When the restaurant was about three years old, Leo had told Kenneth to start making his own pasta, and two weeks later Britt entered the kitchen to find two women, one ancient and one about forty, set up near the walk-in, chatting in Italian and rolling satiny yellow sheets to be cut into tagliatelle. At first Britt thought Leo had imported them from Sicily like a case of plum tomatoes, but it turned out they spoke English and were Kenneth’s landladies. Britt phoned a reporter he’d been talking to now and again and offhandedly mentioned the growing trend of Linden discovering its own pockets of culinary talent for economic gain, embodied in the heartwarming story of the Torsini family, and then everyone knew Winesap served a glorious dish of tagliatelle as well as a perfectly crusted sea bream. Weeknight sales rose accordingly.
He was made for it, just as Leo was made for the position of watcher and string-puller. If the arrangement bruised Leo’s ego, he never said so. And Britt believed that occupying the less heralded role would never bother Leo. This was one of Leo’s greatest strengths: he knew himself.
WHEN BRITT AND LEO ENTERED the kitchen door, evening service was gearing up to a bad start. In the dining room, servers swabbed grimly at the crumbs left on the floor from staff dinner while Alan, the bartender, observed them and polished a snifter. He stood very straight, motionless but for a slow, murderous circling of his thumb.
Watching him, Britt shuddered. “What the hell is wrong with these people?”
“They keep sleeping together,” Leo said. “Annette never trades shifts with anyone and now she can’t find people to cover her vacation. And Alan’s pissed that Helene never pushes people toward the bar to eat. He wants the tips.”
Britt rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Have you been holding roundtables with the front-of-the-house staff about their romantic lives?”
Leo said, “My office window is right above the dining room. You think I don’t open that up?”
In the kitchen the cooks were frantic and silent, the Hobart mixer batting at a vat of butter in one corner, while across from it a stainless steel prep table held two hotel pans of putty-colored cow’s tongues, steam swirling off them as they cooled.
“Where’s Thea?” Leo asked the room at large. Manny, his dishwasher, jerked his head toward the walk-in. Inside the fridge he found Thea with one clog braced on a sealed bucket of chicken stock, counting sardines. Leo closed the door behind him.
Thea glanced up at him and then returned to marking her checklist. The sardines were layered in a flat pan of ice, crescents of blood threading from their gills. “Hector quit,” she said.
“Shit. Really?”
“Really. We have to keep a dessert chef more than six months sometime.”
“We have,” Leo said. “We will again.”
“He got bored silly doing warm chocolate cake.” Thea flipped a sheet of paper over in her binder and began noting the dates, written on masking tape, that marked every item in the walk-in and freezers.
“There’s room to maneuver,” Leo said, slightly stung. “Every workable idea Hector had, we served. He just gave us a lot of stuff we couldn’t use. The place is what it is. We couldn’t serve tobacco as a garnish, no matter how avant-garde he felt that week.” None of it made him feel any better. He’d known he’d never keep Hector forever, that Hector would go to New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, but he’d tried. He gave bonuses. He was judicious in his criticism.
“He’s not big on workable,” said Thea. Hector would spend a week perfecting a sesame grapefruit mousse that Britt had described as the union of grainy and puckering, but then ditch the mousse and debut a flawless napoleon of crackling pastry layered with coconut and kaffir lime custard. He’d sprinkled it with a vivid emerald powder that sent Leo’s mouth alight when he tasted it, a fragrant tartness that intensified the creamy custard and the buttered shards of crust. It turned out to be sugared lime leaf powder. No one knew how he’d made it. Leo had tried at home, just to see, and turned out a murky, unchewable paste. They’d all learned to wait out dishes like the sesame grapefruit mousse, the servers exchanging glances at each tasting but tactfully silent, because the two weren’t unrelated. Thea had pointed out that Hector seemed to need to work a bad dish with his hands while he worked his way through a stunning dish in his head.
