At first he was determined to enjoy a harmless imaginary interlude. He’d seen owners have affairs with the staff in restaurant after restaurant. How many uncomfortable dinner services did a person need to sit through to accept the lesson, how many scrambling, understaffed nights when someone walked out after a breakup? But he also thought about the many couples who opened a place together and made a life of this.
Then last night Thea had changed out of her chef’s coat and into a sweater he would certainly remember if he’d seen it before, thin and dove-colored, wrapping snugly around her body and showing her long, narrow waist and the wings of her collarbones, and Leo thought perhaps he could have it both ways. They could go out in such an open and businesslike manner that really it was not a date at all—they could date without anyone noticing, maybe not even her.
Thea opened her front door and waved him in, her face startlingly composed and untouchable with its newly red mouth and eyes shadowed with makeup, her cheeks a matte pale pink. She said goodbye to her babysitter and tucked a hand in his arm as they headed down the icy walk to his car, and Leo reminded himself that the evening would be entirely beyond reproach, as long as he remembered not to say or do any of the things he desired.
HARRY HADN’T REALIZED HOW EARLY this city liked to dine. He and his staff had invited friends and family for any time between seven and ten, hoping for a natural spacing, but people crushed in at 7:10 and started ordering.
At first he’d managed to look over his shoulder here and there. He saw his parents seated at the bar, watching him raptly and waving each time he turned, and he glimpsed the pale blur of Britt’s white shirt moving swiftly through the dining room among the scrum of people standing, sitting, talking across the narrow aisles. That was an unanticipated problem of a friends-and-family night; they all knew each other and kept trading bites and getting in the servers’ way. People were tilting their heads back, or they had been, when he’d last been able to look, to gaze at the massive mirror or the sprays of silvered branches fanning out of pale blue-gray vases against the brick wall. Somehow it had all come together, visually at least, and the room was a mix of rustic and elegant, warm and cool, and Harry still wasn’t entirely sure how it had been managed. Mostly Britt had done it; he’d exchanged a terracotta vase for the sleek ones the color of chalcedony, the stemware for Moroccan painted bistro glasses, the white napkins for oatmeal ones, and the ferns for more birch branches, until the clusters looked as if they’d come from Norway or a fairy tale.
Harry was moving, moving; his feet barely shifted but he never stopped reaching, turning, poking and flipping and brushing at the pans on the range to his right. On the other side of the range was Jenelle, her hair flat with sweat against the back of her neck, her thick dark brows furrowed and her thin mouth set in a line of concentration as she worked, lifting a basket of crackling shrimp and herbs from the fryer and letting it drain while she reached for a plate with the other hand. Out of the corner of his eye Harry could admire the crisp herb sprigs, parsley splayed like a doll next to the gold and coral crescents of shrimp. This batch looked good, but he’d been glancing over all night and he knew the shrimp kept changing color—she was pulling them out brown, pale yellow, all over the place; the temperature of her oil dropped when she had a crush of orders but then returned to the right one after a pause, and Jenelle, he could tell, kept forgetting to allow for it. She knew it too; she kept shaking her head in a sharp little twitch of recrimination. But this plate looked good, so Harry filed it away as he got a pan of olive oil heating to crisp the socca. On the range next to the socca pan was a wide sauté pan with four duck breasts—potatoes in the oven? Yes, he wasted precious time looking, but that was better than assuming—and then he helplessly watched a ticket print with yet more duck, his perfect self-saucing duck that Britt must have told everyone about because he’d already served ten of the goddamn things and it turned out it was murder remembering the last smear of mustard before the meat came off to rest; he had a bad feeling some had gone out without it, but there was nothing to do now but push through. Jenelle was plating the shrimp in a delicate little pyramid, plucking out the parsley and setting it near the top, scattering the plate with coarse salt and handing it back toward the server station, which was just the last section of the zinc bar nearest the dining room’s back wall (guests kept crowding into the space and servers kept charming their way through, smiles dropping the moment they reached for the plates). She was already reaching with the tongs in her other hand toward the metal plate sizzling with confit that was crisping in the salamander. Hector was in the back room, prepping while he waited for the first dessert orders. They should have started the night fully ready, mise en place arrayed in its bins and perfectly prepared, but it just hadn’t happened, and so Hector was back there amid a pile of produce, knife flashing and eyes flat as coins, a disconcerting faint smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
