The Etiquette of Mythique Fine Dining Read online

  “One roast beef sandwich, one baked salmon, two soup du jours,” Chef Augustine calls from the pass.

  “One roast beef heard.”

  “One baked salmon heard.”

  “Two soup du jours heard.”

  It's Friday lunch service and Ava's working on the leviathan milk cake, the seventh course of that night’s table d'hôte. Christos made the cake, a serpentine log like a cinnamon roll of white cake that melts in your mouth, swirled with blue leviathan milk that makes those who eat it fearless for about twelve hours. He’s left the decorating to her, as it’s easily inside her current skill set and he has phyllo dough to make because she botched her last attempt. She pulls out fondant that she made earlier, covers the cake, which is about three feet long and takes up a big swath of their counter space, trims, and on another sheet of fondant airbrushes color and machines out scale shapes with a cookie cutter that Christos made himself. Place the scales overlapping on the cake, never losing her rhythm, chick chick chick chick, another sheet of fondant, airbrush color, cut out scales, place, repeat. She can imagine a YouTube video of herself doing this, a camera set over her head and then the video sped up to super-speed as four rows of scales appear, then a pause, then four more rows, then another pause. When the repetitive motion starts to cramp her hands, she pulls out the world’s tiniest paintbrush and dabs shadows, details onto the scales she’s put down. She gives herself three minutes to do that, before she forces herself back, another sheet of fondant, chick chick chick chick.

  “How far out on the ants?”

  “Two out on ants.”

  “Two soup du jours on deck.”

  “One vanilla ice cream, one brownie.”

  “One vanilla ice cream, one brownie heard,” Ava calls. Christos is still working the phyllo dough and doesn’t lose his rhythm. She sets down her airbrush and grabs a devil’s brownie from its tray on a cooling shelf. The servers tell all the customers when the brownies come fresh out of the oven, so they never last long. She moves to the freezer, scoops vanilla prickly pear ice cream. Chocolate sauce, vanilla bean decoration, and they’re ready to go. “Ice cream and brownie up.” She washes her hands and gets back to her leviathan.

  “Man, Ava,” one of the commis from the roast station calls, “it must be nice to not have a real job.”

  Half the kitchen hoots. Ava ignores them. Chick chick chick chick.

  The offender is slicing roast sun cow slices for a sandwich, which will use bread Ava more or less successfully made this morning more or less on her own.

  “Naw, dude, it looks good,” another guy says. “Ignore them, Ava. Hey! You know how I’ve got this Dodge B-series van. You think you could paint a mural on the side of it for me?”

  More hoots, and the guys pick that one up and carry it.

  “Like a T-rex fighting a wizard.”

  “And some spiraling galaxies in the background.”

  “And a sexy minotaur.”

  “Whoa! Whaaat?”

  “What? Minotaur ladies can be sexy!”

  They fall upon each other and thankfully move on from Ava.

  The guys all act like beautiful plating is superfluous to the manly art of butchering magical animal meats and getting stoned on deadly venoms, like their delicate, pink bites of veal on beds of finely sliced poached pears are the manliest things ever to be invented. They act like the customers couldn’t get leviathan milk off the street for twenty dollars a hit, and they ignore that the customers come here and spend $30 on dessert instead. They come for the safety and cultural endorsement in which consuming it is wrapped, for the elitism of not having to call it a “hit.”

  “Hey, Ava,” one of the guys calls, unfortunately bringing things back around to her. “Since you’re not doing anything, could you find me a left-handed spatula?”

  She flips him off over her shoulder.

  “Hey, hey. What do you call a cake decorator without parents?”

  “Homeless.”

  Ava’s rhythm stutters. That punchline was provided by none other than Zach.

  She’s cold inside the oven of her white jacket, disloyalty jolting her system.

  Christos appears at her elbow with impeccable timing, pressing a cold bowl of baklava filling covered in saran wrap into her hands. “Fill these.” He takes over the leviathan scales.

  No one mocks Christos for his profession.

  As she spreads baklava filling over phyllo dough, she peeks over her shoulder to where Zach jumps back from a flare from a burner, barely keeping hold of the pan in his hand. The rotisseur calls him a sissy and snatches it from him, pulling the salmon from the pan. Zach has already moved on to rotate a unicorn leg on a spit, and without something immediate that needs doing, he looks up to catch Ava watching him in disapproval. Ava curses herself. She wishes he hadn’t seen her.

  He checks that the rotisseur is busy but not too busy and sneaks over. She wishes he wouldn’t.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Go back to work,” she says, spreading crushed nuts and Manuka honey. They’re both going to get in trouble when Mario notices him away from his station: him for wandering off, her for distracting him or luring him away or something.

  He takes a breath, maybe to apologize, but the way she’s ignoring him keeps him quiet.

  Instead, he says, “You need to lay it on thicker than that,” and takes the filling from her hands, spreading a thicker layer. He grins at her, like this is a peace offering.

