Bread and Butter (11 page)

Britt ate slowly, first this dish, then a series of five more. He took notes, eyed the composition on the plate and compared it to the drawings
. A
t first he offered commentary on the dishes, mentioning a pleasant balance of oil and acid, the ethereal crust on a goat cheese croquette over sharp grilled radicchio, the slight fibrousness of a cache of fried ginger batons. But Harry replied only briefly, not impolitely but clearly concentrating on his cooking, and so Britt stopped bothering him and instead simply ate and watched his brother cook.

Somewhere along the way Harry had learned to move like a chef—or rather, he’d learned to cook, but he must always have had this grace, this economy of motion and lucidity of focus
. Y
ou could learn all kinds of things—you could be a fine cook even if you were hulking in girth and jerky in your movements—but either you naturally moved the way Harry did or you would never learn to
. T
hat was it
. W
hy had neither he nor Leo ever learned to cook, really learned to cook, professionally? Suddenly this failing seemed embarrassing to Britt, as if he and Leo had been merely posing as restaurant owners for years, pretending to know more than they did. He did not truly believe this—they had hired a real kitchen staff to do just that—but watching Harry, he now appreciated the brute self-sufficiency of being able to move easily from the front of the house to the back.

Harry produced the last dish with great fanfare. He drew something meaty and brown, dripping, from a braising pot and set it on a metal dish and slid it into the oven
. T
hen he arranged some crisped root vegetables and broccoli rabe on a round white plate, placed the meat at the center, and scattered the whole thing with a blend of something golden and green and finely chopped. He placed this before Britt with the air of a cat delivering a freshly killed gopher.

It was clearly an animal part of some kind: the bones were there, interlocking like bracelet clasps through the center of the meat, and as Britt peered at the circumference of the item he saw an ivory cord running through them like a string through a necklace. “Is this a neck?” he asked, glancing at the dish plans.

Harry smiled proudly. “Lamb’s neck, with Jerusalem artichokes, broccoli rabe, and gremolata,” he said. “You’re not going to wuss out on this, are you?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Britt said
. T
he meat shredded easily off the vertebrae. Just as he was taking a bite, Harry started and reached for a bottle of red and poured him a fresh glass.

“You have to have this with it,” he said.

“Don’t you want a little?” Britt asked, gesturing to his plate.

Harry shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m full all the time from tasting as I go.”

Britt shrugged. He was chewing, thinking that the meat tasted delicious. The Jerusalem artichokes were rich and crisp, the broccoli rabe refreshingly sharp. It was a great dish, actually, but he was disappointed by the presentation of it. You saw this from cooks everywhere: they thought it gave them street cred to serve you a dish as a challenge. It tasted good, but people dined out for pleasure, for coddling, and they paid for the privilege, so why not give it to them?

He was full, beyond full, but he finished the lamb’s neck anyway, leaving only a few Jerusalem artichoke rounds and the now scattered bones, looking like the remains in a prehistoric cave.

“Okay, then,” said Harry. “So that’s not the entire menu, obviously, but those are some of the dishes I think are central.”

“The octopus was one of my favorites,” Britt said, “except for the tough ginger, but that can be fixed. The goat cheese fritter’s good but a little pedestrian. The cauliflower I love. The proportions are perfect. And the lamb’s neck…I don’t know. You can’t get a nice shank in this zip code?”

Harry laughed. He poured his own glass of red wine and leaned back against the bar shelves. “I can get a shank,” he said. “But no one’s going to talk about a shank. They’ll talk about a neck.”

“And any press is good press,” said Britt.

“I’m not quite that craven,” Harry said. “But I’m not going to all this trouble to serve a nice burger. The goat cheese, I’ll grant you, is kind of an easy mark. But you’ve also gotta give people something they haven’t tasted, something they can’t imagine and have to come in and try.”

Britt shrugged. “True,” he said. “But maybe this brings up a good point. What if you love a dish and I hate it?”

“
Do
you hate it?”

“No, it’s really good. I just would skip the showing off and do a shank, that’s all. What I’m asking is, what if we disagree? What do you picture, Harry? You picture me in the front, you in the back, and we leave each other’s worlds alone? Or something more unified?”

Harry took a long drink of his wine, gazing out the front window at the dark street. Britt looked too, thinking that a big, stylish lighted sign was imperative.

Finally Harry said, “I’m not totally sure. I’d take your input. I won’t guarantee I’ll follow it. I guess I picture the same for you. Maybe I’d suggest something for the service you don’t like, but maybe we agree not to dismiss it out of hand, even if we don’t take orders from each other.”

“It all sounds very civilized,” Britt said. “I just don’t know how it’ll work.”

