The Chicken Sisters(60)
Gus looked up, his sudden movement catching Amanda’s eye. “But—” He started to speak, then went back to wiping the table with a glance at the camera. “Never mind,” he said softly. She hadn’t realized he was so nervous.
No one else seemed to have noticed Gus’s interruption. “We just all miss them,” said Tony’s wife, giving him a gentle push. “Nothing’s the same.”
“I still say it’s different,” said Tony, although he walked on. “Never used to have all these cameras here, either.”
This time, his wife laughed outright. “I’d have kept him home if I could, Nancy.”
Nancy, now at their table and holding out a chair, did smile at that. “Not on a Friday night. Never. We’d have had to come see where you two were.”
Amanda suddenly realized this was her chance. “Let me get your drinks, Tony,” she said, and jumped out of her seat, nodding to James and Cary. “Gotta take good care of our regulars.” She rushed off, avoiding any further questions about what was and wasn’t frozen, although they’d pretty much covered it except for the desserts. It was hard for a small place to have a big menu without some help, and people expected at least a little variety. Buying the biscuits also meant they could serve them generously, in a basket on the table, instead of parceling them out with the chicken. It had been a good business decision, but maybe it made bad television.
Why did they even care? She’d watched three full seasons of Food Wars and never seen them ask this, and of course some of the restaurants were putting frozen stuff on the plate. Handling all your own vegetables just didn’t make economic sense, and no one more than a few miles from the ocean was serving up fresh shrimp and seafood. So why suddenly give Frannie’s, and her, a hard time about it? It wasn’t like they were serving frozen fried chicken.
Now Amanda was determined to evade the cameras, or at least offer them little of interest. She started moving fast and constantly. If she wasn’t seating people, she was carrying bar orders or busing tables. It helped that Frannie’s was so busy. Everyone needed an extra hand. Maybe she should have talked up the biscuit bakery, played up how they were helping another small business. But the desserts and the other stuff didn’t do that. Damn it, did they have to get absolutely everything right?
Or she could have lied. They used to make the biscuits, and they could again. She could have talked about how all restaurants needed the support of their suppliers. Or avoided the first question. Or insisted they talk to Nancy. Or faked her own sudden death from choking on an ice cube.
By the time the place finally cleared out, she was exhausted. Everyone around her was limp, quiet, the celebratory mood of the night before replaced by a sort of anticlimactic silence. All that was left, filming-wise, was the chicken tasting tomorrow and then the big announcement.
Amanda wanted to talk to Nancy, to make things right, to apologize for the biscuits and maybe the chicken and anything she could think of to get Nancy on her side again, but Nancy was avoiding her, and with Sabrina and her team still in the restaurant, it felt impossible to just grab her and insist that they talk. Instead, Amanda, running her sweeper furiously over the patterned carpet, was caught by Sabrina, sitting on a table, somehow managing to arrange her short dress to perfectly show enough leg to be sexy but not sleazy, high heels dangling from her fingers.
“Frozen biscuits, huh?” she said with a frown. “They kinda nailed you with that one.”
Irritated, Amanda pushed the sweeper toward the host, who laughed and lifted her feet higher so that Amanda could get under the table. “Everybody uses frozen stuff,” she said. “Why were they making such a big deal out of it?”
“Because Mae did. She made sure they tasted Mimi’s biscuits, with the fresh local honey. Said they were just as much part of the tradition as the chicken.”
Amanda could not remember Mae ever saying one single thing about Mimi’s biscuits, which were just the same as anybody made. And she didn’t remember any special honey, either. “There’s no such thing as a special biscuit recipe. I mean, some people make them better than others, but basically there’s only a couple of ways to do it.”
“That’s not what Mae said. And she made sure Cary and James knew yours were frozen, too.”
“They freeze theirs! They make them once a week and freeze them. That’s what we used to do, too. They actually bake better that way. This is ridiculous.”
“Well, Cary Catlin loved that every one of the three things Mimi’s serves besides chicken was totally homemade, and then that the pies were, too. She kept saying how brilliant it was to specialize. She asked your mother what happened when they ran out, and your mom said, ‘We close,’ and Cary laughed like crazy. Called it brilliant.”
Frankie, who was wielding the second sweeper while Gus lifted chairs up onto tables, stopped, with a worried look on her face. “Does that mean we’re going to lose, Mom?”
“But Frannie’s makes a whole lot more than four or five things,” Gus said angrily. “We might not make everything from scratch, but we actually make way more than Mimi’s does—the meatloaf, the mashed potatoes, the gravy, the coleslaw, all the chicken, the wings, the steak with mushrooms, soup when we have it—it takes three cooks. That’s not fair.”
Sabrina shrugged, her perfect slim shoulders in their perfectly styled wrap dress irritating Amanda as much as her words. “Not everybody plays Food Wars fair. A hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money. Your aunt wants to win; that’s all.”