Stanley Park

by Timothy Taylor

  There had been a restaurant in France of which Jeremy had often spoken. It had been in a small town near Dijon. Dante had gone to Paris for some downtime, on his own, but he took one side trip. He was curious what he’d find. Who he might find. Dante told of the TGV ride out from Paris, flashing through the fields of yellow. He told of how the small town was reached by rented car, driving out a trunk road that wound and dove between the hills. About the town itself. Impossible streets. An abbey. The restaurant was tiny. He wondered how the French made a go of it. Simple food. Good food, but not much to it. He had a piece of duck breast with a sauce made of pears. A salad with chopped up hard-boiled egg and some cheese.

  “Good value, I suppose,” Dante said.

  “You were thinking of buying the place?” the Professor said.

  Touché. Before it became clear that Jeremy wasn’t hiding out there, hiding in the kitchen behind the protection of his pass-through, Dante was fleetingly inspired to do exactly that. Produce a cheque book, buy the place outright. Offer them so much their provincial French heads would commence spinning. Then take this preciously simple place, this place with nothing to it, and turn it into something that took advantage of the trunk-road traffic flowing through this backwoods on its way from Dijon to Paris.

  He’d been stewing over this exact thought, eating cheese, when a huge grey dog wandered out of the kitchen. A male Great Dane, thirty-five to forty inches at the shoulder, massive gear swinging between its hind legs. The dog made its way through the entire restaurant and finally to Dante’s table, where it put its chin on the cloth not six inches from his plate. The beast regarded Dante with ageless, yellow eyes.

  “And that dissuaded you?” the Professor asked.

  Strangely.

  The men stared at one another in silence for a moment.

  “You can’t protect him,” Dante said.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” the Professor answered. “The Food Caboose.”

  Dante had to have it repeated a number of times. “What kind of name is that?” he asked finally.

  The Professor smiled.

  “You’re not really going to make me look it up in the phone book, are you?” But apparently that was precisely his intent, and Dante got up and walked into the Professor’s house, letting go an involuntary chuckle at the games they inevitably played.

  He found a phone book on the kitchen counter. “Food Caboose?” he called back out the patio door, leafing through the pages. And after a whole lot of leafing, he stopped. The Professor was still smiling.

  “He’s moved out of town,” Dante said. He did not even care to conceal his disappointment.

  “He hasn’t moved out of town,” the Professor answered.

  Dante looked back down to the book with a frown. “Well he’s not bloody here.”

  Over the top of the house came the first rays of dawn. They lit the Professor’s face and all of the vista behind him in brilliant relief, and from the middle of a shining expanse of colour came the Professor’s voice. It said: “Oh, he’s here all right.”

  It wasn’t inspiring from the outside. A ramshackle, barnred house at the dead southern edge of Chinatown. The house itself was missing shakes, and some of the thin-slat cedar siding had fallen off.

  It had been a grocery store for a while, the owner informed. Back in the early years when a vibrant Chinatown had sprawled this far south on Abbott Street. In more recent years the colourful community of vegetable stalls and butchers, spice vendors and the sellers of ancient cures had contracted into a few square blocks around Main Street to the northeast. The beachhead of condo development to the southwest had stalled in its advance this direction. Buildings had been torn down and not replaced. The area stopped being part of any neighbourhood at all. A quilt of denuded lots collecting rainwater, a grid of vainly hopeful streets. A place stranded between other places.

  The red house was one of the last structures, virtually unrentable. Three months before, the owner had visited the premises and found the front room strewn with hypodermic needles. He broomed them into a pile, pulled on work gloves and counted them. Over 250, a busy shooting gallery. He was out of patience waiting for the redemption of development, out of cash. He was motivated.

  Olli hired an engineer. The foundation was hanging in there, the hot and cold water worked and the wiring would not spontaneously combust, at least not in the immediate future. Olli wanted his money out in two years. “Three tops,” he said. “Although barring some kind of total economic meltdown I expect to be ahead in one.”

  “Barring The Big One,” Jeremy joked.

  “Bring it on. For this price I’m buying land.”

