Service Included

by Phoebe Damrosch

  I had been meaning to check out a place on Elizabeth Street, and when I heard they had opened a little wine bar underneath the restaurant, I moved it to the top of my restaurant list. On our next day off, we headed to SoHo and strolled for a while, reading menus and comparing tastes in shoes and ties and baubles in the windows. I slid my arm around André’s waist and hooked my thumb in his jean pocket. I had only to take a slightly larger step to match his stride.

  We decided to stop in the restaurant’s new bar for a glass of wine before dinner. If it hadn’t been for the Beach Boys album playing, the cavernous basement might have felt a little creepy. Dark wood and ironwork gave the room a gothic feel, and, like most basements, this one had the cold, damp climate proven ideal for bogeymen. It was genius really, because the room made me want to cozy up to one of the many candles and warm myself with a glass of something rustic and heartening. We nibbled on a few breadsticks with our wine, but hunger soon nudged us from our wooden stools and back up the stone stairs toward the main dining room. As we climbed out, André grabbed my arm.

  “That’s the kind of dog I’ve always wanted,” he said, pointing to a four-legged animal the size and heft of a fire hydrant. It was breathing like Darth Vader after a flight of stairs. “I love those dogs.”

  Evidently, Buckwheat was a French bulldog who belonged to the chef and sort of ran things around the place. Although he did not correspond to my particular aesthetic sensibilities, after a moment’s consideration, I realized that I should be excited that André even liked dogs.

  “My, what big ears you have!” I cooed, scratching Buckwheat between his big bat ears. It was hard to believe that this creature had descended from a wolf.

  As I explained when we reached our table, I wasn’t used to small city dogs. I had grown up with a “real dog,” a collie/ golden retriever named Turnip.

  “She had a nose and everything!” I told André.

  “Buckwheat’s a real dog.” He sounded offended. “And he has a nose—it’s just a little smooshed.”

  “Do you have pets?”

  “No, we left Leigh’s cat back in Texas.”

  Oops, wrong turn. I was considering how to get us back on track, but André spoke first.

  “Ever heard that thing about porn star names—how they’re supposed to be the name of your first pet and the name of the street where you grew up?”

  “Really? Okay, let’s see…Turnip White-Hollow.”

  “That’s hot.”

  “You’re telling me you’d really want to sleep with someone named after a root vegetable?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Rutabaga?”

  “No. But Rhubarb, maybe.”

  “Did you have pets as a kid?”

  “No, Leigh’s cat was the first. I’d be Maxwell Montgomery.”

  “You’d make millions.” Eager to move away from Leigh and porn, I went back to canines. “I kind of like dachshunds. I like their Romanesque profiles.”

  “We’re not getting a dachshund.”

  We? As in a we that might live in a town house in the West Village with a wine cellar/cheese cave, an herb garden, and a red library with a sliding ladder? I tried to appear unfazed.

  “Come on, we’ll name him some old-man name like George or Stanley and dress him in little argyle sweaters and yellow raincoats.” André looked at me blankly for a moment and then picked up the wine list.

  “White or red? Or bubbles?”

  “I don’t know, what are we eating?”

  After only a few meals together, we had already established a routine. André would start in on the wine list while I scoured the menu. We then peppered each other with questions, although not really listening or expecting an answer.

  “Should we start with white? Or a glass of champagne?”

  “What do you think of cocoa nibs and preserved lemon together?”

  “We should drink red.”

  “Why do all restaurants have the same salad?”

  After an initial read-through, André closed the wine list and picked up the menu.

  “What looks good?”

  This was my cue to take it from the top. My first rule in dining out is to avoid the following: tuna tartare, fried calamari, mixed greens, tomato and mozzarella, Caesar salad, roast or grilled chicken, blackened or poached salmon, crab cakes, and the requisite steak. I have nothing against any of these dishes, but when I go out, I don’t want something that (a) even I can make and (b) I have had a million times. André’s one exception to this rule was his personal holy grail: the perfect burger.

  My second rule of dining is never to order the same thing as anyone else in the party unless he or she is ill or stingy. I tended toward rabbit, lamb, anything with polenta, anything with eggs, and esoteric flavor combinations. André gravitated in the direction of sweetbreads, duck, bacon, pork, anything with truffles, and anything involving sausage. No sea urchin for me. No coconut for him. It went without saying that the kitschiest item on the menu deserved a chance—sweetbread poppers, fried pickles, fried Mars bars, grits, mac and cheese, fried chicken, creamed spinach, and deviled eggs. When the waiter arrived, pad in hand, I had the final say on the menu and André ordered the wine he wanted to drink. He knew I liked sparkling water. I knew he needed the salt close at hand.

  After ordering, we turned our attention to the restaurant, pointing out all of the bad tables in the room and scrutinizing the uniforms. Just thinking about my uniform made my throat constrict and my feet sweat, despite my minimalist black tank top and strappy heels, which were a far cry from the Town Car shoes.

  André made one comment in almost every place we went.

  “If I were going to own a restaurant, it would look something like this.”

  “Hmmm. As opposed to the wine bar last week?”

