“You don’t have to say it,” she said quietly. “We both understand.” There would be a measure of disappointment on both sides. It couldn’t be helped.
And so, that spring, The Monkey’s Paw did open. A narrow fifty-seater on Cambie Street in Vancouver’s Crosstown neighbourhood, edgy but with cheap rents. They served bistro fare on a fixed price menu that changed daily with what could be found in Chinatown that morning. A restaurant other chefs would go to. Local but not dogmatic. It wasn’t a question of being opposed to imported ingredients, but of preference, of allegiance, of knowing what goodness came from the earth around you, from the soil under your feet.
The typical dinner chalkboard read:
Prix Fixe Menu:
$24.00
Down:
Pacific wild prawns
Saltspring Island chevre with toasties
Set:
Fraser Valley free-range duck breast, roasted
Lime-marinated sockeye salmon, grilled
All with inspirational sauces and seasonal veggies.
More details? Just ask.
Hutt:
Jules’s increasingly famous dessert trolley. Get some.
They riffed on sauces, using classical motifs: pear-mustard, chive-cream, shallot-ginger, roasted fennel. It was simple, coherent, Blood cooking in a relais-style room with six nights of Sunday nights.
They had two people out front—Zeena and Dominic—who worked the whole room without zones. Service was enthusiastic and knowledgeable. They went over each new menu item as a group before dinner service.
The room itself was simple: planked wood floors, a single vaulted front window next to a blue door with a centre brass knob. Tables and chairs from Ikea. North wall, brick; south wall painted dark brown to the five-foot mark to simulate wainscotting. The art work was haphazard, the product of piece-by-piece collection at local art-college auctions: etchings, woodcuts, off-kilter portrait photography and a large neo-classical still life with a menacing quality Jeremy couldn’t identify. Jules donated three metal sculptures by a student artist named Fenton Sooner, who had gone on to enter high-profile collections, including (rumour had it) Steve Martin’s. Stylized birds, thought Jeremy, who named the trio Heckle, Jeckle and Hide. They were worth more than all the other art in the restaurant combined, more than the furniture, but they held much greater value to Jeremy and Jules in the image of perseverance that they provided. Fenton Sooner stuck with it, completed the fraught transition from apprenticeship to recognition, and his crows were an emblem of gawky tenacity.
In the black-and-white-tiled kitchen, meanwhile, Jeremy and Jules had their fun at very close quarters. They had a single wood-topped prep area, an old Vulcan-Hart range with a chrome hood, where they worked side by side on the mains and the hot appetizers. There was an L-shaped pass-through in the middle of the room, where they rotated during dinner to deal with cold appetizers and salads. Jules rolled into yet a third position, desserts, as each evening wound to a close. With a dishwasher arriving late to clear the dish pit, there was barely room for anybody else.
The neighbourhood offered a shifting multicultural client base that nobody could consciously target. Film school kids in the mid-morning. (It was a financial necessity to open for the coffee trade.) Business lunches for the kind of businesses that embraced neighbourhoods in the earliest stages of gentrification: architects, designers, software developers. After work they had a bike-courier scene. And in the evening, a tantalizing trickle of those foodies and reviewers adventurous enough to dine out deep on the downtown east side, pushing up against the Hastings Street heroin trade. It was a colourful, kaleidoscopic place. Very Crosstown, very X-town.
And early in the new year, less than twelve months after opening, their efforts earned them the stunned, awe-struck, hyperbole-strewn praise of one Anya Dickie.
“Did you read the paper?” Jules asked him the morning the review hit the newsstands. “ ‘Crosstown Celebrates Local Beverages and Bounty.’ She likes us.”
“She likes a lot of places,” Jeremy said. Bloods could also be suspicious on occasion.
“Oh, very nice,” Jules answered, pinning the review to the cork board outside the front door.
“She liked that tower of tuna and spinach and yam wafers topped with mango chutney at that cream-coloured Crip palace over in Yaletown. What’s that place? The Tea Grill.”
“Hey,” Jules said, holding the door for him as they went back inside. “I happened to like that tower of tuna and spinach and … not yam wafer …”
“You can’t even remember. Was it a fruit? A vegetable?”
