Stanley Park (50 page)

“We are indeed.”

“Doin’ what?”

“Eatin’,” Olli said. “Whaddaya think?”

“Eatin’ what?” Trout asked.

“Walrus,” Olli said. “Elephant.”

Trout laughed. “No you’re not.”

“Oh yeah?” Olli said.

“Tell me,” Trout said, threatening to get cranky.

“Green soup,” Olli said.

“Green?” But now the boy yawned audibly into the phone and Olli told him to go to bed.

He wasn’t tired. What was in that soup?

“I don’t know what was in it. I only know it was green and it tasted good.”

“Find out,” Trout commanded.

“Yes, sir.”

“Promise,” he said, sleepy. “You really should know.”

Olli listened for Trout to hang up before hanging up himself, laughing.

“We really should know,” he repeated to Margaret at a whisper as the main courses arrived. She laughed.

The plates slid one by one onto the table. They inhaled as a group, then exhaled their uniform first reaction.

“My God.” “Look at this.” “Outrageous.” “Is so
beyoutifall!”

The main-course plates were even more fantastically sculpted than the appetizers. Margaret and Olli had lamb racks, the chops carved delicately, mounted in a gravity-defying spiral on top of the puréed celery root. The plate was beaded with drops of black olive jus. Dante and Benny had goose, the colour somewhere between mahogany and purple. It lay thinly sliced around the base of a bright yellow couscous tower studded with clover leaves. Banks had risotto, which spilled out of a hollow acorn squash, the lid set to one side in a field of edible violets and marigolds. Kiwi had duck, the slices propped against a buttery pile of spaetzle, all of it drizzled with a lattice of rhubarb sauce and topped with a julienne of brilliant green leeks.

Philip’s dinner won the presentation medal. His tenderloin arrived cut and fanned across a blood red pool of wine reduction, offset by six blueberries at eleven o’clock, a cloud of leek and potato frite at two. It was balanced, minimal. It looked weightless.

“Culinary haiku,” said Kiwi, looking intently down the table at Philip’s plate. “Although, did you say
beef
tenderloin?
Rather small cow bits, aren’t they?”

A waiter appeared like a genie with these words before anyone had time to consider the smallish disks of red meat on Philip’s plate. “El Chaco Angus,” he explained with an understanding smile. “From the Argentinean highlands. The grown male stands only about so high; he’s a miniature. Tastes like a richer, more intense, free-range veal.”

Kiwi’s eyes bugged out. She almost laughed. But the waiter was nodding deeply, like he’d encountered this reaction before, and she ended up merely shaking her head in amazement. It left them all chuckling over Jeremy’s uncanny ability to provision the unexpected.

And with that, they turned to their meals and a short period of table silence descended. Even Dante fell onto his colourful plate of goose with such interest, followed by such enthusiasm, that he overlooked conversation. Olli too, who wasn’t sure he’d ever eaten lamb like this lamb before. Roasted to a very precise point, each chop rosy inside, darkened and sweetened outside. Each forkful could be given an unexpected salty kick by trailing it through the olive jus before raising it to your lips.

Half a dozen mouthfuls and a few swallows of wine later, they all became talkative at once.

“Really remarkable.” “Delicious, yours?” “Totally.” “I’m forever impressed with that young man.” “Incredible.” “Tarribly, tarribly good,” said Albertini Banks.

There were similar comments spilling in from nearby tables as plates were slid soundlessly onto the white tablecloths and the eating began. Indeed, conversation around the room had ebbed and flowed in the same pattern. The volume fell, then rose. The band responded by switching from mellow to mellow swing.

Kiwi was finished first and up with a camera. “May I?” she said. And they all smiled up from the carnage of half-empty plates. Then to Dante: “I was going to try the kitchen next.
What do you think?”

Dante laughed, still eating and growing red-cheeked. “It’s fine by me, not by my chef, I’m quite sure. You might try sneaking in the alley door.”

They all laughed and returned to their meals. Kiwi sat down and took another few sips of wine, then slipped off her chair and announced the need to powder. Olli was the only one to notice that she didn’t go to the washrooms at all, but slipped out the front door of the restaurant and up the street. Off to buy heroin, he thought. Who knew? But he didn’t think about it further because he was being offered another glass of wine over one shoulder and, down the end of the table, Dante’s conversational radar had swept around to him.

