Comfort Me with Apples and Tender at the Bone: Two Culinary Treasures

Everybody at L’Escargot understood that the restaurant was doomed. Except me. And Maurice.

“You don’t know anything,” said Henry, “and Maurice, as he calls himself, is a fool. But there is one thing I like about the man: he has the courage to dream.”

Henry didn’t have to dream: he loved his work. Watching him bent over a customer murmuring softly that the asparagus hollandaise was really very fine tonight, I was reminded of my father running his hands down the pages of a book as if the type were speaking to him. He too was a man who loved his work.

Henry knew everything about restaurants and he was generous with his knowledge. The first night he showed me how to balance cocktails on a tray, and in which order to remove them to avoid disaster. The next night he told me how to handle the kitchen when a customer returned a dish.

“The kitchen’s not at war with you,” he explained, “so you have to take the blame. Say the customer complains the steak is overdone. Rolf’s going to say it’s not; he’s got to defend his honor. But if you say the man asked for medium but you wrote down well done, that’s a different story because the mistake is yours. Rolf will yell at you. He’ll call you an idiot. But he’ll give you a new steak.”

The third night I forgot a customer’s shrimp cocktail and Henry told Maurice to send the man a bottle of complimentary champagne. When I thanked Maurice, Henry murmured that it wasn’t necessary. “It’s in his interest,” he explained. “Maurice doesn’t want unhappy customers. And you know what? The richer the customer, the more they like free things.”

On the fourth night I told him about my new recurring nightmare. “There’s this table and they keep shouting, ‘Miss, oh Miss,’ and waving their hands at me. I keep saying, ‘I’ll be right there.’ But I never get to them.”

“I remember that one,” he said reassuringly. “It will pass.” Suddenly an odd look crossed his face. I watched it move, like a wave ruffling calm water.

“Your boyfriend over there just used too much curaçao,” he said. And he was gone. In the next instant Alan Jones lit a match, held it to the pan, and the flames flared up and licked at the red velvet curtains. Henry had the fire out before the customers knew what happened.

“Thanks, man,” said Alan, looking sheepish.

Henry strolled back to where I was standing. “How’d you do that?” I asked.

“Smothered it,” he said casually, folding up a piece of oilcloth and tucking it back into his vest pocket.

But there were three problems Henry couldn’t help me with: Alan Jones, Rolf, and Marielle.

Alan Jones did walk me home from work most nights, but he didn’t hold my hand. After he had changed out of his tuxedo and shrugged into his olive-green surplus army jacket he began to lecture me about my materialistic tendencies, telling me about his readings in Gurdjieff and his latest interest, macrobiotics. I thought he was wonderful; I was in despair.

Rolf, unfortunately, had all the passion Alan Jones lacked. As each evening wore on and the temperature in the kitchen climbed to 120° his requests for beer became more frequent. The drunker he got, the more lewd he became.

“One coq au vin,” I’d say.

“What?”

“One coq au vin,” I’d repeat.

“Louder.”

“One coq au vin.”

“You heard her, she wants some cock,” he’d say and the entire kitchen would erupt in laughter as I turned bright red.

One night he followed me into the alley where we went to smoke cigarettes. “I have something for you,” he said, going to the garbage can and rummaging inside it.

“Garbage?” I said.

“Wait,” he said. “You’ll see.” His head was inside the garbage can and he was throwing cracked eggshells and used paper towels in the air. Finally he emerged holding a long package wrapped in silver foil. “Feel this,” he said, throwing it to me. It was surprisingly heavy. “A whole tenderloin,” he said. “Treat me right and it’s yours.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“You better treat me right anyway,” he said sidling over and looking hungrily at the place where my breasts spilled out of my blouse.

“What can I do?” I wailed to Henry.

“How much you taking home?” he asked sternly.

“Thirty-five dollars on a good night.”

“You want to go work in a cocktail lounge where you earn half that and the men put their hands up your skirt?”

I didn’t.

“Rolf won’t do anything,” said Henry contemptuously, “he’s all talk and no walk. Besides, it won’t be long now before Maurice goes broke.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Maurice has done it all wrong,” he said with conviction. “Nobody puts Limoges and crystal into a restaurant. You know why?” He paused. “Because it breaks in the dishwasher. A few more months, there will be none left. He’s already losing half the meat; that fat useless Frenchman is stealing him blind.”

“It’s Rolf who’s stealing!” I said. “He’s the one who offered me the meat.”

“He was just appropriating the Frenchman’s stolen goods. Rolf doesn’t steal himself.”

