I grabbed my bag and sneaked out, avoiding the hassle of a long group good-bye. I decided to treat myself and take a cab home to Brooklyn, cutting my travel time by two thirds. My head, still stuffy with thoughts of the restaurant, welcomed the fresh, early October air. I stood at the curb with one arm raised over my head and waited for an available cab. Cabs were harder to come by at the late hour but I didn’t mind waiting a few minutes.
“Doll!” Joey’s voice came from the bar’s doorway. I turned and saw him standing alone, half inside the bar, half out. He walked toward me.
“Sneaking out?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I told him. “Too many people, you know?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
A cab finally pulled up, and I opened the door.
“Doll,” he said again. I waited, hand on the door.
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” he said. “You know that, right, Doll?”
Did I? I wanted to. “Okay,” is all I said.
“Have a good night, Doll,” he said. “Get home safe.” He kissed me with a quick squeeze before heading back inside.
I got into the waiting cab, the driver looking bored.
“I’m going to Williamsburg,” I told him. “Second exit after the bridge.” He took off down Second Avenue.
I sank into the backseat of the cab, tired and ready to be alone in my apartment, looking forward to getting some sleep before having to get up and do it all again. The critic would have to come back before she’d have enough information for the review, and I needed to be ready.
SIXTEEN
Check, Please
The Times critic made three more visits (any critic worth her salt makes multiple visits in order to sample a wide range of food and to test the consistency), and she was spotted every time. When the paper called to schedule a photo of the dining room during dinner service, we knew for sure that the review would appear the following Wednesday, so we had six days to agonize with anticipation. What was done was done; our fate rested in her hands. The most we could do was make sure that the dining room looked busy on the night of the photo, so we all asked friends to come in for dinner at the appointed time. The last thing we wanted was a photo of an empty room—how would that look?
Late on the night before the review was to appear, Joey left work to buy the paper from a twenty-four-hour newsstand. He’d scoped out which newsstand was the first to receive the earliest edition of the paper. He wanted to be the first to read the review, and he wanted to do it in solitude, just in case. The rest of us waited in the kitchen, glasses of wine and beer in hand, ready to celebrate—or drown our sorrows. What if she’d hated my desserts? Not only would I have failed, but it would be a public failure, in writing, for the entire world to see. I had a second glass of wine.
But Joey returned triumphant, and with an enormous, satisfied smile he held up the paper to us with a sigh of relief.
“Two stars!”
Two stars from the New York Times was a definite triumph. After a collective cheer we gathered around him as he read the entire review out loud, savoring each word of praise for his delicious food. She swooned over the lamb sandwich (one of my favorites, too), a flat disc of grilled dough stuffed with cinnamon-braised lamb, hummus, tadzhiki, greens, preserved lemon, and cucumbers, calling it “the best sandwich I ever tasted.” She praised his fricassee of rabbit with green lentils and the pomegranate-glazed salmon. She applauded the grilled baby octopus salad with finger-ling potatoes and pickled onions, an appetizer that was a kitchen favorite, too, not least of all because the tiny octopus bodies that we discarded (only the bouquets of eight tiny legs were used) made perfect finger puppets. She even loved my focaccia.
I waited anxiously. Desserts always came last.
The owner was happy that he’d been praised for his fine selection of boutique wines and the service, and that she’d acknowledged his restaurant pedigree. Her only criticism so far was the phrasing of the menu: She found it too wordy and cumbersome, especially the dual French-English dinner menu. I wanted to yell out “I told you so,” but I didn’t. It was a minor criticism and a matter that could be easily remedied.
It was all wonderful, but I couldn’t breathe until I heard about the desserts. Joey kept reading: Desserts are classics that have been re-imagined with Middle Eastern flavors and are gorgeously arranged.
“She loved them, Doll,” praised Joey, putting his arm around me.
I stood there and smiled. It was a simple comment on my work, not gushing or superlative, perhaps, like I might have hoped it would be, but it was good. According to the review, my goal in creating Scarabée’s desserts had been achieved. I was the tiniest bit disappointed that my name had not appeared, but could I really complain? My desserts were “gorgeous,” and she hadn’t said a single negative thing about them.
As we hoped, the stellar review brought in business almost immediately, and we happily adjusted to the increase. In the following months, we were reviewed multiple times, and reading each one for the first time was exhilarating. I savored every moment of it. My name did eventually appear, and my ego swelled with pride every time my work was recognized for being “delicious,” “divine,” “fabulous.” I shamelessly told my friends about every review, demanding that they buy the magazines and newspapers to see for themselves.
I faxed the reviews from major publications to my mother in Tennessee, so she, too, could read for herself of my success. Every positive review served as validation: Trading in office life and becoming a pastry chef had been the right choice. My parents didn’t have to worry; I had succeeded in my new career. It was right there in black and white.
With so much positive feedback appearing in print, it should have been easy to brush off the occasional slur, but ego is a fragile thing. For us, cooking was all about achieving perfection: the perfect taste, the perfect plate, the perfect meal, and having someone, especially the less respected writers who had probably never themselves worked in a restaurant, disparage any part of it was hard to swallow.
