All Stirred Up

by Brianne Moore

  “We are trying to relaunch this place as a destination. If we’re going to serve crème brûlée, then I may as well just be out there deep-frying haggis and chips, because it won’t matter how amazing the starters and main course were—all anyone’ll remember is how crap the dessert was. Please tell me your other ideas were better than this. I mean, they weren’t a chocolate lava cake with salted caramel or something, right?”

  There was a very long silence.

  “Ohh,” Gloria says, and the recording ends.

  Julia cackles as Susan stares at the phone, stunned.

  “Oh my God!” Susan finally yells, drawing stares from more than a few of the workmen.

  “I know—it’s amazing, isn’t it?” Julia giggles. “I wish there was video—I’d put it up on YouTube.” She begins scrolling back through the recording. “I love that bit about brûlée-ing porridge—so true! Lord, even my friend Kerry can do that, and she once set her flat on fire boiling water.”

  Susan takes several deep breaths, wondering if this day can get any worse, and trying not to tempt fate by even considering it. A headache is hammering away at the walls of her skull, as if demanding release. They’re supposed to relaunch in three weeks, and now they’ll have to recruit and settle in a new pastry chef. There’s no way there’ll be time for that. But they can’t afford to push the opening back much further.

  Julia’s still giggling, listening again to the recording. “This made my day. Dad’ll get a kick out of it.”

  “Julia, don’t you dare play that for him!” That’s just what she needs: for her father to think she’s incompetent and made a terrible decision, promoting Gloria. After that scene with Dan too. The last thing they need is for Bernard to appoint yet another of his friends to manage the restaurant. “And don’t play it for anyone else either.” Not that it would matter if she did, really. The staff must have overheard this if Julia did. And the pastry chef himself will be out there, telling the story, spinning it so he sounds like the one in the right. This will be restaurant-circle gossip in no time. Dan will be vindicated. Everyone will be talking about how Elliot’s is completely falling apart. On her watch.

  “Lighten up,” Julia huffs. “A little viral marketing would do this place some good. But I won’t post it. Can’t do much with just a voice recording anyway. I should have live-tweeted. Oh”—she tucks the phone into her pocket—“the contractor needs to see you. He says there’s dry rot in one of the walls, but since you control the budget, I told him he’d have to speak to you about getting it sorted. And we can’t continue with any cosmetic work until that’s fixed, so make sure you speak with him today, all right?”

  Bad things always come in clumps. Choosing to tackle one crisis at a time, Susan closes her eyes for a second, then says, “I’ll talk to him in a minute.” She holds out her hand. “May I borrow your phone?”

  “Just for a few minutes,” Julia says, handing it over. “I’m expecting a call.”

  “Fine.” Susan takes it and heads down to the kitchen.

  Salsa music is blasting downstairs, and Gloria and Rey are laughing, swaying back and forth, chopping vegetables in time with the beat.

  “You’ve got the hips, honey, you got it!” Rey declares, hip-bumping Gloria. It’s his first day in the new post, and his excitement is palpable, crackling in the air like static electricity. There’s been a noticeable difference in the energy in the kitchen since Gloria took over: the languid, sluggish feeling of Dan’s days has been replaced by something brighter, more vigorous. The employees, from fellow chefs to waitstaff, to dishwashers, now chatter among themselves and offer up ideas, which Gloria genuinely listens to, nodding, encouraging, saying, “That’s good—really good. Maybe if we also do this …?” And so new dishes and a new way of working are developing. The employees smile now, to Susan’s relief.

  “Make sure everyone likes coming to work every day,” Elliot used to say. “Depressed people make depressing food.”

  “I don’t know: I think it depends on the food,” Susan once countered. “When I’m sad, I make good comfort food.”

  “You might think it’s good, but it’s not as good as it could be,” Elliot insisted. “Good comfort food needs love in it. Think—when you’re sad, would you rather have boeuf bourguignon you’ve made or one that I made?”

