“Ordering three goose,” Henk repeated.
“Awesome,” Benny said to Dante, who watched Jeremy finish the second set of prawns before disappearing into the dining room to eat.
Angela put the pieces of goose breast on the grill to get cross-hatch sear marks on the skin. She grilled them to rare on a medium flame to render the fat and finished them in a skillet in a 450-degree oven. The boys were setting up plates.
“Ordering another three goose,” Jeremy said. “OK, pick-up three goose. Doing well everyone.”
The pick-up call meant Joey de Yonker had to plate a ramekin of carrot-ginger purée (pre-cooked and waiting in a bain-marie), Conrad had to wilt beet greens and lay them out in a bed sprinkled with capers and shredded goat cheese, then back to Joey to plate the Turkish couscous. When the breast was finished, Henk would slice it into seven thin slices per serving, fan these across the beet greens and turn to Angela for a single small ladle full of sauce (made by deglazing the skillet with a combination of white wine, beet reduction and demi-glaze). Last thing on the plate was stuffed Walla Walla sweet onion (which Rolando would have prepared at the order call). Jeremy would artfully garnish with a reef knot of watercress and the entrée was good to go.
So, here Rolando had his onion stuffed with red lentil purée seasoned with roasted cardamom hot from under the broiler, and across the way Joey de Yonker was falling steadily into the shit. Joey grabbed his first ramekin, knocked it out on the cutting surface and replated it at the designated eleven o’clock mark with a metal spatula.
“Plates?” Angela said to Henk, the breasts in their pans now fired and ready for cutting.
The next carrot purée stuck in the ramekin, and Joey tried to dig it out with a paring knife. On the plate it looked like somebody had stepped on it.
“OK, J de Y, let’s keep them whole. Take your time and do another one.”
Sensing he was falling behind, Joey knocked the next ramekin out directly onto centre of the china plate, which cracked into six pieces. One hit the floor and smashed.
“Hold the breasts on the rack,” Jeremy said to Angela, and he jogged around the range to help, but now Joey and Rolando were both trying to clean up and Conrad was starting beet greens (which he’d forgotten at the pick-up). And in this six-armed attempt at catch up, Joey knocked over his container of capers onto the grill, where they bounced and sizzled their way across the hot surface, onto the floor and down into the fire.
“Get more capers,” Jeremy said to Joey. Then, when Conrad was back on beet greens where he belonged and Rolando had been redirected to the ramekins of carrot, Jeremy cleaned up the mess himself. Finally: “All right, fire the goose.”
They got them out eventually. None with capers, since Joey never returned. Jeremy went looking for him. He went looking out back. Nothing. He poked his head into his office. Not there.
“Chico, you seen Joey de Yonker back here?” Jeremy asked.
“Last I saw …,” Chico nodded at the RapidAir.
Joey was still in there looking for the capers.
“Right here,” Jeremy said, showing him where they were.
“I screwed up,” Joey said.
“In future,” Jeremy said, “come back to the kitchen if you can’t find something in the cold room. You’ll get pneumonia. And if you get in the juice, I want you to take the standing eight count. You know what that is?”
They walked back into the kitchen, Jeremy’s arm around Joey’s shoulders.
“The standing eight count. You drop a plate, you torch something. I’m yelling at Henk to fire prawns and you realize you are fucked. So. You step back from your station and you tell me what’s happening. You breathe deep for eight seconds, no more, no less, wipe down your counter area. Then you get the hell back in there, all right?”
Despite the lack of capers, both dishes went down huge. Dante was effusive; he came back into the kitchen, with some of the servers, saying, “You see? You see? The man is a genius. I loved the purple goose. What was that sauce? Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know. Sheer genius.”
Later in the day, they broke down the stations and cleaned. He let the squad go. He went for an early evening walk in Stanley Park. It felt like coming home by now. Jeremy walked the trails with certainty, knowing exactly where he was relative to his destination. For so long his father’s camp had been impossible to find, and Jeremy had struggled to understand the topography of the whole. Now, his father at home, writing feverishly, Jeremy found his way in the dark instinctively, feeling between trees whose textures had become individual to him. Western red cedar, western hemlock, Douglas fir, and on the ground too, spiny wood fern and sword fern and foam flower.
