The Food of Love (19 page)

front of trucks.’

‘It’s a good thing we’re only opening a restaurant, then, and

not a transport company.’

Tommaso sighed. Something about this conversation told him

that Bruno wasn’t really listening. He knew from experience that his friend, normally the most easy-going of people, was also

extraordinarily stubborn about anything to do with food.

‘Wouldn’t it bother you that Dr Ferrara would think it was me,

not you, who was the head chef?’ he asked.

‘Not in the least. In fact, it could be a great partnership. You could do all the shit that chefs have to do these days - talking to customers, flattering reviewers, dealing with Dr Ferrara and so

on - while I get on with the part I really enjoy’

Tommaso and Bruno made a trip to inspect the restaurant in

which Carlotta’s father was proposing to invest. As might be

expected, since the existing owner was nearing retirement, it was a run-down trattoria with no airs or graces and an all-pervading air of neglect.

Christophe showed them around with an air of apologetic resignation.

‘We have our regulars,’ he confided in the two young

men. ‘But there are too many restaurants round here, and people

don’t eat out as much as they used to.’

‘Hear that, Bruno?’ Tommaso said meaningfully. ‘People aren’t

eating out.’

‘The best restaurant in Rome will always be full,’ Bruno said loftily.

‘It’s a struggle to pay my staff,’ Christophe continued.

‘Sometimes we lose money, even in the good years.’

‘How many people do you employ?’ Tommaso asked.

‘Two. Johann helps me in the kitchen, and Marie is our waitress.’

He lowered his voice. ‘Between you and me, she’s the reason

most of the regulars stay regular.’ He called to a young woman

who was sorting cutlery on the other side of the room, ‘Marie,

come and say hello.’

The young woman turned round. Marie was raven-haired,

dark-skinned, full-mouthed and full-breasted; and as her curvaceous body squeezed between the tightly packed tables and chairs,

Tommaso muttered ‘Fosse a’ Madonna? under his breath.

Automatically he broke into his most winning smile. She scowled

back at him, but he didn’t take any notice. For a girl like her, a little scowling was only to be expected.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Bruno said, shaking her hand. ‘Tell me,

Christophe, how often do you have the ovens serviced?’

‘Every six months.’ It was Marie who answered, not

Christophe. ‘At least, since I’ve been here. Before that,’ she

shrugged, ‘who knows? The paperwork was a bit of a mess.’

‘Marie helps with some of the administration, too,’ Christophe

explained.

‘Sweet-talking creditors, mostly,’ Marie said.

‘I’m sure you’re very good at it,’ Tommaso said knowingly.

Marie ignored him. ‘Of course, we very much hope you’ll stay

on,’ Tommaso continued.

“I may do,’ she shrugged. ‘It’ll depend on what plans you have.

If I like them, I’ll stay for a bit, see how things work out.’

‘Our plan is simple,’ Bruno said. ‘We’re going to serve the

finest food in Rome. Proper Roman food, the same dishes your

grandmother made, but brought up to date; a bit simpler, a little lighter, and given a small twist here and there so that you look at everything afresh and don’t take it for granted.’

‘Hmm,’ Marie said suspiciously. “I suppose you’ll change the

decor?’

“I love it just the way it is,’ Tommaso assured her.

Bruno reached up to where a string of garlic cloves hung from

a dark beam. He squeezed it in his fist and watched it crumble to dust. ‘Well, maybe it needs just a little updating here and there,’

Tommaso acknowledged. ‘But you know, this seventies look is

very popular right now.’

‘It’s a shithole,’ Marie said firmly. ‘It needs to be changed

enough so that it brings in a younger crowd, but not so much that it frightens off the regulars. Some decent lighting would help,

but you’ll need to budget at least a thousand euros for rewiring.’

‘She’s nice,’ Tommaso said casually as Bruno and he took a coffee together after their visit.

‘Who?’

‘The waitress.’

‘She seems very organised. Which, to be honest, could be a

godsend, since neither of us are.’ He looked his friend in the eye.

‘So. Are we going to do this or not?’

