She gave me a dirty look and scooted out through her doggie door. I waited the required few minutes until she ran back in.
“Sit pretty.” I held up a liver treat and her bottom hit the floor with a thump. That was one thing Jackie and I had in common—we’d both do anything for food. “Good, good girl.”
Jackie snapped it out of my fingers, and in a flash it was gone.
“Hey you, didn’t anyone ever tell you to chew at least twenty times before swallowing?”
She looked at me as though I’d lost my mind.
I often wondered what people would think if they heard me talk to her. I could have entire conversations with Jackie and I was sure she understood. After three years, I read her body language as clearly as words.
I put a wee-wee pad down in front of the back door. Who knew at what time I’d be back tonight? I gave her a quick kiss and left.
Outside, I was greeted by a bright and sunny day. A perfect June day. A perfect day for a proposal. Every time I thought about it, I got another rush.
My new neighbor was staring at me from his living room window. He and I shared a common wall. Since the man moved in three weeks ago, all he seemed to do was loaf by the window. What a weirdo. Toni, of course, thought he was cute, but then Toni thought all men under forty were cute. This one looked thirty, thirty-five. Certainly too young to sit around doing nothing all day. What was his story? Didn’t he have a job?
He smiled and I turned away, pretending not to have seen him. I threw my garment bag over my shoulder and marched off at a brisk pace, praying that the lime curd would turn out perfect. Limp meringues wouldn’t exactly impress a roomful of Rob’s friends.
Why, oh why, couldn’t life be straightforward, even just occasionally? Despite the less-than-great things, like my weight and the threat of lifeless meringues, I knew I had it good
Here I was—twenty-nine and I already owned my own business. I had a great girlfriend. Toni was not only a close friend and my business partner, but she’d also bankrolled our restaurant.
I had a little house on Shaw Street in the Queen West area of Toronto. Few would describe the house as beautiful, even after dozens of gallons of paint and countless hours of sweat equity. But my home, as unpretentious as it was, was mine, and I loved it.
Then, of course, there was Rob. Lucky me.
whizzing through boyfriends
with the energy of a shredder
Here’s what I discovered on my walk to work. One: those body slimmers were not meant to be worn during any form of exercise, otherwise a girl would soon find herself glowing, as in “horses sweat, men perspire and ladies glow.” Two: the danger of them cutting off your blood circulation should not be taken lightly. By the time I arrived at Skinny’s, I could barely feel my legs. Never again would I ever wear this contraption. It simply wasn’t worth the discomfort—except for tonight of course—and maybe the day of my wedding
I walked into the hot, steamy chaos of the kitchen, threw on my chef’s jacket and glanced at the clock on the wall. Shit. Only two and a half hours until people were scheduled to arrive, and I still had a hundred things to do.
“Where’s the lime curd?” I demanded, heading to the stove. I lifted a lid and peered inside.
“It’s already cooling,” replied Toni. “Don’t worry. It’s perfect.”
“Show me.” I put down the cast-iron lid and followed Toni to the walk-in refrigerator at the far end of the kitchen.
She pulled open the door, striking a Price Is Right model’s stance. “See for yourself.”
Inside were shelves upon shelves of ingredients—cartons of eggs, wheels of cheese, quarts of whipping cream, pounds of butter, containers of precooked vegetables and packages of meat—and right smack in front of me was a large copper pot full of lovely lime curd. Not a speck of brown in it. Thank God.
Toni smiled smugly. “Told you.”
“Okay, where are we with the rest of the meal?” I asked, refusing to be so easily mollified. My eyes darted around the room.
Toni raised her perfectly penciled brows. “Nicky Landry, I do believe you are nervous! Why? This isn’t the first meal you’ve cooked. We’ve been open for nearly a month.”
