Then:
The Threatened Swan
. Standing like a boxer, beak set to jab, wings cocked, feathers flying. Jeremy admired the bristling stance the bird took towards the attacker, knowing that in Asselijn’s day, the threat might well have been a rookie cook like himself.
He walked the gallery many times, seeking out all the food pictures, all the glistening still lifes, but returned again and again to these three. The patron, the kitchen, the swan. As the clock marked off the few hours until departure, he stood in front of these images, one after another, and he found himself thinking again of his American friend who set to war the culinary Crips and Bloods. His mind swirled over his time in the
relais
, over his Sunday nights. Those loud late evenings when Patrice did not go home to Pellerey but consented to return to his bed with him. The hours and days he had spent with her in the forest above the town. The source d’Ignon. The true source of the region. It seemed that all his time in France had been captured in these images, triangulated. Fixing him like a crapaudine on the skewer of his own culinary training.
“These have been the years,” Jeremy thought, reflecting now on his return to North America with new, unexpected enthusiasm, with something like zeal. “These years have made me Blood.”
The Monkey’s Paw Bistro was conceived of this conviction. It took him four years to raise the nerve and figure out how to raise the money, and a few weeks longer to convince his new friend Jules Capelli to join him as sous chef and pastry chef.
They had met only six months before, appropriately enough at the public market. He spotted her first. He was sifting through a basket of chanterelles, for his own dinner on a Monday night off. She was across the way, intently unstacking and restacking a pile of celery roots, setting aside ones that met
some clearly exacting standard. His attention was arrested. She was about his age, thirtyish or a few years younger. Attractive, definitely, but she also emanated a quality he wasn’t sure he could articulate. Something like strength and vulnerability at the same time. She had eyes too large for her face, almost sorrowful, but set under impossibly strong black eyebrows. A straight, austerely beautiful helmet of even blacker hair, blue-black, which she stroked gently behind her ears. And as he watched, she leaned over the stainless steel counter and auditioned the celery roots in her strong hands, the veins standing out in firm relief as her long fingers felt the rough surfaces. She held each one gently up to a nose that arched distinctly across the bridge. Smelling one in particular, she closed heavy lids over her eyes, finding the quality she sought. He held his breath, a chanterelle in one hand, halfway to the bag.
Jules felt this stare on her eventually, opened her eyes and turned to find it. Jeremy looked away sharply at her first movement. He found himself above the chanterelles again, found the one in his hand and began to move as normal, raising it towards the bag. And then—remembering what he had just seen but forgetting both himself and her actual presence five or six feet away—he raised the dusty orange, pine-needle-covered mushroom past the rim of the bag and to his nose.
Jules was looking surreptitiously around herself, having been unable to find the stare immediately. She was glancing back to her celery root when she spotted him. The guy in the suede leather coat, high cheekbones, dark eyes and thick, unkempt dark hair. He was staring back down at a basket of chanterelles, looking with faint recognition at the one in his hand. And standing, staring, his face had become dreamy. The mushroom drifted up to a spot under his nose, where he inhaled its fragrance deeply, taking a long, shuddering draw.
He opened his eyes again and dropped the chanterelle into the paper bag, apparently satisfied. At which point he noticed that she was looking back at him, laughing silently. He saw the
chosen celery root hoisted and sitting on the palm of her hand, next to her shoulder, as if ready for shot put.
“Is that what I look like?” she asked him. “Like I’m trying to get high?”
He reddened. He ran a hand nervously through his hair.
“You cook,” Jules said. It wasn’t really a question. He looked tired. He was checking out chanterelles with a practised eye. He had a snip of Elastoplast around his left index finger, right where you might take off a slice of knuckle if you were behind on prep and not getting enough sleep. But he didn’t ask how she knew, just accepted that she had spotted him as a professional.
“My night off.”
She nodded, eyebrows arched high. “From …?”
He told her about his work, sauté man at a popular tourist restaurant with a steady-on salmon-and-prawns-type seafood reputation. She was doing pastries and desserts at The Tea Grill, a well-known and overtly experimental kitchen, the kind loved by a certain glossy variety of critic and the financially enabled patrons that follow in their wake. A serious Crip credential, but Jeremy was impressed.
