Number One Chinese Restaurant

by Lillian Li

  “Certainly,” he said, through clenched teeth.

  Jimmy was about to hand the plate to a passing busboy, but something told him to take a closer look. He’d demonstrated each new dish to his cooks, had them replicate the recipe once, and the taste had been fine. But was the burger in front of him the same one he’d invented during his time at Koi? What if the flavors didn’t match up under the pressure of a busy service? He carried the plate into an empty waiter station, and after looking around, he tore off a piece for himself. Chewing slowly, he hoped for a problem, missing salt or too much sesame oil. But it was the exact burger the cooks had made for him in demonstration. The only difference was that, at the time, Jimmy had cared only that his staff could make the burger. On such short notice, he had had to hire his cooks through a less-than-reputable Chinese agency. With the clock racing and no chef in charge, he had settled for good enough. Now he had to admit that the flavors were there, but they were muddy. Clumsy. Unrefined. He could come up with a hundred words all saying the same thing, which was that he’d hired a bunch of fresh-off-the-boat village boys to make a gourmet meal. He shoved the burger into a takeout container, wishing he could throw it in the trash, where it would be the next day anyway. He intercepted Annie and told her to rewrite the menu, scratch everything that hadn’t been at the Duck House. She could alert the waiters and the kitchen while she was at it. Then he circled back to drop off the woman’s burger.

  “Excuse me,” she said, before he could leave. “There’s something off about the fried rice. You can take it away.”

  The back of Jimmy’s neck prickled.

  “I’m so sorry.” He grabbed the half-finished platter. “I’ll get a new one made for you. It will only be a minute.”

  “No thanks,” her date said. “We’re actually pretty full.”

  “Just the check, please,” she said.

  “I’ll let your waiter know. The fried rice is on the house.” Jimmy hustled into the nearest waiter station and shooed away a busboy packing up a barely eaten order of kimchi nachos. Snatching the serving spoon out of the busboy’s hand, Jimmy dug into the plate of fried rice. He almost spat out the lumpy spoonful. How could something be oversalted and flavorless at the same time?

  Hindsight yanked him back hard. He hadn’t shown the kitchen how to cook something as basic as the Duck House dishes. Any Chinese cook could stir-fry protein, vegetable, and sauce. Had he hired cooks so new that they couldn’t even make what this country called Chinese food? Were the other Chinese dishes coming out of the kitchen this terrible? It had never occurred to him that the food at his restaurant might fall short of his father’s. He looked around, trying to study the people around him, people he’d spent so many meals with that he could intuit their appetites with a glance. The tables that had gotten their Duck House entrées seemed to be not only eating the food but also enjoying it. Maybe this fried rice was a one-off.

  He checked his phone again. Janine was minutes from arriving. What would she say about the food? And what about her damn son? Back at her table, Jimmy grabbed the steel RESERVED plate and rubbed fiercely at the smudged fingerprints. He pulled the tablecloth one way, then the other, then put his nose close to the seat cushions to check for crumbs. He was balancing on the balls of his feet, peering under the table, when he smelled her perfume and nearly came undone.

  “Here’s the table our owner has set aside for you,” he heard Annie recite. “Though I don’t know what he’s doing right now.”

  “Something wrong with our table?” Janine asked.

  Jimmy spun around. Janine was dressed professionally, but her hair was relaxed, in loose curls that he wished he could wrap his fingers around. Her son was at her side. He was small for his age, delicate like his mother, and pale, as if he didn’t see much of the sun. Already grim-faced, he looked like trouble.

  “It’s perfect,” Jimmy said.

  “Isn’t that nice, Eddie?” she asked her son, who reached out to hold her hand. “Uncle Jimmy gave us the best table in the house.”

  “You can watch the chefs work.” Jimmy pointed to the semi-open kitchen. He didn’t know whether to bend down or hunch over the kid. He leaned against the seat back.

  “Thank you for getting us in,” Janine said. “It’s so crowded! You must be thrilled.”

  A few tables over, someone clapped. Visible from the kitchen window, a cook flambéed bananas, the fire electric blue in his saucepan.

  “It’s only the first night,” Jimmy said. “Once I trash the Duck House menu, who knows who’ll come back?”