Easy for her to say when she rarely picked up a spatula. Toni’s main responsibility was bookkeeping—her only kitchen duty, food assembly. As soon as that thought crossed my mind, I was flooded with remorse. What in the world was wrong with me? Making sure the plates looked as delicious as they tasted was important. In fact, it was one of the determining factors that distinguished a restaurant. And if not for Toni, I would never have been able to become a business owner. At best, I’d probably be a sous-chef somewhere and still years away from running my own kitchen. If our restaurant flopped, Toni would lose all that money, not me.
“That’s true,” I said. “But for some reason, I can’t shake that first-time feeling.”
She responded in typical Toni fashion. “Hmm. Like a virgin, like the very first time.” She sang a few off-key bars of the Madonna song. “Did I ever tell you about my first time?” Without missing a beat she continued, “I had not one, but two orgasms.”
The two new guys turned and stared, slack jawed. As for our three regulars, they had long grown used to Toni’s antics.
She was on a roll. “You know what they say, ‘When you’re hot, you’re hot.’” She jabbed a finger to her hip. “Tsssss.”
“Back to work everyone,” I called out, snapping my fingers. “The show is over.” I turned to face Toni. “You shouldn’t talk about your private life in front of the staff.”
She shrugged. “Hey, one woman’s frankness is another’s vulgarity. Besides,” she stage whispered, “most of these kids lead such boring lives. It’s my duty to provide them with entertainment.”
“Like details about your sex life?”
She winked. “What could be more entertaining than that?”
Toni was tall, thin and gorgeous, just the kind of woman I should have hated. But from the moment we met in chef school, I saw something in her—the kind of false bravado often used to cover pain. I was right. She’d admitted that after eight years of marriage her husband had left her for his twenty-two-year-old secretary. Toni had packed thirty pounds on her rail-thin body and now looked fashionably thin rather than emaciated. She, of course, thought she was fat. I should be so fat. Anyway, since then Toni hated her ex as passionately as she loved every new man she dated. Three years had passed and she had only recently stopped sputtering on about Steven.
Whoever said money couldn’t buy happiness hadn’t told Toni. When she walked out of that marriage, she’d moved into a three-bedroom condo in Hazleton Lanes, one of the most prestigious addresses in the country, filled it with furniture from the Art Shoppe, bleached her hair even blonder, went on a shopping spree that saved more than one boutique from going under, and whizzed through boyfriends with the energy of a shredder. Then one day she’d looked at her life and decided it was time to move on. She enrolled in chef school, where we met shortly thereafter.
For all her bragging about countless lovers, Toni was much more conventional than she put on. Her boasting was about insecurity—her way of appearing desirable maybe?
I glanced around. Toni was at the sink, wearing her opera-length, marabou-trimmed black rubber gloves—a must, as she often told me, for any proud owner of ten perfectly manicured Frenchies.
“You should wear them, too,” she’d once told me when I complained about my dishwater hands. Yeah, right.
She was taking individual romaine leaves from their frigid bath and drying the leaves gently. “All joking aside, you have every right to be nervous. I would be, too, if I was throwing a party for my lover,” she said over her shoulder.
“Not lover. Boyfriend. Rob is my boyfriend.”
“Same difference.”
“No, it’s not. A boyfriend is a relationship, whereas a lover is just for sex.”
She rolled her eyes. “If you say so.”
“Don’t worry, girlfriend. Everything will be perfect.”
When Toni and I first considered throwing a press party, I’d suggested we wait at least a month. By then we couldn’t officially call it an opening, but at least we’d have plenty of practice under our belts, which meant less chance of a mess-up with reporters around.
“We want it to be absolutely perfect, right?” I’d pointed out. “So what we should do is have a practice run before we invite the press.”
Toni had nodded. “Not a bad idea.”
Fact was, I had an ulterior motive. Rob had mentioned how he would like to celebrate the end of his residency, and I wanted to make him happy.
