French Pressed (3 page)

“Please follow me.”

As we walked, I made polite conversation, complimenting the food and service, tactfully leaving out the abysmal coffee.

“Here at Solange, we always strive for excellence,” Dornier replied. “Even in the face of our executive chef’s
continued
absence.”

The critical tone was hard to miss. I decided to probe a little. “Excuse me, Monsieur Dornier? Are you saying that Chef Keitel has been MIA from the restaurant lately?”

The maître d’ scowled. “I am unhappy to say that he has been.”

“It’s, uh…hard to believe. I mean, the meal was so perfect. I could have sworn Chef Keitel finished my plate himself.”

Now, I knew very well that an executive chef like Keitel would not have had to finish each plate to guarantee excellence. Sure, he might have designed the dishes on the menu, but the value of a top executive chef was his ability to reproduce that same dish day after day and teach his staff to do the same.

Whenever Tommy Keitel was absent, his executive sous-chef would be expected to step up and fill in for him. I didn’t recall Joy ever mentioning the name of the kitchen’s second-in-command, so I asked the maître d’ about it.

Dornier sniffed again. “Our executive sous-chef is Ms. Brigitte Rouille.”

“Oh? Joy’s never mentioned Chef Rouille.”

“Brigitte comes to us from Chantal, where she was the sauté chef. Before that, she was the sous-chef at La Belle Femme near Lincoln Center. Originally, however, Ms. Rouille was lured to New York from her native Quebec with an offer to serve as executive chef at Martinique’s downtown.”

The list of upscale eateries was impressive, but Brigitte Rouille’s work experience ran like a backward résumé. “From executive to sous to sauté chef?” I said. “Ms. Rouille’s career path seems upside down, doesn’t it?”

“Oui,”
Dornier replied.

“So why was she hired?”

Dornier fidgeted with his expensive cat glasses. “Chef Keitel has known Brigitte for many years. When her life proved…how shall I say?…
challenging
…Tommy was magnanimous enough to offer the woman a chance to redeem her career.”

Challenging? What did that mean?
I was about to ask, but we’d reached the double doors to the kitchen.

“I’m sure you’ll see, Ms. Cosi, that we run an efficient, professional shop.”

“Professional,” I repeated with a nod.

“
Oui.
Although our sous-chef has had her ups and downs, Brigitte Rouille is quite capable of handling the kitchen with Chef Keitel away.”

Dornier pushed one of the two swinging padded doors, holding it open so I could move through. “Please enjoy visiting your daughter. I’ll return in a few minutes to escort you out again.”

“Thank you,” I said, and stepped inside.

Even though a huge, stainless steel service counter blocked a clear view of the entire kitchen, amazing aromas immediately enveloped me. I recognized the tang of fresh-cut scallions, the piquant bite of garlic, the brightness of wine reduction.

Unfortunately, the riot of appetizing scents was quickly upstaged by the sounds of an
actual
riot. I heard a loud crash, as if a plate had been smashed to the floor. Someone screamed. Another plate was broken, and a woman began shouting in a pronounced French accent.

“Do you hear me?!
Écoutez-moi!
You are an idiot, and your technique is shit!”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” a male voice calmly answered.

An echoing clang came next, as if a pan had been thrown down. “If you back talk to me again,” the woman yelled, “I will fire you!”

“You can’t fire me!” the man replied. “I’ve got a contract, just like you and Keitel. So screw you, Brigitte!”

Brigitte?
I thought.
The woman shouting must be Brigitte Rouille, the executive sous-chef from Quebec.
Obviously, the woman was having a disagreement with her kitchen staff.

I stood by the double doors, frozen like some party guest who’d arrived early to find her married hosts at each other’s throats.
What do I do? Go in anyway? Wait till things calm down? Come back later?

The shouting went quiet for a moment, and I tried to see beyond the large metal service counter, but all I could make out were some cooks moving around in their white jackets. Finally, I heard Brigitte Rouille making angry accusations to another staff member.

This time, a young woman answered in a clear, calm voice: “That’s just not true, Chef. I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken.”

The voice was Joy’s, I realized. And my daughter sounded perfectly calm and respectful. I was proud of her for keeping her cool in the face of a professional dressing-down, and I expected Chef Rouille to respond to her accordingly. But the woman’s reply was a screaming rant, laced with French obscenities.