“Oh well, I guess. That’s how it goes.” It was a blow. Hector had begun knocking away the restaurant’s reputation for classic but staid desserts, but no one kept the best talent forever. You found the next guy. Leo was already thinking about pouring a cup of coffee and getting upstairs, forgetting about Hector’s departure in a mountain of invoices. “Where’d he go, anyway?”
Thea shrugged. “He said he was going to take a vacation and travel for a couple months.” She hefted the pan of iced sardines and bumped open the walk-in door with her hip.
The door closed behind her, but Leo stayed in the walk-in. He poked idly at a plastic bag of demi-glace, gleaming mahogany cylinders like a row of sliced horn. Thea liked to add a calf’s foot for texture. Maybe next time he came in Thea would be handing in her notice too. Leo would have to promise her a mountain of calves’ feet.
No. Thea was happy here. She had a three-year-old daughter and an ex-husband; she’d be loath to mess with a well-established routine—a routine Leo was as much a part of as, say, the ex-husband, if you really thought about it. Britt handled the front of the house and channeled Leo’s directives to the kitchen staff, but it was Leo who had noticed Thea as a quiet, focused prep cook slowly emerging each day from behind a mound of carrots, celery, and shallots, which she turned into great bowls of perfect dice.
Back then, Kenneth was still executive chef. He’d made the restaurant’s reputation, but the drinking problem had curdled his brash personality into an abusive one, and it was Thea, by then the sous chef, who’d slowly taken on responsibility, developing the nightly specials and training new staff, whom Kenneth either threatened or ignored. Leo had been upstairs all day and night, or out front watching the service, and for months he hadn’t seen that Kenneth was deteriorating. When he finally did realize whose dishes he’d been praising and whose guidance had been steering the back of the house, he’d called Thea up to the office, expecting protectiveness of her boss or total self-effacement, in service to a kitchen’s military protocol. Neither appeared: Thea had run the place because she hated disarray and she hated failure, but she had also seen a chance and taken it, and she expected recognition. And Leo gave her what she’d earned. He still did.
Harry might have youth and energy and possibly vision—it was too soon to tell; Britt could charm journalists and angry patrons; but did either of them have any idea how to wrangle the kitchen that kept them all employed? Because the most dedicated, talented, and downright martial kitchen staff were still crazy. They were inked with full-sleeve tattoos and they picked fights about offal; they wore scuffed leather jackets and smelled of smoke and whiskey; they spent their meager salaries on top-shelf brown liquor and execrable fast food; and they placed bizarre wholesale orders for items like duck tongue, Jew’s mallow, persimmons, and blood clams, which they paid for in crumpled bills and then took home to create menus for the decadent, spiteful, all-staff dinner parties they would then dissect throughout service for the rest of the week. Even stern, responsible Thea had joined in, sensing a threat to her authority after a particularly successful paella party hosted by a previously unknown prep cook named Jaime. She’d packed off her kid to her parents’ house and set about breaking down an entire pig into a twenty-four-hour feast of barbecue and charcuterie that had left the whole kitchen staff awed and overstuffed, with a respectful chartreuse tinge lingering in the whites of their eyes.
Britt might get to be the face of the restaurant, but Leo knew that he, Leo, was the brains. Now Leo paused, just out of the way of the swinging kitchen door, to look over the staff: Thea moving into place at the pass to expedite, a towel tucked into her belt and one tight curl of dark brown hair disappearing into her collar; Manny hummi
ng to himself while he raised and lowered the door to the dishwasher as decisively as if it were a guillotine; Dennis slicing the tongue into circles with that gelatinous starburst in their centers, horrid but also rather beautiful; Suzanne at the fish station tasting a spoonful of fish stock; and at the meat station the sous chef Leo had found in a pasta place up in Bingham, where the cavatelli was gluey but the lamb shank had silenced him for a whole minute: Jason, an automaton, a pale bearded carnivore with a preternatural sense for meat temps.
