Stanley Park (47 page)

Splashed all over the side of the saucepan too.

Jeremy groaned. He rolled his head back and looked up at the ceiling. Just what he needed. He should have gone to bed. Any of his own blood in the saucepan and it all had to go into the garbage, of course. He turned off the flame, disgusted with himself, took out a damp cloth and carefully wiped down the
stove top. He picked up the saucepan to empty it into the sink, set it down again.

Two precious quarts. There was no more.

He left the pan sitting on the burner and wiped down the sides, using the edge of a paring knife to scrape off the bits that had been cooked hard. He stepped back from the stove, leaned on a prep counter, chin in hand, staring at the pot.

“Jesus,” he said aloud. He went out into the back alley and smoked a cigarette, looking up and down the dark shining lane. Black clouds were sifting by overhead.

Boutifar or no boutifar, it was only the thematic core of the whole menu. What were the chances any of his blood got into the pot at all? If so, how much? A single drop? Long since mixed a part per billion with the rest? Boiled?

He flicked his cigarette towards the storm sewer. It made an orange streak through the darkness before hissing out on the wet pavement. He went inside. He set the pot on the side rack to cool. He put a new bandage on his knuckle.

It was a simple sausage, really. Onions and leeks cooked in pork fat, cooled and combined with the blood, some cream, salt, pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, cayenne and thyme. It took Jeremy about half an hour to fill the casings on the KitchenAid and make a glistening stack of black sausages. Tomorrow he’d poach them. Sunday, on the order call, they would grill and open half a link per serving, sauté sliced onion and apple in butter. At the pick-up they’d broil a slice of baguette, rub some garlic on the crust, brush the sausage with cinnamon-infused olive oil and grill. When it was crisp the sausage would slide onto the baguette slice. Somebody would plate the apple and onion in a ring around it.

Apple blossom garnish and you were good to go.

“This is the speech,” Jeremy said, in the kitchen 1030 Sunday morning. “This is the only speech because we’re going to be slammed from here down to 2100.”

“Go Chef,” Joey de Yonker said.

“Thanks for coming on time, everyone,” he went on. “Prep lists are at your stations. No surprises.

“Some notes. Henk and Joey, take up the astringency on the rhubarb sauce. Same amount. Try finishing it with a bit of balsamic. The red wine reduction was excellent, same again. Soup same. I’ll be making the squirrel consommé and the won tons.

“Conrad, Angela: leeks first, please. Then seaweed, oysters in the smoker, endive wheatsheaves. I’ll do the potato cream and give you a hand with anything you need.

“Rolando: you’ve got yams, potatoes for the flatfish crust, mushrooms to Henk for the risotto. Celeriac dice into a hotel pan of lemon water, please, and then to me. I’ll do the purée.”

For Jules, he thought.

“New ingredients?” Henk prompted.

“Right,” Jeremy said. The Pacific wild periwinkle was more saline than the imported one they had been using, so they needed less salt in the stir fry. The goldfish were larger than the sardine; Henk would need two and half minutes a side. The flatfish were small. Angela’s potato crust should be thinner.

“And the racoon …,” Jeremy said. “Strong taste. Pepper the tenderloin pieces. I’m not talking about a crust here, but a good grind all over. And remember that these wild birds have been flying distances up until yesterday. They do not have as much fat and don’t need to render as long. The goose and duck can grill a little hotter. They’ll finish the same as before.

“Questions about any of that?”

There were none.

“Bottom line,” Jeremy said, and then lost the words. He felt a flutter of nerves.

“Here’s to it,” Joey de Yonker offered.

Jeremy pantomimed raising a glass. They all did. “Here’s to it,” Jeremy said. “Our tribute.”

“Our performance,” Henk said.

“On which note,” Jeremy said. “By 2130 I want to come back here and see this.…” Jeremy put a hand above his eyes and looked around the kitchen as if it were empty. Spotless. “I mean clean,” he said. “Leftovers go straight into the bins and out to the dumpster. I don’t want to find any racoon leftovers in my RapidAir, understand? You can leave at that point or come up front for a drink. Everyone got it?”

