French Pressed

Eleven

Napoleon Dornier suggested that I come back again the next day to discuss the contract details.

“I just can’t do it now,” he told me, checking the digital schedule on his PDA. “I have a vintner coming in twenty minutes, reservations to review, specials to go over with my staff—”

“Of course, I understand how busy you are. Perhaps I can just take a look around the kitchen on my own—”

“Oh, no,” Dornier said. “Janelle here will show you around.” He turned to the pastry chef. “You don’t mind, do you, Janelle? You two will be working together soon enough anyway.”

Janelle smiled. “I’d be happy to show Ms. Cosi the ropes; she probably just saved my job.”

“Great,” I said. This is going well. Now I just need Janelle to agree to one more thing. “I’m actually looking forward to meeting the kitchen staff. You know, getting the lay of the land.”

“Of course!” Janelle said. “Just give me a moment to wrap up my pâte sucrée and get it into the fridge.”

“No problem,” I said, nodding. “Sweet pastry dough is so much easier to work when it’s cold.” That much I knew from my own trial and error—a lot of error.

As Janelle headed back into the kitchen, I slipped off my suit jacket, hung it on a chair, and began to clean up the table. Loud voices caught my attention as two men slammed through the kitchen doors and into the dining room. One was Tommy Keitel. The other I didn’t recognize. He was younger than Keitel by at least ten years. Shorter, too, but not by much. The man was fit, tanned, and far more polished than Keitel. He had thick black hair styled into a perfect coif, and his attire was obviously expensive. The charcoal gray suit appeared finely made and sharply tailored to his tall, lean form. He wore no tie, just a white dress shirt, open at the collar.

“Tell me again, Tommy,” the man was practically shouting, “because I can’t believe it!”

“Don’t take that tone with me, Anton. You may own this place, but it’s a shell without me. I run the kitchen. I hire the personnel. I make the decisions about who stays and who goes. That was the deal five years ago. That’s always been the deal!”

Anton? I thought. So this is the owner of the restaurant.

The men’s voices were loud, and they didn’t appear to care who was listening. I stepped back and stayed quiet, hoping to hear more.

“Brigitte Rouille was your second-in-command,” Anton said. “She knew every recipe. She was running your kitchen—”

“She couldn’t hack it. She was cracking under the pressure. I did her a favor and let her off the hook.”

“You fired the one person who can run your kitchen when you’re not here!”

“That’s not true,” Keitel said. “I’ve just promoted someone who’s quite capable of doing Brigitte’s job—without the drama.”

“Who?”

“Henry Tso.”

“The sauté chef?” Anton shook his head.

“Henry’s a graduate of Cordon Bleu London. He trained under Marco Pierre White, and he knows every single dish in my recipe book.”

“But aren’t there issues with Henry? He worked only eight months as executive chef for Petite Bouchée, and they let him go.”

“The only issue Henry has—and I hate to say it—is his lack of aptitude in creating new dishes. That’s really the only reason he couldn’t hack it as a chef de cuisine. But that’s not a problem here, because this is my kitchen, and all he has to do is re-create my dishes. Nobody’s better than Henry in repetition of technique. He’s the best mimic I ever met. No one will ever know I’m not in this kitchen.”

Anton sighed, ran a hand over his face. “I’d like to see him in action.”

“Then come back for dinner service. I’ll let him run the show.”

“You’re bailing again?”

“Not tonight. I’ll be here to back him up, take care of any problems. We’ll call it a trial run.”

Anton rubbed the back of his neck. “Listen, Tommy. About that other matter—”

“You know how I feel. End of story,” Keitel said, cutting him off.

“I still don’t understand your problem with it, Tommy. All of the marquee chefs are doing it. It’s the wave of the future.”

“Not my future,” Tommy replied. Then he turned on the man and strode back into his kitchen.

Anton hesitated a moment, shook his head, and followed his chef through the double doors. A second later, the doors opened again, and Janelle Babcock came out, smiling.

“So, are you ready to meet the staff, Clare?”

“First, I have a question for you.” I leaned close, dropped my voice. “Is it true what I overheard? Was Brigitte Rouille really fired?”

