Sweetbitter(5)

The vision that accompanied me on my drive was a girl, a lady actually. We had the same hair but she didn’t look like me. She was in a camel coat and ankle boots. A dress under the coat was belted high on her waist. She carried various shopping bags from specialty stores and as she was walking, pausing at certain windows, her coat would fly back in the wind. Her boot heels tapped on the cobblestones. She had lovers and breakups, an analyst, a library, acquaintances she ran into on the street whose names she couldn’t call to mind. She belonged to herself only. She had edges, boundaries, tastes, definition down to her eyelashes. And when she walked it was clear she knew where she was going.

As I thanked him and we reviewed my contact information, I didn’t know what had transpired, whether it was good or bad. It took me a moment to even remember the name of the restaurant. He held my hand too long and as I stood, his eyes traveled down my body, not like an employer’s, but like a man’s.

“I dislike mopping. And lying,” I said. I don’t know why. “Those are the two that come to mind.”

He nodded and smiled—what I wanted to call a private smile. The backs of my legs were damp with sweat and as I walked away I felt his eyes unabashedly on my ass. At the door, I rolled my cardigan off my shoulders, and arched as if stretching. No one knows how I got the job, but it’s better to be honest about these things.

—

TASTE, Chef said, is all about balance. The sour, the salty, the sweet, the bitter. Now your tongue is coded. A certain connoisseurship of taste, a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet.





II


THE SPACE WAS aesthetically unremarkable, even ugly in places. Not ragged by any means—the paint fresh, the dust banished—but defiantly past its peak. The art was dated, gaudy, some of it honestly preposterous, purchased in the eighties or whenever. The dining room had three levels, as if it had been built during different periods and linked together as an afterthought. Tables cluttered on one side of the room, sparse on the other. The cumulative effect was like someone hadn’t quite made up his mind, but insisted on having you over anyway.

—

THE OWNER TOLD ME at orientation, “There are many endeavors to bring pleasure to people. Every artist assumes that challenge. But what we do here is the most intimate. We are making something you take inside you. Not the food, the experience.”

—

TWO AREAS OF the restaurant were flawless: first, three café-style tables in the front framed by a large window at the entrance. The tables were set in the day’s changing light. Some people—I mean guests—hated to be next to the entrance, to be sectioned off from the main dining rooms. But some of them wouldn’t sit anywhere else. These tables were often held for the most poised guests—rarely a sloucher or anyone in denim.

The Owner said, “Running a restaurant means setting a stage. The believability hinges on the details. We control how they experience the world: sight, sound, taste, smell, touch. That starts at the door, with the host and the flowers.”

And then, the bar. Timeless: long, dark mahogany, with stools high enough to make you feel like you were afloat. The bar had soft music, dim lighting, tinkling layers of noise, the bumps of a neighbor’s knee, the reach of someone’s arm by your face to take a glittering martini, the tap of a hostess as she escorted guests behind your back, the blur of plates being passed, the rattle of drinks, the virtuoso performance of bartenders slapping bottles into the back bar while also delivering bread, while also taking an order with the requisite substitutions and complications. All the best regulars came in and greeted the hostess saying, Any space at the bar tonight?

—

“OUR GOAL,” he said, “is to make the guests feel that we are on their side. Any business transaction—actually any life transaction—is negotiated by how you are making the other person feel.”

The Owner looked and spoke like a deity. Sometimes the New York Post referred to him as the mayor. Tall, tan, handsome with perfect white teeth, effortless articulation, and gorgeous gesticulation. I listened to him accordingly, with my hands in my lap.

Yet there was a tension I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Something false about making guests “feel” that we were on their side. I looked around the room and suddenly everything looked like currency to me: the silver, the wooden beams, the regal floral arrangement crowning the bar. Jesus, I thought, you can get rich by making people feel good about spending their money. We weren’t on their side; we were on the Owner’s side. All the emphasis on details, all the jargon—it was still just a business, right?

When orientation was over, I wanted to catch his eye and let him know that I got it. I wanted to ask someone how much of that money I would be taking home. Then I approached him at the exit and he looked me in the eyes. I stopped. He said my name though I hadn’t told him. He shook my hand and nodded like he had already forgiven me for all my shortcomings and would remember my face forever.

He said, “We are creating the world as it should be. We don’t have to pay any attention to how it is.”

—

WHEN I GOT the job I didn’t actually get the job. I got to train for the job. And the position was “backwaiter,” which wasn’t the same as being a server. Howard led me up a narrow spiral staircase in the back of the kitchen and deposited me in the locker room. He said, “You’re the new girl now. You have a certain responsibility.”