Cocky Chef

by JD Hawkins

  Chow. That’s the word on the sign. The name of the place. Something about the name makes my gut tighten, forcing me to remember that night out by my pool, the look of joy on her face when I pulled away the cloche and showed her the dessert I’d made her. A memory now tinged with bitterness, where recalling it feels like swallowing a jagged pill.

  I watch her a while until I figure out what she’s doing: sanding wood. I see the panels leaning up against the wall, broad and circular, like table tops. She’s working the edges so they’ll curve softly, I realize, and I can’t help smiling. Who else would think about such details? Me, maybe.

  For about an hour I sit there, observing her, feeling the knife she stuck in my back twisting a little more with each passing minute. The distance across the street feeling like miles, rather than yards, impossible to traverse. The cold, hard determination that gave me everything in life making me almost hope that the restaurant crumbles, so she’ll come running back full of regret and apologies.

  For a moment I imagine what it would be like to go to her now, just talk, see how she’s doing. Maybe help with the sanding. See if she wants to get a coffee sometime.

  But no.

  I learn my lessons, and I learn them well—even if I have to learn them the hard way.

  I start the engine and drive away.

  20

  Willow

  “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

  “Um…working here?”

  “Right…ok…and finally: Do you have any questions that you’d like to ask us?”

  The teenager squirms in his ill-fitting shirt, so starched it sounds like rustling leaves.

  “Uh…when would this job start? Like, ‘cause I’d have to give a two weeks’ notice to my manager at McDonald’s if I get it.”

  Tony clears his throat. “Well, we’ll get back to you about—”

  “Tell them first thing you can,” I interrupt. “You’re hired.”

  My partner turns to me, stepping a little to the side to block the kid from seeing the alarmed expression he shoots me. Then he spins around quickly, all professional smiles, and tells the interviewee, “Would you mind giving us a minute?”

  The kid shrugs, confused and daunted, then turns to walk out of the almost-finished kitchen and into the behind-schedule seating area. As soon as he pushes through the nylon curtain we’re using for a door, Tony shoots me that alarmed expression again.

  “Willow, what are you doing?” he hisses.

  “I like him.”

  “Are you serious? He’s a high school drop-out who’s been working the fryer at McDonald’s for a year.”

  “That shows he’s got dedication and a great work ethic! Besides, we’ve only got two weeks til the opening. And he can cook,” I say calmly, pushing the exquisitely fluffed, perfectly prepared omelet toward Tony, as a reminder.

  He sighs and looks to the heavens.

  “So he can cook an omelet. Who cares? My sister can make omelets—but those and Hot Pockets are about the extent of her culinary ability.”

  “She can’t make one like this,” I say, chewing on a piece and savoring the perfect texture. “Trust me. You hire a kid like that, pay him a decent wage, cultivate his skills, and he’ll break his back for you. Have a little faith.”

  Tony’s answer is drowned out by the loud sound of clattering coming from the front. He settles for giving a shake of the head and going to see what the commotion is. Struggling through the door is a tiny Asian girl with turquoise blue streaks in her hair carrying half a dozen flat packages more than half her height in length, their weight and size too much for her to navigate through the mass of furniture parts and boxes.

  “Tacoma?” Tony says, rushing to her aid.

  “Yep, that’s me,” she beams happily.

  “Ok great, welcome, let’s get these things unwrapped so I can check them—then we’ll put them in the back until they’re ready to go up. You,” Tony says, pointing to the nervous teenager still standing like a frightened rabbit in all the chaos, “what’s your name again?”

  “Shane.”

  “Shane—give me a hand with these paintings, will you?”

  “Did I get the job?”

  Tony sighs a little, glancing at me, then waves his hand in an exasperated manner.

  “Sure, but only after you help with these packages.”

  It was Tony’s idea to use the restaurant as a kind of art space, putting a different local artist’s work up on the walls each month. He sold the idea to the artists by telling them restaurant customers were a ‘captive audience,’ not the kind of exhibition-goers who walk straight to the most colorful piece in the gallery and ignore the rest. The local artists would get to showcase their available-for-sale work to the hundreds (Tony’s estimate) of diners a month, while we would get free, always of-the-minute art for our restaurant. It was a win-win, as Tony loves to say.

  We spend about an hour sorting through the paintings, beautiful mixed media portraits of women textured with 3D materials like metal and fabric, then hash out some of the details of the job with Shane, telling him to turn up on Sunday to start running through the recipes with the other hires. Once that’s done, Tony consults the to-do list on his phone as we sit up on the only finished table and take a brief, rare break to work through some fresh iced teas.

  “Oh,” he says, noticing something, “I forgot to tell you. We have three critics—potentially—coming to the opening. Two are maybes, one definite—but the definite is from the Los Angeles Times.”

  I cough down my soda to look at Tony as if he’s insane—which he patently is.

  “The Times is gonna be here? On opening night?”

  Tony nods happily.

  “Shouldn’t we wait until the restaurant finds its, you know, ‘groove,’ before we start asking for the big guns to come in and criticize us?”

