“Beanbag!”
Everything I needed for my new dessert was ready. With the cheesecakes still in their rings, I used a small offset spatula to coat each one with a thin, even layer of passion fruit curd. Then I unmolded them by heating each ring with a propane torch while spinning it on a rotating cake table. I gathered the rest of the garnish for the desserts: wine-stewed berries and Sicilian pistachios. For the berries I had reduced some red wine by almost three quarters with cinnamon stick, bay leaf, and vanilla bean, then poured the hot reduction over blueberries and blackberries. I added the raspberries once the others were cooled so they wouldn’t break down and turn to unattractive mush. The cheesecakes had regular pistachios in the crust, but I used the expensive, jewel-like Sicilian pistachios as a garnish: three nuts on the top of each cheesecake. As I did with every new or special dessert, I would introduce the passion fruit cheesecake to the waiters while they ate family meal, so they would know firsthand what they were serving.
“That’s how Rawd likes it!”
Chatos turned out to be the biggest kid of all, especially when it came to nicknames and random outbursts. Chatos’s “Beanbags” were always the loudest and the most forceful: He used his entire body to yell, stopping in his tracks to bellow with a full body arch. And though he loved “Beanbag,” he also liked to yell about some impending fictional “anal jihad,” though to what, exactly, he was referring I never really knew. Anal jihad is coming, my friend! he would yell in a voice that sounded a little bit like Yoda on crack. Abdullah is gonna get you! Face the east and take it from the west!
“Come on!” yelled one of the cooks, in a faux British accent, responding to Chatos. “That’s it!”
Meredith, a waiter, should have known better than to tell them about the night she met Rod Stewart on the street and ended up having drinks with him late into the night. Just drinks, though, she swore, at a bar. And even though he’d actually sung to her that night and left a message on her cell phone (she said), she never heard from him again. The guys had been using her story as ammunition in an incessant barrage of teasing ever since.
“Come on!” I heard again. “Lick me balls. Tickle ’em!”
It had to be close to four o’clock, time for family meal. I brought my cheesecakes to the walk-in and went upstairs to the kitchen. Sure enough, Meredith, plate in hand, was waiting in line for her serving of Linguine Prima Leftover: linguine with a hodgepodge of inexpensive vegetables in a buttery cream sauce that might or might not have contained cheese. I got in line, right under a picture of Rod Stewart that someone had kindly torn from a magazine and taped onto the “wall of fame,” right next to a wine label from a 1962 Châteauneuf-du-Pape, a few photos of Chatos at an event with another well-known chef, and two photos of the legendary six-fingered dishwasher, in one of which he is waving.
“C’mon, Meredith,” said Culo in his regular voice, stepping past her. “Tell us how Rod likes it.”
“You guys,” she said, smiling in mock anger. It was her only comeback, and it was a futile one. She just kept shaking her head as she moved along in the small line until she stood in front of the bowl of pasta and the bain-marie of agua fresca (family punch) I’d made with leftover passion fruit puree.
“What’s this?” she said, lifting the ladle in and out of the punch over and over.
“Nipple punch,” answered Carter, a young cook, standing across from her.
“Huh?” she said, still idly emptying ladle after ladle back into the bain-marie.
“Nipple punch,” Carter said again, not missing a beat, staring right at her, deadpan.
I then noticed what she was wearing: a flesh-colored, sheer, clingy shirt, through which her nipples did indeed show. She still didn’t get the joke, and Carter didn’t let her in on it. She just took her bowl of pasta and went out to the dining room to eat with the rest of the waiters.
I ate my bowl of pasta standing in the kitchen with the rest of the cooks and then double-checked all the desserts and respective garnishes and sauces on the dessert station. It was the perfect time for this, since the boys usually settled down a bit during family meal, enjoying the lull before the storm of dinner service. As I went through all the mise-en-place, I kept a mental list of everything that needed to be replenished or freshened: caramel sauce, sliced Medjool dates, roasted cocoa beans . . .
“Hey, Dalia,” said Carter, interrupting my train of thought. I pulled my head out of the lowboy and looked up from my squat.
