Tasting Menu

Course One

Thursdays

or Henderson Bay Oysters with Rosé Mignonette and a Sliver of Celery

She was beautiful, my mother, but she was damned. We all knew it, my brother, sister, and I, and we knew that we could do nothing about it. She was cursed with poor taste in most things. I knew her mostly by the sound of keys jingling at the door lock after I had put us all to bed. By the smell of coffee and cream that seeped up from the kitchen early mornings before she left. By the little notes she left on fridges and countertops and bathroom mirrors that parented us and told us where we could grab some cash for things like bread, milk, and toothpaste. But I mostly remember her from our Thursday dinners.

For most of her life, she worked in kitchens. A habit I believe genetic. Mornings she worked as a diner cook where the seats were sticky and cold and bacon grease stained the ceiling panels. In the evenings my mother moonlighted as a garde manger at Elto’s.

Elto’s was soft inside, as if it’d melt if our hands held it. The ceiling was painted with episodic tales and myths from Greek history. Gods and men dancing above you, smiling and smiting you. There was a piano player with hands small and velvet. People dressed in shiny hair and shiny shoes. The servers were pearl and ivory and smiled with their mouths instead of their eyes.

Thursdays she took off from everything, it was a sacred and holy day in our household. She woke us up with hot breakfast; it was sopped in butter and topped with honey. She would then pile her hair on top of her head, throw on a tote bag, slide into worn sneakers, and head downtown to the markets. She would take out a crumpled sticky note scrawled on half-mindedly by the head chef at Elto’s and walk the docks for hours looking for ingredients from her favorite special of the week before.

When she got home, she rushed inside with baskets and bags and threw them onto the kitchen counter. She turned off the air conditioning and opened the windows and put one of her favorite records on, something old and swinging, and cranked the volume till it shook the doors and rattled our brains. The house would breathe, and city sounds sauntered down the hallways. For hours she danced around the kitchen, floating above the old tiles, sipping on her boiling bisque or chewing mouse bites off a fresh radish or rolling rye dough with flour dusting her eyebrows. We were never allowed to help.

At a certain time of night, after we should have been in bed, she would knock on the stairs with a broom handle. We’d race down the stairs, often piling up at the landing and shoving each other to the ground because the first one to sit down was able to pick the radio station or record we listened to during dinner. I picked Elvis, always. I usually won too, because I could hear the sounds coming up from the kitchen and listen for the door hinge squeak of the china cabinet and prep myself to bolt to the door.

When we were all sat, she’d turn the music down and walk over to the head of the table. “Thank you, messieurs and madame for joining me tonight, Thursday, the most holy of nights, to venture taste buds first in a culinary expedition to….” Most nights it was Mediterranean food, as Elto’s was. But every few weeks we would explore the north of France or the British Isles. A few times we went to Spain. My favorite destination was Puget Sound, off the Washington coast where we discovered Henderson Bay oysters.

She opened them up and garnished them half-shell with rosé mignonette and a sliver of celery. My tongue bounced around my mouth searching for every bit of flavor left hanging. It tasted like sea foam and sliced cucumbers. It tasted like hiking along a rocky shore, my brother and sister fighting over smooth stones to skip and my mom smoking a joint behind us. It tasted like living in a new city with seagull sounds and salty air where mom’s boyfriends didn’t have our address. It tasted like melons and moss. It tasted like a smile, a smile deep set within the eyes.

I try to think about her sometimes. I try not to think about her head down on the dining room table asleep with bills piled around and a vodka bottle open on the counter. I try not to think about Tim or Matt or Stefan or Justin. I try not to think about her skin and how it sagged around her eyes as we grew older. I try not to think about how we piled up in one bedroom in the winter so we could share the oil heater. I try not to think about the needles I found tucked behind her nightstand. I try to think of her as Thursdays.

Selena

or Prosciutto and Provolone Stuffed Arancini

I mostly only remember heat above and below me. That’s how I’d describe Italy. Smoke rising from the restaurant below our apartment. Furnaces and stovetops boiling and bubbling the misty air that choked us during classes. Peppercorn-colored roads baked our bodies as we ran to classrooms below kitchens. Simmering sand that scorched the arches of our feet and the spaces between our toes.