They had coffee several weeks later. She called. They met at Save On Meats, in a rough block of East Hastings Street. Jeremy knew about the legendary Vancouver butcher—part slaughterhouse, the band saws and heavy cleavers were in use right behind the glass counters—but he hadn’t known about the little diner at the rear. It had a narrow yellow Arborite counter that curved in and out to form conversational peninsulas. They sold drinkable diner coffee and enormous hamburgers for $3.50.
Jeremy loved it. He looked around the counter area with a broad smile. Jules found herself pleased to have predicted approval.
Save On Meats became a weekly thing, talking shop mostly. He confided in her quickly, told her of the irritations and
rewards of his present work. He told of his ideas, his taste for the simplest, most direct and local cooking possible. “Highend urban rubber-boot food,” he said at one point. He told her about the restaurant where he had worked in France, Chef Quartey, Claude, the cast of other characters and the surrounding countryside, which had all joined to inspire one single idea: The Monkey’s Paw Bistro. He could almost draw the details of the room in words, so long had he lived with the vision. He told her about the slow-dawning possibility that he may have enough seed-investment money. He spoke of his so-far unsuccessful search for that one other chef he would need.
Jules nodded and listened over a number of similar conversations, watching his angular face work with enthusiasm around dark, shining eyes. She thought he was starting to like her, maybe he even had a little crush at this point. And she would have acknowledged a mutual attraction if someone had asked her. She would have admitted that once—the second or third time they got together—there had been a moment when she thought she was going to kiss him. A short lull in the conversation, very typical and comfortable. They were sitting on adjacent too-small stools. Jeremy shifted his weight, and their thighs rubbed. Jules turned with a smile, with a ready quip, just as he turned to her. They were staring at one another. Their expressions grew serious. And there it was, a hovering instant of possibility. Both of them floating in it. She looked at his lips, so full, so nicely formed. She could have. She would have.
But they didn’t. From the start, Jules sensed a very different and possibly better way their relationship was directed. She liked this Monkey’s Paw idea. She liked the implied day-to-day spontaneity, culinary theatre sports in a kitchen where two people could riff off one another. And she also knew that a professional relationship would scuttle romantic possibilities, no matter how their feelings were evolving. She made it a practice not to sleep with cooks in the first place, but turning up the heat with someone from your own
kitchen was a truly ridiculous idea. Cooking was a twelve-hour day, more. You couldn’t spend that kind of time together, dancing around the same prep counters, the same hot grills, literally rubbing against one another, and then go home to the same bed. Jules had tried it once—she knew. The experiment had been to good effect for exactly two nights, to bad effect for the additional two months it took to extricate herself from a life that had so physically, so intensely woven through her own.
Her evolving sense of their relationship was also rooted in her own irritations and rewards. She told him that there had been a time when she had wanted nothing more than the kind of job she had. The Tea Grill was new; it was highly visible on critical radar. At twenty-seven, coming out of cooking school after several years on the sales side of hotel catering, Jules felt she had to jump on board something moving, happening. Something on which a reputation could be quickly built.
“Hip at any cost,” Jules said. Coming out of school it felt like there was no time to waste.
“And now?” Jeremy asked her.
“Turns out I don’t want to be there.” Jules wanted independence. Jules wanted to be known for her own work. “The restaurant gets raves, fine. I’d do something smaller just to establish my own personal connection with something good. Not huge, but good and my own.”
Jeremy watched her eyes. Green. At once open, accessible and yet bottomlessly resolved. She was right about him. His interest had begun to migrate towards the romantic, although he had taken his time deciding. He hadn’t had a girlfriend in the year since he started his most recent job. No dates even—too busy. Sex exactly twice, both with restaurant people, although not from his restaurant.
“There are a million things I can do,” Jules was explaining. “An endless list of desserts that I can dream up and make.
They all taste good. Caramelized peaches with cumin infusion, brandy-yam ice cream.”