“Why are we talking this way?” Harry cried abruptly. His wine sloshed as he set down his glass. “I just cooked you a meal, and you liked it, right? You like the space, you said so. Why’d we skip all the good stuff and go straight to planning for disaster?”

“It’s a contingency,” Britt said. “We plan for contingencies, not disasters. Get used to it, kid.”

“Don’t talk like James Cagney.”

There was a very long silence
. T
hey watched each other across the bar.

Britt looked back down at the flared ivory bones on the plate before him. He gave in to the urge to pick one up and turn it over in his hands, to consider how the animal had been put together before Harry had so deftly taken it apart.

“Look,” he said finally. “You want me in or not? Because I say if we want to do it, let’s do it. If you want to, we can see if Leo wants to give it a try. Can you do this all again?”

Harry looked startled, as if Britt had broken some protocol. Then he said, “I’d better be able to do it again. Pretty soon I’ll be doing this every night.”

“True,” Britt said. He got to his feet. “Well, we should hug or something, right?” They both laughed rather awkwardly, after which Harry walked all the way around the zinc bar to where Britt waited by his chair, realizing that he ought to have met Harry halfway
. T
hey reached somewhat confusedly in the same direction and then reoriented themselves, finally achieving a brisk, back-patting sort of embrace, talking over one another about nonsense as they did
. T
heir voices echoed through the empty restaurant.

H
ARRY HAD A PILE OF RÉSUMÉS,
an obsession with his zinc bar, a kitchen filled with used restaurant equipment, and so many thousands in debt he couldn’t bear to think about it. And now he had something else: he had a partner. Not the two he’d thought he would have—not yet—but still a partner.

Bringing his brother on board turned out to be a lot like winning over a skittish girl: only when he’d given up did Britt take him seriously
. T
he night after Harry cooked for his brother, the two of them sat at Britt’s kitchen table to decide on a restaurant name and prepare for their meeting with Leo. Harry was drinking seltzer by the quart. He hadn’t eaten enough that day, and with each successive cup of coffee—he had had five—he got more jittery. He could not bear to eat after so much menu-testing; even his favorites were no longer appetizing
. T
he lamb’s neck was too rich and brutal, the octopus offered up a suspicious give between the teeth that made him uncertain whether it was tender or raw, and he kept encountering slippery pockets of fat in the duck. He’d been eating vegetables instead, and slice after slice of chickpea pancake, with its bland, soothing starch.

Sitting at Britt’s table, gulping seltzer to settle his stomach, Harry listened to his own voice talking calmly about name ideas, uniforms, operating budgets, and division of labor, thinking that now that another person was actually listening to him, even the most quotidian details seemed too momentous to commit to.

Because of this sensation, he was drawing the naming process into a long, tedious affair. They’d sat down two hours earlier, with lists of names, themes, general ideas, and particular foods they liked, everything from geographical places to cuts of meat to words like “generosity,” “variety,” and “challenge.” Nothing sounded right. Harry began to wonder how anyone named anything.

“How did you decide on Winesap, anyway?” he asked Britt.

Britt shrugged, looking at his laptop screen. “Leo already had it in mind,” he said. “It was pretty much set.”

“I wouldn’t have thought Leo would be so sentimental,” Harry mused.

“I know. Mostly I think he likes the PR—the tree in our yard, the apple butter
. Y
ou know he wishes he could say Dad was from Calabria and cured prosciutto in the garage or something. Personally, I just think it’s a good word.”

“I loved climbing those trees. Mom used to make a pie when the first cold snap hit, don’t you remember? That was how we knew it was really fall.”

“She used those apples?”

“Of course. Here I thought I was the unsentimental one. Mom has one lone point of domestic pride, and Leo corrupts it for commercial reasons and you just don’t care. Too bad we can’t use it here.”

“I care,” Britt said absentmindedly. He picked up a cracker and broke it into little pieces.

“It’s too staid for us anyway,” Harry said. He stared up at the pendant light above the table. “Anything suggesting moms and home and pie is not it.”

“Nope.”

“It’s supposed to sound more random, and more about traveling. More worldwide. Even if we do use heirloom this and artisanal that, I don’t want to sound fussy about it.”

“Traveler,” Britt offered. “Wanderer.”

“I dunno. I picture a hobo with a rag tied on a stick. Or a folksinger getting beard hair in our food.”

“Global. Globe. Globular. That doesn’t even sound like a word, does it?”

“Too Shakespearean.”

“How do you figure?”

“The Globe Theatre,” Harry said.

Britt rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that’ll be a common misconception.”

