“Jeremy?” Dante asked.
“Closed.” He said. “We sweat. We swear. And, I hate to break it to you, but I frequently do not wear the stupid paper hat.”
Dante stared at him for a second or two, then said finally: “Closed it is. If we’re going to cover up the opening with a flower arrangement, why have the opening in the first place? Second, I want the carpenters out next week not next month. Third, as Jeremy has pointed out, cooks aren’t much to look at on the line.” Dante reached over and flicked Jeremy’s beard with one finger. “Is the chin garnish considered ‘grunge’? Grunge is very out, isn’t it?”
Jeremy smiled serenely. “Don’t you think it makes me look spiritual?”
“Perhaps. But spiritual is hardly one of our market response themes.”
“I could die it purple or gold.”
“Very droll. You can’t cook with that thing, can you? It’s not hygienic.”
“I’ll wear a hairnet.”
They turned to other matters. On the opening night guest list, Philip had a confirmation from England. “I am really happy to tell everyone that Kiwi Frederique and
Gud Tayste
confirmed.”
“Brilliant,” said Dante, turning to Jeremy.
“Quam olim Abrahae promisisti.”
“I thought you already delivered on that promise,” Jeremy said, thinking of the blurb in “Hack Your Food.”
“Oh, I have more,” Dante said. “How does a feature strike you?”
Jeremy made appropriate noises of enthusiasm and excused himself. He had a meeting with a kitchen designer and equipment supplier. Dante walked him to the front door, where he said: “We should talk menu at some point, yes?”
In this area, as with kitchen staffing, Jeremy had been given some authority. He was obliged only to pay attention to the “market response themes” and table a draft menu at some point well before the opening.
“I don’t have anything formal prepared,” Jeremy said.
“Just ideas.”
“Come on then. Let’s have one.”
In fact, he didn’t have any ideas. But a Monkey’s Paw dish came to him then for the simple reason that he’d seen one of its ingredients—which was undeniably groovy at the moment—sold in purple glass decanters. “Prawns sautéed with grappa,” he said.
Dante didn’t frown or smile. He was merely straining to understand. “Prawns and grappa. That’s it?”
Jeremy fleshed it out from memory. “Marinate the prawns in grappa, oil, green onions, salt and pepper. Very lightly sauté. De-glaze with the liqueur and minced shallots. Season.
Monté au beurre
. Serve with watercress and fresh bread.”
Dante’s lips were slightly pursed. He was nodding his head the way people do when they would really rather shake their head but don’t, either out of politeness or because they’re fairly sure they can change your mind so why get your defence up prematurely. “I mean, it sounds fine, Jeremy,” he said. “But I need you to begin to think in a new way.”
Just that.
“I know you can,” Dante went on. “But you must. Now: prawns, grappa. These are beginnings. But I do not yet see a completion. I do not yet see an experience about which my fooderati will e-mail their friends in New York City. I do not yet see the vibrancy, the aggressiveness.…”
“The purple?”
“Don’t be sarcastic with me.”
“Shall we add something exotic? Some caramelized, peppered durian?”
“Would that work?”
“No, it would be very unpleasant, I assure you,” Jeremy said. “It smells like a sushi fart.”
“Then you will, of course, think of something more appropriate. Something that carries with it our messages of
newness and sophistication. Grappa, to be clear, I like. But the dish is not hip in total.”
It wasn’t that terribly difficult to do, to utter a sentence in convincing Crip. How had Jules once said it? “Classic Ingredient A plus Exotic Technique B plus Totally Unexpected Strange Ingredient C.” He considered the matter for five seconds and came up with: “Gulf Coast rock shrimp on a spiced ruby yam wafer with vintage grappa and … Thai ginger cream.”
Dante looked surprised and relieved. “Jeremy, you see that’s the idea. Would it taste good, do you think?”
“I’m not going to suggest something that tastes
bad
, not unless
bad
were one of our market response themes.”
“All right then, so let’s use that one.”
“It was just an example. You have to run through these things a few times; there’s a natural evolution. The rock shrimp, for example, is not really a sensible choice given our selection of local shellfish combined with what we can get from the Maritimes.”
“Now don’t regress on me, Jeremy. But fine. That’s enough for now. Develop your ideas along those lines.”
