Chapter 3 #4
The fishmonger’s van waits in the alley, white doors open, refrigerated air drifting into the grey morning.
Henri stands beside it with a clipboard in one hand and the expression of a man prepared to be offended before I speak.
He is sixty, barrel-chested, with white hair shaved close to his skull and a nose that has been broken at least twice.
He has supplied three of my kitchens and still acts wounded every time I inspect what he brings, as if trust should replace standards after a certain number of years.
It should not.
“Damien,” Henri says.
“Henri.”
“You are cheerful this morning.”
“I haven’t rejected anything yet.”
“There is time.”
“There is always time.”
Julien takes the first crate from the driver and sets it on the stainless receiving table. Crushed ice shifts around silver skin, dark backs, clear eyes. Turbot. Sea bass. Sole. Langoustines in a separate crate, antennae tangled in a kind of elegant distress.
I check the turbot first. The skin is firm. The eyes are bright. The gills are red, not tired pink. I press one finger gently against the flesh and watch it recover.
Good.
I check the sea bass.
Better.
Henri watches me with theatrical injury. “You see? I am not a criminal.”
“I haven’t checked the sole.”
“Always the sole with you.”
“The sole offended me last week.”
“The sole had a difficult morning.”
“The sole was dead, Henri. Its morning had already reached a conclusion.”
Julien makes a small sound that he covers badly with a cough.
Henri points his pen at me.
“One day, I will bring you perfect fish and you will say thank you like a normal man.”
“One day, you may bring me perfect fish,” I reply in jest.
He mutters something in French involving my ancestry, which is bold, considering my mother was from Lyon and would have dismantled him before breakfast. I let it pass because the sole is acceptable and because Henri has, against his instincts, delivered properly this morning.
Julien finishes weighing the crates against the order sheet.
“All correct.”
I look at the langoustines.
Henri sighs. “They are alive. They are excellent. They are better than you deserve.”
“That is often true of shellfish.”
I lift one gently from the crate, check the movement, the color, the firmness of the tail.
Excellent.
I set it back. “They’ll do.”
Henri stares at me. “That is the closest I have come to joy in your presence.”
“You should aim higher.”
“I aim for payment.”
“You’ll get that if dairy doesn’t disappoint me.”
Henri throws both hands up and turns toward his driver.
“He wakes up like this. Imagine choosing to be like this before sunrise.”
Julien signs the delivery slip.
“We don’t have to imagine.”
Henri leaves with the air of a man personally wronged by competence.
We move the fish into the walk-in, each crate labeled and placed exactly where it belongs. Julien works beside me without needing direction. That is the rhythm I prefer: two people doing the work, no unnecessary talking, no need to narrate common sense as if silence might frighten someone.
By 6:31 AM, the fish is checked, logged, and stored.
By 6:33 AM, my phone starts vibrating in my pocket.
Julien glances at it before I take it out.
“Claire?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“You know that without looking?”
“No one else begins a campaign before 7:00 AM with this much confidence.”
I pull the phone out. Claire’s name lights the screen. I reject the call. Julien watches my thumb press the red button.
“That was mature.”
“I agree.”
“She will call me next.”
“I know.”
“You could answer.”
“I could also return to medical school and become a dermatologist. Both seem unlikely at this hour,” I say sarcastically.
“You were never in medical school.”
“That’s one of several obstacles,” I reply.
Julien takes the prep list from the clipboard beside the walk-in and scans it. He lets the silence stretch long enough to become deliberate, which means I am about to be bothered.
“Claire is trying to do her job,” he says.
“I know.”
“She is good at her job.”
“I know that as well.”
“She would be better at it if you occasionally let her.”
I close the walk-in door and look at him. “Are you finished?”
“No.”
“A shame.”
“She has journalists asking for access. She has the investor group asking about coverage. She has a launch schedule with no approved interview, no approved photographs, no approved chef statement, and one email from you that says, and I quote, ‘No.’”
“That was my approved chef statement.”
Julien’s mouth tightens because he is trying not to laugh. “It lacks warmth.”
“It has clarity.”
“It has two letters.”
“Efficient.”
He leans back against the prep table and folds his arms. Julien has a way of occupying a room without challenging it. Useful in a sous-chef. Dangerous in a friend, if I were the sort of man who used the word loosely.
