Delancey

by Molly Wizenberg

  I began doing mental calculations, adding up how long it would take me to get through them all. It could easily be more than half an hour, I realized, and probably closer to forty-five minutes, before the last table would even see their first course. They had no way to know that every table around them had ordered as much as they had, or that there is only one pantry cook at Delancey. They had no reason to understand the wait. They would be livid. Their offspring, the sneering witches and dead-eyed ghouls, would put a curse on the restaurant. They would tell everyone they knew how slow and awful Delancey was, that they waited thirty minutes for a salad.

  After hitting the iceberg, it took the Titanic a leisurely two hours and forty minutes to sink. After we opened the doors on Halloween night, it took me fifteen minutes. I stared at the tickets, trying to organize the salads into a few large batches, and then I reached for my biggest bowl, and then I forgot how many batches I had decided on, so I looked at the tickets again, and that was when I started to sniffle. Then I started to cry. I couldn’t see very well, so I fumbled and groped my way through the first three salads. Then I looked at the tickets again, and then I started to sob. Jared walked by to get something out of the fridge. Without saying a word, he took down a bowl and started to make the next two salads. Danielle quietly slipped a glass of Champagne onto the shelf above my ticket rail. Between pizzas, Brandon rubbed my shoulders. I spent the rest of the night alternately plating food and hiding in a corner by the chest freezer, wiping my eyes with a paper towel.

  * * *

  A full dining room is a good problem to have, and I was usually grateful to have it. But it’s a fine line between eager customers and an angry mob. Ben once told me a story about an opera he directed in the cathedral at the University of Pittsburgh. It’s a spectacular Gothic structure, but as it turned out, it didn’t have the electrical capacity to support the lighting they had installed. Normally you would open the doors to a performance space at least a half hour before curtain time, but that night, at that point, there were no lights. The front doors had windows, and from the inside, Ben could see a crowd gathering on the other side. And even as he was elated to see it, he felt more and more panicked as each new person appeared, imagining them clawing at the door, wild-eyed, suddenly transformed into the bloody-mouthed zombies from “Thriller.” And now, here I was with actual zombies in the dining room, and they weren’t there to do a dance number with Michael Jackson.

  While I sobbed into the greens, I wondered how Brandon, standing a few feet away at the pizza oven, could handle the onslaught of tickets. Answer: he’s an East Coaster. In a pinch, he has access to such concepts as Fuck ’em, and Let ’em wait, and I’m working as fast as I can here. I am a people-pleaser from Oklahoma, where life is placid enough that it’s considered song-worthy to watch a hawk making lazy circles in the sky.

  It’s no wonder that the restaurant industry is rife with substance use and abuse. The work depends on adrenaline, the body’s natural drug, and when that wears off, there’s plenty of the other kind around. There’s a bar fridge full of it, to start with. Brandon depends on adrenaline like any other cook, and when it doesn’t come, he struggles to get through the night. But he doesn’t like the feeling of drinking a lot, and he’s never smoked, so his other options are limited. I’m about the same, though once, in my early twenties, I tried smoking weed from a pipe named Colonel Mustard and felt sure that my lungs were collapsing afterward. Brandon believed that there had to be people in the restaurant world who were like us, and that we would find them. I wasn’t sure.

  Restaurant people, and cooks in particular, are a self-selecting crowd. They have to be able to take not just pressure but also criticism. They must be willing to stand up for eight to sixteen hours a day. They have to enjoy staying up late. Often, they come to the job because they dislike the structures of normal nine-to-five society. Restaurant work means dirty jokes and late-night shots, and it also has the benefit of being one of the few types of employment that allows you to leave your work at work: you clock in, do your hours, and clock out, and then you get to live your life. (Unless, of course, you own the place.) It’s not that restaurants are blissfully free of structure and authority; it’s just that, in a working kitchen, the authority figure might call you a name that would have your mother reaching for a bar of soap. There’s a scene in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential in which a wedding party goes into a restaurant where Bourdain is working and the bride winds up bent over a trash can in the alley in her wedding dress, having sex with a cook. It’s extreme, but it says something.

