by Robin Allen
“Show me your neck,” Ursula said. Surprisingly, Évariste complied, turning his face toward the ceiling exposing a bold red line from jaw to Adam’s apple. “It’s just a scratch,” she said. “You’ll live.”
Évariste straightened. “I heet some pans down getting out from his way,” he said. He rubbed his forearm, then circled his wrist dramatically. A knife to the throat got him no sympathy from Ursula, but he thought a boo-boo on his arm would? She had once broken two of her fingers on a busy Friday night and didn’t see a doctor until after Sunday brunch.
“Back to work, guys,” Ursula said.
And that should have been that. We should have all gone back to our respective tasks and tried to forget that Trevor almost killed one of the most famous chefs in the world.
But that famous chef wasn’t ready to move on. “What kind of villains are een your kitchen?”
So now it’s Ursula’s kitchen.
“You, Évariste Bontecou, are the only villain here,” Ursula said. “For two weeks, you’ve antagonized everyone within hearing range, started jobs you never finish, and left me and my cooks to get the work done while you get in our way. Monday cannot come soon enough.”
Évariste responded with a grunt as he bent down to pick up his chef’s hat which had been knocked off during the ruckus and lay on its side. Multiple layers of rich food and expensive wine in the form of his belly prevented him from bending over more than four inches. After his third swipe, I picked it up and handed it to him. He inspected it for damage, sniffed it, then placed it back on his head.
Trevor came through the back door, sending Évariste scurrying toward the swinging doors, saying he needed to speak with Weel. Trevor walked up to Ursula, but before he could speak, she put her hand on his chest and looked him in the eye. I didn’t think it was possible for the kitchen to get any quieter. Everyone must have stopped breathing.
“Trevor Shaw,” she said, “you are the best cook I have ever had in my kitchen. But if you do anything like that again, you’re gone.”
I didn’t know what Trevor expected her to say, but his stony face said that threatening to fire him hadn’t been on his mind.
“Right,” he bit out.
“Good,” Ursula said, then louder, “Back to work, everyone.”
_____
In any restaurant kitchen, there are two places a cook can go to take momentary refuge from the absurdity of cooking with other people for other people. Like Évariste, I prefer the walk-in. With the door closed, it’s like a tomb where you can boil over with rants and indictments of all things food, and no one can hear you. The dry storage room is also good. Warmer, but noisier and more open, it requires you to maintain a low simmer.
The dry storage at Markham’s doubled as the linen room. I pulled an apron from a folded stack on a shelf inside the doorway, then sat on a large sack of white flour. I had been inspecting restaurants since five o’clock that morning and my muscles throbbed out their opinion of doing this favor for my father. I agreed with them.
I looked around the small room at all the spices and rice, canned tomatoes and dried beans. These things knew how to get along. The sugar didn’t think it was better than the flour. The dried oregano didn’t antagonize the curry. They didn’t aspire to be anything, except maybe a sweet tart or a savory sauce. They simply worked together in harmony.
But kitchens are hot, miserable places where harmony melts in temperatures that can reach as high as a hundred and thirty degrees near the grill, with the rest of the kitchen only a few degrees cooler. Throw in a dozen random personalities, then arm them with sharp implements and put them under pressure, and things happen. Bad things, mean things, messy things. But from that springs a passion that empowers all of those miserable people working in an impossible situation to transform a few simple ingredients into a sophisticated feast. It doesn’t bring out the best in a person, but it brings out the best in a cook.
I stood and slung the apron over my head then reached behind my back to criss-cross the apron strings. I stopped when I felt someone take them from me. “Chocolate or vanilla?” Trevor asked, his soft Texas drawl filling the small space.
I turned round to face him and looked up into his blue eyes. I couldn’t tell if he had settled into a trot or escaped the corral. “Rocky road,” I said.
He laughed. “My favorite.” He leaned in close, then reached around my waist and pulled the strings too tight in front of me. A little flirting to help rebuild his ego.
