The kitchen, p.1
The Kitchen, page 1
The Kitchen
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One Maggie
Chapter Two Emily
Chapter Three Nayomi
Chapter Four Maggie
Chapter Five Emily
Chapter Six Nayomi
Chapter Seven Emily
Chapter Eight Maggie
Chapter Nine Nayomi
Chapter Ten Emily
Chapter Eleven Maggie
Chapter Twelve Nayomi
Chapter Thirteen Emily
Chapter Fourteen Maggie
Chapter Fifteen Nayomi
Chapter Sixteen Emily
Chapter Seventeen Maggie
Chapter Eighteen Nayomi
Chapter Nineteen Emily
Chapter Twenty Maggie
Chapter Twenty-One Nayomi
Chapter Twenty-Two Emily
Chapter Twenty-Three Maggie
Chapter Twenty-Four Emily
Chapter Twenty-Five Nayomi
Chapter Twenty-Six Maggie
Chapter Twenty-Seven Emily
Chapter Twenty-Eight Maggie
Epilogue 3 months later…
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Laura Carter
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
For my baby
Chapter One
Maggie
‘One foie gras, one escargot, one langoustine, one Saint Jacques,’ Jean-Sébastien called out from the pass as he read the handwritten check from a waiter.
Resounding replies of ‘Chef’ and ‘Yes, Chef’ came from those allocated to cooking the various elements of the starter dishes.
‘Main course,’ Jean-Sébastien continued. ‘One Dover sole, one canard, two poulet.’
‘Chef.’
‘Yes, Chef.’
‘Oui, Chef.’
Amongst those replying was Maggie, sous chef de cuisine to Jean-Sébastien, who served as both executive chef and head chef in his eponymous restaurant, within the Grande Parisienne Hotel, Upper East Side Manhattan.
The kitchen of the classic French restaurant was as large as the dining room, but where the dining room reflected an old-money, jackets-only, fine-dining ambience, the kitchen was slick and modern in its design. Bright and airy, it held immaculately clean rows of stainless steel work surfaces and state of the art appliances, worthy of the three Michelin stars Jean-Sébastien’s had held for more than a decade.
It took fifteen chefs, working Tuesday to Saturday, with training on every other Monday, to maintain the standards required by Jean-Sébastien and the reputation of the hotel.
As soon as Jean-Sébastien called for service in his native French accent and three perfectly dressed plates of food had been carefully whisked away by a suited waiter, Maggie anticipated his next request.
‘The duck jus,’ she said, as Jean-Sébastien called out for a portion of foie gras – a signature dish of the restaurant.
As her boss and mentor dipped a teaspoon into her jus, she held her breath, waiting for his response.
‘Exquisite,’ he said, kissing the air, his fingers forming a gesture that said perfection.
Maggie exhaled, beaming internally and giving one curt nod externally. She strived for perfection, as Jean-Sébastien had taught her. Outwardly, she had merely done her job – she was sous chef and in control of all sauces. Inwardly, she delighted in every flawless sauce and every word of praise she received. She craved Jean-Sébastien’s approval, his acknowledgement that he thought she was good enough. She was also too aware that the kitchen was a man’s world and if she wanted to be seen as the best, she had to work that much harder than her male peers.
Service was starting to get into swing. With eighty covers in the restaurant spread at thirty-minute intervals from seven thirty p.m., Saturday nights peaked around nine o’clock. That was the time the shouting started at the pass, service was slower due to the unanticipated requests of guests, chefs’ efforts were thrown back at them or into the trash because they had been overcooked by mere seconds. It was important for every chef to know that their components – whether they be a jus, fish, meat or vegetables – were on point before the rush began.
As Maggie moved back to her station to prepare the lemon and caper butter for the first serving of Dover sole for the evening, she received an order from Jean-Sébastien.
‘Chef take the pass.’
It wasn’t an uncommon request. Maggie was his second in command and would often take the pass if he had other business to attend to, such as a request to meet an important guest, or if he needed a bathroom break. Unlike many fine-dining restaurants that had an executive chef – who acted predominantly as a kitchen manager – and a head chef – who took the lead on cooking and service – Jean-Sébastien took on both roles himself, never wanting to be solely managerial. She sometimes wondered if he was also unable to relinquish control.
But what was different about this request was the pained look on Jean-Sébastien’s face as he held a fist to his chest and headed unsteadily in the direction of the back door onto East 63rd Street.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked subtly as he walked past her.
‘Just say “Yes, Chef”,’ he said, continuing to move.
‘Yes, Chef,’ Maggie said. Then she turned to a colleague and said, ‘Jack, take my station.’
Jack was an apprentice chef, alternatively known in Jean-Sébastien’s as a floater or sweeper. He did the running for chefs who needed ingredients or utensils, he took dirty dishes from a chef’s station to the pot-wash station, and he manned a chef’s station in the event of a call of nature or otherwise.
