Chapter 4 #3
Ben steps into the room after him and has a disquieting sense of déjà vu.
He’s been in this room before—no. Of course not.
This is the test kitchen, he realizes after a beat; he’s never been here, but he spent ten hours watching footage of Pete being in here, standing…
yes, just over there. Ben blinks as Pete crosses the room to the same butcher block-topped island he stood at to cook the kale salad.
It’s interesting to see it from a wider framing.
There’s a stand-alone range set into the counter, though no accompanying oven, and a number of pots and pans hanging from a rail on the wooden front panel of the island, which is itself painted a deep royal purple, the Gastronome brand’s anchoring color since it was founded in—God, was it a hundred years ago this year?
Ben finds he can’t quite remember, even though he knew that date by heart when he was a kid.
Then again, Ben’s childhood was itself a hundred years ago, or it feels that way most days, so.
Maybe it’s not such a surprise he’s lost track of some of the fine detail.
Regardless, Pete’s isn’t the only counter; there’s five more, two behind him and then three more next to them, so that all six are lined up in two neat rows.
Though no one else is in here at the moment, each counter is slightly personalized.
His has what looks to be a ceramic hanging sculpture of a braided bunch of garlic dangling from one of the low overhead lights, and a large knife block in one corner that had only been half in frame during the video.
Ben had spent maybe forty-five minutes of his ten total hours of editing puzzling over what on earth the thing was, and now that he’s looking at it, he’s annoyed it wasn’t adjusted into the camera’s sightline by whoever did the filming.
It’s an odd, gnarled piece of tree branch, bark removed and wood polished to a high shine, with thin, barely visible slots out of which a variety of colorful knife handles are jutting straight up.
It alone speaks to Pete as a competent if unusual cook; a collection of knives like that takes time and money to assemble, and such a well-crafted home and display for them… He must care about them enormously.
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Pete says, half-joking, “but you can join me, you know.”
God, Ben must be staring. But the truth is, Pete’s right—there is a lot to take in.
He walks over to Pete’s counter as if in a dream, craning his neck to look around him as he goes.
God, there are ovens set into the walls—home and commercial—oh, and that’s a door to a walk-in fridge, next to one which must be the walk-in freezer.
But there are two home fridges in here, too, each with a masking tape label too far away for Ben to read, and what looks like a grill-top, and—
“Oh, wait, you need somewhere to sit,” Pete says, shaking his head, and runs off for a moment. He returns with a little metal stool, which he sets down in front of his counter before, humming to himself, he opens the walk-in and disappears inside.
Ben, a little overwhelmed, sits down on the stool. But when Pete returns, laden with a carton of eggs and a jumble of produce he’s barely containing in his arms, Ben realizes he has been silent much too long and says, “Uh, do you need like—help? With that?”
“Thanks, but nah,” Pete says easily, and it seems that he doesn’t.
The Pete that Ben spent ten hours staring at on a screen in increasing certainty that he was minutes from death every second of his life—well, that Pete would have managed to find a banana peel, and slip on it, and throw everything in the air, and then have every egg somehow land directly on his face.
But this Pete simply leans across his counter and sets everything down in one smooth movement, then slides the walk-in door shut on his way to a large basket that turns out to contain bread.
Once he’s bent and plucked a round blonde loaf out, he stops by a cabinet from which he selects several spices, drops it all off on the counter, and, still humming, opens one of the two fridges with a masking tape label.
Closer now, Ben can squint and see that the fridge Pete reaches into is labeled Grabs, and the other one is labeled Keeps.
“This is the freebie fridge,” Pete explains, as he rummages around in it.
“Anything in here is up for grabs, and—ha, yeah, I thought so.” He emerges with a large plastic container atop which he has perched two glass pints of orange juice.
“Rick has this buddy who’s a juice wholesaler, and every once in a while, he brings in a case for us.