“You mean everybody knows that the chef is stealing?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Henry philosophically. “And if Maurice had any sense at all he’d be out there checking those garbage cans every night.”

“Don’t you think you should tell him?”

“Not my business,” he said with dignity, getting back to the main subject. “But next time Rolf comes at you remember that a year from now he’ll be back in New York working in some other restaurant, and you’ll be carrying cocktails.”

Meanwhile, there was Marielle. She glowered at me during staff dinner and avoided me in the dining room. But she respected Henry and as long as he was there she kept her distance.

But on his first night off she watched, eyebrows raised, as I mixed a Caesar for a fourtop. The men were solid, with striped ties and diamond pinkie rings, and their wives were large and sympathetic. I milked my story for all it was worth, lamenting the beauty of my lost island, the family sheep, my mother’s homemade jam. I told them how cold it was in America, how miserable I was. The bleached blonde was on the verge of tears.

Any minute, though, she might be crying in earnest. She had ordered Dover sole, the one dish I had not perfected. I was terrified that I would miss a bone and kill a customer. Henry always filleted them for me.

But now I was on my own. As I hesitated over the fish Marielle swooped in for the kill.

“Alors, ma petite,” she said, “on a terminé le drame?” And in her precise Parisian French she began giving instructions. Her thought, she told me later, was that I would not understand a word and be so embarrassed that I would flee in tears, never to return. Or, at the very least, never to return as a Frenchwoman.

But instead, there I was following her instructions to the letter. “You begin with the bones at the top,” she said. “Take the fork and flick them out. They’re small. Oui, c’est ça. Now the bottom. Now run your knife right down the middle of the fish, doucement, doucement, you can feel the bone.”

Step by step she took me through the ritual. Finally she concluded by telling me to serve the first portion to the old bag on the right wearing the terrible dress with the flowers. When I looked up, startled, she said, always in French, “Oh, the Americans! They never understand a word!” And she retired to her station.

When I went later to thank her she just shook her head and said “J’étais loin de croire que tu me comprendrais.” The significance of my having jumped, in the boning of a fish, from vous to tu was not lost on me; in Marielle’s eyes I had become French. And she took over my education.

“Give her to me, Henri,” she said the next night. “You have taught her the American way. Now I will teach her the French. When we are done she will, perhaps, help us with our little project.”

“What project?” I asked, but neither of them would say.

Slowly, proudly, Marielle began teaching me everything she had learned in hotel school. She taught me to bone fish, make omelets, and serve with a spoon and fork and one hand behind my back. She made me taste salad dressings over and over until I could pour out the precise ratio of olive oil to vinegar without looking at what I was doing. “It’s like typing,” she said, “you have to know it in the fingers so that you do not think about it with the head. You will need this later.”

At night, after the final customers had left the dining room and we had reset all the tables, after Rolf had placed the pot of cream over the pilot light to cook down during the night, after William the cashier had balanced out, we went off together for a drink. They all told stories about the restaurants they had worked in, trying to top each other’s horror stories. I wasn’t old enough to drink legally, but I got lost in the crowd and no bartender ever challenged my right to be there.

One Sunday Lincoln invited us all out to his cabin at Whitmore Lake. The best grill man in the Midwest had dug a barbecue pit and spent all day cooking ribs laid across old bedsprings. The smell spiraled up into the crisp air and we drank beer and told jokes. Rolf, sober for a change, went off for a walk alone and came back clutching something.

“Look,” he said, opening his hands as if he had found a great treasure. “Morels.”

“Oh yeah,” said Lincoln, “they’re all over the place. Help yourself.”

Rolf looked suddenly younger in his enthusiasm. ‘We must gather as many as we can,” he said. “If we can find enough I will put them on the menu tomorrow night.” He organized us into teams to hunt mushrooms.

“What if we pick the wrong ones?” asked Marielle, ever practical. “We will poison the customers.”

“Impossible,” said Rolf, holding up something that looked like a fairy’s umbrella from a child’s storybook. “No other mushroom looks like a morel. Even Alan Jones could not confuse a morel with a poison mushroom.”

We came back with armfuls of morels; they were everywhere. As Rolf sliced onions and started to sauté them in Lincoln’s rustic cabin he seemed almost attractive in his happiness.

“Rolf and Lincoln’s Mushroom and Ribs,” he said. “What do you think, Lincoln? You want to go into business with me after Maurice goes broke?”

“Could be,” said Lincoln. “But I think that would be Lincoln and Rolf’s Ribs and Mushrooms.”

