Sweetbitter

by Stephanie Danler

  —

  I WALKED IN on them in the locker room. Simone had been speaking loudly, sitting in a spare chair in her stripes with her legs crossed. He was standing in front of his locker, buttoning his shirt. They both looked at me, startled.

  “Sorry. Do you want me to come back?”

  “Of course not,” she said. But neither of them said anything else. The silence was accusatory. He dropped his pants, stepped out of them, and turned back to Simone.

  “Ignore him,” she said. It sounded like an order, so I obeyed. I looked away.

  —

  “PICK UP” was the call.

  “Picking up” was the echo.

  “Six and six, table 45, share,” Chef said. His eyes didn’t leave the board of tickets in front of him. “Pick up.”

  I put my hands in front of me and grabbed. Another sweltering day. Air conditioners all around the city were giving up. As I pushed into the tepid dining room I noticed the ice was melting in the oyster tray in my hands. Pale blue bodies amid sloshing ice chips. It looked disgusting. And six and six meant nothing to me. I had forgotten to check the day’s oysters. I forgot the table I was going to. Simone flooded by me and I reached for her.

  “Excuse me, Simone, sorry, but which are which oyster? Do you know?”

  “Do you remember when you tasted them?” She didn’t look at the plate.

  I hadn’t tasted them when they had been passed around at family meal. I hadn’t looked at the menu notes.

  “Do you remember tasting them?” she asked again, slowly, like I was dumb. “East Coast oysters are brinier, more mineral. West Coasts are plumper, creamier, sweeter. They’re even physically different. One has a flat cup, the other tends to be deeper.”

  “Okay, so which are which on this plate?” I held the plate closer to her face but she wouldn’t look.

  “Those are covered in water. Take them back to Chef.”

  I shook my head. Absolutely not.

  “You’re not going to serve those. Take them back to Chef.”

  I shook my head again but sucked in my lips. I saw it all unfolding ahead of me. His anger at me, his yelling about the waste, my embarrassment. But I could look at the menu notes while I waited for the new ones. I could hear the table number again. I could figure it out.

  “Okay.”

  “Next time look at them but use your tongue.”

  —

  THE MANAGERS MAINTAINED power by shifting things. They came into a server’s station and moved their dupe pad, moved their checks, rearranged the tickets on the bar. They pulled white wines out of the ice bucket, wiped them down, and reinserted them in a new pattern. They would pause you when you were running, obviously in a hurry, and ask you how you thought you were settling in.

  Simone maintained power by centrifugal force. When she moved, the restaurant was pulled as if by a tailwind. She led the servers by her ability to shift their focus—her own focus was a spotlight. Service unfolded in her parentheses.

  —

  “WHAT’S THAT bartender’s name again? The one who only talks to Simone?” I asked Sasha. I was casual about it.

  Sasha was a backwaiter. He was otherworldly beautiful: broad alien cheekbones, blue eyes, bee-stung, haughty lips. He could have been a model, except he was barely five foot four. His gaze was so cold, you knew he had been everyone: a rich man, a poor man, in love, abandoned, a murderer, and close to death. None of these states impressed him much.

  “That bartender? Jake.”

  He was Russian, and though he was clearly fluent in English, he didn’t bother to adhere to its rules. His accent was both elegant and comical. He rolled his eyes at me while he cut bread.

  “Okay, Pollyanna, let me tell you few truths. You’re too new.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What you think it means? Jakey will eat you for dinner and spit you out. You even know what I’m speaking of? You’re not bouncing around after that.”

  I shrugged like I didn’t care and filled the bread baskets.

  “Besides. He’s mine. I’ll cut your fucking throat if you touch him and I’m not a joker.”

  “Silence in the kitchen! Pick up.”

  —

  “PICKING UP!”

  The kitchen was a riot of misshapen, ugly tomatoes. They smelled like the green insides of plants, like sap, like dirt.

  There were tomatoes of every color: yellow, green, orange, red-purple, mottled, striped, dotted. They were bursting. “Seaming” is what Chef called it, when the curves and indentations pulled apart from each other, but not completely, like parted lips.