Despite the glut of good reviews, the few bad comments stuck in my side like thick, stubborn thorns. I was outraged when a writer from a local free paper trashed my pear tarte Tatin. This same writer had made multiple errors in the food descriptions, mistaking currants for raisins, for example. How dare such a lazy writer be able to judge my work? I bellyached about it for days, despite Joey’s urging that I let it go: Nobody who matters cares about that restaurant column, Doll. It’s in a free paper! People don’t even pay for it! But I couldn’t let it go until finally, arriving home after work one night, I found my answering machine blinking with a single message. Joey had left a loop recording of a snippet from Ruth Reichl’s radio show in which she gave a brief review of the restaurant: the pear tart was quite delicious . . . the pear tart was quite delicious . . . the pear tart was quite delicious.
Reviews led to interview requests. “Doll,” urged Joey after we’d been interviewed together, “you gotta stop telling people that you don’t like sweets. It doesn’t sound good.”
During an interview with a local radio host I’d been asked what my favorite dessert to eat was. I was honest. I didn’t really eat many sweets; they no longer tempted me. Aside from an occasional bit of ice cream or a cookie, I’d much rather have a steak or fries or even sautéed spinach with garlic.
“You’re like a drug dealer who doesn’t do drugs,” he added.
“But it’s true,” I told him. “And it doesn’t mean that I don’t like making them or that I don’t know what tastes good.”
“Doll, you have one of the best senses of quality I’ve ever seen. But just think about it. How it sounds, you not liking desserts. Sometimes you just have to pretend a little.”
It wasn’t the only time Joey encouraged me to “pretend a little.” If a writer called about an article she was writing on a particular ingredient, figs, for example, and asked if I used them on my menu, I was instructed to answer an emphatic “yes”
and spontaneously invent a dessert that included that ingredient that I could then talk about. I could always put it on the menu after the fact, Joey said. That way I’d get included in the article and get the exposure. The more exposure, the better.
As a result of all the good press, we enjoyed an increase in business and therefore, a decrease in stress levels. My routines were set, I was comfortable with my desserts, and I even hired someone to work at night plating them. Finally I had my nights free, and my life resembled something almost normal. I pretended that I had never slept with Joey and had never been jealous of the Frenchie. Eventually, I started dating other people—outside of the business.
Joey and I still saw each other every day and worked together closely. Over time, we became an ideal team, able to work together on any task, our strengths complimenting each other’s perfectly. I fully accepted his authority, and he in turn always treated me with respect. I looked up to him, eager to learn anything I could from his fifteen years of experience, and he valued my computer and writing skills, my patience, my taste buds. Gradually, we developed a deeper friendship, too, and began talking on the phone. By the time summer rolled around, we were spending our mutual day off together, usually at the beach with a group of our friends, some of them in the restaurant business, others not. We became super-friends, friends on steroids. Even our friends became suspicious that there was something more.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before we once again crossed that line, and I should have seen it coming. I did see it coming, but I looked the other way. That night, after a long day at the beach, I didn’t have to go back to Joey’s under the pretense of wanting to take a shower before going out to have a bite to eat (as if spending the entire day together hadn’t been enough). I could have gotten dressed in his bathroom instead of coming out of the shower in just my towel to get my change of clothes. And I could have turned away from Joey when I saw that look in his heavy hazel eyes, the look I should have remembered from almost a year earlier. But I didn’t.
After that night, sleepovers became common, simply an extension of the time we already spent together, but nothing else changed. We remained a perfect team at work and never talked about what was going on between us. It just kept happening, unaffected at first by the gradual slowing of business. But when business began to slow, so did our morale. We tried in vain to figure out the problem. Was it the name? I’d been worried about naming the restaurant after a bug, even if it was a French-sounding one, and my fears were realized every time a delivery man announced he had a package for “Scrabby’s.” Maybe it was the location, though it was unlikely. There was nothing wrong with the food or service, we were sure of that, thanks to consistent affirmation in the press. Maybe New York City was simply too fickle a restaurant town, and our customers had moved on to the next new place. The early success we’d experienced had slipped through our fingers and been washed away, and we all felt the blow, especially the owner.
Eventually, things between Joey and the owner became irrevocably strained until finally Joey accepted an offer to open a new restaurant in a hotel just a few blocks away. Frank and I, utterly loyal to our chef, gave notice, too. We’d come in as a team and we left the same way.
SEVENTEEN
Table for Two
Not long before I started working at the hotel, Joey and I were having dinner at a “friends-and-family” night, one of my favorite industry perks. In exchange for constructive criticism and professional feedback on everything from food to service to lighting, a soon-to-be-open restaurant provides colleagues with a complimentary dinner. It is a system that gives new restaurants a brief chance to work out their kinks before real customers and, even more important, the critics show up.
Since the demise of Scarabée, our amorphous relationship, which consisted of sleepovers, social outings, and work-related conversation, had only grown stronger, despite the fact that each of us silently resolved not to talk about what was going on. It wasn’t until Sal, the restaurant’s manager and a friend of Joey, introduced us to some fellow diners that I was suddenly forced to acknowledge the reality of the situation.
