Lazy

Seattle boasted many restaurants, all clamoring for something to make them stand out. Garish decor, inane themes, celebrity chefs. In an alley near Pike’s Place stood the restaurant whose star power every other cheap-cologne-pseudo-entrepreneur was desperate to emulate. It was unpretentious, clean, neat. The lighting was that of a 1920s piano lounge, and the velvet walls seemed classy when paired with the glittering necks of the socialites that dined there and the immaculately clean tablecloths. The food was good. Really fucking good. And if you were lucky, you’d see her. The head chef of Baiser seemed wonderfully out of place in her own restaurant, a rocker chick stuck in a New Years Eve party her parents had dragged her along to. She’d been pierced symmetrically, her face a studded minefield that would make a metal detector shriek with glee. Both eyebrows were pierced, as were both nostrils and lips. (Though she wasn’t technically allowed to do this, she took them out when the health inspector came around.) She had a tattoo for every kitchen she’d worked in, and an ominous set of tally marks on the inside of her right wrist. When asked what they were for, she’d say “every line cook I’ve gifted with a mental breakdown.” Her head was shaved and her eyes were a disturbingly light brown, the color of bugs frozen in amber. The waitstaff were terrified of her. Her cooks loved her, and she made a mean meringue. All the delicacy she lacked with humans was channeled into her work, with great success. You didn’t get a goddamn Michelin star by being lazy. 

Lazy. That’s the word that circled her brain in Wall Street ticker tape as she watched Pierre’s waitstaff circle the room. It made her think of water parks, the gigantic ring of piss-diluted chlorine where people languished in innertubes. She hated front-of-house at the best of times, the way they pranced like show ponies and pocketed tips without a second thought. And this was not the best of times. In the minute she spent scanning the dining room, she could see sloppy pours, leaning, bad posture, and the slow ambling service of waiters too comfortable with their jobs. As if that weren’t bad enough, she caught five stains, three uncuffed shirts, and one illegally kept trashy necklace. It was one of those astrology charmed things in an atrocious rose gold, and it made her blood boil. She watched it fall out of the crisp white shirt as the girl leaned over to point something out on the menu, and snapped a pencil.

She told Pierre her plan after they closed, and the two of them were sharing their traditional glass of wine at the last table to put its chairs up. It was almost 2am, and Pierre sniffed the wine an extra time before taking another sip, just to test it wasn’t rancid and he wasn’t hallucinating. 

“You want to do what?” he asked.

Dominique leaned back in her chair. “You heard me,” she said. “I want your waitstaff to cook.”

“That’s suicide.”

She shrugged. “We’ll market it as an experiment. A publicity stunt.”

Pierre took a bigger gulp of his Carménère than he’d intended to and coughed slightly.

Dom leaned forward, her bug-in-amber eyes glinting mischievously. “Performance art.”

The announcement was made two weeks in advance. All existing reservations that wished to cancel were politely redirected to an off-season night a month later, and the preparations began. All members of the former waitstaff were enlisted in a two week intensive (paid, naturally), and spent at least one night shadowing in the kitchen. Dom would stay in the kitchen on the fateful night, as would her sous and one of the veterans of Dom’s reign. The rest of the cooks would become waitstaff, assisted by Pierre. The menu was planned the day of the announcement, and each day of the intensive the deer-in-headlight waitstaff would prepare, re-prepare, scrap, and re-re-prepare every dish. 

None of this, of course, could give any of the front-of-house employees any indication of the nightmare of actually cooking in Dominique Gauthier’s kitchen. She did not teach the intensive, nor were any of them expected to answer to her while shadowing. They washed vegetables, filled pots with water, grabbed spices, anything that wouldn’t catastrophically ruin a meal. Even being in the periphery of Dom’s vision was terrifying, though. She stood at the end of the two longest counters, the cold steel seeming almost to be an extension of her body, cousins of the metal in her face. Her arms were folded, her lips pursed, her eyes watchful. She could catch a mistake milliseconds after it happened, and before the culprit could even recognize their own actions the dish would be in the trash. Sometimes she explained what it was, sometimes not.

She prepared all of the desserts herself, and a few of the key dishes. If she yelled instructions at you, it was infinitely better than when she’d glide over to you and murmur in your ear, almost too quiet to hear. The things she said under the clatter of utensils and bustle of activity were the things that made you cry. None of the waitstaff lurking in the two-week preparation ever caught even the shrapnel of her wrath, and Pierre suspected she was saving it for the fateful night itself. He was right.

The night of nights was a Tuesday. An unassuming but slightly hot Tuesday in midsummer, that left most of the employees reapplying a layer of deodorant before stepping into the kitchen where Pierre and Dominique waited for them. The kitchen staff stood to one side, dressed in stiff white dress shirts and pleated black slacks, looking concerningly like a group of parolees interviewing for a job they weren’t expecting to get. Tattoos crept out from long sleeves and peeked from starched collars, but the chefs looked solemn, ready for war. The waitstaff pseudo-chefs stood on the other side of the kitchen, quaking in their non-slip shoes.