“Yeah?”
“Did you know,” he continued, “that the band Steely Dan got its name from a dildo in the movie Naked Lunch?”
The rest of the guys kept their heads down, pretending not to listen. I stood up.
“Carter,” I told him in the same bored tone I’d use to explain the difference between Italian and Swiss meringues, “Steely Dan was around before that movie came out.”
“Rats,” he said under his breath, shaking his fist. He turned back to his cutting board.
Carter may or may not have realized that Naked Lunch was a book long before it became a movie, but I didn’t want to get drawn any further into a conversation about dildos, which was what I was pretty sure he was hoping for. Consistent indifference, I told myself going downstairs. Consistent indifference.
I hastily brought up all the components of my new dessert and showed Labios how to plate the cheesecake. They call me Labios, he had told me, on account of my big crazy lips. He did indeed have insanely full lips, along with an incredibly good nature and sharp wit, in both English and Spanish. Labios was quickly becoming one of my favorite people in the restaurant (his te gustas maiz was the most hilarious), though I tried not to let it show. Aside from Chatos, he was the only person I really trusted with my desserts. Thankfully, he worked garde-manger nearly every night.
I brought my new dessert out to the waiters, who ate their family meal at a large round table in the dining room. After setting the plate on the table, I stood there, waiting for them to quiet down. In every restaurant it’s the same thing. Before I can start my explanation, they start guessing.
“What’s that?”
“Is it a lemon tart?”
“I know! Mango!”
Rather than talk over them, I simply stood there waiting for them, all of them, to quiet down, so I could say my piece. It was a tactic that worked quite well, though it always made me feel more like a kindergarten teacher than a pastry chef. I announced the dessert as it would appear on the menu: Pistachio-Crusted Passion Fruit Cheesecake with Wine-Stewed Berries. I went over each component, trying not to roll my eyes when someone asked if it had nuts. Waiters have an inordinate amount of power when it comes to suggesting dishes, since diners invariably ask them what they like best on the menu. I wanted them to try my new dessert, love it, and suggest it.
After family meal, I finished up the rest of my work downstairs and made a list of things to be ordered for the next day as well as a to-do list. I then headed back to the dingy unisex locker room to change into my civilian clothing. Cooks and waiters shared the same small room, filthy from constantly flooding sewer water and the bags of dirty, fermenting linen. Filth is an inevitable fact of restaurant life. Even Joey, obsessive about cleanliness and order, could not stop the kitchen floor drains from overflowing and sometimes spewing sewage. Visitors to kitchens are usually appalled by the grimy floors (grimy even though they’re mopped twice a day), the crumbling walls, and greasy exhaust hoods—the filth that cooks deal with every day. But diners shouldn’t worry. In any good restaurant, food is always stored and handled with the utmost care, even if cooks have to walk through two inches of dirty water to get to it.
I stood on my dirty chef’s coat while changing. Just as I was finishing, Meredith came in and smiled as she slumped into the single chair in the room, her short-shorts riding up.
“Dalia,” she said thoughtfully, smiling. “Your titties must be filled with milk chocolate.”
“Huh?” I said, trying to get past her to g
ive her more room.
“Because everything you make tastes so good,” she explained innocently.
“Thanks,” I mumbled, grabbing my bag and heading out the door.
I made my way down the dimly lit hallway that led back to the basement, carefully balancing on the slabs of wood that someone had kindly laid down in the puddles of leftover floodwater. I made a mental note to be careful about wearing sandals in the warmer months. The usually treacherous hallway was the only route back to the basement and out of the restaurant.
“You outta here?” asked Chatos, seeing me in my street clothes. I nodded, as I took one last look at my list of things to be ordered for the next day.
Chatos was settled at his spot in front of a cutting board a few feet away from my pastry station. He was still working on finishing up the butchering that the prep guy had started earlier that day. He made all the final cuts on the meat, fish, and foie gras, rendering the cleaned slabs of flesh into expertly sculpted and perfectly portioned shapes.
“You know Culo’s gay, right?” he asked.
