Authors: Stacey Ballis
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Romance, #Contemporary Women
Off the Menu (10 page)
“Okay, I’ll meet with him.”
And I did. And much to my relief there was not the slightest flicker of recognition on his face. Or at least, he made sure there was not the slightest flicker of recognition on his face. If he had twinkled the tiniest bit, smiled in the wrong way, said anything the tiniest bit double entendre, I would have walked right out. But he either genuinely did not remember our night together, which I hoped and prayed, or at the very minimum, he was working very hard to make it appear that
he didn’t remember, and, frankly, either was fine by me. He explained the job, the duties, said he would match my current level of salary, and if I passed the tryout, would meet my current benefits package. If I wanted the job, it was mine to try to hopefully keep.
I went into the job with Patrick thinking I knew what I was getting into. Excited by the challenge. Assuming I would do it for a year or two until I could find the right person to get me back into the personal chef business. Assuming that he would chew me up and spit me out like so many before me. When he promoted me to executive culinary assistant, I made him put in a severance clause that some Fortune 500 CEOs would have envied. Or rather, I asked for something ridiculous, presuming he would have the lawyers bring it down to something rational that would make me feel like I had the smallest bit of security. But he didn’t balk. He just laughed. “You must love me an awful lot to make it so expensive for me to get rid of you.” And signed the papers.
The thing is, as much as he makes me crazy and I hate the way he treats 99 percent of the population, as much as I get creeped out by his pursuit of fame, and his treatment of women, I do, I suppose, love him in a way. Some days I would prefer to love him from afar, but at the end of the day, he has been good to me. In an overly demanding, obliterating-boundaries, twenty-four-hours-a-day sort of way.
But if I’m honest, I also have to admit that I’ve never suggested any other way.
It’s a slippery slope, being needed and depended upon, especially when the person who depends on you is notorious for never letting anyone get close, never trusting someone else. And Patrick has earned his independent nature. His dad left when he was a baby, and his mom resented him fairly
openly for what she perceived as his driving away her husband. When Patrick graduated from high school she effectively threw him out—he was eighteen and had a diploma; her work was done. He had a job flipping burgers, and jockeyed the couch at a friend’s place for a few months, living on pilfered food from the restaurant, saving every dime he could get his hands on, knowing that all he really wanted to do was cook. At nineteen, he got a cheap ticket to London, where a friend from high school was doing a semester abroad. He befriended a bartender at a classic chef’s after-service dive hangout, and eventually met Marco Pierre White, who took a shine to him and hired him as a dishwasher. Within six months Patrick was working garde-manger and absorbing everything he could from his cantankerous mentor. After eighteen months with Marco, they had a falling-out and even though they both apologized, it was agreed that Patrick should move on. He used Marco’s connections to do some stages in Paris, and then he moved to San Francisco, working in several restaurants, always moving up the line, until eventually he landed a stage at the French Laundry. He stayed eight months, and then, with Thomas Keller’s blessing, he moved to Chicago to take over a failing old warhorse of a restaurant, his first gig as executive chef. A year later, the restaurant flush with good reviews and a renewed clientele, he landed investors to help him open Conlon, and has never looked back.
There is obviously more, as most people have seen from the
Chefography
documentary on him, or, will see in his new memoir
(Not) Saint Patrick
, which is due out next fall. The short version is fairly typical. Pretty much everyone he has ever relied upon has left him. His mother died before they ever really got close, and well before he opened his first place. His dad, unsurprisingly, reappeared shortly after he began
doing
Feast
, and it was not a warm reunion, resulting in some nasty tabloid headlines, one restraining order, and a hush-hush settlement, after which his fair-weather father disappeared again never to return. After the one brief marriage to Sharlene, which lasted less than two years and little of it happy, he became an unrepentant playboy. Legs last anywhere from one weekend to a maximum of six months, and I have never ever heard him refer to one of them as a “girlfriend.”
Bob has been directing the shows since the beginning; Gloria has been running the test kitchen. I’m third in seniority, Patrick-wise, and everyone else he works with has been in a reasonable state of perpetual motion. Even Andrea, his current personal assistant, is the fourth person to hold that position in the six years I have been working with him. She’s lasted just shy of two years so far, and we have high hopes that she might just stick around.
But I am the only one whose lines have gone past blurred into nonexistent. He and Bob might go to a ball game now and then or grab a beer after a shoot, and Gloria does any on-air support when he does shows like
Chopped Masters
, or when he beat Bobby Flay on
Iron Chef America
, so they have had the after-work travel adventures that come with that territory. But neither of them get the late-night drop-ins, the invasion of family gatherings, or the complete lack of separation between church and state.
“I think you like it more than you claim,” Bennie said one night when I was complaining about how Patrick had shown up the previous night wanting to hang out and not taking no for an answer, requiring that I surreptitiously cancel a long-anticipated romp with Bruce. “Or you wouldn’t let it continue,” she pointed out.
“I feel bad for him. And yes, I do appreciate that he does trust me so genuinely considering that he doesn’t really trust anyone. But that doesn’t mean I wanted him to come over and twat block me, and make me listen to him whine about not getting the Beard Award for best chef
again
.”
“Methinks you doth protest too much,” she said.
“Because, what? I
wanted
to spend the night babysitting him and not getting laid?”
“Because I think if getting laid were more important to you than being Patrick’s go-to girl, you would have faked a case of explosive diarrhea, or told him that Barry was having a crisis that needed attending, or you would have just put on your big-girl panties and told him that it wasn’t a good night for you and that you would be happy to deal with it tomorrow.”
“That’s not fair. You know I’m a terrible liar. And he would have either stayed to take care of me, or wanted to accompany me to Barry’s, or put on his sad, needy face and convinced me to stay anyway.”
