Vanilla Salt (5 page)

“Take that
gratapaller
to Table Two!” How was she supposed to know he meant chicken?

If Àlex needs to specify the impeccable pasture-raised pedigree of the roast fowl, there is no need to give the number of the table at which it is to be served, since it is the only one that is occupied. Decked out in her frilly patchwork apron, Annette takes the chicken to Carol.

At present she’s a kitchen hand doubling as a waitress. They have to save every last cent. Although she’d prefer to work only in the kitchen, she’s happy enough waitressing, as it’s a way of getting to know the customers and check out how they’re enjoying the meal.

“Madame, Table Two, Carol, is good client?”

“Is she ever! She’s a top food critic. She’s very influential in this country. She’s a friend of mine. She comes here a lot and often gives Antic Món a good write-up in the media. Well, it’s been a while since she’s done
that, because there are lots of new restaurants she has to review,” Àlex tells the empty kitchen as Annette’s back in the dining room serving Table Two and hasn’t heard him.

When she comes back to the kitchen, she says, “Àlex, Carol she wants speak with you.”

“Tell her I can’t now. I’ve got to keep an eye on these morels. This is a highly delicate moment.”

“Carol she wants speak with you,” Annette insists.

Cursing and swearing, Àlex marches out of the kitchen to see what’s going on. When Carol’s had a glass or two – and today she’s worked her way through a Les Terrasses red, 2001 – she gets garrulous. And she would bloody want to talk right now. She should know that morels are terribly temperamental, and if you take your eye off them for a second, they turn into a mess, with the taste and consistency of cork.

Carol’s features faithfully express her personality. They sum up a longish life, lots of experience and a permanent itch to learn. Her aquiline nose has sniffed out the most complex bouquets of all the wines she’s tasted over the years and her wide, wrinkle-free forehead suggests a frank, sincere mind. She has a long, luxuriant mane of black hair, scattered with a few grey ones, each one a little cache of memories representing some moment or other of her fifty-three years, whether it’s one of happiness or disillusionment, a battle won or an instructive failure.

Her clothes also talk. Carol doesn’t dress. She dresses up, drawing attention to her chameleonic nature. She’s someone who can easily split into a host of characters, revelling in every role she plays.

“Àlex, I love you heaps, and you’ve always been my favourite chef, but this free-range hen or haystack-scratcher or whatever you want to call it is inedible. It tastes like a factory worker’s idea of salt cod.”

Carol doesn’t like saying this. She’s implacable and extremely scathing as a critic, and certainly doesn’t mince her words, but today she feels
sorry for Àlex and saddened by the run-down state of Antic Món and all its unoccupied tables. She’s the only client, alone in the whole restaurant.

Standing there in his apron, Àlex grabs a bit of his well-bred chicken and puts it in his mouth. He drains the gourmet’s glass of red to wash it down, his blue eyes roving around the emptiness of the restaurant, the chicken and Carol.

Without a word, he pulls off his apron and throws it on a table. The Arcimboldo reproduction trembles on the wall and almost falls off as Àlex storms out of Antic Món, slamming the door behind him.

Annette, transfixed, watches the scene from the kitchen doorway, with the casserole of morels in her hands. She’s so shocked that she almost drops it. Her nerves are stretched to breaking point. What kind of restaurant has she landed in?

Gourmet writer and kitchen hand stare at each other, both completely dumbfounded.

Just then somebody rings at the door… Whatever next? If someone stabbed her now she wouldn’t shed a single drop of blood. It’s frozen in her veins. At the door she finds three Internet foodies who are keen to try out the virtual-flavours game Antic Món has announced on its web page. Oh my God!

Annette pulls herself together and escorts the clients to the best table, the one in the corner. In a flash of lucidity she announces that tonight they’re doing a tasting menu.

“Today, surprise!”

Luckily Carol has finished her dinner – or non-dinner, depending on how you look at it. It seems she doesn’t want dessert and is contentedly sipping at a double shot of Lepanto. She’s old-fashioned in this. She likes her brandy.

“Brilliant idea,” a girl, the youngest of the three customers, gushes. “Today we’re going to try the very best creations of Àlex Graupera! We
can’t wait to meet him and especially to work out the hidden flavours. We might even win the competition!”