I was only there for a few moments that stretched and warped into months. Culinary school for me was a wonderful waste. It was sultry and sweet but meandering. It passed through me, leaving only the taste of cheese and wine, and of late nights with bad people who promised good things. Time forgets to wake you when you never sleep.

I only remember one recipe from my months in Italy, prosciutto and provolone-stuffed arancini. More than that I remember the lips of the woman who taught me how to make them. They were red like stop signs, red like tomatoes, red like sunsets. We were a fury. A flashing fleeting moment of gasping and weeping and laughing. We never believed in the picket fence or bassinet, but we did dream of a four-bay oven, a stovetop with a griddle and ten burners, two fridges, and a root cellar below the back patio.

She was another student. A better student. One with notebooks and pens and tattered textbooks. I dropped out the day after she taught me how to make arancini in her grandmother’s kitchen. We were off from school that day. A piece of notepaper was taped to the school’s front door, Stanco. Vieni domani. We caught a taxi out of the city to her Nonna’s place along the coast, near Portofino.

When I try to think of that house, I think of pale pink plaster and the tiled counter where she and I hunched over her family cookbook. The heat of the midday sun had refused to leave and forced its way through the wooden window slats. We sliced the prosciutto, grated the provolone, rolled them up into the risotto, crusted them with breadcrumbs and egg, and dropped them into the oil to fry. I studied the way she spoke about the food, the way her nose squinched when she tasted each ingredient, the way her lips lingered on each word and each bite. After they finished, we plated the arancini over a bed of tomato basil sauce and took them out to the loggia where we talked and ate out of earshot of her Nonna.

She talked about food and why she loved pebble beaches more than sand. As she spoke, I fell further and deeper into myself; I loved her. And I would have to leave. After we finished our meal we drove back to the city and chased each other up to her bedroom. We only left for water and wine. I should’ve never gone into that bedroom. We lost ourselves. We were red and lace and velvet. Every touch, every kiss, was heavy, lingering. We were in those moments the most beautiful and whole we had ever been. I should’ve left us after a cold argument where we both knew we’d never last. Instead, I left the morning after, heat from the early morning sun peeping in through the open bedroom window. I left her when we were warm and red.

I left two notes, one for the landlord tucked under the next month’s rent, and one in the school’s mailbox. I caught the next flight home.

Neptune

or Hokkaido Scallop Crudo topped with White Sturgeon Caviar

I apprenticed for two years under a tyrant. It was a small restaurant along the Washington coast. The name of the restaurant doesn’t matter. It was steel. Steel tables, steel ovens, steel fridges, steel knives, steel bowls, steel walls, steel tablets, steel faces, steel credit cards. Even the food tasted like steel, too precise, too intentional. We were cogs in a small clock with bent hands. I’m grateful for the technical skills I acquired, but the cost was my mind. The tyrant was cold and unyielding, every ingredient meticulously measured. We learned to avoid his attention, hide behind his recipes, fade into obscurity below his ego.

There was only one moment of passion for me there— one moment I can look to and smile. One Saturday morning a cold front slid down from the mountains and collided with a warm front coming in off the ocean. The result was a nightmare storm, something apocryphal. Trees were uprooted and flushed down streets. Shingles were ripped from rooftops. Cars and bicycles and buses were picked up by the waves and whisked away to sea.

The small restaurant we worked at was tucked away on a private resort. The restaurant, open to the public but horribly exclusive. We catered to Forbes lists, people nobody could name, but everybody knew. Due to the hurricane roaring down the shoreline, they put the three of us apprentices up in one of the lodge buildings on campus. They closed the restaurant for three days and gave us most of the perishable food, a small generator, a box of old candles, and some booze.

The building they sheltered us in was called the Neptune. It was new, concrete, and brutalist. It was built a few years before as a makeshift bunker for the family who owned the resort, in case their Cold War fears actualized, and Russia sent over the big one. There was no smell in Neptune. The walls and floors were bare, what little furniture there was clung to the center of the large rooms, huddled together for warmth. At night, when the storms worsened, lightning flashes illuminated the walls, absorbing all light. Neptune had swallowed us whole, and we were damned to live out the rest of our lives in his stomach.

