Chapter 10
ELI
TRACK: Graham Nash, “Better Days”
The first day of shooting starts off smoother than I would have imagined.
Then again, it’s not my kitchen. It’s Reese’s. But she still manages to handle it with grace.
Because of course she does.
The setup is fast—the crew sweeps in and soon there are lights and boom mics and cameras everywhere.
It was Reese who suggested they use the unused stage at the end of the restaurant as storage for all their set pieces and equipment.
It’s a giant space, hidden behind a curtain, and is actually a huge benefit to the show and the restaurant, because it means takedown each day takes a quarter of the time it would than if they were hauling everything out into trailers.
It also means that with early morning filming, the restaurant can open as early as lunchtime every weekday.
It’s genius, really, and it was all Reese’s idea.
I try to meet Reese’s eye, to figure out how we’re going to be with each other today. Today will set the tone for the whole show, I think.
But she disappears into the shadows. Then Neil is there, with Kelly at his side, both of them energetic, springy in their sneakers.
Neil’s in Chucks that match perfectly with his dark designer jeans and ridiculous snakeskin blazer, black shirt, and bolero tie.
His larger-than-life personality perfectly matches the energy of everyone in the kitchen, and by the time the clapper goes off and he’s exuberantly welcoming viewers into the sixth season of Chef’s Apprentice, I’m as caught up as everyone else in the magic of the moment.
The contestants vying to win are the most diverse group of people I’ve ever seen.
There are twelve of them in total, though each episode—filmed over the course of a week—will see two of them eliminated.
The oldest is Hélène, a Haitian woman in her eighties.
The youngest, Kelly explains to me, is eighteen-year-old Cruz who’s in it to win it, and as serious as a priest.
I’m stiff around Kelly, noticing how she stands closer to me than she has in years.
How her black T-shirt and jeans fit her like a glove, her dark hair up in a ponytail that shows off the angled edges of her cheekbones.
Her proximity would have made me knock-kneed at one point.
She knew that then and she knows it now.
But now it’s like she senses her power has waned with me.
Because every time I take a step sideways, she follows.
Not immediately, but suddenly I’ll realize she’s only inches from me once again.
It’s strange and slightly unnerving. It makes my chest swirl with confusion.
The hold she used to have on me is different now.
It’s like I’m looking at it from some slightly removed space.
Like I’m outside myself when she’s there.
I keep looking for Reese, but I only catch glimpses of her in the distance.
Chatting with her staff as they move about the kitchen, trying to prep for the restaurant opening while half of them are still gawking at filming.
I try to go and talk to her at one point, but Kelly’s there, suddenly, smiling.
“Eli, meet Hélène.” I have to practically look to the floor to find the tiny woman, with close-cropped silver-threaded hair and a wide, toothy grin.
“Merde!” she exclaims. “Everyone on TV is so handsome!”
I laugh, despite myself.
“Eli is one of the owners of the hotel, Hélène,” Kelly says.
“Ooh, rich too!” she says.
I laugh. I don’t want to burst her bubble—the hotel was close to failing for a bit after Mom passed and before all us siblings assembled.
We’re only now starting to claw our way out of it.
Cass’s fiancé Blake offered to write off our debt for us—his brother is a literal billionaire—but we all refused.
It’s one of the few things all five of us agreed on.
The thing is, I do have money. The property investment stuff I’ve been doing on the side has done very well for me. But I still live in the staff apartments.
“Not quite, but I’m at your service,” I tell her.
Kelly gets called over by the director then, and Hélène leans into me and says, “You’re a good boy, aren’t you?” She gives me a wink. “I can tell. And you’ll make sure they don’t vote me off first.”
“I’ll do everything in my power.”
Then, without warning, Hélène clasps her leathery hands on my jaw and gives me a kiss on the cheek before sashaying back to the prep table.
“I think I’m in love,” I say to Rufus, who’s appeared at my other side.
“Agreed,” the big man says.
Jacques, over with the contestants, straightens the chef’s hat they make him wear. He’s scowling, but he grins when Hélène gets back to her station and cusses loudly in French about the prop pieces some poor unsuspecting crew member left there.
“Never thought I’d see the day Jacques looked happy, either,” I say.
