On Earrings and Michelin Stars
The other night, I spotted Olivia Coleman wearing earrings I made on The Bear. It’s a beautiful scene, intimate in the truest sense of the word, that unfolds between Chef Terry, the executive chef (Coleman) at a Michelin-starred restaurant, and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) while they prep mushrooms, peeling back the brown skin with care and attention designed to provoke surprise and delight in the diner on whose plate the mushrooms will appear. It is 8:53 am. Under the clock, a sign reads EVERY SECOND COUNTS. This saying borders on cliché, but in the setting of fast-paced, carefully choreographed kitchens that The Bear invites viewers into, this adage develops a contextual layer: the difference between greatness and mediocrity is attention to detail, a smudge on a plate or water spot on a fork, food that has gone even slightly cold. There are so many places where we choose between precision – our best work and everything else. To deliver that high-end culinary performance and repeat it each night allows no time for distraction. In this light, the conversation between Coleman and the actor, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, is that of sage and acolyte, the vows of the kitchen that of a noisier monastery; to do something well is the asking and the offering.
I ate at my first Michelin-starred restaurant on a trip through Europe with my older sister, Tara, and our father. I was 10, and she was 12. We traveled by U-rail throughout Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Belgium. My big request was to visit Heidi’s birthplace in the Swiss Alps. I loved the stories of the stern grandfather and the goatherd Peter and his goats, the cheese and butter and thick brown bread, the warmth of the fire, and the way the mountains came alive on those pages. Our father wanted to dine at Gualtiero Marchesi in Milan, so we took a very long train ride for a meal.
This was not a new concept for us children – that one would cross state lines or even the Canadian border for a particular dining experience. We drove to Lowell, Massachusetts on Sundays, an easy 45-minute drive from the North Shore where we lived, for South Indian food, where our father would enter, and the whole establishment would stop and attend to him - a charming, big tipper, looking for the tastes of home. Or we would drive north to Montreal, where our parents had been newlyweds, for pastrami and Linzer tortes. When our father wanted to taste a particular dish, he was dogged in his pursuit. So traveling from Dusseldorf to Milan, a distance of 412 miles and 14 hours for a lunch reservation was just a stepping stone away from previous larks in the pursuit of fine dining. We arrived in our finest, undoubtedly some of the youngest guests to eat there, I remember the care and attention, the food all unrecognizable, dressed up in silk and sequins, color and texture and taste brought together, the plates all different, all part of a story, the relationships between first and second course, the interludes of lemon granita to degrease the tongue to prepare it for a new sensation. The beauty of that meal was partially lost on me. I was 10 after all and focused on which of the 5 forks to use and what the words meant, but I remember a father’s joy in sharing this execution with his middle daughters. Execution from the French, “a carrying out,” and from the Latin “an accomplishment”. Today, I reclaim the word in the pursuit of craft and life. EVERY SECOND COUNTS.
At the end of our 7-course lunch, an offering to the children: a single, perfect sphere of gelato, completely recognizable, the likes of which I had never tasted before, the sweet cream of relief, the joy of being seen as a child, a lesson in doing the simplest things well. With the sauces and colors and performative delivery stripped away, what remains? Milk, cream and sugar. Hands, love, attention.
I was captivated watching Coleman peel mushrooms, seeing the simple, beryl green, over-fired vitreous enameled ovals that I believe I made with the very same hands typing these words catch the light as Coleman moved her head, attending to the mushrooms and her conversation in equal parts. I don’t often experience this part of jewelry making– how a piece of jewelry comes alive on the body, how objects are animated, consumed, worn, and enjoyed. Occasionally I see a piece I’ve made in the wild or on a friend, and it is a chance to revisit it, to understand it in a different light, like the chef who steps out of the kitchen into the dining room to witness delight.