“How long do you think he’s going to last?” asked Alan Jones.

“Well,” said Henry slowly, “the way I see it, he’s probably got another six months. If that fat Frenchman doesn’t get too greedy.”

“I told him to stop stealing,” said Rolf, “or I would tell Maurice. This is the best job I ever had and I wish there were some way to make it last.”

“Why can’t it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Alan Jones, “can’t Maurice just replace the china and crystal with cheaper stuff?”

The others looked at us as if we were sweet, dense children. “It’s the customers,” they chorused.

“What about them?” I asked.

Rolf came up and put a morel into my mouth. It had an earthy flavor, like the entire countryside concentrated into a single bite. “A little more salt?” he asked. He scattered salt from his fingers into the pan and put another morel into my mouth. The salt had intensified the flavors, made them deeper.

“I didn’t know that there was anything that tasted like this,” I said reverently.

“Exactement!” said Marielle, looking at Rolf with new respect. “Americans don’t know what they have. A restaurant like L’Escargot is wasted on them.”

“Have you noticed,” said Henry gently, “how many repeat customers we have?”

One: the art history professor who came, alone, every night and asked the chef to make something special. Nobody else ever returned. “After every curious person has tried the restaurant,” he went on, “Maurice will run out of customers. He is ahead of his time.”

“How would you do it differently?” I asked. Henry looked at Marielle, and I could see that he was asking her a question. She nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“We have it all figured out,” he said. “Maurice’s problem is that the food is too fancy. It frightens people. I have been waiting table all my life and I know exactly what people want. We will give them the food that they know, only better. When people leave our restaurant they will say, ‘I never knew macaroni and cheese could taste so delicious.’ It’s very simple, really.”

“We will take off the tuxedos,” said Marielle, “we will be more friendly. People will love to come to our restaurant. You will see.”

Meanwhile the weeks passed and Maurice slowly grew grayer and more wrinkled. He stopped wearing makeup, his impeccable clothes were sometimes spotted, and he lost the bounce in his step. One day I came in earlier than usual and found him in the dining room running frantically from table to table. “Look at this plate!” he shouted at me, holding it up so that his finger was across the long, jagged crack through the middle. He hurled it at the wall and watched it shatter, the shards skittering onto the carpet in tiny pieces. He went to another table, examined the plates, and hurled another one against the wall. And then another.

When he was done he put his hands over his eyes and then looked at me, his face ashen. “I’m sorry,” he whispered and went to get the broom.

That night Rolf went upstairs, to Maurice’s “office,” the dusty room where the extra chairs and tables were stored. When I went up to change out of my uniform I saw them scribbling figures on a piece of paper as they took alternate swigs out of a bottle of red wine. When they came down, Maurice went into the kitchen and said something to the chef, who shrugged his shoulders and began packing his knives.

“We don’t need him and his fat salary,” said Rolf, startling me by coming up behind me. “He is a useless expense.” The chef didn’t even say good-bye.

We didn’t need all the waiters either, and as the customers became sparser the tips did too. Pretty soon the restaurant was running with a skeleton crew. When Alan Jones left to do his alternative service for the draft he was not replaced. Then Maurice cut my hours to weekends only. I got a supplementary job down the street as a cocktail waitress.

I stopped in every night on my way home, but the mood in the restaurant had gotten grimmer. “Notice anything different?” asked Henry one night. I looked around. I didn’t.

I walked over to the stove and dished up some leftover coq au vin. “It’s incredible to me,” I said, “that the idiots I serve would rather eat the slop down the street than Rolf’s cooking. This is great!”

“Ah, Americans!” said Marielle coming in. “What do they know?”

“But do you notice anything different?” Henry persisted. He pointed to a can of tomato paste. It looked just like the one collecting mold on my own refrigerator shelf. “This comes from the supermarket. And that means that Maurice can’t pay his bills. It won’t be long now. Maurice owes everyone and he’s got no credit left. It’s a damn shame.”

That night Maurice came out drinking with us for the first time. He ordered a Rémy Martin and held up the snifter. “Here’s to me,” he said bitterly, “the last of the dreamers.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Henry.

“Auction it all off, lock the door, and get the hell out of this state,” said Maurice.

“If you come back, you got a job waiting,” said Henry. He looked at Marielle, who nodded her head. “The French lady and I are going to open our own place. Rolf’s going to cook for us. We could use a maître d’.”

Maurice looked at him a long time. Then he shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “But I wish you the best. And Henry?”

“Yes?”

“Keep it simple.”

“You got that right,” said Henry.

THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE TABLE