After plating up four main course dishes for table eight, Maggie glanced to the back door and found no sign of Jean-Sébastien returning. At that stage, she wasn’t so much concerned, as interested in her boss seeing how beautiful the food looked on service. She had pressed the duck with her fingertips to make sure it was tender inside, tasted the jus from a teaspoon before delicately pouring it around her dish, and she had forked the texture of purée to ensure it was perfectly smooth.
From the pass, she called out for service, then proceeded to shout out the starter dishes for table nineteen, the component elements of which, for the most part, descended on her within seconds.
‘Where is the pickled cabbage?’ she called out, mid-plating up.
‘Sorry, Chef. Here, Chef,’ Lucas, a commis chef, said as he rushed to her side.
Maggie sent the three finished plates to the dining room and glanced at the large clock on the wall. Jean-Sébastien had been gone for eleven minutes. Something didn’t feel right. She was about to untie her apron when a waiter carrying dirty but empty plates backed through the doors into the kitchen.
‘Table ten main course, please, Chef.’
‘Two Dover sole, one poulet,’ Maggie read out from the white piece of paper that was tucked into the steel rim of the pass and marked as table ten’s order.
By the time she had plated the poulet, she was still waiting for the Dover sole.
‘Where is the sole?’ she snapped into the room.
‘I had to put it back on, Chef,’ replied Josh, the chef de partie who was running the fish station.
‘How long?’ Maggie asked, her heart starting to race.
‘Two minutes, Chef,’ Josh told her.
Before Maggie could process the dilemma, Jean-Sébastien appeared at her side. Picking up the perfectly finished plate of poulet from the pass, he threw the plate and its entire contents into the trash and hollered, ‘Do it again! Everything again!’
He turned to Maggie, his face flushed, and silenced her enquiry after his health with a glare. ‘Back to your station, Chef,’ he told her.
She nodded, doing exactly as she had been instructed, because like everyone else, she knew her place in the hierarchy and it was beneath Jean-Sébastien.
* * *
Midnight after a Saturday shift was Maggie’s favourite time of the week. The chaos, though she thrived on it, was over. The kitchen surfaces were clean. Happy, full diners had left compliments for the chefs and made their way home or to their luxury rooms at the hotel for those staying.
‘Here we are.’ Charles, the head sommelier, made his way into the kitchen holding a tray of full wine glasses. Behind him, another member of the bar staff carried a tray of beers.
They set the full trays down on the pass and the kitchen staff descended to pick up their chosen drink, all leaning back on the work surfaces to enjoy their first mouthful of hard-earned reward at the end of a busy week.
‘For you, Maggie, something new,’ Charles said, handing her a glass of white wine, chilled enough to have caused a thin cloud of condensation on the glass.
Maggie held it up to the light. She knew from the pale golden colour that it would be full-bodied but crisp. Refreshing after a hot night in the kitchen. She brought the glass under her nose and inhaled citrus.
Smiling, she told Charles, ‘The new Sancerre.’
‘Exactly right. You liked it at the tasting, I think.’
Maggie took a sip and closed her eyes as she let the flavours of the wine explode on her palate. ‘You are the best thing about my week, Charles,’ she said.
He beamed in a way that made the lines at the edges of his eyes crease further. While Charles frequently bemoaned the signs of ageing (as if his shock of white hair wasn’t indicative enough), Maggie loved the physical proof on Char
‘So many people have expressed similar sentiments this evening, my dear.’
As Maggie laughed, Charles straightened his tie, then the jacket of his suit, and he came to rest against the pass between Maggie and Jean-Sébastien, each of the men holding onto a glass of Burgundy. Despite being close in age, where Charles wore his sixty-odd years with the charm of receding height, darkening sun-kissed skin and a rotund tummy, Jean-Sébastien was tall and lean and had retained freshness in his skin and colour in his hair – an impressive feat after years of stress in the kitchen.
‘Good service tonight, everyone. Thank you for your efforts,’ Jean-Sébastien announced, raising his glass.
As usual, the chefs started to banter amongst themselves, throwing jibes around the room, though rarely aimed at Maggie, the only female in the kitchen. She hoped it was her more senior position and not that after six years working in the kitchen they still didn’t see her as one of them.
‘Excellent work tonight, Maggie, as always,’ Jean-Sébastien said, leaning into Maggie’s ear as he placed his almost full glass of red wine on the pass beside her. ‘I’m going to head home a little early tonight.’
‘Is everything okay?’
He seemed to force a smile, nodding as he pressed a hand to Maggie’s shoulder. Then, uncommonly early, he was gone.
‘You know, I’m going to take off too,’ Maggie said, receiving acknowledgement only from Charles, who kissed her cheeks and, with the French lilt he had retained despite more than two decades of living in New York, told her, ‘Goodnight, ma chérie.’
In the back of a hotel cab – free to staff – Maggie took off her white hat and released her long brown hair from the tight chignon it had been held in for more than twelve hours. Her neck clicked as she rolled her head from side to side.