Harry reached up and blotted his forehead with an arm and kept moving. He couldn’t hear the music anymore, didn’t know if anyone could, but there was no time to worry about it anyway. Britt would have to deal with it; that was why he was here. Harry reached into the lowboy for a little oval stoneware dish filled with baccalà; it would go into the oven to heat and finish with a run under the salamander to brown it before it was plated with the socca and lightly dressed arugula. Already he disliked the monochromatic look of it. It needed more than arugula, perhaps, some piquancy, but there was no time to do anything about that. He couldn’t think of what he would do later tonight or tomorrow. What was tomorrow? There was only right now, the varying stages of the dishes before him ticking forward in his head, the mental clicking punctuated by the occasional shout of laughter or his name (he waved wildly over his shoulder in the direction the voice had come from—no idea who it was) and here and there the faint sizzle of his forearm against the rim of a blazing sauté pan. He hadn’t cooked like this in months, he was out of shape, and already his hands and forearms were dotted with burns. Another mistake: he should have found a way to do a stage or two to get back in fighting form, maybe at Winesap if Leo had allowed it, which was unlikely. Who had time to do that anyway? He’d been here every day for twenty hours a day, and he still didn’t know what the fuck he’d been doing with it all, only that it hadn’t been enough, it still wasn’t enough, more remained to be done, and so he just put his head down and kept it all moving, rotating his proteins off the range and into the oven and under the salamander and back out again, spiking his tickets and talking to Jenelle in shorthand about tables and dishes and ordering and firing, until at some point the night would be done, doused like a flame, and he’d breathe.
BRITT WAS CIRCLING THE DINING ROOM, eyeing the servers, peering into the kitchen, where Hector was now working at his little minirange to fry off the hot and cold beignets, to warm caramelized pears and dulce de leche. Hector slid a square of coconut lime napoleon neatly off his spatula and onto a plate. The napoleon was the only dessert from Winesap that had ended up on the menu at Stray. Hector insisted that the recipe was his and therefore he had custody of the dessert wherever he chose to take it. Nevertheless, Britt wondered if Leo, when he finally showed, would order it just to make the point.
He kept looking at his watch and at the door, but Camille was not here yet either. Her time away from him seemed mysterious and tantalizing, all those hours in which she worked or read or drank tea, had dinner with her friends and was probably flirted with and cajoled by servers and movie-ticket-takers. Since their first date, they’d met for lunch and one evening walk; they’d embarked upon an ongoing series of funny and conversational e-mails and texts, but he had so little time between Winesap and preparing for tonight that things between them felt slightly tentative. She was unperturbed; as someone who’d worked in the food world, she knew exactly what these last few days had been like. But Britt felt hamstrung anyway. He didn’t want to be apologizing already for his lack of time; he didn’t want her to have to be underst
anding yet. He wanted to be out with her every night, drinking sake. He wanted her lounging around his house, or around her house, it didn’t matter—he wanted them in some private interior, famished and spent, surprised to find it was daylight once again. Instead they had a teenage makeout session cut short by a text summoning him back to one restaurant or another, and one frustrating, sandwichy lunch.
But this was it. After tomorrow, the restaurant was open. It wasn’t the last hurdle by any means, but it was a major one, and he believed some focus would now be possible, and this lent the night an additional thread of excitement. He planned to get her to stick around as they finished up the service tonight, take her home to a glass of red wine. He didn’t have a fireplace, but who cared? He could set fire to something.