“I didn’t make it personally,” she said, faux-haughty. “But I recall it was popular.”
Jules Capelli was not a Crip, but she was different than Jeremy despite her sympathies to his cause. She believed, primarily, that restaurants were themselves organic. Crip, Blood, whatever it was you were consciously trying to do only had so much impact—you grew a reputation in the divinely haphazard way that trees grew roots and leaves. Being as small as they were, being as flexible, being as fresh sheet as they could be, every day, with a natural, loping and very personal spontaneity that suited her so well—these facts, Jules serenely held, told the story of how they had become Who They Were.
Of course, Jules didn’t pay the bills.
People rarely set out to kite in a controlled way. More often financial kites soar out of sight with terrifying speed, the virtual string burning through your fingers. Jeremy could remember precisely how his own went aloft. It started with his line of credit at the Toronto Dominion Bank, $230,000 guaranteed by Dante Beale. He’d used the largest part of it to buy used kitchen equipment, Ikea furniture, glass and flatware, and decorate the front room. The remainder he had used monthly to buy fish, meat and vegetables. They were slow months, those first few, slower than he fully realized, and ninety days later—twelve weeks of black cod, salmon caviar, roebuck saddle, fresh rabbit and Saltspring Island chevre—the TD Bank rang to point out that his account was overdrawn by several thousand dollars.
He misunderstood at first, and asked cheerily: “Isn’t that what a line of credit is for?”
His account manager, one Custer Quan, broke it to him more gently than he would have if Jeremy didn’t have a heavy-hitting friend like Dante Beale and Inferno International Coffee. There was no more available credit, Quan explained. The Monkey’s Paw was maxed out.
Jeremy remembered processing the news slowly, considering all the cheques he had written in the last twenty-four hours. Forty pounds of fresh sockeye salmon. Fraser Valley foie gras. A crate of arugula. Beck’s from the Liquor Board. There were undoubtedly more that he didn’t remember.
He promised Quan a deposit and hung up the phone, sweating, glad Jules wasn’t in yet. And then it came to him, fully formed. He wouldn’t have known he could be creative in this way. He took his TD Visa card—which, along with an Amex card, were the two other items Dante had facilitated—and drew a sufficiently large cash advance from an automated teller machine. Deposited this amount in his personal chequing account, which had been empty ever since he opened The Paw. And knowing there had to be something wrong with a manoeuvre so simple, he then deposited a personal cheque into his Monkey’s Paw account to cover outstanding obligations.
He was still sweating, but the cheques would clear.
Nobody was the wiser until his maxed out TD Visa statement arrived at the end of the month. Then Quan phoned Dante, Dante phoned Jeremy, and Jeremy had to sort everything out again with another deposit that nobody could have anticipated. He had a bit of cash on hand by then, but he also had several new credit cards which he had applied for in the meantime.
“Do we need to talk about anything?” Dante said. But he was busy, Jeremy knew, and happy not to.
And with that, The Monkey’s Paw kite was aloft and pulling hard, a ring of minimum payments chasing minimum payments. Jeremy paid the interest on the line of credit religiously, before any other obligation (an
d Dante was still his friend), so Quan continued to provide glowing credit references. Two credit cards became four, and those cards flushed out solicitations from still other credit cards until there was a cast of six, then nine unwitting lenders.
Things finally stabilized after the Dickie review. The Monkey’s Paw began to break even about two days in three, a significant improvement and not too soon. By that time Jeremy had a petrified $200,000 line of credit, four Visas, three MasterCards and a Diners Club. He had other, unused cards in his wallet, which he had no clear idea he would ever need: Canadian Tire, Household Finance Corporation, cards that were sent to him pre-approved at unlikely levels. It occurred to him these might be needed in a crisis to make minimum payments on the ones that had come before. But as long as nobody cancelled a card on him or demanded immediate payment in full, Jeremy desperately calculated that he could keep this whole thing flying until The Monkey’s Paw actually became profitable. Then he would slowly reel the kite back to earth.
What he needed was a break, some kind of special exposure to get the mainstream foodies into Crosstown.