“Full. Of. Shit. You are so full of shit I can smell you from HERE. Why is it so hard to admit that you LIKE when he just needs his special Alana time? It feeds something in you.”
“I am not full of shit, I just, it, um … I dunno.”
And truthfully, I didn’t.
And don’t. And I prefer not to think too deeply about it.
S
o this is how it starts.
Hello, Alana—
Free at last, free at last! With our own guidance we are free at last.
I think of Tennessee as a pleasant enough place to drive through on your way to a place you want to be. I hope you aren’t having to talk your hostess friend off any ledges. Just tell her she’s cooking a big chicken, make people bring their favorite childhood side dishes (green Jell-O and Cool Whip where I’m from), buy lots of wine from Howard Silverman at Howard’s Wine Cellar, and it will be spectacular. I have a great recipe for the world’s most versatile dish—Banana Salad. It’s an appetizer, a salad, a side dish and a dessert. Oh, yeah. It requires three ingredients and a willing suspension of disbelief.
So what new ingredients do sirens play with?
Looks like I’m talking your eyes off.
RJ
Hello, RJ—
I am intrigued by this Banana Salad of which you speak. It sounds either very Southern or otherworldly. Possibly both. Or possibly that is redundant. My latest culinary playthings have been very unique and inspiring. Korean black garlic, which is whole heads of garlic that have been aged until the cloves inside turn black and chewy. … They taste like a combination of mild roasted garlic, dates, and balsamic vinegar. And Mugolio, which is Italian sweet syrup made from the sap of pinecone buds. I also recently was given some truly outstanding red grapefruit marmalade from Sicily. My toast has never been happier; it tastes like chunky Campari. It must be that whole
pamplemousse
thing again. … Anything in the grapefruit family is thrilling to me these days.
Sounds like your work has been busy, which must be both a blessing and a curse these days. Hopefully it is something you enjoy. Running to a meeting—we are voting on lasagna recipes. At nine in the morning. I have a very strange job.
Alana
__________
Alana—
Looking at the thread, I appear to be running off at the fingers, so I’ll try (probably unsuccessfully) to self-edit. My father is a Lutheran minister, and we moved around a lot in Tennessee when I was very young, mostly around Nashville. I managed to finish my grammar school education in Nashville, and then he was hired at the University of Tennessee in Memphis to teach classes in
comparative religion, and to serve as the minister and counselor for their Lutheran chapel on campus, so I went to high school there, and my folks have been in Memphis ever since.
I will visit them there for a few days prior to Christmas when my only sister and her kids will be visiting from Atlanta. Couldn’t get out of the near South fast enough, so left for Chicago eleven minutes after graduation to attend the University of Chicago, where I majored in art history, and then went to the School of the Art Institute to do an MFA in visual and critical studies. Every time I move away from Chicago (three years in NY to get it out of my system, two years in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to make a lot of money and be miserable), I return, so I consider myself a Chicago Guy. Learned that NY is exhausting and expensive and much better as a vacation destination than a home, and that Michigan is Kentucky with crappy weather.
Banana Salad does not truck with modern fussiness or strange sci-fi machinations. Thin, vinegar-y mayonnaise, whole banana quartered lengthwise, crushed Spanish peanuts. Dunk banana in mayonnaise. Dredge in peanuts. Voila. Everyone cringes when they hear about it; nobody eats just one.
And let’s get to a key point.
Pamplemousse
is not only truly my favorite French word, it may be the best single word in any pronounceable language. I beg every person I know who gets a dog or has a child to name the animal Pamplemousse. You can confirm this at some point. Your latent urges aren’t about grapefruit. They are about a primal connection to all things
pamplemousse
.
RJ
RJ—
I’m a native Chicagoan, so I know how addictive this city is. I might have mentioned already that my parents emigrated right after they got married, so I was born here, but my dad, like you, loves his adopted city with a fierce passion. I may have mentioned that I too have only one sister, two years younger, and she is married with two little girls. But I also have two older brothers, both married, and both with three boys. All the kids are under the age of nine, which makes family gatherings loud and messy. But luckily they are all really great kids, smart and funny, and generally well-behaved. Which is how I like my kids … smart, funny, well-behaved, and belonging to someone else! I started at Northwestern as a business major, which was what my parents wanted. The trade-off was that if I stayed home for college I could do a semester abroad. I spent the first half of my junior year in Paris, came home and promptly dropped out and enrolled in culinary school. I am the executive culinary assistant for a TV chef, so I spend my time developing recipes, testing techniques and products, coauthoring cookbooks and the like. The work is interesting, the hours are weird, but I love what I do, and am grateful to be able to make a living at it, despite being a college dropout.
I have a small, weird-looking dog who is letting me know that I have to take him out before we have a problem, which is good because apparently I can’t
Reader’s Digest
my e-mails either! Do you have any pets?
Alana
A—
May I call you A? As in A’int you grand, and A-List, and A for effort and any other positive thing you can associate with A’s. I do have one cat. His name is JP (for Jackson Purcell). He is fifteen years old, and in sprightly health, much to my chagrin. He is a devil in a cat suit and I let him loose in the neighborhood every day in hopes he won’t return, but he keeps coming back. My ex went out to the farmer’s market for broccoli one day and came home with him instead. I would have preferred broccoli. When we split it was decided that he was too old to move to a different home. I mentioned that she was a lot older than the cat and she was moving, but that did not go over terribly well. I have reluctantly come to love him in spite of his horrible personality. I will miss him when he is gone. But not for long.
I wish you a lovely evening whatever your plans, and hope that I get to meet this dog of yours one day, as I have always preferred canines as furry companions. (See what I did there? Because if I get to meet the dog, then I get to meet YOU, which is rapidly becoming a major focus of my day and a serious distraction from my work.)
RJ