Dominique and Pierre stood side-by-side between the two factions, stone faced generals staring down certain defeat.

“Tonight will be a shitshow, guaranteed,” Pierre said, a twinge of carefully shoved down nerves slipping into his words. Beside him, Dominique could barely conceal her delight at the prospect. 

“There is a ridiculous amount of pressure on all of you,” Pierre continued. “You will be out of your comfort zones. And yet, you’ll be fine. We’ve prepared for this. And besides, you work in food service. The devil himself could make a reservation and you’d come out victorious.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you haven’t already served him,” Dom added.

A ripple of nervous laughter came from the pseudo-chefs.

“The menu tonight is simple,” Dom said. “Salad or soup appetizers, three entrees, a few simple desserts. The customers know what they’ve signed up for, and they shouldn’t be expecting rocket science. That said, let’s give it to them anyways.”

She clapped, and the assembled teams dispersed. 

Kitchen

Céline was usually in charge of the secluded corner frequented by the regulars, her little kingdom spanning a few tables while her influence extended throughout the restaurant. She was tall, Moroccan, her voice pleasantly tinged with a French accent and her face dotted with beauty marks. During the two week intensive, Dom blind tasted a sample of each pseudo-chef’s cooking, and determined Céline would prepare the more difficult dishes. Granted, in French cuisine, every dish is a “more difficult” dish. Dom’s insistence that Baiser’s menu was simple was a lie, at best. No home cook could be ready to prepare her strange bastardizations of French classics.

The soup was a spiced French onion, stewed for five hours then baked in a massive cast-iron pot before serving. Caramelizing the onions alone took forty minutes, and many of the pseudo-chefs had proven they were incapable of cooking with brandy. The salad was salade landaise et périgourdine, a duck salad that combined two more common dishes in a complex dance of flavor. As for the entrees, they were similarly elaborate, containing processes of cooking with names in French and frenetic activity that had resulted in more than one burn scar during the intensive. The hardest thing for most of the chefs was cooking multiple things simultaneously; as much multitasking as being a server was, none of your tables caught on fire if you left them alone too long.

Céline had proven to be adept at preparing the meat for the salade, as well as the trickier aspects of the French onion soup. While many of the pseudo-chefs sweated through their aprons doing prep work or assembling the dishes, Céline took her place of honor by the side of the sous. Together, they were a whirl of activity, the stove a burbling, bubbling cluster of happy sauces, soups, and sizzling pans of onion. The oven wafted scents of fresh bread, baked earlier in the day, being re-toasted with layers of cheese, chili pepper, and herbs.

Table 12

The hedge fund manager and his spoiled kids sat primly in their seats, a stock photo of perfect posture. The son’s black hair was in a combover almost identical to that of his father’s, greasy and glinting with pomade and gel, and the daughter’s curls left a smell of flat-iron burnt hair in the observer's nostrils. A mother, wife, stepmother, or even girlfriend was nowhere to be seen. Children didn’t often frequent Baiser, but by looking at the family one could tell this man wasn’t exactly an every-weekend father.

“None of this is edible,” The young Mr. Brand said, slapping down the menu.

“It’s haute cuisine,” replied his sister, using the phlegm-filled pretension she’d learned in level 3 French.

Just then, their waiter appeared. (Not that any of the members of the Brand family registered that the burly Chilean ex-rugby player towering over the table was their waiter.) Miguel dwarfed the little notepad in his palm, but despite his appearance, his delicacy with a paring knife was unmatched, and he held the pen with the same care. Mr. Brand looked up at Miguel and scowled.

“What the hell’s going on in here?” he asked.

Miguel smiled. “You don’t know?”

“Clearly not,” Mr. Brand answered, simmering.

Miguel clicked the pen with his massive thumb. “Tonight, dear sir, the waitstaff has switched with the kitchen. My name is Miguel. Normally, I’m the chef de partie in charge of fish and meat.”

“Then what the hell are you doing out of the kitchen?”

Miguel carefully placed the pen back on the notepad. “I’ll give you some more time with the menu. My recommendation is the lamb.” 

Kitchen

“Behind!” One of the pseudo-chefs, his voice barely more powerful than a squeak, scuttled through the kitchen, balancing two plates per arm.

He squeezed past a mousy girl who’d managed to wear her astrology necklace again, this time tucked beneath her apron. She’d caught Pierre’s arm and was digging her nails into his sleeve. “Can’t we have a break?” she whined. “We’ve been working nonstop since before we opened. Hours before we opened.”

Pierre shrugged. “Take it up with Dom.”

The girl shrank several inches and skittered back to her station.

“You!” The voice rang out across the kitchen, over the bustle, the scraping of utensils, the shouts and burbling pots. It almost made everything, everyone, screech to a halt. It was the one voice you never wanted to hear. Everyone looked up except for Terry, afraid Dom’s finger was pointed at them. Naturally, Terry was the one Dom was pointing at. He was nudged by his neighbor and looked up. 

