Interview at Kalaya
Yada // Kalaya
I started applying to jobs a couple days before Dettera fired me. The Beer Garden, PHS Pop Up, got back to me first. I interviewed with Beth a few hours before I had to head in for a dinner shift. I walked through the iron gates to the garden and Beth was sitting at a table by the bar, smoking a yellow American spirit. A blonde lady. She had here hair slicked back. Icons tatooed on each of her fingers. She was typing something on her laptop when I walked up. The interview was fast. I was professional while but flirty. Expressing competence, suggesting sex. I think that’s what got me the job. She set me on the schedule for the following week. A couple days later Dettera let me go.
I couldn’t get along with the Sous Chef there. He was a short guy, thin and well manicured in his chef whites. He had a pencil mustache and big watery eyes, like he was always on the verge of tears. He’d ask me to do heavy tasks at the last hour. Which I could tolerate. But every once in a while he’d siddle up to me, brush his shoulder against mine. That was getting harder to tolerate. One night he told me that I needed to scrub the grill before I could leave. I left anyway and caught the last train from ambler to fern rock. The head chef fired me the next day when I came in. Before I could make it out the door, he asked if I wanted to come back in two weeks to pick up my last check. Or If I wanted, I could have it mailed. I was surprised he asked me at all. I told him to mail it.
…
A few days before my position at PHS started I got a message from Will at Kalaya in Fishtown. He asked if I was available for an interview. I told him Monday at 2:00, I could come by. The date came around, and I arrived a little early. I was sitting on the curb outside Kalaya, wearing the same thing I wore for the interview with Beth. Grey joggers, black vans, a short sleeve black collared chef's coat. I took the coat from Penn Medicine when I quit the job.
2:00 rolled around and I walked into Kalaya. Past the green and cream decor of the entrance, into the dining room. Palm fronds were scattered throughout the space. They had an open kitchen, just past the dining room. I could see some of the early chefs setting up the line. A girl was behind the bar. She wore a black t-shirt tucked into grey jeans. And was quality polishing glasses, while I stood near the entrance. Noticing me, but at the same time pretending not to. After a minute, a guy came around from the back, and asked if I needed help. He was a front of house employee, wearing a black Kalaya t-shirt. He had long hair, a stubbly beard, gauges in his ears and tattoos on his forearms. I told him I was there to see Will for an interview. He showed me over to a booth, and told me to wait a second, while he went to find him..
I felt off when I walked in. The pressure inside was high. My nerves got shaky. My tongue got slow. Umberto, a cook I used to work with, told me he quit Suraya ( Kalaya's sister restaurant ) because it was getting too hot. Too much unspoken tension in the air.
After a few minutes Will walked out from behind the kitchen line. His blonde hair was in a nice coif, and he was wearing a blue short sleeved collared shirt, some tight khakis, and heeled leather shoes. He seemed confused when he saw me. He asked my name. I told him I was Yada, and that we emailed a couple days ago about an interview. Monday at 2:00. He said he’d had an interview scheduled at 2:30 but not with a Yada. I took out my phone and showed him the email chain.
He said he remembered it, but never received a response from me about the date. He showed me his laptop. The same email chain, just missing my last message. I was ready to leave then. Clown shit, funny glitches, a sure sign something is off. But he asked me to stay for a second, that he’d interview me right after the other guy was finished. He handed me an interview packet, and a glass of water then disappeared into the back.
I filled out the paper work, while more staff filed in. More cooks were setting up behind the line. One tall guy, with his dreads pulled back, was his chef's coat with the sleeves rolled up. The front of house started moving in, all of them wearing Black Kalaya t-shirts, black jeans, or slacks. Many of them with flash tattoos up their arms. A few with gauges, or septum piercings. Most of them, young looking, but the tightness in their eyes, gave them away.
I finished filling out the packet and another guy came in. Not a cook or a server. He was dressed in blue jeans and a heather blue t-shirt, his wavy, dark hair unkept. He was actually young. Lean and broad, but still flush with some leftover baby fat. He took a seat at a booth across the room from me. The girl behind the bar, polished a glass, filled it with water from a spigot and sat it in front of him. She asked if he was there for an interview. He nodded and she skipped away to go find Will.
A moment later Will came back out, holding another packet. He set it in front of the scheduled interviewee. They exchanged a few words, then he walked over to me, pulled out a chair and took a seat. He told me while the other guy was filling out the packet, we could go ahead and do the interview.
We moved through the standard questions. Where are you from? How’d you get into the business:
I'm from Tulsa, Oklahoma. I went to Temple after high school to study psychology, then dropped out after reading Bourdain's book, Kitchen confidential. I moved to the pacific north west, and started washing dishes at a Red Lobster. A decade later I moved back to the east coast to start a publishing company.
He seemed to like everything I had to say. Which surprised me, I thought my email getting lost was a clear message from the powers that be, that I was unwanted. He asked me when I could come in and stage for a night. I told him I had to work at the PHS garden over the next few evenings. He said he had to leave the country soon. Senior management was going on a company trip to Thailand to get familiar with the food. He brushed a hand through his hair and asked if I could stage that night.