  “Heirloom season,” Ariel sang out. She was also a backwaiter. She always had pounds of eyeliner on, even if it was the morning. She had bangs and dark-brown hair that she twisted up onto her head and held with chopsticks. She was still named Mean-Girl in my head because she wouldn’t speak to me during training, only pointed and gave exasperated sighs. But today she was passing out dripping bar mops to the line cooks from a bucket of ice water. They wrapped them around their heads like bandanas or slung them over the backs of their necks. That didn’t seem like something a Mean-Girl would do. In fact, I hadn’t seen anyone do something that compassionate with their bar mop stash. I heard from my own head, Our first tenet is to take care of each other.

  She handed me a bar mop. I put it on the back of my neck and it felt like rising out of a soggy cloud into clean air.

  “Pick up.”

  “Picking up,” I said. I looked expectantly to the window but there were no plates lined up. Instead Scott, the young, tattooed sous chef, passed me a sliver of tomato. The insides were tie-dyed pink and red.

  “A Marvel-Striped from Blooming Hill Farm,” he said, as if I had asked him a question.

  I cupped it while it dripped. He pinched up flakes of sea salt from a plastic tub and flicked it on the slice.

  “When they’re like this don’t fuck with them. Just a little salt.”

  “Wow,” I said. And I meant it. I had never thought of a tomato as a fruit—the ones I had known were mostly white in the center and rock hard. But this was so luscious, so tart I thought it victorious. So—some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning.

  —

  “WHAT ARE HEIRLOOMS?” I asked Simone as I ran to get behind her in line for family meal. She had two white plates in her hand and I felt a shiver of expectation looking at that second plate. I noted how she made her own—a generous tongful of green salad and a cup of the vichyssoise.

  “Exciting, isn’t it? The season? They’re rare or unique breeds of plants and animals. Once all our tomatoes were like that. Before preservatives and supermarkets and this commercial food production hell we’re living in. Breeds evolved in places based on one evolutionary principle: they tasted better. The point is not longevity or flawlessness. All of our vegetables were biologically diverse, pungent with the nuances of their breed. They reflected their specific time and space—their terroir.”

  On the second plate she took the biggest pork chop on the bone, a scoop of the rice salad, and a wedge of gratin potatoes. She said, “Now everything tastes like nothing.”

  —

  THEY CONJOINED in my mind. It wasn’t that they were always together. Theirs was an oblique connection, not always direct. If I saw one, my eyes started to move, looking for the other. Simone was easy to find, ubiquitous, directing everyone—she seemed to have some sort of system where she divided her attention between the servers equally. But I had a harder time tracking him, his alliances, his rhythms.

  If they were in the restaurant together they had one eye on each other and I had one eye on them, trying to understand what I was seeing. It wasn’t like they were the only fascinating people at the restaurant. But they were an island if the rest of us were the continent—distant, inaccessible, picking up stray light.

  —

  “PICK UP.”

  My eyes snapped open but I was the barista today, the kitchen w
as far away. Howard looked at me from the Micros terminal. He was waiting for me to make him a macchiato but I was overthinking it. I threw the first two shots away.

  “I’m hearing Chef scream, ‘Pick up’ in my sleep,” I said, swirling the warm milk. It was as glossy as new paint. “Punishing myself I guess.”

  “Thanatos—the death drive,” Howard said. He laid a napkin over his arm and inspected a bottle of wine on the service bar. “We fantasize about traumatizing events to maintain our equilibrium. Lovely.” He took the macchiato and smelled it before taking a sip. He regarded me. The other managers wore suits but somehow everyone in the restaurant always knew that Howard was the man in charge—as if his suits were cut from a finer fabric.

  “It’s compulsive but we actually find the painful repetition pleasurable.” He took another sip.

  “It doesn’t sound pleasurable.”

