The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs (26 page)

“Well, if you’re looking for a fun restaurant, I highly recommend Central. Adam and I went last week and loved it.”

I stop shuffling papers when I hear Adam’s name. Rachel stiffens. “Oh?” I say, trying to sound casual. The gyro churns in my stomach.

“He got a big promotion at work, so we went out to celebrate. He totally deserved it. You know how driven he is.”

Of course I know. I dated the guy for more than a year. Why she thinks it’s appropriate to bring up Adam in this context, I do not know. I assume it has something to do with her status as the most annoying woman in all of Washington.

But, Millie’s irksome nature aside, hearing about Adam’s success stirs up a hot pot of emotions. On the one hand, I am genuinely happy for Adam. I know how hard he worked for this promotion, and I know it’s what he wanted. And though a small part of me wants his career to crash and burn in a spectacular fashion so that he will regret the way he broke up with me, the rational part of me knows that won’t happen. Adam doesn’t “do” regret. What I feel most of all, I suppose, is bitterness. Adam’s promotion is yet another story of a friend moving closer to his or her dream job, while I get sucked further into a job I increasingly cannot stand. As Gore Vidal once said, “Whenever a friend succeeds, something in me dies.”

“Good for him,” I say, trying my hardest to seem genuine. “Tell him I say congrats.”

Millie sighs loudly. “Like he doesn’t talk about you enough already … Anyway, I should get back to work. I have so much on my plate right now. Susan wants my help writing some book.”

I grunt. “Join the club.”

Millie narrows her eyes. “What?”

“Mark offered to add me as coauthor on his book if I help him with a few chapters.”

Millie jerks her head back. “Really? Wow. That’s … surprising. Good for Mark.”

Rachel raises an eyebrow. “I think you mean good for Hannah.”

“Sure, whatever,” she says, lifting herself off my desk. “Good luck with your work. My guess is you’ll need it.”

As she stalks away, I look up at Rachel and plead with my eyes, trying to communicate that if this is what it means to stay employed here, I want her to take my pen and stab me in the throat immediately.

But she doesn’t. And I’m still here. Still here, and stuck, stuck, stuck.

There is only one way to bring myself out of a funk of this magnitude, and that is to cook my ass off. And, with a week to go until the next installment of The Dupont Circle Supper Club, that’s exactly what I do.

I spend the weekend sifting through my recipe files, trying to come up with a suitable theme for our next two dinners. If the food blogosphere is to be believed, The Dupont Circle Supper Club specializes in gourmet comfort food, and so whatever menu I come up with should align with our growing reputation, inadvertent though it may be. After jotting down nine potential themes, I settle on a winner: diner food.

Growing up outside of Philadelphia, I never wanted for diner food, whether it was from Bob’s Diner in Roxborough or the Trolley Car Diner in Mount Airy. The food wasn’t anything special—eggs and toast, meat loaf and gravy, the omnipresent glass case of pies—but I always found the food comforting and satisfying, served as it was in those old-fashioned, prefabricated stainless steel trolley cars. Whenever we would visit my mom’s parents in Cranbury, New Jersey, we’d stop at the Claremont Diner in East Windsor on the way home, and I’d order a fat, fluffy slice of coconut cream pie, which I’d nibble on the whole car ride back to Philly.

I’m not sure why I’ve always found diner food so comforting. Maybe it’s the abundance of grease or the utter lack of pretense. Diner food is basic, stick-to-your-ribs fare—carbs, eggs, and meat, all cooked up in plenty of hot fat—served up in an environment dripping with kitsch and nostalgia. Where else can you get scrambled eggs and toast all day long? Where else are a jug of syrup and a bottomless cup of coffee de rigueur? The point of diner cuisine isn’t to astound or impress; it’s to fill you up cheaply with basic, down-home food.

