Brandon: Are you mad about something? I feel like you’re grumpy today.
Molly: I’m not grumpy. You’re grumpy.
Brandon: Hey, you know, you really don’t have to do this anymore. You know that, right? If it makes you unhappy, don’t do it. Let’s get someone else to do it.
Molly: I can’t not do this. Who’s going to do it if I don’t?
I knew the answer, of course: we’d put up an ad and hire someone. But that seemed inconceivable. I’d been there since Day One, since before Day One. I knew everything about the place. Who would look after the station, and the restaurant, the way I did? Who would be Brandon’s partner? Who would make sure there were no fingerprints on the wine glasses? I was one of the legions of employees who’ve made the mistake of overestimating their importance to their employer, but the real problem was, I was my employer.
* * *
We began planning my departure the only way I was willing: very, very slowly. We inched me out. Erin, the host who had sometimes picked up shifts for me, didn’t like kitchen work as much as she had hoped to, so she wasn’t an option. But our friend Kari, a retired professional ballet dancer and talented cook, was just beginning a career in restaurants, and she’d spent the summer interning at another place in town. In mid-October, she came to us, asking if we had an opening for a paid cooking position. Brandon liked the idea of Kari as a cook because of her background as a dancer: she knew how to work hard and how to pay attention to details. I liked the idea because we knew her. I hoped that, because she knew us as people and not just as bosses, she would care about the job, and about Delancey, as much as I did. We offered her two nights a week, her first paid cooking job. I would work the other three nights.
In late October, my cousin Katie and her friend Pantea, Delancey’s designers, flew up from the Bay Area to spend a weekend in Seattle and eat at the restaurant. They brought a few girlfriends along, and one of them was an architect-turned-pastry-chef named Brandi Henderson. Their last night in town was a night off for us, so we all went out to dinner, and I wound up talking with Brandi about some problems I was having in coming up with a new fall dessert for the menu. Brandi quickly fired off a few ideas, and then she laughed and added, “Actually, if you ever need a pastry chef, my boyfriend and I have been wanting to move somewhere new. I could come work for you.”
I laughed, too. It didn’t occur to me that she meant it.
But a few days later, she sent an e-mail to continue the conversation. The e-mail went directly to my spam folder, as did a second e-mail she sent the following week. Luckily, she had the guts to call, asking if she’d used the wrong e-mail address. We’d never tasted any of Brandi’s desserts, nor any other food she’d made, but she was smart and energetic and had gone to culinary school, and Katie and Pantea could vouch for her abilities. Like Kari, Brandi knew us first as friends—cousins-of-friends, anyway—and I hoped that meant something. In early November we hired her, and by December 1 she was in Seattle, where she became Delancey’s pastry chef and part-time pantry cook, since the positions overlapped.
I spent my last shifts training Brandi. I was so obsessive about it that I even showed her how to whip cream, as though she’d never done it before. She politely watched and listened and repeated after me, and if she thought I was an idiot, she kept it to herself. I liked her. I also liked the Meyer lemon budino that she suggested for the dessert menu, with anise caramel, candied pistachios, and sablé cookies. Because of Brandi and Kari, who’d recently come up with a beautiful salad of roasted beets, three types of citrus, and ricotta salata, I could leave.
Suddenly, I was done. For the next few weeks, I could hardly go to the restaurant. The instant I walked in, I’d see something that needed doing. I’d be sucked in, compelled to do it. I hated the restaurant for that, for the fact that red pepper flakes get wedged into crevices in the tabletops and flour gets everywhere. It was all I could see: the dirt, the problems, the trouble. On the days that the restaurant was closed, Brandon mostly slept, and when we closed for our first long break over the holidays, he promptly came down with a virus. I had visions of us making eggnog together like we had the year before, my great-grandfather’s profoundly boozed-up eggnog, and cooking every night, the way we used to. But we’d stopped cooking at home, both together and separately, months before, and a few days off wasn’t going to bring it back.