The call-and-response of the first orders had begun; he listened to Thea firing one tongue, two ceviche, one venison, one escolar, one gnocchi, all day. He liked to stay for a few minutes during service—later he would return for more coffee and would stand silently near the espresso machine, observing—because when Leo was up in his office he would hear muted servers’ chatter but not this, not the rhythm of the kitchen as orders shuttled through it, the steaming roar of the dishwasher and the click of metal hotel pans on stainless steel counters and the constant verbal assertion and confirmation between the expediter and line cooks, like an animal talking to itself.
CHAPTER 2
LEO SPENT THE BETTER PART OF that autumn preoccupied with the belief that somewhere near Linden lurked an unknown pastry prodigy just waiting to be discovered. Britt, meanwhile, devoted himself to concealing his fixation on one of Winesap’s new regulars.
She had appeared at the end of the summer, a few days before their first visit to Harry’s restaurant space. She arrived wearing a charcoal sleeveless dress that could have been dull except that it was fitted so snugly, with tall heels and dangling, faintly Egyptian gold earrings. When she turned, the skirt flared and Britt saw a flash of a lime silk lining. At first he assumed she was a visitor from New York or Philadelphia, but bigger-city dwellers tended to radiate an air of parental delight at having uncovered a decent place. She might look like a transplant from some larger, chicer city, but she behaved like a local.
The woman handed a credit card to Alan and snapped her purse shut with a brisk click, shaking back a heavy, shining length of maple-colored hair. Alan looked dazed. He had assumed the slightly openmouthed smile of a Labrador retriever, and Britt stepped forward to save him.
“My father,” she said, when she saw Britt approach. “It’s his birthday, but he’ll still try to pay.”
“Not mine,” said Britt. He raised an eyebrow at Alan, who murmured, “Table eight,” and Britt gestured for her to precede him to her table. As they walked, he added, “My father would drop a few hints about college tuition and order a dozen extra oysters.”
They paused at her table and Britt pulled out a chair for her. He was about to introduce himself when she said, “Ah, there they are,” and he turned to see a couple who were an older version of her enter the restaurant, followed by a man his own age. Maybe a brother but more likely a husband. And yet not much of one that he could see: the man was shorter than this woman, who stood eye to eye with Britt (hers were a tawny brown), and he was balding. Disappointed, Britt returned to Alan and told him to send out glasses of champagne.
It was a Friday evening, and Britt was lurking about, observing Alan’s first solo night running the dining room. They had struck a bargain after several shifts of Alan’s carefully reasoned arguments for a trial as maître d’. Britt assumed that Alan was only campaigning out of spite for Helene, the maître d’ who never let people eat at the bar, but Helene was going on vacation and needed someone to replace her, and Alan, who was ABD in philosophy, made a first-rate argument. But now Britt was having doubts. Alan was relaxed and genuine as a bartender, but as a maître d’ the weight of responsibility seemed to get to him, and he took on a peculiar pan-European accent and kept clasping his hands before him like an undertaker. Britt was petrified that he might bow.
She returned the next week, occupying a table of five with two couples, and then a few days later with three heavy-shouldered young men of a sort of collegiate-warehouse hybrid. Then Britt didn’t see her until the end of September, when she was there with a blond, reedy man in his forties, and a week after that with a group of women who appeared to be very much like her: midthirties, chic, with smooth hair and notable eyewear. Britt greeted her the same way each time, warm but professional, never quite willing to turn her over to Alan or Helene but too baffled by her companions to try any further innovation. The two couples had seemed nervous and sweet-tempered, all ordering chicken. They had brought a large box with them, which sat tucked beneath the table until dessert, when they’d opened it and pulled out prettily wrapped jars of jam, handing each to this woman for her examination. The young men, who gave the impression of wearing baseball caps but who in fact were suitably dressed, had listened to her speak with rapt attention, pausing only for the burliest one to order an obscure bottle of gruner veltliner to accompany the mushroom flan. And the blond man, who looked familiar to Britt though he could not quite place him, had ordered cheese as an appetizer and foie gras terrine as a main course and spent the dinner dabbing at his eyes with a transparent ivory handkerchief—too distraught and bilious to seduce anyone, Britt decided. When she turned up with the group of women, Britt circumnavigated Alan and bounded forward, delighted to see her in a recognizable configuration. They ordered champagne as an aperitif, slurped at the heads of shrimp, and leaned back languidly in their chairs, flashing the scarlet soles of their expensive shoes. They seemed to have more and whiter teeth than the rest of the diners. Entranced and perhaps faintly threatened, Alan had sent out an extra amuse-bouche without even asking Britt first.