  * * *

  During the first few months after we opened Delancey, a few people told me that it was sad to see me give up my career for my husband. I knew that they meant well, and that it might reasonably look that way. Sure, right: I hadn’t chosen to open a restaurant. My husband did that part. But I did, however, choose to work in it. He never asked that of me; I wanted it. I wanted to try it. I wanted to push myself. But when it was clear that I was failing—or clear, anyway, that I couldn’t plate a salad if I was crying too hard to see—that’s when I wanted out.

  MY KATE’S BROWNIES

  These brownies were one of the desserts on the Delancey menu on Halloween night, and like the apple crisp, the recipe originally comes from my mother’s repertoire. She’s been making it for decades. She found the recipe in an article about Katharine Hepburn in a 1975 issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal, and she always refers to them as Kate’s Brownies. In the years since she shared the recipe with me, I’ve tweaked it slightly, decreasing the sugar and the baking time. The brownies are thin, but they stay chewy and fudgy, and I think they’re perfect. At Delancey, I smartened them up with a spoonful of barely sweetened whipped cream, but at home, I like them best plain.

  For the record, they’re also great when made with white whole wheat flour.

  1 stick (113 g) unsalted butter

  2 ounces (55 g) unsweetened chocolate, coarsely chopped

  1 cup minus 2 tablespoons (175 g) sugar

  2 large eggs

  1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

  1/4 cup (35 g) unbleached all-purpose flour

  1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt

  * * *

  Preheat the oven to 325°F. Lightly butter an 8-inch square baking dish, or grease it with cooking spray. Cut a rectangle of parchment paper that’s long enough to line the bottom and two sides of the dish, leaving a little overhang. Press the parchment paper into the dish. Lightly grease the parchment paper.

  In a medium (2 1/2- to 3-quart) saucepan, warm the butter and chocolate over low heat, stirring occasionally, until fully melted. Remove the pan from the heat. Add the sugar, and stir well. The batter will look gritty. Add the eggs and the vanilla, and stir to blend completely. Stir in the flour and salt. The batter should now be very smooth. Pour it into the prepared baking dish, tilting the dish as necessary to ease the batter out into the corners, and then bang the dish straight down on the countertop a couple of times, to release any air bubbles. Place the dish in the oven.

  Begin checking the brownies after 25 minutes, inserting a toothpick into the center to test for doneness. They’re ready when the toothpick comes out clean. The original version of this recipe says to bake them for 40 minutes, but mine are generally ready between 30 and 35 minutes. When yours are ready, remove the dish from the oven, and allow them to cool completely on a wire rack—and I mean completely, or else they’ll be too fragile to cut.

  When they’re cool, loosen along the edges of the dish with a thin knife, pull up the parchment paper to lift the brownies from the dish, and then cut them into squares.

  Yield: 16 squares

  20

  I went looking just now for a letter I wrote early that November, but I must have gotten rid of it. It was a letter to our staff, informing them that we were closing Delancey. I probably knew that if I didn’t delete it, I would have to read it again someday. I’m glad I deleted it.

  I remember the date b
ecause it was Erin’s birthday. She worked for us through the early winter of 2010, when she moved away to go to school. She mostly worked as a host, but she was interested in cooking, too, and was considering doing it professionally one day. So, she picked up the occasional pantry shift for me, which allowed me to sneak a little breathing room and tend to some deadlines. I was two years into a monthly column for Bon Appétit then, and the column was supposed to be about home cooking, something I was hardly doing anymore. But it would be months before Delancey would give us an income, and regular gigs in national magazines come along about as often as Halley’s Comet, so I kept at it, and so that I could keep at it, Erin worked my station from time to time. On the night of her birthday, Erin was working and I was at home. The night went well, and Brandon felt good, so after closing and cleaning up, he decided to do something he’d never done before: take the staff to our neighborhood dive bar for a celebratory drink.