His big chance in this regard might have been Brollywood, Vancouver’s rainier version of the L.A. television and movie scene (and so christened by the flattered local press corps). The Monkey’s Paw was no Le Cirque but, since the Dickie review, recognizable faces had been appearing occasionally from the cast and production staff of a television show shot largely in the Crosstown neighbourhood. Last Chapter was a show about all things paranormal, paranoid, concerning aliens, conspiracies or the sudden appearance of large amounts of ectoplasm. All this activity supposedly taking place in the new-millennial glow of an American city for which Vancouver was a cost-effective stand-in.
Jeremy had never watched the show, but that was hardly the point. Last Chapter was an international hit; it spawned rip-off shows, many of which were also filmed in Vancouver. It was all he could do to resist phoning the newspapers when one of the stars appeared at dinner and ordered something not on the chalkboard. One picture on page three, he thought. Michael Duke in The Monkey’s Paw Bistro, Chef Jeremy serving. One Malcolm Perry thumbnail snap and they’d be made.
“Greetings friends.” Jeremy had seen Michael Duke’s car pull up and was ready for them. Duke was suited in brown chalk stripe, fedora pulled low, adhering to celebrity convention by being smaller than you’d expect. He wore unusually pale blue contact lenses.
“Hey there,” Duke said, seeing Jeremy and extending a limp hand. As always, he adopted a sleepy expression and tone, which one assumed Duke felt was removed and sensual, but which veered dangerously near to making him sound like he’d sustained a head injury at some point.
Michael Duke was with Luke Lucas, no relation to George. Lucas was the producer of Last Chapter, a normal off-camera-sized man, but clearly Brollywood. You could tell from the black suiting with sterling silver bits. He was jowly but otherwise trim, thinning on top, a preserved fortyish with simultaneous softness and meanness in the features. With his manicured fingers that tapered almost to points, Lucas radiated an absurd, carnivorous health that Jeremy associated with the biz like which there is no biz.
When they were seated, Jeremy sprinted back to the kitchen to let Jules know. He wasn’t sure why he bothered; she refused to be impressed by TV people.
“What do you recommend?” Lucas asked.
Jeremy suggested the roast duck breast with peach green-peppercorn sauce. “It’s quite light, really. I’m sure you’ll like it.” Please like it, he thought.
“Luke is vegetarian,” Duke murmured through a smile.
“I’ll have the pasta,” Lucas declared.
“That is made with squid, I’m afraid,” Jeremy said.
On vegetarianism benchmarks, Lucas announced: “I don’t eat stuff that can think. Squid can’t think.”
Jeremy checked back on them when they were finished, hands clasped earnestly in front of himself. They were talking about this 1996 Vancouver spring, which had yet to manifest itself in sunshine.
“It kind of … you know,” Duke thought carefully about his choice of words, “… gets me down. This rain. Down.”
“Rain or not, the thing I like about Vancouver,” Lucas said, looking up at Jeremy, “you can make it look like any city on earth.”
“I should go to Cozumel,” Duke murmured to himself. “Sun will warm me.”
“That was very good.” Lucas was now looking down at his plate.
“Thank you,” Jeremy said, pleased. “I really hope you’ll both come back and try us again, and if I knew you were coming, I could prepare something vegetarian—”
“But when did you go Italian?” Lucas cut him off.
Internally, Jeremy winced. Fresh red and yellow tomatoes flavoured with minced capers, garlic, some lemon. Lightly sautéed squid. They were umido-inspired flavours, sure, but local everything except the capers. And here his target market had no idea that the dish was grown in this place, was of this place. Of the hard blue ocean full of this squid and that rain. Of the hands that gutted and cleaned and sliced and sautéed those squid, and the tongue that tasted it, and goddamnit, in the end it was better not to think about it too much because You, sir, are a fucking Crip.
“We try a lot of different flavours,” he began, not sure where he was going with this equivocating response, but the question, thankfully, turned out to have been more rhetorical than anything. Already Duke was beginning to murmur about how maybe Tuscany would be better than Cozumel.
