A Job Well Done: On Chocolate Cake, Racquet Strings, and the Pursuit of Mastery
The mouthwatering chocolate cake
I’m a little late to the party, but I recently started watching The Bear. I can safely concur with fans and critics alike that it is indeed an excellent show. The Bear follows Carmy, a young Michelin-trained chef who returns to his hometown of Chicago to run his family’s sandwich shop (“The Beef”) after his brother commits suicide. Teeming with heart and humour, the show shines a light on the wonders and complexities of the human experience. And on good food.
The fourth episode of the first season was especially affecting. It includes a rather minor yet memorable subplot featuring Marcus, a hard-working and affable baker. When Carmy gives Marcus advice about improving the consistency of his bread, Marcus is moved to explore his nascent passion for pastries. He decides to make a chocolate cake. Working slowly and fastidiously, he is totally focused and absorbed by the task at hand.
Marcus combines the sugar, whipped egg whites, and cocoa powder, continuously whisking them together, to create the perfect chocolate ganache—the pièce de résistance. Then he carefully spreads the icing over the top and sides of the multi-layered cake to complete his masterpiece. In the final moments of the episode, humbly and with little fanfare, Marcus serves each of his coworkers a piece of cake. He then leaves the room with a quiet yet palpable sense of accomplishment.
The expertly-strung tennis racquet
In a similar vein, in Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open, the tennis icon waxes poetic about his racquet stringer, Roman. Agassi deeply admires Roman’s skillfulness. He recalls that when he’d feel lonely on tour in a foreign country, he enjoyed sitting with Roman and watching him work.
I’m calmed, grounded, inspired by watching a craftsman. It reminds me of the singular important in this world of a job done well.
Observing a master engaged in his craft gave Agassi the relief he needed. He goes on to describe Roman’s process in exquisite detail:
He starts by removing the factory grip and putting on my grip, the custom grip I’ve had since I was fourteen…Roman has a mold of my grip, which he applies to the racket. Then he wraps the mold with calfskin, which he pounds thinner and thinner until it’s the width he wants. A millimeter difference, near the end of a four-hour match, can feel as irritating and distracting as a pebble in my shoe…
And then come the strings:
With the grip just so, Roman laces in the synthetic strings. He tightens them, loosens them, tightens them, tunes them as carefully as strings on a viola. Then he stencils them and vigorously waves them through the air, to let the stencilling dry.
Roman took a highly specific skill and elevated it to an art form. For this, Agassi revered him. Similarly, Marcus’ coworkers at The Beef, steeped in the kitchen and immersed in the business of good food, fully appreciated the superior quality of his chocolate cake.
The ever-presence of excellence
These two examples confirm that excellence is all around us, all the time, in every facet of life. But it can be easy to miss. If we don’t happen to share an area of interest with the master, their mastery could evade us. Have I unwittingly sat at a table that was the culmination of a brilliant woodworker’s labour and expertise? Was the unknown street musician I passed by while hurrying to an appointment a guitar virtuoso? As I observed in a previous blog post, there’s an abundance of beauty in the world, but only to the extent that we can see it.
Mastery and humanity
Why are we so drawn to excellence? Why are we moved by Olympic athletes, brilliant musicians, and great works of art? The answer, I submit, is that in every instance of mastery, we detect something that’s wholly and unmistakably human. The athlete’s performance is an expression of deeply human virtues such as tenacity, resilience, and commitment. The same holds true for incredible music and art, expertly-strung racquets, and mouth-watering chocolate cake. These are not random, disembodied elements; they are outward expressions of the pursuit of excellence. And they’re imbued with all the triumphs and struggles of their creators. As fellow humans, we connect to their humanity.
If excellence is indeed ever-present, where do we go to look for it? And in the absence of any kind of a measurable test for mastery, how can we know that we’ve found it? Here, the famous phrase coined by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart springs to mind: “I know it when I see it.” This, to me, best encapsulates the undeniable feeling of biting into a truly divine piece of chocolate cake.