  “Anyways,” he answered. It was an affectionate André-ism, signifying the end of a discussion, and one I was beginning to love.

  * * *

  • A TIP •

  Don’t send something back after eating most of it.

  * * *

  • the fault, dear bruni •

  tHERE HE WAS again.

  “Good to see you again, sir,” I greeted Mr. Bruni on his fourth visit. “I was just thinking about you the other day!” he answered. He was sitting on table three with someone who, from the ease with which they were chatting, appeared to be a good friend. I pretended to blush. “Wait—no—not like that….”

  He explained that he was thinking about how intensely I had been staring at him during his last visit, while he ate the risotto. Great, I thought to myself. He thinks I’m creepy. What about the managers hiding behind the flower arrangements, weren’t they creepy? What about Gabriel, who had been standing alongside me throughout the meal?

  “Should we pour him more water?”

  “No, don’t cramp him.”

  “Okay, I’ll let him take a few more sips.”

  “Oh, wait [elbow, elbow], he just chugged it. Go pour.”

  “No—you go, I was just there.”

  “His wine is low, too. Don’t let him pour.”

  “Should I take the bottle off the table?”

  “Best not to take a chance.”

  “Did you hear what he just said?”

  “No, but I think it was something about the fish. Should I go say something?”

  And so on.

  I will admit, I had been staring at him, but only because I wanted to know whether he agreed with me that the truffle risotto was close to perfection. I had also been thinking about something that occurred earlier in the evening, before the risotto, and before the “down-home country” incident. Although he and his guests were firm in their resolve to order from the menu, the kitchen had slipped in a custard course as an extra canapé. As he picked up his custard spoon, I noticed that he paused and looked down at his scrambled hen egg with truffle coulis, seeming perplexed.

  “You look perplexed,” I observed.

  “I am. What ma
kes these scrambled eggs any different from my scrambled eggs? Why would a restaurant of this caliber serve a whole course revolving around eggs?”

  I thought about this for a moment. He was right, really. I had never thought to question the custard course. Some of the more virtuosic egg preparations seemed more appropriate: the white truffle-infused custard served in an eggshell or the pickled hen egg with truffle filling made to look like a deviled egg and paired with a tiny truffle “Pop-Tart.” But a soft-boiled, scrambled, or coddled egg was simply an egg, no matter how much truffle coulis you added.

  I dodged the question, babbling instead about the rabbi from whom we bought our eggs and the benefits of a Bonnet stove. When I finally extricated myself from the table, I went straight to the kitchen, where Corey was in the throes of service.

  “Why do we serve eggs?” I asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘why do we serve eggs’?” he responded irritably, stirring something violently over the stove by the pass.

  “I mean, what makes them so special that we would do an entire course around them?” I realized that this was a bad time, but hoped that he might have something I could take back to the table with me.

  “Because they are eggs! Eggs! Do you think we could have this conversation another time?”

  I went back to the dining room with nothing. Clearly, I wasn’t going to go to the table and tell Frank Bruni that we served eggs because they were eggs. I let the question go unanswered and concentrated on more concrete tasks.

  In the days following, I tried to outline a thoughtful response for Mr. Bruni, should he come back. After a little digging, I came across an essay by Michelle Wildgen in Tin House titled “Ode to an Egg.” In it, I found references to Hemingway’s characters eating eggs in such a way as to foretell their fate. A few lines later, came a magical quote by M. F. K. Fisher: “Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.” I read musings on the sound of the word egg, on its shape, and on its meaning: “At times I think the nutmeg speckling on a blue egg is as much as we can hope for.” Perhaps the best lines in the piece were her last: “The egg is drama and succor, birth and parenthood, sex and death, the start and the finish. The egg is inevitable.” I photocopied the essay for those in my life who would appreciate it. I even left a copy on Corey’s desk. But would I be able to convey any of this to Mr. Bruni?

  “I’ve been considering what you said about the scrambled eggs,” I told him on his next visit. Although I couldn’t really explain why the egg deserved its own course, I believed wholeheartedly that it did, if only for its solitary perfection. He nodded and seemed to agree, but he might have been humoring me.

  Not surprisingly, Corey and I never discussed the drama and succor of the inevitable egg. It was just my luck that almost every time Mr. Bruni came in, Corey was expediting in the kitchen. In some ways, I felt as if I had critics on both fronts. In other ways, I felt that Corey and I were partners whether we liked it or not. Especially in times like these, with so much at stake, it is easy to lose touch with the symbiotic relationship between front and back of the house. From my perspective, the review would be about the food; there was only so much spin I could put on a lukewarm cobia or the world’s best scrambled eggs. According to the kitchen, however, there was quite a bit I could do to screw it up.

  Per Se had no cameras in the dining room, and the chefs had to rely on my observations and the truth of a clean plate. God help the captain or runner who returned to the kitchen holding a plate with food left over and could not give a satisfying explanation as to why it was not finished. Each time I returned with plates, I found the expectant and terrified eyes of Corey or J.B., and certainly of the chef de partie of that particular station. When the fish plates came back, it was the fish cook who was standing on his tiptoes to see the plate; when meat came back not entirely finished, it was the meat cook who picked up the scraps and squeezed them to feel if they were overcooked.