Jeremy was home around midnight. He called his father, knowing he would be up.
The Professor gave him the word count for the day. “Two thousand. Not great. Not terrible.” He always asked about the restaurant. How was Dante?
“Dante is Dante,” Jeremy said. “He pays well.”
“No surprise. You made a deal.”
“Not forever,” Jeremy said. “A year maybe. After that, who knows?”
The Professor was interested. “So that’s the plan, is it?”
“That’s part of the plan.”
“And may I know the rest?’
He told the Professor the rest of the plan. Thinking about it beforehand, he had tried guessing his father’s reaction. Now he just spelled it out and waited. And the Professor didn’t laugh like it was funny or comic, didn’t scold like it were dangerous or wrong. He was only thoughtful.
“Practical matters aside,” he said, “it has a certain appeal.”
“It’s a one-time thing,” Jeremy said.
“A Blood overture to Dante’s Crip opera,” the Professor said.
“Not bad,” Jeremy said. “But I was thinking of it more as a tribute.”
The Professor was quiet for a few seconds.
“You all right?” Jeremy asked.
“I’m quite all right,” his father answered, just a tiny bit choked up was all.
And in this way, the days before the opening flew. The kitchen stocking up steadily, his dry goods, his early orders of dairy started filling the RapidAir. The drills were run and rerun. The squad, improving.
Monday the week of the opening, they had a dry-run dinner for the full staff. It was the full menu for the first time. Out front, the servers would rotate through two simulated sittings, which gave everybody a chance to eat and a turn serving. With significant others invited, it was more than enough people to try all the appetizers and entrées, enough people to slam them thoroughly.
Jeremy went out before service and talked to the group. Aside from the familiar faces of Dante, Benny, Albertini Banks and Philip, the room was full of identically gorgeous wait staff and their matching J. Crew perfect dates. All the women were blond. All the men black-haired, lantern jawed. It looked like a room full of candidates for the Biosphere, sleek lustworthy specimens in tight grey pinstripes.
“How’re the underwear?” he said after Dante asked for quiet, and he got a huge laugh.
“They ride up,” someone called from the back. More laughter.
“All right,” Jeremy said, motioning for quiet. “I have never said this in front of a group before, but now is the time to thank Dante Beale for what he has done, for making possible what we all have done here, together, in our underwear.”
Wild applause. He glanced quickly over at Dante to read whether he was cutting the right line through this material. Dante looked serene and pleased, nodding and applauding with his hands out in front of himself, gesturing towards Jeremy as if to say: Not me. There’s the man deserving applause.
“I think it’s the right time to say this,” Jeremy went on, “because I know on Sunday we’re all going to be slammed. You always forget to thank people under that kind of pressure. And so: Dante, thanks to you.”
Again, enthusiastic hand claps. Dante rose, crossed the room and embraced him. The
n, holding Jeremy’s face in both his hands, Dante kissed him once on each shaved cheek. When there was silence, he returned a thank you to Jeremy saying: “I have few weaknesses, but this man is one of them. For reasons I have never tried the rationalize, I have known for many years that there are things this chef will do, things this man is called to do, that will be done by no other.”
The clapping was tentative at first, but when Dante left it at that and returned to his golden mohair seat, sat, shot cuffs and nodded once, the room erupted.
When things settled down, Jeremy addressed the group with a final encouragement before retreating to the kitchen. “Please order anything you like off the menu,” he said. “Part of the idea is to take the kitchen out for a spin. We’re only going to stagger the orders a little bit so we don’t get swamped immediately. Complain if you don’t like something. Tell us if it’s good. That’s all I have to say. Enjoy.”
In front of the squad, in the tight air of the kitchen, he realized he hadn’t given or received a real live pre-service pep talk in a long, long time. Quartey used to do it along the short lines of: “Chicken, fish number one, fish number two, pork roast, everybody? Bien.”