“Uh-huh, girl,” she whispered, her professional tone loosening for a little old-fashioned gossip. “I can’t say as I’m broken up about it, either. That woman was a holy terror. But you already know that, don’t you? I saw you in the kitchen last night, defending Joy.”

“When was Brigitte let go?”

“I’m not sure. Tommy and Nappy got into a hell of a row about her. Dornier was defending her. Why? I don’t know. But it’s Chef Keitel’s kitchen, and he made that clear. He must have called her late last night or pretty early this morning to tell her she was fired, because Brigitte, she hasn’t been back since she ran out of here last night.”

Janelle held the kitchen door open for me, and I walked through. Savory scents enveloped me as I moved around the high service counter: simmering wine reductions, freshly cut vegetables and herbs, yeast breads baking in the oven.

Four Latino men in white aprons were moving quickly around the banks of heavy gas stoves and metal prep tables, yelling in Spanish to one another. They carried trays of chopped vegetables, pots of sauces and extractions, delivering them to the various cook stations that needed stocking or replenishment.

I recognized a short, squat man directing the Hispanic workers. It was Ramon, the gracious swing cook who’d filled in for Joy the previous night while she’d spoken to me in the break room.

“These guys are the prep crew,” Janelle explained. “They come early in the morning, and most of them will be gone by the time we open for dinner, usually to shift jobs at other restaurants and cafés. Ramon here is our prep supervisor, swing cook, and unofficial translator.”

“Hello,” he said.

“Ramon. Nice to see you again.” I smiled. “Don’t you ever go home?”

He laughed, revealing a gold tooth. “If I ever left this place, it would fall down around all of their ears. That would be sad, because then I’d have to get a job with Robbie Gray.”

Seeing the way Ramon ran his staff, I had no doubt what he told me was absolutely true.

Next, Janelle led me over to a commercial sausage machine and pointed to a line of black plastic ring binders on the shelf above it. All the volumes were dated and covered a six-month period from the day Solange opened to the present. I counted ten of them.

“These binders hold the daily menus and recipes for every dish ever served at Solange,” Janelle explained.

I was shocked. “You mean the recipes Tommy spent years perfecting are just sitting out here, where anyone can take them?”

“The line cooks need to be able to prepare what the chef wants on a given day. When in doubt, they look it up.”

“But someone could steal these so easily.”

Janelle shrugged. “What would they do with them if they did? Tommy would sue the pants off anyone who stole his signature dishes and tried to pass them off as his own”—she laughed—“if he didn’t kill them first.”

Next she led me to a slight, pale man in his late twenties with adorable dark curls peeking out beneath a flat-topped cook’s cap. He was furiously stirring two pots at once.

“Yves Blanchard, this is Clare Cosi. Starting next week, Clare’s going to bring premium coffees to the menu here at Solange.”

The man glanced over his shoulder at me, his lips lifting into a smile. “Good,” he said in a very discernable French accent. “Something better than that merde they provide for the staff.”

“You’re a man after my own heart, Monsieur Blanchard,” I said.

“Yves, if you haven’t guessed, is our saucier,” Janelle said. “And we better let him get back to it.”

We moved deeper into the kitchen, past the prep tables and the refrigerators. Suddenly I heard a loud voice.

“Don’t be afraid to use your knife! It’s just a piece of meat, for God’s sake. Stab first, really cut deep into the flesh. Then start to slice. Otherwise you’ll make a total mess of it.”

I stepped forward, observed a table-sized cutting board, a pile of small hens piled on one side. Beside the birds, an intense Asian man in his late thirties circled around a young man who was clutching a silver-handled chef’s knife.

“You’re really making a mess of it, dude,” the Asian man said, a note of exasperation in his voice.

“Sorry, Chef Tso,” the young man replied, dropping the bird.

“Don’t be sorry. Just do it right.”

So this was Henry Tso, I realized, the man who’d just been promoted to executive sous-chef, the second-in-command of Solange, the man Tommy himself picked to replace Brigitte Rouille.

