“We’re overflowing out there,” he said to Henk. “What’s the count?”
Henk asked a waiter and reported back: 155 people. Many were sitting at the bar. “We’ll be fine. We’ll be fine,” Jeremy heard himself saying to no one in particular.
Joey dropped a terrine plate that Rolando had very beautifully arranged, the beet carpaccio fanned just so under the two triangles of pâté. He had turned with the plate to give it a spray of minced green onion and ended up distributing the entire dish across the tiles.
“Racoon down,” Joey said aloud. But he didn’t take the count, just stopped long enough to clean the mess and immediately plate another portion.
“Three bloods, two escabeche and a terrine.” The blood sausage was a hit too, as it happened.
“They’re in the stretch,” Jeremy said when a waiter informed him that the first tables were ready for mains. “Love it, everyone. Good work. Order squab, order duck, order risotto, order lamb.”
He got his callbacks. Nothing hit the floor. Conrad flipped his last periwinkle salads on high flame and tonged them out gently in a ring around Angela’s endive wheatsheaf. Jeremy gave the plate a once-over and put it up for the server. He noted Angela turn sharply to the duck, searing it off on the grill.
“Order two rabbits, two flatfish and a prawn. Fire the squab and the duck. Fire that lamb, please.” Everybody at the range top was making quick, controlled movements between mise en place and station. Nothing rushed, just precise. Joey said bunny when the rabbit orders came through and racoon whenever he had to plate leek frite for the tenderloin, but aside from that they were executing like seasoned pros. In fact, the mains would have gone like the culinary Olympics had it not been for one interruption.
Jeremy was working with Henk on three crapaudine orders. The rock dove had been fired and positioned on the warm plates. Henk had finished the sauce with a tablespoon of cognac and a bit of double cream, boiled it down to consistency and was ladling it over the brown birds. Conrad was cutting thin wedges of gratin Savoyard. And Jeremy had just turned to his mise en place for a fresh thyme garnish and found none.
He took a glance around the kitchen. Everybody was bent to a task. Torkil was busy with desserts. Henk had turned to his next orders. And so Jeremy slipped the sauced birds up on the pass-through, called for Conrad to plate the gratin slices and trotted back to get the fresh herbs himself. He did not like leaving the point during service for anything, but here it was, a necessity. He avoided the crowded cook top and took the long way back to the RapidAir. Then, coming out of the cold room—conscious of the cooling squab on their plates, sauced and ready with their gratin—he took the faster route back to the kitchen. He turned left out of the RapidAir, past the alley door, past his office, and right in behind the auxiliary prep tables and the stock stove—a part of the kitchen hidden from his view at the front of the range top.
Which was how he came to find Kiwi Frederique in his kitchen.
They had ended up being included at a sort of head table, emphatically not Olli’s idea but when Margaret whispered a few words to him after Dante extended the offer, he knew the matter was decided. It was bigger than most of the other tables in the room, and it was set off to one side under a huge bank of still lifes. The captain’s table. At least they were near the band.
Benny kissed him on the cheek a little sloppily and sat opposite, between an English woman in a silver down vest, who was writing an article about the opening, and a thin man with a helmet of greased hair, wearing a cream-coloured suit with some kind of superhero cape. “Albertini Banks,” the man had said, shaking the very tips of Olli’s fingers.
Olli tried politely for the accent: “Swiss?”
“Oh nooo,” Banks said, putting a hand over what appeared to be a light-weight anchor chain where his watch chain was supposed to be. His white French cuffs stuck out of his sleeves a good six inches. “Ahm frem New Yowrk.”
“Philip Riker,” said the other man, who shook everyone’s hand before sitting down next to Olli. Dante’s secret weapon, his right-hand man. Olli smelled it right away, even before Dante took the head of the table and started calling him Philly, right in front of everyone like he were a pet dachshund. It might have been interesting to talk frankly to Philly about this relationship, Olli thought, but it wasn’t going to happen tonight. Olli knew that much about working with heavyweights. Since you could not convince them of anything directly, you became accustomed to getting your way more subtly. The first casualty of that reality was candour. You simply could not state aloud all that you thought, no matter that the seeds of discontent weeded over your insides after a while.
