Wedding of the Season by Lauren Edmondson

Author:Lauren Edmondson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graydon House Books
Published: 2022-12-09T14:10:29+00:00

* * *

At the end of the dinner service, after we insisted we could not fit any more morsels down our gullets, Spencer cleaned his knives, straightened his mise, and offered me a tour of The Bonnie’s rear kitchen.

Behind the swinging saloon doors, the space was filled with laughter and grunts and line cooks snapping lids on plastic containers and the metallic sound of knives being sharpened and waitstaff cracking at each other with rolled-up towels. It smelled of heavy cream and garlic, and the huge, stainless-steel contraptions were still radiating heat. The counters were gleaming spotlessly, but there were crumbs and bits of chopped-up items coating the floor. Gelatinous liquids, too, were congealing in pools, including something that looked like melted chocolate.

Spencer introduced me to the front-of-house manager, a very nice woman who cursed a lot and had a tattoo of a cross emblazed on her neck—though it turned out she knew me already. Well, not knew me knew me, but her father had done much of the masonry during Susie’s renovations, including some at the carriage house.

“He’s an artist,” I said, thinking of the time and attention he must’ve devoted to The Land’s miles of stone. “A true master.”

“I’ll tell him.” When she smiled, I noticed a stud inside her lip. “And hey, welcome home!”

“Thanks!” I said, and I didn’t even register her statement, nor my offhand answer to it, until days later, which tells you something about my shifting definition of home.

Even after a full day of work, Spencer was energetic and happy. As I stuck close to his side and tried not to tread in anything sticky, he pointed out the reach-ins, the walk-ins, the mincers, the slicers, the peelers, and the proofer. He tried to convince me—me, who considered microwaving oatmeal “cooking”—to buy a sous vide machine and gave a passionate speech about the unquestionable power of salt, the treachery of black pepper.

I asked him to tell kitchen stories and he obliged; the one about the grizzled alligator of a chef who taught his pastry-making course in culinary school, who loved unleavened dough almost as much as he loved delivering pee-inducing tirades to any student who dared present him with a droopy soufflé. The one when he was working as sous in a big fancy French place in Providence that hadn’t changed its menu in seventeen years and the head chef decided it was “Tequila Tuesday” and ended up setting half the clean linen on fire. Spencer had to stomp the flames out himself because no one could find an extinguisher. Spencer quit—“easiest choice I ever made”—right in the middle of dinner service. That was when he vowed to open his own restaurant. That’s when he made a promise that whatever his new restaurant concept would be, it would have a strict no-assholes hiring policy.

His only shared complaint, which he conferred to me in a hushed voice, was a recently hired line cook, who, in his estimation, had exaggerated his skills on his résumé. “I

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