Annette is about to faint. She’s tough and courageous, but the problem is she doesn’t know where to start. Terrified, she runs into the kitchen, opens up the fridges to see if salvation resides therein, some dish she’ll only have to warm up… Her brain is boiling. She looks for solution number one, something she can serve them immediately so she’ll have time to think about what to do next.

Ah, the morels!

Yes, the first course will be morels à la crème. She tastes them, and they aren’t bad. She doesn’t know if Àlex meant to cook them like this, or whether they’re the whole dish or a side dish. Not a clue. She puts them on three aperitif plates and, full of dignity, goes out to serve them. Whoops, she hasn’t given these people bread or water or wine yet… What a mess! But at least they can start eating something. She quickly supplies the bread, water and a bottle of Trepat Foraster, a lovely red
denominación de origen
from the Conca de Barberà.

“Today he marry menu with wine,” she murmurs.

The clients don’t understand anything, least of all Annette, but they’re happy to go along with it and open to whatever surprises the night might bring.

“I think the waitress said that it’s a tasting menu with specially chosen wines,” the boy in the group says.

Annette wants to get back into the kitchen to invent some dish, to let the food inspire her, to give the best she’s got, or simply cook something edible dressed up as haute cuisine.

She’s on the point of bursting into tears.

All that effort to pull in customers, all those hours at the computer, all the accumulated stress is now hitting her. She was so thrilled at the idea that someone might respond to her promotions on Facebook, but
they would have to come today, of all days. Her hands won’t obey her. Her brain’s at a standstill. She’s done for.

Then a divine apparition, in the form of Carol with Àlex’s apron in her hands, descends on the kitchen.

“I’m going to give you a hand, my girl, if you’ll let me. If you have to cook and serve a tasting menu to the only customers who’ve set foot in here all week, you’ll need a bit of moral support at the very least. I don’t know much about cooking, but I’ve eaten plenty of things in my day, and between the two of us we’ll come up with something decent.”

“Thank you, Carol.” Annette is weeping.

They cook, side by side, for three hours. It wouldn’t be easy to reproduce what they served up to the clients. They’ve dreamt up everything on the spot. They’ve switched sauces. A shellfish base has been used to make a sauce for the roast kid, and the saffron sauce has landed on the chocolate delights for dessert. The stewed squid has been a star dish.

The plates have come back empty, except for the last one, which the foodies have hardly tasted: hot raspberry soup with green-pepper ice cream. They’ve apologized, saying they can’t eat any more, but when Carol tastes the “creation”, she nearly throws up. It’s horrible. Now Annette remembers that the green-pepper ice cream has almost no sugar in it. It was supposed to go with baked turbot, and they’ve used it for a dessert. What idiots!

Just before Annette goes to see if the clients want coffee, Carol opens up a couple of nice cold beers and offers her one. She’s only too happy to accept. They’ve earned this! They clink bottles and drink directly from them, glugging almost the whole lot in one mouthful. Their eyes meet for a few seconds and they burst out laughing. This has been such a thrill!

The three customers are happy. They don’t know what they’ve eaten, but they think it’s all been daring, different and very entertaining.
They’ve tried to guess the secret ingredient in each dish and now it’s time to see if they’re right. With the serious face of a professional chef, Annette tells them they’ve got it almost all correct, except for the secret ingredient in the meat, which wasn’t sesame seeds but toasted pine nuts. Actually, there were no sesame seeds and no pine nuts either, but she has to say something.

She invites them to a shot of Caol Ila. She leaves the bottle on the table and tells them in her outlandish French-laced Catalan that Àlex Graupera has had to dash off to appear on a television programme about the latest trends in gastronomy.

Carol, now minus the apron, comes out of the kitchen and returns to her table, where she calmly sips the brandy left in her glass. She waves Annette over to join her.

Annette accepts the invitation, although she still has to clean up the kitchen. She’s well aware of the fact, because the whole place is a complete mess, as if they’ve been cooking for forty. Nothing has been spared. Not a single casserole, stirring spoon or plate. Everything has to go into the dishwasher. Right now, it’s pure hell, worse than anything Dante could have imagined, but she’s dead on her feet, because of the culinary adventure and all the drama she’s had to endure this week. It will be nice to chat with a friendly voice, and it seems that Carol is in the mood for talking.

