The World's Greatest Chocolate-Covered Pork Chops

by Ryan K. Sager

  La Cucina di Cannoli smelled like butter and garlic and olive oil and focaccia bread. Grapevines and murals of Tuscan orchards adorned the walls. Red-and-white-checkered tablecloths draped square tables. Empty wine bottles wrapped in ribbons and filled with raw farfalle pasta served as the tables’ centerpieces. A selection from Verdi’s La Traviata sang from small HD speakers in the domed ceiling.

  Diners wore suits and gowns and shiny jewelry, and the low lighting made them appear more attractive than they really were. Zoey and Dallin, on the other hand, looked like they’d emerged from a homeless shelter. Their clothes were wrinkled and sooty, their faces sweaty and dirty (Dallin more so than Zoey). On a normal evening, Zoey would’ve never gone anywhere in this state. But right now she was too tired, too hungry, and too bummed out to care.

  At the podium by the front door, a hostess greeted Zoey and Dallin with a toothy smile. Zoey didn’t recognize her. She must be new.

  The hostess opened her reservations book. “Name?”

  Yep. She’s new.

  “Please tell Chef Cannoli that Zoey Kate is here.”

  The hostess moved her finger down the page, making clicking sounds with her tongue. “Hmmm. I don’t see it. Perhaps you made the reservation under a different name?”

  Zoey reached over the podium and closed the hostess’s book. “Let me bring you up to speed. I’m Zoey Kate, culinary prodigy, gourmet innovator, child chef extraordinaire. You may call me Chef. I’m a regular here. Chef Cannoli and I go way back. He gave me my first panini press. I made the wedding cakes for his third and fourth marriages. We’ve been trading recipes for years. The tiramisu on your menu, that’s mine.”

  By chance, a server rushed past carrying two plates of pecan-pesto shells and sausage. “Ciao, Chef Zoey. Always a pleasure.”

  Zoey smirked at the hostess. “See?”

  The hostess flushed. “Sorry, Chef Zoey. I’ll notify him now.” She picked up the phone, pushed a button, and waited. “Hello, Chef, sorry to bother you, but, um, Chef Zoey is here and…Okay, I will. Okay, thank you.” She hung up the phone. “Chef Cannoli is in his office. I’ll be happy to escort you if—”

  “I know the way.”

  Zoey led Dallin across the dining parlor. Their shabby appearances garnered a few disapproving looks from the immaculate patrons, but nothing to snivel about.

  At the back of the restaurant were two doors. The door on the right, a two-way, led to the kitchen. The door on the left led to Chef Cannoli’s office. Zoey gave the door on the left a brisk, one-knuckle tap-tap, then opened it and walked in, bringing Dallin with her.

  Chef Cannoli rose from a chair behind the old wooden table that served as his desk. “Ciao, Chef Zoey, what pleasant surprise is this.”

  The chef wore a collared shirt the color of Parmesan, unbuttoned to his sternum, a fancy gold watch too big for his skinny wrist, espresso slacks with creases so sharp they could cut through Fiore Sardo, and Borgioli designer shoes. His white hair, wavy on the sides, thin on top, looked disheveled and whippy, like he’d been pulling on it all day.

  Zoey wondered why he wasn’t wearing his chef whites. Maybe he’s saving his energy for the weekend. Everyone knows the best chefs work weekends.

  Chef Cannoli reached into an umbrella stand next to the desk and withdrew a long black cane. At the top of the cane perched a gold lion’s head, four inches tall, its jaws open in a silent roar. Leaning on his cane, Chef Cannoli hobbled around his desk to greet Zoey.

  “That’s new,” Zoey said of the cane.

  “Is nothing, this,” Chef Cannoli said, smiling, “I don’t know why I got old. What thing was I thinking?”

  Zoey and Chef Cannoli hugged. Chef Cannoli kissed her on the cheek as was the greeting custom in his native Tuscany. Zoey liked this custom very much.

  “Chef Cannoli, this is Dallin.”

  “Un piacere.” Chef Cannoli leaned forward to kiss Dallin’s cheek.

  Dallin raised his arms in front of his face. “This ain’t Europe, dude. Keep your lips to yourself.”

  Chef Cannoli clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Americano tipico.” He placed his liver-spotted left hand under Zoey’s chin. “Bambina, when I look at your pretty face I see only the worry and the sadness. What thing to you is happened?”

  “Rough day,” Zoey said.