Joy had talked about Chef Tso, always with a little awe. She said he was the best chef on the entire line. That was important because, unlike the roasting chef, the vegetable chef, or the saucier, who had the luxury of preparing many of their courses in advance, the sauté chef prepared dishes that were made to order. He had to be on top of his game all the time and possess the ability to juggle two, three, or even four tasks at once.

Joy also said that Henry had the best technique she’d ever seen. And it appeared I was about to see a demonstration.

“Watch closely,” Chef Tso said. He took the eight-inch blade from his young apprentice, pushed the mangled bird to the side. Then he reached for a fresh chicken from the pile. He slapped the fowl onto the board, belly side down.

“Remove the spine first, cutting here and here,” he said, flicking the blade twice. “Cut on both sides, as close to the bone as possible.”

With quick, smooth motions, Henry Tso sliced through the pink flesh on either side of the spine, extracting the bones so fast I barely followed his moves.

His movements were sure, economical, and precise. In under a minute, Chef Tso removed all of the bones except the tips of the legs and wings. At one point he flipped the knife in the air, caught it blade up, and used the handle to break a joint for easy extraction. When he was finished, he placed the perfectly deboned chicken on its belly and set the knife down.

“Think you can do that?” he asked the apprentice.

Gamely, the young man lifted the knife and tried again.

“Chef Tso,” Janelle interrupted. “I’d like you to meet Clare Cosi. Clare is going to help us add premium coffee to our menu.”

Henry Tso faced me. Under his high chef’s hat his hair was shaved so short I could see his scalp. He was a lot taller than I, but his hands were small, his fingers long and delicate. His brown eyes scrutinized me with intensity, and he moved with a contained energy that reminded me of Chef Keitel. Something else reminded me of Tommy Keitel: Henry Tso’s ego and a radiated confidence that bordered on arrogance.

“Coffee, huh,” Henry finally said. “Sorry, I prefer tea.”

“No worries,” I replied.

Henry suddenly noticed another transgression by the new young apprentice and cried out. “Cut the meat; don’t rip it!” he said. “If I served that bird, I’d look like an asshole!”

The apprentice quailed.

“Is that your job description?” Henry asked, getting into the young man’s face. “Make Chef Tso look bad?”

“Yes, Chef…I mean, n-no, Chef,” the apprentice stammered.

Janelle touched my arm, tilted her head, and we moved on.

“Is he always like that?” I asked when we were out of earshot.

“Like what?” Janelle asked. “An arrogant, superior perfectionist who’d do anything to get ahead?”

I blinked.

“Let’s just say that if you get between Henry and his ambition, you’ll probably end up like one of those chickens.” Janelle froze, closed her eyes, and shook her head. “God. I shouldn’t have said that, not after what happened to poor Vinny.”

“It’s okay,” I said, and we continued moving through the kitchen. “Janelle, since you’ve brought it up, did Henry and Vinny get along okay? I mean, did you ever notice any hostility between them? Or maybe there was something else in play. Did they have an especially close friendship by any chance?”

“That’s funny,” said Janelle. “The police basically asked me the same thing this morning.”

“It’s a pretty standard question when someone’s found murdered. The detectives want to know if that person had any enemies…or intense relationships.”

“I can only tell you what I told them. Vinny was a quiet kid. Very private. Didn’t talk much at all. Except for Brigitte picking on him, I didn’t see much in the way of hostility directed toward the boy by anyone, Henry included. And as far as Henry and friendship—” Janelle shook her head. “He’s pretty much all business around here. The other line cooks go out sometimes to hang after work. It’s fun, and I usually go, too. But Henry never joins us.”

Finally, we arrived at an island away from the chaotic activity everywhere else. “Well, here we are. My domain,” Janelle declared proudly.

In the center of the space stood a large prep table, now wiped clean. A gas stove and array of ovens hugged the wall; beside them stood a bakery rack on wheels, holding freshly baked rolls and baguettes. Janelle offered me a high metal stool. She pulled up another to sit beside me.

“I have to tell you, Ms. Cosi, I’m very excited about your coffees. My mind’s already spinning with ideas.”

