Page 13

FAMILY MEAL

SIX MONTHS LATER, grey city snow slushed into sewer grates, string lights twinkled from every retail display, and Konstantin grew quietly desperate for burns.

Getting burned would mean that he was working the grill or sauté or even the fryer, for crying out loud. That he stood an actual chance of accumulating oozing blisters and shiny scars up and down his arms, the kind of badass injuries real chefs wore like badges before tattooing them over with expensive, elaborate sleeves. It would mean that he was cooking with fire.

But Kostya was stuck on garde-manger—the salad station!—and the only thing that could burn him there (maybe?) was ghost pepper oil, though even that would only be able to eat away at him from within—something his insecurities already had well in hand.

He knew he should feel proud of what he’d accomplished, and grateful three times over. And he did, for the most part. To make it to a station—any station—at a place like Saveur Fare, with zero culinary cred and well under a year on the job, was almost unheard of. He’d gotten lucky—absurdly lucky. One of the busboys had quit his first week, and Kostya stepped in to pull doubles, bussing at lunch and then doing dishes at dinner, which turned into bussing at both, and then a stint on the finishing station, and on to garde-manger. Michel hadn’t exactly taken him under his wing, but his sous, Tony, had seen something in Kostya, an eagerness he’d liked enough to let him learn.

Whenever there were quiet moments—early in the morning, before service; late into the night, after the last table left—Tony would teach Kostya technique. How to hold a knife. How to start a stock. How to see if a pan was hot enough to sear but not scorch. While he washed dishes, bussed tables, did any and every menial task—scrubbing the burnt layers of pans till his knuckles bled; carrying fifty-pound crates of shallots down into the cellar; shoving his arm pit-deep behind the walk-in to clear a decades-old air filter—Kostya watched the men and women around him, and took copious mental notes. At night, he practiced what he’d seen them do—how they tasted and adjusted their sauces; how they butchered and broke down meat; how they organized their stations; the confidence with which their fingertips seasoned, sautéed, and served.

He worked himself to the bone most days. He came in early and left late, with barely enough time between to go home, shower, and change before heading back for another shift. His only day off was Monday, when the restaurant was closed, and most Mondays he spent in the kitchen at Saveur anyway, watching Tony and Michel debate the menu, sample the week’s produce, and talk shit about the soms.

Every minute he spent at the restaurant, each time he learned a new cooking method or honed a new skill, Kostya could almost feel the possibility of seeing his dad draw closer. Whenever he got an aftertaste now, he’d test himself, making mental notes about the flavors and textures and techniques he thought had gone into the dish, and trying them out later, when the Saveur Fare kitchen was abandoned to his own private ghost laboratory.

He hadn’t actually summoned a spirit since that night at The Library, but Kostya suspected that had more to do with the other factors—the deceased’s presence and the intermediary who needed to eat the food—than it did with his cooking. He figured that, in his dad’s case, he could do the tasting himself, provided his father ever showed up again with that liver. Though the odds of a repeat taste didn’t seem quite so hopeless now, not after that night with all the Reese’s.

He wished he could go back there, to Seyoncé, and face the psychic again. Show Madame Everleigh how wrong she’d been, not just about the aftertastes, but about him. He thought about it a lot. About her. About how gorgeous she was, and how mean. About her warnings. About what he should have said. What he might say now.

He was different; Saveur had seasoned him. Every minute he spent in the kitchen made him feel like he’d found something he hadn’t known he’d lost. He woke up buzzing. He liked coming to work. So much that it barely felt like work at all. He liked the chefs and the line cooks and the front-of-housers, even if they didn’t always like him. He liked the scrupulous kitchen, the way everything had its place. He liked how hauling crates and being on his feet and sweating in the kitchen heat made his body feel. He liked working with the ingredients, learning the seasons by the harvests they yielded, the treasures he unpacked. He worshipped the food.