  “Poor bambina.” Chef Cannoli pointed his cane at two chairs in front of his desk. “Please, have a place to sit. I give to you something delizioso for eat. A good meal lifts the heavy soul, no?”

  “Merci and grazie,” Zoey said as she and Dallin took their seats.

  Chef Cannoli pressed a button on a small intercom on his desk. Static. “Panzanella?”

  A woman’s voice answered: “Sì, Chef?”

  “Tre spaghetti e polpette, per favore.”

  “Sì, Chef.”

  As Chef Cannoli limped back to his side of the desk, Zoey admired the many awards on his walls. There were framed certificates of achievement from the Julia Child Foundation, the Culinary Institute of America, the Academia Barilla of Parma, and the Italian American Heritage Foundation. A wall-mounted shelf held well-polished plaques and trophies, most notably a James Beard Award and two Michelin stars. Above that shelf was another shelf: a smaller shelf, square, with nothing on it.

  I wonder what that’s for.

  Two bookshelves stood against a wall. One bookshelf held fun books with titles like 1,001 Uses for Fettuccine, 1521: The Year Michelangelo Made Asiago Cool Again, and Eat Carbs, Stay Thin: The Joy of Italian Cooking. The other bookshelves held boring books like The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Taxes & Fines, Red Tape: Everything You Must Know About Employee Health & Safety, and She’s Having A Baby: How Maternity Leave Affects Your Bottom Line.

  The fun books were in mint condition. The spines looked crisp and smooth. No wrinkles. Chef Cannoli hadn’t read or even touched them. The boring books were worn-out, beat-up, and dog-eared, like he’d read them daily for decades. Poor guy.

  Chef Cannoli settled into his chair and laid the cane on his lap. “Please pardon the disorder.” He panned his hand over untidy stacks of invoices, receipts, proofs of purchase, credit card bills, and tax documents on his desk. “I have much busy, but I make tidy of this.”

  He commenced gathering up the papers and transferring them into desk drawers and baskets on a nearby shelf. Zoey felt useless, sitting there watching him tidy up by himself. But she didn’t pitch in either. Those papers contained business-sensitive information, and Zoey wanted to respect his privacy.

  While Chef Cannoli tidied up, Dallin leaned over to Zoey and whispered, “Hey, ask him about the Olive Garden name thing.”

  Zoey whispered back, “How would he know? He doesn’t work for Olive Garden.”

  “It’s his people. They talk. He’ll know.”

  Chef Cannoli finished tidying his desk. “So, bambina, what did happen to make to you a, how did you say, rough day?”

  Zoey folded her arms on the tabletop. “Me and Dallin were in Chinatown. We ran into Chef Pao and—”

  Chef Cannoli pounded his fist on the desk. “Pao—I curse the name! He always is winning the Golden Toque, six years in rows like he is the god of cooking. Es un sacrilegio! I am come to worry that Golden Gate Magazine has no more the taste for the fine cooking.”

  “I hope not,” Zoey said, “otherwise I’ll never win one.”

  Dallin leaned forward, planted his elbows on his knees, and looked Chef Cannoli in the eyes. “About the Olive Garden…”

  A server came into the room. Panzanella, presumably. Her silky black hair hung past her waist and shimmered like caviar, and her ornate gold earrings jangled like Christmas tree ornaments. She carried a big, round serving tray, from which she served them three heaping plates of spaghetti and meatballs, a basket of steaming garlic Parmesan rolls, and three glasses of iced pomegranate juice. Next to each plate she placed a maroon silverware roll-up. “Buon appetito,” she said with a pretty smile. She strode
out of the room, her long hair swaying like a silk cape.

  Being in the company of an Italian chef, Zoey decided to eat her spaghetti the Italian way. She unwrapped her silverware and tucked the napkin into the neck of her jacket. She took the fork in her right hand, the spoon in her left. She held the spoon bowl-down at a forty-five-degree angle. With her fork, she speared a clump of saucy noodles. She planted the fork’s teeth in the bowl of the spoon. She rotated the fork clockwise until the noodles swaddled the fork. Leaning forward, she positioned her head over her plate and inserted the bundle of noodles into her mouth. “Best spaghetti in San Francisco,” she said between chews.

  Chef Cannoli placed a hand over his heart and bowed his head.

  Dallin stabbed his fork into a meatball the size of a tennis ball and proceeded to cram the greasy sphere into his mouth. It took some finagling, but he made it fit.

