I’m back in Grattard’s kitchen before dawn. After changing into my uniform, I walk straight to the espresso machine and make myself a triple shot, hoping that a steady caffeine drip will get me through the day. I also make a café au lait for Lucia; I know she likes those. Call it a peace offering to get us through the day.
I got exactly two hours of sleep. Back in this sobering, cold, stainless steel environment, I’m questioning some of the choices I made last night.
Nothing could’ve prepared me for that kiss. When Diego’s lips pressed hard against mine, I was certain no one ever had felt as alive as I did in my own skin.
It all happened as if in a dream. His hands clutching the curves of my hips. His fingers creating sensations I didn’t even know existed. His breath, warm against mine, was heavy with wanting.
I kissed him back, sinking my fingers into the roots of his hair. Leaning my head back, so his lips could trace the lines of my chin until they found my neck.
A shiver runs down my spine at the memory of his mouth kissing my collarbone.
It was thrilling and sexy and everything I imagined Diego could be and more.
When we got back to the house, we curled up together on one of the lounge chairs by the pool. Diego fetched a blanket big enough to cover both of us. After a while Beluga turned up and plopped himself by our feet. He was asleep and snoring in no time.
“What are you doing this weekend?” he whispered, kissing me on the nose.
I shrugged, unable to remember any plans.
“Come with me to Barcelona,” he said, running his fingers down the back of my neck. The room spun in every direction at his touch.
“You’ll need to get permission from my dad.”
“That can be arranged. I know someone working on the inside.”
I smiled and kissed him hard on the lips.
“Okay,” I said, pulling back. Okay, as if he was asking me to stroll down to the market and not travel to another country.
Exhausted, I fell asleep in his arms.
Who needs eight hours of sleep? I thought in a haze.
Me. That’s who.
The possibility of sex, I now realize, does weird things to your brain. Memory loss, for one.
What are you doing this weekend, Isa? Not going to Barcelona, that’s for sure. My final exam, the one that will decide my fate in this kitchen, is scheduled for Monday. What are my plans? Going over every technique, method, and recipe I can get my hands on.
I pour a spoonful of sugar into the hot espresso and stir, allowing the crystals to thoroughly dissolve before drinking.
I’m facing the start of a grueling sixteen-hour day, and I’m already tired and cranky.
I find Lucia at our station, diligently working on her mise en place.
“Good morning,” I mumble, setting down the café au lait in front of her.
“Thanks,” she mumbles back, taking the coffee. Unlike me, she looks as fresh as a peach in July.
We get to work in silence, diligently prepping our station for the madness ahead. I move about awkwardly, praying I can get through the day without making any significant mistakes or calling unnecessary attention to myself. I gulp down my coffee, eager for the caffeine to kick in. But instead, it goes straight through me with not so much as a jolt of energy.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”
“Good luck,” she scoffs.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
When I reach the bathroom, I jangle the door a few times but it’s locked.
“What the heck?” I say to myself, unaware Snake Eyes is passing behind me.
“You have to get the key,” he says, walking away.
“What key?” I ask.
“Can’t you read?” he snaps before disappearing behind a tower of baking trays.
Someone’s in a mood.
I glance back at the door and see a torn piece of paper I assume is the sign. A message in French reads we need to ask Hugo for the key.
Seriously?
It takes me fifteen minutes to find Hugo, who’s in the receiving dock inspecting a shipment of oysters. My bladder is about to burst.
“When and where were these caught?” he says abruptly to the delivery man—a tall, middle-aged man with a crooked smile and rough hands.
“Je ne sais pas,” the man answers dismissively.
“If you can’t tell me when and where these were caught—I want exact time and location—you can take them back. And tell your boss that Chef Grattard wants the exact time they came out of the water, not the time they made it to shore. Do you understand me?”
The delivery man seems immune to Hugo’s condescending attitude—that or he flat-out doesn’t care.
“I’ll be back,” the man says, returning the box of oysters to the back of his truck and slamming the double doors shut.
“Imbécile,” Hugo mutters as the truck drives away.
I tap Hugo on the shoulder.
“Excuse me, Chef,” I say, watching him flinch at my touch.
He turns around, glaring at me like I’ve just run over his cat.
“I need the bathroom key,” I say, pressing my legs together.
Hugo releases an exasperated sigh. He glances at his watch and says, “Didn’t you just get here?”
I blink a few times. Is this guy serious?
“I really need to go,” I say with a mix of fear and impatience. No one told me I would need a diaper.
He strides back inside the restaurant and I follow. We stop at his station, where he produces a red logbook and a pen. The book lands with a thud on the metal counter.
“What do I do with this?” I ask.
