A Restaurant Somewhere Else
Guess What
At the beginning of a December fifty-seven harvests prior to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ projected start date for the era of total global soil infertility, Julia got the job at Cascine.
She called the closest person she had in her life, who was her mother, to deliver the news by voice.
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘I know.’
‘You’ll be—’
‘I know.’
‘It’s such a step up.’
‘I know.’
‘Such a step forward.’ Her mother laughed, then kept laughing. ‘Imagine that.’
The low-fidelity audio of her mother’s laughter bade Julia to laugh as well. Their laughs were identical in cadence and dissimilar in pitch. Julia raised her non-smartphone- wielding hand to her head. ‘I’m imagining.’
Late November
Throughout her three unpaid trial shifts, Julia had received orientative and procedural supervision from Lena, the sous-chef whose position the former would, after having successfully demonstrated her utility to the latter, eventually be hired to inherit.
‘Mind your elbows.’ ‘Cut against the grain.’ ‘Sumac lives in the storeroom, not on the sideboard.’ ‘Next time, bring your own knife roll.’
Of the many formed and as-yet-unformed thoughts Julia had about Lena, the majority were dedicated to either comparing or deliberately attempting not to draw comparisons between their common and contrasting qualities. Lena was approximately Julia’s goal weight and sported the kind of pixie cut that made women of lesser confidence ideate over cutting their own hair short. She could not have been any more than five years older than Julia, but the extent of her culinary proficiency suggested decades of experience separating them. Each time Julia left Cascine following a trial shift, she felt inadequate in some new way and certain it had been her last.
After what would in fact prove to be Julia’s final trial shift, she and Lena exited the restaurant together into an unobtrusively warm front of glossy rain, leaving Ellery, the kitchen’s head chef, to finish locking up by himself.
Outside, as they walked, Lena announced that she intended to endorse Julia to Ellery for the sous position. Julia thanked her so much, said oh my god oh my god she couldn’t believe it, asked what were Lena’s plans and where was she headed, and – although she’d been referring more to the short-term when she’d asked those questions – responded encouragingly when Lena replied, ‘Somewhere good, Berlin, I have a connection out there.’ Looking down, Lena performed an incisive task on her smartphone and added, in a modulated tone that made what she said sound like a sideways way of saying something else, ‘Yeah, I’ve just been here too long, I think.’
If she ever cut her hair as short as Lena’s, Julia knew, she’d only want it long again after. She understood that all she really wanted was a change.
Because she was nice, Julia waited kerbside with Lena beneath the coldening rain, long enough for Ellery to catch up with and call goodnight to them both from his collapsible bike, its wheels raising a light spray as they planed the cycle lane’s slicked surface. Shortly thereafter, Lena took her place among the city’s Uber ridership and Julia never saw her again.
The Imitator
Julia spent her first days at Cascine imitating what little she’d known of Lena’s presence there: emulating her easy familiarity with the chefs de cuisine; acting out the memory of her command over utensils.
In those earliest shifts, Julia felt – or felt as though she felt – the rest of the restaurant’s mostly male staff mentally adding and subtracting competency and attractiveness points to and from their fluctuating impressions of her, tallying up opinions relating to her appearance and character which, once formed, would be hard for her to ever improve upon.
At her previous restaurant of employ – the latest in a series of incorporated dining ventures executively co-managed by a celebrity chef known, in the industry, for the emotionally toxic atmospheres of his kitchens and increasingly, on the industry’s outside, for his strongly worded online free-speech punditry and resultant new-media fan base of neoconservatives – Julia had earned a reputation as an easy mark; a line chef overeager about the job and therefore manipulable into assuming responsibilities occasionally beneath, but more often than not well above, her pay grade.
She had been waiting to become the next version of herself at a new job for a long time, long months. She had to be careful, now she was here, not to fall back into old-Julia behaviours: not to reveal her true nature as a crier, pleaser and worrier; not to do or say the kinds of things the person she was pretending to be wouldn’t say or do. Not to let others’ views of her warp her view of herself. Not to be vulnerable in the places she had been before.
The Apartment
After her first full week of non-trial shifts, Julia returned home to be airily ‘Oh, hey’-ed by Margot – her landlord, flatmate, and older sister’s closest friend – who was lying in her ritual night-time position on the living-room sofa; her attention split-screened between her smartphone’s various feeds and an episode of prestige television streaming on her laptop.
The living room was moodlit in accordance with Margot’s preferred rotary dimmer setting, thirty degrees clockwise from exact midway, as demarcated by a Sharpied dot on the white plastic casing of the wall’s light switch.
‘How’s it going?’ Julia replied.
Margot leant awkwardly over to pause her show. ‘Oh, good. I’m just tired. How about— How’s things with you?’
‘Also good. Also tired. But good-tired. From the new job.’
‘Oh yeah. How’s it all—?’
‘Good so far. Very good so far.’
Usually if she arrived back in the evening and saw, from the hallway, the telltale Margot-signalling band of light running beneath the living-room door, Julia would head immediately to bed. She and Margot had not yet worked out a natural, non-strained way to communicate with one another; their relationship was probably permanently contaminated by the monthly standing-order payments Julia transferred to her for rent.
