Spiced

It was the only thing I could say, my solitary sentiment, as my hand slipped off the edge of the large bain-marie of chocolate sauce I was holding.

“Motherfucker!”

I didn’t recover quickly enough, and so the bain fell over. I watched the mass of thick, hot, near-black sauce—a good six quarts—ooze across my table in a slow, steady blob. It blanketed my notebook, which had all my recipes-in-progress, and ran over the edge of the table and onto the floor before I could slow it with a stack of side towels.

“Hmmph . . .”

Gilma stared smugly at me from across the room, fixing her collage of fruit stickers to the table. She made no effort to lend a hand, and I responded to Gilma the way I always responded to Gilma. I ignored her.

Using a week’s worth of side towels, I mopped up the sticky chocolate mess and attempted to salvage my notebook. One by one I wiped the pages off with a damp towel. Amazingly, it worked, and I lost only a few minutes cleaning up the disaster. At least I had my notebook and the months of work I’d done on new recipes. I kept meaning to transfer them to the computer.

I grabbed the dirty pot and headed for the pot sink to drop it off but stopped in my tracks a few feet before the sink.

“What are you doing?” I asked, dirty pot still in hand. Three dishwashers were huddled around the pot sink, hunched over a magazine.

I knew what they were doing; I could see the glare of bare skin staring back at me from the large, glossy photos in the porn magazine. The three men just stared at me and my stupid pot, looking irritated that I’d interrupted them and, even worse, that I’d dared to question them.

What began as an exciting opportunity to open a new restaurant had slowly turned into a borderline unbearable situation. The day-to-day minutiae of kitchen work had proved to be frustrating to the point of complete exasperation. The “old” employees did little to help the “new” and sometimes even went out of their way to make our lives more difficult. In a normal restaurant, the chef reigns, and each person works to support everyone else to make everything run smoothly, like a well-oiled machine. But that spirit of cooperation was lost at Q56. It was not a normal restaurant; it was a corporate one with a union staff—a different animal entirely.

“I need this pot, please,” I said, at least trying to sound authoritative.

Not only did they meet my request with a collective eye roll, but they didn’t even bother hiding their porn. I considered repeating the policy I’d been taught at orientation that imposed a ban on all pornographic material in the workplace and forbade any form of sexual harassment, but I had a feeling it would just elicit more eye rolls. What? I wanted to yell at them. Like you’re gonna jerk off between pots? All three of you together? The group consumption of porn was weird enough, but in the workplace? I wished I could intimidate them or even humiliate them, but I knew it would be useless. It wasn’t the porn that offended me so much—working in kitchens, I’d been privy to plenty of raunchy, locker-room chat from the many men I’d worked with—it was their complete lack of respect for my supposed authority (I was in a management position, after all) and for the restaurant that I wanted so desperately to succeed. I dropped off the pot and went back to my kitchen.

Maybe I was just tired. I had worked thirty-three straight days, every one of them a double, and the daily battles, small as they sometimes were, were beginning to take their toll.

Back in the pastry kitchen, Gilma had finished her fruit bowls and left her daily sticker arrangement on the table as always. I wanted to shove her out of the way and pick them off, show her how easy it would be. As if ease had anything to do with it. I started weighing out the mise-en-place for chocolate sauce attempt number two.

“Dalia!” said Evelyn, one of the good waiters, one of the few who had been trying her best to keep up with all the new food and upgrades in service and wine. There were a few cooks, too, whom Joey had hired who gave us some respite from the antagonistic old regime. These cooks had come to work for Joey, not the hotel, and they gave us hope that the restaurant might have a chance. “There’s someone here to see Joseph.”

“Okay,” I told her. “I’ll be right out.”

The staff had certainly realized that Joey and I were close. If they couldn’t find him they usually came to me, figuring that I’d either know where he was or that I’d know the answer to a given question or problem. As far as I could tell, though, we’d been successful in keeping our secret. In fact, keeping the secret had turned out to be easier than actually maintaining the relationship.