In a melange of English, French, Catalan and Spanish, they settle into a surreal conversation. Carol is worried about Àlex, as everyone’s given up on him, she says. The critics, the gourmet writers and the connoisseurs are all saying he’s not doing anything interesting now, he’s outmoded, and that his pig-headedness in refusing to cook any food coming from the Americas doesn’t make sense. He never had a lot of fans in the wider public, but at least the gourmets respected him and kept track of what he was doing. But he’s finished now. It’s not enough to be a great chef.
He has to make sure people like and understand his food. His success hitherto has been based on his technique, but he’s got to improve his communication skills and apply a touch of diplomacy. If he doesn’t get his act together, he’ll end up having to close the restaurant.

The conversation with Carol after that is hazy in Annette’s memory, and she can’t remember how the night ended. She sees through a rip in the grubby curtain of her room that the sun’s high in the sky and it’s late. Her brain dredges up few blurry images: young customers, bottle of Caol Ila, the five of them dancing tangos, other tomfoolery, and her “criminal” Catalan, which had them laughing so much they were almost rolling around on the floor. She has no idea of what time they left. Maybe it was four in the morning.

Now it’s ten o’clock and she has to get out of bed, but she fears what will be awaiting her in the kitchen and restaurant, as she didn’t clean up last night. If Àlex comes back early, he’ll make mincemeat of her and throw her in the soup. She’d better get moving right now and do the tidy-wash-wipe-shine circuit faster than a Formula One driver.

Her head is heavy, but that’s not the worst of it. Everything disgusts her and she wants to vomit. She’ll have to pull herself together, be strong and try to get through the morning with the help of some Vichy Catalan mineral water, Coke and a few aspirins. She’ll feel better this afternoon, so she just has to get through three or four hours. This she knows from experience. It’s not her first hangover.

She has no regrets at all. It was a fantastic night and she had a great time. She needed to relax her muscles and head after a very tense week and, more than anything, she needed a friend. But, ooh, this is a headache and a half!

She goes downstairs, and the sight of the dining room is a slap in the face. She gets a tray and starts cleaning up. She’d better get moving and
sort this out. She’s terrified that Àlex will see the deplorable state of his restaurant. What’s that noise? Is that someone in the kitchen? Mon Dieu, he’s in there! What colour coffin does she want?

“Good morning, Annette. I imagine you’ll be able to tell me what went on last night here in my restaurant. When I left, everything was in order in the kitchen and dining room.”

This is it. Now he’s going to cut her open and stuff her with olives, mincemeat and breadcrumbs. She doesn’t know Àlex very well, but this exceedingly polite tone he’s using doesn’t augur well. She was expecting shouts, a brandishing of knives and offensive gestures. His measured words are tissue paper covering an imminent earthquake, she’s sure of that.

“Three clients come when you leave.”

“So what did they eat, eh? You’re crazy, girl. Who the hell do you think you are? How dare you serve my customers when I wasn’t here? Needless to say, you don’t know how to cook, so what did you give them? My God, what a disaster… This little girl thinks that by filling the bellies of three poor bastards she’s also going to fill the coffers of this calamitous restaurant. What’s this I’ve got here, for Christ’s sake? Ah yes, of course, it’s Mother Teresa of Calcutta dressed up as an enlightened lass from Quebec! Listen, my girl, stuff your charity up your arse. There is only one cook in Antic Món and that’s me. Got it?”

Now, yes, Àlex is ranting, striding up and down the kitchen with a knife in his hand.

Annette does nothing. She doesn’t know if she’s transfixed by the threatening knife or because Àlex has gone from the formal
vostè
to the familiar
tu
again. This change of register is significant. She’s still not sure what it means, but something is happening in Àlex’s head. For him,
tu
is a sign of closeness, a way of saying he likes the person, of wanting to be friends. She’s seen this with his suppliers. He addresses Frank as
tu
and uses
vostè
for the butcher, the dairyman and all the drinks people, whether they’re bringing wine or water.

She hasn’t known him long, but she’s starting to predict his reactions. This is exactly what happened a few days ago when Frank told him he wasn’t bringing any more fish unless he paid off his mounting debt. She knows he’s going to yell a bit more and, immediately afterwards, will devote all his attention to some painstaking culinary task of the sort that locks away all kinds of rage and murderous thoughts, as if absolutely nothing has happened. So, despite her paralysed muscles, Annette isn’t afraid. So she serenely replies, “I no want you leave me tout seul, Àlex.”