On the Steamy Side (11 page)

“Doesn’t matter. That was then, this is now. And thank the kitchen gods it’s not winter, so we have no root vegetables to contend with. It’s summer, that season of glorious fresh fruit and vegetable bounty.

And in the spirit of Market’s mission, I went to the Union Square greenmarket and picked up a few things to add to tonight’s dishes.” Allowing himself another curled lip, Devon stared straight into Frankie’s black eyes and said, “The menu needed a bit more curb appeal before I’d be willing to have my name associated with this restaurant.”

“You jumped-up piece of shit,” Frankie exploded, tossing his knife to the counter. He made an abortive move as if to hurdle the huge wooden kitchen block separating him from Devon, but the garde manger guy, a scrappy little Italian—Milo?—rounded the corner of the salad and cold apps station to grab Frankie’s arm.

“Quit it, man,” the smaller man said, shooting Devon a disgusted look. “Chill. Adam’s only gone for a coupla weeks. We just gotta get through it. Don’t go making trouble.”

“Bugger off,” Frankie sneered. “What’s this ponce going to do, fire me? He knows damn well Adam didn’t leave him with that kind of authority. Did he, Hollywood?” Devon tilted his head, studying the pugnacious thrust of Frankie’s rough-shaven chin. All activity in the kitchen had ceased; every line cook was watching to see who would come out on top of this dog pile.

Devon smiled. It wasn’t a nice expression, he knew.

“You’re right. I can’t get rid of you, no matter how obnoxious you are. But don’t fool yourself; if your plan is to make the next two weeks a living hell for me, I’ll give as good as I get. This is my kitchen for fourteen days; you’ll cook whatever the fuck I say you’ll cook. If I want to add a nice pavé of dog shit and horse testicles as a special, you’ll cook it, and perfectly.” Calmly, with deliberate steps, Devon rounded the butcher block and moved into Frankie’s personal space. When they were nose to nose, Devon said, “And if you think I’m going to allow a snot-nosed punk like you to throw me attitude, then you’ve taken one too many stage dives, mate. Now get back on the line and get ready for service.”

Without waiting to see if he’d be obeyed, Devon turned, hands on his hips, to shout to the rest of the cooks, “That goes for the rest of you monkeys! Keep your head down, do your job, and we won’t have any problems. Give me static, and I’ll make you wish you’d decided to become an accountant like Mommy and Daddy wanted. Now get to fucking work. You’ve got prep to finish. The new menu items are taped to the inside of your low boys.”

Amid a flurry of disgruntled grumbling and sullen stares, the cooks bent to the squat miniature refrigerators below each station. The lowboys held all the prep items necessary for every dish that came out of that station—plus a few extras, courtesy of Devon’s sneak afternoon delivery. For instance, along with the containers of softened butter, minced shallots, chopped parsley, and squirt bottles of dry vermouth for the pan sauce that normally accompanied the roast chicken, Devon had added large tubs of brown sugar, handfuls of ripe, unpeeled lychee, and bottles of rice wine vinegar for a tart, citrusy gastrique to spoon over the finished chicken.

He’d gone down the menu and augmented every too-simple recipe with more expensive specialty ingredients, things that looked great on a menu. That should take this place to the next level—not that the cooks appeared grateful in any way.

Devon crossed his arms over his chest and watched the frowns and shrugs, the low-voiced conferences. They didn’t seem to know what to make of his additions—the lychee, in particular, was raising eyebrows. Milo, the skinny line cook who reminded Devon of kids he grew up with in the North Ward of Trenton, fingered the spiny magenta orbs dubiously.

Peeling back the thin skin with his thumbnail, Milo made a face at the slimy texture of the white flesh beneath. Devon rolled his eyes.

“Peel them. Pit them. Chop them. Boil them with the vinegar and sugar until the liquid is reduced by a third. Strain it. Bring it up to the pass with the chicken; I’ll plate it,” he said.

Milo started peeling, his movements slow and halting. The rest of the cooks got to work, too, and Devon turned away. They’d figure it out. He didn’t intend to coddle the Market crew. This was his chance to dictate a menu again, to have the kitchen make something he came up with, rather than slavishly cooking someone else’s idea of good food. It was a relief to take back some measure of control.

Lilah wished fervently for a moment to pause, breathe, and possibly pay someone a million dollars to rub her feet. Who knew feet could hurt this badly! And she’d been a drama teacher, for sobbing out loud.