I didn’t mind.
“You cookin’ tonight?” he asked. He stood close enough that I caught a whiff of patchouli under the wood smoke.
“You know what they say about too many cooks,” I said. “I’m just here for the dinner rush, then I’ll presto-chango into the owner’s daughter and join the party.”
“Lucky Popstar,” he said as he tied the strings into a double bow.
I untied the bow, loosened the strings, and retied them. “What happened in there with Évariste?”
He looked through the doorway into the kitchen. “Nothin’ happened. It’s just a lot of pressure tonight. I guess I lost it for a minute.”
Poor guy, caught between his loyalty to Ursula and his admiration of Évariste, but it wasn’t nothing. “Trevor, you almost severed his windpipe.”
He wiped his sleeve across his forehead. “It’s over, Poppy. Let it go.”
“Were you protecting Ursula’s honor?”
“Ursula’s not the one who needs my protection.”
I followed him out of the room to ask what he meant, but Shannon snagged him and I lost my chance.
We had about an hour until the first guests began to arrive, and I felt the familiar charge of adrenaline I used to feel when I worked in the kitchen. That is my favorite hour. When the waiters start clocking in to stock the wait stations and set up their tables, and the bartenders uncork bottles of house wine and fill the ice bins, when the fragrances of grilled meats, baked bread, and sautéed garlic arise from pots, pans, ovens, and grills. The kitchen throbs with life, and it feels like the point of no return. But it’s a precipice you enjoy teetering on. Everyone is focused because if everything doesn’t get done in the next sixty minutes, you’re in the weeds from the very first order and it’s well-nigh impossible to recover.
Évariste did not return from his meeting with Will, apparently choosing to leave rather than help, which forced Ursula to shuffle duties around. She made Shannon skin the hares, a job he attacked with such relish, you might think he viewed it as a promotion. By the time I finished stemming a box of asparagus and washing two boxes of artichokes, the first orders had started rolling off the printer.
That was when I was supposed to exchange my clogs and sweat for sandals and a smile, but having no Évariste meant we had no expeditor. I was standing in the wait station calling out orders as fast as they machine-gunned out of the ticket printer when he stumbled back into our solar system. Sweat poured down his neck, forming a dark stain on the front of his coat, and he wore an inane grin on his pudgy face.
He looked in my direction, then pushed off with one foot and barreled toward me. I had no room to move and the impact pinned me between the countertop and his pillowy stomach. When he realized he had quit moving, he relaxed his body, then laid his head against my chest and cast unfocused eyes up to my face. “Bon soir,” he sang.
Sweet fancy Moses, the man was drunk!
And this toad was the only person who knew how the plates should be dressed before the waiters served them to customers. Important customers. Restaurant critics and congressmen. Maybe even local celebrities like Matthew McConaughey or Sandra Bullock. The expeditor conducted the kitchen’s symphony, but Évariste couldn’t stand erect, much less read and call out orders, make sure they were prepared correctly, garnish plates, and chivvy waiters to get hot food to the tables.
“What’s going on out there?” Ursula asked as she placed two roasted rabbits in the window. They had no paws or heads, which resolved on
e of my curiosities that night.
Évariste had lost his skyscraper hat somewhere in his travels, which made him too short for Ursula to see over the pass. “Nothing,” I said. Hands down, the biggest lie I had ever told. “I need to find Évariste so he can show me how to dress this hare. Back in a sec.”
Ratting on Évariste smoking in the walk-in just to issue a little payback to Ursula was one thing. But she would become dangerous if she caught Évariste soused. I had to protect Markham’s.
I shoved Évariste away from me, spun him around, then prodded him the few feet into Will’s office. I closed and locked the door then pushed him into a chair. He started giggling and pitched his head back.
I seized his sweaty head with both hands and forced him to look at me. “Évariste!”
He blinked then focused his eyes on my face. “’Alo cherie.”
Gin.
“What goes on the rabbit?”