My menu, however,
should
astound and impress, which is why I’ve decided to take some of the diner foods I remember from my youth and put my own twist on them. So far, this is what I’ve come up with:

Sloe gin fizz cocktails/chocolate egg creams

Grilled cheese squares: grappa-soaked grapes and Taleggio/Asian pears and smoked Gouda

“Eggs, Bacon, and Toast”: crostini topped with wilted spinach, pancetta, poached egg, and chive pesto

Smoky meat loaf with slow-roasted onions and prune ketchup

Whipped celery root puree

Braised green beans with fire-roasted tomatoes

Mini root beer floats

Triple coconut cream pie

The menu is longer and slightly more involved than my previous supper clubs, but now that The Dupont Circle Supper Club has started turning a slight profit, I can afford to splurge on some extras here and there. Plus, due to the surge in our popularity, we’ve increased the price per head from forty-five to fifty-five dollars, giving me a little more wiggle room. These decisions hardly make me the Warren Buffett of supper clubs, but I’m beginning to grasp the business end of this operation in a way I hadn’t appreciated before.

My greater concern, however, is that due to the surge in demand, we increased the number of available seats each night. Now, instead of hosting twelve guests a night, we’re hosting twenty-four, catching the overflow in Blake’s living room with the folding table Rachel borrowed from NIRD. That amounts to forty-eight heads a weekend. I’m a little concerned as to how, exactly, this will work, but with three dinners under my belt, Rachel assures me I can handle it.

The Friday before the dinners, Rachel and I sneak out of work early and head to Whole Foods to pick up our last-minute ingredients, slipping out before Mark, Millie, or Susan spot us leaving the building. The local Whole Foods sits one block away from my old apartment, where Adam still lives and where the temperature is probably still five degrees too cold. I would worry that I might run into him, but given Millie’s big news about his promotion, I’m guessing he is either at work or in Millie’s pants.

Rachel grabs a shopping cart and pushes it into the Whole Foods produce section, leaning her weight into the handle as she steers around the displays of apples and pears.

“So … have you seen the paper today?” she asks.

“I scanned the digital version. Why?”

She reaches into her purse and pulls out a ripped-out page from the Letters to the Editor. “Here. Read this.”

I grab the paper from her hand and begin skimming the page as Rachel fills a plastic bag with green beans:

I was disappointed with Celia Green’s feature last week on The Dupont Circle Supper Club [“Shhh: Dinner Is Served,” Sept. 30], which glorified an operation that is, at best, irresponsible and, at worst, illegal. The Dupont Circle corridor already suffers from an overabundance of restaurant and food establishments, some of whom employ illegal workers and owe back taxes to the DC government. The last thing our neighborhood needs is yet another shifty restaurant operation. While the secret nature of The Dupont Circle Supper Club may sound exciting and fun to some, the complete lack of regulation and accountability creates a risk for patrons and for the neighborhood at large. I would encourage the carrot-cake-loving hostess of this supper club to do the responsible thing and terminate her operation immediately. She should play by the rules, just as I, as candidate for the Dupont Circle ANC, am encouraging all restaurants in the neighborhood to do. There is no point in having rules if some people don’t have to follow them.

Sincerely,

Blake Fischer, candidate for Dupont Circle ANC (Ward 2B07)

“
Whaaaaaaat
?” My voice fills the entirety of the Whole Foods produce section.

Rachel snatches the article from my hands. “Shhh. Don’t shout.”

“This is five thousand percent terrible, Rachel. Five thousand percent!”

Rachel grips the shopping cart by its handle and pushes it toward the baking aisle. “It isn’t that bad.” She casts a sideways glance. “Okay, yeah, it’s pretty bad. But this feels to me more like a ‘concerned citizen’ letter. He’s leaving the responsibility in your hands. Besides, ANC members have no legislative authority whatsoever. So even if he does get elected, he doesn’t have the power to shut us down.”

“Uh, he does as the owner of the house in which we operate.”

Rachel frowns. “True.”

“We can’t do this in his house anymore. We have to call it off.”

“Hannah, you’re overreacting. Blake is out of town for the entire weekend. Let’s get through this dinner and figure out the rest later. Okay?”

I sigh. “Okay. But you are taking some of the blame if we get caught.”