* * *
When my first book came out earlier that year and I did a reading in New York, my editor took me to dinner. I was so nervous that I hardly remember what the place looked like, or how we got from the front door to our booth. I had met my editor in person only once before, and I still sort of didn’t believe that I had managed to write a book at all. I worried that if I opened my mouth, she would figure me out. We drank a bottle of Champagne that she ordered, and mostly we talked about Delancey, which was then under construction. I didn’t know yet that I would work there—it was still solidly Brandon’s project—but my editor asked me something that I’ve revisited many times since. What will it be like for you, she said, to make cooking a public thing? It’s always been a part of your private life, even though you write about it. What will it be like for you and Brandon to make it public?
I’d never thought about it. She had a point: my normal life found me at home, at my desk or in front of the electric range in my small, quiet kitchen, not standing in a restaurant, tending to the needs of strangers. But I didn’t know how to answer her. I wouldn’t know until after I had left my post at Delancey and was trying to find that normal life again, that in taking cooking from our private world and sharing it with our public one, we would change it. We would lose it.
In the months after I stopped working at Delancey, I thought about cooking, but I rarely did it. I wondered what had happened to me, why I’d gotten so lazy. It’s not that I was an elaborate cook before, the type to routinely make three courses on a weeknight—on the contrary, our most frequent meal has always been a big salad, some cheeses, and bread, which can barely even be called cooking—but now I could hardly motivate myself to wash a head of lettuce. I would beat myself up for it, but that didn’t change the fact that I didn’t want to cook. I was now on my own, at home alone, five nights a week. And on Brandon’s days off, we didn’t want to make dinner. That was work now, and we wanted to be taken care of. It would be years before we would find a rhythm again—before I would accept that we might never play together in the kitchen the way we used to, every night and every day, before I could look at our marriage without seeing a hole in it. I wondered when we’d go back to being the old, better us. I wondered when I’d go back to being the old, better me.
In an article in the New York Times a couple of years ago, Jonathan Franzen talked about what he calls the problem of actual love. “My friend Alice Sebold,” he wrote, “likes to talk about ‘getting down in the pit and loving somebody.’ She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.” I’ve thought about that line a lot. I wanted so much to enjoy this successful thing that Brandon and I had made together, to celebrate his enthusiasm and his hard work. But that’s not who I was, or who I could be at that point. It was an ugly thing to see that in the mirror.
Because I loved him, I had encouraged him, even when it scared me. I had wanted to believe in what he believed. I had wanted to help him succeed, because helping him succeed would help us succeed. I had tried to do something that I couldn’t do, and it had made me someone who said things and did things I didn’t like at all. It made me lash out when I should have put an arm around his shoulder. It made me cry at the thought of making salad. I had not been the person I thought I was: someone fair, someone in control, someone deserving of love. All I had tried to do was be a restaurant cook; it wasn’t like I was hoping to sing an aria or make a building play music. But I had failed, and now I didn’t know how to go back to what I had been before.
J. P. HARTT’S EGGNOG
My maternal great-grandfather, Jo
hn Phillip Hartt, came up with this recipe, and my mother’s family has made it for decades. Though Brandon didn’t grow up with a family nog tradition, he now looks forward to it as much as I do.
This eggnog is a little thinner in texture than most, which I prefer, and alcohol-wise, it’s all business. J. P. Hartt made his nog using double the quantities listed below, but because I don’t know anyone with a bowl big enough for that, I’ve scaled it down. You’ll still have plenty to go around.
If you’re concerned about the raw eggs, I can tell you that alcohol does inhibit bacterial growth—although it cannot, in truth, be relied upon to kill bacteria. It may, but I can’t make any promises. We make this eggnog with fresh eggs from a local farm that we trust, but if you’d prefer, feel free to use pasteurized eggs.
6 large eggs
1 cup (200 g) sugar
2 1/2 quarts (2 1/3 l) half-and-half
1 fifth (750 ml) brandy
1 cup (240 ml) dark rum
1/2 cup (120 ml) bourbon
1/2 cup (120 ml) dry sherry
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, preferably freshly grated
* * *
In a very large mixing bowl, whisk the eggs to break up the yolks. Add the sugar, and whisk vigorously (or beat with a handheld electric mixer) until the mixture is foamy and lightens a bit in color. Add the half-and-half, whisking (or beating) to combine. Add the brandy, rum, bourbon, and dry sherry, mixing thoroughly. Whisk in the nutmeg, and chill well before serving.