Our personal and private lives had become so completely entwined that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began: Joseph-my-boss and Joey-my-boyfriend were virtually one and the same. Hiding my feelings at work was easy, since most of the time at work I felt frustrated and stressed, not loving and romantic, which left little opportunity for an affectionate glance or tender moment to slip out. By the time we got home late at night, we were too tired for anything but sleep, after which we got up early and started all over again.

I watched Evelyn walk back to the podium to see who was waiting for Joey. When I finally saw her, my stomach began to contract with nausea. Ohhh nooo . . . Camille. French coat-check Camille from Scarabée. Fucking stupid, hot, tight-pants-wearing, perfect-ass Camille. What was she doing here? I thought she’d gone back to France.

I didn’t want to deal with her; in fact, I didn’t feel physically able to deal with her. I had a quick look around, scanning for Joey, but I didn’t see him. He could have been anywhere: in a meeting, in the basement. He often slipped away, finding brief respite in the second-floor conference rooms or downstairs in the gym. Even if I had seen him, my torso was filling up so quickly with bile that I might have simply spit when informing him that she was waiting. In my workplace. Why the fuck was she here?

Seeing her, with her dirty blond hair pulled up in high pigtail braids, eyebrows raised expectantly, and, yes, tight pants, I was suddenly and absolutely overwhelmed with regret. Regret for falling for Joey, regret for dating him while under the pressure of opening this stupid restaurant, regret for not being able to hold myself together because some stupid girl he used to date had turned up where I work. Suddenly, I hated my job: Gilma, the pot washers, hotel management, human resources, all of it. As I walked through the dining room to the podium, I hated the cool and happy instrumental music, too. All the money the hotel had blown on “music consultants” to create the perfect vibe, and we ended up sounding like a goddamn Banana Republic commercial.

“Hi, Camille,” I said dryly, holding it together.

“Ello, Dal-ee-ah,” she said cheerfully in her youthful, thick French accent. “I was looking for Joey? Eeez he here?” She craned her head, looking past me.

I realized that she must not know about me and Joey . . . or did she? My stomach hardened as I considered for a moment that maybe I had been taken for a fool, that this little dingbat Frenchie knew very well where I stood with Joey but simply chose to ignore it, and that Joey had betrayed me. My eyes glazed over, and my jaw stiffened.

“Um,” I said vaguely, “I don’t know where he is right now. Somewhere in the building . . .”

She just stood there, smiling like a dummy. “Okay. I’ll wait.”

Okay, I’ll wait? Who did she think she was? This was where I worked, a supposed high-end restaurant, not some slacker café where she could just laze around for hours. I rushed back through the dining room and into the kitchen, determined to find Joey, to get answers, to make him get rid of her. I felt like my home, broken though it may have been, was being occupied by a foreign invader.

As I rushed through the kitchen, I caught a waiter putting some rolls into a microwave. “What are you doing?” I almost yelled.

“Some lady wants warm bread.” Greg shrugged, hitting the buttons. Beep beep beep. Greg had been a waiter at the hotel for years, despite his rumored problem with crystal meth. He was almost never pleasant and had a twitching, sour face. He’d been offered a buyout—a lump sum payment in exchange for “early retirement”—as had some of the other undesirable but tenured waiters, but had refused.

“You don’t microwave bread,” I spit out, opening the microwave door and pulling out the rolls. “It’ll turn hard as a rock as soon as it cools. Just give it to one of the cooks to warm up in the oven. It’ll take two seconds.”

“Yeah,” he said under his breath, taking the sizzle platter of bread out of my hand. “Like it matters.”

“It does matter,” I yelled back, knowing full well that as soon as my back was turned he’d be back to his old ways. But it did matter. Why didn’t anyone fucking think it mattered? I walked away, not caring that I’d made him the object of my anger, of my feeling of being trapped—in more ways than one—by the four walls of the hotel.

I started my search for Joey downstairs in the purchaser’s office. Nothing. Storage, prep kitchen, office. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I was storming, actually storming, by the time I found him coming down the stairs in the hallway near our office.

“Joey!” I called. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

“What is it, Doll? What’s wrong?”

