Britt shook his head. “The frame is beautiful,” he said. “It picks up the zinc. If you get too much dark rough wood in here, it’s going to stop feeling modern and feel Hobbity.”
He looked around, touching the tables, jostling the chairs to see how sturdy they were. He gazed up at the clear bells of glass in the pendant lamps. Harry watched him move around the space. After a minute he uncrossed his arms and looked around too, as if seeing it for the first time.
At a huge old hutch that Britt guessed would be a server station, he paused. “Why do you have a pancake griddle in your server station?”
“Oh,” Harry said, embarrassed, “I grabbed it at Bed, Bath and Beyond to warm the coffee cups. It’s nicer than pouring hot coffee into some cold porcelain cup. This is just a stopgap.”
“And you can have the waiters grill cheese on it. Let’s hear the menu,” Britt said.
Harry got out his laptop and set it on the bar. “It’s a work in progress,” he said. “It has to be simple, just because of the space limitations, but I don’t want it to be too simplified. On the island we did pretty stripped-bare stuff, you know—wood-fired-oven breads and pizzas, roast chicken. We kind of had to up there. I think I can do a little more here.”
Britt was nodding, scanning the page Harry had opened for him. Pan-crisped socca with baccalà and arugula. Nduja toasts with sardine and blossomed caper. Lamb’s neck with gremolata and artichoke. Korean glutinous rice stick with crisp pork, grilled scallion, and house-made chile sauce.
“You might want to pull back on some of the culinary terms,” Britt mused. “Call it crispy chickpea pancake and whipped salt cod, you know? People zone out if they don’t recognize enough words.”
Harry looked at the page, nodding. “You’re probably right. But I don’t want to condescend to the people who’d know.”
“In this town that’s about a dozen people. Leave a few in there for interest, but if you don’t think most people can pronounce it, reword. You should’ve seen us when we first started. Leo went hard-core Francophile. That first menu was all sauce bordelaise and entrecôte—no one knew what we were talking about, and the waitstaff kept mispronouncing it anyway. In a year, you get your clientele, you start calling it socca again.”
Harry looked cheered by this. He had gone back around the bar, opened a toolbox, and taken out a level and a pencil.
“All small plates?” Britt asked.
Harry began marking the wall. “I think it has to be,” he said over his shoulder. “For one thing, people spend more on a bunch of small plates than on one entrée. But also if you put entrées on, they make people feel cheap if they don’t order that instead.”
“Uh-huh.” Britt returned to the menu. He kept getting stuck on the Korean rice stick. “Why just one Asian influence?”
“There’ll be more,” said Harry. “The rice stick doesn’t even seem super-Asian when you eat it. I mean, yes, that gooey texture does, but I thought, why not use that starchy soft component like you’d use, say, polenta? Serve it with contrast and heat, but not actually Korean flavors.”
“Grilled scallion and chile sauce seems pretty Asian,” Britt noted. “It’s just—it’s a little pizza, pizza, ramen bowl, you know. Talk about being a bit all over the place.” He glanced up, smiling, to be sure Harry didn’t take offense.
Harry looked stricken. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “No wonder I’m sensitive to it on someone else’s menu. I’m doing the same thing.”
“Well, it’s here to be edited. Nothing’s set in stone.”
Harry nodded, looking relieved. “I really like that dish, though.”
“Okay. How are you serving the duck and potatoes? Just like a little entrée?”
Harry set down his pencil and returned to the bar. “The duck is very cool,” he said. “We confit the leg and serve that with roasted fig and butternut chips, whatever, that’s a different prep. But the breast we sear off, right, and the potatoes we slice thick and roast with a little thyme. Crisp up the duck skin, let the fat render, and a minute or two before you take it off the flame to rest, you brush the meat side with some mustard thinned with a little olive oil. You let the breast rest on the potatoes, mustard side down, for maybe two minutes before serving. The juices mingle with the mustard and the thyme and the olive oil on the potatoes, and boom—dish has a sauce by the time you serve it. It’s a self-saucing dish.”