Yield: About 1 gallon
22
I would very much like to tell you that we fired Jared after the “Tiffany, I’m your boss” debacle, and that it was so anticlimactic, so obvious, so boring, that I forgot to mention it. That would be significantly less embarrassing. But the truth is, Jared outlasted me at my own restaurant.
He lasted long enough to, among other things, imagine or fabricate an attraction between Brandon and Kari.
“He’s sweet on her,” Jared told me casually, almost absentmindedly, as though he were recounting what he ate for breakfast. It was late November, and he and I were unpacking a produce delivery together.
I was too tired to question it. I swallowed it whole. Later that night, I confronted Brandon, already set in my refusal to hear his reply. He was incredulous, furious that I believed Jared. Weeks would pass before I was ready to listen. But it never occurred to me, or to Brandon, to fire Jared for it.
We knew that Jared was different from who he had been when we hired him a few months earlier, but we didn’t yet know the dimensions of his drinking, or how nasty he was with the rest of the staff when we weren’t around. No matter how much your employees like you, when there’s a problem among them, they will whisper amongst themselves for weeks—and maybe even months—before reporting it to you. As far as we could see, Jared was a good cook and a reliable employee with a few notable personality issues. I was too busy imploding, and Brandon was too busy working, and we were both too busy trying to learn to run a restaurant to see how bad things had actually gotten. You don’t know what to expect, anyway, until you’ve been at it for a while. I figured that Jared’s behavior was typical for a talented, ambitious cook, the type with aspirations to be a Chef-with-a-capital-C. It’s the kind of behavior that makes dollar signs appear in the eyes of Top Chef producers.
That year, Christmas and New Year’s Eve fell in the middle of the workweek, so we decided to close for both weeks, to make the most of it and get some rest. The day before the restaurant reopened, a Tuesday, Jared stopped by to pick up his paycheck. Brandon and I were there, organizing paperwork and getting ready for the coming week. Jared was hoping to move to a new apartment soon, he explained, and did we think we might be able to float him a loan? A few thousand dollars? I told him the truth: that I was in the process of putting together a bundle of end-of-year reports and receipts to send to our bookkeeper, and that until she’d gone through it, we wouldn’t know where we stood, money-wise. We’d been open for barely five months, and there was still debt to pay off, plus upcoming tax deadlines. Could he check back in a month? He agreed.
The next morning, Brandon went to the restaurant to help Jared break down a few pork shoulders for the week’s supply of sausage. I was at home, trying to get back into some kind of writing routine. Within half an hour of his departure, the phone rang. It was Brandon.
“Jared’s gone,” he said by way of a greeting. “I let him go.” He sounded calm, matter-of-fact. I thought I could even hear him grinning. It was barely noon on the first day back from our first holiday closure, and we had no pizza cook, and Brandon was all right.
Jared had asked again about the loan, he reported, and he’d also asked for a 150 percent raise, effective immediately.
“I’d be happy to consider some kind of raise at some point,” Brandon had told him, “but like we said yesterday, we can’t do anything until we know where we are financially.”
“I’m worth just as much now as I will be in a month,” Jared had retorted.
“Listen, we can’t do it right now. And a hundred fifty percent is a lot. I can’t pay anyone that much.”
“Okay,” Jared had said, putting down his knife. “Then I’m done.”
We didn’t have to fire him. We didn’t have to wonder what to do. He had made demands that were unreasonable, satisfyingly and undeniably unreasonable, and when we didn’t give in, he left. It felt almost easy. I whooped into the phone. After we hung up, Brandon made a couple of calls to find someone to fill in for the week, and then he called Ryan Thompson.
