Authors: Michelle Wildgen
“You’re kidding,” she said.
“I am not.”
Thea’s face clouded, and Britt experienced a rare flash of genuine warmth for her. It
was
ridiculous, he was about to say, for his brother to assume that he could so easily step right into what Leo and Britt had built. Of course it was!
“Why wouldn’t I have heard about this?” Thea said. “Are you guys in it with him?”
“Nope. We may have offered an idea or two, but that’s it. We didn’t want to mention it till it was clear he was really going to do it.”
She shook her head. “Jason! Did you know about this?”
Jason handed her a plate. “Yes, chef.”
“You did?” said Britt.
“Yeah,” said Jason. “We heard over at Mack’s. He came in to buy drinks and meet the locals.”
“Tell them what they’re calling it,” said Suzanne. Jason shot her a look, but Suzanne had served up a plate of fish and turned back to the range, leaving Jason to his fate.
“Crab Apple,” Jason admitted. He wiped a sheen of sweat from his ivory forehead, looking faintly ill, but Jason always looked faintly ill. “I heard the real name is 71 King.”
“Goddammit,” said Thea. “People are going to compare us, whether it makes any sense or not. I need to be aware of it. If my own sous chef hears something like this, I should know.” She looked at Britt accusingly. “Now I have to hang out at that dive bar once a week or else I’ll be out of the loop.”
“I’m sorry,” Britt said. “I should’ve told you.” Britt thought of the front table, the window table, where he had installed Camille and Harry, where even now Camille would be working her way through a glass of champagne. The taut pull of her throat as she swallowed, her fingers curled around the stem. Professional acquaintance or not, Harry would be laying some groundwork, a glancing touch on the shoulder as he returned to the table, a disarming opinion of some recent movie.
“Oyster fritter,” Britt said
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hea whipped out a pad and began to write. “Oyster fritter, then the foie gras terrine, then a little taste of the pork rillettes.” Thea raised an eyebrow. “The sea bream with potato-truffle galette, the lamb, and a half course of the venison
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nd a half course of the rabbit ragù, before the bream
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hat’s the soup situation?”
“Plenty of the bourride,” said Thea.
“Well, then, a little bourride early on as well,” said Britt. “Finish with the rib eye, and give them the works on dessert. I’ll have Helene do the cheese.”
Thea had finished writing—the meal order had gone on to a second page—and now she looked at him. “No halibut?”
Britt blanked. “What’s the prep?”
“Clementine gremolata, saffron broth.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed, “it’s the light-bright.” This was their term for the dishes that were high in acidity and low in cream; every night’s menu had one, to appease the dieters and the faint of heart. “Nah. Make it a full order each of bourride and we’ll take it from there.”
He headed back out to the dining room, where the tenor had shifted slightly. It had taken him a full year, maybe even longer, to calm down during the madhouse period of a Saturday night and accept that it would always eventually smooth out into this: Britt thought of it as the acceptance phase. The pace was no less frantic, but the servers had settled into their groove and the backwaiters remembered how to think only three or four tasks ahead instead of trying to see their way through the whole evening. Alan was pouring out martinis in a perfect silver thread, with not so much as a pause between glasses, and Helene was removing the empty plates from the diners at the end of the bar. They would all keep going like this until a couple of hours from now, when the last turn would filter in and the room would suddenly be dotted with a few blessedly empty tables and the welcome sight of coffee cups and brandy snifters. The moment always arrived as an abrupt shift in perception, marked every night by the instant when Britt realized the music was now too loud. Inevitably, at the very same moment he would see Helene reaching inside the maître d’ stand to lower the volume on the sound system.
THEA WATCHED JASON PLATE
a venison rib chop, curious how long he would try to avoid looking at her. He finally looked at her as he handed over the plate. “I thought they told you, chef,” Jason said. “Sorry.” Thea waited. “Leo didn’t say anything?”
Thea shook her head as she placed the ticket for Harry’s table at one end of her board.
“Can I get a down-the-road?” Suzanne asked.
“Yup. Ordering one fritter, split,” Thea replied. “Firing two amuse. That’s all you.”
“One fritter, split,” Suzanne replied. “Firing two amuse.”
Thea sighed. “You know how Leo is. If we hear anything from anyone, it’ll be Britt. And it should’ve been them. I shouldn’t give you guys a hard time. So I won’t, but still—you hear anything further, you let me know.”
“Of course,” Suzanne said piously.