  “You, definitely,” she responded immediately. “Though I think I’d prefer a spaghetti bolognese.”

  “Good girl.” He kissed her forehead.

  The new energy in the kitchen had given Susan hope. But now this had to happen.

  “Gloria, I need to speak to you!” Susan shouts over the music and general cooking din.

  Gloria looks up. “Oh, hey, how were the kids?”

  “In the office. Now.” Susan moves in that direction and waits for Gloria to join her. A moment later she does, wiping her hands on a towel. Susan closes the door behind her, crosses her arms, and demands, “What happened with the pastry chef this morning?”

  “We had a difference of opinion,” Gloria replies, sitting in the desk chair.

  “I’ll say.” Susan brandishes Julia’s phone and plays a few seconds of the recording. “You think browbeating employees is the best way to get good work out of them?”

  “Oh, come on,” Gloria scoffs. “He wasn’t even trying!”

  “Maybe he would have if you’d had anything encouraging to say. Instead, you just yelled at and humiliated him. Of course he walked out!”

  “This is a good thing,” Gloria insists. “He was lazy, like the others.”

  Susan sighs deeply and pinches the bridge of her nose between two fingers, willing that headache to go away. Instead, it just redoubles its efforts.

  “Gloria, listen—I put you in charge here because I thought you were ready for it. I thought you would be a better leader than Dan was, and to your credit, you have been.”

  “High praise indeed.” Gloria smirks.

  “Until now,” Susan continues in a tight voice. “This is not good leadership. Bullying someone is not acceptable. I won’t tolerate it here, understood? Staff should be treated with respect. We need them. We need them to do good work and to want to come and do good work here. What we don’t need are enemies. I think we’re pretty well set there already, don’t you?”

  Gloria sighs, looks down at her hands for a moment, and looks back up. “You’re right, and I’m sorry,” she says. “I got carried away. It’s just …” She purses her lips and clenches her hands. “You know how I feel about this place and this job. We’re getting some good, solid ideas down, but none of that’ll matter if we serve shite puddings. If you fall at the last hurdle, it doesn’t matter if you jumped clean the rest of the round, right?”

  Susan responds with a baffled look.

  “Sorry. I thought that all rich girls were into horses. I was trying to speak the language,” Gloria explains.

  “I’m allergic to horses,” Susan grumbles. Begrudgingly, she agrees with what Gloria’s saying, even if she doesn’t agree with how it was communicated. “So what’re we going to do now? We relaunch in three weeks; that’s not enough time to get someone new in post at all, let alone get them testing ideas and recipes.”

  Gloria sighs again, and the two of them contemplate this dilemma in silence. Then Gloria brightens a little and says, “You can bake.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “No, really—didn’t you train in Paris or something?”

  “During my gap year. That was ages ago.”

  “But you haven’t forgotten it. You learned all the techniques, and you’ve kept up with it—I’ve had some of the things you’ve brought in.”

  “I’m just a home baker, Gloria. It’s something I do for fun.”

  “Do you know of anyone else who can step in at short notice?” Gloria asks. “I mean, I’ll ask around, but I don’t know of anyone off the top of my head.” She leans forward, eyes snapping, gesticulating. “Look, we can put out the call and start recruiting, but in the meantime
, you’ve got a few weeks to work on some things and iron out the kinks so at least we’ll have something when we launch, right? Better than ordering in from somewhere.”

  Susan groans. She has a needy sister and a business to run—when is she going to have time to do this? And what if the things she makes aren’t good enough? What if they’re the boring, crappy desserts everyone walks away sneering about? The restaurant might fail entirely because of her inability to make a decent babka.

  But she can’t see any other solution. Not in the short term, at least. So, she nods. “All right. As you said, we’ll start recruiting, and I’ll start coming up with ideas. But Gloria, if anything like this happens again, you’re done here. I mean that. I won’t have a bully running this kitchen.”

  Gloria slowly nods. “Fair enough. Can I get back to work now? Rey and I have an idea we’re working out.”