“Nice,” said Britt.
“Nice? It’s smart, that’s what it is. Come on, say it, it’s smart.”
Britt laughed. “It is. Where’d you learn that, anyway? You go to culinary school when I wasn’t looking?”
“I probably should have,” Harry said with a grimace. “But I just picked it up over the years, on the island especially. People dropped like flies up there. I ended up learning everything, pretty much.” He watched Britt for another beat, then took back the laptop, opened a file, and returned it to Britt. “Wine list.”
Britt began to read, nodding. The list was focused and moderately priced: Arneis, Malbec, wines from Sicily instead of Tuscany, Austria instead of Bordeaux. He returned to the menu, picturing the meal he would choose from it. “You want a salad or some vegetable thing,” he said. “Something crisp, something bitter.”
“I know. I haven’t quite decided yet.”
“What about dessert?”
“Oh, I figured I’d just offer a nice rye flour and maple pudding and make it my signature.”
“Funny.”
“Ha. Okay, not really.” Harry looked up toward the ceiling and closed his eyes. “What about pears and dulce de leche with salted almonds? Goat’s-milk cheesecake with poached fruit—vanilla poached pears, or tart cherries, whatever, with the season. Corn ice cream with roast plums at the end of the summer. Something with basil ice cream, or basil cream, maybe. But it could all change.”
“No chocolate?” Britt said, not looking up. “What, are you crazy?”
“Oh, there’ll be chocolate. We’ve even been trying to work with fresh cacao liquor and butter and playing with that a little, but it’s like a chemistry th—” Harry stopped abruptly.
For a moment Britt wondered why Harry seemed to have gotten so self-conscious. Britt was still concentrating on the wine pricing, which he found low, but he was also thinking how strange it was that this was the second time in recent days that he’d been thinking about cacao beans in desserts. Who else could possibly be working on cacao beans in a town of this size? Hot Springs, maybe? He was all set to say this—he had even looked up at Harry to ask him if he could recall who else could be working on such a thing—when he saw his brother’s face. Harry’s cheeks had gone red, the skin around his eyes a stark yellow-white. His lips were parted dryly as if to speak, but he was silent for another second before he swallowed and then added softly, “It’s very tricky.”
For some reason this dropped things into place. Britt set down the laptop and said, “I could’ve sworn I heard about somebody doing something with cacao beans. It’s the same person, isn’t it?”
“Listen,” Harry said. “I didn’t contact Hector. He e-mailed me.”
Hearing this was the difference between suspecting the blow was coming and the sting of feeling it land. Britt actually winced. Why did Harry always find some way to make things harder on everyone? “Aww, Jesus. When?”
“After he quit. I didn’t have anything to do with that. He just FedExed me some cacao beans and started e-mailing me all these ideas.”
“Why not go to all your contacts from your old restaurant?” Britt said. “Was it so important to hire the one guy who just left our place?”
Harry was looking panicked. “I didn’t think this would be such a huge deal,” he said. “How many other good pastry chefs is a town like this going to have? I figured you guys would understand. Do you think Leo’s really going to be that upset?”
Britt rubbed his eyes. “Beats me. It’s never happened before. I just know you need to tell him.”
“I know. Listen, why don’t you guys come by next week and I’ll try out some stuff on you? We can talk it through then.”
“You want Leo to be your consultant at the same time you poach his pastry chef? Yeah, whatever, it isn’t technically poaching, but he’s still going to be pissed.”
But Harry must have decided he’d apologized enough. He squared his shoulders and turned away to get two bottles of water from beneath the counter. He set one before Britt with a businesslike thump that seemed to end the debate. “I think Leo can take it,” Harry said. “You guys were just up at Hot Springs tempting fate with the Makaskis. Leo plucked that Jason dude right out of the Italian place—he knows perfectly well how this goes. I didn’t take Hector—Hector got bored. He quit to travel and he heard through the grapevine about my place. That’s it. Maybe if Leo hadn’t made him do all those stupid chocolate cakes he’d still be there.”