Thea decided she had taken it as far as she could. She was more concerned about Leo—either he didn’t think she knew the local scene, minimal though it was, or else he didn’t think she needed to know. He was hard to catch hold of these days, weaving his way through the restaurant silently and unexpectedly, ever-present but difficult to pin down. Often the cooks looked up to realize he’d been standing by the espresso machine for who knows how long, observing the movement of the kitchen with a look of calm, if unsmiling, contentment
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et he rarely spoke at staff meal or offered more than polite greetings when she ran into him in the office. It was tough to believe that his brother was Harry, who seemed to like everyone and who over the years had stopped in to charm the staff whenever he was in town
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pparently he’d strolled into Mack’s and started introducing himself and within a night or two had had cooks practically fighting to name the best staff in the local industry. Even Britt, whose charisma was so professional and yet so unconscious, gave only the impression of intimacy, the constant promise of it. But she could imagine Harry leaning back in his plastic chair, listening as intently as a therapist
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et he too kept some silences. It seemed he hadn’t said much about the kind of place he was opening. Maybe those three were related after all.
A new ticket spat out of the printer. “Ordering three venison, firing one bourride, split,” Thea called. Jason nodded and repeated the venison portion of the order, pulling chops from the reach-in to let them come to temp. Only when Thea fired them would he begin to cook each dish.
“Sure you want to split these dishes?” Jason said. “I think Britt wants us to double ’em up.”
Thea laughed. “We should send out an extra course too, come to think of it. Poor Harry. He’s gonna end up sleeping here.”
H
OT SPRINGS WAS THE VENTURE OF
a couple who had been around the restaurant scene near Linden for years
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he Makaskis had started out in the late eighties with an Italian place that was not a chain but cooked like one, with pesto cream and skinless chicken breast and frozen ravioli
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hey’d hung a painting of a tiny, black-clad old woman over the bar and offered the impression that she was a maternal grandmother of either Barbara’s or Donnie’s—the story seemed to change, but Donnie Makaski liked to glance fondly up at the image when he passed
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t the time, Leo was working for a seafood place in the same neighborhood, while Britt was still strategizing campaigns for outpatient aesthetic surgery clinics
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hey stopped in for a drink once and sipped flaccid Valpolicella while watching Donnie pour himself a half glass of wine and knock it back. On his way to the kitchen he’d looked up at the portrait’s sweet, round-cheeked smile and touched the edge of the gilt frame as if it were the robe of a saint. Leo decided then and there that they had bought the picture at an estate sale or out of someone’s garage; any genuine portrait of a Makaski ancestor would have included what Leo believed to be the Makaski familiars: Kalashnikovs, maybe, or a vampire bat.
Hot Springs had opened a year earlier, touting itself as Northern California fare, and Leo was as surprised as anyone to find himself there late on a Saturday night. But as the Makaskis had opened and sold places, they’d learned a few things
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hile the decor was rather bland, all ivories and slate accents, it did not resemble a hotel lobby or an Atlantic City reception for the pope, as their first few places had
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he menu bore fewer overtly silly touches; the pesto cream was long gone, and the dishes looked reasonably edited: roasted figs and prosciutto, grilled sardines with capers
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hough Leo was still fairly certain that the Sysco truck backed up behind Hot Springs in the dead of night to deliver everything from linens to chicken breasts the Makaskis swore were free-range or mesclun greens they advertised as local, the Makaskis had learned to hide such shortcuts
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nd now somehow they had obtained this new pastry chef who had earned them the best part of a recent review. In the wake of Hector’s departure (Hector had recently sent a note from Guatemala, accompanied by a photo of him wielding a machete and a purple cacao bean the size of a football), Leo didn’t think he had any right to snobbery. Besides, Leo used Sysco too, where it didn’t matter. He was no purist.
He hoped that by showing up late on a Saturday, he’d miss Barbara and Donnie, who might already be in the back doing book work or even at home if things were going well enough. But when he and Britt walked in, Barbara was there at the host’s podium, sweeping the dining room with a martial gaze, offering them a view of her Roman general’s profile and her frozen magenta hair. She was taller than Britt and Leo both, with ropy limbs and muscular freckled hands with short unpolished nails and a single ring: an inky, pointed stone clawed in yellow gold
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onight she wore a black wrap dress that exposed the planes of a chest that looked like hammered copper. She came out from behind the podium to press cheeks, clouding Leo with the dark fragrance of sawed wood and nightshade. Sometimes Barbara scared the shit out of him. She gazed at them searchingly. “How divine to see you both,” she said. “Simply divine. How is everything at Winesap?”
“Fantastic,” said Britt. “Throngs. I’ve had to add a velvet rope out front.”
She laughed abruptly. Britt was very good with Barbara—he stayed with jokes and exaggeration, which meant Barbara spent all her energy trying to ferret out hidden meanings and secrets about their purveyors, their service, their vinaigrette
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he Makaskis were known to quiz guests about their experiences at nearby restaurants, usually menacing them with a glass of grappa first. It would never occur to them simply to have dinner at Winesap.