  “It’s how we self-soothe. How we maintain the illusion that we are in control of our lives. For example, you repeat ‘Pick up’ in hopes that the outcome each time will be different. And you are repeatedly embarrassed, are you not?” He waited for me to respond but I wouldn’t meet his eyes. “You are hoping to master the experience. The pain is what we know. It’s our barometer of reality. We never trust pleasure.”

  Every time Howard looked at me I felt bare. A coffee ticket printed up and I used it as an excuse to turn around.

  “Are you dreaming about work often?” he asked. It felt like he spoke it into my neck.

  “No.” I slammed a portafilter to empty it and I could feel him walk away.

  But I was. The dreams were tidal, consumptive, chaotic. Service played over in my head, but no one had faces. And I heard voices, layered on top of one another, a cacophony. Phrases would rise then evanesce: Behind You, Pick Up, To Your Right, To Your Left, Picking Up, Candles, Can You, Now, Toothpicks, Pick Up, Bar Mops, Now, Excuse Me, Picking Up.

  In my dreams these words were a code. I was blind and the directives were all I had to pick my way through the blackness. The syllables quaked and separated. I woke up talking: I couldn’t remember what I had been saying, only that I was driven to keep saying it.

  —

  TERROIR. I looked it up in The World Atlas of Wine in the manager’s office. The definition was people talking around it without identifying it. It seemed a bit far-fetched. That food had character, composed of the soil, the climate, the time of year. That you could taste that character. But still. An idea mystical enough to be highly seductive.

  —

  IGNORE HIM. That’s what I did. When Jake came into family meal late and took his seat next to Simone, when he pulled up on his bike outside the front window, when he called harshly out for bar mops, I looked away.

  But I started to hear things, all of it unverifiable and improbable. Jake was a musician, a poet, a carpenter. He had lived in Berlin, he had lived in Silver Lake, he had lived in Chinatown. He was halfway through a PhD on Kierkegaard. They called his apartment “the opium den.” He was bisexual, he slept with everyone, he slept with no one. He was an ex–heroin addict, he was sober, he was always a little drunk.

  He and Simone were not a couple though their magnetic, unconscious way of tracking each other seemed to indicate otherwise. I knew they were very old friends, and that she had gotten him the job. Some nights a cherubic strawberry blonde that Sasha called Nessa-Baby came and sat in front of Jake at the bar as service was winding down.

  He knew part of his job was to be looked at. He was a quiet bartender. There was a submissiveness to his beauty that was nearly feminine, a stillness that made one want to paint him. When he worked the bar he submitted. Women and men of all ages left business cards and phone numbers with their tips. Guests gave him gifts for no reason—that kind of beauty.

  If he rolled up his shirtsleeves, you could see the edges of tattoos that spoke to another private body he kept. It was the sight of his arm resting on the beer tap that changed me. The beer was acting up. The kegs were probably too new, not cold enough. Just foam, no beer. Jake let the foam pour while he talked to a guest. The drain was full of foam, it ran over to his feet, a spreading white pool. His sleeve was rolled up, the tendons of his forearm tensed from shaking cocktails. I remembered that static shock when I touched him. I felt the shock in my mouth. His inappropriate forearm and the foam cascading, his manner too casual, too condescending.

  “That’s a lot of beer to waste,” I said. My voice surprised me, ringing out over my vow of silence.

  He looked at me. Perhaps it was raining that night, a stifling tropical storm. Perhaps someone struck a match and held it to my cheek. Perhaps someone cleaved my life into before and after. He looked at me. And then he laughed. From that moment on he became unbearable to me.

  —

  YOU WILL ENCOUNTER a fifth taste.

  Umami: uni, or sea urchin, anchovies, Parmesan, dry-aged beef with a casing of mold. It’s glutamate. Nothing is a mystery anymore. They make MSG to mimic it. It’s the taste of ripeness that’s about to ferment. Initially, it serves as a warning. But after a familiarity develops, after you learn its name, that precipice of rot becomes the only flavor worth pursuing, the only line worth testing.

  IV

  The sardines are insane tonight.

  It’s true, Chef called him a faggot.