  There was no meat to be squeezed or any other major upsets during Mr. Bruni’s fourth visit. It was a shorter meal because he and his friend ordered from the five-course menu and requested not to be sent anything other than what they ordered. It seemed that he was really trying to experience the restaurant as an average guest. They spoke mainly to each other, and asked only a few questions about the food. Even so, I analyzed every comment and gesture. I watched Mr. Bruni read the menu; I watched his face as he ate; I watched where his eyes fell and what caught his interest in the dining room. I studied his credit card, on which the name Dirk McKenzie appeared, and wondered if he built different personas around each of his identities. The more I watched Frank Bruni, the more fixated I became. I recently read in a study that people who watch a lot of television believe they have more friends than those who don’t. The more a face becomes familiar, the closer you feel to that person, even if they show up once a week behind a square piece of glass.

  “You’re scaring me,” André said that night as I went over Mr. McKenzie’s dinner in minute detail. “They’re only stars.”

  “Only stars? You are so clearly not from New York.” Neither was I, for that matter, but I loved it more. But maybe he was right. I needed to put this whole review thing out of my mind for a while.

  MY COUSIN OWEN was getting married in Vermont, so I asked André if he’d like to go. Even though we were free to roam the city together these days, I still had pangs of guilt when he went home at six in the morning. Was Leigh staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep? Would she even ask where he had been? It would be a relief to have some time together in another setting.

  “It’ll be great. We can stay in a little bed-and-breakfast and eat pancakes. There’ll be cows!”

  “We have cows in Texas, you know,” he said. But he agreed to go, and I reserved us a rental car.

  We would drive up early on Saturday morning on the day of the wedding, and drive back the next day, in time for both of us to work dinner. It wasn’t much time, but compared to the hours both of us usually worked, it was a long weekend. At three o’clock in the morning on Saturday, André called.

  “Why are you whispering?” I asked, trying to wake up enough to make sense out of his call.

  “I’m in the bathroom.”

  “Whose bathroom?” Now I was awake.

  He slurred something about being at a party and having found a car for us to borrow.

  “Don’t drive!” I yelled into the phone. I was sitting stark naked on the arm of my couch by the window where the reception was better.

  After we hung up, I sent him a text message suggesting that we meet at my favorite bakery on Columbus at ten and pick up the car together. I figured that, not being too far from his apartment, it was fairly hangover-proof.

  I got there early, as I tend to do, and considered my options if he didn’t show. I don’t drive, so renting a car by myself was out. I suppose there was always a bus, but that would be tight. I called. No answer. I left a message asking where he was.

  “On my way,” he wrote in a text message. I went outside to wait.

  Because I had no idea what kind of car to look for, I didn’t notice the white minivan pull up at 10:30 until I heard honking. André waved and grinned from the window. He was wearing his picnic basket shirt and looked a little like a soccer dad whose other car was something small and red. I grabbed my turquoise hatbox by its plastic looped handle and crossed the street to meet André. I bought that hatbox at a thrift store in Williamsburg after envisioning just such an occasion.

  “Leigh said to tell you hello,” André said as I climbed into the front seat.

  “Well, that was nice of her.”

  “Actually she hollered it from the window when I was halfway down the block.”

  “Ah.” I strapped myself in. “But here you are. How’d you score the wheels?”

  “It’s my wine rep’s mother’s car. We had dinner at some guy’s house last night. I think they were supposed to be having a date, but the date kept talking
to his sister and my rep kept talking to me.”

  “She probably wants to sleep with you.”

  “You think?” He looked over at me and winked. “Too bad I’m taken.”

  “And then some,” I said with a dramatic roll of my eyes and turned around to see if the mother of the woman who wanted to sleep with my boyfriend had a map somewhere.

  With our late start and the miles to cover, we would barely make the wedding. I called the bed-and-breakfast in Brattleboro where I had made a reservation and told them that we would have to check in that night. It was late summer and it seemed that the farther we drove from Manhattan’s gray skyline, the roads just kept getting smaller and the trees greener. The town where Owen, his future bride, and their baby had settled was barely even a town. I would call it a village, a hamlet, or maybe just a few people and a post office.

  “There’s a bunch of cars in the driveway of that house,” I said as we drove over a single-lane bridge.

  “Which house?”

  By the time I turned around to point, we had reached the end of the town. We went back and parked near the other cars. At the top of a little hill was a big red barn and tucked against the side of the hill, a tent. I climbed into the back of the van and put on the red taffeta dress that I had found at another thrift shop in Williamsburg. It seemed like festive wedding attire when I had tried it on at home, but I now had second thoughts. I had forgotten, once again, that this was the land of round-toed shoes and earth tones. I was wearing pointy black boots with my red taffeta. André looked dapper, as always, in his tweed jacket and brown loafers without socks. Suddenly, it occurred to me that he was about to meet my family. I hadn’t really thought about that.