  Susan nods, collects Julia’s phone, and follows Gloria out into the kitchen. The music is still playing, though at a slightly lower volume, and Rey is showing one of the dishwashers how to make the spice mix for his paella.

  “You think some cayenne might be good in there?” the dishwasher suggests.

  “Not in this one,” says Rey. “Too overpowering. But maybe we’ll work on another version, yeah?” He looks up as Gloria rejoins him, and she gives him a quick nod before getting back to separating eggs. Rey visibly relaxes.

  Susan heads back up to the dining room, where Julia is demonstrating to the contractor the exact height at which she wants the new lamps to hang. Susan joins them, handing the phone to Julia, and says to the contractor, “Tell me about this rot.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Radio F-U

  Susan is doing battle with sea buckthorn.

  She wants to make this work: everyone’s going mad for the stuff because apparently it’s a superfood. And it’s local—harvested from wild plants right in East Lothian—so it fits their new goal to source at least three-quarters of their ingredients from within fifty miles of the restaurant. Even the flour is coming from a farm just outside Drem, only twenty miles away. And she, Rey, and the head waiter spent part of this morning at Mr. Eion’s, a coffee roaster in Stockbridge, sampling blends concocted just for Elliot’s, choosing which one would be served in French presses and delicate espresso cups at the end of the meal. They’d sipped and quizzed Mr. Eion himself (a warm and enthusiastic man with the full hipster glasses-moustache-beard combination) on bean origins, roasting times, and Fair Trade status before declaring blend number three the runaway winner.

  And sea buckthorn. Susan got it into her head to turn some of its juice into jellies to serve alongside a rich pound cake flavored with thyme, but she’s having trouble getting the consistency right. One batch of jelly refused to set, and another set so hard you’d need a hatchet to get through it. She wonders if there’s something in the chemistry of the juice that’s interfering. Baking is a delicate chemical science; the littlest thing can throw a whole recipe off. Or maybe it’s her. Maybe jelly is her Waterloo.

  There’s a bag of coral-colored buckthorn berries in the refrigerator, which she considers turning into a sort of jam. Perhaps she can do a nutty tart crust to go with it—a spin on a linzer torte. Or maybe she’s overthinking this and needs to get away from the buckthorn for a while. After all, there are other recipes that need her attention.

  She’s been at this for a week now. Holed up in the pastry kitchen, making ice creams and tarts and meringues. Experimenting with flavors, tweaking classic recipes, and getting a handle on the incredible array of gadgets at her disposal. Because Dan and the pastry chef were given free rein to buy whatever toy they wanted, both kitchens are loaded with the latest thing, whether it’s useful or not. Gloria isn’t quite sure yet what to do with the sous-vide machine, but another gadget that cold-pickles just about anything is proving to be a source of inspiration. For her part, Susan was a bit horrified by the bread machine in the pastry kitchen, but intrigued by the candy-floss maker. Her attempts to make chocolate-flavored floss haven’t worked because the cocoa burns too easily, but she’s having better luck with peanut flavor and trying to think of what could go with it.

  She whisks some agar into the sea buckthorn juice, pours the liquid into a lined pan, and pops it into her refrigerator to set (hopefully). It shares a shelf with four bowls, each containing a different flavor of sourdough bread, slowly rising. The sourdough mother now lives on a pantry shelf, happily bubbling away after its feed the previous afternoon.

  Susan turns her attention to strawberries. They’re easier. Who doesn’t like a strawberry? And they’re excellent right now: a cold, damp spell in May delayed the season, but the more recent, prolonged good weather means they’re exploding all over, rich and sweet. She’s trying them out on a cloudy pavlova flavored with pink peppercorns, mixing the strawberries with mint and lemony sumac. Getting the flavor balance just right is tricky, but she’s nearly there, and once she has it, she can sign off on at least one dessert.