Sometimes, inspired, he’d experiment with variations on the house specialties, swapping sauces or modifying ingredients. He found he had a gift for knowing which flavors to pair, for intuiting how textures and notes and even the shapes of foods would combine in an excited mouth. And while he’d never dream of feeding the fruits of his labors to any of the staff, he thought, by and large, that his edits had improved their dishes. It wasn’t that he thought he was a better cook, or that his measly months of kitchen drudgery outweighed their years of experience and toil. It was just that he thought he was a better taster than everyone there—Michel included.

Sometimes he’d even forget himself and toss unsolicited suggestions out to the kitchen floor. Mostly, this was met with vitriol. But once, Henri’s—the saucier’s—consternation changed to a look of surprised consideration when Kostya suggested lemon juice to resurrect a forgotten reduction that’d boiled into sludge. Another time, when Tony was swamped with a private party, he had Kostya finish his plates before sending them out to the dining room. And the sommeliers, who had a reliable hate-hate relationship with the line, found Kostya refreshingly approachable, took to shooting the shit with him after hours, and even occasionally solicited his opinions on food pairings. Even Michel—from whom he had about as much chance of extracting a compliment as he did of finding a pearl in a raw-bar oyster—had been caught actually smiling as he watched Konstantin work.

But all that still didn’t change the fact that he didn’t have any formal training and no one at Saveur was going to let him forget it. The kitchen was stacked with school snobs, which wasn’t much of a surprise, since the fish stunk from the head. Michel (Le Cordon Bleu, ’96) was notoriously nepotistic, and though he’d espouse egalitarian views about hiring the hardest-working chefs regardless of pedigree in interviews and glossy spreads from Bon Appétit to Zagat , the vast majority of his kitchen came straight from fancy schools and fancier apprenticeships. Still, even with the CIA or Le Cordon Bleu or ICE behind them, Kostya’s colleagues couldn’t do a lot of what he could. Decades of ghost tasting had trained his tongue better than their big degrees ever could.

All of which is to say, it came as both a surprise and not a surprise when Michel asked to speak with him before dinner service the Thursday before Christmas.

Kostya’s hands got clammy on the walk over to his office. He barely ever went down this administrative hallway; he hadn’t, in fact, stepped foot on the Moroccan floor tile since he’d first filled out his employment paperwork. His mind hummed with energy, speculating. Kostya could be getting fired. Promoted. Invited to an exclusive restaurant orgy. Framed for murder. Nominated to represent Saveur Fare as a marathon runner. His body sold to a science convention to pay for truffles by the pound.

He opened the door.

“Konstantin. Good. Come in. Sit.”

Michel looked years older than the last time they’d sat in this office, and decidedly pissed about something.

“Uh, thanks. Merci , Chef.”

His French sounded like he was asking for mercy, which, well , he wasn’t not. Kostya swallowed and sat.

“I’ll keep this brief since service is about to begin. I need a favor.” Michel pinched a tiny speck of lint from his chef’s coat and flicked it to the floor. “Henri’s sister is getting married on Saturday” (uttered with the air of discussing something decidedly perverse), “and he begged off a year ago for the wedding” (as if this were a first-degree crime), “which means we don’t have anyone making sauces that night…” (this with a sort of hopeful despondence).

“But Saturday’s the Gild,” objected Kostya, and Michel gave a small smile, pleased that he appreciated the seriousness of the situation.

Saturday, the restaurant would be shutting down for the private party to end all private parties—Bouche de Noel, the annual, by-invitation-only Christmas bash hosted by Gild, the restaurant group that owned Saveur Fare and Tutankhamen and a dozen other impressive New York institutions. The guest list was always a who’s who of New York’s culinary elite, plus the rich and famous who liked to rub elbows with them. Each year, Gild tapped one of their restaurants to host the soiree, and though it was an absolute pain in the ass of a night for the staff, it also guaranteed Gild’s generous financial support—big, fat, year-making bonuses—provided it went off without a hitch.

