Epilogue
Sage
The brewery’s supper club runs on Tuesday and Friday nights, twelve seats, one seating per night.
The wait list is three months long and growing.
I didn't plan for a wait list. I planned for eight seats, which Hops talked me up to twelve on the grounds that eight was punishing myself for an imagined limitation. He was right. So, I upped to twelve.
The kitchen is the brewery kitchen, before service on Tuesdays and Fridays, and there are also days in between when I'm in there developing the menu with no one else around except Hops coming through to the production side with a coffee for me and a look on his face like a man checking in on something he's genuinely happy about.
He never interrupts. He just looks, and I feel it, and he goes back to his side of the building.
I cook now and my hands don't shake.
Last month a food writer from Vancouver emailed asking if she could do a profile.
I said yes. The profile will run next month.
It'll describe the supper club accurately: twelve seats, hyperlocal, seasonal, ingredient-first. It will describe the chef accurately too, or as accurately as you can describe someone who has stopped being what they used to be and become what they were always going to be, once they found the right kitchen.
What it won't capture: the Tuesday after we got engaged when I walked fully into the brewery kitchen for the first time and stood at the central island and put both hands flat on the wooden chopping block.
The steadiness of the surface under them.
The way I stood there for three minutes just to confirm it was real.
The festival pairing is still on the pub menu.
The Wild Sullivan is now the brewery's best-selling seasonal.
Hops extended the fermentation room in January to increase production — he didn't sell, didn't scale, didn't go corporate, just made more room for what he already had.
I watched him draft the plans at the kitchen table at midnight with a beer at his elbow and thought: this is what it looks like when someone knows exactly who they are.
I have been trying to learn that from him since the day I walked in.
I'm sixteen weeks. The bump is new enough that I still catch myself in the kitchen mirror and stop for a second, just looking.
Tonight I cook.
Not the test batches I've been doing for the supper club menu, careful and measured, one component at a time.
A full dinner. His kitchen, his six-burner stove, every surface in use the way I used to run a pass — organised chaos that only looks like chaos from the outside.
I've been in here for two hours by the time I hear him on the stairs.
He stops in the doorway.
I don't turn around. I'm finishing the sauce.
"Don't say anything," I say.
He doesn't say anything. I hear him set his keys down, hear him cross the kitchen, and then he's behind me looking over my shoulder at the stove — three pans going, the oven on, the chopping board behind me with the evidence of everything that came before.
"What is all this," he says, low.
"Dinner." I taste the sauce, adjust, put the spoon down. "And the spring menu. I've been working it out for two weeks and I needed to cook it through, not just write it, so." I gesture at the kitchen. "This is the spring menu. You're the tasting."
He's quiet for a moment. I turn around and he's looking at me with an expression I don't have a name for and couldn't describe to the food writer from Vancouver if she asked.
"How long," he says.
"Forty minutes. Go sit down."
He sits. I cook. The apartment fills up with the smell of it — butter and stock and something bright coming off the herbs, the specific warm smell of a kitchen that's being properly used — and I am in my hands and in the work and not measuring anything against anything else, just cooking because the food is good and I know how to make it and the person at the table is worth making it for.
I plate it the way I'd plate it for the supper club. His eyes when I set it in front of him do something to me.
He eats. I sit across from him and watch him the way he watched me taste his beer on the first day, and when he looks up he has the same expression he had then — moved past pleased into something more like interested.
"Well?" I say.
"The sauce," he says. "What's in it?"
I tell him. He asks two questions, both good.
I answer them and reach across and steal a bite off his plate and we talk through the whole menu like that — back and forth across the table, his hands moving on the second question, which means he's still working something out, and mine still when I know I've got it right.
Afterward we wash up and he leans against the counter with a glass of the Wild Sullivan and watches me wipe down the stove.
"The spring menu," he says.
"It's good," I say. "It's the best thing I've written."
"Yeah," he says. "I know."
I put the cloth down and look at this man, this kitchen, this life I almost drove away from. I don't have a word for what I feel standing here except: right. Exactly right.