He was asking about the Tree of Knowledge project, predictably. They had earned a blip of press coverage three months before.
Wired
had picked up the story because Redmond was involved.
Newsweek
did a sidebar in a longer article about Internet publishing. Olli accepted the glass of wine and took a stab at a lay person’s description. They were archiving Internet development, taking multi-trillion-byte snapshots of the entire thing. The project allowed them to develop tools for the manipulation of huge amounts of data, which in turn … He couldn’t think of newer, better words and so out it came, his old vision: “Libraries of everything,” he said, and then to emphasize added,
“disseminated freely.”

It was a point that always got things going, people at the turn of the millennium having developed a fetishistic relationship with data, information. Dante was especially enthusiastic. “Just to bring life to such a tree,” he said.

They talked along these lines for some time. The miracle of knowing. But Dante was also drilling relentlessly through the surface to underlying issues. He sensed something and Olli knew he sensed it, because just as his original idealism about collecting and disseminating libraries of everything
had now been beaten into to a massive, megalomaniacal archiving project with no express reason whatsoever, so too had the shine come off Olli’s pronouncements on the topic.

“And now you archive,” Dante said, “but do not disseminate.”

True. Things hadn’t turned out exactly as he’d wanted on the Tree of Knowledge project. He admitted it when pressed. He let himself be coerced into acknowledging that his ideas had been redirected. And then, recognizing in Dante exactly the kind of force that moulds the idealism of others into service of personal metavision, Olli thought it was a good time to draw another junior into the conversation.

“You know how these things happen, of course,” he said to Philip.

Philip smiled without committing. “Not sure I do,” he said eventually. “This project turned out more or less as I imagined.”

Well, so much for that. Olli hoped the subject would change soon.

“Me too,” Benny said. “Despite what Jeremy wanted.”

Margaret wrinkled her brow. Olli saw Dante frown a small frown. Benny forged ahead. “He wanted to make us into a French bistro. Not exactly
bleeding edge.”

“Perhaps not thet, ’zactly,” Albertini said, looking genuinely confused. “But the bistro is … timeless, yes-no?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Benny started up again, and now Dante’s frown deepened to frank discouragement, noticeable to all but those whose E was malfunctioning. “He wanted it to be all
French
. French food. French decor. French … I don’t know … bidet.”

Philip put up a tent of fingers in front of his face, resting his chin on his thumbs. It covered a small smile.

“Jeremy always talks about that place he worked in France, I know,” Olli said to Benny, kindly. He personally did not want to see the girl go up in flames merely because she was loaded.
“But I know he’s really pleased with what you’ve made here.”

“As if,” Benny snorted. “I almost had to break his arm.” She was looking across the table at Philip for support and was getting it with little, barely perceptible, encouraging nods. “You remember, he was talking about beef tongue in mustard sauce.”

She said the words just as Kiwi Frederique slid back into her chair. Olli hadn’t seen her approach; he was just there all at once. An engaged, conversational aura about her.

“Can you believe that?” Benny was saying, now turned to Kiwi. “Beef tongue. I mean, who eats beef tongue any more?”

And when Kiwi realized the question was aimed at her, she didn’t take more than a half-beat to answer. “Oh, I’ll bet our chef does,” she said brightly.

He had almost stepped on her. He certainly scared her. Kiwi screamed and scrambled to her feet.

“What the …?” Jeremy said.

“Chef—” Kiwi started.

“What the hell are you doing in my kitchen?” He was standing there with his thyme in one fist. There was a tense exchange.

Dante told her it would be OK.

Dante didn’t run this kitchen.

She really hadn’t been in the way.

He didn’t care if she was in the way. And what the hell was she hiding for?

She wasn’t hiding. She came in the alley door as Dante had suggested.

“You are not seriously going to tell me that Dante told you to sneak in my alley door,” Jeremy shouted. He was going to lose it.

Joey de Yonker poked his head back around the shelving just then. “Everything OK, Chef?”

Jeremy was still glaring at Kiwi. “Give this thyme to Henk and tell him to get those three squab outta here.”

“Yes, Chef!” Joey de Yonker said, snatching the herbs from Jeremy’s hand and disappearing.