“Have you been seeing Camille?” I asked, keeping my face as stony as could be. As if nonchalance were even a remote possibility.

“Camille?” he asked, confused. “What are you talking about? No, why?”

“She’s here,” I said sternly. “Why is she here?”

“Doll,” he said, sensing I was on the brink. “Let’s go into the office.”

“I don’t know why she’s here,” he said once the door was closed behind us.

The sudden privacy knocked me over the edge, and before I knew it I was regrettably and totally in tears. All of the pressure that had been building up over the past months was forcing its way out, and I couldn’t help becoming emotional. I could no longer pretend that our relationship didn’t exist.

“I just don’t understand why she’s here,” I sobbed. “And why doesn’t she know about us? She wouldn’t come by if she thought you were unavailable.”

Joey let me sit and cry for a minute, releasing my worst fears, my aggravation and frustration. In the midst of my tears I also felt guilty for having laid all this on him and for letting my personal life interfere with my professional one. Our relationship had become so complicated.

“Doll,” he said, putting his arm around me, keeping one eye on the closed door just in case someone walked in. “I haven’t seen her in months. She must have heard I was working here.”

I looked at him, horrified that I’d become a blubbering fool in an oversized chef ’s coat stained with chocolate sauce.

“Think about it, Doll,” he went on. “When would I have seen her? I’m with you every day and every night.”

He had a very good point. I had failed to remember that.

“She’s waiting outside for you. Can’t you just go tell her about us so at least she won’t come back to where we work?”

“I’ll get rid of her, but you know I can’t tell her about us now, not here. Too many people around.” He handed me a tissue and headed out the door. He was right. I knew he was right. He couldn’t have any sort of scene at the restaurant, and who knew how she might react, but I still hated the situation. No matter what happened, I tried to reassure myself, it was just one job of many, and it wouldn’t last forever.

It wasn’t long after the whole Camille incident that things went from bad to worse. After spending so much energy keeping our relationship out of our work, we had little success keeping work out of our relationship. Joey and I had both become so stressed, so tired, that by the end of the day, we had little to give each other in the way of support. Eventually, the only thing holding us together was work; we were dating by default. By the time I met Les (a photo editor blessedly far removed from the restaurant world) at a party and was instantly attracted, it was simply the final nail in the proverbial coffin. The time had come for my romantic relationship with Joey to be absolutely and undeniably over.

It was a relatively painless split and a relief for both of us, I think. No more breakdowns for me, no more late nights at work wishing I could just go to dinner and a movie with my boyfriend like everyone else. No more contemplating the complexities of a relationship in which pleasing my boss (and living up to his expectations) meant pleasing my boyfriend and vice versa.

Amazingly, we managed to salvage our superlative work relationship, though at a greater distance and with fewer private jokes and glances. Joey pretended not to be bothered when Les called, and I pretended that I didn’t care that he was sleeping with the newest restaurant manager, the one who wore dresses and high heels to work every day. The one who, unlike me, always looked pretty at work. We settled into a tolerable rhythm; most of the enmity between us and the worst of the employees had faded to indifference. We focused instead on the few cooks who actually cared. There was Jimmy, the loudmouth cook in his twenties who still lived with his mother. Jimmy wanted so badly to do well that he actually cried when Joey sent him off the line for not listening. We loved Charlotte, the more experienced cook who had been a chef in her own right but at lower-end establishments. She wanted to hone her skills with higher-end food and quickly devoted herself to Joey. There was Hon Lee, my Chinese-American assistant, who became known as anything but Hon Lee: Hon Solo, Crème Hon Glaise, Honda, Honshimeji. We wondered about Diana, the career changer who came to work with perfectly coifed hair, three pounds of makeup caked on, and professional manicures. She didn’t last long, but a few others did and were invaluable, as much for keeping our spirits up as for their cooking skills. We still had the restaurant to run (even if business hadn’t picked up), the employees to deal with, the food to prepare, and, we thought, a Times review to await.

