John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Those Christmases in Colorado were beautiful, but the house in Winter Park had been too much of a temptation for Joe-especially during the remainder of the ski season, when the young college student’s father and grandfather were back in Toronto. Naturally, the boy was going to cut some classes-if not every time there was fresh snow in the ski area. The nearby skiing alone would have tempted any college kid in Boulder, but having a house in Winter Park at his disposal-it was within walking distance of the ski lifts-was almost certainly Joe’s undoing. (Oh, Daniel, what were you thinking? Dominic Baciagalupo thought.)

At last, the light changed and the cook limped across Yonge Street, mindful of those harebrained city drivers who were desperate to find a parking place at the Summerhill liquor store or The Beer Store. What had his writer son once called the neighborhood? the cook tried to remember. Oh, yes, Dominic recalled. “Shopping for hedonists,” Daniel had said.

There were some fancy markets there; it was true-excellent produce, fresh fish, great sausages and meats, but ridiculously expensive, in the cook’s opinion-and now, in the holiday season, it seemed to Dominic that every bad driver in town was buying booze! (He did not fault his beloved Daniel for drinking again; the cook understood his son’s reasons.)

The icy wind whipped the long way up Yonge Street from Lake Ontario as Dominic fumbled with his gloves and the key to the restaurant’s locked door. The waitstaff and most of the kitchen crew entered the kitchen from Crown’s Lane-the alleyway parallel to Yonge Street, behind the restaurant-but the cook had his own key. Turning his back to the wind, he struggled to let himself in the front door.

The winters had been colder in Coos County-and in Windham County, Vermont, too-but the damp, penetrating cold of the wind off the lake reminded Dominic Baciagalupo of how cold he’d been in the North End of Boston. Though he’d had Carmella to keep him warm, the cook was remembering. He missed her-her alone, only Carmella-but Dominic strangely didn’t miss having a woman in his life. Not anymore, not at his age.

Why was it that he didn’t miss Rosie? the cook caught himself thinking. “Nowadays, Cookie,” Ketchum had said, “I sometimes find myself not missing her. Can you imagine that?” Yes, he could, Dominic had to admit. Or was it the tension among the three of them-or Jane’s harsh judgment, or keeping Daniel in the dark-that Ketchum and the cook didn’t miss?

INSIDE THE RESTAURANT, Dominic was greeted by the smell of what Silvestro, the young chef, called “the mother sauces.” The veal jus- the mother of all mother sauces-had been started during the dinner service last night. It underwent both a first and a second boil before a final reduction. Silvestro’s other mother sauces were a tomato sauce and a béchamel. The cook, as he hung up his coat and scarf-and halfheartedly attempted to rearrange what Joe’s favorite ski hat had done to his hair-could somehow smell all the mother sauces at once.

“The old pro,” they called him in the kitchen, although Dominic was content with the role of sous chef to the masterful Silvestro, who was the saucier and did all the meats. Kristine and Joyce did the soups and the fish-they were the first women chefs the cook had worked with-and Scott was the bread and dessert guy. Dominic, who was semiretired, was the odd-job man in the kitchen; he did start-up and finish-up jobs from each station, which included spelling Silvestro with the sauces and the meats. “Jack of all trades,” they called the cook in the kitchen, too. He was older than any of them, by far-not just Silvestro, their hotshot young chef, whom Dominic adored. Silvestro was like a second son to him, the cook thought-not that he ever would have said so to his beloved Daniel.

Dominic had also been careful not to mention the filial nature of his feelings for young Silvestro to Ketchum-partly because the woodsman was now a veteran and bullying faxer. Ketchum’s faxes to the cook and his son were ceaseless and indiscriminate. (You could sometimes read a page or more without knowing who the fax was for!) And Ketchum’s faxes arrived at all hours of the day and night; for the sake of a good night’s sleep, Danny and his dad had been forced to keep the fax machine in the kitchen of their house on Cluny Drive.