“Oh, everyone thinks they’ll change the world with their chocolate bourbon soup or something, but I’m telling you, no one ever wants it. They say they want something interesting, but when it comes to chocolate, nobody does. Deep down all they want is cake or mousse or ice cream.”
“Well, that’s the place you guys have. You have a warm chocolate cake place. It’s a better fit for Hector here and you know it. Maybe we can sell chocolate bourbon soup.”
“Nobody can. It’s disgusting.”
Harry laughed, but quieted almost immediately. “You’re right that I need to tell him. I know. I’ll do it today, okay?”
Britt nodded thoughtfully. He was so used to being Leo’s gatekeeper, to fending off ridiculous requests and useless purveyors and hack cooks and defending Leo’s point of view as a matter of course, that it was surprisingly difficult to admit that Harry was right. Leo would have to understand.
Britt felt a pleasant jolt of energy being in here; it was the opposite of the soothing palette of Winesap’s buff-colored walls and swooping white plates and shatterable stemware. Here one felt a little roughed up and alerted by the mix of stimuli, like a cat with its fur rubbed in one direction and then the other. The menu looked simpler than it was, he could tell already. Of the fifteen dishes, Britt saw only one or two he questioned, and even those he suspected would work better on the plate than on paper. Of course, Harry still had to execute it all.
He looked around the space again. “What’s your POS system? Where are you putting the terminals?”
Harry leaned back against the counter, looking uncomfortable. “I was kind of thinking about trying to do it old school at first.”
“You mean jotting down orders on pads? No. You can’t do it.”
“People do it all the time.”
“Diners do it. Take-out joints do it. You have to be modern where it counts. Ask Leo sometime about what it used to be like keeping track of all your inventory and shit without an integrated system.”
Harry shrugged. “I was just thinking about putting that money somewhere else.”
“No.” Britt felt this very urgently. “Just trust me.”
Harry nodded. “That’s what Camille said too. She used the phrase ‘pound foolish.’”
For a moment Britt didn’t even know whom he was talking about. “Harry, who the hell is Camille?” he said. “What’s she do?”
“She’s a consultant,” Harry said. “I thought you knew that.”
“A consultant? In restaurants? Or does she just have dinner with all her clients? And who the hell are her clients?” This was not at all reassuring. She might have been evaluating his restaurant for some future investor while he’d been doing the food equivalent of pinning down his little brother’s arms and spitting on him.
“Food people. People who want to open restaurants or start food businesses. She consulted with Hot Springs when they revamped their menu, and she was the one who helped the All-Fresh stores create their specialty sections. She’s not doing a lot of local stuff now, though. Too penny-ante.”
Britt was recalling the odd assortment of people with whom Camille had dined that autumn: the group of young men, the couples. The young men, he guessed, might have been thinking about starting a craft brewery. The two couples must have been trying out a line of preserves, though at the time he’d thought maybe they’d brought them home from travel and were simply giving a gift. And then there was the blond man who’d looked so familiar.
“Is the owner of All-Fresh a blond guy who talks a lot?” Britt asked.
Harry laughed. “He’s the son of the guy who started it. Camille would never say anything, but from what I hear, you practically have to tie him down to get him to make a decision.”
That explained a lot. “What about you?” Britt said. “You’re working with her?”
Harry looked embarrassed. “I can’t afford her,” he said. “But in exchange for dinner she said she’d do a little consulting for me.”
“So you took her to Winesap,” Britt said.
“That feast probably got me an extra hour or two at least. Thanks. The mirror was her idea, by the way, and so were those leather-topped stools and opening up the ceiling.”
“I thought you were seeing her,” Britt admitted.
“Not yet,” Harry said, and Britt felt his mood—so volatile since last night—settle lightly, like a robin landing on a branch.
“And you’re cooking?” he said.