Maybe it was the frantic pace, the sense of always being a beat behind as she raced from table to table, clearing plates, filling water glasses, replacing dropped knives/forks/napkins.

“You’re doing great,” Jess, the poor unfortunate waiter to whose tables Lilah was assigned, assured her in passing. He couldn’t stop for a pep talk because he was carrying a fully loaded tray out to the front of the house. Lilah flashed him a quick smile anyway, thankful for the encouragement. Even if it was a big fat lie.

She wasn’t doing great. Unless it was considered “great” to drop not one, but two separate trays of dirty dishes in the middle of the dining room, creating such a loud crash her eyes had snapped to the older gentleman at table seventeen to make sure the noise hadn’t shocked him into cardiac arrest.

The guest, who looked like Colonel Sanders wearing a conservative navy suit, was fine. The other customers, however? No fewer than four people had commented on her twang, in grating, isn’t-she-cute tones that ought to be reserved for little girls attempting to play the piano for their parents’

friends.

And everyone wanted something! Busboys (and girls) were dressed just like the servers, so inattentive diners had a hard time telling them apart. Lilah would’ve thought the people in her section would at least be able to distinguish her plump, curly-haired self from slender, redheaded male Jess, but no such luck. One table had insisted on giving their order to her, and in her panic, Lilah had whipped out a pen and written their menu choices on her palm. She didn’t have a notepad! The highly trained professional servers might be able to remember four different appetizers and dinners with different temperatures for the meat entrees, all in their heads, but Lilah wasn’t too proud to admit she couldn’t.

Jess had laughed long and hard when she’d showed him the scrawled order, her sweaty palms already smudging so that it was hard to tell if Mr. Pushy wanted steak tartare or salmon terrine. Grant shook his head but gave no lectures; he was too busy dealing with the bartender crisis. Which, thank the good sweet Lord for pregnant bartenders who quit without notice, because Lilah was strung tight enough without Grant raking her over the coals.

Nerves jangling, she jostled past the knot of servers clustered around the computer where they entered their orders and pushed open the kitchen doors. A lady at table fourteen needed a new bread plate—the one she had showed a visible finger smudge that looked innocent to Lilah, but apparently was entirely unacceptable.

The swinging kitchen door opened onto the pit of hell. Lilah shrank back from the immediate blast of heat, ovens pumping, flames leaping from the grill and illuminating the intense set of Frankie’s usually sardonic face. The sous chef was working in a silent rush while everyone around him shouted and swore, hurrying up and down the line, slipping on wet spots on the floor.

Gone was the serene, happy kitchen of this afternoon. Gone was the cheerful crew of lovable, quirky cooks Lilah had gotten to know over corn salad and tacos at the family meal.

These people were angry, red-faced demons who looked like nothing so much as the tormented souls in the illustration of the fifth circle of hell in her ancient copy of Dante’s Inferno. And presiding over these lost souls was the devil himself.

“We’re in the shit, you fucking monkeys,” Devon Sparks shouted, kicking a trash can so hard that it fell over. “Get your heads out of your asses and back in the game!” Beyond some extra hunching of the shoulders, not a single person acknowledged Devon’s rant. Not that Lilah blamed them. If anyone ever spoke to her like that, she didn’t know what she’d do. It was appalling, truly, and she couldn’t help clucking her tongue a little, even though she knew it made her sound like an old biddy. Luckily for her, the clatter of pots and pans and curses of struggling chefs drowned it out nicely.

Now how in the world was she supposed to get to the dishwashing station where the clean plates were stacked? There were a whole lot of fast-moving, knife-wielding objects between here and there. Lilah did her best to suck in her belly and attempt to become invisible, squeezing past flailing arms and shuffling feet.

“You!”

The enraged voice of the head chef froze the blood in Lilah’s veins and turned her feet to immovable blocks of ice.

Oh, Lord. Here we go.

Pasting on a pleasant expression, Lilah faced him with a light, “Yes? Can I help you?” Sparks lowered his head like a bull about to charge. “You can get the hell out of my cooks’ way, is what you can do.”

Lilah’s eyes darted to the dishwashing station, so close and yet so far. “I just need one little, teensy plate and I’ll be out of your hair,” she said.

Oh, no, please don’t tell me there aren’t any clean bread plates . . .

