that you don’t produce a benny that sits in the window waiting for five minutes for a lamb sausage from the guy working the grill station. Five minutes in the life of a cooked egg, unlike a nicely resting piece of meat, is the difference between excellent and bullshit. At three o’clock, with the last pummeling of tickets on the board, I need to be told over and over by the expediter, and probably much to his irritation, which benny is this particular benny. I know all of the strategies and I use them—repeating back the ticket after it’s called—“echoing” the expediter, and constantly talking in minutes and seconds with my fellow line cooks:
“I’m two out on benny/carbonara.”
“Thirty seconds on huevos/pancake.”
“Selling benny/oyster!” We break it down to each other from minutes to seconds to sold! But invariably all I can see by the last round through my red, swollen eyes is the pan and the egg in front of me. I’m just punching and hoping I land one on the guy’s jaw.
To have a waiter pop back into the kitchen during this beat down and tell you that Arlindo is outside, drilling holes through the sidewalk down into our wine cellar to drain his flower boxes in a way so the water doesn’t pool up in front of his front stoop but instead now drains down—where? Into the earth, does he imagine? Into the great sweet clean aquifer. Just below his front stoop? Here, in New York City? No, when his landscaping fever passes and he realizes, at the same time that I realize, that his flower boxes now drain into his own basement, which happens to be where all our wines with their once-pristine labels are stored, I go slack in the neck from exhaustion.
You want to own your own little place? You want to have a tight relationship with your farmer? Surround yourself with poet-philosopher wine merchants? Make your own ricotta and cure your own lardo? You want to be chef/owner? It’s not the eighteen-hour days and the hot kitchen that’ll get you. It’s all that plus a half-naked six-foot-two, two-hundred-forty-pound man in front of your restaurant drilling holes into the basement and then watering his ivy.
11
MELISSA CALLED ONE DAY, WHEN SHE WAS STILL WORKING AS AN editor at Saveur.
“Gabs,” she says, her voice very, very low, not whispering, but very quiet, “get this, guess who’s here,” and then, even lower, “Jacques. Pepin.”
Top Chef, Iron Chef, The Next Food Network Star? We don’t give a shit. Flavor of the month, right place at the right time, big-fish-small-pond? We are not moved. Jacques Pepin breaking down and boning out a whole chicken with a paring knife?
Five phone calls. A play-by-play re-enactment. Later, when we meet for drinks, a physical demonstration. I stood here.… Jacques stood here.… He said … I said …
She commutes into the city from Jersey. Sleeps on my couch three nights a week while her husband does the role reversal, dad-as-mom thing. Compared to those bleak winter days in that Williamsburg loft, we love being roommates. She’s the only one in my family who’s held on tight to me, and I will never let go of her.
“What’s he doing there?” I ask.
“We’re doing a piece on The Greats. The French New York Greats. Soltner. Saihlac. Pepin. You know, Lutèce. Le Cygne. Le Cirque. Before what’s going on now with the CO2 guys, and the Aspen swanaround. You know, Alsatian onion tart. Soltner, who missed only five nights in thirty-four years at Lutece … Anyway, Pepin; I’ve invited him for lunch.”
“Very cool,” I say, understanding perfectly every word of this slightly free-associative answer.
The following week, after Pepin, she invited Soltner. To anyone under thirty he’s not famous, and he’s not doing a show on the Food Network, not using hydrocolloids or glycerin. For us, however, he is a big deal and the real deal. She was prepared. And called to run it by me. As we do.
“So he’s coming for lunch on Tuesday. Nothing big. Just casual. Just a visit. I’m not really even going to cook—that would be stupid. Can you imagine trying to cook for Soltner?”
And I’m on the other end, forty minutes before we open for dinner service, phone on a long curlicue cord up between my ear and my hunched shoulder; I’m blanching beans, finishing anchovy butter, having sign language conversations with the dishwashers about getting these trash bags changed now, please before dinner guests arrive, and dodging my fellow cooks who are