Because it was such an important night, Michel had called in several artisans—a sugar sculptor, a wild-game huntsman, a guy who planted pearls inside edible oysters—as well as tightening his already prong-like grip on his regular kitchen staff. Kostya was supposed to tag-team salad and cold appetizers with Fernando, with Tony running sauté, Francois on grill, and Henri razzle-dazzling everybody with the new sauces he’d been concocting. Kostya had watched him prep for the better part of a week, sticking teeny-tiny tasting spoons into goop of every imaginable color and shade and making micro-adjustments to the tune of five grains of salt or a single turn of the pepper mill. And now he didn’t understand how no one had planned ahead, or what, exactly, Michel expected him to do.

“So, what’s the favor?”

Michel blinked rapidly.

“It appears that the gravity of Saturday isn’t lost on you. Good. Fortunately, Henri is wrapping on his sauce plan and is going to prep everything we need before he goes. It should be a simple plug-and-play, but—just in case—I’d like you on saucier.”

Kostya swallowed a throat lump so large he thought he might have ingested his Adam’s apple.

“Me?”

“You’ve impressed me. I was sure you wouldn’t, but you did. I’d like to give you this opportunity to rise to the occasion. I’ll arrange for Henri to brief you tomorrow.”

“Wow. Yes. Of course! Thank you, Chef. I won’t let you down.”

THE NIGHT OF the party, Kostya took over saucier, Fernando worked salads solo (with a visible chip on his shoulder), and Michel made rounds in the dining room in his chef’s whites, occasionally popping his head in to give them play-by-plays or hiss at them to hurry it up.

Henri had left seven pages of meticulous notes in minuscule slant; if anyone was going down for a sauce-related snafu, it wouldn’t be him. But what Michel had described as a simple plug-and-play was nothing of the sort. There were myriad dishes presented as bites to create the desired cocktail atmosphere, each with its own accompanying sauce, some with modifications for food allergies, general aversions, et cetera, et cetera, and enough variation in the flavors that mixing up one sauce with another could be damning.

If he weren’t thoroughly convinced that Michel had no sense of humor, Kostya would have wondered if this was his idea of a joke.

Things went smoothly through the cocktail hour, thousands of morsels of scallop ceviche, cryo-seared lamb, endive and fig gratin, and foie gras parfait sweeping past Kostya’s station just long enough for him to paint their corresponding sauces—preserved lemon butter, julep mint foam, raspberry-quince glaze, apricot preserve—on with tiny brushes before they were twirled round the room on enormous silver platters.

He got a brief respite during the raw-bar service, since the mignonette and cocktail sauces, clarified butter, Thai-chili vinegar, and lemongrass yuzu reduction that accompanied the oysters, shrimp, king crab, and caviar had been dished in advance into mother-of-pearl bowls and arranged within an elaborate ice palace.

He swigged water from a quart container, wiped the sweat dripping down his eyebrows and nose with a kitchen towel, and checked the clipboard. Pasta was next.

Kostya braced himself.

At Saveur, they made their own fresh pasta, cooking it to order à la minute. Even though the number of guests at this party more than tripled their average pasta orders for an evening, Michel had promised Gild that he’d deliver not only fresh pasta but seven different kinds, each with an inspired sauce and garnish.

Lorenzo, their pastaio , had come in at the ass crack of dawn to craft thousands of gnudi, anelli, cavatappi, fideo, gemelli, orecchiette , and mafaldine . Each pasta dough had been infused with a specific flavor—lemon zest in the gnudi , basil oil in the anelli , white truffle for the cavatappi , and so on—calibrated to complement the pasta sauces and create an orgasmic eating experience. The problem was that Kostya now had to oversee which sauce went on which pasta, with mere minutes between different batches flying in and out of water baths and sauté pans across three different stations, all hands on deck to cook, sauce, plate, garnish, and serve. And all this with two cream-based sauces, four tomato-based (two meat; two vegetarian), and one purple pesto, which meant that, aside from the pesto, he couldn’t just yell, Hot nut for mafaldine with the red jizz! , because no one would know which red sauce he meant.