During the day we contented ourselves with board games, books, and cards. I realize now how imperative it is to think of such things when stocking a survival bunker. Neptune’s library only stocked three authors, Hemingway, Kafka, and L. Ron Hubbard. I was never much of a reader. Hemingway was boring, ranting on about dick problems and alcohol-fueled hunting accidents. I didn’t like Kafka, not because he was boring, I just didn’t understand him. L. Ron Hubbard stole me away by his cover images of women in dresses screaming for help or men in raincoats holding magnifying glasses. He seemed tolerable until I read Dianetics.

We passed the time like this. For breakfast and lunch, we scrounged around the food stores, making whatever was quick and cold: peanut butter and jellies, turkey and cheddar sandwiches, granola and yogurt. We saved the generator for nights. Each night, one of us would prepare a meal for the others. Whatever we prepared had to be something original, untouched by family, other restaurants, or the tyrant. I don’t remember what the other two did. I think one of them made some type of bisque, I just remember it being warm and savory. I went on the third day.

By this time, most of the storm had blown away down the coast to terrorize northern California. In Neptune’s kitchen, there was an enormous three-paned window wall that opened to a stretch of sand and slate and evergreen trees; beyond this, there was a rocky cliffside towering a hundred feet or so over the waves that broke against its base. I walked out across the sandbar to the cliffside. The wind howling up from the sea was vicious, nearly toppling me over several times. I grabbed onto a tree near the edge of the cliff and peered over. Trapped in the waves below, pierced upon a rock, and spread open, flesh spilling out, was a whale carcass. Little black ravens beaded the white flesh and blubber, picking at the pale and pink strands of meat and fat. Seaweed floated atop the water, getting caught on the jagged edges along the cliff. Scattered amongst the scene was debris from above. Young and tawny trees and enormous evergreen branches tossed about the waves, pushed in towards the cliff, and then pulled out back to the sea until they were caught amongst the rocks that peaked out from the water.

On the wind, I could taste it. The soft and savory flesh of the whale. The sea brine that carried it. The complex notes of the raven. The alkaline seaweed, and the earthy musk of the evergreen branches. The first dish I would ever think to call mine. I ran back along the sandbar trying to think about all the ingredients we had stored in Neptune’s kitchen.

I pinballed around the kitchen, acting fast and blind. I thinly sliced some Hokkaido scallops into a crudo and cured them with lemon. I dotted and drizzled pesto and olive oil around the plate and along the scallops. I opened a jar of white sturgeon caviar and built a nest of it in the middle of the crudo. To garnish I grabbed a healthy handful of microgreens and scattered them along the plate. I called the other two in and set the table. I stood at the head of the table and detailed the wreckage that sat before them served on deep blue plates.

Vanilla

or Smoked Duck served with Rosemary Polenta and Roasted Carrots

Most things are uninspired. The vibrancy of a color doesn’t dictate its beauty. Sometimes a meal is a meal. Vanilla is a necessary flavor. What I mean is that life should not be forced to change itself for our lack of patience. When we prepare meals, we often use bread to bookend flavor, crackers to carry flavor up on their backs, and rice to soak and sop up the flavor so that it might become more subtle and tolerable.

I sleep around the same time most nights. I watch television shows slowly, one every other night. I walk my dogs every morning at nine o’clock. I am no longer a young chef who fights hurricanes for inspiration. I pay my taxes. I drive the same route to work nearly every day because I appreciate its consistency. I look at green yards well-trimmed and dressed moderately, and I nod my head and purse my lips in approval. I scroll through news articles on my phone; I read the headlines nearly every day. I form opinions on things like HOAs and washing machines. Samsung is probably my favorite. Maybe Maytag. I look forward to jury duty for the free meal at the Mexican restaurant beside the courthouse. I drink decaf coffee. I play golf on weekends, with my doctor, whom I visit often, for sprains and strains I got from sleeping with the wrong pillow. I have recently wondered if I should build model ships in bottles. I want a study. I don’t study. I want one so that I can say that I have one. I have no idea what to do in a study. But when my doctor shows me his study, tucked away between the bathroom and kitchen, previously his kid’s bedroom who left for college three years ago, I nod along, and dream of having my own, so I can invite my doctor over to see mine, and see him nod along.