At the server station he paused, shaking himself out of his reverie. They still hadn’t gotten around to replacing the griddle with an actual coffee-cup warmer, so he’d had to admonish the servers to keep the griddle on low so no one got burned. That was bad enough, but now he noticed that the shelves were too high as well. All the servers, except for one or two of the men who were as tall as Harry, were on tiptoe, swiping at the dishes and glasses. The shelves would all have to be rehung within reach of people of normal height instead of Harry’s height, and it would have to be done soon.
The servers all wore jeans and dark shoes. Harry had wanted to allow tennis shoes as long as they weren’t white, but Britt knew that would end up getting interpreted in some hideous way, try though they had to find waitstaff who wouldn’t even think of owning white running shoes instead of sleek little Pumas in taupe or dark gray or chocolate. It wasn’t worth the time it would take to describe it, so Britt just said dark shoes, no sneakers, and left it at that. (Actually, at first he’d specified leather, but Joshua’s hand had shot up so he could inquire, ready for a fight, about vegan shoes, and Britt had backed off, bored already.) In their black T-shirts and denim, their messy chignons and facial hair and those awful spacers widening the holes in their earlobes, they could have been clientele but for the black aprons knotted around their sleek midsections. The bartender, Travis, was the one Britt was wondering about, getting steamy and red-faced from the heat of the range so close, losing precision and overpouring. This negated the whole reason the servers weren’t pouring wine at the table—with the eyes of the guest on them, servers overpoured. It was human nature.
As he passed his parents, he let a hand linger briefly on their shoulders while he peered at their plates. They were down to crumbs, but that didn’t mean they’d loved the dishes. Harry and Britt could have set a live possum before their parents and their mother would have coolly, maternally, sharpened her butter knife.
Years before, their mother had looked up a recipe for Harry’s lamb tongue. When it was ready, she and Harry had each cut a tiny, brave piece of the ugly thing, which was sprinkled with parsley and marooned on its plate like a science experiment. Britt and Leo had watched them chew for what seemed a long time, until Harry swallowed and frowned, no doubt regretting his lost allowance.
“Lighten up on your pours, just a touch,” he told Travis, who nodded and slowed very slightly. Ounce by ounce, lost booze drained away money when it should be the biggest moneymaker in the house—it was all markup and no prep.
Britt made his way yet again toward the front of the space, pausing to speak with tables as he did and then picking up plates as he returned to the back of the house. The duck plates were wiped clean, the baccalà not so much—people were running out of socca and reluctant just to spoon it up. They’d have to add another slice. The sardines lay denuded and separated from their nduja-spread toasts, a flavor combination Britt now confirmed was not working, since no one was eating it together. The cloudy-eyed heads of the fish were stoically averted from the bare fronds of their ribs. The baby octopus wasn’t moving, but the few he’d seen looked perfect, purple and white beneath a yellow haystack of frizzled ginger.
He watched Joshua serve a table of four, placing a dish at an empty seat whose occupant had gone to the restroom. Britt sighed. When Joshua saw Britt watching, he reddened and sidled over to him. “She keeps leaving,” he muttered under the din. “Is she feeding a freaking pet back there or what?”
Britt said, “If you can’t hold the food another second, at least cover the dish and watch for her to come back, okay? I’ll warn you now, this is one of my pet peeves.” Joshua nodded and departed to replace the woman’s napkin, darting an ingratiating smile in Britt’s direction as he did.
The first desserts were now moving past him, and Britt raised his brows at a server to signal her to slow and let him look at the plates: the beignets a generous little pile of sugared pastry next to their glass cup of basil cream, the pears all plump, feminine roundness beneath a veil of warmed dulce de leche. Next to these two playful, homey dishes, the napoleon looked too refined, its lime powder too vivid, like a dessert from a different restaurant, which it was. He shouldn’t have let Hector serve it. Or Harry shouldn’t have let Hector serve it. Britt was trying very hard to keep out of Harry’s kitchen; he was front-of-the-house and therefore he issued opinions through the lens of what got the orders, what went back untouched, and what was exclaimed over at presentation and consumed in an instant. He’d bring it up later, when Harry didn’t look so wild-eyed. Even the back of Harry’s neck looked crazed, the muscles visibly bunched beneath the constant motion of his head.