“Write down the exact time you go in,” Hugo says, fishing a key from his chest pocket.
“To the bathroom?” I ask, incredulous.
“In time and return time here.” He points at a new blank page on the log. “Write your name. Chef Grattard wants to see everyone’s name.”
I oblige because I don’t know how much longer I can hold it.
I finally get to pee. My head leans back in absolute relief. Then I wash my hands and face. I splash water on my hair and pull it back into a bun at the nape of my neck so my toque can rest on top of it.
I stare at my reflection in the mirror. My eyes are sunken from lack of sleep.
“Barcelona,” I scoff.
In two days, Grattard, Troissant, and Hugo will decide who gets the coveted spot in Grattard’s kitchen and opportunity to learn from the master himself. It dawns on me, though, that the master may be more of a madman.
Still, a madman with the power to change your life forever.
I step out of the bathroom. Hugo is outside, waiting.
“The average time is five minutes,” he says, frowning at his watch. “Not ten.”
I hand him the key, turning an appropriate response in my head. Before I can speak, he walks away.
I write my out time in the log, wondering if every high-end kitchen operates like this. And how does anyone last any longer than a month working under such conditions? I’m no expert but this seems insane.
“You just missed him,” Lucia says when I return to our station. Judging by her strained expression, I can’t decide if she’s talking about Hugo or Grattard.
“Who did I miss?”
“Chef Grattard. He was just here. He wants to see how the dotted plates look on the table . . . in three hours.”
“All forty dishes?” I ask, helping her organize the various sauces.
“All forty,” she repeats, her voice taut.
“We can do this,” I assure her. “We got this.”
Who says the kitchen is not a team sport?
We divide the plates, twenty each. It takes about fifteen minutes to craft each one. We have less than three hours to finish. It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure the timing doesn’t add up.
Dot, dot, dot . . . I have no idea where the times goes. Hours later, my mouth is parched and my hands are shaking. Halfway through the morning, the wall fan behind us broke, unleashing a heat wave over our station. My skin is sweltering, my face drips with sweat, and I have a monster heat-induced headache.
I grab an ice cube from a tray in front of us and slide it against my lips. I’m not drinking water. Water equals pee. And pee equals the pee book. I’m not going though that indignity again.
My vision spins with dots by the time a server approaches our station.
“Are these ready?” he asks, a pleading expression on his face. “Grattard wants to see the dishes now.” His dress shirt has big sweat stains under his armpits. “Please tell me you are finished with these.”
I dip my needle into a bowl of sauce and create the last dot on my twentieth plate. Lucia is finished too.
“Last one,” I say, pushing the plate in his direction.
“Take them away,” Lucia says.
We watch him cart away the plates. When he’s out of view, our eyes meet and we burst into uncontrollable laugher.
“That was crazy,” I say, gasping for air.
Lucia is bent over herself, trying to get a grip.
“By plate ten, I thought I was going to go blind. All I could see were those stupid dots.”
We lean into each other through another bout of manic laughter. We’re soon both wiping fat tears from the corners of our eyes.
When the hysterics finally subside, I reach for Lucia’s arm and say, “Listen, about the other day . . .”
“I would like to think it was a mistake,” Lucia interrupts. She slides her hands into the pockets of her coat and squares her shoulders. The power in her posture makes me feel even smaller for what I did.
I’m certain the guilt on my face speaks for itself but nonetheless I say a quiet, “Yes, it was a mistake—a stupid mistake.”
Lucia sighs, then turns to me and says, “Look around you; we are the only two girls in this kitchen. Instead of wasting our energy backstabbing each other, like they do, why don’t we focus on helping each other. That’s what I want to do, anyway.”
I nod. “That’s a good plan.”
“Should we go see how the plates look? There’s air-conditioning in the dining room,” she says.
“Lead the way.”
We stand by the server pass, which offers an unobstructed view of the dining room. One long table spans the length of the restaurant, with a lavish array of flowers and candles as the centerpiece.
“I heard the fish guy say Grattard had the tulips flown in from Holland this morning,” Lucia says.
“Did this fish guy say who’s coming to dinner?” I ask, taking stock of the gold-rimmed chargers and glassware on the table. Every piece has been exquisitely chosen.
“He thinks it’s a repeat customer. Some prince from a royal family in Asia,” Lucia says. “Whoever it is, they have money to burn.”
“No kidding.”
Chef Grattard himself oversees every detail. The server tasked with carrying our dotted dishes carefully places each one on the table as if he were handling explosive material. Every plate, we overhear, has to be at exactly the same distance from the edge of the table. How they will re-create this effect when all the guests are seated, I have no clue.