* * *
The previous summer, one day in early June, Brandon was at Delancey, doing whatever construction task he was doing that week, and a guy showed up and introduced himself. Ryan was in his mid-thirties, a little older than we were, and had put himself through graduate school by working for Punch, a well-known pizzeria in Minnesota. He’d been a cook and then a manager, helping to open new locations. Now he was between careers, working at a pizza shop in Seattle and planning a move to Sonoma in late July, to try working a season at a winery.
Ryan was living at his sister’s place, not far from Delancey, and she’d read somewhere about what we were doing. He liked the sound of it, so he rode over on his bike to check it out. He told Brandon that if he needed any help with construction, he’d be happy to pitch in. What kind of stranger does that? Ryan Thompson.
One afternoon not long after, Ryan came back. He and Brandon opened some beers, sat down at the bar, and set to work assembling the pendant lights that were to hang over it. They’re made from tall, narrow canning jars meant for asparagus, with a hole drilled in the bottom for an electrical cord to slide through. Katie and Pantea designed them, and our friend Mark, who owns a metal shop, made steel sleeves to slip inside one end of the jar, holding the socket and bulb in place. Each light has a half-dozen parts, and they’re not complicated. But when the electrician later went to install them, he had to take apart and reassemble most of them, because Brandon and Ryan had been so absorbed in talking pizza that they’d botched the whole operation.
Ryan came back nearly every week, and he and Brandon began to practice baking pizzas. Ryan knew a lot about wood-burning ovens, and he showed Brandon some tricks for getting the fire right. Like Brandon, Ryan is fascinated with the details that make food taste the way it does, and that make some versions taste better than others: not only pizza, but also coffee, bourbon, and wine. He knew a hell of a lot more about wine than we did. When the time came to choose the wines for our opening menu, he helped us sift through the samples that our reps brought by and build a list.
We wanted him to stay and work for us. But he wanted to learn about winemaking, and he had that job waiting in California. He left in late July. He e-mailed sometimes to check in and send cheers, and just before the holidays, he wrote to say that he was trying to decide what to do next, that he felt torn between Sonoma and Seattle. Did we have an opening at Delancey? I wrote back to say that we didn’t, but that, as we were di
scovering, the situation could always change. Three weeks later, within twenty minutes of Jared’s departure, Brandon was on the phone with Ryan. Ryan packed his car, and four days later, he arrived in Seattle to be our new pizza cook.
He lived with us for a month, in the guest room in our basement. The three of us shared the small bathroom on the main floor. He never used the sheets and comforter we gave him; he just laid his sleeping bag on top of the bed. He worked the prep shift three mornings a week, and four nights a week, he worked the pizza station with Brandon. On Sunday nights, his night off, he and I would cook together if he wasn’t spending time with his sister. It was the first real cooking I’d done since leaving my post at Delancey. I was grateful to have company, to have someone other than myself to feed, a reason to get back in the habit. It was midwinter, very cold and wet, and the first night, we decided to braise some short ribs. Neither of us had ever had Yorkshire pudding, but since we had plenty of beef drippings, we decided to make a batch, and that, we discovered, gave us an excuse for talking in faux British accents over dinner. (What ho!) It had been months since I’d spent an evening with a friend that way, not working or at the restaurant, just eating and sitting around. Ryan gave me that, along with something else that I also needed: a friend who knew me best within the life we had now, not the life we’d had before the restaurant. I didn’t have to explain.
Even after he’d found an apartment of his own and moved out, Ryan would sometimes come over on weekend mornings, and the three of us would make breakfast. One Sunday, we had a French toast cook-off, Cook’s Illustrated’s recipe versus my father’s. (I am pleased to report that the latter won.) Other weekends we did waffles, buckwheat pancakes, or oatmeal pancakes. I would make coffee, mostly badly, and we’d listen to the blues show on KEXP. Or if we weren’t making breakfast, we’d meet up for lunch—often giant, sloppy slow-roasted pork sandwiches that I would pick up at a shop called Paseo. Brandon and I have always tended to share close friends: Sam, Ben, Olaiya. During the months that he worked at Delancey, Ryan was the closest person to us. His friendship was the first thing to come out of the restaurant that felt familiar, that felt like mine, that I would miss if it disappeared.
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