Chapter 8
Dublin
The plane lands, and the dual sensations of dread and anticipation wash over me, like being splashed with a bucket each of scalding and frigid water all at once.
I really dislike the sensation of feeling unprepared.
But if I want to continue this strange little escapade, I have no choice in the matter.
And I find I do want it even more than I want to feel in control of the situation.
Which is quite a lot.
It’s midafternoon now and tonight is, according to my trusty app, one of the rare nights we both have off.
Rian is an upwardly mobile physician, specializing in internal medicine.
He was always supportive of my career, though scheduling date nights was usually as complex as lawyers and judges scheduling trials.
He boasted to his friends about my work, which was refreshing after Edward’s bad-mouthing.
While I’d confided everything about my ambitions to Edward, I’d learned to be more circumspect in the four years since.
I told Rian I dreamed of becoming a food critic and travel writer, though I decided to wait until we began to seriously plan our future together before getting into the details about Michelin.
I thought setting up the expectations for a demanding job with a lot of travel was enough before we set a date.
Brand names and specifics were just details.
I didn’t even tell him about my blog, which I started in this phase of my life.
Though my wallet isn’t as thin as during my tenure in New Orleans, I take the bus rather than a cab into town and stop at a market I’d favored not too far from my small downtown flat. I gawk at the sprawling streets like a tourist, reacquainting myself with the city I haven’t seen in over a decade.
Shortly after Rian and I called it quits, I took a job in London and never came back. Which was a shame. I’d had little chance to travel outside of Dublin and knew there were untold wonders to discover outside the city. It was one of several regrets I had from my tenure in Ireland.
But I have the chance to erase some of those regrets now.
Irish cuisine may not be spoken about in the same breath as French or Italian, but Dublin has an amazing food scene, and Kinsale is the sort of hidden gem true foodies dream about.
I take my time walking the aisles of the small market, filling the little trolley with whatever looks promising.
In this era of my life, I know my spice drawer contains an embarrassment of riches—the sort that would have been enough to buy my way into the nobility half a millennium ago—so my wanderings down that aisle are mostly academic.
Checking to see what new and interesting blends they might have or what exotic choices might hold fun possibilities for experimentation.
I linger over a jar of Maharajah curry powder.
It’s an earthy blend and generally made from the highest-quality spices, including a good dash of saffron.
It’s pricey, but it packs a flavor punch worth every cent.
I add it to the cart. The niggling little idea I had at Baile Phadraig for merging a sauce Créole with curry needs to go from concept to reality in this do-over.
Aside from wishing I’d been able to make things work with Rian, I often wished I’d been less timid about auditioning dishes when I was in this job.
I won’t make that mistake a second time.
I linger in the seafood section and find some catfish that looks amazing, especially since it’s been imported from such a distance.
I plan to make Rian a dish fit for a king and benefit from some practice before hitting the saucier station again.
I carry my haul back to my flat a few blocks away.
The space is dated, sure. I’m pretty sure the linoleum on the kitchen floor dates back to the Inquisition.
But the kitchen itself is large in relation to the rest of the space, and the stove is one of the best home models I’ve worked with to date.
Important, given that I spent a great deal of time perfecting my sauces at home back in this epoch of my life, and I needed the space and equipment to do it.
I begin with the sauce so it will have plenty of time to simmer before Rian’s shift is over.
I omit the Worcestershire sauce, which is a classic staple of the sauce Créole, to make room for the curry.
A principle I’ve always had with sauces is to make sure there aren’t too many notes competing for attention, even in something as bold and complex as this.
Like the culinary equivalent of Coco Chanel’s maxim about removing one accessory before leaving the house—if you’re going to add a new flavor, take away an existing flavor to make room for it.
The trick is not to take so much away from the sauce Créole that you wind up with an unconventional curry.
I treat the dicing of the celery, green peppers, and onion like a ritual to be observed with reverence.
I slow down to take in their aroma as they simmer in the olive oil at the bottom of the enameled cast-iron pot.
