The Blue Bistro (4 page)

Adrienne felt like one of the born-again Christians on early Sunday morning TV. She had been saved! New job, decent, affordable housing, complete with Internet and a used ten-speed bike. The first morning in her new bed she lay with her eyes closed and banished Doug Riedel from her mind once and for all. In the six months of their dating, he had lied to her about his drug use and stolen all her money. But it hadn’t been all bad. At the bottom of her trunk rested a lovely pair of shearling gloves that Doug had given her when they first started dating, and there had been some nice walks, the two of them throwing Jax sticks along the snowy banks of the Frying Pan River. Adrienne felt some white noise coming from her heart, but she sensed it was because she missed Jax. She loved that dog.

So it was good-bye and good riddance to another man, another town, another phase of her life. Nantucket would be the start of sound decision-making, a healthy lifestyle, the straight and narrow. Adrienne loved the island already—the historic downtown homes with their lilac bushes and their snapping flags; the wild, pristine beaches. It was so easy to breathe here.

Adrienne’s new housemate, Caren Friar, had been a waiter at the Blue Bistro since the beginning. (When they first met, Adrienne made the mistake of calling her a waitress and Caren curtly corrected her—
Waitresses worked at diners in the 1950s, okay? This is fine dining and I bust my ass as hard as any man out there
. . . . ) Caren was tall and extremely thin. She had been with a ballet company in New York City for three years before she accepted that she was never going to make a living at it. That’s when she got sucked into what she called the life of hash and cash. Caren had a long, graceful
neck, regal posture, a way of floating from place to place rather than walking. She wore her dark auburn hair in a bun so tight it made Adrienne’s head ache just to look at it. Caren knew the ropes at the bistro—she knew the dirt on every person who ate there and every person who worked there—and although Adrienne was dying to mine the woman for information, most pressingly about the chef, Fiona, she intuited that she should proceed with caution.

Adrienne had already done a little bit of research on her own. The day she was hired, she dug up three articles about the Blue Bistro from the magazine archives of the public library: one in
Cape Cod Life
(August 1997), one in
Bon Appétit
(June 2000), and one in
Travel + Leisure
(May 2003). The articles offered variations on the same information: The Blue Bistro was wildly popular because it was the only restaurant on the beach on Nantucket and because of the food.
T + L
called the food “consistently delightful . . . Fiona Kemp is one of the most talented chefs in New England today.”
Cape Cod Life
said, “Fiona Kemp never does interviews but her plates speak volumes. . . . She is a master at giving every diner an unforgettable taste experience.” Each article referred to Thatcher and Fiona as partners and
Bon Appétit
mentioned that they had grown up together in South Bend, Indiana. Fiona attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and she landed her first job as a line cook at the Wauwinet Inn on Nantucket. Thatcher was quoted as saying, “She convinced me to come out to the island for a visit in 1992. She had found a great spot for a restaurant. Once I saw it, I decided to leave the family business in South Bend behind. We were up and running the following year.” Thatcher went on to explain how, the first two summers, they struggled to get the menu right. “We were trying to make the food really grand. It took us a while to figure out that fancy French food wasn’t the answer. The answer was simple, fresh, fun. Food you’d want to eat on the beach.” A photograph of Thatcher appeared in each article—Thatcher holding up a bowl of coral-colored soup,
Thatcher in a white wicker chair grinning in a Notre Dame baseball cap. And the most surprising was a photo of Thatcher in a navy blazer and red paisley tie standing behind the oak podium. It was Huck Finn, all gussied up. There were no pictures of Fiona.

Caren had rented the same two-bedroom cottage on Hooper Farm Road for as many years as she’d worked at the restaurant and she took a roommate every year. Thatcher had asked Caren—as a favor to him—to rent the spare bedroom to Adrienne. Adrienne had been forced upon her, basically, because nobody turned Thatcher down and certainly not in the final year, when there might be a farewell bonus for loyal employees to consider. Adrienne was just happy for housing, and not only housing, but company. In the morning, Adrienne and Caren sat at the kitchen table drinking espresso. The following night was the first night of work, the soft opening. Adrienne was unsure of what to wear. She had two trunks of clothes from her days on the front desk, but somehow looking-nice-at-a-day-job clothing didn’t seem suitable for representing the front of the house at the hottest restaurant on Nantucket. She asked Caren.

