Authors: Michelle Wildgen
“Yeah,” Harry said. “There’s talk of a new development on this block, new business to use the waterfront.”
“Mixed-use condo and commercial, right?” said Britt. Harry nodded. “It always is,” Britt continued. “I just hope it’s not just another mall.”
“Say they put in a Target,” Harry argued. “Ugly, sure, but people would come.” But his cheer had lessened once again.
“Come on,” Leo said softly. “It’s getting late.” He went back to Harry and patted him on the shoulder, momentarily surprised at the hard planes beneath his palm. As a boy Harry had been so round and freckled, until he stretched out at thirteen. Leo still found it startling sometimes. “Britt’s tired,” he said. He looked over his shoulder. Britt was leaning against the window, plucking the cuffs of his shirt so they showed beneath his jacket. “Long hours.”
Harry walked away from the window and knelt beside the zinc bar top. “I know,” he said, tipping a bottle of polish onto a rag. “I know the hours will be long.”
Behind them, Britt slurped his coffee pointedly. “You want me to find out the distributor for these coffee beans?” Britt asked. “Since you like it so much. I can even write up some tasting notes for the menu. ‘Boxy, with top notes of resin and defeat.’”
Harry rubbed creamy greenish polish on the metal and didn’t look up.
“Come spring this stuff will make your name,” Britt went on. “‘Bursting with the freshness of the Linden waterfront. A lingering finish of stevedore.’”
Leo stepped to the side so he could see Harry’s profile. Harry was still covering the grimy zinc surface with polish, but Leo saw the smile at the corner of his mouth.
“An intriguing balance of sparkling acidity and robust municipal corruption,” Harry said, and Britt laughed. He crouched next to Harry, picked up an extra rag, and rubbed at the cloudy polish, opening a circlet of blurry light on the metal, glowing somewhere between silver and pewter. All three of them gazed at the circle, the shiniest spot in the whole place.
“It’ll fly,” Britt said.
“Even if it doesn’t,” said Leo, “it won’t be the end of everything.” Both brothers turned to stare at him. “Well, what business did you think this was? A lot of great places fail. Don’t think I’m all smug—a lot of successful places go downhill and fail later too.”
“I’m kind of regretting asking you guys over here,” said Harry.
“It’s just risky,” Leo said. “You weren’t living here when we were first getting Winesap off the ground.”
“Come on. You’re doing great.”
“Now we are. It takes a while. You don’t know how scary it is. I’m worried we made it sound easier than it was.”
For years Leo had admired his brother’s basic optimism and the sheer energy with which he plunged into any new endeavor. Maybe Harry’s forays into graduate school fellowships and overseas trips and a stint in a salmon cannery had been just as treacherous as this but too foreign for Leo to have realized it. But now Harry was plunging into Leo’s own business, the demands and financial cruelties of which would daunt even a veteran if he ever stopped to think about it. Maybe he should have been urging caution all along. He feared that the restaurant business, which outsiders adored and thought would be so relaxing and congenial until they waded in and found it was all oil spatter and mayhem, might spell the destruction of Harry’s many, if poorly applied, gifts. For once, Harry might have come upon a task where sheer energy and will might not be enough.
Harry leaned back on his heels and looked up at Leo. “I do know,” he said.
“Okay,” said Leo. “Hey, who’d you get for investors, anyway?”
“Mostly the landlord. He gets to have a long-term tenant for once, he hopes, and he can swan in anytime he likes.” He paused. “Then a small business loan. Mom and Dad chipped in a little too.”
Britt’s head jerked back in surprise. Leo’s eyebrows darted up as he said, “You took Mom and Dad’s money? They’re retired. It’s enough you’re staying with them.”
“They offered. Insisted, even. I didn’t clean out their savings. It was very modest. And you know I’m paying them rent, right? More than what they wanted me to pay, if you must know. I didn’t just show up and ask Mom to do my laundry.” He delivered the last part with equal measures of defensiveness and amusement, and was rewarded with a collective snort at the idea of their mother doing laundry for any of them. There’d been an individual laundry policy in place since Leo was still standing on a chair to reach the washing machine.
“But, man, Harry,” said Britt, “we never asked them to invest in Winesap.”