  “Stop assuming the world is full of cheap bastards.” She whispered the last word conspiratorially. Eddie squirmed past Jimmy’s legs to climb into his seat. The little boy’s shoves were surprisingly rough, and Jimmy nearly pushed back.

  “I’m going to be your waiter this evening.” Jimmy fixed his plain patterned tie and took the menus from Annie. He almost faltered, struck by a funny smell coming off his niece. But he recovered quickly and dismissed her with the butt of his hand.

  “How special,” Janine said to her son. She’d settled into the chair next to Eddie. “Did you hear that?” She leaned in, touching her head to his.

  “Yeah,” the boy said. He was pretending to be distracted by his chopsticks, which were made of laminated wood. He let them fall from his fingers, until they finally rolled off the table.

  “He’s used to the lighter, break-apart kind,” Janine said.

  “I’m sure the carryout station has plenty of those,” Jimmy said. “I’ll send over some drinks and be right back with your utensils, sir.” He tousled Eddie’s hair, or, rather, his scalp, since his hair was buzzed short. The boy gnashed his teeth at Jimmy’s hand. Janine grabbed her son by the point of his chin and gave him a light shake. Jimmy wished she had been a little harsher.

  The duck arrived soon at Janine’s table. Jimmy had ordered the kitchen to jump the line. Nan was their assigned carver. Jimmy took a seat across from Janine and the boy.

  Nan was clumsier than the other carvers, who’d spent years practicing at the Duck House. Her hands were still sensitive to the hot grease that spurted from the duck. They were red underneath her plastic gloves and she sprang back, if only a few centimeters, each time the fat burned her.

  “Doesn’t this look yummy?” Janine asked her son.

  The boy reached out and took a strip of skin, so quickly that Jimmy almost didn’t see his hand move. He stuck the piece in his mouth and sucked on it.

  “You should wait to put that on a pancake,” Jimmy said. “Then you can use the plum sauce and the green onions.”

  “Don’t they wrap the first pancake for you?” Janine asked. “You should wait, honey, for the nice lady to show you how it’s done.”

  “He his own master.” Nan put the first plate of meat in front of Eddie. She knew better than to tell Janine that waiters wrapped the first pancakes.

  “He’s very independent,” Janine agreed.

  “I can wrap your pancakes while Nan keeps working on her carving,” Jimmy said.

  “So generous. Eddie, watch an expert at work.”

  The boy continued to suck on his strip of skin, which had gone limp in his hand. He looked intently at his plate. Jimmy grabbed a hot pancake from the silver serving bowl and dotted the dough with plum sauce. He grabbed a few sprigs of cut scallions with his chopsticks, as well as a slice of duck meat and a slice of crispy skin. Then he wrapped the pancake closed like a burrito and handed it to the boy.

  “He touched it.” Eddie shrank away from the pancake as if it had hissed at him. “He didn’t wash his hands before he touched it.”

  “Of course I did.” Jimmy dropped the pancake on the boy’s plate and held his hands up in front of him.

  “Stop making a fuss,” Janine said. She took the pancake and made a show of biting into it. “It’s very tasty. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  Nan had finished carving the duck and was waiting awkwardly. Jimmy stood up and whispered
for her to bring him three serving spoons.

  “If Mr. Eddie doesn’t want me using my hands, I’ll go old school.” He planted himself at the front of the table. His thighs pressed against the edge. Nan came back around quickly, her hands freed from their plastic wrap, and passed on three medium-size oval spoons. He wove two through the fingers of his right hand. He held the remaining spoon loosely in his left.

  “Wow!” Janine was already applauding. She’d put down her hand-rolled pancake, which slowly came undone on her plate.

  Jimmy hadn’t assumed this server’s position in well over a decade, and he fumbled a few tries before the spoons fit into their grooves and became makeshift tongs in his hand. He pried a pancake off the pile and onto a plate; pincered the meat, skin, and scallions; and dolloped sauce with his third, free spoon. The entire process was going smoothly, though for some reason Nan was hanging back. As if her presence jinxed him, he pressed his spoon a little too hard against the pancake’s belly. The thin dough split; plum sauce oozed out.

