Food Whore

by Jessica Tom

  “Hello, Tia,” Dean Chang said coolly.

  “Hello, Dean Chang,” I returned. I heard myself breathing and felt faint. Suddenly I wished I could have erased everything with Michael Saltz. So far, I had nothing to show for it, just clothes and secrets piling up.

  “Tia,” Jake said. “We have something very serious to discuss with you.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  But if Gary could have fired me with his stares, he would have already done it ten times over. His face was sweaty, red, and speckled. Every time he inhaled, the front of his shirt gaped so I could see bits of his undershirt.

  “Tia Monroe, NYU graduate student,” Gary started. “Many ­people consider Madison Park Tavern one of the best restaurants in New York. Do you agree?”

  “I agree,” I said.

  “Of course you’d agree. Not that you’ve been to many,” he said. “How could you? You’re just a twenty-­two-­year-­old girl from . . .” He looked down at a piece of paper, which must have been from my employee file. “Yonkers? How quaint. No restaurant experience. No industry connections. Tia Monroe, allergic to crustaceans and bivalves.” He jerked his gaze toward Jake. “Seriously?”

  I sat up straight, waiting for the ax to come down.

  “Gary, please. Don’t torture her,” Jake said.

  “Just tell her,” Dean Chang said, though she wouldn’t look at me, either.

  Gary took us in. “I don’t know why we let ­people like you work in this restaurant. You’re a child in a grown person’s job. I cannot take children on staff. Especially wicked children like you.”

  The room closed in and a cacophony of smells slammed into me—­the rottenness of Michael Saltz’s apartment, the ambiguously sandy dumplings at Bakushan. I smelled gingery perfume off Dean Chang, a powdery scent from Jake’s freshly cleaned suit, an odor of cigars and dark wood and leather on Gary Oscars.

  Gary punched a button on his computer keyboard and turned the screen toward us. I saw a black-­and-­white movie of me talking to Michael Saltz in the basement. It was crude and pixelated, but it was clearly me.

  “Would you mind telling us what is happening here?” Gary asked.

  I just stared at the screen, a grainy image of me held captive by a thin man who still had such immense strength. It looked like a scene out of a cop show, where all the viewers know this is a moment of danger. It hadn’t felt that way, but from the outside, it was obvious.

  “We also have footage of you going to the basement, and Michael Saltz following you soon after.”

  Dean Chang put her hand on my shoulder and I snapped away. “Tia, what happened between you and Michael Saltz?”

  Jake crossed his arms, gazed at his shoes, and said nothing.

  “Yes, Tia,” Gary said, “what happened? Because you have an unusual relationship with the New York Times restaurant critic.”

  They all waited for me, their collective authority seeming like an impossibly high wall fringed with barbed wire. But in one second, my outlook changed and I tried hard not to smile.

  They only had this tape. They had no idea Michael Saltz had used my words in his review. They didn’t know about my visit to his apartment, Bergdorf, Panh Ho. Though the image had at first alarmed me, it was nothing compared to the truth. Gary Oscars could call me a child all he wanted, but he knew nothing.

  “Tia, tell us,” Dean Chang said. “Is Michael Saltz bribing you? Is he . . . taking advantage of you?”

  “Oh, that’s bullshit,” Gary said, spitting at me. “She’s not the victim here.”

  “No, none of that happened,” I lied. “This is all a misunderstanding. I’ve never worked in a restaurant before and that was my first night on the job. I didn’t know who he was.”

  All three of them looked at one another. Dean Chang shrugged slightly, as if to say Hey, she’s got a point.

  But Gary Oscars couldn’t be swayed. “But you talked to him. For five minutes. He was scribbling notes after you spoke. What in the world were you discussing?”

  “Five minutes?” I said. It had actually felt much longer than that, but of course I wouldn’t let on. “I honestly don’t remember what I said. Maybe he just had a random thought and wanted to write it down? I didn’t say anything important. I’m just a student.”

  “We realize that you couldn’t have affected the reviews,” Dean Chang said, “but this is still—­”

  “Insubordination,” Gary Oscars finished.