“And there is liberty in it,” Jeremy said, articulating what he believed to be her point.
“Sure. But I like key lime pie.”
Jeremy considered this confession.
“The intent is spontaneity,” Jules went on. “But the more I think about it, the more I imagine our creations to be the product of a ‘spontaneity rule’ of some kind. Like: Classic Ingredient A plus Exotic Technique B plus Totally Unexpected Strange Ingredient C equals Wacky Dish D. Sauce with something black or dark blue and you’re good to go.”
Jeremy was nodding.
“Everything
works
, clearly,” she continued. “Crème de bourbon and lemon-grass tart is actually very good. But I sometimes think what I’m doing is totally …
incoherent
. That I’d rather make key lime pie.”
“Key lime pie,” repeated Jeremy (who didn’t particularly like key lime pie, as it happened, but who could think of nothing more sumptuous just then, nothing more compelling, more richly personal than the
idea
of the key lime pie that Jules liked.)
“For example,” Jules said.
It had not been since Quartey that Jeremy had had such a sweeping sense that somebody knew exactly what he was talking about.
She said yes a week later, to the question she had been anticipating. He started to address the harder choice this answer represented. “You know, one thing I’ve always thought about working together—you and I.…” He stammered into a conversational cul-de-sac.
“You don’t have to say it,” she said quietly. “We both understand.” There would be a measure of disappointment on both sides. It couldn’t be helped.
And so, that spring, The Monkey’s Paw did open. A narrow
fifty-seater on Cambie Street in Vancouver’s Crosstown neighbourhood, edgy but with cheap rents. They served bistro fare on a fixed price menu that changed daily with what could be found in Chinatown that morning. A restaurant other chefs would go to. Local but not dogmatic. It wasn’t a question of being opposed to imported ingredients, but of preference, of allegiance, of knowing what goodness came from the earth around you, from the soil under your feet.
The typical dinner chalkboard read:
Prix Fixe Menu:
$24.00
Down:
Pacific wild prawns
Saltspring Island chevre with toasties
Set:
Fraser Valley free-range duck breast, roasted
Lime-marinated sockeye salmon, grilled
All with inspirational sauces and seasonal veggies.
More details? Just ask
.
Hutt:
Jules’s increasingly famous dessert trolley. Get some
.
They riffed on sauces, using classical motifs: pear-mustard, chive-cream, shallot-ginger, roasted fennel. It was simple, coherent, Blood cooking in a relais-style room with six nights of Sunday nights.
They had two people out front—Zeena and Dominic—who worked the whole room without zones. Service was enthusiastic and knowledgeable. They went over each new menu item as a group before dinner service.
The room itself was simple: planked wood floors, a single vaulted front window next to a blue door with a centre brass knob. Tables and chairs from Ikea. North wall, brick; south wall painted dark brown to the five-foot mark to simulate wainscotting. The art work was haphazard, the product of piece-by-piece collection at local art-college auctions: etchings, woodcuts, off-kilter portrait photography and a large neo-classical still life with a menacing quality Jeremy couldn’t identify. Jules donated three metal sculptures by a student artist named Fenton Sooner, who had gone on to enter high-profile collections, including (rumour had it) Steve Martin’s. Stylized birds, thought Jeremy, who named the trio Heckle, Jeckle and Hide. They were worth more than all the other art in the restaurant combined, more than the furniture, but they held much greater value to Jeremy and Jules in the image of perseverance that they provided. Fenton Sooner stuck with it, completed the fraught transition from apprenticeship to recognition, and his crows were an emblem of gawky tenacity.
In the black-and-white-tiled kitchen, meanwhile, Jeremy and Jules had their fun at very close quarters. They had a single wood-topped prep area, an old Vulcan-Hart range with a chrome hood, where they worked side by side on the mains and the hot appetizers. There was an L-shaped pass-through in the middle of the room, where they rotated during dinner to deal with cold appetizers and salads. Jules rolled into yet a third position, desserts, as each evening wound to a close. With a dishwasher arriving late to clear the dish pit, there was barely room for anybody else.