“I know,” Harry said. “They didn’t pay for any schooling for me, though. I did it all with scholarships and work-study. I think they felt it was unequal.”
“Oh,” said Leo. Britt, who’d also long forgotten about the expenses of his education, looked sheepish. For Winesap, Leo and Britt had cobbled together their own small business and personal loans along with money from a few wealthy investors who liked the tax break and the special treatment. No one in his right mind bet on a nonfranchised restaurant to be a moneymaking investment, but now and again people got lucky.
There was a silence until Britt said, “Tell him where you got the bar top, Harry.”
“Craigslist, for a hundred bucks,” Harry said, his voice lightening. “Some lady in Pottstown’s grandfather died and this was in his attic, can you believe it? I’m going to have people cooking behind it, since the space isn’t big enough just to use it as a straight-up bar.”
Leo shrugged, more to himself than to anyone else. It was not a bad solution. He didn’t love to watch cooks at work when he went out, but other people were into these things. He gazed at the round of light on the metal, which was widening as Harry polished.
“It’s amazing,” Leo said.
BRITT HADN’T COME TO THIS NEIGHBORHOOD
in years, and as he drove away from Harry’s restaurant space, with Leo brooding in the passenger seat, he remembered why
. T
his section of town had always had a certain amount of…call it grit, he decided, but when they were kids, even teenagers, it had felt more gruff and working-class. No frills, but not dangerous. Now the bars he drove past looked not like shot-and-a-beer joints where you might go after a shift but crooked and grimy, with more than one window boarded up, the kinds of places frequented by the real alcoholics, the ones who’d made a profession of it.
“Did you try to talk him into another location?” Britt asked. He glanced toward Leo, who was peering out his window with a frown.
“He’d already signed the lease,” Leo said. “I didn’t realize the landlord was the main investor. I told him he could break it. I told him he
should
break it.”
“How’d that go over?”
“About like you’d expect.”
Britt nodded. Harry had waited until he was deep into this venture before bringing it to them. He suspected that Harry didn’t really want their input at all.
He hummed under his breath as they entered the greener, cleaner part of town on the way to their restaurant. The sugar maples were turning crimson and golden. Leo was quiet as they neared the gray stone façade of Winesap and pulled around the back. He seemed to become focused and inward as they began each day at the restaurant, so interior that when summoned, he often looked at Britt for a split second before he took in who was speaking to him and why.
Britt looked forward to each day’s fresh scan of the dining room, the bar, and the maître d’ station, the straightening of its crooked tables, polishing of its liquor bottles, and dispatching of its droopy flowers. He liked a space in which flaws could be whisked away, order and grace visibly restored. He liked walls the color of some creature’s muted underside or the soft inner petal of a plant, slippery leather banquettes and a silky curl of gravlax served on a slick white plate. Britt knew that some people found the repetitiveness of the restaurant business rather crushing, but to him it was rhythmic and satisfying. Somehow Leo must have known he would find it so.
The first time the
Daily Journal
had covered Winesap’s opening, many years earlier, the photo that accompanied the article had showed Britt in a sand-colored linen suit and a tangerine tie, looming before the bar seeming taller and more handsome than he was in real life, a mirthful, conspiratorial expression on his face. Leo was in the photo too, hunched and rumpled on a barstool, with his dark auburn hair showing too much scalp.
The article was respectfully interested, the
Journal
unwilling to tip its hand before the dining critic (who was also the arts editor) had a chance to eat there. She’d attempted a bit of a disguise, but Britt had recognized her in spite of the hair stuffed beneath a hat and what appeared to be extra sweaters to add bulk.
This was the sort of thing you ended up obsessing over: not only the critic in halfhearted costume in your dining room, but the fact that critics sometimes relied on such dowdy disguises. Britt didn’t believe in relegating poorly dressed people to the back tables, but there was no denying that people walked into a new restaurant and judged their company as they considered whether to join it. A dress code had seemed too off-putting for a new place back when Winesap opened, so they’d just had to concentrate on outfitting the staff and space as stylishly and simply as they could, so that anyone who showed up in running shoes or a T-shirt would be sufficiently aware of the contrast to step it up if they returned.