When the last dotted plate is set on the table, and the server steps to the back of the room, the chef’s ultimate vision is revealed.
“Wow,” I whisper, afraid that even the tiniest sound will disturb the artistry I’m bearing witness.
“Did you see the way the dots catch the light?” Lucia whispers, one hand half covering her mouth.
A couple of years ago, Mom and I went to see an art exhibition in Chicago by a Japanese artist named Yayoi Kusama. Mom got the tickets months in advance, which was necessary as it ended up being a sold-out show. Kusama’s “infinity rooms,” as she calls them, were strewn with hundreds of thousands of dots. Her dot obsession is only rivaled by Grattard’s. The museum tour guide told us Kusama was the kind of artistic genius who could force spectators into the unknown. Mom and I agreed. It was like stepping into someone else’s imagination.
Staring at the dotted plates, I realize Grattard is not serving a meal. He’s creating a life-altering experience.
“Wow,” is all I can say.
“Fish guy said he’s serving the lobster claw salad on our plates,” Lucia says giddily.
We exchange proud smiles. And for the most ephemeral of seconds, we relish in a shared sense of accomplishment, as together we watch Grattard pace around the table.
“Off the table,” Grattard suddenly bellows.
Lucia and I jump in fear.
“What’s going on?” she murmurs.
“No dots. I don’t want the dots. Get rid of the dots,” Grattard barks, snapping his fingers at the server. The poor man stands paralyzed at the back of the room.
“What’s wrong with our plates?” I whisper, unable to compute the scene evolving in front of us.
The server can’t get to the dotted plates fast enough. Grattard, losing whatever patience he has left, grabs the plates himself and tosses them into a dirty dish bin.
“Dots? Why am I doing dots?” he shrieks. “Do you see this?” he asks the waiter.
There is so much fear on the server’s face that his left side has developed a nervous twitch.
“Can you see the curve of the lobster claw? The nest of lettuce? It’s all wrong. I want all these plates gone!”
A whole morning of punishing work is tossed into a dish bin on a whim.
Lucia pulls on my sleeve to get me to move. Like the server, I too am paralyzed.
“Let’s go,” Lucia says, sounding dejected.
We return to the sauce station in silence. All the other cooks have also gone unnaturally quiet. Even the hum of the kitchen equipment seems to have temporarily subsided.
Chef Grattard bursts into the kitchen and slams shut the door to his office. Someone drops a pot in the back, but the way it clinks and clanks, reverberating on every surface of the kitchen, it might as well be a bomb.
“What do we do now?” I ask.
“Wait, I guess.”
During the downtime, I submerge my hand in a bucket of ice water. The cold helps ease the stiffness from holding the needle tool way too tight for way too long.
A short time later, Chef Grattard reappears, calling out for Hugo.
Hugo sprints from the back of the kitchen like he’s been called to put out a fire. And maybe that’s exactly what he’ll need to do.
“We are doing something new,” Grattard tells Hugo, loud enough so the cooks in the back can hear.
Lucia and I peer through an opening in the sauce station. We have a clear view of Hugo but not Grattard. Hugo rings a towel in his hands with enough force that he could probably rip it apart if he pulled a little harder. He mumbles something I can’t hear.
“What did Hugo just say?” I whisper.
“I think he said we don’t have time for something new,” she whispers back.
“Whose name is on the door?” Grattard bellows. “My name. It’s my name. I decide if we have time.”
Grattard gives Hugo a sheet of paper. “This is what we are serving. I want to see it in an hour.”
I don’t have to see what’s on the paper to know it will be extremely complicated to execute and will look absurdly elaborate on the plate.
After Grattard locks himself back in his office, Hugo glances at the white piece of paper in his hands. I swear on Lala’s grave, his soul seems to eject out of his body the moment his eyes land on the page, like the man just gave up on his life because of whatever is written there.
Not only do I feel sorry for him, in that exact instant I realize I don’t want to be him. Not ever. Not by a long shot.
When Hugo finally snaps out of it, the first words out of his mouth are, “Listen up, you good-for-nothing scumbags! I’m not repeating myself! You”—he points at one of the cooks—“find me twelve tins of black osetra caviar.”
The cook nervously shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “Chef, where am I supposed to go?”
“The market. The fish vendor. I don’t care where you go. But either come back with twelve tins of caviar or don’t bother showing up. Ever.”
The cook scrambles out of sight. He leaves out the back door with his toque still balanced on his head. If this guy doesn’t come back with the caviar, his only culinary future will be in a McDonald’s kitchen.