“This is just a dry run,” Jeremy started, “so nobody panic. The house is full of friendlies. Everyone remember the standing eight count. You’re in the shit, you step back for eight, then back in. We’ll get through it.”
Henk was nodding tightly, poised against the salad prep counter. He looked like a paratrooper getting ready to jump.
“All right: Rolando, Conrad. You guys have two apps: the kebab and the periwinkles. Remember the drill. Order call: Henk starts the fish. Four minutes later he’s gotta see those plates. So, Rolando: seaweed in, oysters and toss. Conrad: plate the kimchi, then the seaweed, oysters last. Chili oil and you’re good to go. “Periwinkle pick-up” means four-ounce ladle of cream to the plate, wheatsheaf up nice and straight in the middle. Boom.”
“Got it Chef.” “Right on Chef.”
“Henk: escabeche, two minutes a side. Two tablespoons hot marinade a serving. A swirl of preserved lemon oil, spray with chives. Right?”
Henk held up a fist. “Right on Chef!” he said.
“Angela: you and me on bruschetta and foie gras. You’ve got the toast and the apples. You’ve got the potato crisps. I need those plates a few minutes after the order.”
“You bet Chef.”
“J de Y, the terrine you just have to plate. Prepped materials are at your station.”
“They sure are Chef.”
“I know they are, I checked. And the soups: pesto and consommé. One twelve-ounce ladle, one dollop crème fraîche for the pesto. You have to heat a won ton and add some fresh chive to finish the consommé.
“OK, now the mains.…”
And, of course, their timing was terrible. There were something like five standing eight counts. Joey dropped a terrine. Rolando got cocky and dropped three fully prepped periwinkle salads he was trying to hoist onto the pass-through at once.
“Take. Your. Time.” Jeremy said to the whole kitchen.
Now there were little black and grey shellfish underfoot. Jeremy stepped on one and it squeaked like a piece of Styrofoam. Joey stopped to clean up. He started picking them up by hand, counting aloud—one, two, three, four—slowing down steadily as it dawned on him that there were probably sixty of them on the tiles and under the range top.
“Chef,” Joey called out, holding one arm in the air like a kid in first grade who had to go to the bathroom. “In the shits, Chef. Eight, seven, six, five.”
Mains went well for two tables. Then Torkil, up from the baking station to lend a hand, burned a load of yam wafers that made it onto the plates anyway. Jeremy saw Henk hesitate, looking at them, wondering if they were too dark.
“Those cannot go out,” Jeremy said, throwing two more prawn orders on Henk’s grill. At which point Joey and Conrad exchanged plates inadvertently and two lambs headed towards the door with spaetzle and leeks, two ducks in black olive jus.
“Come on people,” Jeremy yelled, intercepting the plates at the pick-up counter.
“In the shits,” Conrad called, holding up his arm. Jeremy made a mental note to talk to them about yelling “in the shits” at the top of their lungs, then sprinted behind the range again to finish plates, still calling out the orders that were coming in to the pass-through. “Order two more lamb. Order one prawn. Order one squab—hey, somebody ordered pigeon! Pick up three ducks.”
Henk was firing a lamb, finishing the plate with the celeriac purée. When the lamb was ready Jeremy watched him artfully cut and place the rack, position the zucchini blossom garnish, the drizzle of black olive jus. He was grilling two tenderloins at the same time.
“Order one rabbit, one risotto, one flatfish, another risotto,” Jeremy called. Henk shot him a quick look. “Busy, busy, busy,” he said, finishing Conrad’s goose and prawn plates and jogging back around the range.
There were more meltdowns but, as always, it was over before you thought possible.
“Aaaaah,” he said, sighing loudly. “Wine, anyone?” He poured Tempranillo all around. By the time they’d sipped and laughed their way through a glass, there was applause coming from the dining room again. Jeremy straightened his white toque, wiped his hands, pulling sharply downward on his uniform front to straighten himself, took another glug of wine.