And here it was. Dante would lob something down Philly’s way, and he would answer the same strategic way every time. Not saying all he knew or identifying all that he wanted, just putting the question or the comment back into play.
“This is only the beginning, am I right, Philly?” Dante said. They’d been talking about the time involved preparing the room. The planning, the effort. The future.
“It sure is,” Philip said. “And we can go a number of really interesting directions from here.”
Olli just smiled widely, laughed or nodded sagely at everything anybody said. He had no point to make; it was Jeremy’s big night. Margaret only looked at him once or twice, and he knew what that was about. Checking his drink intake, not wanting him to notice. It was Trout who had been on him in his strange way. Just the week before the kid asks him up to look at the dollar bills Olli had been doing his best to ignore.
“There’s always more,” Trout says.
“That’s the thing,” Olli told him. “In real life, there isn’t always more.”
“For me there’s always more,” Trout insisted. “I just paint more.” Then, no warning: “Daddy, you smell different.”
What was up with that? He hoped Margaret would lift the embargo on soccer, which Trout so obviously needed to take his mind off how his father smelled.
“I’m fine,” he said now, answering Margaret’s whispered question. White wine was being poured. The appetizers were arriving.
Dante offered a toast before they began. Around them the food was arriving at tables all over the restaurant, and Olli saw other glasses hoisted. Other toasts being made. Every face ruddy and glowing in the candlelight.
“To the beginning of something,” Dante said, and he looked around the table, cycling through each of them in order. “For Kiwi, a discovery, a story. For Monsieur Banks, another notch in the stock of your formidable reputation. To both Benny and Philip, a job so very well done means the beginning of other exciting Inferno projects. And for you, Oliver, Margaret … a striking new adventure for a good friend.”
He was back to himself.
“For me, a return to beginnings. The energy of something created anew, something done to the beat of my own heart. Something I have found restorative.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you: Gerriamo’s.”
“Gerriamo’s,” they all said. A toast that was picked up at the tables within earshot and rippled on out from there. In a moment, everybody in the room had a glass raised in the direction of Dante, who toasted the room in return. “Gerriamo’s,” he said again.
“Gerriamo’s,” the room answered. Like Mass, thought Olli. He took a sip, set down his glass, then picked it up and took another small sip. Fantastic wine, tasted a bit like grapefruit. Even he could tell.
“Now let’s eat,” Dante said, sitting. And they did.
Margaret had ordered him green soup, it turned out. It came with a dollop of something white in the middle. “Pesto soup,” Margaret explained. “That’s crème fraîche.” She had a precise shish kebab of salmon cubes herself, which lay balanced just as precisely on what looked like a pyramid of coleslaw guarded by three plump molasses-coloured oysters.
Kimchi. Smoked oysters. Olli was learning something wherever he looked. Each sculpted appetizer defied the next in its oddly original architecture and its myste
rious ingredients.
“And what is that?” Olli asked Philip, who was eating silently beside him. He had just forked a tiny triangle of something translucent and purple—a beet?—which lay fanned under a pile of tiny green peas or beans that were providing a fulcrum for a lever of pâté.
It was beet, yes. Pâté, check. The beans were actually le Puy lentils. “The very best,” Philip informed, spreading pâté on a tiny wedge of bread. “Expensive as hell.”
The soup was good, Olli thought. It tasted like basil. Everybody else at the table was groaning in ecstasy. Benny took one bite of her salmon and forgot about whatever had been so troubling. (Even married to Margaret, who hid her emotions, Olli could tell a woman who’d been crying in the bathroom. Bruised eyes, new makeup.) Now the transformed Benny gushed: “Totally de-lish-us.” She squirmed on her chair, hugged herself. She took another large sip of martini. Then one of wine.
Banks had taken a microscopic lick of the white salad dressing on his plate and rolled his eyes to heaven. Now he was trying to figure out the impressive sheaf of green in the middle of the plate, knife and fork dancing this way and that, both pinkies quivering erect.