“Christ!” he snarled, accepting a full dinner plate distractedly and wiping spattered sauce from the rim with the white cloth tucked in the apron tied at his waist. “If there’s anything you don’t need, it’s more plates you can smash on the dining room floor.”

Lilah winced. She should’ve known he’d heard that.

Devon turned away to send the waiting server out with a heavily-laden tray, then turned back to Lilah, eyes snapping. He pointed directly at her.

“One more fuck-up like that . . .” He raked her with a scathing, dismissive glance, mouth pulling into a sneer. “And I don’t care how pissed Grant gets, I’ll kick your ass out of here in a heartbeat.” CHAPTER ELEVEN

The kitchen gods Devon had thanked earlier were evidently intent on reminding him that control was an illusion. From the instant the first order for the first four-top came in, Devon’s first dinner service as Market’s head chef was an unmitigated disaster.

Nausea swirled in his stomach, sending hot flushes of blood straight to his head. He probably looked like a maniac, the way he’d been running his fingers through the carefully ordered spikes of his hair. He was at the pass executing orders, calling out tickets and plating the food that came up as quickly as he could, but everything was out of sync. The cooks were struggling with the last-minute menu additions, and to make matters worse, plates were starting to come back.

It was bad enough to have a customer send a steak back to the kitchen to be refired because it wasn’t done to the right temperature—but to have a whole table send back all four entrees because they flat-out hated the food? Devon wanted to throw up.

Instead, he yelled. And yelled some more. At Lilah Jane, no less, who was so completely out of her depth here, it made his lungs hurt just to look at her. And to top it off, he’d shown some of his jealousy over Grant and just what exactly the handsome restaurant manager wanted from Lilah.

Anyway, what was he thinking, wasting time on front-of-house stuff in the first place?

He refused to acknowledge that if it were anyone else, he’d have fired her instantly, dinner rush or no dinner rush.

“I’m sorry, what did you just say?” Lilah pulled herself up, as regal as a queen, and gave Devon the kind of stare he hadn’t seen since Principal Dryden threw him out of assembly for clowning around.

“You heard me. No more plates on the floor,” he told her, already softening his voice. Christ, he was such a sucker. Those big green eyes, though, damn. But she didn’t look as if she took this quite seriously enough. Raising his brows, Devon delivered his final shot: “And I don’t care if you have to leave your shirt as collateral, the next time a table tries to give you their order, you promise them you’ll be right back and go get Jess.”

That got her. Lilah’s cheeks blazed and her mouth opened but no sound came out.

“That’s the thing about an open kitchen,” Devon said, tilting his chin toward the open pass through to the dining room. “Not only can they see in, I can see out.” As if on cue, Grant appeared on the other side of the window.

Every muscle in Devon’s body clenched. Here was Lilah’s knight in shining armor, come to rescue her from the evil bastard executive chef. The thought burned going down like a gulp of straight chili juice.

Devon pointed at the manager and ground out, “If you’re here to tell me to keep it down because the customers are complaining, then I’m here to tell you what the goddamn customers can do with their bitching. They tune in to see me scream at cooks every week, they can damn well sit through one evening of it at Market.”

“Lord, how I wish the only problem were the nastiness of your mouth combined with your startling lung capacity,” Grant moaned. The blond man was actually wringing his hands in distress, Devon noted with a sinking sensation.

“It better not be about your gal pal, either, because she had it coming and I still went easy on her,” he said, ignoring the gasp of outrage from behind him and wiping a spill of sauce from the edge of a white bowl holding a quivering morel custard on a bed of lemon-scented asparagus. He spun the bowl onto the server’s tray and barked over his shoulder, “Where’s the goddamn endive salad? The custard is ready to go.”

“Coming up behind you, Chef,” panted the Italian kid who’d held Frankie back before.

“Nowhere near good enough,” Devon spat at him, snatching the plate from his hands. “It’s a salad, you idiot, not open-heart surgery. Be faster.” Turning back to the server, Devon shouted, “What are you waiting for? Go!”

“Chef.” Grant was practically vibrating with the urgency of his message. “Please.” The front of the house was as big a mess as the kitchen, Devon knew. Five minutes into service, Grant had appeared at the pass to let Devon know that Samara, the lovely and exotic bartender who delighted guests waiting for their tables with her blend of charm and expertly made cocktails, had called in sick. And it was the kind of sickness she’d diagnosed with a little white plastic stick and was going to take nine months to recover from.