  Then on to the next: she has dinner and lunch menus to fill with delectable, seasonal delights. There need to be at least four desserts for each meal—five, if she can manage it, plus breads and anything else that needs baking. Gloria will need crusts for quiches and pies; puff pastry for various dishes. She and Susan have been putting their heads together on the menu, and now Susan is experimenting with flavored pastry crusts—there’s a vibrant orange carrot pastry relaxing in the refrigerator just above the jelly and bread dough. Susan worries about what color it’ll be when baked—it won’t stay that bright and might very well turn an unappealing brown. They may have to consider a carrot nest instead, if they want to keep that visual appeal.

  She chops strawberries and mint, humming along to the music pouring through her propped-open door. Today it’s classic Motown. “I need something with a little soul,” Gloria insisted as she tied on her apron that morning.

  “You got it, honey,” Rey answered.

  Their daily music choice sets the tone and pace of the kitchen. Everyone chops and stirs and cooks in time with it. Gazing through the window that overlooks the main kitchen, Susan sees Gloria and Rey swaying their hips, even as they keep their heads down, focusing on their work. Gloria is tweaking presentations on the dishes Susan has already approved, and Rey is developing a new accompaniment to their scallop dish. An apprentice works alongside him, learning how to get just the right sear on the scallops so they caramelize, but don’t burn, and remain tender and just barely cooked inside.

  “Otherwise, you’ll get rubbery scallops, and nobody wants that,” Rey tells him, gesturing for the young man to flip the creamy mollusks.

  The other apprentice is making buckwheat crepes for one of the starters they’re testing. With a cocky smile, he tries flipping it in the air with a flick of his wrist, but he misses the catch, and it lands draped over the side of the pan, clinging for a second before disintegrating and landing on the open flame of the gas burner. The kitchen briefly fills with the acrid smell of burning before the extractor fan manages to whisk the stench away.

  “Hey, don’t get fancy, here; there’s no one to impress with that kind of trickery,” Gloria scolds him, glancing up from her painstakingly placed microgreens. She catches Susan’s eye and they exchange a “kids, you know?” smirk.

  There’s a good feeling, a good energy, but it feels like time is running short, even though they’ve pushed the launch back yet again. That’s mostly thanks to the dry rot in the walls upstairs, which is proving extra tricky because they’re in a listed building, and the Council needs to sign off on any structural work. They don’t seem to be in any particular rush to do that, because what do they care if Elliot’s ever reopens?

  There’s still so much to do, and now Susan is gazing down at her pile of precisely diced strawberries and wondering if this is enough. Will they be enough? Will she be enough? Will the critics and the Instagram-loving diners they’re going after take one look at her desserts and think, “Pavlova? Really
? Welcome back to 1986, amirite?”

  She needs a break. She’s been at this since half past six, and now, Susan realizes, it’s past two. She puts the strawberries to one side and steps into the main kitchen, stretching her arms above her head and trying to get the kink out of her lower back.

  Gloria glances up and smiles a hello, then catches sight of the clock on the wall and yells, “Ah, shit—Rey, the interview’s on.”

  Rey switches from the music to BBC Radio Scotland, where a pleasant female voice is saying, “… today we’re sitting down with Chris Baker, who’s followed up his rapid rise to culinary television stardom with the much-acclaimed opening of his first restaurant, Seòin, in Edinburgh. And he’ll be following that with the publication of a new book in August. Quite the busy man! I feel fortunate he had the time to sit down with us. Chris, thank you so much for being here today.”

  “Not at all—thank you for having me.” Chris’s voice, light and warm, roots Susan to the spot.

  “Tell us a bit about your restaurant,” the presenter urges. “It seems like you’re pulling from a lot of different culinary traditions, but tying them in with classic Scottish cooking.”

  “You have it exactly,” he agrees. “I’ve been fortunate enough to travel and study all over the world, and I’ve sort of stolen the best bits—or my favorite bits—and used them to play around with some of the dishes I grew up with.”

  “Yes, that’s right, you grew up in Edinburgh, didn’t you?” the presenter says, as if Chris has only just reminded her.