I clenched my fists, knowing there was nothing I could do. This was Joy’s workplace, after all, and she’d be mortified to have her mommy butting in. So I just stood there, waiting for Brigitte Rouille’s tirade to finish.

But it didn’t. The French-Canadian woman continued to rage. I understood a fair amount of the French language, but the more she shouted, the less sense she seemed to be making.

Then more plates went crashing to the floor. A woman screamed, and a Latino busboy in a white smock bolted past me in a panic. I grabbed hold of his smock.

“What is going on back there?” I asked.

“She’s gone loco again!” he called to me before breaking away and punching through the dining room doors. “I’m outta here till she comes down!”

Good Lord!
I thought.
What kind of hell’s kitchen is my daughter working in?

I
hurried around the high steel service counter and finally got a good look at Solange’s kitchen. The space was a long, narrow rectangle, with a bank of stoves along the wall and prep tables opposite.

According to my daughter’s descriptions, Solange operated no differently than any other busy, upscale restaurant. It utilized the brigade system: basically, a hierarchical food assembly line that was invented in the nineteenth century by the Frenchman Escoffier.

There were supposed to be line cooks here, each one in charge of a different part of the menu (grilling and roasting, sauces, fish, soups, pastry…). But the kitchen looked suddenly abandoned, like a creepy ghost ship’s galley with pans left simmering on the fire and food still on prep tables.

So where’s Joy?! And where’s the staff?! I just heard them!

“I have had enough! Enough, do you hear!” Chef Rouille’s voice shrieked from the back of the long kitchen.

I moved around obstacles toward the sound of French obscenities, stepping carefully over shattered china, a pan emptied of its contents, and an overturned bowl of asparagus stalks.

Finally, I found my daughter. Her back was pressed against one of the stainless steel doors of the walk-in fridge. A brown sauce was splattered across the front of her white jacket—as if someone had sullied her deliberately. Her chestnut hair was slipping from its dark net. Her green eyes were wide, and her heart-shaped face was crimson with embarrassment.

An older woman was bawling her out, and I assumed this was Brigitte Rouille. She was thinner than Joy and slightly taller. About my age, maybe a few years older, with pale skin, a long nose, and straight hair that trailed down her white-jacketed back in a long ebony ponytail.

“You stupid brat!” Brigitte shouted. The woman’s face was flushed with fury. Beneath her tall chef’s hat, her forehead was beaded with sweat. “You are a clumsy moron!
Vous écoutez-moi!
If you bump into me
one
more time during service, I will filet your ass so it
fits
into this kitchen!”

“It’s not my fault, Chef Rouille. I know about economy of movement from school, but
you
kept bumping me. I was standing still.” Joy’s quiet defense seemed to further enrage the woman, and she went back to shouting in French, tendons bulging on her neck.

My fists clenched, and I looked around to see what had happened to Joy’s coworkers. Finally, I saw them. They’d fled to the dishwashing area: five male line cooks (four small Caucasian men and an Asian guy, their faces blanched as white as their chef’s jackets and flat-topped cook’s caps). There was also an older Latino swing cook, a younger Latino dishwasher, and an African American pastry chef (an attractive young woman wearing a burgundy chef’s jacket). They were all huddled close, like paralyzed swimmers watching a shark circle its chosen victim a few yards away.

Just then, Chef Rouille paused to take a breath from her venomous ranting, and Joy finally snapped out in anger: “If Tommy were here, you wouldn’t be acting like this!”

Chef Rouille’s body went still. “You little
putain
,” she spat. “
You’re
the one undermining me with Chef Keitel, aren’t you?”

“No!” Joy’s head shook vehemently. “I’ve never said a word to him about you.”

“You’re lying!”

I desperately wanted to stop this horrifying scene. Yet I knew, as bad as this looked, it was still a workplace matter. I could see Joy was starting to defend herself now, and I didn’t want to make things worse for my daughter, who’d plainly told me to “butt out” of her business more times than I could count.

But then something happened that tilted my universe.

Chef Brigitte Rouille raised her arm. “I’ll teach you!” she cried. Something flashed in her hand, and Joy screamed. That’s when I realized this woman was menacing my child with a foot-long chef’s knife.
Okay, that’s it! Butting out time’s over!

I lunged forward. “Get away from my daughter, you crazy bitch!”