  “For what reason you were in Chinatown?” Chef Cannoli asked, slicing his fork through the center of a chunky meatball.

  Zoey tore a hot, buttery roll in half. “Checking out real estate. I’m starting a restaurant.”

  Chef Cannoli dropped his saucy fork. His upper body went as rigid as dried fettuccini. “Are you sure you want to do that?”

  “Super sure.”

  “But you are a chef, bambina. You should not be running a ristorante. You should be cooking.”

  “Oh, I’ll do all the cooking. I’m the only chef.”

  Chef Cannoli tittered and shook his head. “That is how I had the thoughts when I started La Cucina. Then I had it to learn how things really happen. Running a ristorante is so much of the work. Most of the work is not for the cooking. Is for the other things. To keep it clean the men’s restroom is part-time job. Do you know what means the Code Brown?”

  Zoey and Dallin shook their heads.

  “You will,” Chef Cannoli said. “I recommend you to have a big toilet brush and a big mop.”

  “Gross,” Dallin said.

  “In beginning, I did all from solo—the cooking, the service, the cleaning, the labor of office, e tutto. I work for twenty hours of day, seven days of week. Many nights I have the feeling so exhausted that I sleep on the kitchen floor.”

  Zoey’s eyes lit up like veal flambé. “Sounds awesome.”

  “Yes, but…” Chef Cannoli rubbed a thumb across the gray stubble on his chin. “…but in time it becomes…troppo…what is word?”

  “Super awesome?”

  “Too much. Yes, troppo, too much. So I hire sous chef to assist me in the cooking. It takes three months for to train the sous chef. Then one sous chef no is enough, so I hire a second sous chef. Then the IRS comes to say I owe to the government more taxes.”

  Zoey knew all about taxes. Taxes were why she had to pay a buck-oh-eight for a ninety-nine-cent chocolate bar. The extra nine cents went to the government to pay for wars and the president’s vacations. But she didn’t understand why an IRS (whatever that was, probably a robot) had come around demanding he pay more. “They made you pay the same taxes twice?”

  Chef Cannoli looked puzzled. (Dallin kept eating. He had tuned them out.) Chef Cannoli said, “What you mean to say, twice?”

  “You know, you buy a can opener, you pay the tax, and that’s it. You’re done. Why’d you have to pay again?”

  Chef Cannoli chuckled in a way that made Zoey feel young and naïve. “You speak of the sales tax. The government came to collect from me the income tax.”

  “Income?” Zoey said. “As in all-the-money-I-make?”

  Cannoli frowned. “Yes.”

  “Hold on. Whoa. You’re telling me…” Zoey tried (and failed) to soften the edge in her voice. “…the government makes us pay taxes on every dollar we spend and earn?”

  “The more of the money we make, the more is for the government to take.”

  “In Italy or America?”

  “Both.”

  Zoey thought about all the money she’d made from four years of covert Lunch Rush ops.

  Uh-oh. Was I supposed to pay taxes on that? Nah, of course not. I’m a kid. Kids don’t pay income tax, right? I don’t even know how much money I’ve made. How am I supposed to pay taxes if I don’t know how much money I made? It’s not like I can travel back in time. What if the government decides I owe them money and they dispatch an IRS (probably stands for Insidious Robot Soldier) to hunt me down and laser-blast me?

  No, of course not. I’m being ridiculous. The government doesn’t send robots to kill people. They got drones for that.

  (Note to self: make arrangements for one or two false identities, just in case.)

  The room was, like, a zillion degrees now. Zoey picked up her cold pomegranate juice. “How much does the government take, exactly?” She took a big, long drink.

  “If you have much of the success, like me, then you pay…” Chef Cannoli’s frown became even frownier. “Half.”

  Zoey did a spit-take. Red juice sprayed Chef Cannoli’s face and his shirt and his spaghetti and meatballs and his table/desk.

  “Nice,” Dallin said without looking up from his plate.

  “So sorry,” Zoey said.

  Chef Cannoli chuckled the way a grandpa does when his grandkids get butterscotch pudding all over their faces. “Is okay. That was my first reaction too.”

  Chef Cannoli used his maroon cloth napkin to wipe off his face and shirt. “So the IRS say I have to pay to them the incomes taxes. I pass weeks for dig up of the receipts and the orders and the papers from the bank. My restaurant it gets many and many the customers and my two cooks no can to handle it, so I forced to hire a three chef.

