Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

—

EVERYTHING WAS over my head. The senior servers, the bartenders especially, had doctorates in talking shit to guests. They could skim any topic. You couldn’t stump them. The briefness of these interactions meant their casual expertise was never exposed as groundless.

As I overheard it, to be good at this job you needed to know the city, but also how to leave the city. Which was hard for me to imagine, since I found the idea of traveling to the Upper West Side daunting. Everyone had a cursory knowledge of the East Coast weekend retreats: not just upstate and Connecticut, but unlisted antiques stores in the Hudson Valley, small towns in the Berkshires, lakes in the Northeast Kingdom. Beaches were their own category, divided mainly between the Hamptons and the Cape, and again, the specific towns were identity badges.

You knew which shows were at which galleries, and it was a given that you attended the museums regularly. When asked whether you had seen Manet’s execution paintings (and you were going to be asked by someone taking a late lunch after visiting MoMA), you were either on your way or had already seen them in Paris. You had opinions about opera. If you didn’t, you politely implied it was too bourgeois. You knew what was playing at Film Forum, and you corrected anyone who lumped Godard and Truffaut together.

You knew trivia from the guests’ lives: where couples got married, where men traveled for business, what kinds of projects they were working on and the deadlines. You knew where they’d gone for undergrad and what they’d dreamed of doing while they were there. You knew names of the towns where they kept their mothers in Florida. You asked about the absent colleague/husband/wife.

You knew the players on the Yankees and Mets, you knew the weather, more about predicting the weather than any meteorologist. You were a compendium of disposable information that people burned up while they drank and escaped their lives.

And the most peculiar part was how none of it mattered to them. One push through the kitchen doors and they were back to food, sex, drinking, drugs, what bar had opened, what band was playing where, and who had been drunkest the night before. Once I saw someone throw a rag in Scott’s face over a spaghetti carbonara dispute, but I don’t know if anyone held a political belief.

They were so well versed in that upper-middle-class culture — no, in the tastes of upper-middle-class culture — they could all pass. Even most of the cooks had gotten an Ivy League education at Cornell before they spent a second fortune at CIA. They were fluent in rich people. That was the fifty-one percent of it.

—

SCOTT AND HIS COOKS sat on a lowboy postshift, drinking beer. Scott was bitching about Chef: how threatened Chef was by his food, how out of touch Chef was with what was happening in Spain, how Chef had dried up a decade ago. Chef called Scott’s food “subversive” and it was clear that Scott wanted us to see that as a compliment. Jeff and Jared nodded, worshipping. As I eavesdropped I felt an unexpected swing of loyalty toward Chef, toward his food and the restaurant he’d built, even if was “hopelessly out of date.”

The back of house had separate kitchen beer, which sat all night in an iced-down bus tub. One of the interns drained and refilled the ice during service — that task was actually in his job description, I asked him. The beer was genius. The boys could be cut, burned, or crying, but within their line of vision was a bucket of beer that was just theirs.

“New girl, come here, Santos likes you.” They had the newest prep guy that I hadn’t met yet. His skin was stretched and skinny, like a child in a growth spurt’s. He didn’t look much past fifteen.

“Be nice, guys,” I said. I jumped up on the lowboy.

Jared put his arm around Santos and said, “I love Santos. He’s our new friend. Show the new girl that dance we taught you. The dance like a pollo.”

Santos smiled but looked at the floor and didn’t move.

“Ah he’s being shy now. Want a beer?”

Santos took one and they gave one to me as well. I swung my heels against the door. I saw Santos slipping under a fence at the border. Making himself as thin as a coin and rolling through a crack in the wall. They had told me it was so expensive they could only pick one to go. And that once that one landed, it was too dangerous to ever go back.

“Cuántos años tiene?” I asked.

“Dieciocho,” he said defensively.

“No es verdad? Eres un niño. De dónde eres?”

“Mexico,” said Scott. He finished his beer in three gulps and opened another. “You know I’m not hiring any more filthy Dominicans. Right, Papi?”

Papi was the troll-like man who had spit at me the first day. He nodded with hooded eyes and a vacant smile.

Santos said timidly, “Hablas español?”

“Sólo un poco. Puedo entender mejor que hablar. Hablas inglés?”

He looked at the kitchen boys to see their reaction.

“Not impressive,” said Scott. “Everyone speaks Spanish here. Bueno, yes?”

They opened new beers and Jared said, “Papi, do the pollo dance.”

Papi knocked out his elbows and flapped them like a chicken and yodeled. He spun in a circle and the boys clapped.

“One more time, Papi, show Santos how the pros do it.”

Scott saw that I wasn’t laughing and seemed embarrassed. His eyes said, These are the rules here. “He’s wasted. They steal bottles of whiskey and hide them in the dry goods.”

“Oh,” I said. We drank our beers. Until that moment I’d been the girl they tricked into dancing like a pollo. Santos looked at me with grasping, runny eyes, the kind of eyes that take in everything and have no defenses. I knew how badly he needed a friend. I shook my head and asked for another beer. I looked at Santos appraisingly and said to the boys, “He’s brand-new, isn’t he?”

YOU WILL STUMBLE on secrets. Hidden all over the restaurant: Mexican oregano, looking cauterized, as heady as pot. Large tins of Chef’s private anchovies from Catalonia hidden behind the bulk olive oil. Quarts of grassy sencha and tiny bullets of stone-ground matcha. Ziplock bags of masa. In certain lockers, bottles of sriracha. Bottles of well whiskey in the dry goods. Bars of chocolate slipped between books in the manager’s office.

And people too, with their secret crafts, their secret fluency in other languages. The sharing of secrets is a ceremony, marking kinship. You have no secrets yet, so you don’t know what you don’t know. But you can intuit it while holding yourself on the skin of the water, treading above deep pockets, faint voices underneath you.

—

THEY FOLDED NAPKINS and I refilled pepper mills on table 46. They talked as they did every day. I listened in my trance as I did every day. Up front, at the café tables, Howard and a young woman sat in interview fashion. I kept thinking about my cardigan, and how they must have all been there that day but I’d seen no one. I couldn’t remember the interior of the restaurant besides the hydrangeas and Howard’s hands that sat on the table. This one was not wearing a cardigan.

“They can’t be serious, interviewing her.”

“Maybe she got lost on her way to Coffee Shop.”

“Or that place in Times Square where they wear bikinis.”

“Hawaiian Tropic, don’t hate.”

A few peppercorns slipped through my fingers when I tried to funnel them. They bounced on the floor, popping when the servers walked over them. Fine, spicy gravel around my feet.

“They make crazy money there.”

“You wear a bikini. It’s one step away from a strip club.”

“But an important step.”