“Divine,” she said again. “Dinner tonight?” Already her hands were on their shoulders, steering them toward a table, but Leo gently wrenched himself toward the bar.
“Just a snack,” he said. “How’s everything going here? Donnie?”
She allowed them to choose seats at the bar, then said, “Donnie is astonishing. The man’s instinct for business, for inspiring loyalty—you can’t imagine. It’s new to me every day, really.” She shook her head, pondering Donnie. “He’ll want to say hello, of course. He thinks—
we
think—so highly of you both.”
“Love to,” said Britt. Barbara bowed slightly, as if in the direction of a dueling partner, and departed.
Leo picked up his menu while Britt scanned the wine list. “She’s probably dispatching the busboy to slash our tires,” Leo said.
“She smells a rat,” Britt murmured. “I’m still not wild about this. You never know when we might need that proverbial cup of sugar.”
“We’re just doing research,” said Leo. “I want to know who’s out there. Anyway, I don’t seek them out. If someone comes to me, that’s a different story.”
Britt smiled. “And if the pastry chef just happens to hear you were in for dessert, maybe she’ll come over to Winesap to say hello. Very nice
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hat do you want to try?”
Leo took a deep breath and examined the dessert menu for a few seconds, chewing the inside of his lip. “Let’s try the chocolate quills, the roasted pear, the sour cherry cake, and the ice cream trio
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ou think she put up sour cherries? Dried them?”
“Maybe,” said Britt, shrugging
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hey ordered desserts from the bartender, plus decaf for Leo and a port for Britt
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hey watched the bartender pouring cocktails for a few minutes. Leo caught a glimpse of Barbara gliding into the kitchen. Donnie would be out soon
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hey could have ordered something besides dessert if they had wanted to be a bit subtler about checking out the competition, but Leo figured there was no point in hiding it. He didn’t need some poor sap thinking he was there to see what someone could do with rolls of prosciutto on an antipasto plate
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he pastry chef might as well know why they were here. Britt was sipping his wine, gazing out over a still-full dining room.
“What’d you send out to Harry?” Leo asked.
“Oh, a bunch of stuff,” Britt said, not looking at him. “Kind of a tasting menu.”
“Lot of wine pairings too, it looked like,” Leo added.
“I thought they’d like it. Camille never drinks much, though, have you noticed? Does she drink at all?”
“She sips,” said Leo. “But I don’t think it’s her thing.”
Britt nodded. “That’s what I thought.”
As he and Leo had prepared to leave the restaurant, they’d stopped by Harry’s table, where Harry and Camille were midway through the marathon. Several wineglasses in varying states of fullness sat before each of them, and Harry was sniffing at a glass of red while Camille took a minuscule bite of cavatelli off the very tips of the tines of her fork. The two were talking quietly, unsmiling, as Britt approached, and when he and Leo stood next to the table, both Harry and Camille had started slightly, their gazes unfocused by wine and animal protein, before they recognized who had joined them. That was the error in strategy, of course: Camille was now just as woozily ensconced as Harry. There was no chance of inviting her out for anything, except perhaps sleep or insulin.
Now Britt rubbed his fingers on the edge of the bar top and glanced at them surreptitiously, hoping to detect dust or cleaner residue. There was none. “You gone over to Harry’s new place lately?”
Leo shook his head. “Not since we saw it in September. It keeps getting away from me. And he didn’t even mention it last weekend.”
The three of them had met up for a game of basketball, at Harry’s behest, early on Sunday morning before Harry returned to the restaurant space. He’d been on a roll on the court, weaving silkily around the other two and sinking layups. He didn’t bring up the restaurant. When Britt asked after it, Harry had said, “Oh, it’s fine. I just need a break from thinking about food and places people go to buy it.” Then he sank a three-pointer and added, “Aha! Now that’s the shot that’s going to take me all the way to Reykjavik.”
“I never saw him in this business,” Britt mused now. “I figured he’d be a professor by now. He could’ve been, too, if he hadn’t kept taking off to gut fish.”
“You never saw yourself in it either,” Leo said.
“I know. It’s just that for someone who always liked to wander, he’s tying himself down pretty tightly. Since when does he settle down?”
“And he always said he’d never come back. Though I guess he was a lot younger then.”
Britt snorted. “In college, I never thought I would, either.”
Leo looked away. He’d gone to college not far from Linden; both of his younger brothers had made a big deal of going to more demanding schools.