Hugo calls out the other ingredients. “Crabmeat, seafood gelée, cauliflower puree.” The staff moves so fast they are tripping over each other. Someone is dispatched to buy crabs since, like the caviar, this is not an ingredient we keep on hand. A cook is asked to make the seafood gelée from the stock we have, and someone else is tasked with the puree. And just as I am wondering what my role will be in this bedlam, Hugo drops a stack of large gold dishes at our station.
“You and you,” he barks at Lucia and me. “Memorize this.” He tapes Grattard’s sketch in front of us. “You will plate.”
I glance at the sketch, then at Hugo. My first thought is to tell him he has lost his mind if he thinks we can plate this . . . thing. But then I catch his eyeballs bouncing around inside the sockets. Yes, he has lost his mind.
He leaves, then returns with a handful of squirt bottles and specialty spoons. “You will need these,” he says before he leaves for good. I watch him disappear into the walk-in cooler and lock the door behind him.
“That man is about to crack,” I say.
“Hugo?”
“He just locked himself inside the walk in. It’s thirty-five degrees in there.”
Lucia takes the sketch and studies it.
“Amazing,” she says. “This is . . . It’s a work of art.”
She hands me the paper. On it, Grattard has drawn what will surely be his latest masterpiece: a shiny round layer of black caviar sitting atop a delicate mixture of crabmeat, which is floating on a pond of seafood gelée. The pond is dotted with cauliflower puree. He doesn’t call them dots, though; he calls them pearls.
“How many pearls is this?” I ask, trying to do a quick count on the page.
“Sixty,” Lucia says. “Plus the sixty tiny green spots on top.”
“Is that gold?” I ask, pointing to the garnish at the center of the dish.
“Twenty-four karat gold leaf.”
“Of course.”
Panic starts to set in.
“We have to plate forty of these in an hour?” I ask, my voice tight with stress and fear.
“We just have to go a little faster than last time,” Lucia says. I don’t know if she’s trying to reassure me or herself. “We need a system.”
We work fast, organizing our station and debating a plan of action.
“Efficiency is key,” I say. “We can use a squeeze bottle for the puree pearls.”
“If you do the pearls, pass the plate to me so I can finish the green dots with a needle,” she adds.
Cooks from other stations drop off the components of the dish. The green sauce for the tiny dots appears, then the cauliflower puree. The head of the fish station brings the seafood gelée and the crabmeat mix, both of which smell amazing. The only thing missing is the caviar. I pray for the guy who got sent on that mission. He might as well leave the country if he can’t find the twelve tins on time.
“Where is he?” Hugo yells, slamming shut the door of the walk-in behind him. I guess the cold air didn’t help.
As if on cue, Caviar Man runs into the kitchen carrying a small cardboard box. It all happens in slow motion after that. He shouts, “I got it.” His shoe gets stuck under a floor mat. He trips. The box glides through the air. The lid opens and out fly twelve tins, like tiny projectiles, some hitting Hugo square in the head.
No one dares to move. The last can hits the floor, swiveling in circles and making a metallic brushing tone. When it finally stops, Hugo picks up a can that landed by his feet and quietly drops it off at our station.
Lucia and I work in silence. At this point we can anticipate each other’s movements.
We plate the crabmeat and the caviar at the center of the plate using a mold ring. Then, very slowly, pour a pool of seafood gelée around it.
But when it’s time to create the cauliflower puree pearls, my hand starts trembling like I have some disease of the nervous system.
These pearls require surgical precision. I have to squeeze exactly the right amount of puree out of the bottle and onto the plate to create a perfectly sized pearl while not disturbing the gelée pond.
“Hold your wrist,” Lucia tells me.
I wrap my left hand around my right wrist to keep it from trembling.
“Almost done,” she says to someone behind me. I don’t have to turn around to know Hugo is breathing down my neck.
I grip the squeeze bottle tighter, moving steadily around the plate. I have to create three rows of pearls before I pass the dish to Lucia. It takes every ounce of concentration in my body and mind not to screw this up. After my sixty pearls are finished, I get out of the way and let Lucia do her thing with the green dots. When she steps back, I pinch the gold flecks with a set of tweezers and drop a small amount at the center of the caviar circle.
Hugo, Lucia, and I step back at the same time.
“It’s beautiful,” Lucia says.
“Don’t you think it’s a little creepy?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“It looks like a swamp creature with lots of eyes,” I say. “Like the dinner is staring back at you.”
“Just give me the stupid plate,” Hugo says, sounding both hopeless and exhausted.
As I watch him walk into Grattard’s office, shoulders hunched as if he’s carrying the whole kitchen on his back, I can’t help but wonder if Hugo ever had any joy in him. And if he did, where did it all go?