Rachel takes a deep breath, her eyes tense as she stares into the distance. “I’m sure everything will be fine. I wouldn’t worry.”

She pushes the cart speedily along the linoleum floor, and I race to catch up with her, now more anxious than ever because although Rachel says I shouldn’t worry, the tone in her voice says the opposite.

Saturday morning, we meet outside Blake’s front door and launch straight into our prep work in his kitchen. Rachel unloads a bunch of double shot glasses onto the counter, which we’ll use for our mini root beer floats, and unpacks a few vintage diner napkin holders that are painted a pale robin’s egg blue.

“Where did you find these?” I ask, twirling one of the napkin holders in my hand.

“Etsy. Aren’t they great? I’m going to showcase them on my blog after the dinners are over.”

“How’s the blog going?”

She flashes a confident smile. “Great, actually. The
Post
listed me as one of the top ten local bloggers to watch.”

“Rach—that’s fantastic.”

“Thanks. Although I’ve been a bit of a slacker ever since I started helping you with the supper club. And there have been … other distractions.”

Rachel looks as if she is about to continue, but before she can say anything, my phone rings.

“Oh my god,” I say, staring down at my phone. My heart races. “It’s Blake.”

“Answer it,” Rachel says.

“I can’t answer it! I’m in his house.”

“He doesn’t know that. He can’t magically see you through the phone.”

“But what if he can tell by the sounds in the background?”

She furrows her brow. “Because the silence sounds different here than it would in your own apartment? You’re being crazy. Just answer it. If it’s important, he’ll just keep calling anyway.”

I pick up the phone and press it to my ear. “Hello …?”

“Hey, Hannah? It’s Blake.”

“Hi.”
I’m in your house, I’m in your house, I’m in your house
.

“You’re going to think I’m a little OCD,” he says, “but I’m in Tampa, and I can’t shake the feeling that I left the lights on in my kitchen. Would you mind running up to my house and checking for me?”

I gulp loudly. “You want me to go … into your house?”

“Yeah, if you don’t mind. I don’t set the alarm or anything, so you should be fine. Sorry. I know it’s a weird request, but my electricity bill was insane last month, and I can’t figure out why, since I was away so much. The only explanation is that I’m leaving lights on by accident while I’m away. Either that, or I’m totally losing my mind.”

Those aren’t the
only
explanations … “O-okay. Sure. I’ll run upstairs and let you know.”

“Great. Thanks.” He laughs. “Sorry to make you do this. I know you have better ways to spend your Saturdays than wandering around my house.”

“Ha,” I say, my eyelids batting at one hundred miles an hour. “Right.”

Of course I do.

I can’t keep up this charade forever. Can I? No, I can’t. But that’s fine because I never intended to run this supper club out of Blake’s house
forever
. Frankly, I never intended to run it out of his house at all. But now that I have … No. I’ll get through this weekend, and then I’ll find a new location, and that will be that. The only reason I’ve continued to use his house is because my apartment is too small and I haven’t found a better place to host these dinners. But I’ll start looking. Soon. As soon as this weekend is over.

By the time our guests arrive that night, I’m already a sweaty mess. All six burners on Blake’s Viking range are firing like mad, and both ovens are cranking at high heat. In two huge skillets, I am frying up the grilled cheese sandwiches, the buttered brioche sizzling in the pan as the Gouda and Taleggio melt into the slices of pear and grappa-soaked grapes. A huge skillet of water bubbles away in the back corner, ready to poach the eggs for the bacon-and-egg crostini. My braised green beans are hanging out in the other back corner of the stove top, swimming in a sauce of fire-roasted tomatoes and sweet fennel seed, and on the middle burners sit a pan of frying pancetta and a bowl of celery root puree atop a bain marie. Two weeks ago, the mere sight of all of these pots and pans and total strangers would have been enough to send me into cardiac arrest, but now, aside from shedding a few gallons of sweat, I’m fine. Although, admittedly, Adam’s subzero apartment doesn’t sound so bad right about now.