It was a short ride to her one-bedroom apartment at this time in the morning but there was no shortage of cabs, tourists and weekend party-goers on the streets of New York City. It was one of the things she loved and loved to hate about New York – the city truly never slept. And right now, that was all she wanted to do, without noise from the streets beneath her bedroom window. But late August was still bringing some muggy nights, the stuffy heat of summer not yet cooling off and she couldn’t sleep with the window closed.
She traipsed up the three flights of stairs in the old building with heavy legs. Inside her apartment, she was welcomed home by Livvy, her beautiful, silver-grey Egyptian Mau.
‘Hi girl,’ she said, setting her handbag and keys down on the kitchen counter as she picked up the cat. ‘What have you been up to, huh?’
Livvy was a rescue that Maggie had taken into her care two years ago, as a twenty-eighth birthday present to herself. A house cat, Livvy was generally quite happy in her own company but sometimes she needed a snuggle on the sofa – just like Maggie. They were a perfect match.
Navigating the kitchen with one hand as she held Livvy in the other, Maggie poured herself a glass of home-infused mint and cucumber water from the refrigerator and crossed the open-plan living area to unwind on her sofa with an old episode of Friends. As exhausted as she felt after a long shift, she was also too wired to go right to bed. Her mind ran through every dish she had made and everything, no matter how miniscule, she could have improved in her never-ending bid for flawlessness.
She heard her mom’s words: dreamer, fantasist. Words that Maggie had been told over and over as a girl. Words that gave Maggie as big a reason as any to prove her worth in a kitchen like Jean-Sébastien’s.
At some point, sleep must have got the better of her because she woke on the sofa with a start just after three a.m. as her phone rang, vibrating loudly against the glass-topped coffee table.
Netflix had paused – continue watching? – and Livvy was nowhere to be seen. Rubbing her eyes, Maggie reached for her phone.
Who on earth would call at this time?
When she saw the name Isabella dancing on her screen, Maggie accepted the call, her heart racing without her truly knowing why. All she did know was that Jean-Sébastien’s wife didn’t often call, and she had never called Maggie in the middle of the night.
‘Isabella? Is everything okay?’
‘Maggie… it’s… it’s Jean-Sébastien. He’s… he’s dead.’
Chapter Two
Emily
Emily groaned as she rolled over in bed, coming out of her alcohol-induced coma with the kind of headache that made her think she’d been hit by a truck. In actual fact, she’d been hit by the inevitable consequences of a pre-dinner cocktail, an eight-course tasting menu paired with wine, and one, no two, possibly three digestifs in the form of a very nice fortified wine. For the record, the digestifs did not aid her digestion but resulted in her head hanging over a porcelain pot as soon as she arrived home.
Would she ever learn?
Through the ringing in her ears, she could hear the familiar slide and clink of Oliver’s rowing machine as he carried out his Sunday morning regime in the other room. The sound told her it was not even nine a.m., despite the fact that Oliver was fully aware that she hadn’t got to bed until the early hours after dinner last night. Oliver was one of those people who just couldn’t lie in, no matter how pig-selfish he was being.
It wasn’t as if she had just had a night out on cocktails with the girls, she had been working. It didn’t sound much like work, as Oliver liked to remind her, but she was the lead restaurant critic for the New York Times and that meant she had to spend her evenings eating indigestion-inducing rich food paired with copious amounts of alcohol.
Okay, so it was a job with perks. But as she staggered from her bed, pulling on her robe from the back of the bedroom door, her mouth so dry the skin of her lips was peeling, knowing she had to write a twelve-hundred-word review by Monday lunchtime, she didn’t feel so perky.
She and Oliver had been together for two years. A combination of Oliver’s Wall Street salary and her salary from NYT had recently allowed them to purchase a bright, open apartment in Brooklyn Heights, with a waterfront view and, traffic dependent, relatively quick access to the city across Brooklyn Bridge. She popped a pod into the coffee machine in the kitchen and switched it on. Then she sliced in half four Jaffa oranges and put them into the presser because pressed is best.
Armed with a glass of fresh orange and a black coffee laced with a hangover helping of sugar, she made her way through the lounge to the Juliet balcony window and watched the sun dance across the East River.
‘Emily, would you call your mother? She’s left five missed calls on my phone in the last hour,’ Oliver said, appearing from the second bedroom, shirtless and sweating. ‘Each time it cut out my workout music.’
‘My mom? Oliver, why didn’t you answer? She never calls.’
He shrugged as he flung a towel around his shoulders and moved into the kitchen.
Emily couldn’t remember when she last had her phone. Looking around the lounge, she saw her handbag on the floor next to the sofa.
‘Eleven missed calls. What does she want?’ Emily asked aloud, coming to sit on the sofa.
‘How about call and ask her?’ Oliver said in his mocking, childish tone, which drove Emily up the wall whenever he did it.
Scowling at his back as he left the room with a large glass full of iced water, Emily dialled her mom’s landline, but it wasn’t her mom who answered.
