He Could Stand the Heat, Now He’s in the Kitchen

Captain Stefan Barr said the scallops at the Gramercy Tavern could use a little more salt. He’s been back only a few months from his second tour in Iraq. For 10 years, he was one of the few, the proud, or, as he puts it, “the best”—a Marine. Now he lives in Soho.

Yes, there are soldiers walking among us, dining right next to you, tucking into those same $20 scallops. Some of them probably look just like you or me. Mr. Barr does not. He is 6 foot 5. He has a chest like a well-fed pterodactyl, with long, sinewy arms and giant hands that could easily reach across the table and pop my head off like a cork.

His boyish, all-American handsome face bears no signs of a man who has war on the brain. “Some guys who come back have it rougher,” he said.

“I like a little more salt,” said Mr. Barr. Since returning home, he’s traded in his khakis for a white chef’s coat and some checkered pants. He’s attending classes at the French Culinary Institute and interning at Craft. While in Iraq, Mr. Barr did his best to avoid the Marine-issue food bags. He subsisted on the protein shakes and oatmeal packets his mom would send him, and dinners at the homes of the friends he made in Iraq.

He looked down at four big, juicy, pan-seared scallops that had been served on a bed of red beets. He ate them and said in his deep but soft voice: “I’ve never done scallops and beets before, but I thought it was good. A little bit of arugula in there. The beets weren’t overpowering; it just kind of added a nice mellowness to the scallop. I love the way they did the beets, very creamy consistency throughout the whole dish. A little texture with the arugula.”

Mr. Barr grew up in Lynchburg, Va. His mother’s family had a grain farm; his father was a shoe salesman. In high school, he was tall but all skin and bones. He ran track at Brookville High. He saw Top Gun and decided he wanted be a pilot. But his vision was 20-40, so he joined the Marine Corps. For the past two months, Mr. Barr, who is 32, has lived in a small, overpriced apartment on Canal Street and Broadway, only a few giant footsteps from cooking school.

“I’m actually moving down to South Street Seaport,” he said, sipping a $13, fish-bowl-size vodka martini. “This place I’m at is more the transient, you know, European crowd”—he has a slight Southern drawl, Yer-uh-pee-in—“European models—not a bad thing. Lot of traffic, but I planned on finding a better place to be, a little cheaper. Which is going to be good if I’m gonna be working in a restaurant. You don’t start out at top-chef salary.”

He says he’s fallen in love with New York. “It’s amazing, when you’re walking through the streets of the city,” said Mr. Barr. “You see the huge buildings, and everything is so big and high, and there’s so many people. It’s great, though. You can blend in and be nobody, or you can walk into a place and have a hundred friends.” And he’s made a lot of friends; later that night, while shooting pool, Mr. Barr had trouble focusing on the game on account of all the text messages he was getting. (He didn’t like it when I beat him rather badly. I consoled him. “Yeah, but I’m a Marine,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t like to lose.”)

Life after Iraq has taken getting used to. Over dinner he described life in the town he was stationed in, outside of Falluja. “When you walk around, you have your unit, your squadron, you spread out, you don’t all bunch together, just sort of check different areas out. If you see something suspicious on the road, you stop—it could be a bomb. You’re extremely aware of your surroundings,” he said.

Now that he’s back, “it’s just kind of like, O.K., I don’t need to look at every window when I’m walking down the street. Not every piece of trash is a potential bomb.” The Marine in him nags; it’s a rare morning he forgets to make his bed.

“I don’t think about [Iraq] all the time, maybe once a week,” he said. “You just kind of like—this whole chef thing, it’s a big transition. You think about all your experiences, and I don’t necessarily call it second-guessing myself, but you always think, ‘O.K., did I do the right thing?’ Obviously, O.K., I brought all my guys home. So I was ecstatic about that. You hope that your service over there made a little difference. You hope that your little contribution now can help people 20 years from now, with this generation of Iraqi kids, that they grow up and they see that we’re not heathens, they see we’re there to protect them, and help them do whatever they want to do—hopefully, that will have an impact in the future.”

He hastened to add, “Again, there’s a lot of guys who’ve seen a lot more than me, that have a harder time adjusting.”

Mr. Barr graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1998. He was trained as a platoon commander, and then deployed with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit in Okinawa, Japan, in January 2000. In 2004, his obligation to the Marines was completed, but he signed on for another two years. “Crazy, I know,” he said. In April of 2006, he was off to war.

In Iraq, he was stationed with the 1st Battalion, a staff job, so he wasn’t in the field too much, but at the time the field was coming to the base. “People were shooting mortars at you all the time,” he said.

The worst day of that first tour came in July 2006. A humvee hit a roadside bomb; three Marines were killed instantly. “It hurts everybody. Even like me, just a staff guy at that time, sitting back at the headquarters. You meet a guy one day, and the next day, he’s gone. ”

By that time, Mr. Barr had realized that he did not want to be a Marine forever. It was beginning to feel like a job. Up till now it had been fun. But in June of 2007, he returned to Iraq with a very different job: company commander, in charge of 200 marines. Things had gotten better. Over the course of that eight-month tour, Mr. Barr estimated that there were only 10 to 15 incidents—a shot would ring out, a roadside bomb.

By that time, most people were “tired of people dying, things blowing up, so they started making more of an effort,” he said. “These guys who were like, ‘I don’t care what the terrorists do, I’m going to work with the Americans to get this place running.’”

Mr. Barr said that when he meets people socially or at the cooking school, as conversation progresses and he says what he’s been up to for the past decade, the “usual response is, ‘Wow, that’s awesome,’” said Mr. Barr. “Usually people thank you, which is humbling but a little awkward. I don’t need to be thanked.”

He said the questions usually stop there. As we shot pool that night, I asked him his opinion of the war. Later, he told me I was the first person to ask him that question since he’d returned. “I guess that is a bit odd,” said Mr. Barr. He said he believes it was the right thing to do, that it was presented to the world in a very unfortunate way, but that people will be thanking the Marines in 50 years.

This summer, Mr. Barr is hoping to make his way through his laundry list of great restaurants in the city. He told me that other day he’d had this amusing conversation with a pal at culinary school:

“I was saying it was sort of funny that here I am braising short ribs, when a couple years ago I was coordinating an assault involving F-18s and a platoon of tanks.” This was at Twentynine Palms, the world’s largest Marine base, in Southern California; they used live ammo. “It’s called a combined arms exercise, where you basically learn how to seize an enemy objective, a hardened position. They’ve been there in the dirt. Dug in. You prep the target with aircraft, you send in the F-18 jets, the Cobra attack helicopters. The jets drop 2,000-pound bombs, they’re technically called Mark-84 bombs; the Cobras shoot with guns and missiles. Then just as the planes leave, the artillery picks up, and this whole time you’re moving, you’re in your Mechanized Troop Carrier Vehicle—you’re closing with the objective. You start big, dropping big bombs, and then you go to artillery, which are a little smaller so you can get a little closer. You’ve got a platoon of tanks, then the mechanized troop transports—it’s my whole company. So you just get closer and closer as you get to those smaller type of weapons, and by the end you’re a few hundred meters away, and your guys are getting out, and they begin suppressing the target, then you even get closer with the machine guns so the bullets are impacting the objective. Then you start bounding forward, and you get to a point where your guys are on the objective in the trench and there are paper targets and things like that. It’s pretty intense.”

smorgan@observer.com