I told him I could. If he could wait a minute, I’d uber home and grab my knife. I caught a ride back to Hunting Park, took off the black chef's coat and my black vans. Put on a black tee and slipped on some rubber kitchen shoes. Then ubered right back to Kalaya. Will walked me past the line and introduced me to everyone in the kitchen. A cute lady was washing dishes. She had gold studs in her pointy ears. A shorty, she was barely tall enough to look over the dish rack. She saw me asked how my Spanish was, “Dos que tres, Ocita.” Will introduced me to the women working in the prep kitchen. They had their hair tied up in buns, wore white aprons, and were rolling up dumplings. They looked, long enough to say hello then went back to folding up dough. I remember one tall Spanish lady, had thighs like a stallion. She side eyed me a little, as Will escorted me downstairs. He showed me the locker room, and where to get towels and an apron.
We headed back to the line where he introduced me to Justin. Tall, dark, almost all muscle. He reminded me of my little brother. Will intorduced me to Ben, who I'd be shadowing for the shift. Ben was tall and gangly, loose in a funny way. He looked almost like Anthony Bourdain. Will asked him to walk me through any prep that was left, then he disappeared into the office. Ben was playing some trap music on a little speaker near his station. Him and Justin were talking. I was tuned into the prep Ben was doing, but I keyed into their conversation when Ben made a joke. Something about Justin smelling like Coco Butter. I laughed. It’s funny people still know about coco-butter. Justin looked hurt, but not offended.
Ben spent maybe 5 minutes showing me how to slice ginger on a mandolin without splitting my fingers open. I did that for a while, while Ben gathered up some things for service. A few third pans of chopped cabbage, and some extra squeeze bottles of sweet fish sauce. While he was gone, i remember looking at my cuts of ginger next to his. His were wafer thin, almost transparent. Mine were oafish, blocky, dense.
Somebody stopped me while I was finishing up and told me it was time for the staff meeting. I followed him around back into the prep kitchen. Justin was marking something on a clipboard, while the cooks circled around. The prep ladies were already gathered, standing at attention with their arms folded. I kept trying to catch eyes with the lady, who had the legs. She looked like measured indifference.
Justin started the meeting by making announcements for the week, then moved into aligning everybody to the day’s objective. Ben came in from one of the coolers, mid-meeting. He looked like the odd one out. A good cook, but clearly different in some way. Somebody asked how he was doing. He took his fingers and spread his face into a smile. The meeting ended with a clap up and some cult-like chant, something like - one, two, three, team. I followed Ben back to the line.
Customers were already seated under the palm fronds, in padded booths. Twirling ice cubes around cloudy drinks, pointing at things on the menu. I asked Ben if it got busy. He said usually it’s packed. He fired up the burner under the wok and showed me how to work it. He told me, the wok gets hot fast and cools down fast. I rocked it a few times, not quite with the finesse he had. It was lighter than I expected. The bowl of the wok was paper thin. Easy to rock but hard to get the bounce right, like working a saute pan. I asked him to show me how to make Kalum. An app they sold a lot of. I figured I could make myself useful for the night by making something simple.
He threw a few handfuls of cabbage into the wok, rocked the cabbage a few times. Then squeezed some of the fish sauce into the bowl. He rocked it a little more, until cabbage started to turn clear, then ladled it out, and into a tiny porcelain bowl.
Justin, standing with his arms crossed on the other side of the line, took a plastic spoon from a bain marie, tasted the cabbage, crossed something off a sheet of paper in front of him, and tossed the spoon into the trash. That was impressive. Very few kitchens actually taste everything before it’s sold. I spent the rest of the night making Kalum. Usually burning it. I’d get the wok too hot, and the fish sauce would start to smoke when I put it in. But every once in a while I’d get it right. To my left a cook was frying giant prawn. Head still on. The pink antenna scratching his chefs coat. On the right, past Ben another wok cook was ladling spoonfuls of hot oil over a big chicken thigh. The yellow claw was still attached at the end.
Between orders we talked about books. I asked if he liked Pynchon. He seemed like a Pynchon guy. He said his parents liked Pynchon. When he was growing up they kept a copy of ThenCrying of lot 49 on the shelf, but he never read it. I told him the book was pretty good. That it was about the ways in which society grounds people. When people are confined they charge insignificant objects ( lot 49 ) with extraordinary meaning ( the crying ), until they’re too heavy to fly away. He told me I might like the SIrens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. He said it was about corporations colonizing the galaxy and locking humanity into a subtle slavery. We had a moment of communion. Both of us understood the problem, neither of us started talking about it directly.
Will came to get me not long after. He pulled me into his office and asked about the experience. I told him I was impressed by the diversity and caliber of people he had working in the kitchen. He seemed to appreciate that. He told me for the most part everybody liked me. Which I found hard to believe. They said they’d get back to me sometime soon with an offer. We shook hands. I picked my knife up on my way out, said goodbye to Ben and Justin, and caught the El home.
A couple weeks later I told Will I had to pass. I needed a job in Fishtown. But to work at Kalaya I’d have to give up working at PHS Pop Up. The nature connection at PHS was too important for me to let go. Plus I had a few more interviews in Fishtown lined up. Dettera never sent me that last check, I think they want me to come back and ask for it.