“This is Joey,” Sal said to the two couples seated at the table next to us. “He was the chef at Layla and Scarabée. And this,” he continued, “is his girlfriend, Dalia.”
Girlfriend? I noticed Joey stiffen at the sudden designation hanging in the air, and I felt a little bit panicky at the prospect of being outed. That single word, which up to now had remained unspoken, abruptly gave name to a situation I’d pretended didn’t exist and one that, judging by his reaction to the label, Joey wasn’t keen on acknowledging either. We both nodded at the table, Nice to meet you. Why had Sal said that? Of course Joey and I had bumped into friends and industry people during the many hours we spent together, but we’d always observed an unspoken rule to limit any affection beyond what was appropriate to our relationship as friendly coworkers. I was always introduced as Joey’s pastry chef (it was not unusual for a chef to work with the same pastry chef from job to job, since it could be difficult to find a good match). The last thing I wanted was for anyone to think that I’d been hired as Joey’s pastry chef just because we were dating. Pastry chef was a title I’d worked hard for and one that I valued—and one that got a lot more respect than “girlfriend.”
We left the restaurant in silence. Neither one of us said anything, in fact, until I was at the corner hailing a cab. Normally after a dinner out, we’d get into the same cab and go back to the same apartment, where we would discard all the unspoken pretenses and get into the same bed. When the cab pulled up, though, I was so frustrated with myself for being in this situation and with him for letting me (he was the chef, the one in a position of authority, wasn’t it his responsibility to respect boundaries?) that I practically ran to the cab that pulled up a few feet in front of me.
“Wait, Doll,” I heard Joey say as I walked toward the cab. “Where are you going?” He was smiling, as if nothing had happened. Typical.
“Home,” I answered, turning back to my cab. “I’m going home.” I slammed the door.
It took twenty minutes to get home to Brooklyn, twenty minutes in which I thought about what an idiot I’d been. I’d been loath to think too deeply about our relationship, for fear I’d be forced to acknowledge the very real possibility that the addendum to our perfect work friendship meant nothing more to Joey than a simple convenience or, worse, that I might be just one of many women he was “friends” with.
The truth was that I’d been enjoying all of our time together and I didn’t want to risk ruining it by splitting hairs over its definition. There was so much more than work that held us together. We saw things the same way, appreciated the little things and the bigger ones, too. He had been generous in every sense of the word, helping me fix things around my apartment, driving me for errands, taking me out for countless dinners and movies, always resisting my pleas to pay for something. Save your money, Doll, he always said. Buy yourself something nice. He took care of me. He was adorable and manly and talented and ambitious and perfect, and I had done the unthinkably stupid: I had fallen for my chef.
Idiot.
To make matters worse, in just a few days I would officially start my new job as pastry chef at the hotel with Joey. Another restaurant opening, which meant another extended, stressful period of long hours working closely together. Not exactly the ideal situation in which to work out personal feelings for a boss, especially when those feelings might not be reciprocated.
By the time I got home at nearly midnight, there was already a message from Joey on my machine. Gimme a buzz when you get in, Doll. I gotta ask you something. It was the same message I’d gotten nearly every night for the past few months. How did he manage to sound so vague and yet so endearing? Of course, I called. He picked up on the first ring.
“Hi, Doll,” he said. “What’s going on?” He sounded almost cheerful.
“What do you mean?” I answered. He had to know what’s goin
g on, didn’t he? I hated him for pretending that he hadn’t cringed at hearing me called his girlfriend.
“You seemed so angry, Doll. When you left.” He sounded superficially concerned. He was probably worried that I would quit, that he’d have to find a new pastry chef in a few days. He was going to make me bring it up. I braced myself.
“What are we doing?” I finally said.
“What do you mean, Doll?” he said. “You’re my best friend.” Great. I was his best friend. I’d heard it a million times before. You’re my best friend. This was going nowhere.
“Yeah, Joey, I know,” I said purposefully. “But what are we doing?”
Nothing. He had to know what I was getting at, but he made me spell it out.
“Joey,” I started again. “We spend every day together. We talk on the phone every night.” I paused. “We have sleepovers.”
More silence.
“What are we doing?” I said louder, gaining momentum. “You seemed horrified when Sal introduced me as your girlfriend, and I know we never talk about it, but if what we’re doing isn’t dating or whatever, then aren’t we wasting our time? How can either one of us meet someone to be with for real if we spend every single minute together? Talk every night on the phone? I just can’t keep doing this if it doesn’t mean anything.”
Still more silence. I was getting worked up, aware that I was on the verge of sounding like a crazy drunk girl and I did not want to be that girl. I took a breath.
“I’m just saying, Joey, that we have to decide.” Okay. I was going to do it. I was only going to say it once. “Either we do it for real, or we stop now and we go back to being friends. Just friends.”
“It’s complicated, Doll,” he said.
“I need to know what’s going on with us, Joey. My head is full,” I explained. “In a few days I start working with you at the hotel, and I need to know where I stand before then.”
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