  Which was not bad considering that the house had the basics. Medium-sized kitchen with a gas range top, the oldest and quirkiest Jeremy had ever seen but functional. There was an open front room with wood planks, a bathroom in the rear. A narrow spiral of stairs corkscrewed up through a hole in the high ceiling and into a sleeping loft at the back of the house. Jeremy’s personal quarters.

  His for two hundred dollars a month, Olli said. Enough to cover property taxes.

  Everything needed work, but Jules helped visualize the finished product, made decorating suggestions. She also produced a drum sander from somewhere and helped him refinish the planks in the front room. He stained the planks mahogany. He finished the front room dark brown to the wainscotting and cream above. He spent almost a week with a box of steel wool and three quarts of Pinesol, cleaning the kitchen, every surface, every corner.

  The Professor asked first before contributing anything.

  “Pots,” Jeremy suggested, and his father came through with Calphalon.

  He scraped together everything else on his own. He found a cut-rate set of counters at Charmin’s, racks of shelving and an aluminum cold-storage unit, both salvaged off a minesweeper scrapped by the Canadian navy. He tracked down the tables and chairs at flea markets, a case of homemade candles at a craft fair. A box of red-check linen and plain steel cutlery came from Ikea. With half a dozen garage-sale Braque prints—plus Heckle, Jeckle and Hide—Jeremy thought the room had become a pleasantly dark and comfortable place. A place somebody might like to be all alone over the fifteen-dollar prix fixe dinner and a magazine. A place someone else might like to take a special date on a night they wanted to be just a little unpredictable. A place where other people might like to pull two tables together and drink bottles of whichever of the four available wines they liked the most, talk late into the night until the chef had to go to bed.

  A place with a Byzantine reservation system, in the end. Jeremy wanted something more straightforward, but Fabrek was the acclaimed expert on all things underground. “No, no,” he said over Jeremy’s objection. “This is important. I’ve seen these go down before.”

  “There are more?” Olli said, looking around the front room. He liked the smallness of it. He liked the idea of coming here regularly and never telling anyone about it. He walked up to the curtained front window and opened it a crack.

  Not right here exactly, Fabrek said, but they were around. Alt.repreneurship, the punk economy. No business or liquor licences, no insurance, no regulation, no inspection. Risky but occasionally very good, mostly a lot of fun. Bars, nightclubs, and yes, restaurants.

  “Even I’ve heard about speakeasies,” Olli said, in his own defence.

  Fabrek told them about two other restaurants, just examples. There was a hip underground tapas bar out in Burnaby somewhere. The best anticucho and live flamenco in the city. There was a Russian place in the basement of an old West End mansion, where you could drink seventeen different kinds of flavoured vodka, quite possibly homemade. Two bucks a shot.

  “I was not aware of that,” Olli said.

  “That’s the point,” Fabrek explained. “Unless you know somebody who knows somebody, and those two people know each other pretty well, you’re never going to get a reference. Forget about the phone number or the address.”

  “Reference?”
Jeremy said.

  Sure, that’s the glue that held the whole thing together, Fabrek explained. Say a person hears about the Food Caboose and they want to go. Well, in that case they need to find a reference.

  Olli looked dubious.

  “Like who?” Jeremy asked.

  Someone who had reserved before. An insider. A friend of the Food Caboose. That made selecting your first guests all the more important. It was like seeding a stream with salmon fry. Those first guests were going to spawn all the ones that followed.

  So (Fabrek went on) a person gets a reference. Now, since the reference would have actually had a reservation before, they would have the restaurant’s unlisted phone number. The reference would phone that number during specified hours and leave contact information in a voice mailbox.

  “Like,” Fabrek said, demonstrating. “Hey, Jay-Jay … yeah, it’s Fabrek. There’s this guy I know, he heard about the Caboose. Pretty good guy. Give him a call at whatever.”

  Jeremy thought he understood. “So I call this person with the reservation date.”

  Fabrek shook his head slowly. “You call him with his waiting list confirmation.”

  “Waiting list?” Olli said.

  Fabrek nodded, eyes closed. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Later, when you have room, then you call him up and give him a reservation date and a number to call and confirm.