“I don’t care whatever the hell you think you’re doing. Just stop doing it and go help Céline. You’re making Table 12’s lamb.”

Pierre, who had noted the family at Table 12 with apprehension, shot Dom a nervous look. Dom waved him off, and her finger swiveled from Terry to Céline, who was preparing a set of stuffed tomatoes for the table of reporters that had happily lapped up a dropped reservation. Terry’s neighbor shoved him towards her and turned back to her own salad dressing, her hands shaking slightly. The rest of the kitchen similarly returned to their tasks. Terry attempted to turn the shove into a strut, and waltzed up to Céline’s elbow. 

“Hi,” he said.

She didn’t look up.

“You’re very good at this,” he added.

Instead of responding, she opened the oven and slid in the tray of tomatoes.

Terry refused to give up. “But I mean, if a rat can do it, how hard can it be?”

Finally, she looked at him, frowning ever so slightly.

“Ratatouille,” Terry clarified.

“Ah,” Céline said. “The one with the little Parisian rat.”

“Exactly,” he said, then echoed her words back to her, attempting to mimic her accent. It sounded like Pepe Le Pew, and his words got scrambled in his mouth, half swallowed and half spit. Ze leetle puhreezeean rat.

“I think I would rather cook with the rat,” she replied.

Table 12

Mr. Brand ordered the most expensive entree. His daughter opted for the stuffed tomatoes she saw the journalists eating, and Junior was the one who took Miguel’s recommendation of the lamb. Mr. Brand had an expensive glass of wine, and the children pretended to enjoy the sour rosemary ginger mocktails they thought would make them feel like adults. Miguel, for his part, was really trying his best. When the entrees came, he remembered who had ordered what, and managed to nudge aside the silverware without knocking it off the table. Once the plates were placed, he disappeared. At least until Junior took his first bite.

“This is disgusting,” he said, spitting it back out onto the plate to prove his point.

His father didn’t hesitate. Mr. Brand snapped his fingers, and Miguel ambled over to the table, attempting to plaster on a customer service smile long rusted through.

“I want to see the chef who made this.”

“I’m sorry sir, we don’t do that here. The chef is busy. I can pass along my compliments, if you like.”

“It’s not compliments I want to convey,” Mr. Brand said icily. “I want to shove my shoe so far up your cook’s ass he can taste his own shitty cooking.”

Kitchen

“Chef? Table 12 wants to complain.”

Pierre, a man horribly disappointed to be right, collapsed into himself. He respected Terry as a waiter but the kid hadn’t exactly impressed him during the intensive, and Mr. Brand looked like a man itching to cause a scene. Why Dom had assigned Terry to work with Céline, and on Mr. Brand’s meal, Pierre would never understand. Dom lay a hand on his arm.

“Then send Céline,” she said. “Oh. And Terry, I suppose.”

Table 12

Céline exited the kitchen gracefully, but a close observer could see the impatience in her stride. Only a close observer, though: the woman was back in her element, and could handle a situation like this with ease. She and Terry made their way to Table 12, pretending they couldn’t see the entire room following them with curious eyes.

Mr. Brand wasted no time with pleasantries. “You fucked up the lamb.”

Céline took a small breath, and allowed years of customer service scripts to take the wheel. “My apologies, sir. It breaks my heart to not live up to your standards, and I would be happy to rectify the situation with the utmost haste.” She finished her sentence with a small smile.

Junior positively swooned. “Never mind,” he said. “Forget it, Dad. It’s perfect.”

His father was not nearly so forgiving. He started by attempting to yell at Miguel again, but after it became clear that his pummeling words were making no impact on the brick wall, he turned to Terry. Not only did he put Terry through the ringer, he put him through the washing machine on “soil,” wrung him out and hung him on the line with the clothespins on his balls.

Terry took the battering with his chin high, but the moment he pushed his way back into the kitchen, he found Dom. He grabbed her sleeve and attempted to yank her aside. She didn’t budge, and her eyes flicked down to his grip with an impassive glance.

“Why the fuck would you do this? Why would you set all of us up to fail?”

She brushed Terry off of her and crossed her arms. “You're used to being yelled at.”

“Not about things I’ve made! Not about things that I should never have been making in the first place.”

The rest of the kitchen pretended not to be listening in, but sauces were stirred a little more slowly and vegetables were cut with a little less precision. Pierre reappeared, and shooed everyone off. He glanced at Dom, who shook her head. Terry continued to fume.

“Why would you ever let him stay if he wasn’t aware of your little stunt?” he demanded. “Why wouldn’t you have Miguel offer him a new reservation, send him off with apologies and a bottle of wine?”

“Do I seem like someone who would have anything to do with apologies?”

Terry reeled like he’d just been slapped. “That’s not the point. With a stunt like this, you should have been more careful. You should have the whole thing under control.”

“Oh, I had everything completely under control. I wanted to make sure Mr. Brand had no idea what was happening.” The grin on Dominique’s face would have put piranhas to shame. “Then I gave an incompetent cook the reins on an important dish. What fun is performance art without a little performance?”