“Have fun in Tuscany or Cozumel,” Jeremy said smiling, holding the door for them.
Jules, returning later to her theme of organic growth and spontaneous creativity said: “You’re right in trying to make them happy, but you can’t worry too much if they don’t get it. The point is that in here—between you and me—that stuff just happens. Remember when Xiang started bringing in those Maris Piper potatoes? What did they become?”
Among other things, Jules was the queen of unexpected illustrations.
“Ten things we didn’t expect,” she continued. “Vodka-potato soup.”
“Killer,” Jeremy said, remembering.
“Roasted with the garlic cloves and lemon,” she said. “Mashed with dill and mustard. Potato galette.”
“You’re right.”
“So we riffed, baby. We get stuff and riff. That’s what we do. That’s how we stay honest. That’s Who We Are.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Jeremy said, inspired again.
“The thing about TV people.,” she continued, assuming her self-evident-statement pose. She put a hand on a hip, still holding a spoon sticky with olive tapenade, her head tossed slightly back, eyes gazing at a spot above and to the left of Jeremy, where hovered (he was sometimes forced to presume) a cloud of obvious insights visible to the world but outside his own peripheral vision. “The thing about them is that they come and they go. Which is why they work on locations. So don’t build your business plan around TV people unless you’re planning to open a string of poison wagons, and Jay, my darling, I ain’t slapping together falafels in the back of a poison wagon even for you.”
Being contrapuntal was a good part of her significant appeal, thought Jeremy during these speeches.
“So, honey. What’s tonight?” she said then.
“Chilliwack rock doves.”
“And what’s up with that?”
“Pear-brandy glaze,” Jeremy said. “Roasted.”
“You see?” Jules said, lifting her chin slightly, as if to capture the aroma of a typical Papier-Capelli idea.
She was so unimpeachably wonderful, he always had to pin reminder notes to these thoughts that they were friends, just friends. Although he allowed himself the pleasure, as she turned again to her tapenade, to observe how Jules wore her subtle oppositions physically. The black eyebrows and hair. The strong nose, firm square shoulders, athletic legs and powerful hands. These things opposed by a fragile, feminine mouth and vulnerable eyes, with their pale green irises
forming the narrowest of rings around the pupils. Expressive in two distinct ways. Sometimes, watching her eyes, Jeremy thought he saw right back to the child that he imagined Jules had been. An odd, quiet and beautiful girl. Tough in the school yard. Stronger than the teasing boys from her grade-school classes. Streets smarter, then and now.
“The Snub notwithstanding, we have a good thing going,” Jules was saying, gently folding the tapenade.
“The Snub,” he said, shaking his head. It still annoyed him almost a full year later.
Just after opening, they had inquired about participating in a local foodie festival called Seasons of Local Splendour. The event was held on a farm—with the migraine-inducing name Garrulous Greens—where twenty or thirty local chefs and vintners would hand out samples from kiosks. Crowds of foodie and organic farming enthusiasts would descend on the farm, and mill about nibbling food, sipping wine and having their various epiphanies along the lines of: “The food I eat comes from the soil!”
It was a worthwhile event, one they felt especially suited to, but The Monkey’s Paw was rebuffed. Jeremy got a letter saying thank you but that the slate was getting full of “the better known organic and Pacific Northwest restaurants.” They received no encouragement to apply again next year.
Jules hadn’t been fazed in the least. She pointed out that they were starting to get busy, that the people who tried them liked them and that they didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. Their food was local, demonstrably local. Not braying about its localness, just doing it. And with that, the Seasons of Local Splendour Snub became a routine part of the kitchen banter.
“We have the food, sugar,” Jules said. “The foodies will follow.”
“Food is a language,” Jeremy said. “We must keep our sentences simple and coherent.”
“How about: Service in thirty,” Jules said, as she moved over to the big aluminum fridge door, swung it open and disappeared inside.
It was just over a week since he had visited the Professor. Friday morning, and Jeremy stood on the steps of his apartment building, the Stanley Park Manor, contemplating the street with some dissatisfaction. It was drizzling, again. What was happening to their spring?
Stanley Park Page 6