by Jeff Oliver
THE TWO-PLATE SOLUTION
A NOVEL OF CULINARY MAYHEM
IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Jeff Oliver
Copyright: Jeff Oliver, 2018. All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events,
people, or institutions is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means,
including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from
the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.
Interior design: Tracy Copes
Cover concept: J.L. Herchenroeder
Cover: Liz Blazer
Author Photo: Stuart Tyson
HC: 978-1-61088-223-1
PB: 978-1-61088-218-7
Kindle/Mobi: 978-1-61088-225-5
Ebook: 978-1-61088-226-2
Audio: 978-1-61088-227-9
Published by Bancroft Press “Books that Enlighten”
410-358-0658
P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209 410-764-1967 (fax)
www.bancroftpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
To the storytellers working in reality TV
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Acknowledgements
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
From the very first day of production, Sara Sinek knew it was going to be a shit show. Who shoots a reality TV cooking competition in Israel while under imminent threat of a terrorist attack?
And yet, a mere fifty-six miles from a suspected ISIS base in Egypt, cameras were up on Natural Dish-aster season five. The network had already printed swag for what they lovingly branded The Chosen Season™.
At the site of the shoot, on what was a regular summer day in Eilat, Israel, the sounds of Skrillex thumped from a Vegas-like hotel. Israelis in speedos sipped cocktails under sun umbrellas. Amidst the sweet stink of sunscreen and shawarma, all luxuriated in a dazzling view of the Red Sea’s emerald waters and endless coral reef.
There was, of course, the ever-present reminder of existential threat. Armed Israeli soldiers walked the perimeter and military jets streaked the distant sky. But this was Eilat; a place to forget all that, to unwind from the holy and to be content with the profane—even laugh a little. And that’s exactly what everyone seemed to be doing so effortlessly.
Everyone but Sara. She sat in a production tent down the beach at the Grand Sheba Excelsior. The newly-constructed five-star resort was still receiving finishing touches before its official open. At the main gate, an electrical crew tinkered with the security system and argued loudly in Hebrew. Inside, an American reality TV production was in full swing: Production Assistants (PAs), camera-operators (ops), and producers of all kinds scurried about. At the pool, a crane extended fifty feet in the air, holding up a large platform on which a cooking station, two burners, and a small pantry had been placed.
Nine hot young American chef-testants were lounging around the pool. Some chefs smoked cigarettes, comparing tattoos. One chef, Tanya, wept loudly as two female chefs tried to console her. Camera and audio covered the spectacle.
“He’s gone!” Tanya wept. “I miss him so much. My Brandon. His abs alone … so fucking hot!” As Tanya keened like a widow at a funeral, she noticed the crew quickly losing interest. Abruptly ceasing her crying, she asked: “You guys need me to do a safety?”
In the control room tent, Sara Sinek watched the situation wearily on a quad of TV monitors. She pulled off her Misfits baseball cap and let her long black hair fall over her face like the creepy girl in The Ring. Then she stood up, all 5’11” of her, and shook herself out, Kundalini-Yoga-style, before falling back into her chair.
“You okay?” a story coordinator seated behind her asked.
“Just cringing again,” said Sara, putting her cap back into place. “For once, I’d like to experience a warm flush of pride; even the pleasant tingle of intellectual stimulation… Nope. I get full-body cringes from Chef Tanya’s theatrics.”
As interim Showrunner, Sara was sitting between Strider, the Lead Director (so nicknamed because he supposedly took everything in stride) and Zack, the Director of Photography (DP). Sara wore the standard half ninja/half skater-boy crew outfit—black-on-black cotton with Chuck Taylors.
“Want me to keep covering this abomination?” Strider asked her.
“Is a pig’s pussy pork?” Sara replied.
“Holy shit! Can I marry that phrase?” asked Zack.
“Let me put it another way,” said Sara. “Only if you want to work on season six. Yes, please continue to cover Tanya’s emotional breakdown.”