“Rub eet?” he asked, the suggestion creeping into his eyes.
Euw. “The hare. What goes on the saddle of roasted hare?”
He hiccupped.
I squeezed his head. “Focus, you drunk little demon!”
He winced. “Uh … lemon, beerut, water …”
Someone rattled the door handle, then knocked. “Will?” Belize said. “Those friends of yours are asking for you.”
“He’s not in here,” I called.
Back to the rummy. “And the frog legs?”
He blinked slowly. “I like les mademoiselles with the blond hairs.” Then he went limp.
“Argh!” I dropped his head.
Évariste started snoring as I flew out of Will’s office, slamming the door behind me and rushing to the wait station. I shot my hand into a plastic glove then threw lemon, beetroot, and watercress on the plated hares just before a waiter swept them into the dining room.
“Where’s Mount Everest?” Ursula demanded.
“Taking a break in Will’s office,” I said. “I can take over as expo. He can’t reach the ticket printer anyway, even if we put him on a milk crate.” That was not a lie, and not just because he had passed out.
“A break from what?” she asked. Then the printer jumped to life, redirecting our focus. I tore off a string of paper chits and called out, “Ordering. Five frogs, four tournedos medium, three with mushrooms, one with artichokes, three stuffed artichokes, two cheese plates,” sending the cooks into battle.
_____
All busy nights are exactly the same. Ninety-five things happen at once and any one of them can throw you off your game. It could be a waiter who screws you up by forgetting to turn in an order and taking another waiter’s food, or you run out of the nightly special in the first two hours and have to eighty-six it, or every customer inexplicably orders soup and you run out of bowls.
That night everyone would point to the dishwasher, Amado, but he didn’t deserve the blame. The second dishwasher didn’t show up for work, leaving Amado with the Sisyphean burden of keeping the line supplied with clean dishes when every dish in the restaurant was at a guest’s table in the dining room.
“I need those frogs for table seven,” I called to Ursula.
“Ready,” she said, reaching under the stovetop for a warm bowl and coming up with nothing. “I need a bowl, Amado.”
“One minute, Miss,” he said.
“I don’t have one minute!”
“Put it on a plate,” I said. “This rabbit’s dying.”
“Bowl. Now.” Ursula hovered the pan over the flame and waited for Amado to power rinse and dry a bowl. It seemed to take forever. Everything takes forever when you’re so busy that time loses any meaning. She poured the frog legs into it then slid it to me and I put it up in the window next to the rabbit. “Order up!”
For every order that left the kitchen, four more came in. Waiters ran back to let me know which orders would be eaten by VIPs. “Those bunnies are for the mayor’s table.” “The congressman’s wife wants her meat discs extra rare.” “Table four wants rice instead of veggies.” I knew Mitch loved having all the wattage in the restaurant, but their pickiness was killing our ticket times.
Will came up to me. “Where is Évariste?”
“In your office,” I said in a low voice. “Passed out.”
“Perfect,” Will said. He looked calmer than I would have if I had a major disaster brewing with very few solutions. Without word or expression, as if he had done this dozens of times before, he pulled a loaf of bread from the warming drawer and a full pot of coffee from the burner, then opened the door to his office.
About half an hour later, Évariste walked out unattended, and wearing his hat. He looked more tired than drunk, so I figured Will’s mission had been a success. As the night wore on, Évariste occasionally wandered back to the kitchen trailed by an expensively dressed couple or a gaggle of tipsy girls who twittered at everything he said. They would stand just inside the swinging doors while Évariste explained how the kitchen worked and what each cook was doing. I wanted to flog him with asparagus every time he gave the kitchen a thumbs up and said, “Kip up the good works, guys,” before he toddled back into the dining room.
A couple of hours later, orders for Petit Fours and Tarte aux Figue started to replace the heavy demand of appetizer and dinner orders. Shannon took over as expeditor so I could start my third job that night entertaining Markham’s guests. Between inspecting restaurants all day and working at Markham’s all night, I felt like I had been inside one kitchen or another for twenty-four hours straight, but it was probably only twelve or thirteen hours.