They got it, and fell quickly into the routine. For two hours there was little talk in the kitchen of Gerriamo’s, just the reassuring sounds of the kitchen humming. Chopping, oven doors thumping shut, Torkil knocking out bread pans, Chico running the dishwasher, the sound of gas flame and scraping pot bottoms. They worked in this familiar cocoon of sounds until mid-afternoon, when Jeremy had everyone take a break together and he made them frittata with pancetta and arugula.

After they’d eaten he walked into the RapidAir and found a bottle of La Fin du Monde. He was at the door, ready to go back into the kitchen, when he thought better of it and grabbed a bottle of Pellegrino instead. He poured off a glass in the kitchen, slugged it down.

“Santé,” he said, to nobody in particular.

“A la vôtre.” Henk said from nearby.

He went out front later. Staff were jogging everywhere, every movement an urgent errand. Someone was washing the baseboards. Somebody else was brushing the purple drapes at the front of the house. The barman was meticulously redusting each bottle on his massive mirror-backed shelves. Dante and Benny were discussing seating arrangements.

The room looked both opulent and messy—the desired effect, Jeremy was sure. Banks, having seen the zucchini blossom garnish on the lamb he had for lunch on Monday, had strewn the tables with dried ones. To this decorating scheme he’d added open champagne crates set strategically
around the room, two dozen of them. Jeremy noticed that the crates contained champagne bottles and, in each, several cabbages: red, white and savoy. Veuve Cliquot and peasant vegetables spilled out of the straw as if the crates had dropped from the back of a very specialized delivery truck.

“You like it?” he asked Jeremy. “We make a joke about rich and poor.”

“What’s the joke?” Jeremy asked, towering over Banks, his toque adding authoritative feet.

Banks looked confused, and pointed a quivering finger at a Savoy cabbage. “Jeremy, the cabbawge. People laugh at the cabbawge. He is so … green and wrinkled.”

Jeremy pretended to be greatly irritated. He said: “Do you mind telling me exactly what you find funny about cabbages?”

Banks squirmed in his cream three-piece suit (under a black cape), his hand fiddling with the huge chrome links of a vestigial watch chain. “Jeremy, is just visual humour. Peoples they look at the cabbawge and the beautiful bottle of the Veuve Cliquot and they will lawf. Is all. Please, Jeremy …”

“Please,
Chef,”
Jeremy said to Banks.

“Please … what?” Banks said.

“Call him Chef,” Dante said from a few tables away, without looking up. He was examining a guest list. “It’s a courtesy he deserves. Jeremy, you don’t like the cabbages?”

“In fact, I love the cabbages,” Jeremy said, not lying.

“Good,” Banks said, rubbing his hands together with relief. “Good.”

Jeremy walked back up the riser towards the kitchen. Just at the kitchen door he was intercepted.

“Chef Jeremy.” It was a harsh English accent, chalk to Dante’s cheese. Jeremy turned to find a tiny, spiky-haired person standing next to him, looking up. She was wearing a puffy, silver raver’s jacket and four-inch orange platforms.

“You must be Kiwi Frederique,” he said.

They sat at the bar. Jeremy took another soda. Kiwi took
a Gibson. She slid her Palm PDA onto the mahogany counter, picked up her drink and commenced looking at him intently. Jeremy stared back with a small, expectant smile.

“Who has been your greatest professional influence?” Kiwi asked finally, no preamble.

Over her shoulder, Jeremy was watching the band set up, a large jazz band, octet at least. The stand-up bass player was noodling up and down through scales, and one of three sax players was throwing the riff back and forth with him, bobbing and weaving. It looked like fun. It reminded him of Olli.

“Ray Kroc and Ferdinand Point,” he said, returning to the conversation. Chef Quartey would forgive him for lying so egregiously given the circumstances.

Kiwi laughed at what she assumed was an ironic same-breath reference to the founder of McDonald’s and that of nouvelle cuisine.

“Seriously,” Jeremy said. “In the early part of the century, Ferdinand Point rejected classical French mother sauces. Mid-century, Kroc introduced the first truly global commodity food. Here at Gerriamo’s, at the end of the same century, we pay homage to these great revolutionaries.”