What did this woman do? Was she a therapist, an etiquette coach? She did not dominate the conversation at any of her dinners, but she was nevertheless clearly central in some way to all—her companions oriented their bodies in her direction subtly but unmistakably. Watching each set of shoulders angled toward her, Britt was not sure it was even conscious. She ordered last and differently from the rest of the table but always shared tastes of her rabbit ragù with pappardelle, her saddle of lamb with potatoes dauphinoise. With the two couples she seemed solicitous and gentle, almost maternal, and she let the weeping man talk at her for an hour, nodding calmly, but then just before the chocolate truffle she reached over and tapped his knuckle. Whatever she said made the man rear back and drop his handkerchief. A passing server swooped in, folded it, and placed it at the edge of the table. Britt made a note to compliment her on the grace and subtlety of the move; the man seemed unaware that he had dropped it, and therefore that anyone had noticed whatever little shock had caused it. The woman just signaled for the bill.
Britt made a point of being accessible each time she departed so they could discuss the finer points of whatever she had chosen that evening. He made casual circuits of the room, noting the details of her frame with what even he could tell was a strange and orthopedic kind of attention: the diagonal sweep of her jaw, the length of her fingers, the smooth cup-and-ball of her bare, gleaming shoulder.
At the time, Britt was distracted and defensive thanks to a dying relationship, and the appearances of this woman were a respite not only from that but from arguments with Leo over finding a new pastry chef and from unreliable suppliers and the kitchen’s latest turf war with the servers.
She was also a useful barometer for Alan’s progress as a maître d’, a position he had continued to occupy a few nights a week after Helene returned from vacation. Alan was slowly abandoning his Continental undertaker mode and honing his instincts for how and when to woo a guest with small displays of welcome, which had to be dispensed judiciously or else the guest would expect some free thing every time.
By this time Britt had learned her name, and so despite his general distraction he brightened when, just after Halloween, he saw her on the reservations sheet, slated for a window table overlooking the half-leaved trees and the darkening gray sky. He had noted a BC next to her name, which was Camille.
BC no longer stood for an actual blue index card but for a file on the compu
ter system of frequent guests and their habits. A note on the servers’ ticket would alert them to check it before approaching the table, so they would know who hated salmon, who was allergic to gluten, who adored soft-shell crab, and who liked to linger over coffee. It was a habit Leo had picked up years ago, at a place where he had worked in college. There the staff had kept a small recipe-card box at the bar, containing alphabetically arranged blue index cards with additional notes jotted on, crossed out, and amended. The cards bore family names and configurations, the dead and the divorced neatly crossed out, new names in fresh ink to one side. They knew who married, separated, and gave birth. They knew birthdays and anniversaries and wonky food issues like an aversion to onions but a love of chiles, a rotating circuit of odd diets, favorite cheeses, and beliefs about meat temperature. However wise a business move the files were, scrutiny of them revealed lives in a way that was also oddly moving, and sometimes—perhaps—unflattering.
The staff was continually admonished to keep the cards’ language simple and neutral. No jokes, no giving in to moments of rage. Nevertheless, unable to resist, several servers had amused themselves by writing cards for one another: Often leaves table to weep in lavatory, read Alan’s file, likes server to offer brave smiles upon return. The file for a longtime server named David was nearly a novel, from Likely to arrive with chorizo in pockets; do not be persuaded to cook it for him to Frequently unmanned by hiccups. No one had made a card for Leo, who was just distant and intimidating enough that the servers weren’t sure how he’d take it. Britt would have told them to write one for him—Leo would love it—but the cards were not the kind of thing one could direct. Every now and again Britt read through them, hoping to see one for Leo appear. Britt’s blue card file read simply, Mouth breather.
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