I had just untied my apron when Évariste busted through the kitchen doors, chased by a flawlessly made-up woman. A tight cream silk dress set off glossy raven hair, her face severe and desperate. She walked on the balls of her feet, expertly hovering her four-inch heels over the holes in the floor mats.
She screamed something at Évariste in French and he spun around to face her. “Merde!” he cried, then let loose a tirade punctuated with hasty hand gestures and emphatic facial expressions. They yelled over each other, neither of them listening to the other. Then in two long strides, she was in front of him, slapping him hard across the face.
If Évariste wasn’t completely sober before, he was now. As a bonus, he was also speechless. If only someone had slapped him earlier. I leaned into Trevor. “Madame Bontecou, I presume.”
He rested his forearm on my shoulder. “BonBon does not live up to the sweet promise of her name.”
Évariste backed up, keeping his eyes glued to the silk-clad cyclone. Blood tricked from a scratch at his temple. She looked around the kitchen, pointing her heavily ringed fingers first at Ursula then at me, still yelling in French.
Évariste shook his head. “Non, cherie, non.”
It didn’t take a private eye to figure out that BonBon thought he had been unfaithful to her, and with one of the only two women in the kitchen. Ursula shook her head along with Évariste, for once in synch with him. BonBon took another step toward him and he raised his arms to protect his face against another blow.
Évariste’s savior came through the doors wearing a bright smile. “Ah, BonBon, there you are,” Will said merrily. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
When BonBon turned around, Évariste scampered into the dry storage room.
“The governor and his wife are waiting to meet you,” Will said, taking her by the elbow. Derailed from her intent and now without a target, she allowed Will to steer her out of the kitchen.
Ursula told Trevor to watch a pan of artichoke hearts simmering in butter, then she peeked around the doorway of the dry storage before stepping inside. It wasn’t a good idea for even Cujo to be alone in a room with Ursula, so I followed her.
“I really don’t need you to look after me, Poppy,” she said.
Ingrate. “Actually, I’m looking after Évariste.”
He stood in the center of the room, pressing a white linen napkin to the cut at his temple. Ursula step
ped in front of him, hands on hips. “I’ll thank you to keep your domestic squabbles out of my kitchen.”
“Eh?” Évariste responded.
“Fight with your wife somewhere else,” she said, then went back to work.
I opened the first-aid kit on the wall, then tore open an alcohol packet with my teeth. “What did you do to Trevor to make him attack you?” I asked.
Évariste crossed his arms. In his red chef’s coat he looked like an inverted, exploded Roman candle. “What did I do? I ask heem to order truffles and oysters for tomorrow and he yells obscenities at me, tells me he is not my boy yet. If he aggresses me like that een my own kitchen, I will sack heem on the spot.”
I began to swab his cut. “Then it’s a good thing he did it in Ursula’s kitchen.”
“Sacrebleu!” he bellowed, recoiling from the sting.
He couldn’t be serious. I pointed toward the door. “Most of those cooks out there have second-degree burns on their hands, and they’re still working. If this were a TV show, I’d hire Anthony Bourdain to make you go bobbing for French fries to show you what real pain feels like.”
He stood still and I applied the alcohol more gently. “Why is your wife so upset?” I asked.
He squinted at the name on my coat. “You are Meech’s daughter?”
“Poppy Markham,” I said, extending my hand. “Nice to meet you.”
He turned his head, examining a shelf of silver chaffing dishes. “You weel leave me alone.”
“Fine. Do it yourself.” I threw the alcohol pad at his chest, then pulled my apron over my head. It was stiff and filthy from butter, hare grease, beet juice, melted cheese, sweat, and the hundred other things I had wiped on it the past few hours. A sharp contrast to Évariste, his pants and coat spotless, even though he hadn’t worn an apron the entire night. He hadn’t cooked, so he hadn’t needed to.