He was doing okay, though, planted before the range with his back to the crowd, his height and long arms an unexpected boon in the tight space. Small Jenelle had to move her feet, but Harry did not.
By the time nine o’clock rolled around, the room was calming down. One or two tables sat empty, and the staff kept running out of coffee before the next batch was brewed—annoying, but at least a welcome sign of the end of the meals. Britt had had to remind the backwaiters only once to watch the water glasses—he despised an empty water glass—and when he poked his head into the restrooms, he saw just what he wanted to see: moisturizer, soap, folded towels, and a basket of tampons in the ladies’, the same minus tampons in the men’s. Plenty of toilet paper, no unsightly wastebaskets or towels missing the little linen-lined hampers.
By now Harry was starting to look normal again: Britt could no longer see the whites all around his irises when Harry scanned the room. In the kitchen Hector was in a groove, tossing beignets in the sugar with a practiced flick of the wrist. The cacao custard in its malted cone-cup was proving a tough one to serve—everyone wanted it, though people kept pointing at the word “cacao” instead of saying it, unsure how to pronounce it—but the delicate malt cup kept slipping out of the dollop of pastry cream that was intended to anchor it to the plate. The servers were all moving like zombies, eyes locked on the malt cup, and Britt was sure they were going to collide.
“Sourcing cacao beans,” someone said behind him. “Such an esoteric skill.”
Britt turned and found Leo standing just behind him, about to sit down at a table. Britt hugged him, ignoring the cacao comment because it seemed to be a joke anyway, and because in the adrenaline of the night he was now elated to see his brother, whose prior absence Britt only now realized had felt quite glaring. Leo seemed to be in a good mood too; he laughed when Britt embraced him and then turned to present his companion. For a moment Britt didn’t recognize her: he saw a woman as tall as Leo, with dark brown curls and luminous eyes, broad shoulders, a simple black dress. He was reaching a hand forward, the other resting on Leo’s shoulder for an extra beat to silently convey admiration for Leo’s companion, when he paused, hand in midair, and realized with a shock that this was Thea.
“It looks wonderful,” she said. She saved him by leaning forward to hug him, then made a little show of looking around. “How’s it been? Did we give you enough time? We figured we both needed to check it out, so we scheduled a little professional dinner meeting.”
Leo’s hands were in his pockets. He and Thea offered Britt the same sunny, im
penetrable smiles. “We wanted to be here sooner,” Leo said, “but figured better to let you get the early diners out of the way.”
“Thanks,” said Britt. He was still recovering from recognizing Thea with his brother. It had to be business. There was no way Leo would cross that line; it was sacrosanct. When Britt had started at Winesap, that was one of the first lectures Leo had given him: labor laws and not screwing with the staff. Usually that meant waitresses, for some reason, but this was potentially far more explosive. There were a thousand waitresses out there, but try finding a new executive chef in a town this size. No, Leo would never show up here so brazenly if something was going on. Britt collected himself and said, “It’s been a madhouse, but I think in a good way. We’ll see how the postmortem goes tomorrow, but I’m feeling good. You just missed Mom and Dad.”
“We saw them on their way out,” said Thea. “I don’t know how I’ve worked with you guys for years and never met them. They were lovely.”
Who was this Thea, all sweetness and interest in parents? It was bizarre, and it made him worry all over again. Britt preferred grumpy, silent Thea, the Thea who understood that his parents were lovely but would drive her batty in the kitchen, insisting that they loved everything but then allowing their plates to go back half full, assuring the servers that everything was stunning, simply stunning, even as they refused to touch another bite of something they had clearly, distressingly hated.
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