‘Absolutely,’ Tommaso said, his earlier misgivings apparently

forgotten.

‘Good. We’ll need to call it something different, so people

know it’s under new management.’

Tommaso thought for a moment. ‘What about II Cuoco?’ he

suggested.

‘“The Cook”. Hmm. Meaning you, or me?’

‘A bit of both.’

Tl Cuoco it is then.’ Bruno raised his espresso cup. ‘To the best restaurant in Rome.’

It was one thing to create a few meals. To create a whole menu,

Bruno soon discovered, was another thing altogether, and

required much more work. But his inspiration remained the same:

Laura.

From the little kitchen in their apartment emerged dish after

dish. Bruno was trying to recreate the traditional dishes of Rome, but he was also trying to impose a little of his own personality on them, and to bring to them some of the quality he loved in

Laura - the same mixture of complexity and simplicity, freshness and acidity, innocence and experience. In some way, every dish he created had to taste of her.

He hummed as he worked, and lost himself in a blizzard of

flavours and combinations. Later, when he looked back, he was to think of this as one of the happiest times of his life, when anything was still possible, and his heart was not broken, only fractured.

Laura had decided to show Tommaso some of her favourite paintings.

‘Caravaggio

was famously excitable,’ she told him as they stood

in front of the Boy Bitten by a Lizard. ‘He once pulled a dagger on another artist during an argument about a painting. Oh, and he

loved his food. He once asked a waiter which artichokes were

cooked in butter and which in oil. The waiter told him that if he couldn’t tell by smelling them, he certainly wouldn’t be able to taste the difference when he ate them. So Caravaggio hit him.’

Tommaso nodded unenthusiastically. ‘It’s tough, being a

waiter.’

‘His big obsession was realism,’ she continued. ‘He wanted his

paintings to show ordinary Romans, not idealised figures from the Bible.’

But Tommaso had already moved on. His idea of a tour round

a gallery was a brisk stroll, glancing at whatever took his fancy, but certainly never stopping, the sooner to reach the exit.

Eventually Laura gave up. What did it matter if Tommaso

didn’t share her appreciation of art? He clearly had a lot on his mind at the moment.

Something was troubling Tommaso, in fact, and that was the

refurbishment of II Cuoco. Various things were conspiring to take them over budget. Dr Ferrara had acquired some new partners,

about whom he was somewhat vague, but the amount of money

he had to spend was finite and never seemed to be enough. First, there was the redecoration, which was proving incredibly expensive.

Then there was old Christophe’s wine cellar - Marie was

insisting that the price paid for the restaurant include a fair

allowance for all the wine he would be leaving. But the worst

thing was that Bruno was hiring staff and ordering state-of-the-art kitchen equipment with no regard to compromise or cost. When

Tommaso asked his friend if a twenty-speed mixer or a wood

fired oven was really necessary, Bruno simply gave him a puzzled look.

There was only one thing for it, Tommaso decided: Bruno

would have the equipment he wanted, but the rest of what was

needed they would obtain in the same way Tommaso had stocked

his larder when he was an impoverished waiter, just starting out.

Night after night, therefore, Tommaso and Bruno left Templi

with their pockets full of silver cutlery. Clanking audibly, they trudged back down the hill, before finally emptying their haul

into a box at the apartment.

‘At this rate it’ll take us a year to get enough,’ Tommaso said, inspecting the contents of the box one night. ‘I’m going to put

the word out.’

From then on, petty theft at Templi escalated to epidemic proportions.

Franciscus would pull open the silverware drawer to

discover that there were no teaspoons left at all, while bowls, platters, side plates and even lead crystal glasses seemed to vanish as

surely as if there was a poltergeist in the building.

‘It’s the mafia,’ Franciscus said despairingly to Alain. ‘Once

those thieving bastards have their eye on you, there’s nothing you can do.’

Alain had no wish to see Teodoro and his pasta-eating companions again. ‘We’ll just have to live with it then. Order some

replacements, and put the prices up by another ten per cent.’