In go the garlic, tomatoes, chicken stock, all manner of spices, and a dash of Louisiana hot sauce that had been Jean-Rémy’s favorite brand.
All that remains is the curry. I add it slowly, tasting as I go to make sure the rich, earthy curry flavor comes through but doesn’t overpower everything else.
I take note of the precise amount I settle on in my leather-bound recipe book on the counter, just where I kept it all those years ago.
The aroma is heavenly. The adjustment of the recipe, swapping one ingredient for another, has made something better than the sum of its parts, and I remember why it is I love this work.
When people come to a restaurant, they generally don’t comment to their friends the next day at work that the beef was well aged or the chicken was particularly tender.
They extol the sauces and spices. The elements that bring the dishes to life.
I turn to the catfish and decide that the traditional Créole method of blackening the fish would compete too much with the sauce, so I opt to pan-fry it with a light coating of breadcrumbs and a few mild herbs.
It will serve as a canvas for the sauce, not its competition.
The timing is perfect, as I expect Rian to arrive at any moment.
In the original timeline I remember I picked up takeout.
I was usually so tired on my days off, the last thing I wanted to do was cook.
But now, with the chance to do it all over again, I feel energized.
Just as the sauce is reaching perfection, I feel my phone buzz in my back pocket and pull it out.
It’s Orla. Of course.
I steady my breath and focus on being kind and empathetic. I refrain from cursing my own stupidity for giving the woman my phone number. Mostly.
ORLA: When are you free? I’d like to meet for lunch.
I vaguely remember any number of these so-terse-they’re-almost-rude invitations from her. I probably thought not responding was a clever tactic to get her to ask more politely. Spoiler: It didn’t work.
I flip to my calendar app and see I have tomorrow off at the restaurant as well.
They like to try to give us a proper “weekend” when they can, even if it doesn’t fall on Saturday and Sunday.
Which means I don’t have a good reason to put her off.
And as much as I loathe it, trying harder with her is one of my prime objectives here, so stalling would defeat the purpose.
ME: How nice of you. Does tomorrow work? I have it off.
ORLA: Off today and tomorrow? Fortunate that your work schedule isn’t too taxing.
Heat rises in my cheeks, the way it often did when Orla was involved.
I want to remind her that a large segment of the working public does indeed get two days off in a row every single week, but I resist the temptation.
Do not engage. Do. Not. Engage. I’m also confused as to how she knows my schedule, but I don’t want to open that perilous can of worms either.
ME: Where would you like to meet?
ORLA: McHenry’s. Eleven thirty if that suits you.
Fine. An early lunch will give me plenty of time in the afternoon to fiddle with another batch of the sauce in case I want to make tweaks.
ME: See you then. Looking forward.
No response.
I plate the fish moments before it gets too brown and drizzle it with the sauce just as I hear the workings of my locks. I’d loved the sound of Rian letting himself in and find that it evokes the same thrill in my chest now as it did more than a decade earlier.
He wraps his arms around me from behind and rests his chin on my shoulder, his head nestled against the curve of my neck.
And I melt. As good as the electricity was between Edward and me, what I feel for Rian is fathoms deeper.
There is something more meaningful here than the allure of a first serious romance. The hope of a future.
“This smells amazing, mo chroí.” My heart. Lord, how I’ve missed him calling me that. His arms remain taut around me, though I can hear the rumblings of his empty stomach. “Any special occasion?”
I turn around in his arms and take in his beautiful face.
His riot of black curls, the deep green of his eyes, his cheeks that dimple boyishly when he smiles.
I plant small kisses on both his dimples before giving in to the temptation of his lips.
At some cost I finally pull myself away.
“I thought we both needed better than a carton of takeout noodles tonight, so I decided to cook.”
“You’ll spoil me, Ms. Sorensen, and I won’t know how to act.” He steals a few kisses of his own before he releases me to put the two plates on the table, side by side.
“So tell me what we have here.” His eyes are fixed on the serving platter, not with apprehension but with genuine interest.
Rian wasn’t on Dad’s level, but he knows his way around Dublin’s finer eateries.