“I’m on it.”
“And bruschetta.”
“Sorry?”
“Bruschetta, what about it?”
“Not innovative. Indeed, common.”
“As a technique. As a launching point. Put something unusual on it.”
“Bruschetta with three strange ingredients,” Jeremy said.
“Think about it,” Dante said, opening the door for him. “It’s a personal favourite.”
At the kitchen supply warehouse, he said to the sales rep: “If I had to have a single pot in my hand at the moment of death, what would you suggest? I’m thinking Chaudier.”
“Your own death?” the rep said. “Bourgeat copper, I’m sure. The Jacques Pépin Signature Series. Of course, I’m of
the view that Pépin
is
God. You might as well be holding his pot when you rise up to meet him in the sky.”
“But he’s not in the sky yet,” Jeremy pointed out.
“Oh, sure he is,” the rep answered.
Aluminum-base would cover their needs. Jeremy ran through the Chaudier catalogue and picked out a suitable range of skillets, sauté pans,
saucière
, reducing and roasting pans, stock and sauce pots. But then, acknowledging the point vis-à-vis Jacques Pépin’s potentially overlapping relationship with God, he ordered a set of thirty-four Bourgeat pans. These would have to be FedExed in from France, naturally.
They ran through a number of range and grill configurations. In the end, he decided to anchor the kitchen on a twenty-five-foot installation bridge, the main cook top that would centre the room parallel to the front doors. Here Jeremy and his sous chef would work side by side opposite line cooks brought in for the grill, the broiler, hot appetizers and soups. The main work top would have an eight-burner and a grill on either side, a deep fryer, a small secondary prep area and plating counters. Pass-through shelving would run the length of the unit so the team would be able to fire plates back and forth. Behind the unit were some additional work areas and an auxiliary stove top for soups, stocks and sauces. To the far right: cold prep, meat prep and baking stations. Far left, Jeremy was saving square feet for an indulgently large cold room that would sit between the dish pit and the alley doors. Right rear, a small chef’s office and dry storage. And just inside the two doors to the dining room would be the hot and cold pick up counters, forming the line across which servers would not pass, where dockets and dishes would be exchanged. The spot from which Jeremy would play point, run the plays, control the action.
“Knives?” the rep said.
Jeremy sighed. No. He had his own.
They worked right through the Christmas holidays. Jeremy was spending nine hours a day in the kitchen, supervising and giving hands-on help installing everything from a Halon fire-extinguishing system (designed for the galley of an American Whittaker-class nuclear submarine), about an acre of Metro shelving, an automated dish pit, the installation bridge and a massive new RapidAir walk-in cold unit.
The walk-in unit inspired unconflicted enthusiasm. No reservation about the menu or the overt artificiality of cooking to market research data could obscure the fact in Jeremy’s mind that this was the pinnacle achievement of the global refrigerator-manufacturing community. Never had he seen one as large and perfect. At The Paw, efficiency had been paramount. Leftovers had to be carefully repacked into stacking blue plastic buckets. Storage of anything for more than a day or two was sure to cause log-jams, meaning Jules and Jeremy juggled a very volatile, quick-time inventory. They didn’t view the requirement as cramping their style, particularly. They were a fresh-sheet place and couldn’t have afforded to carry a large inventory anyway.
But the RapidAir could have been made by NASA, so thoroughly did it provide for all conceivable contingencies. From the outside it looked a module from a space station, all sleek, rounded, white sides with the input console for its Pentium III processor and its flat-screen colour readouts recessed flush into side panels. When you popped the front, using the patented TouchPoint latch-release system, the doors slid aside with a pneumatic sigh. Inside were four distinct compartments, each with separate temperature controls that demarcated the box into distinct climatic zones. The first, a great expanse of crisp, chrome shelving. The second, an open area with hooks for curing ham and sausage. Third, the produce section with clear plastic bins. Last, a wine cellar.
“We call this one the Food Caboose,” the RapidAir on-site
installation specialist said. “Only it’s closer to the size of a goddamn locomotive.”
Indeed, a portion of the alley wall had to be removed to get the Food Caboose into the kitchen. It was the first point in Jeremy’s acquisition binge that produced a small frown out of Dante. Even so, he didn’t say a word.
