all hooked up." Miguel says.
"Sweet," Joel says.
Back in the kitchen, everything has to be broken down. Cleaned. Hosed. Scrubbed. Taken apart. Washed. Dried. Put back.
The owner orders a rare steak, and he sits with a glass of wine. A manager joins him and then Chef. A bottle of red wine is brought to the table, and soon the creators of Merkado Kitchen are toasting their victory after months of work and sacrifice.
Miguel is standing on top of the grill, pulling down the stainless steel backsplash for washing. Sticking out of his pocket is his first week's paycheck: $596.75, including overtime.
Joel yells for the crew to hurry it up. "Let's try to break a record," he says. "I got 12 missed calls on my phone. Let's try to maintain a social life here."
Miguel gets home by 1:30. His fiancee and son are asleep. He goes out to the balcony. Their condo in Anacostia sits high on a ridge facing west, offering a poor man a millionaire's view. "My hideout," Miguel says. "This is the place I rest my head." He picks up his telescope and observes his city below: the Washington Monument, the Washington National Cathedral and somewhere in the field of lights, Merkado Kitchen.