But it was taking too long. Normally, a new restaurant, especially one with money, a hefty PR firm, and a name chef behind it, got reviewed within the first few months of opening. And we were ready. We had photos of the new Times critic (sadly the previous one who had raved about Joey’s food at Scarabée had since left the paper), along with some of his aliases and phone numbers. Months passed without a visit from the critic, but I still had hope that he would come. Until the phone rang one night at work.

“Doll?”

The hotel kitchen line I’d picked up was inconveniently located near the room service kitchen throughway, so I could hardly hear the warbled and weak voice on the other end of the line. The voice was familiar, though. And only one person would have called me Doll over the phone.

“Joey?” I asked. “Is that you?” I put my free hand over my other ear to block out the distractions.

“Yeah, Doll,” he said. “It’s me.”

Why was he calling me? Since breaking up, we’d limited our interaction to work-related stuff; no more late-night chats, no nightcaps, definitely no overnights. It was only seven thirty, so he should have been in the kitchen expediting dinner service. I could tell by the type of ring that he was calling from outside the building. It sounded like he’d been crying.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Doll,” he said after a long pause. “I got some bad news.”

My chest tightened as I suddenly panicked that something terrible had happened to someone in his family. I dismissed any definitions and parameters of our ever-changing relationship. I didn’t care what our status was; I just wanted to be there for him.

“What is it, Joey? What happened?”

He was quiet for a long time, gathering his voice.

“Doll, I talked to Steven,” he said, pausing again. “We’re not getting reviewed.” He let the receiver fall away from his head.

I allowed myself a brief moment of relief—no one was hurt or in danger—before I began to understand the gravity of the information. Steven was our public relations guy, our interface with the press. Though he had no real power over what actually got written, a large part of his job was to convince writers and critics that we were worth a visit and hopefully a review.

Joey was talking about the review, the only one that really mattered—the New York Times. The one that validated all the hard work. The one that made it all worth it. If we weren’t getting a Times review and business wasn’t picking up on its own, then what were we working for?

It wasn’t as though we hadn’t gotten any press since opening. Joey’s food had been lauded but mostly in smaller publications. It was my desserts that received the lion’s share of press: They had been photographed for countless magazines and newspapers, thanks to our PR firm. I’d been featured in local newspapers across the country after being included in an Associated Press article on custards, and I even had my first brush with “the public,” if that’s what you call a creepy guy calling from Somewhere, California, who complimented me for looking cute on the front page of his town’s paper. My ice creams appeared in the New York Times and in a spread on dessert cocktails in New York magazine, among others. I was even on television when a Japanese morning show decided to feature one of my desserts. Though I’d been prepped for the questions beforehand (I was interviewed briefly through a translator), I realized after watching it that my future probably didn’t lie in television. Still, the attention I received for my work had been good for my ego. But none of this brought people rushing through the doors of Q56, because, let’s face it, people just don’t flock to restaurants just for the desserts. Especially not hotel restaurants in midtown. Hearing the defeat in Joey’s voice made all of my own press infinitely superfluous. I would have traded it all in for a single Times review.

“I’m not coming back in tonight, Doll,” he said before I could respond. “Tell Frank I had something to take care of.”

Frank was more than capable of taking charge of the kitchen, especially since we’d been so slow. I wished Joey were taking a much-needed night off under better circumstances. I wished I could do something.

“Of course,” I said.

“Doll,” he added, straining. “Can you come over?”

Come over. It wouldn’t be like old times. I glanced at my watch, though there was no question about my answer.

“Sure,” I said. “Let me just finish up, and I’ll be right there.”

It felt strange to be heading downtown to Joey’s place again. I knew Joey well enough to know he probably hadn’t eaten all day and wouldn’t have any food in his apartment, so I picked up some comfort junk food on the way: nachos and Chubby Hubby ice cream, his favorite. When I reached his fourth-floor walk-up after being buzzed in, the door was slightly ajar. The apartment was dark, except for the shimmering, iridescent light of the television, its volume barely audible. I pushed the door open and found Joey hunched over the end of the couch, his head resting on the arm.

“Hi, Doll,” he said, barely lifting his head.

“Hi.”

I took my coat off and dropped the junk food on the coffee table.

“I thought you might be hungry,” I offered.