Word of what was happening circulated quickly among their

friends. Vincent, Sisto and various other colleagues past and present came by regularly to lend a hand or to drop off some booty. II

Cuoco’s wine coolers bore the crests of the Hilton and the

Intercontinental, and the kitchen was filled with bits and pieces smuggled out of the Radisson and the Marriott. Sisto even turned up on his scooter carrying an entire sink unit under one arm,

balanced only by the weight of the electric juicer he had jammed into his opposite pocket.

There was no money to employ decorators, so the two of them

did most of it themselves before they went to work. They were

painting the walls one day when they heard an unfamiliar sound

coming from under the dustsheets. It turned out to be an ancient telephone, its bell so loose and pitted with rust that it could now manage only a wheezy rattle.

‘Pronto,”1 Tommaso said into the receiver.

‘Is that II Cuoco?’

‘Si, but we’re not open yet.’

‘Well, when will you be?’ the voice said impatiently.

Tommaso plucked a date from the air. ‘Two weeks on

Saturday’

‘Good. I want to make a reservation.’

‘Our first customer,’ Tommaso said wonderingly as he replaced

the receiver. ‘It looks as if this is really going to happen.’

Laura decided to wear a pair of white linen shorts she hadn’t worn for a while. When she came to do them up, however, she discovered they no longer fitted. She tried on another pair of trousers

instead and found that they, too, were a little tight.

She had never needed to worry about her weight before. But

now, as she inspected herself in the tiny mirror in her apartment, she had to admit that her figure had undoubtedly expanded.

‘Never mind,’ Judith said. ‘I’ve got plenty of looser stuff you

can borrow. And it’s got to be worth it for all that fantastic sex, right?’

Laura hesitated. She hadn’t yet told her friend that sex with

Tommaso actually wasn’t that fantastic. Oh, he was beautiful, for sure, and the food he cooked made all her senses tingle in anticipation, but when it came to the act itself she was slowly coming to

the conclusion that Tommaso was just a bit too - well, straightforward.

Not to mention perfunctory. In fact, you couldn’t have

cooked a Roman pizza in the time that it sometimes took

Tommaso to make love to her. Slow and painstaking in his cooking, it seemed as if in bed he sometimes reverted to that other

Tommaso, the impatient, exuberant Italian who drove at ninety

miles an hour, swallowed espressos in a single gulp and toured art galleries at breakneck speed. But when everything else was so perfect, it seemed a small price to have to pay.

When Bruno finally plucked up the courage to tell Alain he was

leaving, the chefde cuisine took him to one side.

‘And where are you going?’ he asked calmly.

‘I’m going to open my own place.’

‘In Rome?’

‘Si, in Rome.’

Alain sighed. ‘Listen,’ he said kindly, ‘you’re a good chef. If I’m hard on you sometimes, it’s only because I can see that you’re like me; you understand food, you have potential. But can you honestly tell me that you know everything?’

‘Of course I don’t. No one does.’

‘Then why are you in such a hurry to stop learning? If you

really want to leave here, let me make some calls for you. I can get you a job with someone good, someone who’ll teach you properly.

Don’t you want to work with the best? I can call Bras, Martin,

Ducasse … even Adria, if you fancy going to Spain. We all talk to each other, you know. A word from me and any one of them

would create a job for you, just as I made room for Hugo. You’re simply too inexperienced to start your own place. Wait a few years, learn a little more, and then, when you’re ready, we’ll help to set you up in a real restaurant, one where you can earn your own

stars. Believe me, there’s no point in doing these things by halves.’

Bruno hesitated. The names Alain was dangling in front of him

were the names of his heroes. A few months ago he would have

given his right arm to be told that he was good enough to work

with Guy Martin or Michel Bras.

But a few months ago, many things had been different. In

some way, his feelings for Laura had also changed the way he felt about food, and the dishes he had been cooking for her had been

part of a voyage of discovery for him, too; one from which there was no turning back.

‘It’s kind of you, chef, and I will always be grateful,’ he said.

‘But my mind’s made up.’

‘Wily old bastard,’ Tommaso commented when he heard what