“Café au lait and beignets, by any chance?”

Janelle laughed. “Joy must have mentioned I come from the Big Easy.”

“Yes.” I smiled. “She really likes and admires you.”

“Well, that’s very sweet. And Joy’s a very sweet girl, very accomplished, too, and at such a young age. You should be proud.”

“I am.”

“It’s funny you should mention the beignets,” Janelle said. “My mother made them all the time, so I practically grew up on them. You can tell, can’t you?” She laughed, patting one ample hip. “And while I do believe it would be fun to offer something as simple as a classic French doughnut, Chef Keitel would kill me if I proposed it. He won’t allow retro to come out of his kitchen. He’s all about fusion, loves new spices, combinations of flavors, aromas, and textures. Explore! Experiment! That’s Chef Keitel’s credo.”

“Is it?” And here I thought it was ‘Sleep with your young intern on the side.’”

“It’s no joke, Clare. It’s your entire professional reputation on the line. You start putting traditional chocolate mousse and crème brûlée in your dessert selections, and the gourmands will declare you zombified and send a body bag back to the kitchen.”

“I suppose the same dish, prepared the same way for years and years can be numbing—for the diner and the chef,” I conceded. “Then again, there’s something to be said for paying tribute to the classics. I love what you did with the tarte Tatin, for example, deconstructing it on the plate, adding the cardamom and ginger to the apples. And what you did with the profiteroles, using blackberry sorbet instead of the same old vanilla ice cream. Drizzling casis coulis instead of chocolate sauce.”

“Yes, if you really love something, then it’s worth looking at it with new eyes.”

“Now there’s a credo I can agree with: loyalty. I had this coq au vin recipe that I loved. It was hard to admit that it was getting pretty tired after fifteen years. But instead of throwing it out, I woke it up—literally—by infusing coffee into the braising process.”

Janelle paused a moment, tapped her chin in thought. “You know what, Clare? I could do that with my desserts. I’ve wanted to do chocolate pots de crème—except it’s so retro that Chef Keitel would be unhappy with a one-dimensional approach. But if I were to infuse the heavy cream in the recipe with some of that wonderful Colombian coffee you brought today, I could create a mocha pot that would resonate with the coffee itself. I could serve the dessert in an espresso cup with praline crème Chantilly standing in for the macchiato froth, and place two vanilla-pecan sablés on the side of the saucer.”

I nodded. “My mouth’s already watering.”

“Or…” Janelle searched the ceiling, “what do you think of a tartelette of framboise and chocolate ganache with a pistachio crust? Wouldn’t that be delicious served with fresh raspberries and a French-pressed pot of your Kenyan?”

“It would, but I’d want to give the Kenyan to you in a French roast for that pairing. The darker roast carries a bolder flavor that will stand up better to the chocolate ganache. A darker roast also changes the flavor profile of the Kenyan beans so the fruity notes you tasted in my medium roast will become caramelized. Then you’ll have a cup with flavors closer to a chocolate-covered cherry.”

“Excellent! I can’t wait to try it. And how about this pairing with the Purple Princess? I could do those little ol’ beignets after all, but keep them small, about the size of a profiterole, inject each one with a filling of lavender-ginger-plum crème pâtissière and on the plate drizzle a bit of plum coulis—”

“Janelle,” a voice interrupted.

The pastry chef and I looked up to find Tommy Keitel looming just a few feet away, legs braced, arms crossed. It was clear he’d been standing there, quietly listening to us.

Janelle tensed a bit. “Yes, Chef? Did you have any problems with what we were discussing?”

“No.” He stared at us for a silent moment. “Have you taken Ms. Cosi downstairs yet?”

“No, Chef.”

“I’ll do it.” Keitel said, then abruptly turned and began moving toward the back of the kitchen. “Come with me, Ms. Cosi!”

Janelle shot me a glance, but I couldn’t read it.

“Where am I going?” I whispered to her.

She arched a dark eyebrow. “Oh, you’ll see…”

“Clare!” the man called, his legs continuing to stride toward the stairwell doorway. “Come see what’s in my cellar!”