They’d agreed to try to keep just one pasta type on sauté at a time to avoid confusing the sauces and garnishes, and the plan seemed to be working. The first two had already gone out, and the third—lemony gnudi with almond–arugula–purple cauliflower pesto—was being plated. Kostya was just starting to feel a sense of pride, a new level of confidence in his culinary abilities, when he felt a tingle along the back of his neck.

It chilled him even though the kitchen was a fiery ring, his jacket soldered to his back with sweat. He took a deep breath and prepared for the aftertaste to pass over him, rolling in and out like an ocean wave, but as soon as it hit his tongue, his whole body went numb.

Gooey, sweet onions. Crispy morsels of liver that melted as he chewed. A zing of acid. Dill. And something bitter, just there, bringing up the rear.

He hadn’t tasted this dish in twenty years, but it was exactly the same as the very first time, the taste he’d tried to re-create with Frankie, the taste he’d churned in his mind like butter, the absolutely irrefutable proof that his dad was here, now , waiting to see him, lingering for who knew how long before he vanished again, maybe forever. And for the first time in all those years, Kostya suddenly thought he knew how it was made.

“Oh shit!” he gasped.

“What?” To his left, Fernando jumped, alarmed, one pan in each hand, tossing gnudi coated with pesto into the air. “Didn’t you tell us pesto?”

“Yeah. No! Sorry. Pesto’s right.”

Kostya’s mind raced. There were whole chickens in the walk-in. He could pull the livers out of a couple, grab a lemon and white onions from the pantry; the dill was right there, on Fernando’s mise.

“ Oy! Konstantin! Cavatappi, what’s the jizz?”

It was Tony, who was working a station and also directing the guys boiling the pasta. Kostya snapped back to attention.

“Meyer lemon Alfredo, garnish beluga!” He recited it automatically, the memory rote, and then hesitated. “No, wait! Sorry. The other Alfredo—the smoked salmon, garnish with Everything Bagel.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “You sure?”

Kostya thought. The cavatappi was the curly one, with the charred-onion infusion. The smoked salmon Alfredo was an ode to cream cheese and lox, paired to give the whole thing a New York bagel vibe.

“Yes, Chef!”

“You’re the boss.”

As Kostya hurtled toward the chicken, he heard Tony turn to the rest of the floor, raise his voice.

“I got cavatappi, smoked salmon Alfredo, Everything garnish! We gotta kick it up, people, shit’s dying on the pass here, and Fernando, Jesus! Get your fucking meez in check!”

Kostya hunted in the walk-in, smacking his lips as he did, willing the taste to linger. He finally found the chickens tucked behind three boxes of duck breasts, and snagged the onions, the lemon. He was firing on all cylinders. He’d have to pull the giblets, toss the gizzards and hearts, keep the livers. Thin-slice the onion. Lemon into wedges.

He grabbed a sauté pan and jammed it onto one of Fernando’s burners. Fernando was busy trying to clean up the mess on his station—garnishes everywhere—and almost didn’t see him.

“What are you doing?” he finally asked, aghast, as Kostya started fumbling inside the chicken cavity.

“I got a VIP on the fly,” Kostya lied. “From Michel.”

Fernando moved one of his pans to make room.

“ Shit shit shit ,” Kostya chanted under his breath, half from nerves and half to remember the flavor he was going for.

All this time, and he’d somehow never put it together. It was his father’s favorite dish, but his mother had prepared it. His mother, who was always yammering away on the phone when she cooked, so absorbed in lecture or conjecture that she burned almost everything. Including pechonka .

Kostya wished that he could have just asked her about it. He wished she would have consented to talk about his dad, or cook the foods he loved, or keep the clothes that still smelled like him. He wished that she could have found a way, however small, to keep his father alive. Instead, it was like she’d blotted him out in her mind, an ink stain where the man used to be. A redaction. Everyone had their own way of grieving, and hers was denial.

He’s no more , she used to say whenever Kostya brought up his father, the words bitter as a rind, and he never will return now.

Except now, maybe, with Kostya’s help, he might.