“Another season of blowing The Network? Sounds like a blast,” said Strider.
“And if the blowing’s decent, they take credit for that too,” added Zack.
Sara gave the DP a fist bump for that one, adding, “Ugh, BJs… I think I gave half of one in high school before swearing it off for life. If anyone sees Colin Mechlowitz, tell him I apologize for the braces, and that his boner definitely turned me gay.”
“Boss Lady wants the Tanya safety,” Strider said into a microphone.
“Close on the tears,” Sara added.
“And get close on those crocodile tears, please,” parroted Strider.
Sara stood up and headed for the exit. She passed her boss, Warren Lopez, who snoozed on an army cot with a bag of pita chips on his belly.
“Listen up, people,” Sara said into her walkie. “Unless you’re C-Camera, time to reset for the next climb. Once that’s done, feel free to go back to sleep.”
The crew leapt into action. Culinary sprinted to replenish ingredients and replace dirty pots and pans; audio swapped mics; the art department touched up a smudged logo; and producers buzzed around the pool texting story notes on their iPhones back to Post in Burbank.
Sara stepped into the sunlight and lit a cigarette. She tried to focus on the natural beauty before her but was distracted. She didn’t like how loose resort security was: one of the Krav-MaGuards she’d hired was napping in a Jeep while the other was lounging about in the shade, swiping his fingers over an iPad like he was scratching lotto tickets. Sara pulled out her phone and scrolled through the newest Terrorist Threat Alert: “ISIS movement confirmed near the border. Threat level upped to medium-high.”
“So fucked,” Sara whispered to herself, then drew heavily on her cigarette.
“You the metumtam [Hebrew for “moron”] in charge here?” asked a female medic with an Israeli accent.
“Second idiot, actually,” Sara said. “Unless you want to wake the circus bear in the tent.”
“Ah, so you speak Hebrew? Big whoop. You’re freakishly tall. You know this?”
“Bevakasha [Hebrew for “thank you”].”
The Medic shoved some papers into Sara’s hand. “The moron you almost just killed? These release him into hospital care. Sign twice and initial there.”
“How is he?” Sara asked.
“Concussion. Twenty stitches, easy.”
“When do you think he’ll be able to … ”
“Cook?” the Medic scoffed. “This is Breaking Bad?”
“We considered calling the show Baking Bad but cakes aren’t rating.”
“Oh, so you’re someone funny,” th
e Medic said.
“Why not?” said Sara.
The Medic rolled her eyes. “Whether he can cook depends on the scans. He’ll need a couple of days rest at least, much more if there’s bleeding inside his skull. Can’t you find another crash test dummy to replace him, or have you killed off the alternates?”
The Medic brashly lifted a cigarette from Sara’s pack and lit up, giving Sara the chance to look the Medic over. She had bright green eyes, olive skin, and a mess of lush black curls—a real beauty under all that righteous indignation. Sara noticed a burn scar along the side of her neck shaped like a panther, which the Medic instinctively covered with her wrist as she smoked.
The “crash test dummy” the Medic was referring to—actually a two-time James Beard Award-winning chef—had been carted away in an ambulance only minutes before. He was daily carnage from that morning’s Jugular Challenge, a mainstay in the Natural Dish-aster format.
“Prepare to reach culinary heights you never thought possible,” the host, Chef CJ Bazemore, had said to the ten hot young chefs lined up next to the pool. Bazemore, who’d gained notoriety on Facebook Live for deboning a pig in under a minute, had earned an audition for the hosting role based on his robust social media following. That, along with his boyish good looks, bright blue eyes, and the ability to arch his eyebrows like Jack Black had sealed the deal. Bazemore’s only sticking point, other than an exorbitant wardrobe budget, mostly for chef jackets made entirely of silk, was that he insisted on writing his own copy.