  “Then the first chef, he slips on wet floor and breaks himself the ankle. He no more can cook. Lawyer man tells me I have to pay because of the fall in my restaurant. I am the responsabilità. I say to the lawyer man, ‘I no have it the insurance.’ He says, ‘Then you have the problem.’

  “I have to pay money to the hospital for to fix the first chef ankle. I have to hire a four chef to do the work of the first chef. First chef tells me, ‘My ankle will be better, I will come back to cook the food,’ but he no come back. Bugiardo.

  “Now I am to pass all of the day and all of the night at desk, buying the insurance, paying the taxes, making the paperwork. One day, I look around. I say, ‘What did happen?’ I have twelve cooks in my kitchen. I am too much busy to cook. Today I no wear myself the chef whites because I no more have time for the cooking.”

  Zoey gasped. “That’s horrible.”

  “Sì, is very, very horrible. But…” Chef Cannoli patted Zoey’s arm. “…I am sure that you figure out. Mi scusi, per favore, I must verify if the cash register has enough of the receipt paper. Enjoy you the spaghetti. Remain as much long as you have desire.”

  Chef Cannoli stood and, leaning on his cane, tottered around the table/desk. He kissed Zoey on the cheek, smiled at Dallin (who had his hands up, karate-chop-style), and exited the room.

  Dallin went back to chowing down. Zoey did not. She felt like she had an anvil in her stomach. And the anvil was covered in spikes. And the spikes were impaling tiny cuddly teddy bears. And the teddy bears were reading The Communist Manifesto and saying “That’s a good point” a lot.

  She sank in her chair, unable to eat. “Do you think Chef Cannoli is right?”

  “No idea.” Dallin licked a streak of marinara sauce off the back of his hand. “I couldn’t understand a word that dude said. Except for the Code Brown thing. That I got.”

  Zoey pushed away her plate, feeling sicker by the second.

  Dallin raised his fork. “Mind if I…?”

  “Fine.”

  Dallin scooped Zoey’s spaghetti onto his plate. “What did Cana-olives say that’s got you so depressed?”

  “It’s Cannoli.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “You said ‘Cana-olives.’”

  “Sounds the same,” Dallin said.

  Zoey yanked the napkin from her collar and plonked it on the table. “He said owning
a restaurant is all bills and taxes and messy bathrooms and sitting at a desk and not cooking. Do you think he’s right?”

  Dallin nibbled the char off a meatball. “Dunno, Z. I’ve never owned a restaurant.”

  Zoey looked at the bookshelves: the untouched fun books and well-used boring books. “Maybe he is right. I mean, I’ve been up since six a.m., I’ve worked all day trying to find a stupid property to rent, without success, mind you, and I haven’t done a minute of cooking. I can’t even think of a cool restaurant name. Maybe Chef Cannoli did me a favor. Maybe I need to jump ship. Get out before it’s too late.”

  This time Dallin did the spit-take. “You’re not gonna open a restaurant now?”

  “I’m not giving up cooking. But maybe I’d be better off, I don’t know, working as a line cook or something, in someone else’s restaurant.”

  Dallin glared with suspicion. “Who are you and what have you done with Zoey Kate?”

  “Finish up,” Zoey said. “I wanna go home.”

  Zoey and Dallin stood on the corner of California and Hyde, waiting for a cable car. It was night. The wind blew, cold and wet like a sea urchin. Headlights, streetlights, and traffic lights glowed in the crawling fog like UFOs. Zoey tucked her hands in her skirt pockets to shield them from the biting cold.

  Unaffected by the cold, Dallin drummed his fingers on his round belly like it was a djembe. “You could get a food truck.”

  “I’m not a barbarian,” Zoey said.

  “People like food trucks.”

  “Out of the question.”

  Dallin burped, then flinched at how bad it smelled. “It’s too bad your Italian friend didn’t offer us dessert. I could go Godzilla on a hot-fudge sundae right about now.”

  “Mmmm.” Zoey tilted her head to one side, savoring the thought. “With glazed maraschino cherries.”

  “And crushed-up graham crackers.”

  “And melted marshmallows.”

  A cable car emerged from the fog like a torpedo in slow motion. Its maroon shutters and silver spindles glimmered in the streetlights. Riders sat on an open deck, chatting, laughing, and sipping hot chocolates. On the trolley’s flat front, flowing gold letters spelled the words: