by MJ Post
“Naw, Mr. Winfrey. Ain’t so you can taste it. I just left my cinnamon shaker on the flattop for a minute.”
“It’s still delicious,” Toby said.
“Marie is remarkable enough to have covered her mistake with grace,” Boris Winfrey said. “Still.” He waved over his head waiter, tuxedoed and slim. “This family’s meal is on me. Marie, go home for the weekend and get some rest. No shifts till Monday.”
“Mr. Winfrey,” she whinged.
“You need a break. Throw out this batch of gumbo before you go. Now, let’s start again. Wash up, young man. Your name is…?”
“Toby Brutus.”
“You’ll take Marie’s shifts this weekend. If you learn and execute my recipes, you can stay. Oliver, get Toby a W-4. Twenty-five an hour starting.”
Toby stood quivering, unable to believe this luck. He’d gotten a stage in the best restaurant in the area, working for a man with a James Beard Award!
“It is what you want, isn’t it?” asked Winfrey.
“Yes, sir,” Toby said shakily. “It works for me.”
By the time Marie returned, chastened, to her station on Monday, Toby was a working member of the team at Gumbo King. He scrubbed and prepped more than he cooked, learning recipes one at a time by watching the team members execute them, practicing after midnight when everyone had gone home except Boris Winfrey himself. The restaurateur sampled his concoctions, critiqued them, proclaimed them flawed but edible, and, while he did his books late into the night, ate them alongside Toby. Toby had had accounting class at Delta and also learned by observation about that part of the business.
One year later, the line cooks were invited to come in early to create one new dish each for the menu. Boris Winfrey and his new wife, another successful restaurateur called Nina Lestrade, would try them all, and the best two would become occasional specials, with 20% of the proceeds after food costs from those dishes going to the originators.
At the designated time, Toby got at the end of the unofficially seniority-based queue holding two plates of spicy crawdads with sweet potato and cauliflower mash.
Boris and Nina were clearly in a dating mood, as they fed each other and nuzzled and giggled more than they talked to the staff, all of whom were doubtless on tenterhooks wondering if their dishes could win the favor of the couple and earn them a new revenue stream.
The tasting proceeded slowly as the new couple sniggered, joked, and sampled tiny morsels. Toby stood in place, shifting his hips to and fro, trying to ignore the pain in his wrists from holding the huge plates, and willing his food to stay eating temperature. When he arrived at the table, he faced a surface littered with plates of unfinished meals. Two wine bottles and four glasses and several beer bottles added to the clutter.
“Best for last?” Boris asked as Toby set the dish down in front of his bosses.
“I sure think so,” Toby announced.
Nina grinned at him in a way that conveyed no warmth. “I’m full, and he’s new. Do we have to try this one?”
Toby was ready with his answer. “Only if you want the best dish on the menu.”
Noah, a tall, thin man from Biloxi who had been first to serve his food, was standing by. “You’re cocky,” he asserted.
“Have some and see,” Toby answered. “If you do, I’ll choke down the rest of yours so it doesn’t go to waste.”
“You mind?” Noah asked the couple. He raised a fork.
“G’head,” said Boris. “Nina and I will share a plate.” He had his own fork, and put a dab of the mash onto his wife’s tongue just as Noah pierced and served himself a crawdad.
The three chefs ate for a minute before all looking at Toby almost in unison.
“Well what do you know?” said Boris. “It’s top two, at least, right, sugar bun?”
“It gets the Madame Queen seal of approbation,” said Nina.
∞∞∞
The spicy crawdad dish and Noah’s pork chops with mint jelly went on the menu as specials that week. The crawdads did better and were held over for the next week. Toby took in several thousand dollars, and saved it. He had a plan.
By the time the spicy crawdads migrated to the regular menu, reformulated slightly, and his percentage was quietly discontinued, he had a great start on the investment he was planning.
After two years working for Boris Winfrey, he gave his notice. The timing was bad; the kitchen was in chaos. Boris and Nina were in a speedy divorce proceeding. Toby said sorry, and his mentor forgave him, and he bought a food truck.
Permitting didn’t take long, and soon the food truck had a regular spot in a parking lot adjoining FNC park. He painted his truck with neon colors and christened his business and himself “The Crawdad King of Mississippi.”
The business grew rapidly. It started with lunches for athletic park-goers, but before long, students were driving from the University campus, and office workers followed. He was reviewed in local papers and appeared on a local TV station, first in his truck, and then as a guest chef explaining how to make down-home country side dishes for a backyard barbecue. He was asked to bring his food truck on-campus to supplement tailgate parties. At the third of these, Boris Winfrey himself arrived, stepped into the truck, and cooked alongside him while newspaper cameras snapped photos.
Boris had gotten heavier; although the divorce had been quick and efficient, it had not been painless. He wasn’t over Nina, but she was definitively over him, it appeared.
“She’s cold,” he said. “So cold. My God. So cold. I’m so sad. So I been eating to warm up.”
They talked about opening a new restaurant together, somewhere outside Oxford, like Baton Rouge or even New Orleans. Toby was young to be a chef de cuisine, so it would be a while.
“I want my own place,” he told Boris.
“You can think about it a while, son,” Boris answered.
∞∞∞
Toby still thought about it at times, but for now, he was going to strike out on his own. He could pile up some old sleeping bags. He’d have to sweat. He’d find a place he could shower and clean up every day. Maybe he’d rent a room. There would be no more living with the professors.
Having secured his luggage, he opened the side door of the truck to climb down and go into the house for a final look at his room, when he saw a TV camera pointed up at him. Behind it was a stocky man with a light sandy beard. Beside it was a thin man older than forty with bright eyes and a warm smile, wearing slacks and a button-front shirt and colorful suspenders.
“You should do well,” he said. “He has a camera presence, right, Ricky? How you doing, Chef Brutus?”
“You can get that camera out of my face, and tell me who you are.”
“Oh. Sorry. I emailed. I’m Herschel Singer, and I’m a casting director for Chef Showdown, a new competitive cooking show on The Kitchen Network. We have an innovative format and the toughest judge imaginable. On behalf of the network, I invite you to be one of stars of season one.”
Chapter Two
Chef Kacie Lee, Early Spring 2018
Her parents didn’t acknowledge that her name was Kacie. They called her by her Korean birth name, Yookyung. She hadn’t used that name in years except with family. In 9th grade at Townsend Harris High School, she told friends she wanted to be a Korean chef, and they called her K.C., for Korean Chef, which she began to spell Kacie.
At the time of her high school graduation, so far as her father, Seogkyun Lee, and her mother Mingyung knew, Kacie was Yookyung and she was going to be an electrical engineer. She’d gotten top grades in all subjects, and had applied to top engineering schools and gotten acceptance letters for all of them. There was even a senior picture of her in their backyard, with the family pet dog, Hayangi or Whitey, curled up in her arms, and a banner for Rensselaer Polytechnic at her feet. Her younger sister Hyunji, known outside the family circle as Eunice, snickered from a vantage point behind the photographer when that picture was taken. Eunice already knew the truth: Kacie ha
d enrolled in culinary school in Manhattan.
There was not much of an explosion in the home when the truth came out. Seogkyun, called Steve by his co-workers, said that he was ashamed, and that she should keep away from him as much as possible since she would remind him that one of his children had rejected her parents. Mingyung let Kacie cry in her arms in her bed while Whitey howled up at them from the floor. Later, when Kacie had dried her tears, mother gave daughter a flier from a surgeon who performed double eyelid surgery, and said kindly that if she was going into such a terrible career, she ought to get her eyes fixed to be more acceptable to the baegin.
“This is America,” Kacie said. “The white people accept us.”
“Try running for president,” said her mother. “They’ll be calling you dog breath from the first day. You’ll see.” She stroked Whitey’s soft fur. “You’ll see.”
Kacie went to culinary school and excelled. She learned a variety of cuisines, and used the advanced techniques to improve her Korean cooking and to create fusion dishes. She became known at the school as “Smiley,” because her smile was so broad, and her brown eyes were so bright with delight when her apron was on and a knife was in her hand. At home, her smiles were less genuine. Steve Lee wasn’t speaking to her, Eunice was applying to engineering schools and snooty about it, and Mingyung was friendly but would not let her cook the family dinner out of respect for Kacie’s father.
Kacie graduated with honors, received the business cards of all her instructors, and got no job offers. She had set her sights high — no less than sous chef, and no Korean restaurant with a non-Korean owner — and it had not paid off. She languished at home in their three-bedroom Jackson Heights apartment for over a year, only working the occasional shift as a fill-in for the regular line cook at one upscale place or another, trying to stay out of Steve’s sight. She listened to K-pop night and day.
Kacie was five foot six, slim-hipped, with long black hair that she could quickly knot behind her head. She had even features, eyes that alternated between laughing and challenging those she looked at. She often bit her full lips even without noticing. She kept the nails short on her lean fingers – they were always breaking anyway when she cooked. Kacie was all about casual dress – slacks and blouses for work and school, jeans and t-shirts the rest of the time. In high school she had been criticized by lots of the Korean boys and ignored by everyone else. One of them told her he’d romance that tomboy look away and she’d be a girly-girl and like it. When she had poured a carton of school milk over his head, he’d given up that plan. Kacie liked a good-looking boy as much as her friends did, but she doubted she’d ever find a boy, or a man, who wouldn’t mind being a distant second to her career. A tall man with a long-haired rock star look was her type, but she never met anyone like that who wasn’t a self-centered jerk.
As her period of relative unemployment continued, most days, while her father was at work, she cooked lunch for herself and her mother.
“You really are good, dear,” Mingyung told her as they enjoyed a japchae, a slaw with noodles made from sweet potato. “I wish I could get your father to try your culinary creations.”
“He’s being stupid,” Kacie said to her mother. “He should trust me more. I’m ready to prove myself. Did you tell him that?”
“Oh, Yookyung! You know he won’t talk to me about it at all. He is the breadwinner of the family, dear, and he is entitled to the greatest possible respect. He feels you disrespected him.”
“I didn’t disrespect him! I mean, he forced me to go behind his back because he wouldn’t listen.”
Mingyung shrugged. “It’s the difference between generations, I guess. But I think he knows I’m making your student loan payment, and he hasn’t said anything to stop me. So it’s not hopeless, is it?”
Kacie shrugged back. “One day he’ll miss me more than he does now. I’ll make a success of myself, and he’ll come to me to start talking again.”
“Maybe, dear. Yookyung, you know, you could still go to engineering school.”
“No, umma! I’ll make it in culinary. You’ll see.”
“Maybe you should try to find a nice man,” her mother offered. “I’m sure you would make a good mother.”
Kacie was pretty sure there was no hope of meeting a man who would like her. “Umma, if I haven’t had a boyfriend by now, then we can forget about that, can’t we? I just want to work.”
Her mother leaned close and peered into her eyes. “You are still a virgin, aren’t you, Yookyung?”
“Yes, of course I am. Can we be serious? I’ll probably die a virgin.”
It was another week or so before Jinwoo, her first cousin on her mother’s side, stopped by and asked her to go for a walk with him to look at an apartment he was going to rent. A wiry, chipper young man of twenty-four with a vaguely insulting grin, Jinwoo had neglectful parents, overworked at their luggage store, and was left to his own devices most of the time. He’d been working in a travel agency and wasting his associate’s degree in business.