He spooned a thick dollop of softened butter into the pan. It skipped across the surface, sizzling hot, foaming, turning brown. He threw on the sliced onions, flicked his wrist again and again to coat them, watching them soften.

“C’mon, c’mon,” he willed them, “faster.”

“Who’s the VIP ?” Fernando asked conspiratorially. “You know?”

“I gotta concen—” Kostya began, but then Tony was asking him what went on the gemelli .

“ Gemelli, gemelli ,” Kostya repeated, adding a splash of oil and the livers to the pan. “Meyer Alfredo! Beluga garnish. And then the fideo , with the Mexican meat sauce, cotija, and cilantro.”

That should keep the line busy for a while, and after that was just the anelli and the orecchiette —glorified SpaghettiOs and puttanesca—and they’d be home free.

“Konstantin, you gonna burn the liver, man.”

Fernando tried to help him move the pan, but Kostya shrugged him off.

“Michel said kill it .”

Fernando shrugged and got to work on the naked gemelli toppling into his station.

Kostya watched the outside of the liver fry and slid half—if it needed more time, he’d be able to try again without missing the window—onto a plate, seasoned it with Kosher salt, squeeze of lemon, sprinkle of dill, and a tiny pinch of parsley from Fernando’s newly organized mise en place. He turned the gas off the burner.

He stared down at the dish, a vibration kicking up in the back of his throat.

The waitstaff were pirouetting in and out of the swinging kitchen doors now, delicate test tubes of gnudi and cavatappi glinting from the viper jaws of the Medusa-headed candelabras they were using to serve. (Talk about overkill.) The guys on the line were starting to boil fideo , switching to ultrafine mesh colanders to catch the hair’s-width noodles as they came steaming out of the water. That gave Kostya just a couple minutes before Tony needed another direction.

“Yo, Tony!” he called. “Next up’s anelli . Tomato broth, Parm crouton garnish.”

Tony nodded. “Heard!”

Kostya grabbed his plate and shuffled to the pastry station, which was dusted with confectioners’ sugar and flour and abandoned since dessert wouldn’t be for another two hours. It was almost eerily quiet, just the occasional bang or sizzle from the kitchen. His hands trembled as he speared a bite of liver and brought the fork to his mouth.

He closed his eyes.

Chewed.

Tasted.

Smiled.

The bite was, note for note, what his father’s ghost had slipped him. Only real.

Kostya swallowed, and something happened.

He could feel the aftertaste traveling down his throat, past his lungs, down into his stomach. He followed it deep into his gut, and somehow further, down into the chasm of his longing, to the lining between worlds. He could see it in his mind’s eye, the way the morsel of liver—chewed, half-digested—ate away at the whisper-thin wall, dissolving it like an acid wash.

It was so bright on the other side, the kind of blinding luster that burned straight through your retinas. Just as the aftertaste was about to break through, tiny pinpricks of light beaming right into his insides, Kostya heard a crash in the kitchen and opened his eyes.

There, hovering over the floured stainless steel, were hundreds of blinking yellow lights.

The rest of the kitchen—well lit by rows of heatproof fluorescents—seemed almost dim by comparison. Kostya bit his lip, watching the lights pulse and twinkle, unable to peel his eyes away as they coalesced into the shape of a head, a torso, a waist.

There were more crashes across the line as the lights drew notice—murmurs and holy shit s peppering the air as the cooks glanced up and witnessed the uncanny over in pastry, their sauté pans dropping with a clang as they lost concentration, utensils skittering to the floor—but Kostya barely heard them.

“ Papa? ” he asked, his voice on the edge of a sob.

The lights at the very top—the ones that were just now forming a forehead and jaw and oversized ears that were so excruciatingly familiar—gave an eager nod.

Кушай.

He heard the word like music, his dad’s voice telling him to eat. He shoved another bite of liver into his mouth, found it hard to chew and swallow around the lump welling in his throat.