Nights, meanwhile, Jeremy was running what amounted to a second kitchen in Stanley Park. Caruzo spread the word, and Chladek found a neutral spot for it, in the forest between their two camps. And people simply began showing up. Most would bring something, and invariably their offerings became a soup or stew, given both the weather and the odd assortment of ingredients. A ring of Polish sausage, a tin of tomatoes, a dozen potatoes or a clutch of starlings or a rabbit. Always a poverty-inspired mixture of items salvaged from dumpsters (from those who had just arrived) or items harvested from the forest around them (from those, like Caruzo and Chladek, whose skills had been honed by need).
In the four hours’ sleep he was managing between these two shifts, unexpectedly, there were florid dreams. Just as in France there had come a point when he was swamped with thoughts of the past, thoughts that spurred him on towards the future, so was he now awash in nocturnal recollection. His psyche was taking an inventory of some kind.
“You will be exceptional,” Chef Quartey said to him.
“I feel exceptional,” Jeremy answered. “The only thing I worry about is if I will forget the things you taught me.”
“The things I taught you?” Quartey said, plating a crapaudine.
“Yes, you. Who else taught me?”
“I taught you to cut a chicken like so, to make people comfortable. To pour wine without pretence,” Chef Quartey said. “What then can be forgotten? Although it is, I think, very North American to forget like this, no? I forget nothing.”
“Where is Patrice?” Jeremy asked Chef Quartey.
Quartey evaporated in steam, shooting skyward with a screech.
“Claude,” Jeremy said. They were standing outdoors, on the hillside below the forest. The small sous chef held a Sabatier paring knife in one hand and a leek in the other.
“Ger-ah-mee,” Claude said, seeing him for the first time and repeating Quartey’s admonition. “Very North American to forget like this, no? Go to her. Go to Patrice, see how she lives.”
“I don’t know where she is,” Jeremy said. And, unexpectedly, he began to weep.
Claude held the knife up now, the blade resting across his Adam’s apple. Tears flowed from his eyes too. “Go to her and make up with her,” Claude said, the Sabatier beginning to cut his flesh. Jeremy saw the blood bead and spill. “Do you still remember her?”
“I remember,” Jeremy said, gasping out the words. “I remember everything. I remember the source de la Seine. We took a picture. I gave it to my father. I remember the source d’Ignon. I haven’t forgotten any of it.”
Claude stopped cutting his own throat and straightened up. As if he had just caught himself daydreaming when a great many things still needed to be done. “Ah, well then,” he said. The leek and the knife were gone and he pulled sharply downward with both hands on the front of his white jacket, as he always did before entering the dining room. “It’s not all your fault.”
And at his feet the stones bled water. The flow sounded like wind chimes.
Jeremy breathed deeply upon waking, breathed the cold air of his own room. Breathed in Vancouver. Around him the sense of the bed grew firm, the sheets knotted under him.
At Christmas dinner in Stanley Park they had over twenty people in the small clearing. He roasted geese and mashed a cauldron of potatoes, a ring of apples baked in foil around the
fire. At first he was self-conscious about the noise they made—no singing and dancing, just the sound that two dozen people will make shuffling and eating in the otherwise quiet forest—but after a few slugs of Chladek’s Becherovka he forgot about it entirely. He fed everybody that came, and when he remembered the thought later, he shook his head. It was too wet to be self-conscious. Those who had not returned to their various places to huddle out of the rain were hugging the bases of trees for the little shelter they afforded. Full of geese and potatoes and apples and, for some, a little wine. But cold and still out of doors on Christmas. The rest of the city, the world, was not even looking this direction.
He hugged Chladek before leaving. “Máme holé ruce,” Chladek said to him.
He walked with his father through the forest afterwards, the Professor’s pace slower than Jeremy remembered. He told his father about a magnificent kitchen coming together.
“Well, this is not so bad then,” the Professor said.
No, not entirely. “But come right down to it,” Jeremy said, “I’d rather cook here.”
He then spoke of his dreams. Chef Quartey with his advice. Claude with his Sabatier. He took a breath and told his father how he had lost his own, lost that special gift.
The Professor looked concerned, but did not reproach.
“And meanwhile I have a Crip menu to write.”
To which his father said only: “Something will come up to inspire you.”