“It’s not that his idea’s bad,” Britt was saying. “I don’t know if it can work around here, or in that location, but small plates of something a little interesting—I can see it. I can see it somewhere. It’s something new.”
“New around here,” Leo pointed out. “You go to a bigger city and trust me, none of this stuff is really new. Still, someone has to bring it here, I guess.”
“He really wants to get a farmers’ market going in Linden,” Britt said.
“Well, who doesn’t?” Leo cried. Britt looked taken aback, and Leo lowered his voice a notch. “How long have we been name-checking every remotely local producer on the menu? For years. I happen to find it kind of obnoxious, but it works, so I’ll do it. I may not chase every trend that filters through, but sometimes I think Harry thinks we’re serving veal Parmesan or sun-dried tomatoes or something.” Leo sipped his coffee and sighed, disliking the sound of his own voice.
“The space has possibilities,” Britt ventured after a brief silence. “And maybe this time the waterfront really will improve.”
“You should tell him that. We should quit giving him a hard time. He’ll carry a lot of debt for a while. It’s not a casual thing. Plus, he admires you.”
“He thinks I’m shallow,” Britt said.
“Yes, but he also trusts your taste.”
The bartender refilled his decaf and Leo nodded his thanks. The Makaskis didn’t run a sloppy operation. The bar was whisked clean and the bartender wore a spotless white tuxedo shirt and bow tie—he looked like an elevator operator, but crisp and neat.
“Why did he and Shelley split up?” Britt said. “I thought they’d stay out there in Iowa or Michigan or wherever they were forever.”
Leo shook his head. “I only know she quit that island thing they were doing and left Harry to clean it up.”
“Ugh. I always thought he was just too smart for her. He was too nice to notice.”
“I think she went off with a baker to open a pizza place in the Bay Area.”
“That’s even worse! He’s opening a rebound restaurant.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s that simple,” Leo said.
“Listen, she did him a favor, not marrying him. He’d never have divorced her and we’d still be dealing with her at Thanksgiving.”
“Jesus. Those weird little tempeh pie appetizers.”
They sipped their drinks, smiling. The truth was, they loved discussing Harry and felt a sort of backhanded pride in his eccentricities and the way he saw new projects where others saw only the same old systems.
For all Harry’s intellectual flexibility, however, he could be unexpectedly fierce once he’d homed in on a goal. When he was about ten, in Little League, Harry had once forced a home run out of what should have been a triple, and he still sometimes displayed the same clenched jaw and narrowed eyes he’d had then, as he rounded third and hurled himself mercilessly and foolishly into the kid at home plate. They’d ended up with bloody faces and elbows, Harry with a swollen cheekbone and a finger’s length of raw skin on the bridge of his nose. Leo had been seventeen, at the game with Britt on orders from their parents, and the two of them had exchanged a glance half of amusement, half of alarm, while next to them their parents had cried out over the dust and blood.
The only other woman in Harry’s life who’d ever seemed serious had been the one before Shelley, a Ph.D. in history whom Harry had lived with in Ann Arbor. Catherine had been reedy and dark-haired, with large eyes in a foxy, elegant face, given to slim-cut pants and striking old jewelry and heathery tweed blazers. From behind she had looked like an English schoolboy in need of a haircut. Catherine was almost freakishly brilliant but too polite to flaunt it; they understood how meteoric her career track was only when Harry mentioned that she was deciding between jobs at Oxford and Harvard. It turned out she’d wanted to set up her new life alone, however (she chose Oxford), leaving Harry bereft, in possession of a collection of arcane books he no longer wanted to own and a cat soon revealed to have feline leukemia. Not long after the cat’s demise Harry left Ann Arbor for the island. Leo and Britt assumed that he was healing, that after Harry had enjoyed the company of someone as particular and graceful and intelligent as Catherine, he would be drawn to ever greater heights of romantic accomplishment
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hey had waited in pleasant anticipation of some divine creature, and instead they’d gotten Shelley, she of the goat’s milk soaps and endless balls of smelly untreated wool, which she ferried about in badger-sized lumps; she of the joyless dietary theories and miasmic dinner table silence; she of the pallid limbs and midday naps and whispered arguments with Harry and hateful rye flour and maple puddings
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he first time she set one before Britt, he’d looked as if she’d stabbed him through the back of his hand
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hen the rest of their family played a hand of poker, Shelley would meditate
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hen they divvied up the preparations for some elaborate holiday meal, Shelley inevitably expressed disappointment over the authenticity of the local ingredients or the source of a recipe. No one had ever seen her smile. Britt and Leo were too dismayed to discuss her even with each other until, several months earlier and right before Harry reappeared in Linden, she had finally, mercifully, removed herself, like a virus that dies off for no discernible reason.