The other day I spent three hours watching a two-part Civil War documentary. I drink Pepto before my whiskeys. I don’t like bars. Bars are loud and smell like desperation and hormones. There are bars for people like me, quiet ones, with big TVs that show two different news channels, and the only sports on are ones where people sit, like Nascar. I bought an umbrella the other day. I have two others. I just liked this one, the hand grip felt more comfortable than the ones I have. I shop for flashlights based on their lumens. I recommend hotels to people. People I am meeting for the first time.

Often these people seek me out to talk to me about other things. Chaotic things. The food on menus I made years ago. They tell me how beautiful the plates look, and how amazed they are that every bite requires effort. Compliments to the wrong chef. They look at me and see hurricanes. They want to see me this way, a mad scientist, plagued by my genius. They like the way foreign ingredients sound in their mouths. I smile with my mouth instead of my eyes.

Last month I added smoked duck to the menu. Served beside it are rosemary polenta and whole roasted carrots. They are sensibly sat upon each other on the plate. When I look out over the dining room, I can spot the people who will order it before they realize they are going to. They walk in the restaurant with sensible shoes, classy, but comfortable. They talk about portfolios. They complain about how long it took to park. They order the glass of wine they had that one time in that one restaurant. They fall asleep in movie theaters. They talk politics, loud and unyielding.

We once skinny-dipped on Italian beaches. Now we wear sunhats in Florida. Meat and starch. We’re smooth. Vanilla. Every flavor is perfect but contained. There isn’t a meaning in the arrangement of sauce droplets. It tastes like chimney smoke. You are not consumed by the mouth feel. It’s stone-ground grains and earth. Each bite takes you home. Not the home you want yours to be, the home it is.

Coffin

or Dark Chocolate Espresso Crème Brûlée

Everything we know will collapse in on itself. Structures unable to hold their own weight. It will be swift and brutal and sweet. Sweet like cough syrup. A violent collision with ourselves. Memories towered high in our minds reduced to melted beams and our families gathered around pleading for revenge, for answers. I will one day write a cookbook. In it will be everything I have ever made. Each recipe will reflect a piece of me baked at 350 degrees. At the end of the book, there will be nothing but honey and cane sugar and licorice. Below them biting and gnawing will lie bitter beans full of acid.

I don’t think I’ll ever move to Florida, open up that shack along the beach. This restaurant I poured myself into will melt away. My last breath won’t be sea salt and brine. It will be sugar. This building will crush me. I’ll consume myself with my own spoons, bought for presentation. This is not a sad affair. No! This, to me, is justice. Fate? I have been lucky enough to live in my coffin for years. Painting its innards. Hanging expensive mirrors and fancy foreign paintings of cliffs and Italian cities held in place by cheap wood frames gold-dusted.

A few weeks ago, I was offered several million dollars for the restaurant. Coffin. If I had a son I’d ask him about it. We’d look at retirement villages. In Florida. Along the beach. Where they’d let me have my fish fry shack. It’s going to be experimental.

But I don’t have a son. I have a pastry chef. We talked about dessert that night. I told him tonight was special and I asked him for something unique that he’d been working on and he opened his book and pointed to a crème brûlée made with espresso and dark chocolate. While he prepared it for me, I told him about the deal. The millions. The fry shack. I told him how I declined the offer.

He told me I was foolish. That I’d die here surrounded by caviar, picked on by the ravens. But I knew that.

I knew this place would undo me when I signed the lease, during the hurricane as the winds picked me up and threw me down, in Italy when I looked at her and only saw myself in her eyes, at the table with my mother as her skin grew sallow and we ate like kings while Elvis crooned. I am a fool, I said. An addict. A glutton. He sprinkled sugar over the crème, flicked his torch on, and scorched the sugar till it crystalized. He slid the bowl over to me, handed me a spoon, and said, “Then eat.”