“As long as we’re having a rehearsal, why don’t we wait until next month?” I’d added, “Would you have any objection to celebrating the end of Rob’s residency?” I saw her hesitation and upped the enthusiasm. “We could invite his hospital friends. It wouldn’t hurt to have a bunch of soon-to-be-rich doctors sample our food. What could be better? They’ll love us and become regulars. Besides, I really want to do this for Rob. The poor guy’s been working nonstop. Sometimes he doesn’t even come home all night. He just works around the clock, shift after shift, back-to-back. I don’t know how he does it.”
Toni had quickly agreed. “I suppose if we did it on a Monday evening, we wouldn’t lose any paying customers.”
“That’s a good idea.”
Then her face had lit up. “Do you think Rob could invite some hot doctors?”
And so, it had been decided.
*
The kitchen was in a state of pandemonium. Just for tonight, we’d hired two extra employees. In addition to our waiter, Jake, whose charm placated the most difficult of customers, our sous-chef, Charles, who almost out-cooked even me—unless he was in one of his occasional torpors—Marley, our general assistant who chopped, stirred and whipped, and Scott, our dishwasher, we now had Jeff and Rick as pinch-hitter helpers. Everyone rushed about, sometimes coming perilously close to crashing into one another.
“For crissake be careful!” As much as I wanted to stay calm, I found myself on the edge of panic. “I love you guys but if anyone drops as much as one crouton, I’ll have a nervous breakdown.”
Our regulars were fresh out of chef school, working more for the experience than for the wages, thank goodness—otherwise, Toni and I would never have been able to afford them. Still, as much as I was grateful that they worked for minimal pay, coping with inexperienced workers drove me crazy. I was still too new at this myself.
From behind the eight-burner professional Wolf stove, I went over my to-do list as I stirred the béchamel.
Romaine for the Caesar? Across the room, Toni was wrapping the last bouquet of lettuce leaves with chive strings. I had to hand it to her, her presentation was inspired.
Vegetables for the root macédoine? At the vegetable counter, I was momentarily distracted by the tattooed snake on Rick’s arm. He wore a white T-shirt and, as he chopped and diced, the reptile seemed to undulate and writhe along his bicep and forearm. Ugh! I gave my head a shake and returned to my checklist.
Appetizers? Yes, those lovely little seafood cakes. Check.
One by one, I crossed off everything that needed to be done.
“Marley,” I called, “get over here.”
The young man came running, his blond dreadlocks in a Gibson bun that tilted precariously under his hairnet.
“You take over.” I handed him the whisk and he took it reverently. “Don’t let it boil. A low simmer, that’s as hot as a béchamel should get.”
I brushed a lock of hair back under my hat and turned my attention across the narrow room where Charles was working. He sported a close-cropped haircut with a lightning rod shaved across the back. He was turning over dozens of miniature seafood cakes on the grill as he bopped along to a rhythm only he could hear. Honestly, sometimes I wondered about that boy. If he wasn’t so damn talented, I swear I’d hire somebody else.
“How many times do I have to tell you to take off your iPod?”
He looked at me, a question in his eyes. “Did you say something?”
The thought flashed through my mind that maybe he was on drugs. It would explain a lot. I walked over and pulled out one of his earphones. “No more than six minutes or they’ll get tough. And take off that iPod.” I knew that when it came to cooking he didn’t need instructions. But I was the boss.
“Cool,” he answered, removed the other earpiece and resumed flipping the seafood cakes to the same secret rhythm.
I snatched a seafood cake from Charles’s pan and popped it into my mouth. Okay, so I shouldn’t have, but one of my head-chef duties was to test the deliciousness of everything that came out of my kitchen—and it was delicious. I wiped my hands on a bar towel and then flicked it onto my shoulder.
At that moment, Toni swept by on her way to the dining room. “I’ll set the tables. The place will look gorgeous. Now stop worrying.”
Stop worrying? Ha! Easy for her to say. She didn’t have to worry, the way I did, that all this would be taken away at any moment. Toni had money. Me, not.