  “Come on! It’s going to be an event! We’re going to explode on this city with our opening! God…I feel like I’ve been engaging in foreplay for months and I just wanna…” Tony shakes and grunts in a way that I’m pretty sure is similar to his sex face, “already.”

  “Sure…” I say, brushing plaster from my paint-specked boyfriend jeans, “and it will be an event. For family, friends, people who are interested. But it’s not like we have to prove ourselves completely in one night.”

  “Oh, honey,” Tony says, with a convincing sense of pity, “I’m sorry. I keep forgetting you’re from Idaho. See, you don’t get second chances here—and you sure as shit don’t get to prove yourself over the long run. The opening night is box office time. That’s when you make your money, and your reputation.”

  “You’re thinking of the movies.”

  “This is L.A. Everything is the movies.”

  A truck pulling up and honking its horn outside signals the end of our break. I hop off the table while Tony glances at his phone again.

  “Can you handle this?” he says. “I’ve got to go file that form for the Department of Public Health.”

  “Sure. I’ll catch you later.”

  When I go outside, two men have already descended from the truck, one of them slamming open the rear door and unloading boxes while the other plucks a pen from behind his ear and starts studying a folded bunch of papers in his hand. He’s a short guy in his forties, skin leathery from working in the truck, his eyes small and dark. He barely looks up as I approach.

  “One box sea bream, one box red snapper, one squid, one mussels, one crab,” he says.

  “These should have come earlier this morning,” I say, confused. “I was told before nine-thirty—the latest.”

  The guy looks up at me for the first time. He checks his watch.

  “What is it? Ten twenty…eight? Less than an hour out. I’m sorry.”

  I frown at him but he’s already turned his attention back to his order list.

  “An hour late is an hour late,” I say. “You ever wait an hour to eat at a restaurant?”

  He looks u
p again, and upon seeing that I won’t let it go he softens a little, smiling.

  “I’m sorry. Fishing season’s full swing right now, you know? We had a hell of a lot of deliveries to make, and a little trouble with the boxing. I figured since,” he waves his pencil at the covered glass behind me, “you guys weren’t even open yet that you could take the hit. Won’t happen again, I promise.”

  “You know, the next couple of deliveries I have from you guys are the ones we need for the opening. If those are even five minutes after nine-thirty then it’s going to—”

  “Relax,” the guy says, chuckling with a fatherly ease. “I understand. What do you think I’m gonna do? Screw over a relationship with a new customer? If I did that I wouldn’t be in business as long as I have been.”

  I relax a little, realizing that my shoulders have been hunched with tension all this time.

  “Ok,” I say, making it sound like a sigh. “I’m just making sure everything goes right.”

  “Trust me. This is my job,” the guy says, still smiling. He looks back at the restaurant behind me again. “Place looks good, and this location is great. You guys are gonna make a killing.”

  I smile, the offhand compliment in his comment somehow feeling way more meaningful than it should.

  “That’s the idea,” I say.

  “Where do you want these?” the guy unloading says, kicking up the hand cart.

  “Oh, just put them in the kitchen. I’ll sort them out.” I hold the door open for him and then turn back to the other guy. “Hey, actually, I wanted to ask something.”

  “Hm?”

  “Since it’s our opening, and we’re expecting some pretty important people, do you think you could, you know, just make doubly sure that we get good, fresh stuff? Especially the squid—we cook it in this marinade, see, and when it…anyway, we just need really, really excellent stuff—we’d be willing to pay a premium, even.”

  “Uh-huh,” the guy says, looking at me as if deep in thought.

  “Say…ten percent?”

  He thinks about it a little longer, then smiles easily.

  “Say no more. I’ll get you the freshest seafood we have. Sign here,” he says, handing me the paper. “You know, usually we charge twenty percent for that kind of…offer. But for an attractive lady like you I’m willing to make an exception.”

  I hand the paper back and smile, pretending to be flattered. There aren’t many things that would suppress the feminist in me, but line-caught salmon that can take a yuzu and chive marinade well is one of them.

  “Thanks a lot,” I say quickly, spinning on my heels to get back into the restaurant.

  I start working through the boxes, refrigerating and freezing some of the seafood for the chef training and run-throughs, then begin to prep the rest for the start of training tomorrow, scaling, gutting, fileting, and marinating to have good examples ready to show.

  It feels good, being in a kitchen again, working with my hands. Even if the kitchen is empty, and this food isn’t for a customer. For a month now I’ve been a nonstop negotiating, interior designing, event planning machine—but I haven’t actually been able to cook much, beyond trying out some stuff for the menu. Even the slippery, smelly, cold texture of fish feels great in my hands now, like coming home.

  With each thing falling into place, the artists’ work, the discussion with the distributor, the prep for the chefs, I feel my dream get closer and closer to coming true, the line dissolving between my mental vision of what this moment would be, and the reality in all its fish-smelling glory. Like finally adding paint to the elements of a sketch I’d been working on since I first tasted oysters and realized I wanted to be a chef.

  But then there’s Cole. Never far from my thoughts. His distinctive outline still standing in the depths of my emotions, so powerful, so suppressed, so ever-present that sometimes I almost feel like he’s standing beside me when I work late at night.