  HR is freaking out.

  Have you been to Ssäm bar yet?

  No, the best Chinese is in Flushing.

  I’m playing a show Wednesday.

  Scott is on fire.

  I was obsessed with Chekhov.

  I’m obsessed with Campari right now.

  I need to get my cameras out again.

  I’m fairly well known in the experimental dance world.

  Table 43 is industry—Per Se?

  If one more bitch cuts me off to ask for Chardonnay—

  If one more person asks for steak sauce—

  What the fuck?

  Carson is in again—without the wife.

  That’s twice this week.

  Sometimes I think, Fuck the pooled house.

  I’m not jealous.

  Technically I texted first. But he responded.

  You don’t get it.

  I’m on day three—I feel great, high all the time.

  Will you water 24?

  Will you drop bread on 49?

  Move.

  Fuck off.

  Fuck you.

  It’s like the rude Olympics in here today.

  They’re just French.

  And after I took the LSAT, I was like wait, I don’t want to be a lawyer.

  I still paint sometimes.

  I just need space. And time. And money.

  It’s so hard in New York.

  Allergy on 61.

  It’s not really romantic.

  I’d fuck the mom.

  Does she come in drunk?

  It’s just lemon, maple syrup, and cayenne.

  It’s just Nicky’s martinis, never drink more than one.

  I just need representation.

  It’s like banging against a brick wall.

  I need soupspoons on 27.

  Chef wants to see you—now.

  I’m dropping soup now.

  What did I do?

  Fuck—the midcourse.

  —

  “PICK UP.”

  The tickets came from a printer on Chef’s right. They flew into the air like an exclamation and fluttered down in a wave. He yelled: “Fire Gruyère. Fire tartare. Hold calamari. Hold two smokers.”

  From that code the cooks on the line went into action. Chef lined up the tickets, bouncing from foot to foot like a child who had to go to the bathroom. He was a small man from New Jersey but classically trained in France. He screamed anecdotes at the cooks, recalling “real” kitchens where chefs would slam you in the head with a copper pan if you couldn’t chop the parsley fine enough. Chef’s voice was too loud and he couldn’t really control it. The servers and managers were always complaining that
you could hear him from the dining room. Everyone, even Scott, his number two, kept their eyes averted if he was on a tirade. The man paced the kitchen red-faced, primed for explosion.

  The line cooks were a blur of movement while essentially staying in one place. Everything was within arm’s reach in their stations. Sweat funneled off their eyelashes. There were open flames or salamanders at their backs and heat lamps in the pass at their front. They wiped the rim of each plate before passing it to Chef, who inspected it mercilessly, eager to find smudges of stray sauce or olive oil.

  “Pick up!”

  “Picking up.”

  I was the food runner, I was next. I covered my hands with bar mops. The plates heated up like irons, I expected them to glow.

  “I heard you don’t know the oysters yet,” said Will, startling me. Will was Sergeant, the guy who’d been in charge of me on my first day. Even though I had my stripes now, he still seemed to think I was his project.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Everything is a lesson around here. It’s just dinner.”

  “You don’t get to say that yet.”

  “Pick! Up!”

  “Picking up,” I responded.

  “Pick up!”

  “Louder,” said Will, nudging me forward.

  “Picking up,” I said, harder, hands outstretched, ready.

  It was all one motion. The roasted half duck had been in the window for going on five minutes while it waited for the risotto, the plate baking. At first, as with all burns, I felt nothing. I reacted in anticipation. When the plate shattered and the duck thudded clumsily onto the mats, I cried out, pulling my hand to my chest, caving.

  Chef looked at me. He had never really seen me before.

  “Are you kidding me?” he asked. Quiet. All the line cooks, butchers, prep guys, pastry girls watched me.

  “I burned myself.” I held out my palm, already streaked with red, as proof.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Louder. A rumbling, then quiet. Even the tickets stopped printing. “Where do you come from? What kind of bullshit TGI Fridays waitresses are they bringing in now? You think that’s a burn? Do you want me to call your mommy?”