More to the point, Ketchum had issues regarding Silvestro; the young chef’s name was too Italian for the old logger’s liking. It wouldn’t be good if Ketchum knew that his pal Cookie thought of Silvestro as “a second son”-no, Dominic didn’t want to receive a slew of faxes from Ketchum complaining about that, too. Ketchum’s usual complaints were more than enough.

I THOUGHT THIS WAS A FRENCH PLACE -WHERE YOU WERE WORKING IN YOUR SEMIRETIRED FASHION, COOKIE. YOU WOULDN’T BE THINKING OF CHANGING THE RESTAURANT’S NAME, WOULD YOU? NOT TO ANYTHING ITALIAN, I PRESUME! THAT NEW FELLA, THE YOUNG CHEF YOU SPEAK OF-SILVESTRO? IS THAT HIS NAME? WELL, HE DOESN’T SOUND VERY FRENCH TO ME! THE RESTAURANT IS STILL CALLED PATRICE, RIGHT?

Yes and no, the cook was thinking; there was a reason he hadn’t answered Ketchum’s most recent fax.

THE OWNER AND maître d’ of the restaurant, Patrice Arnaud, was Daniel’s age-fifty-eight. Arnaud had been born in Lyon but grew up in Marseilles -at sixteen, he went to hotel school in Nice. In the kitchen at Patrice, there was an old sepia-toned photograph of Arnaud as a teenager in chef’s whites, but Arnaud’s future would lie in management; he had impressed the guests in the dining room of a beach club in Bermuda, where he’d met the proprietor of Toronto ’s venerable Wembley Hotel.

When the cook had first come to Toronto, in ’83, Patrice Arnaud was managing Maxim’s-a favorite café rendezvous in the Bay and Bloor area of the city. At the time, Maxim’s was the third transformation of a café-restaurant in the tired old Wembley. To Dominic Baciagalupo, who was still quaking from Ketchum’s dire warning that he totally detach himself from the world of Italian restaurants, Patrice Arnaud and Maxim’s were clearly first-rate-better yet, they were not Italian. In fact, Patrice had enticed his brother, Marcel, to leave Marseilles and become the chef at Maxim’s, which was very French.

“Ah, but the ship is sinking, Dominic,” Patrice had warned the cook; he meant that Toronto was rapidly changing. The restaurant-goers of the future would want to venture beyond the staid hotel restaurants. (After Arnaud and his brother left Maxim’s, the old Wembley Hotel became a parking garage.)

For the next decade, the cook worked with the Arnaud brothers at their own restaurant on Queen Street West-a neighborhood in transition, and somewhat seedy for much of that time, but the restaurant, which Patrice named Bastringue, prospered. They were doing fifty covers at lunch and dinner; Marcel was the master chef then, and Dominic loved learning from him. There was foie gras, there were fresh Fine de Claire oysters from France. (Once again, the cook failed to teach himself desserts; he never mastered Marcel’s tarte tatin with Calvados sabayon.)

Bastringue-Parisian argot for a popular dance hall and bar that served food and wine-would even weather the 1990 recession. They put waxed paper over the linen tablecloths and turned the restaurant into a bistro-steak frites, steamed mussels with white wine and leeks-but their lease ran out in ’95, after Queen Street West had gone from seedy to hip to dull mainstream in the space of a decade. (Bastringue became a shoe store; Marcel went back to France.)

The cook and Patrice Arnaud stuck together; they went to work at Avalon for a year, but Arnaud told Dominic that they were “just biding time.” Patrice wanted another place of his own, and in ’97 he bought what had been a failed restaurant on Yonge Street at Summer-hill. As for Silvestro, he originally came from Italy, but he was a Calabrese who’d worked in London and Milan; travel was important to Arnaud. (“It means you can learn new things,” Patrice told Dominic, when he decided on young Silvestro as his next master chef.)