Culo, I had already gathered, was many things—a chauvinist, hypocrite, loudmouth, misogynist, homophobe, borderline bigot—but as far as I could tell, he was definitely not gay.
“Get out!” I answered dryly, turning to him with faux wide eyes. I was still trying to figure out how to respond to my new chef’s outrageous behavior. I turned back to my list, adding a box of 61 percent chocolate pistols.
“GAY!” yelled Chatos at the top of his lungs, bending his knees and throwing back his head. “GAAAAAAAY!!!”
Chatos had started the teasing months earlier, and what started out as good-natured ribbing against a self-proclaimed “man of hate” had snowballed into a new animal all its own, one that was as gargantuan in its size as it was merciless in its execution.
“He likes it in the AAAAAAY!” Chatos added, screaming.
Pause.
“Twice on Sun-DAY!” came another burst, to no one in particular. Chatos’s outbursts were so free and forceful, so persistent, that I became convinced he suffered from both autism and Tourette’s. Most restaurants exist within an atmosphere that encourages constant insults, teasing, and general adolescent ribbing, but the “Culo is gay” phenomenon was far beyond anything I could have imagined. Chatos had made a conscious and absolute decision to run the “Culo is gay” gag every day. Common sense or common management guidelines might dictate that the boss should be the last one encouraging the rest of the employees to tease and disrespect his sous-chef—his second in command, of all people— but I was quickly learning that common sense did not apply to Veritas kitchen politics.
“Chatos,” said Stewart, suddenly sticking his head out from the sommelier office. Stewart could hear everything from in there. He looked down the hallway, making sure the coast was clear.
“Dude, maybe you should chill out with the gay stuff,” he said, smiling. He didn’t sound very convincing. “Culo got really pissed last night.”
Stewart explained how, the night before, he went online and found a rhyming website. He spent the rest of the night sharing the wealth with the kitchen, reciting a never-ending ode to Culo: Culo is gay . . . he likes it in the AY . . . from a guy named Andre . . . when he’s in Taipei . . . with boys he likes to roll in the hay . . . even if he has to pay.
“Poor Culo,” Chatos said, shaking his head. He paused before confidently raising his head and smiling. “Fuck Culo!” he yelled valiantly.
He paused again, thinking. “Nah,” he decided. “I don’t wanna fuck Culo. He’s too ugly. Maybe just his lips. That’s it.”
Stewart laughed, shaking his head.
It would have been easy to write Chatos off as simply irritating, or immature, or even sadistic (and he did take occasional pride in calling himself a sadist), except that his cooks loved him. He was outrageous and funny and smart, and they not only looked up to him, they worshipped him. Their eyes would light up with delight at every bizarrely inappropriate word that came out of his mouth. That he was superlatively talented and generous with his knowledge only meant they loved him more. I would have found him impossible to tolerate if he weren’t, as strange as it sounds, fair and not the slightest bit arrogant. We had very few serious conversations about my work, but when we did, he was always surprisingly professional. I actually liked him.
“Dude,” Chatos said when Culo finally ventured into the basement. “When are you gonna come out of the closet?”
“I’m not gay,” Culo insisted. He was sick of the gay jokes, but Chatos, his chef, was the one and only person in the restaurant he could not tell to fuck off. He was helpless and had to take the abuse. All of it. Every day. The rest of us certainly didn’t mind.
“Dude,” Chatos countered, “you watch American Idol. You probably watch it in bed with a big bottle of Jergens lotion and a box of Kleenex.”
It was his most stalwart evidence. Who else but a gay guy watches American Idol? Culo also made the mistake of admitting he’d gone by himself to see Miami Vice in the movie theater. That’s fucking gay. It doesn’t get any gayer than that. Culo became a new benchmark for gay. If Styx, for example, was broadcast on the radio, Chatos instantly changed the station. Oh God, that song isn’t just gay; it’s Culo gay. The only thing Chatos hated more than gay music was a Rachael Ray commercial. Oh, kill me now, he would say upon hearing her cheery voice on the radio.