Harry rubbed a hand over his forehead, dislodging his glasses. “That’s the plan for now,” he said. “And of all the stuff I plan to do, that’s the part I’m scared of. But I can’t not do it. I don’t trust anyone else, and I don’t think I can pay them anyway. I cooked on the island. I can do it here.”
“You need a good sous chef,” Britt mused. “You’ve been interviewing, getting résumés?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, get on it. If your opening is coming up soon, you’d better get your team together, get them cooking together. You can’t chuck ’em in here on friends-and-family night and hand them some recipes. How many cooks—two, three?”
“Three, including me.”
Britt looked over the menu once more and then got up and walked around the space. At the window he peered out toward the street. There was a liquor store, with a guy sitting on the steps out front. A bodega with a steady stream of people going in and coming out, holding two bananas, a large bottle of soda, or a box of cereal or cigarettes. He couldn’t see the waterfront from here, but it was out there, with a couple of guys fishing from the pier, most likely. Maybe Leo was right and the location was tainted not only by past failures but by its sheer homeliness. Britt was worried that the area wasn’t quite urban enough for the restaurant to feel like an exciting outlier—it might just feel downtrodden. He wished there were a boutique nearby, or one good bar in addition to the Irish pub. What had Camille told Harry about that?
Britt began to pace the dining room, moving the tables an inch away from the painted walls so they didn’t scuff, looking up at the newly towering ceiling.
He was thinking about hours. Plenty of people opened a second restaurant when the first was going well. If he’d been asked yesterday, he’d have said Winesap was a well-oiled machine, but he was still stung by Harry’s critique. He had the uncomfortable sensation of knowing some vulnerability of his older brother’s that even Leo didn’t know of yet, as if Leo were walking around with an unshaven spot on his jaw or a slip of soft flesh showing between an untucked shirt and his belt. Britt didn’t know if he wanted to protect him or flee.
Winesap needed to be redecorated, he realized. He was feeling very annoyed with Leo all of a sudden. Their place was too muted; there was too much blue in its greens, too much fuss on its plates, shiny silver where it should be a cool tarnished pewter. He could picture the menu in his head, and even in his imagination it was too long, marked by too many random influences. Where was the elegant focus they’d started with? Now they had pasta, they had foie gras, they had the whole of Western Europe in there. Harry was right. Worse, they were old
er—Britt suddenly felt the restaurant’s absence of youth and energy like a physical hunger. Winesap was a woman of a certain age wearing a statement bracelet and a statement ring and a careful painted coiffure, while this place—he couldn’t remember the name, a bad sign—was some punky chick who had her Escoffier down cold, a rangy braless model with a silky tumble of untouched hair and a pair of scuffed-up boots.
Britt turned back to the bar, where Harry was marking off the wall with a pencil and humming under his breath. In this space, which he had all but conjured out of the air, he looked competent and comfortable, not like a student but like a professional. How amazing, that Harry’s idea might turn out to be a good one—a great one—and Leo had almost persuaded Britt to miss out on it altogether.
Except that Britt had just gone along with his brother’s opinion without even questioning it. Leo didn’t have to say a word; he’d simply looked chagrined at the neighborhood, and Britt had accepted instantaneously that Harry was a goner.
“Listen,” Britt said, almost as an experiment. “Would you consider changing the name?” If Harry refused to consider it, then maybe the two of them just wouldn’t see eye to eye.
Harry didn’t turn around. “I know, you guys hate the name. I’ve been thinking about some other ones since you got me picturing a pit bull.”
Britt nodded, both pleased and discomfited. If he did agree to work with Harry, he was thinking, it would be a whole new job. He hadn’t had a brand-new job in many years, and the truth was, he liked the pleasant, knowledgeable groove he’d worn for himself. That was why he was so rattled to find himself thinking this way.
“I don’t hate it. But I’m glad you’re open to ideas.” Britt took a nervous breath, which he exhaled as a laugh. Maybe Harry wasn’t even interested anymore. He had the distinct sensation of trying to date his brother. “If you still want a partner, I’m open to it, but I’d have to at least connect with the name.”
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