  That night, Brandon got home late, after two in the morning. He’d called to say that he was going to the bar, but I’d still expected him home earlier. I was lying awake in bed, having paranoid visions of him making out in the bathroom of the bar with a chain-smoker in cut-offs. Between Jared’s increasingly erratic behavior and the strain that the long hours were putting on Brandon and me, I was spending time in dark places.

  I heard the side door unlatch, and the dog leapt off the bed and ran down the hall. Brandon appeared in the bedroom doorway. He was in tears. Obviously, he had cheated on me and was now filled with self-loathing and Jägermeister. He threw himself on the bed, sobbing, and turned away from me. I’m not sure what would have felt worse: if he had cheated, or what actually happened.

  “I can’t do this,” he howled. “It’s too hard!” His whole body heaved. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want this restaurant.”

  * * *

  Two weeks earlier, just before we were due to open for the night, Jared noticed that the recycling hadn’t been taken out. Ordinarily, as the day’s deliveries come in, the cooks put everything away and then toss the empty cardboard boxes next to the host station, and it’s the host’s job to break them down and carry them out to the recycling dumpster. It’s part of the division of labor in the restaurant, and it’s been that way since we opened. But that day in October, as customers waited to come inside, the cardboard boxes were still sitting there. Brandon and I were at the back of the restaurant, working on a batch of vinaigrette. We hadn’t noticed the boxes. But Jared noticed, and since the host was busy with something else, he asked Tiffany, a server who was standing nearby, to start breaking them down. Tiffany grabbed a pair of scissors and got to work, but later that night, she came to Brandon about it, complaining, asking if Jared was a manager now, since he was bossing her around.

  It was hard for us to fault Jared for what he did. We could see why Tiffany was annoyed, but it was reassuring that Jared had stepped up, that he felt invested enough to care. But we also knew that it wasn’t Jared’s job to tell Tiffany what to do. The fact that he didn’t come to us and let us handle it was a problem, as was the fact that he was defensive when we later spoke to him about it. Mostly, we were annoyed that the two of them were handling it like guests on The Jerry Springer Show. Brandon and I had been on our feet all day, and we were not about to march into battle for some empty produce boxes.

  On the night of Erin’s birthday, the bar was nearly empty. Brandon and the staff slid into a booth and ordered a round, but it was clear that the bartender wanted to close up early. When they’d finished their drinks, Brandon suggested returning to Delancey. So they walked back and helped themselves to beers, and that was when Tiffany decided to revisit the Big Recycling Issue. It was Jared’s last day of work for the week, and he’d had a beer or two before the group went to the bar, plus another beer and a shot while they were there.

  “You know why I did it?” he said, talking nonchalantly into his glass. “I did it because I’m above you here. I’m your boss.”

  Oh, God, Brandon thought. He’s drunk.

  “I’m your boss, Tiffany,” Jared repeated.

  “Actually,” Brandon interrupted, “you’re not. You’re not anyone’s boss.”

  Jared tossed back the last of his beer, spun off the stool, and threw open the door. Brandon went out after him, but Jared shook him off and disappeared around the corner. When Brandon got back inside, he found the servers laughing, kicking around ripostes to Jared’s rant. “Classic back-of-house shit. Cooks are always bullies!” There was no sense in defending Jared, but Brandon was frustrated to hear the servers turn it into a petty case of us-versus-them. What was the point, he thought, of having worked my ass off to open this restaurant if I can’t enjoy it? If I can’t work with people I like? If we can’t even go out for beers together? If I have to deal with this?

  I would like to be able to tell you that I understood, as I lay there while he sobbed. I would like to tell you that I understood that I was supposed to console him. I was supposed to rub his back and tell him that we would be okay. I was supposed to have some perspective—to see that, like every day before this one, today would end and we would make sense of it in the morning. But it didn’t occur to me to do that. I can sit here and see it now—ah yes, I should have just reached over and held him—but I’ve had years to think about it. That night, after having spent months building Delancey, after having spent months working there, after having myself been reduced to a sobbing heap just a week or two earlier, I could not rub his back. He wasn’t allowed to say that it was too hard. I didn’t care what had happened, or that it was actually, objectively, yes, very, very hard. We had opened this business because he wanted it. He didn’t get the privilege of saying that he didn’t want to do it anymore.