  It is so far from a peace offering. She stares at him, unable to control what her face is doing. This is her station. She’s the assistant pastry chef. She knows what she’s doing, and while, yeah, in a typical baklava you’d want it thicker to get the flavor, here the strong honey will overwhelm it and the phyllo dough won’t cook. Where the hell does he get off telling her how to do her job? They’re the same freaking level.

  Christos makes a noise that will require he wash his hands afterward. “Get away from my baklava, idiot.” He scrapes off the layer of filling.

  Zach doesn’t care. He slaps her shoulder and heads back to the unicorn, where he snatches a brush and a jar of marinade from another assistant who wasn’t laying it on thick enough and does it himself.

  “Idiots,” Christos repeats. “Marinating in their own stupidity.”

  And that’s what Zach’s doing: marinating in it.

  ~

  She ties on her apron one morning and realizes that two months have passed and she’s still at the pastry station. She scoops amaranth flour with the porcelain measuring cup without checking and hums the bronze wheat’s favorite song without worrying herself into a sweat over it. She stirs the dough for rye bread clockwise and devil’s brownies batter in a seven-pointed star. Christos mentions that he likes her sourdough better than his own, and then tells her to stop smiling.

  It’s hard to tell how Zach is faring. Like everyone, he shivers when he comes into the break room and takes off his coat, air conditioned as it is and dressed as they all are for the heat of the kitchen, which only increases when they put on their white coats at service. They are as scantily clad as they can get away with without violating health codes. Zach has a full-body shudder every single morning that he covers with over-exaggeration: bouncing on his toes and flapping his arms and motor-boating his lips. He covers discomfort with jokes and enthusiasm.

  It carries into the kitchen with his constant talk about the billdad, which has only grown worse when Chef Augustine caught wind of it and interrogated him about every nitty-gritty aspect of his vision. Should they smoke the meat? Should they marinate it in the antidote or have it be the customer’s responsibility to drink with every bite? Then he announced that they would do a test run of the antidote wine.

  Then he announced that they would cook a billdad.

  Not for the Friday night diner, but for themselves. A proof of concept. None of them have tried it before, and he doesn’t care how hot an idea it is, if it ends up
tasting like budget deer meat, he isn’t serving it.

  Zach and Ava and everyone peer over Chef Augustine’s shoulders as he cuts open the Styrofoam cooler from the truck and lifts the lid. The billdad hasn't been plucked, but its plumage has been folded and crammed into the cooler. It’s surrounded by bags of dry ice and its oversized back legs rear up well over its back, folded in on itself to fit. Zach tsks and reaches in to gently unpack it. After some careful extensions of its neck, some checks of the meat and malleability, the beast is stretched out on the counter like a Thanksgiving turkey with neck too long and legs too big. Its plumage is dull and drab, brown with only a hint of red. Zach and Augustine run their hands over it again and again, smoothing feathers, rearranging. "Nothing to be done for the plumage," Zach says.

  Some turkeys have layers on layers of beautiful, iridescent plumage, which you wouldn't know from construction paper hand-turkeys made in elementary school, or the images of the emancipated and the force-fed turkeys that come out of turkey farms. Free-range birds are glorious and terrifying, and pictures Ava has seen of billdads in the wild attest to this.

  Chef Augustine agrees, "We'll need a better supplier," and then slaps Zach on the back and leaves him to the plucking.

  Ava leaves him to it as well. With him working on that, she and the other junior chefs have to take on some of his prep work, and she doesn't want to think about billdad suppliers. She imagines billdad farms that bred them in their billdad form, which she's not sure is possible. She imagines sinister men offering "turkey burgers" to homeless people, to kids in group homes, to guys in jail, to people in retirement homes. She thinks about who this billdad used to be, how they came to be this way, if they chose it or if it was chosen for them, if their family knows what happened to them. She thinks of the protesters outside and their reaction to the creature lying on the counter. She shivers and starts making bread, bread made with bronze wheat that when it rests on your tongue, you--and only you--can hear angels singing. Ava's always heard it more like a damp finger circling the rim of a wine glass, but maybe that's what angels sound like, and maybe everyone hears something slightly different and the experience is not only life-changing but personal.

  She thinks about how all her favorite magical foods are vegetarian. Bronze wheat. Honeysuckle nectar. Fire honey. Pomegranates.

  Zach finishes plucking the billdad after the action in the kitchen has reached cruising altitude. Another group clumps around him as he turns to butchering. He has the idea to just cook the legs. They're the meatiest part and the real draw of the creature, since the wings are small and the breast uninspiring. But there's a push to use every piece of it, and although Ava knows deep down is fueled by respect for the life given so they could have this meat, the push is voiced in terms of occupational integrity and pragmatism. "It's expensive. You're not throwing out half the bird." "Use the breast in billdad Kiev?" "Use the giblets in a gravy?" "At least freeze the head and neck for broth." "One whole bird could work for a tasting menu. Everyone should only eat one bite anyway. Don't trust people to eat a whole leg. They'll get complacent halfway through." "So what? Some people get dark meat and some get light?" "Sure. Individualized!" "Consistency!"