“Are we getting the Philly say-so here?” Dante asked, beaming from the head of the table.
Philip nodded through a mouthful of pâté and bread. When he’d swallowed he said: “Yes, Dante. Definitely. Very, very good.”
Dante was eating something black that had been strapped artfully to a piece of toast with a green onion. It was surrounded by a perfect fan of apples. “What did you order, Dante?” Olli asked.
“Blood sausage,” came the answer, satisfaction evident.
Margaret looked up. “Blood, you know …” She started to say something, changed gears. “Very Jeremy,” she said only.
Dante shook his head, crunched up some crostini and swallowed. “My idea actually. I adore bruschetta.”
“Well, Jeremy’s ideas are your ideas,” Olli said, hoping to open things up a bit.
Margaret nudged him with her thigh, but Dante took the joke. “Emphatically,” he said. “Part of the deal. That was part of the deal, wasn’t it, Philly? I got his ideas?”
They riffed along these lines. The ideas of juniors, the credit taken by seniors. Philip thought the strong idea would always win but, at the same time, that there was demonstrably more money and reputation to be made in repackaging the ideas of others.
“I don’t disagree,” Olli said. “You just gotta get yourself on the right side of that exchange.”
Philip returned an almost imperceptible nod of agreement.
Benny thought they were being very crass. Wasn’t originality worth anything? Albertini chimed in his support on this matter.
“Well, I guess that’s the point,” Philip said. “Originality is worth something even if it isn’t your own.”
The only one not talking at all was Kiwi Frederique, who was sitting on Dante’s left, eyes down to her plate, concentrating intently on her food. At the moment her face was about six inches from her oysters. She gently cut one in half, examining the insides. She raised her head an inch further from the plate and put the half-piece gingerly in her mouth, exploring it with her tongue. As she began to chew, her chin rose slowly so that by the time she swallowed, her head was right back, and she was looking at the chandelier overhead. She turned to her second appetizer next, consommé, and did much the same thing. She gently set aside the orange flower, removed the floating dumpling from the middle of the clear soup. She cut it delicately in two, pulled the stuffing out of one half, smelled it gently. She took the other half on her fork and put it in her mouth. She orally massaged this bit before, head back again, her throat waggled in and out and the masticated, well-analyzed dumpling disappeared below.
“Is it good?” Olli finally had to say something.
She looked back down to him as if she’d known he was watching all along. “It was really quite shockingly splendid. Mysterious but yummy.” She scribbled something on the screen of her Palm, which was sparked up and running, stylus at the ready, next to her plate. And then, to the rest of the table, she announced: “But I disagree with what one of you was saying before.”
Everyone looked in her direction.
“Chef Jeremy’s originality cannot be taken by someone else,” she said. “What he has created really belongs to him alone.”
Margaret was listening. Dante had turned to an inquiring waiter and was ordering more red wine. Benny was finished the small amount of her appetizer that she intended to eat and sat drinking down the white wine that was being continuously poured. Kiwi was now launched through an explanation of something she called the Third-Wave Culinary Revolution. Something Jeremy had apparently invented. Not international, post-national. Olli thought he picked up strains of the tune they’d all been playing over at Dante’s place those months before. A new place. No geography. Something like that.
“And Jeremy said all that?” Margaret asked Kiwi.
Apparently. “I have a nose for the new idea,” she insisted.
The waiter was refilling wine glasses again. A busser was taking away dishes, all but Benny’s wiped clean.
Kiwi was back taking notes in her Palm, and Margaret turned to Olli. “Trout won’t be in bed yet.”
Olli hesitated.
“Go on,” she said.
The phone and washrooms were in a plush, blue-carpeted hallway on the north side of the restaurant. There was an attendant in the sparkling white men’s room, who passed him a towel after he washed his hands.
Trout answered the phone in his room. Olli asked about the sitter. She was downstairs watching TV. “And you?” Olli asked.
Trout was reading Jacques Pépin’s La Technique. Olli shook his head.