Kacie was willing enough to get out of the home for a while, and followed her cousin. She figured his real reason for taking her out was to ask for advice about his pathetic love life, as he had recently been dumped by his Malaysian girlfriend Annie, who wanted him to entertain her at higher cost than he could afford. To Kacie’s surprise, he took her arm and led her briskly along two blocks of 84th Street to Roosevelt Avenue, turned right and headed left toward the Social Security office. Right there under the train tracks, just a few blocks from the subway and bus terminal situated between Broadway and Roosevelt, was the location of Papa Jose’s Empanadas, where she had used to eat with her neighborhood friends back in her high school days. Caught up in the joys of culinary school and the woes of her stalled-out career, Kacie hadn’t even realized the fast food place was out of business. The windows were shuttered, and a For Rent sign was taped to the inside of the glass door. Jinwoo dug in his pocket and pulled out a key. “It’s all mine, Kacie,” he said. “I got a deal on the lease, I got some financing, and this is my restaurant.”
“Since when can you run a Mexican restaurant? You can’t even melt cheese on a tortilla. Don’t be stupid, cuz.”
“I can’t run a Mexican restaurant, but that’s not my master plan, Kacie. What do you think of this? Koryo Burger. Authentic Korean-style burgers and fries, with homemade kimchi and daily authentic specials?”
“It sounds better than you trying to run Papa Jose’s,” Kacie said. “But you still don’t know how to run a restaurant.”
“That’s right,” he answered. “But you do, cuz. Right?”
“I do, sure. But…”
“So it’s your restaurant. I’m the boss on paper, and I’ll do the books, but everything else is yours to run. It’ll be hard as hell getting the place started with just you and me and maybe one person in the front, but everyone works hard at the start of a new venture. This can be the start of a Korean burger dynasty. What do you say?”
Kacie was twenty-three, and had been thinking about working under a premier chef for a while before striking out on her own. On the other hand, a Korean burger place was far from as hard to manage as a fine-dining establishment. The menu would need only a few consistent items, plus occasional specials. The location, right by the subway station, and a short walk from Elmhurst Hospital Center, was superb; only a shopping mall would have more foot traffic. They’d have to attract non-Koreans to eat there, since the neighborhood was primarily Latin American, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, but no new business lacked some sort of challenge.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do it. But you have to tell my dad.”
“He still isn’t speaking to you?”
“He isn’t.”
“Shit,” said Jinwoo. “Okay, I’ll take care of that.”
Jinwoo invited himself over for dinner, and demanded that Kacie make him a celebratory bibimbap: a bowl of rice with a whole egg and pickled vegetables on top.
Steve came home
as his daughter was dishing up the food. He came in the kitchen looking for his wife, and said, “That smells wonderful, Mingyung, what… Oh.” He turned away, tucked his folded newspaper under his arm.
“Uncle, it’ll taste even better than it smells,” Jinwoo announced.
Steve humphed and stepped out of the kitchen. Jinwoo followed. Kacie continued to layer vegetables atop the bed of rice, listening uncomprehendingly to a muffled argument in Korean between her cousin and her father. Mingyung rushed into the kitchen with a panicked look; smelled the food, bit her lip; licked her lips; slid into a chair. “What could that be about?” she asked, not convincingly.
“Jinwoo is opening a restaurant, and I’m going to run it.”
“But you’re a child,” Mingyung said plaintively. “He’s a child, too. I’m calling your auntie.”
“She’s probably forgotten she has a son at all,” said Kacie as she set the completed dish on the small wooden table in the kitchen where the family ate together.
“I’ll remind her. What, are you both stupid?”
Kacie put a bite of mung beans into her mother’s mouth.
“It’s delicious, Yookyung, as always, but…”
Outside in the living room, the shouting stopped. The silence was painful. At last the kitchen door swung open, and Steve entered alone. He looked at his wife. “Our daughter will be making Korean burgers on Roosevelt Avenue,” he said. “This is not a proper use of her potential, but I have no choice except to congratulate her. It is now clear that things will not change the way I want them to. I cannot continue forever to live with only one daughter. I will forgive her someday, since there is nothing else to do. Is that our dinner?” He glanced at the bibimbap.
“It’s our dinner,” said Mingyung.
Chapter Three
The Pitch
“Someone put you up to this,” Toby said.
“Absolutely not,” said Herschel. “I’m a genuine member of the Kitchen Network team. We both are, right, Ricky?” he added to the cameraman.