  “—­not adding up,” Dean Chang continued. “Is there something you’re not telling us?”

  I looked at each of them. I was going to make it out of this okay, I just had to get through this conversation. “No, I told you everything.”

  Dean Chang smiled, apparently relieved that I wasn’t as evil as Gary had made me out to be.

  My heart twisted again. It was easy to lie to Gary, someone who didn’t know me and wasn’t a particularly nice person. But Dean Chang and Jake were different. In this moment, they were placing their bets on me. They could have backed Gary, the path of least resistance. But they were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. I was amazed and touched and guilt-­ridden. Did I deserve that kind of loyalty from them?

  I was sure I didn’t. I was lying to them just by sitting there silently, letting them believe a better side of me.

  “You can still work here, but we’ll be pulling back your hours and putting you on probation.” Dean Chang sighed. “This is your last warning. If we have another . . . breach of trust . . . then we’ll have to reevaluate your graduate candidacy and scholarship. Best-case scenario, things run smoothly from here. Worst-case scenario, you’ll lose the generous funding we’ve given you and be placed in a more structured program with traditional classes and check-­ins with an academic advisor.”

  That sounded terrible. It sounded belittling, more like middle school than grad school, though grad school wasn’t so great, either. They glorified it like some great privilege, but thus far, it had only held me back.

  Gary leaned over the desk, his pudgy, hairy forearms streaking grease on the surface.

  “This is the real world,” he said. “There are no grades or empty probationary periods. You either fucked us or you didn’t. And I think you fucked us.”

  Jake cringed. “Gary, there’s no evidence to suggest that. We can only take Tia’s word and give her a warning.”

  “Hm,” Gary said, drilling his eyes into mine. I stayed still and strong.

  “Her word,” he continued. “Tricky thing with words, though. You can’t trust a liar’s word. But I suppose that’s all we have.” He inhaled and for a second, despite his intimidation tactics, I thought he was giving me the benefit of the doubt. He briefly let his head-­honcho guard down and I didn’t think he really believed I was as wicked as he said. But of course he was oblivious.

  “Thank you for letting me stay at the restaurant,” I said.

  Dean Chang shook her head and looked out the window. Jake got up out of his chair and held out his arm with the slightest bow, just as he had when he’d first welcomed me into Madison Park Tavern.

  “Come on, Tia. I think it’s time you leave. You don’t have to work tonight.”

  “Make sure you stay out of my sight!” Gary called after me.

  The whole encounter only took a ­couple of minutes, from the locker room to the office to the dismissal. I had gotten away with it. Nothing had changed. The rush caught up to me and suddenly I was gasping for air. Somehow, the restaurant knew—­maybe not the ­people, but something in the walls, the twinkle of the glass, the marble of the stairs. If I wouldn’t be punished by Gary, Dean Chang, or Jake, then maybe the restaurant would have its own karmic retribution.

  I retrieved my things from the locker room and was about to escape when Carey called after me from the dining room. “Hey! What are you doing? Ser­vice starts in twenty minutes.”

/>   “I . . . I’m not working tonight.” I held on to the wall for balance.

  “Oh, gosh, Tia. Are you sick? I’ll call you tonight after ser­vice. Or we can talk about it now?”

  “No,” I replied, softening my voice to a whisper. “Don’t. It’s better if you don’t know. Or, rather, I don’t want to get you sick.” I reached for the rotating door, but it was rotating too fast, and I couldn’t keep up. I thought it would tear my hand off.

  She looked at me, confused, then gave me a hug. I was sure my body was pulsating with tension and guilt, but maybe my coat was too thick, because she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Okay, Tia,” she said. “I’ll see you later.” Then she ran back up into the dining room.

  I walked into Madison Square Park and sat on a bench. Gary Oscars pulled away in a town car. Guests arrived for dinner. I hoped to the ends of the earth that the review wouldn’t affect business. I hoped Chef Darling would prove himself to the world and that Carey and Angel and Chad and the whole gang would make it out unscathed.

  And I hoped I’d be able to pull off this balancing act.