“You’re at Jay’s new restaurant,” the boy announced. His choice of reading material and his absence at the opening were not unrelated.
“We are indeed.”
“Doin’ what?”
“Eatin’,” Olli said. “Whaddaya think?”
“Eatin’ what?” Trout asked.
“Walrus,” Olli said. “Elephant.”
Trout laughed. “No you’re not.”
“Oh yeah?” Olli said.
“Tell me,” Trout said, threatening to get cranky.
“Green soup,” Olli said.
“Green?” But now the boy yawned audibly into the phone and Olli told him to go to bed.
He wasn’t tired. What was in that soup?
“I don’t know what was in it. I only know it was green and it tasted good.”
“Find out,” Trout commanded.
“Yes, sir.”
“Promise,” he said, sleepy. “You really should know.”
Olli listened for Trout to hang up before hanging up himself, laughing.
“We really should know,” he repeated to Margaret at a whisper as the main courses arrived. She laughed.
The plates slid one by one onto the table. They inhaled as a group, then exhaled their uniform first reaction.
“My God.” “Look at this.” “Outrageous.” “Is so beyoutifall!”
The main-course plates were even more fantastically sculpted than the appetizers. Margaret and Olli had lamb racks, the chops carved delicately, mounted in a gravity-defying spiral on top of the puréed celery root. The plate was beaded with drops of black olive jus. Dante and Benny had goose, the colour somewhere between mahogany and purple. It lay thinly sliced around the base of a bright yellow couscous tower studded with clover leaves. Banks had risotto, which spilled out of a hollow acorn squash, the lid set to one side in a field of edible violets and marigolds. Kiwi had duck, the slices propped against a buttery pile of spaetzle, all of it drizzled with a lattice of rhubarb sauce and topped with a julienne of brilliant green leeks.
Philip’s dinner won the presentation medal. His tenderloin arrived cut and fanned across a blood red pool of wine reduction, offset by six blueberries at eleven o’clock, a cloud of leek and potato frite at two.
It was balanced, minimal. It looked weightless.
“Culinary haiku,” said Kiwi, looking intently down the table at Philip’s plate. “Although, did you say beef tenderloin? Rather small cow bits, aren’t they?”
A waiter appeared like a genie with these words before anyone had time to consider the smallish disks of red meat on Philip’s plate. “El Chaco Angus,” he explained with an understanding smile. “From the Argentinean highlands. The grown male stands only about so high; he’s a miniature. Tastes like a richer, more intense, free-range veal.”
Kiwi’s eyes bugged out. She almost laughed. But the waiter was nodding deeply, like he’d encountered this reaction before, and she ended up merely shaking her head in amazement. It left them all chuckling over Jeremy’s uncanny ability to provision the unexpected.
And with that, they turned to their meals and a short period of table silence descended. Even Dante fell onto his colourful plate of goose with such interest, followed by such enthusiasm, that he overlooked conversation. Olli too, who wasn’t sure he’d ever eaten lamb like this lamb before. Roasted to a very precise point, each chop rosy inside, darkened and sweetened outside. Each forkful could be given an unexpected salty kick by trailing it through the olive jus before raising it to your lips.
Half a dozen mouthfuls and a few swallows of wine later, they all became talkative at once.
“Really remarkable.” “Delicious, yours?” “Totally.” “I’m forever impressed with that young man.” “Incredible.” “Tarribly, tarribly good,” said Albertini Banks.
There were similar comments spilling in from nearby tables as plates were slid soundlessly onto the white tablecloths and the eating began. Indeed, conversation around the room had ebbed and flowed in the same pattern. The volume fell, then rose. The band responded by switching from mellow to mellow swing.
Kiwi was finished first and up with a camera. “May I?” she said. And they all smiled up from the carnage of half-empty plates. Then to Dante: “I was going to try the kitchen next. What do you think?”
Dante laughed, still eating and growing red-cheeked. “It’s fine by me, not by my chef, I’m quite sure. You might try sneaking in the alley door.”
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