Kiwi stood her ground. “I heard that young cook say
racoon
 …,” she began.

Part of being on the hot line was being able to respond immediately to the unexpected. Jeremy heard what she said and didn’t need a second to compose himself. Kitchen plate code, he snapped. The kid was a jokester, wisecracked all the time. “I do
not
have time for this conversation,” he said, turning.

“Later,” Kiwi said, following.

By the time Jeremy got back to the point, they were backing up at the pick-up desk. “Order lamb, make that two lamb, order flatfish, order rabbit. Order prawns and another squab. Please.” He glared over at Kiwi, who had the nerve to follow him and stand off to the side, out of the way but in clear view. Only now was he beginning to wonder how long she’d been back there and what exactly she had heard.

“How about a picture?” Kiwi called from the sidelines.

“No pictures, no talking,” Jeremy barked.

The rest of service was smooth, although one dinner did come back without any accompanying request for it to be heated or replaced. A racoon tenderloin. Jeremy sent a waiter out to talk to the table directly. When he came back he said, “Said it tasted just a bit funny to him. Quite sure it was fine.…”

“Not everybody likes El Chaco Angus,” Jeremy called out, too loud. “Get him something else. Henk, are we out of anything?”

“Prawns, squab and lamb.”

“Rabbit,” Jeremy said. “Suggest the rabbit.”

“Order bunny,” Joey de Yonker said, reaching for his slices of pancetta.

The last orders were being prepared. “Almost there,” Henk said without looking up from a last duck breast he was beginning.

“We killed,” Jeremy said. “OK, fire everything, you hear me? What do we have here—prawn, squab, duck, and I have the rabbit. These are last orders, last pick-up, people.”

Jeremy finished the rabbit order, topped it with the sweet onion ragout and the lightly sautéed pancetta. He sprinkled the plate with a tablespoon of grated Romano, some chives, then slid it onto the pick-up counter.

The waiter was back in what seemed like three minutes with an empty plate and a message from the table that had returned the racoon. “The best rabbit he’s ever eaten in his entire life,” he said, eyebrows raised.

“Desserts are on the trolleys,” Torkil announced from the cold pick-up. “Sauces in serving boats. Gelato is in the reach-in. Servers have been told to wheel them around in fifteen. The bar cappuccino station will be handling coffee orders.”

“Henk,” Jeremy said, turning to talk privately with his sous chef. They would break everything down, clean it all up. There would be nothing left.

“I understand, Chef,” Henk said.

He gave Kiwi about five minutes, standing there against one of the prep counters, the dish pit wailing behind them.

“What was in the won ton?” she tried. She was pretending to be interested in the background of each dish, for the article, of course. He was playing along and giving her bogus answers like: “Marrow.” And there was simply no way that was bone marrow in the won ton. Who did he think she was? She told him that he was a terrible liar—very sweetly—that she’d eaten marrow using a spoon made originally for Louis the Sixteenth, and why wouldn’t marrow be on the menu in any case?

“Not everything was on the menu tonight
exactly as served,”
he allowed.

“Fascinating,” Kiwi said.

The chef sighed. “Listen, off the record?” he said.

“Of course, darling,” Kiwi said. He was even cuter when he flushed. The tips of his nice cheekbones went all rosy. She
powered down the Palm and put it on the prep counter between them.

“My cooking is always part performance,” he told her.

Is that so? How so?

“Well, an actor doesn’t give it all to the audience, does he? There are parts you cannot know. Secrets that make the actor who he is. So the audience is ignorant, but the show is better for it.”

Kiwi protested. If one agreed to go off the record, she argued, one really expected to learn something. It was only fair.

And my, did she guilt a long speech out of him in response to that. He was all the way back to the Third-Wave Culinary Revolution now, going on about memory. In this brave new world of post-national cuisine, Chef Jeremy left his little reminders about what he thought had been lost. He had a whole list of nostalgic examples: regional tastes, local ingredients, passed-down recipes, family farms.

“Even something of the family itself,” the chef said.

And more: Embedded in this cuisine, Kiwi was to believe, were messages about knowing the earth’s bounty and your connection to it. Understanding where one stood, understanding loyalty and the sanctity of certain soil.