I don’t remember exactly how I got myself in front of Brigitte’s slashing chef’s knife. One moment I was calm, the next livid. One moment I was standing still, the next I was on the move, grabbing a wooden cutting board off a prep table and shouting my own head off.

“Back off!”
I cried, raising the cutting board like Lancelot’s shield. “I’m Joy’s mother!
Je suis la mère de
Joy!”

This failed to impress the woman. She was breathing hard, her eyes dilated, her lips curled into a sneer as she continued shouting in French and making stabs at the board. The line cooks remained huddled across the room; still no help from that quarter!

Before Brigitte could do any real damage, however, Napoleon Dornier crept up behind her, seized her wrist, and twisted it.

Brigitte howled in pain.

“Get hold of yourself, woman!” the maître d’ commanded, shaking the chef’s knife from her hand.

The heavy blade clattered to the floor, striking a spark when it hit the tiles. I kicked the knife. It slid away and clanged against the base of a metal cabinet.

Brigitte whirled, lashed out with a clawed hand that shredded the flower on the man’s lapel.
“Mon Dieu!”
Dornier reared back but continued to grip the sous-chef’s arm.

Though she was very thin, Brigitte Rouille was obviously very strong, and it looked like Dornier might actually lose this struggle.

“
Ne me touchez pas
!” Brigitte repeated again and again. “Do not touch me! Do not touch me!”

“Stop it, this instant!” Dornier demanded. “It is me, Brigitte!
Il est moi! C’est Napoleon Dornier! C’est Nappy!
”

“Nappy?…”

Brigitte stopped fighting, and Dornier released her. She blinked and looked around the room in a daze.

“Brigitte,
what
is going on?” Dornier demanded. “Are you—”

Before he could finish his question, Brigitte burst into tears. Covering her eyes, she fled the kitchen through the back door.

“Brigitte! Brigitte!” Dornier called, and followed the sous-chef into the alley.

W
ITH
the disturbing scene over, the line cooks returned to their stations, picking up with their duties as if nothing had happened. I turned to face my daughter. Joy’s eyes were full of tears as she yanked off her stained chef’s jacket.

“Honey, are you okay?”

I didn’t know what reaction to expect, but I certainly wasn’t expecting the one I got.

“Omigawd, Mom,” Joy whispered, then hugged me tight. “Thank you.”

My daughter had a good four inches on me, and she had to stoop slightly to bury her face in my neck. I could feel her shaking, and I held on to her, giving her time to regain her composure. The staff worked on, avoiding us with their eyes.

“Joy, what happened?” I asked softly.

My daughter pulled away, swiped at her tears. “Ramon,” she called to the older Latino swing cook, “can you take over my station?”

The squat, dark-haired man with a slightly pockmarked face nodded once. “No problem.”

Joy thanked him, then took my arm and led me down a narrow corridor lit by buzzing fluorescent ceiling lights. She sat me down in a tiny room next to a stairwell. Inside the room, a bunch of metal folding chairs was scattered around a wooden table. There was a TV, a computer, and a boom box, all of which were off.

“This is our break room,” she explained, avoiding my gaze.

My daughter was obviously dealing with feelings of embarrassment. I was feeling a very different emotion. “What’s wrong with those people out there?” I said loudly.

“Quiet, Mom, they’ll hear you—”

“No. You could have been killed, hurt badly at the very least, by that crazy woman, and nobody in your kitchen moved a muscle! You’re lucky the maître d’ was there to disarm her!”

Joy closed the door and sat down. “You don’t understand,” she said, much softer than I was speaking. “Brigitte accused me of messing up some of tonight’s plates.”

“Excuse me?”

“She said the sea bass should have gone out on a bed of ramps, but I was putting asparagus down instead. I wasn’t! I know the difference between a freakin’ locally grown leek and a spear of asparagus! She accused me of being incompetent, but I told her that I’d done it right. And since the plates went out already, I couldn’t even prove it. I told her nobody sent them back or complained—so she was just making it up to make me look bad in front of everyone. That’s when she flung the béarnaise sauce on me.”

Joy lifted the soiled chef’s jacket in her hand. “And then she said I was purposely bumping into her all night. I wasn’t. She was the one bumping me—and on purpose, if you ask me. Anyway, her little fit tonight was nothing new. Chef Rouille’s been throwing a tantrum almost every night now.”

“I’d call trying to slash your throat with a chef’s knife more than a simple tantrum.”