“Each of you will climb that crazy-ass fifty-foot crane, step onto the platform, and cook a bible-themed amuse bouche with only the ingredients you find under the cloche, plus a limited pantry.” The chefs looked up at the crane, which extended over the pool, and gave the cameras the astonished looks that would assure them more screen time. “But as always on Natural Dish-aster, there’s a twist,” said Bazemore, arching an eyebrow in that evilicious way that made him a perennial Snapchat celebrity. “You will be cooking over a trap door, and when your ten minutes are up, that trap door will fall, you with it, fifty feet into the unforgiving water.”
CHEF BRANDON (REALITY-STYLE INTERVIEW): “I’ve had vertigo since my foster mother died in a hang gliding accident when I was eight years old. Plus, I can’t swim. Okay, laugh. Guess who’s the black guy who can’t swim this season? I don’t think I can handle this challenge… let alone… [frankenbite edit] create… a bible-themed amuse bouche… in ten minutes.”
“Question,” said Chef Joaquim. “Can we cook a New Testament amuse bouche, or does this shit have to be racist?”
“Up to you,” replied an off-camera producer. “Just be prepared to explain its historical relevance to the judges.”
Bazemore continued: “As always, a heckler from the opposing team will be assigned to each of you and will borrow my megaphone to ensure they’re heard. So who’s first? Let’s see… Chef Brandon from team Mise En Place?”
Brandon lowered his head like a man condemned to the gallows. His forehead glazed with sweat and his fingertips tingled. But as he climbed the ladder to the platform, what triggered Brandon’s anxiety was less his emotionally wrenching backstory, or even his inability to survive once he hit the water, but more that he knew right away who his heckler would be: Tanya.
The mousy blonde in daisy dukes and purple eye-shadow had trained in Japan with Michikutu, where she’d gained not just a competence in the chirashizushi technique, but also a mastery of ninja mind games, which she used mercilessly, and to great effect, against her competitors on all the cable cooking competitions. She had won three straight on Chef, Marry, Kill.
Chef Brandon had made the mistake of accepting Tanya’s challenge of a Café Patron drink-off the night before, and a hazy cringe-fest was now playing in his mind: the two of them atop the washing machine; she performing reverse cowgirl on the laundry room floor; and then…
“Why do you cry when you come, Brandon?” Tanya’s voice, both nasal and raspy, boomed over the megaphone. “When we did it in the laundry room last night, you wept like I stole your binky. Why?”
Brandon shook off a full-body cringe as the rest of the cast members laughed. He reached the platform and pulled open the silver cloche: a bag of fresh pita, a whole swordfish, and four plump Israeli figs.
CHEF BRANDON (INT.): “When I saw the figs and the swordfish, I knew right away I would do a crudo with miso foam on a toasted pita brioche drizzled with fig compote. It’s a tricky dish since you have to micro-fillet the swordfish… plus… (frankenbite*) I’m going to plunge to my death at any moment.”
Brandon stuck to the basics he’d learned during his externship at South 44 in Miami and then as Sous Chef to Heston Blumenthal at Fat Duck in Berkshire. He readied the liquid nitrogen.
CHEF JOAQUIM (INT.): “Of course Brandon goes molecular gastronomy. Can that pretentious pendejo even make toast without it exploding in a cloud of smoke?”
“Why do you cry when you come, Brandon?” Tanya yelled. “You had snot running down your face!”
Four minutes in, Brandon’s figs had caramelized ever so tenderly. Honey and lemon played gently on paper-thin slices of swordfish. And as he sautéed, chiffoned, glazed, garnished, and eventually plated, Brandon used near-Ghandian discipline to block out Tanya and her yelling about a “teary-eyed orgasm!” It was a masterpiece; a sumptuous morsel of emulsified genius. But once plated, a full forty seconds remained on the clock, and that extra time proved to be a killer.
