Colton Gentry's Third Act by Jeff Zentner;

Author:Jeff Zentner; [ZENTNER, JEFF]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2024-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Lunch, served from eleven thirty to two, is hectic. Dani mostly runs lunch service while Luann continues to ease Colton into the kitchen’s rhythms. He burns his palm on a pan handle but otherwise acquits himself decently for a beginner. Everyone is patient with him.

The restaurant closes at two o’clock. Luann leaves to pick up her daughters from school, spend a couple of hours with them, and take them to their grandparents’ before returning for dinner service. Dani assumes Colton’s training in the interim. Together, they prep the mise en place for dinner service.

“Chef tell you about family meal?” Dani asks Colton as they start winding up their mise preparation.

“What’s that?”

“Restaurant tradition and nice little perk of the job. Between lunch and dinner service, we make a meal just for staff. Everyone sits down as equals and eats together. Lotta times we use up leftovers. We go a lot simpler than our guest menus. We like to do quality, straightforward executions of familiar dishes with great ingredients. Rule is, everyone tries to bring in a family recipe or something they loved eating as a kid. Keeps us honest. Chef’s big on us remembering our connection to food. She says in fine dining you can lose sight of that, and then food becomes an abstraction. More about you than the guest.”

“Kinda like a guitarist who endlessly solos?”

“Exactly. Anyway, family meal is my favorite part of the job. There’s something special about cooking for your coworkers who are there in the trenches with you, getting your back.”

“So how’d you end up here?”

“I read the profile on Chef in Garden & Gun and connected with her philosophy of cooking. I was working at a restaurant in Louisville at the time. It had aspirations to be like here but wasn’t willing to do what it takes. Too much corner-cutting. Cheap over fresh, bottled over scratch, that sort of thing.”

“So you moved from Louisville to Venice just to work here? No family or any connection to the area?”

“Yep. Working for Chef was exactly what I’d hoped for.”

“You’re young. Don’t you miss all the big city stuff? Friends?”

Dani shrugs. “I grew up in a small town. It was fine. Plus the goal was to work too hard to care. Learn as much as I could. I have a boyfriend back in Louisville. He’s a chef too—we met at the restaurant where we both worked. Plan is to open our own restaurant together someday.”

“It’s nice when you and your significant other understand each other’s work. I used to work in the same business as my ex-wife.”

Dani chops okra to fry. “What business?” She doesn’t sound like she’s feigning ignorance out of some sense of politeness.

“Music.”

“You’re gonna sear that chicken on both sides for about three minutes. Eyeball it until it browns. Were y’all musicians?”

“This pan?”

“Next size up.”

“We were both singer-songwriters.”

“What’s your ex’s name?”

Colton stares into the heating pan as though awaiting a message from an oracle. “Maisy.”

“Like Maisy Martin?”

“Like that.”

“What’s her last name?”

“Martin,” Colton says quickly. “Okay, so before I pop in the chicken do I need to—”

Dani studies his face.

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