Joy sighed. “She probably wouldn’t have hurt me—”

“
Probably!?
Muffin, that woman’s certifiable. I think someone should press charges. Surely Brigitte’s guilty of assault with a deadly—”

“No!” Joy touched my arm. “My internship’s been going really well. I’m not going to mess it up by calling the cops on Tommy’s restaurant.”

“Okay…but you have to tell me more. What exactly has been going on with that woman?”

Joy shook her head. “It’s not like Chef Rouille singled me out for special persecution. Last Saturday she screamed at Henry Tso, the sauté chef, and Henry
never
makes a mistake. On Tuesday she came down on Don Maris, the seafood chef, for overbroiling a lobster. Then yesterday, she gave Vinny so much work he had to hide in the walk-in refrigerator until everybody went home last night, just so he could finish. She threatened to have him fired if he didn’t have it all done by the morning. You remember Vinny Buccelli, don’t you? You met him at that press party last month. It was the same night you met Tommy.”

I did remember Vinny. He was a nice-looking Italian boy—a young friend of Joy’s from her culinary school class. I had assumed (wrongly) that the quiet, slight young man was Joy’s boyfriend, something I still hoped could come true once she realized how wrong she was to get involved with Tommy Keitel.

Joy frowned. “Brigitte’s got Vinny so rattled he called in sick today. And nobody calls in sick at Solange unless they want to lose their job.”

“What kind of a kitchen is Tommy running?” I demanded.

“This isn’t Tommy’s fault,” Joy replied—
too
quickly, I thought.

“Mr. Dornier told me that Tommy hasn’t been around much lately,” I said. “Dornier doesn’t sound happy about it, and I can see why. Tommy’s the executive chef. If he’s not around, then he’s not doing his job.”

Joy’s face got tight. I recognized
the look
. I’d obviously struck a nerve.

“Is that man still sleeping with you?” I asked bluntly.

“Mom!”

“I know. I’m not supposed to bring it up, but—”

“Please don’t start that again, or we’ll have to stop talking altogether.”

I threw up my hands. “Truce!”

Joy flipped her ponytail over her shoulder, looked away.

“Truce,” I repeated, reaching over to squeeze her arm. “Okay?”

Eyes downcast, Joy nodded. “Okay,” she said softly. “And the answer is yes. Tommy and I are still involved…romantically.”

I tried not to cringe at the word. I found nothing whatsoever
romantic
about their relationship. It was seedy. It was wrong. And it was a testament to my daughter’s immaturity that she’d use a word like that to describe what was going on between her and a workplace supervisor thirty years her senior, who was married with kids.

On the face of it, I would have guessed that Joy had been singled out for criticism, if not sabotage, because she was getting preferential treatment from the big boss. But if the restaurant’s French-Canadian sous-chef had been torturing poor Vinny Buccelli so badly that he’d called in sick, it sounded like she was routinely targeting different staff members for her wrath. So why wasn’t Keitel doing something about it?

“Joy, tell me what’s going on with Tommy.”

“Well…Mr. Dornier is right,” she began, leaning closer. “Tommy has been absent—
a lot
. When I first started my internship three months ago, he was practically married to this place. Everyone says he was like that from the very first day. He’d come in early, oversee everything in the kitchen, right through dinner service. He’d stay late, too. After the last customer left, he and Dornier would sit in the dining room with a bottle of wine and go over every detail of the evening—‘tragedies and triumphs’ is how Tommy put it. He wanted to be in on every little thing that went wrong or right at Solange.”

Joy shook her head. “I really loved that about him, Mom…but now he’s hardly here. Sometimes he checks in around noon, but then he takes off a few hours later, way before dinner service even starts. And he doesn’t come back.”

“Where does he go?”

Joy shrugged. “Nobody knows. He won’t tell me, and everyone’s talking. Everyone has a theory about where Tommy’s going, what he’s doing…even
who
he’s doing…”

My daughter’s voice trailed off, and she looked away, her expression hurt and confused.
Congratulations, Joy,
I thought but didn’t dare say.
Now you know how Tommy’s wife must feel.

I loved my daughter more than anything, but I wanted her to learn from this mistake. Affairs between older, high-powered men and their young interns seldom ended well—and the beginning of the end was the girl getting a clue that her cloud-nine view of Mr. Big was far from grounded in reality. I was relieved to see Joy at last displaying some ambivalence toward the larger-than-life Keitel.