An Order of Oysters With a Side of Smoke

By Libby Copeland Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, July 21, 2001; Page C03

BALTIMORE – Chaos outside. The kind of chaos you see in disaster movies, with water rushing along the streets and chunks of pavement buckling. For blocks, Baltimore is now an industrial parking lot, with red-and-white emergency trucks whirring and humming like great angry insects. Beneath the streets, corrosive chemicals are leaking and a fire rages. Civilization? This feels like Armageddon.

Except.

Near the trucks sucking hydrochloric acid out of a tanker underground, inside an office building that's shut down for lack of power, above a basement that was flooded by a water main break, a young man is cooking. Unhurriedly. A wonderful blend of smells rises from his burners. Tandoori fried oysters, curried grilled tuna. An epicurean oasis in the midst of disaster. He is cooking for the tens and tens of men working outside to rescue the city.

And he is cooking in the dark. He bustles from counter to stove, doing much of it by feel.

"Okay. What makes a chef a chef is that he is a master of his surroundings," the young man says. "What's the point of cooking if you don't do try to do your best with what you've got?"

The kitchen doors swing open.

"This is unreal," says an older man with a cigar between his fingers, surveying the scene. He is the boss. "What a cook."

It is nearly 5 p.m. and the men are coming. Sweaty, dirty, exhausted men, with badges that say "Department of Public Works" or "Baltimore City Fire Department." At this point – it is Thursday evening – the railroad tunnel disaster has been raging for more than 24 hours. Some of the men have been working since 6 in the morning.

They will be hungry. And they will eat curried tuna.

Specifically, curried tuna on three-grain rice with oysters.

The chef thought of giving them blackened tuna, but no, that seemed too pedestrian. Already he'd given them Spanish calamari chili for lunch. He needed something to keep the standard up, something with pizazz.

It's a funny thing about disasters. People create a new brand of normalcy under the most surreal conditions. Right after the train derailed and smoke and water were spewing, Orioles ticketholders coming out of Camden Yards reportedly paid panhandlers to take them across the flooded streets – on their backs. Perfect strangers carrying perfect strangers. Strange.

At Max's at Camden Yards, the broken water main forced the restaurant to close right during the dinner rush Wednesday. Max's is in a prime location; from its huge floor-to-ceiling windows you can see the bleachers at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. When there's a doubleheader, Max's gets loads of customers. But sitting as it does on the corner of Pratt and Howard streets, just above the Howard Street tunnel, Max's was practically at the epicenter of the accident.

On Thursday morning, the executive chef and the owner showed up to find theirs was one of only two office buildings still without power. (Yesterday, it was the only one.) The gas is working, but there is no electricity for the freezers. All the food in the massive walk-in refrigerator is going to go bad. The owner has two options: throw it away or cook it all. So Ron Furman, 43, surveys the work crews outside and says: "Let's feed 'em."

To which chef Aharon Denrich replies: "Done."

So Denrich, 24, disappears into the murky kitchen, and Scott Guinto, 27, the bartender-turned-boy-Friday, focuses on finding tongs for the salad. Furman meets up with his buddy from the insurance company, and the two survey the damage. When he thinks about all money he's losing – the food, the customers – Furman cringes.

In the kitchen are huge plastic canisters filled with bleach water and dirty dishes. There's no hot water for washing. A lone generator light occasionally flickers out.

But Denrich cooks with aplomb. Rome may be burning, but he is creating art. Or perhaps it's a form of worship: "If I didn't have food in my life, I guess I'd just be a rabbi."

He's a talkative, intense fellow with a beard and wire-rimmed glasses who graduated from the Culinary Institute of America three years ago. At Max's he has 15 chefs working under him, and during busy times, he works 100-hour weeks with only one day off.

He throws some breaded oysters into a basket and down they go into the oil. When they come out, he sprinkles them with tandoori powder from a plate. "The best thing about food is aromas – they bring back memories," he says, lifting the plate a little to his face. "Do you remember the first time you smelled tandoori powder?"

To step into the realm of a chef is to give yourself over to another country. Chefs have rules. Cleanliness, for example, isn't just about spotless plates; it is an ethic. A messy kitchen is evidence of a careless chef. (Unless you have no hot water for washing, in which case a messy kitchen eats away at you.) Denrich has been eating sushi and Indian food since he was a kid, and seems to carry a moral imperative of introducing others to good food.

"That's what our purpose is as true chefs," he says. "People today in America – they're content with garbage."

Today, Denrich will be feeding workers who, if they weren't eating at Max's, one remarks, probably would have had fast food. Thus, his duty is all the more pressing: "There's no greater sin than fast food."

Soon enough, voices are heard outside the kitchen, and the chef and the bartender get their creations out just as the firefighters and city workers are lining up. There are at least 60 men here for dinner, and they bring their paper plates back for seconds and thirds. When the tuna is gone, Denrich whips up spinach salad with tandoori chicken, and when that's gone – in desperation – he puts out cold cuts, and when those are gone – "We're outta lunch meat! We're outta bread! We're outta everything!" cries Ron Furman – he serves grilled chicken biryani with Caesar salad.

And when all is said and done, and the men have thanked the chef and the owner many times, and headed back into the fray, the only thing left on the buffet table is lettuce.

Denrich goes out the back door of the restaurant and stands in the sun. It may be his only moment of relaxation today. In a little while he'll go back inside and start making Asian chicken salad with "baby mizuni greens, baby arugula, a citrus ginger vinaigrette and curried pita latticework" for his boss and some bigwigs running the train cleanup. But for now, he stands still, captivated by the chaos.

A policeman approaches, asks some folks on the sidewalk to move along. Denrich lingers, conspicuous in his white chef's jacket. A tall firefighter with shaggy blond hair approaches him. Will he order the chef inside?

No. The firefighter says: That tuna and oyster thing was incredible. How do you make it?

Another convert! Denrich happily ticks off the ingredients: " . . . then the oysters, you bread 'em and toss it in tandoori."

And the firefighter thanks the chef one more time. He says, "It almost makes it worth being here for 14 hours."

-- Anonymous, July 21, 2001