fills up and the customers stacked up at the bar start screaming for their
tables, who's going to win the World Cup, who thinks Heather Graham is
a babe, who probably takes it in the ass this week, and how about the
time the Bengali busboys got into a fight in the middle of the dining
room and one stuck a steak knife into the other?
Dinner service. Overbooked as usual—with two whopping twelve-tops
booked for prime time. I remain in the kitchen to expedite, hoping that
maybe, just maybe, things'll slow down enough by ten for me to have a
couple of cocktails and get home by eleven. But I know full well that the
two big tables will hold up seatings by at least an hour; more than likely,
I'll be here for the full tour.
By eight-thirty, the board is full. Entree tickets flutter in the pull from
the exhaust fans. To my right, below the window, plated appetizers are
lined up, waiting to get delivered to the tables, the window is full of
sauté dishes, the work table in front of the fry station a panorama of
steaks of different donenesses. It's still Cachundo—he's working a
double too—and he ferries the plates out by hand, four or five at a time.
Still, I have to press-gang the occasional busboy or empty-handed
waiter, separating them out from the herd at the coffee and bread stations
and returning dirty plates and glasses, into delivering desserts. I don't
want ice cream melting over the clafoutis, or the whipped cream on the
chocolate mousse to start falling. Food's getting cold, and my voice is
already blown out from calling out orders over the noise from the
dishwasher, the hum of the exhaust, the whine of the Paco-Jet machine
and the growing roar from the dining room. I make a hand gesture to a
friendly waiter, who knows what I want, and he soon arrives with an
"Industrial", a beer stein filled with margarita, for me. The drink
manages to take the edge off my raging adrenaline buzz and goes down
nicely after the three double espressos, two beers, three cranberry juices,
eight aspirins, two ephedrine drinks, and a hastily gobbled hunk of
merguez, which I managed to squeeze into a heel of bread before
swallowing in two bites. By now, my stomach is a roiling hell broth of