“Too bad. I really thought you had it with ‘globular.’”

A cracker crumb dinged Harry in the neck. “I was spitballing,” Britt said with dignity.

“Drifter,” Britt said.

“Murderer.”

“Nomad.”

Harry shrugged. “Middle Eastern food.”

“Stray.”

There was a silence. Harry said it, just to hear it, and typed it into his laptop in caps, to see how it looked. It looked good. “Is it too canine?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Britt said. “But I think I like it anyway. I mean, it’s not ‘the stray dog,’ it’s simpler than that. It’s kind of rough-and-tumble, though.”

“I like that, given the location.”

“Yeah, I actually meant that as kind of a good thing. Unless it also suggests fleas.”

They added it to the short list, along with a few other words that instantly looked outdated. Harry kept staring at it, feeling as if the word were being carved indelibly into the screen. He tried out different fonts, closing one eye and then the other.

“We don’t have to decide for sure right this second,” Britt was saying. “But it’ll be good to have a working name for interviews and whatnot.” He glanced up at Harry, then focused on him piercingly. “You haven’t told Leo about Hector yet, have you?”

Harry flushed. “Oh, right! Right. Not yet. I thought I could tell him in person.”

“And then I have to tiptoe around it all week until you see him? This is exactly what I was afraid of, you making me your little secret-sharer
. A
t least tell him before we all meet, okay?”

“I’ll try.” Harry truly meant this—it was just that he was so busy. It was hard to imagine popping into Winesap for this purpose.

“Harry.”

“Okay, I promise. When are you telling him about you?”

“I guess this week. Or maybe when we meet. Whenever the moment’s right, I guess.” He kept tapping away at a spreadsheet, not looking up. Harry wasn’t sure whether Britt was really unconcerned or just flawless at feigning it. As they wrapped things up an hour later, Britt appeared to be expansive and relaxed. “This is going to be good,” he said to Harry. “You feel good?”

“I feel
great
,” Harry said, too loudly
. A
nd sometimes he almost did.

LEO WENT TO HARRY’S PLACE
the following Sunday afternoon, when Winesap was closed
. T
his time Harry was going to cook his way through nearly the whole menu instead of a sampling, which hurt Britt’s feelings just a bit.

He had never quite found the right moment to mention to Leo that he planned to be a partner to Harry. It seemed uncouth to discuss it at Winesap, and he’d had a vague idea that today would be a good day, but now that the three of them were here, Britt knew he ought to have spoken up sooner
. A
s they shook out their napkins and poured water and wine, he found it hard to look at Leo. It would be better, he decided, to let Leo eat first and then tell him. Maybe he’d agree to be a partner and it would be one big fraternal celebration. But then Leo said, in response to a comment from Harry, “Stray, eh?” and Britt worried that the name sounded silly and a little mangy.

They watched Harry set out his mise en place. Harry’s hair was held back in tufts by a folded bandanna and his brown T-shirt bore holes in the sleeves and a picture of a bowling ball on the chest, but his clean towels were folded neatly over the apron tied around his waist while he arranged squeeze bottles of mustard and vinaigrette and square metal bins of shallot and thyme, dishes of soft, slumping braised fig and thick chewy lardons. He laid out a garnet and white-fatted duck breast butchered as beautifully as a diagram.

Britt had learned enough over the years to know that a good prep was everything: a sloppy cook was a sloppy thinker; a jumbled workspace meant that the mind got stuck in the same disorder. Once again Harry cooked silently, gracefully, but with complete concentration. Britt shot a meaningful look in Leo’s direction, but Leo gazed blandly back at him.

Harry served the first several dishes with only the briefest of descriptions, so that Britt found himself filling in what he perceived as the gaps. “This one actually makes me like cauliflower,” he said at one point; later he offered an appreciation of the architecture of sardine skeletons. Harry had made a few little shifts in the plating and the proportions of some dishes, improving the entire experience in a way Britt found difficult to quantify. It all just felt sleeker and more finished, as in a real restaurant. If only Leo would talk more. Britt was so delighted as the meal continued that his conversation became less nervous and more simply excited.

But next to him, Leo ate quietly, offering little but nods and raised eyebrows. At the end of the tasting, Leo patted his mouth with a napkin and took his time folding it into a neat triangle before laying it back on the zinc bar. There was a lull until Leo said, “Coffee?” and Harry looked around a bit wildly, as if a coffee machine might have materialized without his knowing it. “Never mind,” Leo said. “I’ll be right back.” He got up and headed off to the restroom, which Britt hoped was properly equipped.

