Клео Коул - French Pressed

“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.”