“Damien,” Julien says.
There it is. My name, not ‘Chef’.
That is always where the trouble starts.
“No,” I say.
“You don’t know what I am going to say.”
“I know the category.”
“You are impossible.”
“Imprecise. I am selective.”
“You are refusing every controlled opportunity to shape the opening before strangers do it for you,” he says with his voice tinted with frustration.
“I am opening a restaurant, not running for office.”
“No one is asking you to kiss babies.”
“Good. I don’t trust babies. They lack standards.”
Julien looks at me for a long moment, then looks at the ceiling. “God help us.”
“I believe he has other obligations.”
My phone vibrates again. This time it is a voicemail notification.
Claire does not accept defeat. She is thirty-nine, French-Moroccan, terrifyingly polished, and capable of turning one closed door into six alternate entrances.
She runs her communications firm like a military operation conducted in excellent tailoring.
I hired her because she is brilliant, not because I intended to obey her.
This distinction appears to cause her ongoing distress.
I open the voicemail and put it on speaker because Julien is already involved and pretending otherwise wastes energy. Claire’s voice fills the receiving area, crisp, controlled, and lethal beneath the civility.
“Damien, good morning. I am choosing to believe you are in the kitchen and not ignoring me, because the alternative would make me less generous when I arrive at 9:00. We need to approve the press framework today. Not tomorrow. Today. I have Leclerc from Saveur Paris asking for a pre-opening conversation. I have Monde Gastronomie requesting photography. I have two critics making reservations under names that insult all of us by how obvious they are. I also have an investor asking why the chef has not provided a quote beyond ‘The food will speak for itself,’ which, while admirably obnoxious, does not constitute a communications strategy. Call me.”
The voicemail ends. Julien looks delighted in the restrained way of a man trying to protect his own face.
“Admirably obnoxious,” he says.
“I heard.”
“She likes you.”
“She likes being paid.”
“She can like both.”
“That sounds inefficient.”
Julien picks up the dairy order sheet and starts toward the main kitchen.
“She is coming at 9:00.”
“She said that to frighten me.”
“Did it work?”
“No.”
“It should.”
We return to the kitchen as the first prep cook arrives through the staff entrance. Thomas appears with damp hair, an overfull backpack, and the careful expression of a young man who knows he has recently been disappointing and would prefer not to repeat the experience.
“Morning, Chef,” Thomas says.
“Morning,” I say. “You’re on bones today.”
His shoulders tighten by half an inch. “Yes, Chef.”
“Color, not clock.”
“Yes, Chef.”
Julien gives him the prep list.
“Set up stock first. Then shell peas. Label everything before it leaves your station.”
“Yes, Chef,” Thomas says to him, then moves quickly toward the sinks.
The rest of the crew begins to arrive in measured increments.
Elise from pastry, pale-haired, calm, already annoyed by someone who is not here yet.
Marc on sauce, broad-shouldered and quiet until service, when his vocabulary narrows to curses and exact temperatures.
Inès for garde-manger, hair wrapped in a scarf, eyes sharp enough to cut herbs by looking at them.
One by one, they enter, change, wash, and take their places.
The room fills. The kitchen becomes itself.
Knives come out. Boards land on steel. Water runs.
The first onions split beneath a blade. Coffee appears in paper cups and disappears before anyone admits needing it.
The language shifts between French and English depending on who is swearing, asking, answering, correcting.
The morning moves with the fragile order of people who have done this before and know that order is only real if everyone keeps earning it.
I change into my jacket in the office, buttoning it from the bottom up. The fabric sits clean against my shoulders. White, pressed, not yet marked by the day. That will change.
When I step back into the kitchen, Julien is at the pass with my phone in his hand.
I stop.
“Why are you holding that?” I ask.
“It was vibrating on the shelf.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“I thought it might be Claire.”
“So you picked up my phone?”
“I considered answering it.”
“You considered death very early today.”
“It was Claire,” Julien says. “She left another voicemail.”
“Of course she did.”
“That makes eighteen.”
“Seventeen,” I say.
“No. Eighteen.”
“I returned two.”
“That still leaves sixteen.”
“You’ve become invested in arithmetic.”
“You’ve made avoidance measurable.”
I take the phone from his hand. “Don’t touch my phone.”
“Then answer it.”
“That is not how property works.”