His dad got brighter, his edges more defined. He could see his face now, aglow in warm citrine light, like a prism passing through topaz. Every line in his forehead and eyes was exactly like Kostya remembered them. He felt his heart flutter in his chest, lifting him up as though he weighed nothing at all.

“Papa, Papa! Oh, God, it’s so good to s—”

“Duhovny!”

Both Kostya and his father jumped in response to their name.

Michel burst violently through the kitchen doors. His face was rabid, flecks of spittle lining his mouth, eyes absolutely enraged. He pounced purposefully from station to station, scanning the room for Konstantin, the other chefs on the line all keeping their heads down, the work going. Whatever this was—though they’d gossip and shit talk and bust Kostya’s balls endlessly about it afterward—they wanted no part now.

He shoveled more liver into his mouth, hoping it was enough to keep his dad materializing, and wove through the kitchen toward Michel. They met in front of the fry station.

“Here, Chef,” Kostya said meekly.

“Instead of where you’re supposed to be! Why aren’t you at saucier?”

“I—uh—”

“You know what, I don’t even care. What I really want to know is what the hell this is.”

He held up a thin glass vial—plucked from one of the Medusa-headed candelabras—with spiral pasta curled inside, coated with a white Alfredo sauce, dots of black sesame visible in the garnish on top.

“The cavatappi, Chef?”

Michel shoved the vial at him, his furious face inches from Konstantin’s, a vein in his neck throbbing.

“Eat.”

Kostya nodded nervously, his mind a horrible blank—had he really fucked this up? given the wrong order?—and tipped the shot of pasta into his mouth.

The taste was instantly overpowering. Discordant. Wrong. It was bad. The creamy smoked salmon clashed horribly with the dough, which had been infused with truffle, not onion, offending his whole palate. In short order, it overtook the liver and onions, wiping the aftertaste entirely from his mouth.

Before he even realized what he’d done, the light in the room blinked, a bulb burning out, and Kostya whirled back toward the pastry station to find shadow.

“No!” he gasped.

“You shit the bed,” Michel snarled. “The most important night of the year, and—hey! Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

Kostya was darting back to pastry, bobbing around the stunned cooks at a half-dozen stations as he hurled himself toward the plate of liver, Michel hot on his heels. He shoveled it into his mouth with his bare hands—flatware be damned—but no matter how quickly he chewed, how completely he coated his mouth with the taste, the sparks didn’t flicker back.

He had lost the tenuous connection, had severed the tie. His dad was gone.

Kostya felt the blood rush to his head. He grew faint and swayed on his feet. The kitchen was so hot, suddenly, so suffocatingly hot.

“I was speaking to you, Duhovny.”

Michel’s voice simmered, nearly a whisper. Kostya thought he looked mad enough to slug him, and he stared at Michel’s thick, kitchen-scarred hands, waiting for them to clench into fists. Instead, he snatched the plate of chicken liver away.

“What is this garbage?” he asked, smelling it, sampling a tiny morsel on the tip of his tongue, his eyes growing wide, flashing dangerously. He strolled back through the kitchen, the plate held high. He wanted everyone to see this.

“Oh, I think I understand. We’re getting creative now. We’ve somehow grown the balls to come into my kitchen during the most important service of my year , and fuck up my pasta course—so badly, I might add, that the president of Gild just told me he thinks I might be losing my touch—and in the meantime, we think we’re so brilliant that we’re coming up with our very own recipes, testing them out in the middle of my event, instead of doing our fucking job and overseeing every fucking bite of food that comes out of this fucking service like we were fucking supposed to. Fuck you, Duhovny. You’re a waste of fucking talent. Now get out of my kitchen.”

Kostya stood rooted to the spot, his mouth dry.

“Chef. Give me the plate back. Please.”

He was desperate to try again, to somehow invite the connection, to make that dish perfect, one more time, to get his dad back and tell him—

“This plate?”

And with one furious motion, Michel threw the whole thing—plate, liver, lemon wedges, garnish—into the nearby fryer, which erupted so violently it sprayed Konstantin’s entire right arm in a wave of flesh-curdling oil.