‘Better than the old place?’
‘Oh god, like, about a zillion times better,’ Julia said, the act of speech becoming increasingly wearying for her to perform.
‘That’s good. I’ll have to stop by and try it sometime.’
‘You must.’
‘I will.’
‘Cool. Well, goodnight.’
Margot reverted her attention to her devices. ‘Goodnight.’
Winter Menu
Aside from maybe occasionally feeling left out of certain in-jokes and references whose origins predated her tenure there, Julia slotted quickly into place in the restaurant’s small culture. The staff members who usually made those in-jokes were Ellery and Nathan, Cascine’s fore- and second-most senior chefs respectively, whom Julia liked and who also seemed to like her back.
How the kitchen’s chain of operations went was: Ellery and Nathan oversaw the hot section, while Julia and one or maybe two members of a high-turnover workforce of junior cooks alternated between the cold and prep lines. Occasionally she’d cover the plancha or assist on sauté, other times she’d work the pass and triage the incoming checks. (Ellery would always be the one to micromanage the presentations of the outgoing plates to which those checks corresponded – a responsibility he took pride in never delegating.)
When Ellery spoke to her directly or gave her pointers, she made sure to active-listen, nodding and saying things like, ‘Okay, Chef,’ or ‘Got it, Chef,’ which was overserious, probably; she should learn to relax around him. (On the occasions that it happened, her face flushed at hearing its wearer’s name spoken in praise – Ellery looking at her with one eye closed, sighting her down the straight of his fork, ‘Perfect texture, Julia,’ having tasted her first- attempt youvetsi lamb stew.) Mainly, she just tried to work hard and keep her head down. To be seen simply as a safe pair of hands.
Rules
Ellery had a lot of rules, which he took pleasure in recounting larghetto and with irony, as if quoting from a list he’d long ago asked Julia to commit to memory and that she’d failed him in since having forgotten: no smartphones in the kitchen; no haircuts before a shift; no unironed T-shirts; black plastic utility clogs only; stick to your station (or its variant: disturb the mise, disturb the peace); no smartphones in the kitchen; if you’re walking behind someone, say so; sanitise, sanitise, sanitise; did he mention no smartphones in the kitchen.
However annoyingly they were dictated, the rules at least prompted rare moments of collective discussion among the working chefs (Julia, who had never once taken her smartphone into the kitchen, suspected Ellery of deploying the rules primarily as icebreakers to shatter the extended silences that sometimes set in during peak labour hours); Nathan usually responding by citing instances of Ellery’s violation of his own rules’ basic precepts in objection; Ellery, in turn, responding to Nathan’s responses by gesturing as though jacking off a thickly girthed, invisible dick – a routine that reliably, if a little forcedly, did make Julia laugh, and which she increasingly felt the two of them performed solely for that reason.
Rota
Given that she’d only recently been hired, Julia felt uncomfortable about requesting annual leave from the restaurant. This was a problem, because back when she’d first accepted the job, her mother had FaceTimed specifically to ask her to please, please book some time off so they could spend a couple of weeks at home together over the Christmas period – which Julia, knowing how lonely her mother sometimes got, had sworn she’d definitely do, fully in the knowledge, even as she’d made it, that she would not fulfil her promise.
Historically, the main way Julia dealt with conflicts in her life was to endlessly defer making any real decision or committing to any specific course of action, preferring instead to allow fate to autopilot her toward its natural-seeming, predestined outcomes without risking incurring any accidental negative consequences as a result of her own personal interference.
But out of sheer accumulated guilt for having raised her mother’s hopes unduly, a week and a half before Christmas, Julia eventually did ask Ellery about taking some unexpected short-term holiday, to which he replied that he honestly wouldn’t normally do this, that he was ordinarily mostly pretty lax about these things, but with the last days of December and first days of January tending to be so busy, he couldn’t allow her to take any more days off than the few she’d already been auto-assigned on the restaurant’s Google Sheets rota.
‘Is that going to be okay?’ he said, reframing as a question what had moments before been a series of clear declarations. And Julia, internalising shame, responded: ‘Yeah totally, no worries, no definitely. Completely cool and fine.’
Stephanie
One late-afternoon communal lunch break, Julia was trying to talk to Stephanie, Cascine’s head waiter, about her life and the things in it. Stephanie was putting little to no effort into the conversation and asking an unequal number of return-questions, acting cool and aloof in a way that forced the counterposition of tryhard oversharer onto Julia. The interaction had begun to feel – for them both – like a kind of test.
‘And so, have you been here a long time?’
‘Since I finished my PhD. About eight months.’
‘Wow. And, were you studying around here before that, or?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s amazing,’ Julia said, then felt the words that’s amazing expanding in dead air. ‘Same here, I studied geography.’
‘Oh right.’
‘Yeah, MA not PhD. Human geography. I did four years. My dissertation was about how, gradually, soil—’
‘And now you’re a chef.’
‘Yeah. Actually, it’s a funny story—’
‘I’ll bet.’
Copyright © 2022 by Jem Calder