Sweetbitter(86)

We were turning, moving delicately on tiptoe. Will, Ariel, and I weren’t getting drunk anymore, and Scott didn’t stop sweating, but it was just another service. Howard and Chef took the inspector up to the mezz and sat him at a table, where he wrote a report.

I was dropping off a rack of glasses at the service bar and batting my eyes at Jake when I saw him look past me, which he didn’t really do anymore. I turned. Howard was coming down the stairs on his cell phone. It was a fracture—managers never had phones on the floor. No one did. Howard went straight to Simone and pulled her into the back hutch. They spoke with their heads bowed. Her hand went to her chest and she nodded. When I went back into the kitchen it was silent, not like a church, like a graveyard.

Howard came in behind me and announced, “We are ending service for this evening.”

“Now?” I asked. No one responded.

“If anyone has questions be vague but firm. We are voluntarily closing for repairs. We will see them all in a few days. I will touch all the tables. Mandatory all-staff meeting in one hour.”

—

WE WERE IN a very old building: it was the foundation, the layout, pipes, ceilings, and walls that weren’t completely up to the new codes. It felt fundamentally wrong that we could be operative one second and closed the next because of architecture. No one mentioned pests, or rodents, or hygiene—only I seemed to be thinking of the fruit flies, the cockroaches, the foreboding empty mousetraps, infestation humming in the walls, down in the sewers, behind every plaster and asphalt coating of the city. Architecture was definitely an easier—cleaner—problem, but I wondered if the inspector had found the drain under the bar sink, or if he knew that I was too scared to fully clean the espresso machine.

The hostesses were on the phone with our sister restaurants, securing tables for the remaining reservations and the people who had barely started eating. All checks were comp’ed. Pastry made to-go boxes of cookies and I delivered them in little stamped paper bags. Simone and Jake stood at the service bar, whispering, not looking at each other, but holding each other in that magnetic exclusivity. I kept waiting for an outburst from anyone—one of the guests, a server, but everyone moved mutely around the room.

Most of the guests had assumptions about what was happening—they were the regulars, who knew what the Department of Health was, and being New Yorkers, operated on a communal subtext that let them observe life unsurprised. They were put out but flexible. It was the tourists who seemed most perplexed. Howard guided them each step of the way.

The inspector sat at bar 1 as the guests shuffled past. He stared placidly at a midpoint on the wall. Mr. Clausen, old enough to be the inspector’s father, rapped on the bar until the inspector met his eyes and said, “This is appalling. You’re as punitive and pointless as the damn meter maid.”

We held the door open and the air was supple. It may have been the first true day of spring.

—

WE SAT in the empty dining room, streetlight laminating the windows. An oxidized edge in light that came from routine being disrupted beyond repair. The Owner was all smooth surfaces when he strode in and shook the inspector’s hand. I was still waiting for the explosion—a punch, a copper pan flying, a gasp. When the Owner looked out at us, I knew that would never happen.

“First of all,” he said, putting his hands together, pulling our focus to him, “I want to thank you all for your dedication and patience tonight. What has happened here is not a reflection of how hard you work, but a reflection of an outdated system, a reflection of an outdated structure. This is an old building, an old restaurant. And we are proud of that. But in keeping up with the DOH, we have a lot working against us. We still keep the cleanest restaurant below Twenty-Third Street. And that’s a testament to you—to Chef, to Howard. I want to apologize for this upheaval. A lot of you don’t know what exactly I do. I sit at a desk in corporate across the street, I give interviews, my photo is in the paper, I open new restaurants. But my only real function here—and this has been from day one—is to make sure that you guys can do your jobs perfectly. That’s all I do. I put structures in place so that you—the blood and guts and heart of this restaurant—can shine. So you can excel. Today I’ve let you down and I’m sorry.”

He put his head down. When he raised his head again, he acknowledged each of us as his equals. “We expect to be closed for three days tops while we do some restructuring in the basement and behind the bar. We will reach out to the regulars and explain. Each of you will be compensated if you were scheduled to work….”

He went on. I felt pinned to my chair. So it was true. I glanced at Simone and her cheeks were wet, Jake standing guard behind her. For the first time in twenty-some years, the restaurant was closing.

—

I HAVE FORGOTTEN exactly what Howard sent me up there to retrieve. I want to say a blue binder containing checklists, phone numbers, policies.

I remember climbing the mezz stairs with a sense of purpose and privilege. I remember that I had on my gold hoop earrings. I remember pushing papers to one side of the desk. And I remember her handwriting. I had seen it nightly—on her dupe pad when she took orders, on the whiteboards marking the counts on specials and wine, in the margins of the wine notes we kept in a folder behind the bar. The extravagant script, cursive that looked engraved, slanting deeply to the left as if it had been lured across the page.