  With the bird carved, Zach turns to the antidote wine. He mixes up a glass, a concoction of Merlot, phoenix tears, cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, and orange zest, but he stirs "like a lady making a daiquiri," and the roast master takes over with his unsung mixology skills. He practically struts as he mixes, puffing out his chest like he’s flexing his muscles on a beach rather than peacocking for his coworkers. They pull a dragon crest sauce from the fridge, pull back the plastic wrap. Zach eats a spoonful and then chokes down a swig of wine through his coughing that he tries to keep locked in his mouth with his lips pressed together, but the coughs slip out in billowing clouds of smoke and spluttered wine. After the first sip, he starts chugging it as if it will quench his fiery belches, and five people shout at him to cut it out. He sets down the glass, twists his face like he's sucked a lemon, and shudders. He opens his mouth to another round of fireworks, and the mixing duties are taken from the roast master and given over to Dennis, who’s unusually friendly today. They’re like sharks in the water, gleeful for spectacle and violence. They claim to be there to help Zach succeed, but it feels like they’re there to watch him fail, ready to kick him to the curb if he turns into a bird or catch him and embrace him for days and days of more trials.

  Dennis's batch dulls the flames from Zach's mouth, and one whole side of the kitchen applauds. There are much less explosive magical ingredients they could have used for a test.

  Maybe it’s her own tension she feels, but Christos seems to get more and more agitated as the day goes on. They do their work in silence, barely looking up at the showboating distraction on the other side of the kitchen, barely speaking to anyone as no one bothers to speak to them.

  She juices some light lemons and fog mint, some pomegranates and black apples for the juices. Christos makes devil's brownies. She makes fondant and pre-makes candy wings and stars. She fills piping bags with chocolate sauce laced with moon dust and preps pastry dough. She mixes up batter for cookies with honey and silk strings and catches Christos watching her.

  When she pauses, he nods and goes back to his candied blood oranges. "Someday I'm going to open a bakery.”

  He says it so quietly that at first she's not sure she heard him right. Then the group behind them explodes again. The billdad is on the grill.

  No one seems to be working, watching Zach watch the bird. There was excitement and distraction when the entremetier first tried his peas, an excitement that kept going each time they were brought back out for a new test, but that was nothing. It's like they're all eager to watch Zach put his life in danger, ready to watch him become a kangaroo before their eyes.

  Ava whips up meringue, taking her frustration out on the poor egg mixture, which collapses, reverting back into golden egg goop. Thankfully no one is watching but Christos, who says nothing and takes the bowl from her after she's cleaned up her mess. He hands her a saucepan of heated caramel for the decorative cages he’s been making and does the meringue himself. The acceptance of emotion is not lost on her, and she sets to drizzling the caramel with exceptional care.

  When the billdad is ready, Ava's work stops as if a force has halted her hands for her. She's frozen, watching the plating. She lifts her eyes to watch Zach's face, the way the sweat has run from his temples, the glitter of his eyes like he's got the best quip ready to go and it's going to make her spit her drink across the table at family meal, the way his T-shirt rides up his human arms. She can't watch. She can't look away. Everyone is frozen or chanting, "Zach! Zach! Zach! Zach!"

  She lowers her saucepan. She can't watch this. She has to leave. She has to throw up.

  Christos grabs both her arms, holds her there. Her heart is beating too hard to tell if the hold is restraining or grounding. "You want to be a chef?" he says, right next to her ear. "Then you stay, and you watch." He shakes her, and she sucks in a breath for the first time in minutes. "Watch."

  The billdad is arranged, and the plate's turned a quarter turn for effect.

  "This is what you’re in for. This is what it’s like. It’s not going to get better."

  Chef Augustine nods.

  “You can break now, but then you’re through.”

  And he was right. This is what it’s like, what it will be like. If she can't bear it another second, if she can't fathom a life of this, day after day after day until she dies or quits or pushes her way through to some safe and friendly place more mythical than the food they serve, then she can walk away. And if she walks away, she'll give up on a dream.

  She has to be stone.

  Zach picks up a fork and knife. Grinning, he cuts off a bite, checks the color, wipes it through the sauce, and pops it in his mouth.

  Ava becomes stone. Zach becomes a monster.

  ___

  Copyright 2019 Car
olyn Rahaman

  Carolyn Rahaman writes and produces the Twenty Percent True Podcast: short stories about modern monsters and hosts NaNo-It-All: a podcast about National Novel Writing Month. She’s working on a novel about a cursed magician, live oaks, and breakfast tacos. You can find her online at twentypercenttrue.blogspot.com and on Twitter at @CaryAndTheHits.

  Giganotosaurus is published monthly by Late Cretaceous and edited by LaShawn M. Wanak.

  http://giganotosaurus.org