  Chapter 13

  THE NEXT DAY I DID EVERYTHING BY THE BOOK. I WENT TO class, did my reading. I texted Elliott, but he didn’t text me back. I wrote extra-­precise notes about my internship and sent them off to my seminar leader two hours early. Everything would be just fine.

  Around seven, Melinda and I got hungry and walked to a fancy bodega near NYU. I wandered around the buffet and served myself a smattering of arugula leaves, a spoonful of canned tuna, and some other small bites. Moving between worlds—­NYU, Madison Park Tavern, Michael Saltz—­was a shock to the system, like an astronaut blazing into a new planet’s atmosphere every ­couple of hours.

  “Were your classes today as boring as mine?” Melinda said as she scribbled in her hummus with a carrot.

  Her voice spun in the air until it landed with a flat, incomprehensible thump on my head. Class! As much as I had tried to focus, that was still the last thing on my mind. “Classes? You’re taking classes?” Last I heard, Melinda was working on her acting career.

  “Yeah, I’m taking figure drawing classes. They’re okay. I’m quitting soon, I think.”

  “Oh, yeah. That sucks, they suck,” I said, mirroring her apathy. I smooshed everything together on my plate—­olives, peas, arugula, mustard.

  “Yep.” Melinda sighed.

  I looked down and saw I had accidentally made a tuna niçoise. This tiny autopilot act grounded me a little.

  I mixed and tasted and went back for other ingredients until the tuna salad was near perfect. It was filling and bracing and pickled. It didn’t taste like bodega food at all. The simple act of cooking and tasting calmed me like nothing else.

  We sat in Washington Square Park and picked at our food. It felt nice to be outside, where no one expected me to be anyone or say anything. But apparently we picked the wrong park to sit in, because I saw Dean Chang walk out of her office right across the street.

  Twilight had turned to night and the park twinkled with streetlamps and stringed lights. Our gazes caught and she walked toward me, a tempered pace like she was deciding how it’d go.

  “Tia, it’s nice to see you here. How . . . how are you?” she asked, searching my face, presumably for distress or any other reaction from yesterday.

  Melinda looked at her blankly, then went back to taking baby bites of her steamed broccoli.

  “I’m okay. It’s been an eventful ­couple days. As you know,” I said, digging into my salad. The truth was, I already felt like I was juggling one too many things, and I hadn’t even officially reviewed restaurants with Michael Saltz yet. Something would fall through the cracks, so I had to tighten up ship. There was no other choice.

  “I see,” she said, looking at Melinda, who didn’t look back at her, which was crazy because Dean Chang was tall and imperious, a woman who commanded attention. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”

  I turned toward Melinda, but she didn’t signal approval or otherwise. She gave me a perfect whatever face. “I’ve gotta go,” she said. “See ya, Tia.” And then she left, taking a pack of cigarettes out of her purse after she threw away her food.

  Dean Chang gracefully settled on the bench wearing a long black silk skirt with tiny pleats and an asymmetrical hemline. Issey Miyake, I realized with satisfaction.

  She started, “Yesterday afternoon disappointed me, and I would like you to tell me, in confidence, what happened at the restaurant.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, mimicking the tone I had taken with her yesterday, but with greater conviction. Practice makes perfect.

  “What do you mean you don’t know? Why were you with Michael Saltz in the basement? And before they received that disastrous review? Something isn’t right.”

  “I didn’t—­”

  “Tia. Please, talk to me. Did he do anything to you?” She bent her head, confidentially, motherly, filled with a warmth that, despite my efforts to remain hardened, broke my heart.

  “Who cares about the review,” she continued. “I only care about you. I want to help, but you have to tell me what happened.”

  “Nothing happened.” I stiffened. I wished she would lay off. This had nothing to do with her.

  “Oh, Tia. Fine. Keep your secret. But I hope you realize how lucky you’ve been up to this point. Have you noticed how few first-­year grad students are even allowed into the self-­directed internship program? This is the best program in the country, filled with students of staggering caliber. We picked you and placed you at one of the finest restaurants in the world. Think about what you’ve learned in just a few short weeks: food, culture, consumption . . . interior design, sociology, even floral arrangements! In no other place are you going to rub elbows with dishwashers and fishmongers and CEOs and celebrities.”