“Wash your hands,” Jeremy told them. “And get ready for adoration.”
The clapping started again as he entered the dining room, but he made them stop with two hands up, palms out. “Now wait,” he told the seated group. He went back to the kitchen and pushed open the door.
They paraded in, vamping like runway models, making a point of it. Angela in the lead, the boys following in a line behind her. They stretched their necks upward, pouted, looked hard right or left over one shoulder and then the other. Hands in pockets or arms rigid and held slightly away from the body, hands flared out. They walked out to the top of the riser this way.
Everyone clapped and laughed.
“All right, all right,” Jeremy said to the squad. “A little dignity, please.”
But he was smiling. Benny could see it. Dante could see it. The Chef was smiling. There was warmth there, pride too.
Dante leaned over to Benny. He whispered in her ear.
“I did not make a mistake, did I Benny?” Dante said to her.
Benny leaned away from Dante so she could see his face. “Of course not, Dante. You thought you might have?”
His eyes were back on Jeremy. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
Back in the kitchen the squad was all grins. They were slapping hands and back to making fun of the standing eight counts.
Henk quieted the group down to ask a question. “How’d we do Chef? Seriously.”
Jeremy told them honestly. There was work to be done. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, he was going to continue the drills. Friday and Saturday, if they were ready, they could take off.
“But the kitchen opens 0900 Sunday, the big day,” Jeremy went on. “I’ll be here earlier. Please, nobody later than 1000. We have mountains of prep. One hundred-plus bodies for an early service about 1900. Dante wants people done and partying by 2100.”
“Menu changes, specials?” Henk said.
“I’m coming to that,” Jeremy said. “One other thing first.”
He pulled out the new jacket that he had made for Henk. He’d picked the throat colours himself, two bands of colour: black and orange. Henk did not want to grin like a kid, but his cheeks were rigid with the effort.
Jeremy helped him on with the jacket. The group gathered around and touched the sous chef colours and smacked him on the arm and teased. It was a group compliment, and Jeremy let them quiet down on their own. He let their comments fly and spark and settle.
“Opening nights are special,” Jeremy began when he had their attention again. “After opening night you become a normal restaurant again. You open,
you close. You buy, prep and cook. You clean up and restock. Go out and have a drink. Sleep too little. Do it again. But on opening night you put on a play about yourself. Like theatre, like a culinary monologue. You stand out there in front of a new house and you say: This is my kitchen. This is who I am. This is how we have become Who We Are.”
And then he gave them every detail on Sunday’s performance. A performance about memory, a tribute to the way things once were. He ran down the menu changes, one by one, watching the group expression come to a simmer of new and sharp-edged interest. They did not exchange looks. They were listening only to him.
“It’s important to be able to do something like this once in your life,” Jeremy said, wrapping up. “Because you’re going to learn that in the kitchen, your work is destroyed almost before you know it’s finished. It’s the nature of cooking, of eating. A six-top, half a loaf of your dill sourdough is gone in minutes.”
Torkil nodded. The collective group expression had risen above a simmer now, approaching a gentle boil of Guerrilla Grill enthusiasm.
“This is my work. This is what I do,” Jeremy finished. “Maybe it lasts twenty minutes on somebody’s plate, but it has to be made. For me. For this house. And the plate is where it belongs.”
It was going to be a busy weekend. Chladek and Jeremy met Thursday evening at Lost Lagoon to plan an extensive restocking of the meat, poultry and fish supplies.
“Racoon?” Chladek suggested. “There is certainly no shortage.”
Jeremy smoothed the menu on the stump between them.
“What’s it like?” Jeremy asked.
Chladek thought for a minute. “It’s like dog,” he said finally.
“Well, as long as it’s not like cat,” Jeremy said.
“No, cat is more like chicken.”
Jeremy mulled it over.
“Right here,” Chladek said, pointing at the last main on the menu. “Racoon tenderloin with red wine sauce and leek frite. Sounds pretty good to me.”
“You realize, Chladek, we’re not actually putting the changes on the printed menu for guests to see.”
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