(perfect absorption), feuille de brik for pastry, Provence honey for the
duck sauce, white anchovies in olive oil for niçoise salad, escargots,
flageolets . . . I'm already thinking about pot-au-feu for next week and
will need plenty of the expensive grey sea salt for condiment.
Ramon, the day dishwasher, tells me he'll need the day off tomorrow to
visit a relative in the hospital, but he's replaced himself with Jaime II,
the night dishwasher who'll double for him. I'm grateful, as nothing
causes me more grief than last-minute emergency scheduling, and I'm
always pleased when my crew takes care of things internally. Phoning
my Mafia at home is a near impossibility. Most of them claim not to
own phones. For those who do, their phones are answered by people
suspicious of strange Norteamericanos asking questions, and are not
likely to acknowledge that, yes, Mr Perez, Rodriguez, Garcia, Sanchez,
Rivera is actually in residence at said address.
Dinner-tasting for the floor staff is at five-thirty, when the heavy-hitting
veteran waiters have arrived. They fall on the family gruel and the
tasting plates like rabid jackals. It's never pretty watching waiters eat;
you'd think they had no money the way they dive into any available
trough. Dinner-tasting is conducted in the kitchen, as there are customers
in the dining room straight through lunch into dinner. It looks like a
crowded subway car as I describe the evening's specials and present each
plate. They tear at the four plates of food, ripping apart the pheasant with
their hands, nearly spearing each other with forks as they gouge at the
tuna, drag cockles to their greasy maws with bare hands, and quickly
turn Janine's lovely tarte Tatin into a dark smear. I swallow some more
aspirins.
At five forty-five, the downstairs is clogged with the night-time lifer
waiter crew, sitting on milk crates, folding napkins, smoking and talking
about each other. Who got drunk last night, who got thrown out of a
mob-run after-hours club then woke up in the bushes outside their house,
who thinks the new maître d' is going to lose it tonight when the room