With nothing to do but think about the trap door and the water below, a muscular boa of anxiety slithered around Brandon’s neck and tightened. All his fears rushed to the surface—his vertigo, fear of sharks, drowning. Brandon’s face broke out in tingly sweat and his vasovagal vein clenched as images of his foster mother plummeting to her death beamed on the IMAX screen in his skull and Tanya’s voice echoed slow and Vader-like: “Yoooour whoooole face waaaas coooovered in teeeeeeeears!”
The segment producers had accounted for many possibilities: chefs who might step off the trap door at the last second; chefs with knives still in their hands when they fell; even the possibility of a chef getting caught on the door. But none had expected someone to faint before the trap door even opened. But that’s exactly what happened. In Brandon’s body, blood went every-which-way except to his brain. His eyes rolled to the back of his head and he buckled to his knees, slapping his beautiful dish off the cooking station and causing it to fly off the platform and into the pool fifty feet below.
“You dropped your damn plate, jackass!” yelled Tanya.
When the ominous click of the trap door triggered and the metal grate fell, pure instinct made Brandon cling by his fingertips. He hung there for several seconds, giving the producers hope. Maybe his unconscious-self would climb back up? No such luck. Chef Brandon let go, awkwardly falling backwards but then splaying out into a mid-air cartwheel that seemed so graceful that hope sprang again in the producers’ hearts.
Perhaps Brandon felt a similar sense of optimism, because he awoke mid-air with a strange smile on his face, feeling pride swell within him that he could enjoy an entire quartersecond before his head clipped against his own plate of food and everything went black.
“Medics! Goddammit, get out there!”
In dashed the medics, sirens blaring. The Line Producer nervously fished out insurance forms to make sure they were covered. Tanya, in a touching display, ran into the water to be at her lover’s side as he was strapped to a gurney and carted off. Blood poured down Brandon’s face and neck from a gash on the side of his head.
But just as the medics lifted him onto the ambulance, he came to. Brandon slowly raised his fist and whispered: “Go Team Mise En Place,” to which his four teammates responded in roars like it was the Braveheart speech, and didn’t stop until the ambulance drove off.
“Aw crap, now they’re fired up,” Tanya said to the camera.
Out from the production tent, Strider strode, donning a pair of white-framed Ray-Bans and
calling out to repo camera for Tanya’s climb. Tanya bounded up the plank, cooked a simple swordfish sashimi drizzled with date syrup, took a deep hypnotic breath, and before the other team could even heckle her that she’d murdered Chef Brandon with talk of his own orgasm, the trap door gave and she sailed gracefully down into the water below. A completed dish, and thus a win regardless of quality. Team Amuse Bouche: One. Team Mise En Place: Zero.
“It was the single stupidest stunt I’ve ever seen, and I did three years in the Israeli military,” the Medic was saying to Sara. She blew smoke in Sara’s general direction to punctuate her disdain. “Do these chefs even realize they’ve put their lives in the hands of a maniac? Can this show make you that rich?”
“Last year’s winner signed an overall with Bourdain’s company.”
“So that is at least something.”
“Make you a deal,” Sara said, sensing an opening. “I’ll keep an extra eye out on safety for you—no more shenanigans at all. In return, you’ll instruct those security guards by the gate to quit napping on the job. They won’t listen to a thing I say. Honestly, I don’t even know if they understand English.”
“So tell them in Hebrew,” the Medic said. “Anyway, you don’t have the authority to make such a deal.”
“I do,” said Sara. “But even more important, you have my word. From now on, nothing dangerous on set. I promise you.”
The Medic saw the sincerity in Sara’s eyes and almost conceded when a breathless Associate Producer ran up to them. “Bazemore is refusing to get in the tiger cage. Says it’s not in his contract.”
Sara pressed her temples. “Ask if he’ll do a bear.”
“Copy that,” said the AP and ran off.
“Wow, an American with chutzpah,” the Medic scoffed, stubbing out her cigarette. “Is it exhausting to be such a total cliché?”
Sara didn’t have a chance to answer that rhetorical question before total chaos broke out on set. It started with a shriek from Tanya, followed by the sound of gunshots spraying the air.