  “It’s been a little while.” He put down his dirty spoons and Nan took over. She’d brought a second set. As always, her preparedness left Jimmy defused when he’d rather have exploded. He couldn’t watch her correct his shoddy job. He muttered an excuse about checking in with the kitchen.

  He didn’t even get halfway there. At table 10, a waiter was cleaning bones off a customer’s plate with his bare hands. He seized each chop as if he were about to pick it clean. It seemed to Jimmy that half the tables were still waiting for their food, that customers were tripping over one another to get to the bathroom. The layout of the seats was slightly imprecise; people couldn’t push out their chairs without colliding straight into others. The tables themselves were meant to hold much smaller plates, and with no lazy Susans outfitting the larger groups, people dipped their shirtsleeves into their soup when they reached across the table for wonton chips. One peek into the kitchen confirmed it. Nothing fit together. Food was dying under the heat lamps. Order slips were on the ground. The new amigos couldn’t communicate with the Chinese cooks, who couldn’t understand the American waiters. The Duck House’s ecosystem had always seemed haphazard to Jimmy, but he now realized it had had an internal logic, one he had not thought to construct for the Glory. His father would have laughed in his face. It was easy to imagine what else his father would or would not have done.

  His father wouldn’t have hired amigos who’d never worked in a Chinese kitchen or Americans with tongues too lazy to learn the sounds that came from the back of the house. His father wouldn’t have gone into debt for a flashy space surrounded by restaurants far more comfortable in their flashiness. The new place was everything his father distrusted. The outdoor patio would bring vermin and beggars. The partially exposed kitchen made even less sense. Who wanted to watch a fat cook scratch his ass and bang his wok? The floor plan was too open, the lighting too bright, and where, pray tell, was Jimmy going to find the time to clean all those windows? “Why do people need a view?” his father would have asked. “They’ll be sitting in their seats for hours.”

  But his father had been blocked in by his own golden bricks, his dreams compressed like a watermelon grown in a cinder block. Jimmy had different plans. He was not going to be so obsessed with monthly returns; he was going to focus on the big picture. He was finally going to get his hands on the status that had eluded his family, rich as they were, or had been. He was going to grow that intangible capital that reached where money couldn’t go. But in this strident difference, would Jimmy elude the money as well? Would his restaurant drag him down, taking his apartment, Janine, his family, his livelihood, with it? He’d spent his entire life working in a restaurant; he’d never graduated from college. If they charged him with insurance fraud, he would have a record on top of everything. How could a restaurant this fucking big feel so small? A fist formed around Jimmy’s lungs. Steel fingers crushed the air out as soon as he sucked in. Yet with each cruel squeeze of his chest, there followed an opposite reaction. One of expanding heat, energizing heat. Anger built deep in his gut, until his body hummed from the need to do some necessary violence.

  He set off for the waiter with the tray full of bones, a moon-faced white boy named Tom. He pulled him into the nearest station, where the other new servers could overhear. Grabbing Tom by the wrist, Jimmy forced him to look at the greasy print on his palm.

  “Are you an animal?” Jimmy asked. Tom shook his head. Jimmy grabbed the plate of bones off his tray and threw it to the ground. “Use your spoons to pick up the bones, like I taught you.” He left Tom on his knees, spoons clinking together. The waiters who’d stopped to look quickened their pace.

  Swinging by the coat closet, Jimmy hung up his jacket and pushed up his sleeves. Then he headed toward the kitchen. He threw the first cook—a large, stooped man with one bloodshot eye—off the line. Taking his place in front of the flaming wok, Jimmy motioned for the others to give him their tickets. He gave half to the one veteran cook in the entire kitchen, a grizzled man who rubbed the white stubble on his chin as he received the tickets with an otherwise neutral face.

  “Throw out your food,” Jimmy shouted in wooden Chinese. He tied on an apron. He had the cooks gather as closely around the wok as the narrow space allowed. “Pay attention. Then you cook like me.”

  He cranked the burner as high as it would go, until the air in front of his face shimmered with heat. Then he dropped his ladle into the drum of peanut oil by the wok, pouring it straight into the pan.

  “Always more oil,” he demanded. “More, even more.”