“The other assistant managers have all been men,” Caren said. “They dressed like Thatch.”

“He wears a coat and tie?” Adrienne said.

“A tie if there’s somebody big on the books. Otherwise he wears blazers and shirts from Thomas Pink. And Gucci loafers, a new pair every year. At first, he couldn’t stand the idea of spending three hundred bucks on shoes, coming from Indiana and all, but he grew into it, and now his loafers are a part of the whole show. They’re as much of an institution as the blue granite and the crackers.”

“I heard about the crackers,” Adrienne said.

“Let’s look in your closet,” Caren said. “Another espresso?”

“No, thanks,” Adrienne said. The espresso machine was Caren’s. She hauled it between Nantucket and St. Bart’s the same way Adrienne schlepped her laptop. Caren even owned a set of demitasse cups and saucers. It was a very sophisticated
setup except Adrienne discovered she didn’t like espresso. It tasted like a cross between gasoline and tree bark, but she’d accepted a cup to be polite and now that the caffeine was coursing through her blood, she was ready to leap out of her skin. Soft opening tomorrow night! She needed to find something to wear!

As she feared, Caren deemed every item of clothing Adrienne owned too frumpy, too corporate, too Banana Republic. “You’ve worked in resorts for six years,” Caren said, “and you haven’t learned how to
shop
?”

Caren took her to Gypsy on Main Street where Adrienne’s pulse reached an unsafe speed. The clothes were so gorgeous, and so expensive, that Adrienne thought she was going to pass out.

“We have to go someplace else,” Adrienne said. “I can’t afford any of this.”

“Oh, come on,” Caren said. “You’re going to be making more money than you know what to do with.”

“I doubt that,” Adrienne said. Still, she mustered enough courage to browse the sale rack, and there she found two pairs of silk pants and a stunning Chloe dress that was marked down 70 percent. Adrienne put the dress back but bought both pairs of pants; then, at the last minute, she decided to try the dress on.

Caren whistled. “You can’t pass that one up.”

Adrienne scowled at herself in the mirror. Becoming self-sufficient did not mean spending exorbitant amounts of money on last year’s designer clothing. She would probably get fired her first week and end up living in the back of a junkyard car . . . but no, she couldn’t pass the dress up.

Adrienne bought the dress, her hand trembling as she signed the credit card slip, a combination of the price and the espresso. Once she had enough clothes to get her through the weekend, she felt better about starting this new life. This, after all, was what she had needed. A clean slate. A chance to get it just right.

“Let’s pretend for twenty minutes of every day that the restaurant business is about food,” Thatcher said.

Adrienne wrote on a yellow legal pad: “Restaurant=food.” She sat at one end of a very long table, a twelve-top, in the dining room with the rest of the staff—five waiters; three bussers; the bartender, Duncan; and a young female bar back. Thatcher was the professor. Adrienne was the nerdy kid who took too many notes—but Thatcher had asked her to
Please absorb every word I say,
so that this, the soft opening, might go as smoothly as possible.

The dining room had been completely transformed since the morning of her breakfast. The wood floors had been polished, the wicker chairs had been cleaned, the plastic sheeting was rolled up so that every table had an unimpeded view of the gold sand beach and Nantucket Sound. Landscapers had planted red and pink geraniums in the window boxes that lined the outer walls of the restaurant and in the wooden dory out front. All of the tables were set for service and the waiters (three veterans, two newcomers) had arrived early to polish the glasses. The waiters wore black pants, crisp white shirts, and long white aprons. The busboys and the bar back wore black pants and white oxfords. Duncan wore khakis, a blue silk shirt, a sailboat-print tie, and black soccer sneakers.
Adrienne had decided on her new pink silk pants with a gauzy white top and a pair of Kate Spade slides that she bought off the sale rack at Neiman’s in Denver. Her black hair was short enough that she only had to blow it dry and fluff it. She would have looked okay except that morning had been so sunny and warm that she had headed off to the beach. She came home sunburned, and when she applied her fuchsia lipstick it matched not only her toenail polish and her new pants, but the stripe across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Ten minutes ago, when she’d arrived, Thatcher had narrowed his eyes at her (just the way her father would if he could see her). She was certain she was going to get a word about sunscreen.