Harry and Britt looked at each other, then Harry shrugged and began stacking dishes and pans. Britt looked toward the front of the building, where he now saw the dark silhouette of a man at the windows, hands cupped at his temples against the glass. The last rays of sun shone around him, glaring into the space, illuminating pinpoints through the man’s rumpled coat and a hole in his hat. The deliciousness of the food didn’t seem like enough right then; what guest would want to eat two inches away from a looming homeless guy, even one who mercifully shaded the chalky autumn sun? Then Leo returned and started talking almost before he sat down.

He didn’t mince words: even though he thought the food was excellent, he still had his doubts.

Leo said, “It’s a little overstated, maybe, and you’re getting some chewiness in the meat. Plus your spices are on the raw side, and I think the portions are just
slightly
too big for the plates.” He paused. Harry shot an appraising look in Britt’s direction, and Britt could not help but feel abashed, as he suspected Harry meant him to
. W
hy had none of these issues been obvious to Britt? Did he really know anything other than flatware and seating charts? He’d felt the same way back when he had first stepped in for the departed Frances and was just guessing at what he was supposed to do.

Leo went on. “But the thing is, it
is
fun. It’s bold, it has range. Maybe too much range, but I’d eat almost all of it again, Harry. Maybe I can’t be your partner, but I can definitely be your customer.” Before Harry could bask in this slim praise, Leo moved on, gazing around the restaurant as he talked.

Now Leo aired his concerns about the space. It was beautiful, he noted, but it was hard to work in; the proximity of cocktails and line cooks struck him as dangerous. “And maybe I’m wrong,” he was saying, “but there’s something a little inelegant about divvying up your kitchen. Who gets stuck back there?”

“Desserts,” said Britt, and as he spoke Harry looked up at him, his expression surprised and guilty, and Britt thought,
Oh no
. A
fter Harry had agreed to tell Leo about hiring Hector, Britt had put the whole thing out of his mind. He’d been busy worrying about breaking his own news.

“Hey, Leo,” Harry said. He coughed into his fist. “Something I keep forgetting to tell you.” Leo cocked his head, looking from one brother to the other. “The dessert guy back there will be Hector, actually.”

“You’re not serious,” Leo said.

Harry managed to turn a shrug and a nod into one motion. “Now you probably don’t feel so bad about him being stuck back there.”

“Is this how it’s going to be,” Leo said, “that I have to be afraid to have you in my place for fear you’ll poach all my people?”

“I think that’s a little rich,” Harry said, “coming from someone who’s done his share of poaching.”

Leo said, “Not from my
brother
. A
nd all I ever did was check out a place.”

“Well,” said Harry, “I didn’t even do that. Dude tracks me down from Guatemala, obviously he was pretty interested in working with me, okay?”

Britt jumped in. As Harry got more combative, Britt got more nervous. Had Leo actually said no yet? Britt wasn’t certain. He’d really only expressed doubts, and that wasn’t the same thing. “I know Harry didn’t seek him out,” he said to Leo.

Leo rolled his eyes, no doubt thinking of Hector’s vexing fickleness and the tensile beauty of his phyllo. “Fine, whatever, he left you no option. You’ll find that Hector’s not the most easygoing employee you ever hired.”

“I know,” said Harry. “I have no idea how long he’ll last, but you have to realize that more familiar faces are going to apply here. It’s not that big a city. I won’t poach anyone right out of your kitchen, but if I can hire people who’ve worked for you, I probably will. I want them to have been trained well, and yours have.”

“Thank you,” Leo said, rather grandly.

Britt interrupted. “Can we get back to the restaurant itself? You’re being kind of rough on the place. Nothing’s perfect right from the get-go. Don’t you remember our all-French menu? The tableside carving?”

Leo assumed a distant expression, as if trying to recall a busboy from many years ago.

“Those were things we could work through,” he said. “We can’t pick up this building and move it. I can’t start neglecting Winesap for a place that might not even make rent.”

Harry looked sick. He leaned back against the countertop with a thud.

“I did a little research,” Britt said hastily. “There’s a couple renovating that old theater down the block, did you know that? They’re going to run independent movies. They got a license to serve wine and beer too.”

Harry cheered up slightly, but Leo narrowed his eyes at Britt and said, “You’ve been helping, I gather. A lot.”

“Well, yeah,” Britt said. He decided just to lay it out there. “I changed my mind about this place. But I’m not leaving Winesap. I’m just buying in here.”

“Really?” said Leo. Then he nodded for a very long time and cast a newly appraising look around the space before he settled on Harry.

“I still think it’s going to sound weird if it’s just the two of us,” Harry said. “People will probably just assume you’re part of it whether you actually are or not. Are you sure you don’t want to give it a try?”