  He swirled the oil around in his wok, coating the entire surface, then poured the oil back into the drum. Filling his ladle partway again, he wet the wok with one more splash of oil and cracked eggs into the gleaming puddle. Stirring the yellow around, he grabbed a container of rice, dumped it in. Mixing the rice into the oil and eggs, he lifted the wok with his left hand. One heavy flick and the rice transformed into a wave, cresting over the edge of the rim and breaking back down into the center of the pan.

  “Again.” He tasted sweat as he flipped the fried rice three more times. “Do it until your wrist breaks.” While he rested his hand, he pressed the rice down with the back of his ladle, until each individual grain was crisping in oil. He handed the wok back to its owner, instructing him to toss the rice until he saw it dance. Then he took over the next wok, refilling his ladle with oil.

  He moved down the line, wok by wok. He left a new cook to finish each dish he started. He showed them how to boil vegetables in a spider perched over hot water and how to measure everything with their ladle, from salt to soy sauce to green onions. He demonstrated kung pao shrimp, instructing the cooks how long to fry the peanuts and how to jostle the frying cage to make sure the oil dropped off the nuts. They saw how to coat thin slices of flank steak with cornstarch for extra-crispy Mongolian beef and how to precook chunks of chicken in deep oil in their woks. By the time he reached the veteran cook, taking just over fifteen minutes, his line was busy again and he was free to wipe the sweat from his eyes.

  “Give them back their tickets,” he told the old cook, clapping him on the back. Around him, the kitchen was alive with fire and fragrance. Iron clanked against steel, and the smell of sizzling meat turned heavy in the air.

  The first cook, the one with the bloodshot eye, finished his dish. He presented his plate, his nose running from the heat. Jimmy grabbed a nearby spoon and carved into the mound of fried rice. He barely tasted the perfect combination of salt and grease before he bit down hard on the spoon, his teeth aching against the metal. Dirty tasting spoon in mouth, he was the spitting image of his father.

  Dizzy from the heat of the burners, Jimmy stumbled out of the kitchen’s back exit and onto the alley street outside. He needed air. But the cramped Georgetown quarters were no less claustrophobic. Three pairs of shoes hung on the telephone wires above his head. Graffiti tagged the high brick walls. He got down into a crouch, feeling his pants stretch
dangerously, and tried to count out his breaths. He reached back for something to prop himself against. He settled for a locked bike. Why was he panicking? The first night was always a terror. The first year, even. Once his mother gave up the house, once they caught the fire setter, he would feel more like himself. He would redesign the menu, retrain the staff, and throw out anything and anyone who didn’t fit. He would take the chef position until he found someone suitable. With the house on the market, he could remake the restaurant in his own image and not his father’s or Koi’s. That was all he had to do. He focused on the patch of moss growing from where the brick met the pavement. It was nothing. Truly nothing.

  Out of nowhere, a four-fingered hand reached down and brushed a hair off his shoulder. Jimmy lost his hold on the bike’s crusted wheel.

  “How’s your opening night?” The corners of Uncle Pang’s eyes wrinkled.

  “What the fuck?” Jimmy gasped; he’d lost whatever grip he’d had over his breathing. A fat diamond of pain inserted itself between his eyes.

  “Your mother called,” Uncle Pang said. A black BMW idled next to them against the curb. How had Jimmy not seen it on his way out of the restaurant?

  “Why is she calling you?”

  “I’m a friend of the family.”

  “You’re not my friend.” Jimmy struggled to right himself.

  “You always say that. But I’m afraid you inherited me.” Uncle Pang offered a hand. Jimmy ignored it; he felt safer crouched.

  “My father’s fault.”

  Uncle Pang flicked Jimmy hard on the knobby tip of his nose.

  “Don’t speak ill of the dead.” He’d switched to Chinese for his superstitions. “Especially not the dead who raised you.”

  “What do you want!” Jimmy clutched his nose. “Do you want the Glory? It’s going to be a giant, money-sucking hellhole, just like you said. Happy now?”

  “I’m surprised you’re not more thankful.” Uncle Pang smoothed his black tie against his chest. A breeze brought the smell of the marina into the alley.