  I told him this, or something like it. I screamed. I remember him asking me over and over why I couldn’t understand, why I couldn’t just comfort him. He lay there crying while I took my glasses from the nightstand and stood up. I went to the basement, to the storage room that we called our guest bedroom, a collection of boxes with a double bed against one wall. I lay there for a while, trying to get used to what he had told me: He doesn’t want to do this. He wants to close the restaurant. We have to close the restaurant. I retrieved the computer from my desk upstairs, and lying there in the dark, wrote a letter to our staff to announce Delancey’s closure. It was terrible, and it was also a relief.

  It never occurred to me that he hadn’t meant it. It never occurred to me that he was exhausted, like I was, or that he could reach a breaking point, like I had. It never occurred to me that the next morning, he would wake up, get dressed, and go to work like he always did—that he would still believe in Delancey, and I wouldn’t.

  21

  The summer that I was eighteen, I was killing time in Oklahoma City, waiting to leave for college, and I killed a lot of it at a Barnes & Noble bookstore near my parents’ house. These were the days when people still bought CDs, and the store had a music section in the back. There was a listening station in one corner where you could vet new arrivals, and one day, an album there caught my eye. It was Feelings, by David Byrne, the former singer for Talking Heads. I knew the band the way anyone does, from hearing “Burning Down the House” on the radio, but Feelings was my real introduction to David Byrne. The thing about David Byrne is, he’s weird. He’s weird, but because he has immense talent, it works. He does what he wants. He makes music, of course, but he’s also written books about bicycling, designed art installations that turn buildings into musical instruments and put clothing on pieces of furniture, delivered lectures-cum-stand-up-routines on the subject of PowerPoint, sung arias by Bizet, and somehow managed to look 100 percent straight while wearing a tutu over his clothes. What I admire most, beyond his sense of humor, is his skill at self-reinvention. It’s not that I have a strong desire to dress a table in a pair of pleated chinos, but I like that he’s not afraid to try it, and that he’s savvy enough to pull it off.

  I’ve always thou
ght it was a little stupid to look up to celebrities. But if I’m going to, it’s got to be a celebrity who can teach me something about living authentically without fear, like Byrne, or Animal from the Muppets. When I decided to quit graduate school, I thought of David Byrne. I thought of him when I quit my job in publishing to write my first book. And I was thinking of him when I decided to work at Delancey.

  I wanted to be game. I wanted to be able to pull it off. I wanted to surprise myself and Brandon. I’d read these dreamy magazine profiles of husband-wife teams in Brooklyn and San Francisco and Paris, working together to build their artfully conceived boutique business, pickling vegetables or making cupcakes or running a tiny neighborhood restaurant that sat on the cusp of world domination. I pictured myself like those women, with a striped linen apron and dewy, hardworking skin and a hairstyle that said both “I’m too happy to care” and “Brandon and I took a ‘nap’ [wink, wink] in the office after lunch.” That’s the kind of wife I’m going to be, I decided. Forget writing. Forget that old restaurant internship, the one that made me think I don’t like professional cooking! I’m in the reinvention business!

  I had the striped linen apron, thanks to Carla, who gave me one of hers. I also had the dewy skin, thanks to the lack of an exhaust fan in the kitchen. But as much as I tried to cultivate a devil-may-care attitude and its matching hairdo, I was a miserable wreck.

  Brandon has pointed out, and I agree, that we probably wouldn’t be married anymore if (1) I hadn’t worked at Delancey and (2) I hadn’t stopped working at Delancey. I lasted four months in the kitchen, and despite my clear unsuitability for the job, he had to almost shove me out. It took a number of conversations, and most of them went like this: