Cooking It Up In the Square

Mopping the floors of Figs pizzeria for seven dollars an hour really isn’t the ideal post-graduation job, and it’s even harder when your college classmates are on the fast track to six-digit salaries.

Amanda Lydon ’94 was only too aware of the contrast between her situation and that of her friends. When she was “on the very bottom rung, doing hard physical work with new immigrants,” she says, her friends were cramming for their bar exams.

The addition of “Harvard graduate” to her resume wasn’t necessarily helpful in Lydon’s initial forays into the culinary world, and her senior thesis on Jane Eyre certainly didn’t make kitchen doors fly open. But the intrepid Boston native is now a successfully established professional chef. She has worked in the acclaimed Boston restaurants Radius, Truc and Chez Henri, and she was named one of Food and Wine’s ten best new chefs in the country in the summer of 2000.

When UpStairs on the Square opened last November, Lydon was appointed Chef de Cuisine of the Soiree Room. “Amanda could put three raspberries on a plate, and it would look great and taste spectacular somehow,” says Mary-Catherine Deibel, co-owner of UpStairs on the Square. The petite, short-haired brunette spends her days controlling the kitchen—and perhaps creating the occasional raspberry dish—or, as she describes it, “watching my Brazilian coworkers try to figure out what the hell the Kroks are up to.”

Amusement and bemusement aside, she loves what she does and sees her job as a constant process of “creative reeducation,” involving “rules of chemistry and discipline and artistry and passion in the most multicultural of environments.”

Multiculturalism probably doesn’t encompass the antics of the Kroks, but Lydon certainly could have drawn on personal experience to give her coworkers tips on what was going on. During her sophomore year, she began working part-time at the kitchen at UpStairs at the Pudding, the predecessor of UpStairs on the Square. Her friends, some of whom were Kroks and Pitches, often came to eat her food. While serving your peers has the potential to be uncomfortable, Lydon never had negative encounters with Harvard students on the other side of the table. “It was not a servant’s job, but it gave another perspective on a very privileged four years,” she says.

Lydon also enjoyed the friendly and nurturing staff atmosphere. The kitchen staff consisted mainly of women—mostly former English majors, in fact—who treated her like family. The waiters, too, she describes as “better educated than most.”

While Lydon learned much from her experience at UpStairs on the Square, her training in a professional kitchen had begun the summer before. After failing to get a job at the Pudding, she got a job as a prep cook at a restaurant in Nantucket, where she and her family had spent their summers. In childhood, she had “sold them berries to finance horseback riding lessons,” and now she had the opportunity to make culinary magic with those berries.

LIFE FOOD LESSONS

Nantucket and other childhood memories were indeed the source of Lydon’s interest in cooking. One of her fondest culinary recollections is of a lobster soup made from fresh lobsters caught during summers in Nantucket, and she has early memories of finding recipes “scrawled on note cards” in her family’s home. Her mother, a recreational gardener and cook, introduced Lydon to cooking’s creative side. “My mom is a wonderful forager; she can make something out of nothing,” Lydon says. “With just water and onions, she can make a soup that would make you weep.” Lydon’s early affinity towards cooking didn’t have much room to expand during boarding school at Phillips Academy in Andover, where culinary creativity was limited to “sort of picnics.” Fortunately, Lydon’s natural instincts were not stunted by that period of dormancy and flowered during her college years.

In fact, even aside from her work in professional kitchens, Lydon’s college years were food-filled. Some of her friends had an apartment nearby with a full working kitchen, so the Dunster resident often hopped over to use the utilities. “We used to make dinners there...and sit around the apartment and pickle things,” Lydon says. Though she had friends in the Signet Society and used their facilities as well, Lydon never joined herself, explaining that “I didn’t feel like making the argument that cooking was an art. It is.”

With such convenient access to kitchens, Lydon ate out infrequently while in college. She remembers, though, when her friend’s boyfriend took them to Vietnamese restaurant he had “discovered” in Allston. “It was called Pho Pasteur”—the precursor of the established chain which now has a site in the Garage.

After graduating, Lydon got recommendations from her Pudding employers Deibel and Deborah Hughes, now the owners of UpStairs on the Square. “She was very hardworking, even from a young age,” Deibel says. With these references, Lydon received a scholarship for three months of training at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. She shared an apartment with a former roommate before ultimately returning to Boston “to be near family—and out of cowardice,” when she began working in restaurants around the area. Sometimes it was “energetic and inspiring,” she says, and sometimes it was “mopping floors with Brazilians.” Managing and cooking was quite a lot even for someone used to multi-tasking. “The jobs were so much more challenging than anything I faced at college,” Lydon says.

While some of the challenges were quite prosaic, she occasionally found thrills in the kitchen. Once, at Truc, Lydon attempted to filet an eel. The eel, dead for hours, began “twitching beyond twitching.” The whole kitchen erupted into screams.

In addition to the occasional kitchen excitement, Lydon also found stimulation of another sort. She met her boyfriend of seven years when both worked at Chez Henri. “Meeting him definitely kept me in the business,” she admits, proving that the food of love can be just that—food.

A decade after graduating from Harvard, Lydon still loves Cambridge. “It’s a constantly evolving and changing community, with such energy.” She continues to enjoy her proximity to Harvard student life. The restaurant often hosts the Kroks and the Pitches, who “still do the same dances and sing the same songs.”

Something about Lydon is still the same as well—beneath the talented chef there still lurks the English concentrator. Lydon plans to write a book one day, perhaps continuing that thesis on Jane Eyre. “Writing is much harder than cooking. I’m saving that for my forties.”