I describe the dish as a sort of Cajun-Indian fusion, which intrigues rather than puts him off.
I am glad he has a curious palate, given that he was definitely raised by the gray-pot-roast-and-soggy-potatoes sort.
His only caveat used to be that he had to be careful not to develop such refined taste that hospital cafeteria food would become unpalatable to him.
To ward off this terrible fate, he had a practice of indulging in fish and chips fortnightly, and generally from the dingiest chip shop he could find.
Only he could render the practice endearing.
He finally samples the dish and his eyes light up. “This is a marvel, Sabrina. Truly. Promise me you’ll audition it with Padraig and Fiona.”
Making a sample batch for Padraig—obviously the restaurant’s namesake and our head chef—and our sous-chef, Fiona, was the requisite first step in getting a new dish included on the menu.
I’d made sample dishes for Rian before, but I always concocted reasons never to share them with Fiona and Padraig, even if Rian praised my cooking to the skies. I was terrified of a no.
In retrospect, it was silly. They might have rejected a dish due to practicalities that I, as saucier, would not be privy to.
In this job I don’t have connections to vendors or a working knowledge of the operating budget.
A no due to those reasons wouldn’t necessarily reflect poorly on me unless my submission was so outlandishly expensive to produce or so discordant with the rest of the menu that I was displaying a lack of judgment.
I had been timid. But I am coming back to this time in my life armed with a lot more industry knowledge and a dash more confidence.
I know now that a saucier is not an annoyance by auditioning a dish, so long as they are genuinely putting forth their best efforts.
A good head chef depends on the whole staff, especially station leads, to share their ideas.
It’s not a privilege reserved just for the sous-chef or perhaps a specialist like a pastry chef.
But I didn’t believe that included me back in 2013.
I sample my own handiwork, and not to boast, but it’s better than more than a few dishes I’ve sampled from Michelin-starred kitchens. It deserves a shot. “I promise. Day after tomorrow at lunch service.”
Rian is taken aback by my confident tone. “You sound self-assured . . . I like it.”
I realize the version of me he knows is constantly second-guessing herself.
Unable to believe that she has the chops to really impress her superiors with anything more than her unflagging work ethic.
She’s the sort who dismisses her successes as the product of luck rather than talent.
I can’t say I’ve completely cleared the hurdle of self-doubt, but thirty-seven-year-old Sabrina believes in her abilities far more than twenty-six-year-old Sabrina did.
I’m curious to see how that confidence will change the course of events here, and this time I’m not afraid of meddling in my own past. It’s hard to imagine that I was well served by my own reticence.
“I’m going to do better. I won’t audition every idea that pops into my head, but I want to start putting myself out there more.”
He sets his fork down and places an arm around me. “I am so glad to hear that, love. Don’t think of it as taking a notion. Be brave.”
Taking a notion, Irish slang for “putting on airs” or having an inflated sense of ego. I always described the vibe in Ireland as being “ruthlessly humble” during my time here, so “taking a notion” is a habit most Irish absolutely can’t stand.
I clear my throat. “Speaking of brave, I’m having lunch with your mother tomorrow.”
He chuckles, but his face pales by several shades. “She didn’t mention it when she texted me earlier. I assume it wasn’t you who asked?”
I shake my head. “No, but I didn’t ignore her texts either.”
He pats my thigh. “I appreciate that. It would mean a lot to me if you two got on.”
“I’ll do better.” I echo my previous sentiment about auditioning more dishes. “At the end of the day, she and I have something very important in common. We both love you.”
It’s the first time I’ve spoken these words to him in over a decade, though it won’t seem that way to him.
But the truth of it rings loud in my ears.
I never stopped loving him. Can one ever really stop those feelings entirely?
But I did stop fighting Orla for him, which amounted to the same result.
We finish the meal, chatting companionably about his day at the hospital—the gorier details redacted—and finish with some lemon sorbet that cuts the heat of the spices.
We move to the sofa where we start, and fail, to watch a movie.
And as I lose myself in his arms, I know I was wrong to give up on this man so easily.