Last May, Toni and I had decided to go for it. We’d both completed our chef’s training and since then, I’d been looking for work. But it seemed that no decent restaurant in the city needed a chef. I was almost ready to throw in the towel and take a job as an assistant in hope that I could work my way up, when Toni presented the idea. “Why not open our own restaurant?” she’d asked, as casually as I might’ve said, “How about we go see a movie tonight?” But she was serious.
After calculating how much we needed, and after every bank in the city had turned us down for a business loan, Toni offered to provide the seed money.
“It’s only fair,” she’d said. “After all, you’ll be doing most of the cooking.”
“I’ll do most of the cooking?” That had come as news to me. But I saw her point. It was only fair. And the truth of the matter was, although nobody could make a dish look like edible art the way she did, as a chef, Toni was good, not great. I, however, was great, but I had no seed money. We made the perfect team. And six months ago, we found the perfect place.
I remember standing on the Queen Street sidewalk, staring into the empty storefront. The place was rundown but it used to be a restaurant. The kitchen still existed, complete with an antiquated Wolf stove and a professional sink. Of course, there was a ton of work to be done, but considerably less than if we picked a virgin space.
Toni had been doubtful. “Are you serious? This place looks like a dump.”
“Trust me. It’s exactly what we need. Also, it’s all we can afford.”
“If you say so. So what will we name it?” She’d followed me inside the grimy interior. “How about Chez Toni?”
“How about Chez Nicky?”
During that visit, I was already envisioning how I would rearrange the working area, where I would place the stove, the counters and the refrigerator.
“How about La Cuisine Française?” Toni had asked with an atrocious accent.
I’d laughed. “Too pompous and very unoriginal.”
She must have submitted dozens of names but every suggestion sounded too one thing or another.
“How about something sort of tongue in cheek? Like Two Fat Chefs?”
“I’m fat, Toni. You’re not.”
“I am, too,” she’d said, lifting her sweater to reveal a perfectly nice-looking midriff. “Look at those bulges. See?”
“Hmm, let me get a magnifying glass.”
“Fine,” she’d continued derisively. “If you don’t like Two Fat Chefs, how about Two Skinny Chefs?”
“It’s hardly better. I’m not skinny.”
“Okay, how about Skinny’s?” she’d asked, laughing. “That doesn’t make personal claims about anyone’s size.”
<
br /> For some reason, the name appealed to me. “I think I like it. It’s unpretentious and fun. But not quite right. How about Skinny’s on Queen?” I could tell that Toni was surprised. She’d obviously suggested the name in jest.
“It’s certainly catchy,” she’d agreed, nodding pensively.
“And that way everyone will remember our location,” I pointed out.
*
Of course Toni took the credit for the name. “I’m so smart,” she’d proclaimed, fanning herself with a diamond-bedecked hand. She’d had her engagement ring redesigned into a right-hand ring, adding enough smaller diamonds to turn it into a real showstopper. I’d seen more than one shop girl gawk at it when Toni pulled out her credit card. Toni loved to show it off.
After getting our business license, our liquor license and running around madly for restaurant equipment and furnishings, everything had finally fallen into place. Now, exactly one year after our momentous decision, here we were—co-owners of Skinny’s on Queen.
“Hey, Earth to Nicole.” Toni was waving a hand in front of my face. “You can stop worrying now.”
“I know. Tonight will be spectacular.” For all the confidence I was trying to project, my insides were quivering like wobbly aspic.
“So, what are those deep lines on your forehead?”
Before I could think of a quick comeback, a voice called out from the dining room.
“Yoo-hoo.”
I cringed. Only one person I knew had the knack of always dropping by at the wrong moment, and the very sound of her voice was enough to set my nerves on edge. Sure enough, the door to the kitchen swung open and Kim sauntered in, arms full of flowers.
“I thought these would lend an appropriately festive air to the place. Where should I…?”
I forced a smile. “You didn’t have to do that.”
She gave me her don’t-be-silly smile. “No, but I wanted to. You wouldn’t let me do anything to help for tonight. I figured you couldn’t say no to flowers.”
Getting Skinny (A Chef Landry Mystery) Page 2