“That’s because he can bitch about us in French to someone who’ll know what the feck he’s talking about,” Rufus says. “That and the way that sad-looking man keeps looking at him.”
Another contestant, Marcel, who bears a striking resemblance to Gomez Addams, if Gomez favored fuchsia suits and platform shoes, flutters his eyelashes at Jacques, though he still looks sad doing it.
The chef, meanwhile, turns a shade that matches the other man’s outfit, but then shockingly breaks into an ear-to-ear grin.
“I think they’re…flirting?” Rufus says, incredulous.
“Incredible.” Everyone was worried about how Jacques would handle being at the center of a TV program when he can barely keep his shit together in the kitchen, but he looks on top of the world.
“I got nothin’ to lose,” Hélène proclaims in her thick accent, giving a wink, before the camera turns to another contestant.
As the morning stretches on, the thrill of filming quickly cools.
The director, Nancy, a no-nonsense woman in her fifties with tight red curls and thick, red-rimmed glasses to match, makes everyone do several takes of their introductions.
“Again!” she barks. She’s worse than a boot camp leader.
Though I have to admit, it’s exactly what it takes to wrangle all these excited contestants.
Eventually I make my way back upstairs to my office with a little tugging of something at my chest. It’s disappointment, I realize. Not at the way anything’s going with the show, but at not having properly seen Reese again.
I remind myself she’s not going anywhere, and I can pop back downstairs at any time.
But I don’t—the day ends up being surprisingly busy, with meetings both with work at the hotel, and one with Seamus, my best friend, who’s been living in upstate New York for a two-year work project over there.
But he still comes back regularly to be with his fiancée, my sister Chelsea, and to pop in on the contracting business he runs with his dad Jamie.
The meeting isn’t just friendly—I’m trying to coerce him into giving me one of his guys to do a job for me at the Waterfront Block. I tour him around the empty floors in the middle of the building, telling him what I have in mind.
“Since when are you interested in music?” Seamus asks as he takes some measurements.
He’s already been grilling me about the show—Seamus is obsessed with Chef’s Apprentice and his questions aren’t exactly things I was paying attention to this morning.
Like what kind of onions they were chopping for the soup or how many dishes they need to make at competition time.
“Since when do you ask so many questions?” I ask. Seamus is normally a guy of few words, but between his favorite cooking show and this job, the guy’s practically been a motormouth.
Seamus rises up from his knee where he was inspecting a floorboard and props his hands on his hips. “That’s one question that isn’t about the show.”
I’m tall, but Seamus is taller. I could still take him though, always could when we wrestled as kids.
I look away, not sure why I’m thinking of wrestling rather than answering his question.
“Ben said there are tons of musicians looking for space here,” I say, making it so this is clearly just about business sense.
Seamus squints. “Isn’t Reese into music?”
“Jesus,” I say, rubbing my hand across my mouth. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”
Seamus grins. “Sorry.”
I told him Reese and I were seeing each other again, though I was vague on the timeline.
It kills me to lie to my best friend, but he’s engaged to my baby sister, and there’s no way he’d keep it quiet from her.
Once one of my siblings knows, my whole damn family will be in on it, and that’s way too fucking much to try to juggle.
Easier just to let everyone think this is really happening.
So my solution is mostly to not talk about her.
Luckily, Seamus lets it drop, and we end up shooting the shit about baseball until he’s done sizing up the room.
“All right, Dad’s got a new guy in his casual pool who’s a total keener—I bet he’d be able to get this place set up for you in a couple weeks.”
Relief hits me that I’m going to be able to pull this thing off. I realize I’d been worried. “Thanks, man. I knew you’d come through.”
“Don’t thank me, thank Sam. The guy’s fast as hell.”
“I’ll see you at O’Malley’s tonight, right?” I ask. Cass insisted all of us siblings meet up at the local pub to celebrate the first night of the show filming.
“Yeah, Chelsea’s making me.” Seamus doesn’t like going to O’Malley’s, not just because the full name of the place is Seamus O’Malley’s, but because he’s not exactly Mr. Sociable.
I was always the talker in our friendship.
He preferred beers down at the batting cage—at least until he and Chelsea got together.