Shaking my head, I stepped into the small office to place my order, hoping that Chatos’s yells were not audible on the other end of the line. Finally, I made my way out of the basement, irritated that I could not stop myself from thinking of more words that rhyme with gay. On the stairs, I ran into Culo, who was still shaking his head at Chatos.
“Geez,” Culo said to me, eyes wide. “I don’t know what to do. I think he really thinks I’m gay!”
Despite his tendency to be asinine, disrespectful, and insulting, I liked to believe that Culo’s loudmouthing was as much an act as Chatos’s, that it was just posturing and that underneath it all, he was a decent guy. I liked to think that, but it didn’t make him any more likable or trustworthy. I knew he was venting to me only as a last resort; everyone else in the restaurant was in on the gag.
“It’s driving me crazy, Dalia!” he said.
“You know,” I offered, “it’s not about you. It’s got nothing to do with whether or not you’re gay,” I told him. After all the months of torment, he still hadn’t figured out what most of us figured out in second grade and what the cooks so clearly took advantage of: The more he protested and showed his upset, the more fun it was to continue the abuse.
TWENTY-FIVE
After Hours
I walked into work one morning and found the bar littered with dirty wineglasses, empty bottles, and cigarette ashes. Had it not been for the broken glass on the floor, the wine stain on the wall, and the two upended tables, it might have been like any other day. I took off my jacket, hung it in the coat check, and grabbed some coffee before going to check out the dining room. An entire section of the normally neatly arranged room was completely disheveled—tablecloths bundled on the floor, place settings out of order, and tables at cockeyed angles. One of the upended tables was actually broken, its top partially separated from its pedestal.
“I know,” said my new assistant, Peter, suddenly emerging from the kitchen, coffee cup in hand. Cooks drink enormous amounts of coffee.
Peter showed up at the restaurant one morning not too long after I started at Veritas. He’d staged (worked for free) for the previous pastry chef one day a week and asked to continue to stage with me, and he’d arrived just in time. I’d just about had it with The Albanian who, in addition to being generally inadequate, took too many cigarette breaks, talked on his cell phone in the kitchen (Cell phone in the kitchen? Was he kidding?), and had a nasty tendency to make blatantly racist and sexist remarks. Just when he had pushed me over the edge, Peter appeared and accepted my offer to be my full-time assistant. Not only was Peter m
ore than adequate as an assistant, but he was familiar with the kitchen and the cooks, too. Maybe too familiar. The cooks called him Stinky Peter because of what they perceived to be a body odor problem.
“This is fucked up, right?” Peter said.
“Yeah.” I nodded, taking it all in. “It was like this when you got here?”
“Uh-huh,” he answered.
“Nobody else is here?” It was not unusual to arrive in the morning and find someone passed out on table seventeen’s banquette.
“Nope,” he replied. “Just me and David.” David was the new prep guy.
“Huh.”
“And get a load of this!” he said proudly.
Peter directed me back to the floor at the end of the bar and pointed down to a clump of hair. A clump of actual human hair!
“Check it out.” He crouched down closer, pointing purposefully to the dark brown thatch. “It’s got highlights,” he said triumphantly. “It’s gotta be from Chatos. He’s the only one with highlights.”
He was right. Chatos was the only one with highlights. It was weird enough that he had highlights, let alone that they’d been pulled out and left on the floor. We walked back to the broken table in search of more clues.
“Holy crap!” Peter said, getting a closer look. “Is that blood? Or wine?”
I peered at the reddish brown drops on a neighboring tablecloth and shrugged.
“Who knows?” I answered nonchalantly.
Leaving the scene undisturbed, we walked back to the kitchen. Peter got back to work setting up the dessert station for the night’s service, and I went downstairs to change into my chef ’s jacket and clogs.
I’d like to say that finding the restaurant in such a state was a shock, but it wasn’t. The extent of the damage was unusual but not completely outside the realm of possibility. All kinds of stuff happens in restaurants at night after the customers are gone, the work is done, and the unwinding (i.e., drinking) begins, and Veritas was no exception. I could assess the previous night’s debauchery by how much urine (or vomit or excrement) was left on the women’s toilet seat.
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