  She was right. I had learned about those things, but it was hard to trace the origin. Was it the restaurant or Carey’s Wiki page or Michael Saltz’s access? I couldn’t quite define the outlines in my life anymore. The mind wants things clear-­cut, but instead everything blurred.

  She stood up and continued, “Don’t derail your academic—­and professional—­career now. Graduate school is a place for you to plant the seeds of your entire life. I’ve seen very promising students set terrible precedents for themselves. It’s unfortunate, and I don’t want that to happen to you.”

  This was going to work out fine. Life had gotten mixed up, but there’d be plenty of time to sort it out. I shouldn’t have been surprised that there were some transitional bumps. Surely the girl who sold ice pops had overcome some hurdles before she’d made her dream come true. Looking at it that way, of course I could survive a little restaurant interrogation.

  Sorry, Dean Chang, I wanted to say. I’m building my foundation, but it’s not according to your blueprint.

  I saw some girls in the corner of my eye watching my exchange with Dean Chang with rapt attention. One guy was creeping up to us, eavesdropping. It wasn’t comfortable, but at that moment, my resolve to push through became stronger than ever.

  I’d thought I had my future figured out. I’d get good grades. Get into a good college. Pursue food and writing in grad school. ­People had tried to tell me that grad school wasn’t necessary, but I hadn’t listened. That degree was a badge. Validation.

  But now I realized that was naïve. Nothing is handed to you. I had learned as much with Helen. You could want something so bad that your feverish desire was practically a neon sign on your forehead. You could work hard, do all the right things, and still not succeed. You weren’t better than anyone else and you didn’t have a claim on rewards that everyone else wanted, too.

  So instead of telling the world that you wanted those prizes, instead of wearing your best dress and your most cloying smile, it was better to just grab them. Beat your way to the front of the line.


  Your best intentions aren’t enough.

  Dean Chang’s words clarified this for me. She was nice and helpful and well-­meaning—­but she was dealing me bad hands, telling me adversity made me stronger and then wondering why I was struggling.

  The proof was in the pudding. Or, in this case, my two-­hundred-­dollar La Perla bra and five-­hundred-­dollar Hermès cuff. My dinner with Michael Saltz. My words in the New York Times. That was the real, in-­the-­hand jackpot. I just had to be strong and careful. Dean Chang talked about the unsurpassed education I would receive working at Madison Park Tavern, but with Michael Saltz, I was on the better side of the table. I’d receive food, not serve it. I’d judge instead of being judged. The choice was so clear.

  “I’ll only ask you one more time. What does Michael Saltz want from you?”

  “He doesn’t want anything from me,” I said, like she was stupid and this was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “You have real talents, Tia,” she said. “I don’t want you to waste them. If that’s what you say about Michael Saltz, I believe you.” Then she spun on her high-­heeled shoe and left.

  I sighed and returned to my clever tuna niçoise salad, now looking more wilted and wan.

  Strong and careful, I thought. I ate my salad by myself.

  Chapter 14

  ONE WEEK LATER, MICHAEL SALTZ AND I DID OUR FIRST review together. Tellicherry was not a subtle restaurant. It was loud, crowded, and white-­hot cool.

  I had spent the week reading up on everything about the chef, Chris­tian Rhodes, and all the go-­to dishes. Several bloggers and reporters—­the ones who weren’t anonymous and who could accept invites to dinners and launch parties—­had already reviewed the restaurant. I read these with curiosity and just a little bit of self-­satisfaction. They and I both knew that many ­people considered the New York Times the final word.

  I had also read every review Michael Saltz had ever written, studying the last three months extra carefully. After he lost his sense of taste, he must have enlisted some friends, gotten them drunk and talking about the food, and just used their impressions. Reading them now, I could tell the difference. The critiques felt surface, like assessing the costume design rather than the play. Michael Saltz must have known that was unacceptable in the long term. So here I was.