It’s honestly insane how good it is; you have to try it. ”
“I mean,” Ben says, making a face. “If it’s like a—a special thing for the staff, I wouldn’t want to—”
“Oh, shut up,” Pete says, grinning and waving a hand. “We’ve all tried it before; besides, I’m having one, too. The code of the fridges is very sacred here—if it’s in Grabs, it’s for grabs.”
“And I assume if it’s in Keeps, it’s for keeps?” Ben asks, as Pete sets the bottle down in front of him.
“Oh, yeah,” Pete says, shaking his head ruefully. “God help you if you take something somebody else put in Keeps; that’s a serious offense. But the orange juice is yours—seriously. Nobody will mind.”
Ben hesitates for a second, but then shrugs and says, “Thanks.” As Pete begins to open containers and pull out pots and pans and cutting boards, Ben twists off the bottle cap and takes a sip of the juice; his eyes go wide. “Oh my God.”
“See?”
“How is that so…” Ben pauses, not sure how to describe what it is, and takes another sip.
“God, like—crisp and sweet and sour and so orangey, somehow, even though it’s not quite like any orange juice I’ve ever tasted, and—floral, too, I think.
” He pauses, and then, realizing he has perhaps let himself get a bit carried away, corrects, “I mean, uh. It’s… really good.”
“Adina always pulls the floral note, too,” Pete says, shaking his head. “My palate isn’t that good—to me, it just tastes like incredible orange juice.”
Ben ignores this implied compliment to his palate as so much nonsense; however incompetent he may be, Pete is still a professional, and Ben’s … well, whatever Ben is. But he feels the faint flush creeping up his neck anyway, betraying his pleasure even as he tells himself it’s nothing at all.
He sips the orange juice instead, trying to enjoy every nuance of the flavor, and something about the sugar and the brightness must enliven a few of his critical thinking brain cells from the stupor in which they’ve spent most of the morning.
Rather belatedly, it occurs to him to ask, “Uh, what are you doing, exactly?”
Pete grins at him as he pulls out an enormous hunk of what looks like—oh, God, is that pastrami? Homemade pastrami? With a thick smokey bark on the outside and beautiful marbling on the inside? Even cold, Ben can smell it, and he’s suddenly ravenous, hungry like he hasn’t eaten in a hundred years.
“I’m proving to you that I can cook,” Pete says, settling the pastrami on a cutting board and pulling a wide-bladed butcher’s knife from the block. “What’s your bodega order, by the way?”
“Bacon, egg, and cheese, American, ketchup if it’s the right brand and hot sauce otherwise, hard roll,” Ben rattles off immediately, as if he’s at the bodega counter with a line of impatient New Yorkers behind him.
“Ah, good,” Pete says, peeling the onion and setting it down on another cutting board next to a small container of mushrooms and two red peppers. “You’ll like this, then, I think.”
“I’ll—wait, are you making something for me?” Ben demands, abruptly horrified. “That’s—oh my God, you don’t have to do that! I don’t—you don’t have to—I mean, who says I’m even hungry?”
“Hmm. Hold this?” Pete says, plucking a piece of paper out of an open metal inbox screwed onto the side of his station. He offers it out to Ben; it looks to be a recipe for an enormous quantity of shakshuka.
Mystified, Ben takes it. And then, a second later, the flush that was starting to fade back down his neck flares all the way up to his cheeks when Pete gives the trembling paper a significant look.
“That says you’re hungry,” Pete says, plucking the paper back out of Ben’s hands.
“At least, in my significant experience of working with people who’ll cook for everyone but themselves.
Come on—it won’t kill you to have a breakfast sandwich.
Anyway, I made this pastrami myself, and it took me three days, and if someone doesn’t eat the rest of it, it’ll be depressing. ”
“Oh, I…” Ben says, badly wrong-footed. Pete must have—he must have noticed the paper shaking in Ben’s hand back in the office.
And instead of saying anything about it, he…
led Ben down here and started cooking for him, and only bothered calling Ben out on it when Ben more or less forced his hand.
That’s—it’s—atypical, that’s what it is.
Ben can’t find a place to slot it in against the rest of his mental landscape.