“Diaphanous top on the first night,” he said. “Gutsy. I like it. What size are you?”

Was this any of his business? “A six.”

He nodded. “The shoes won’t work, though.” He checked his watch—she thought it was a Patek Philippe. “But you don’t have time to go home and change. Sorry. Menu meeting at table nine, right now.” He handed her the yellow legal pad. “Please absorb every word I say. You’re trailing me tonight. Soft opening. That means friends of the house. Nobody gets a bill for anything but alcohol, and everything has to be as close to perfect as possible. Then, tomorrow night, close isn’t going to cut it.”

Now he was lecturing. The professor in his Gucci loafers and twenty-thousand-dollar watch. Everyone around the table sat in rapt attention. This was the big time. The Harvard Business School of resort dining.

“I thought Fee might come out and tell you about the food, but she’s in the weeds back there. No additions tonight. There are a lot of our standards on this year’s menu but there’s some new stuff, too, and since we have two new wait-people, two new bussers, and a new assistant manager, and since the rest of you spent all winter skiing bumps or sizzling in the equatorial sun, I’m going to run through the menu with you now. Everyone’s met Adrienne Dealey, right?” Thatcher held out his arm to introduce Adrienne, and
the staff turned to look at her. She blushed on top of her sunburn. “On the floor, Adrienne is going to be my second in command, taking over for Kevin who conned his way into the maître d’ job at Craft in New York. As some of you know, Fee and I might be gone more often this summer than we’ve been in years past. And Adrienne is going to run the floor in my stead and alongside of me. But let’s give her a week or two to learn what it is we do here. She has never worked in a restaurant before. Not even Pizza Hut.”

Adrienne was sure she heard groans. But then one of the waiters, shiny-bald, black square glasses, said, “Let’s welcome Adrienne.”

“Welcome, Adrienne,” the rest of the staff echoed.

Adrienne smiled at her yellow legal pad. She heard someone say, “You drink champagne.” She looked up. Duncan was pointing at her.

She nodded, overcome with a bizarre shyness. He remembered her. Hopefully, he didn’t remember her as the woman whose boyfriend had been ripping off the esteemed patrons of the Little Nell.

“You drink champagne?” Thatcher said. “That gives me an idea. Make a note to ask me about champagne. Now, let’s pretend for
eighteen
minutes that the restaurant business is about food.”

Adrienne never worked in restaurants, but she loved to eat in them. Until her mother died of ovarian cancer when Adrienne was twelve, her family had lived in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and her father ran a successful dental practice in King of Prussia. They used to eat out all the time—at the original Bookbinder’s in downtown Philadelphia, the City Tavern, and her mother was a sucker for all of the new, funky cafés on South Street. What was it Adrienne loved about restaurants? The napkins folded like flowers, the Shirley Temples with maraschino cherries speared on a plastic sword, seeing her endless reflection in the mirrors of the ladies’ room. The pastel mints in a bowl by the front door.

After her mother died and Adrienne and her father took up with wanderlust, Adrienne became exposed to new foods.
For two years they lived in Maine, where in the summertime they ate lobster and white corn and small wild blueberries. They moved to Iowa for Adrienne’s senior year of high school and they ate pork tenderloin fixed seventeen different ways. Adrienne did her first two years of college at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she lived above a Mexican cantina, which inspired a love of tamales and anything doused with habanero sauce. Then she transferred to Vanderbilt in Nashville, where she ate the best fried chicken she’d ever had in her life. And so on, and so on. Pad thai in Bangkok, stone crabs in Palm Beach, buffalo meat in Aspen. As she sat listening to Thatcher, she realized that though she knew nothing about restaurants, at least she knew something about food.