Kiwi Frederique had decided that he was, in fact, serious and was now making aggressive notes on the Palm. Sometimes when he was throwing things together in the kitchen, not following a recipe, Jeremy felt the same way he felt now. Infallible. Any seasoning he added, any word said … any one would work. And punctuating this thought, the piano player kicked in, slapping down magnificently dissonant chords that anchored all the unrelated noodling going on behind him.

“You see, Ferdinand Point was the first wave in a culinary revolution,” Jeremy went on. “He broke with French formality; he broke with fat and weighty flavours. He kicked free of the past and floated somewhere new without baggage. Kroc created a second wave with his humble hamburger. He broke the constraints of being
wherever
—McDonald’s is the same
anywhere in world, right? Who cares where the beef comes from? He created something that lived independent of its ingredients, a huge change.”

Frederique continued to scribble ferociously. Slashing down strokes, pounding period marks into the little screen. She was backdropped by eight guys going hard on the band riser. Everybody jamming a different tune, the piano running straight down the core. It was a cacophony of random squawks and squiffs, scales and licks. And yet it swung.

“Which brings us to Gerriamo’s,” he plunged on, raising his voice above the band. “You have a word for our kind of food.”

“International Groove,” Kiwi said, looking up.

“We’re more than that,” Jeremy said. “We claim Point’s victory over the past and Kroc’s victory over locale. We’re beyond international. Beyond globalized. We aren’t the restaurant of
all
places—Europe and Africa, Asia and the Americas. This is
not fusion
. We are the restaurant of
no
place. We belong to no soil, to no cuisine, to no people, to no culinary morality. We belong only to those who can reach us and understand us and afford us. Gerriamo’s is post-national.… Post-National Groove Food.”

His grand culinary pronouncement complete, the on-stage jam unravelled to silence and the sound of mikes being adjusted. “Chack … ch-ch-ch-ch-chaaack.”

Frederique stopped writing, mesmerized. She leaned forward, eyes locked on Jeremy and said breathlessly, “The Third-Wave Culinary Revolution.”

Jeremy nodded very slowly. “Complete with the echoes of sorrow for what has been lost in the process, left behind or forgotten. A revolution with memory.”

Frederique wrote a word down, then stopped. She picked up her drink. “Like what?” she asked from behind her glass.

He might as well end it there. “It’s personal,” he said. “The personal part of your involvement with the food. Your memories. Taste and remember for yourself.”

Frederique snapped shut the Palm. She smiled broadly. He got her another drink.

“How are we doing, people?” he called out, back in the kitchen. He strolled up and down the lines, checking progress. Conrad and Angela had finished the leeks and were struggling with the endive. Jeremy showed them again how to julienne the heads lengthways, how to make the sheaf of tiny strands tied into a bundle with a blanched chive. You needed to tie the chive with a reef knot, he told them again. A Granny knot would slip. They got back to it.

Rolando was grating potatoes. Henk was roasting pears for the foie gras sauce.

Jeremy felt sudden and profound satisfaction. Kiwi Frederique had heard what she’d come to hear. Now let her eat fully of their efforts. Eat and be unconsciously connected to this place. To himself, to the squad here, working their way through prepping
mise en place
and assembling, straining and reducing sauces.

Jeremy picked up the Sabatier, steeled it, then turned to the celeriac purée.

“Wow,” Margaret said, climbing out of the cab and looking up at the front of Gerriamo’s.

“Ouch,” Olli said. He was still in the cab, sitting forward in the seat to pay the driver, and his tuxedo pants were pinching. He’d complained putting them on earlier.

“Look at this,” he’d said, disgusted. “I’m getting a gut.”

“You look fabulous,” Margaret said. Like all men, he grew a little taller, a little more dignified in the basic black and white cutlines of a dinner jacket. It was true; he was softening. He had pouches above his hips that weren’t there when he had time to play squash, when he was just a Vancouver-based entrepreneur-workaholic. Now that he was an
internationally commuting entrepreneur-workaholic, he was gaining weight. And sure, he was drinking again. Margaret knew all these things were related, but she was determined not to get squirrelly about it. If she worried, it was only a shadow anxiety about what it meant that Olli had changed his mind on something, so seldom did it happen. The few drinks in themselves … well, he got a little sharper, a little funnier, in fact. And the love handles on the once-lean frame didn’t bother her either.