“Thanks, Doll.” He opened the nachos, crunched, and then sighed as if it were the first breath he’d taken in a while.

“So what happened?” I finally asked, sitting down next to him. I wanted details.

“I talked to Steven,” he said slowly, as if the pain were still fresh.

“Yeah,” I coaxed.

“And he talked to him. Asked him what was going on, when he was gonna come in, review us.” He paused. “He said he’d been in once for lunch and decided not to come back.” He paused again. “He said”—Joey’s voice became strained and his face stony before he finished—“that we weren’t memorable.”

Joey buried his head in the sofa arm again, reliving the news. And the pain.

“I’m not memorable, Doll,” he sobbed. “I’m nothing. Not even worth a review. That’s what he thinks.”

For as long as I’d known him, and on all the different levels, Joey had been a pillar of strength, the person in charge, able to handle any situation, confidently take care of anyone and anything. But after having his talent and integrity questioned and, even worse, dismissed, he was wounded. It killed me to see him in pain, but it was remotely comforting to know that he was human, too. I reached over and put my arms around him. In spite of everything, or maybe because of it, he was still my best friend. I didn’t really know what to say.

“He probably wasn’t talking about the food, Joey,” I offered, trying to take the focus off him. “After all, it is a restaurant review; it covers the whole experience, not just the food. Maybe he just didn’t like the whole hotel vibe thing.”

It was very likely; Q56 had little charm. For all the money that had been spent on its design, the room still felt utterly and ines-capably like a hotel dining room, with none of the “slick and sexy” vibe the hotel had hoped for. The lobby was visible from the bar, and one of the head bartenders was Josephine, a dowdy gray-haired woman who looked to be in her sixties and who rarely smiled as she wobbled behind the bar in her updated uniform. The music remained a disaster. Overall, the service barely made it past mediocre. Human resources repeatedly hired managers with little experience outside of the hotel world.

“Yeah, but still,” he countered with defeat, “whatever he ate wasn’t good enough to make up for any of that.”

“But imagine a worst-case scenario, Joey. Maybe he came in, and no one was at the podium to seat him. And then maybe his waiter was Sam, who almost goes out of his way to be rude. And then no one brought him bread. Or water. Or the glass of wine he ordered. And maybe the crappy soundtrack grated on him. Maybe that’s what happened. Clearly no one spotted him, or we would have known he’d been in.” I was pouring salt in the wound by bringing up the last bit, reminding him of an earlier incident.

At our friends-and-family night, the general manager—the general manager!—had turned away an important food critic from New York magazine. The GM was new to the nonhotel restaurant scene and hadn’t recognized her. Sorry, he told her, but it’s too late to be seated. She, in turn, angrily reported the exchange to Steven. Upon learning that she’d been turned away, Joey called the hotel bigwigs together and voiced his anger and frustration with their inability to understand or heed all the things he’d been trying to tell them. They’d let down their end of the bargain, not Joey. I desperately wanted to take the failure off of Joey’s shoulders and place it firmly in the hands of the hotel, where it belonged. I wanted it to be their fault. They deserved it. I started to get angry.

“Joey, you’ve done everything you could have possibly done,” I finally said. “And anyway, I don’t care what the guy said. He can say anything he wants, but I know, I know that your food is delicious and amazing and very memorable. And you know it, too.”

He nodded unconvincingly into the sofa.

“But what are we going to do, Doll?” he finally said after a long pause.

What were we going to do? Without a positive review from the Times, it was likely Q56 would never get any busier. It was quite possible that the restaurant would slip further and further into midtown hotel obscurity. The hotel would still have its restaurant, which would really exist only to serve its guests, and we’d still have our jobs and the frustrating reality that we were unable to change things.

“I don’t know, Joey. I guess we just keep making the best food we can, right?” I said. “And we figure something out.”

Eventually, Joey bounced back, determined not to let the Times or the hotel defeat him. We did the best job we could until finally none of it seemed worth it to any of us. We’d made it a year when we decided that we could leave our jobs in good conscience. Once again, we left: Joey, Frank, and I, together.