He had considered not telling Leo that the critic was there. He’d considered not even telling the kitchen or the server or the backwaiters, as an experiment. It shouldn’t matter who this woman was; there should be no higher standard reserved for VIPs, but of course there was. It gave customers something to aspire to: the martini materializing as soon as they were settled, the reserving of one last lamb loin for a late reservation known to be partial. Guests who dined out only now and again might not even realize such a possibility existed, but those in the industry and its frequent visitors would have felt slighted by having the same experience others had every day, one in which they were forced to verbalize every wish and then received no more than what they’d asked for.
In the end Britt had entered the kitchen and told the executive chef about the critic. Kenneth was expediting rather than cooking that night and smelled perceptibly of gin even back then. Britt still marveled that Leo had been right about Kenneth—he’d hired him saying that they might get a few years out of him before Kenneth imploded somehow, but that those impeccable years might be enough. How did Leo know these things when he spent his time squirreled away in the upstairs office like a dotty aunt? But there was nothing to be done about it right then: the critic was in the house; Kenneth seemed sober and brisk and so maybe he only reeked of the booze from the night before; and the servers, summoned, had stood before Britt in a dark-clad phalanx in the kitchen, hands clasped behind their backs. Once admonished to be unobtrusively perfect, the servers melted back out into the dining room, where they gave no sign they knew who had just asked for the rillettes au lapin and homard à la vanille. (They had flirted with French menus at first, a wish of Leo’s that Britt had indulged for a few months before it became too ridiculous and dated to continue. Say what you would about Leo, he was gracious when he’d been wrong.)
And so the article heralding their opening appeared, and the review a few weeks later was so good it drew not only local papers but even a mention in the
Inquirer
’s “Neighbors” section. Britt found it hard to believe they’d managed such attention, but Leo had shrugged. “This city is just starting to climb out from a sinkhole,” he said. “They want to be able to cover an economic recovery. Do you see anyone else insane enough to open a restaurant in Linden?”
Britt had swayed for a moment—somehow he had not realized how big a risk Leo had so easily talked him into. Britt had replaced Leo’s ex-wife, Frances, who was supposed to be in charge of the front of the house but had left Leo and the business before the opening, and at the time Britt had found this reassuring: surely Leo would not risk the livelihoods of
two
family members. He’d assumed that Leo had some knowledge he did not, some secret that assured him the restaurant would be a success despite the city’s teetering municipal services and seedy downtown, but now he realized Leo had been banking on the fact that they were going to be pioneers. Perhaps Linden could join other outlying cities in being revitalized even after steel and textiles were gone. It had the advantage of distinct neighborhoods that still bore a faint ethnic imprint. It had a waterfront with some commercial potential, and it had a nearby college that helped bring in a few more adventurous eaters and support the local farmers’ markets. For years anyone who wanted to eat a good meal had gone into Philadelphia while Linden concentrated on eggplant parm, diners, and grungy but tasty Asian or Mexican food. Now, spurred by Winesap’s success, a few local restaurants were venturing further afield, with seasonal cuisine or menus showing cross-pollination of various countries.
But it was always precarious. Linden wasn’t close enough or rich enough to be one of the posh suburbs, and businesses like Winesap would either grow fat on the gold rush or be forced to eat one another during the pitiless winter. This rather stately place was balanced on the head of a pin—that was why the
Inquirer
thought it worth a mention.
For the first two years they were alone in the endeavor
. T
he local diners kept slinging eggs and soggy toast; the local taco joints kept delivering grease-soaked paper bags
. A
nd meanwhile Winesap operated out of a converted old stone house on the edge of Linden, where, not coincidentally, the city’s most upscale neighborhood clung to the adjacent town like a barnacle, still shamefaced about its Linden mailing address.
They were carefully positioned between blowout expensive and pleasantly upscale
. T
o some extent, Winesap had to replace that sense of occasion people got by driving into Philadelphia, and so certain requirements were nonnegotiable. In choosing the location, Leo had ensured that no strip malls were nearby, for example. Even expensive places near Linden often operated out of strip malls
. T
he concession horrified Leo, who communicated this horror to Britt until Britt accepted it as his own. Because it
was
awful, walking into a mall and dropping two hundred dollars on lamb shank and Barolo in the shadow of a Radio Shack.