  Jeremy nodded. “Got it.”

  It was a minor inconvenience, but by month six the waiting list was a month long. During the reservation call-back hour, which Jeremy established between 4:30 and 5:30 every night from Tuesday to Saturday, he was typically finishing up sauces at the stock stove he’d bought and set up near the low passageway into the dining room, arm’s reach from where the phone also happened to be. And on Sundays, when Jules sometimes came in to cook with Jeremy on her days off, she might answer the phone.

  This past Sunday, for example, Jules had come in and brought a stack of new CDs. She was on a Dexter Gordon kick and so they were listening to “The Squirrel,” loud, the music hammering, driving away behind them as they prepped. Jeremy answered the phone while he was finishing brown stock. And later—when he was over on the far side of the kitchen reducing this stock to demi-glaze and Jules was roasting walnuts—she answered.

  They got their last confirmation at 5:25. Their sixth and last table for their one seating at 7:00 p.m. Another packed house of twenty-four hungry people. Jules hung up and, dipping her head instinctively under a low beam in the passageway, ducked back into the kitchen.

  “Booked,” she said, taking out the walnuts to cool and turning to the beautiful red sockeye salmon that had arrived that afternoon. Jeremy nodded and continued prepping lamb roasts. Each boned piece of leg was being spread with a mixture of roasted garlic, mustard and ground rosemary before being tied.

  When the roasts were in, he checked the bread oven. The baguettes were done. He cracked the oven door and the room filled with that very particular hot and delicious smell. Jules was bent over the food processor. She was seasoning the salmon mousse with salt and pepper. Adding a bit of cream.

  Jeremy removed the baguettes to a rack and stood for a moment watching her. There was some kind of cataclysmic drum solo going on in the background, and he found himself smiling uncontrollably.

  He went out front later. The little square tables were silent under their checkered cloths. The candles sat unlit in the centre of each. There was a fresh sheet tucked under the corner of each candle holder.

  INTRODUCTION: Endive-apple-walnut salad

  HOOK: Salmon mousse with arugula pesto + crostini

  CLIMAX: Lamb with mint-apricot demi-glaze

  DÉNOUEMENT: Sorbet + cheese

  The room was warm. There were bottles of red wine on a sideboard. Jeremy lit the candles and glanced at his watch. He turned back to the kitchen just as Jules emerged, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “All set?” she said. She came close, slid an arm around his waist, leaned her head over onto his shoulder.

  He kissed her hair, breathed in her smell. They stood like that for several seconds.

  All set.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to a lot of people who helped and encouraged me as I wrote Stanley Park. (None of whom, naturally, should be held personally accountable for what’s in the book.)

  First and always, thank you Jane.

  Thanks to Allen Hepburn, co-editor at Descant, for reading an early version of the manuscript and for making persuasive suggestions. Many thanks also to my agent, Dean Cooke, for guidance and for his work in getting the novel published. Thanks Diane Martin and Noelle Zitzer at Knopf Canada for wise editing advice. I would also like to thank Louise Dennys and others at Knopf for believing in this novel.

  I would like to acknowledge two chefs who talked cooking with me. Chef Barbara Alexander helped me design the kitchens that appear in the novel. She also made me aware that chefs have many more colourful ways of saying “busy” than merely saying “busy.” I am very grateful also to Chef Dennis Blaise, who let me visit his kitchen when they were truly “busy.”

  Thanks to my brother, Dr. Dylan Taylor, who patiently answered questions on the topic of cardiology and heart disease. Thanks also Ross Crockford for talking with me about Czechoslovakia. Big thanks to the Montana Nelsons: Dr. Kirk Nelson, Helen, Cathy and my buddy Chris Sauvé. The week you put me up in Granny’s cabin on Flathead Lake was instrumental. Finally, thanks to the people upon whom I imposed various parts and versions of the manuscript. You were all game: Frances Bergin, Robert Duncan, Chris Elgin, Curtis Gillespie, Zane Harker, David Isenegger, Jill Lambert, John Meier and Kevin Williams.