  I miss him. As stupid and pathetic as it sounds, I miss him. In the brief moments I have a second to think about anything other than the restaurant, it’s always about him, our time together. Unresolved and ended in that abrupt, unjust way. Only the sheer amount of work that fills my every waking hour keeps me from glancing at my phone, distracts me from playing out how I might call him and see if time has healed anything, if the path back to him is as closed as it was when we parted. It doesn’t help that both Ellie and Asha seemed so genuinely disappointed when I told them how it ended. Both of them were rooting for us.

  To make it easier, I try to think of his flaws, but even those end up endearing him more to me. It’s so easy to turn a flaw into something admirable in the people you love. His infuriating stubbornness becomes a commendable strength in his beliefs. The way he makes his decisions rashly and quickly, unyielding to any criticism, becomes the decisiveness of passion, of dedication to his art. Even his ‘secrets’ make a kind of sense when you realize this is a guy who built himself up from nothing. I wish it was easier to hate him…

  “Ah, Willow. There you are.”

  The voice startles me out of my thoughts and I look up to see our investor Andre walking into the kitchen, politely wrinkling his nose only a little at the smell.

  “Oh, hey,” I reply, finishing the filet I’m working on quickly and walking over to the sink. “Sorry about the smell. Just prepping for tomorrow.”

  “It’s fine,” Andre says, coming to stand beside me as I clean off my hands. “I was just dropping by to see how things were going.”

  “Good,” I say, flicking my hands and picking up a towel. “Though ask me again when I start training the cooks.”

  Andre laughs easily.

  “I’m sure you’ll do a fantastic job. You’re doing far better than I could have ever hoped anyway.”

  I take the compliment with a smile and tilt of the head, though it turns out Andre’s just preparing me for some bad news. His expression goes gentle as he unlatches his satchel and pulls out a magazine, already folded to a specific page.

  “I didn’t really want to bring this up, but I just had to know. Is this going to be a problem for us?” he asks as he holds up the magazine so I can read the title while I’m still drying my hands.

  Cutting Edge: Why Knife is Still the Best Restaurant in America (if you can afford it)

  I skim the article’s platitudes and praises quickly and then look back at Andre, shrugging it off with a smile.

  “Not at all. Why?”

  My shrug seems enough for him, and he puts the magazine back in his satchel.

  “I don’t know. It’s just that this must be the twentieth article I’ve read about Knife. Sounds like quite the revolution going on over there.”

  I snort dismissively and turn to face Andre head on.

  “The only thing they’re ‘revolutionizing’ is how much people are willing to pay for grilled asparagus on rye. I mean, you could buy half our menu for the price of their soup starter!”

  Andre smiles, but his eyes are unsettled, and I can tell the words only make him a little more uneasy.

  “Right,” he says, concerned still. “I’m just ever-so-slightly afraid we’re going to be the ‘cheap’ version of Knife, you know? They’re causing quite a buzz and I just hope we don’t end up in their shadow.”

  I slam the towel over my shoulder in frustration—with the idea, not with Andre.

  “We are not the cheap version of Knife, because my menu is different, and it’s better. In fact, once we get going, Knife will be in our shadow, because everybody who eats at Chow will recognize Knife as the pompous, overpriced exercise in food fakery that it is. In fact, you know what I’d love? I’d love to put my menu against his—no tricks—and have people taste and see which one they like more. I’d love that, because there’s no way anyone could doubt Chow then.”

  Andre raises his eyebrow and nods.

  “I don’t doubt you at all,” he says. “But there goes that passion again. I was just overthinking it a little, ignore me. Perha
ps it’s been a little too long since I tasted those mango scallops and chili clams.”

  I laugh, if anything to release the tension of talking about Knife.

  “Well you’re my boss now, so you can have them whenever you like—though I suspect we’re fully booked for the next three months.”

  Andre laughs, taps his satchel, and starts walking away.

  “It’s going to be a hell of a ride. I can’t wait.”

  “Yeah,” I say, as he pushes through the nylon curtain. I look back at the pile of fish guts. “Neither can I.”

  21

  Cole

  Charles is standing in the office when I enter and dump the boxes of dragonfruit and lime in the office.

  “Tonight’s the night,” he says, standing with his hands behind his back, making me wonder if he waited for me like that.

  “I know,” I say, pulling out a pocket knife and cutting one of the dragonfruits down the middle. “I don’t care.”

  I scoop some of the fruit out and try it.

  “You don’t care?” Charles says, in the mildly-humored way he asks questions. “Apparently it’s the biggest film premiere of the year—there will be photographers here, you know.”

  I look at Charles as I make my way back behind my desk, putting the fruit down on it—it’s good enough.

  “Well, Hollywood people are customers just like everybody else,” I say nonchalantly.

  The truth is, I wasn’t even talking about the premiere’s private after-party. Something a million times more dramatic and emotionally charged is going to be happening just a couple of streets away from those flash-lit celebrities: Chow’s opening night.

  “You want some of this?” I ask in an attempt to try and change the subject, offering the other half of the fruit to Charles, who shakes his head.