“How’s it going, Chip? Denzil?”
Chip and Denzil stared at me numbly and mumbled “’kay I guess.”
“And this is Letitia.” A frowning dark-haired girl was painstakingly tearing up iceberg lettuce as if it were as difficult as lacemaking.
“Letitia’s one of our challenged crew members,” said Mr. Le Renges, resting one of his hairy tarantula hands on her shoulder. “The state of Maine gives us special tax relief to employ the challenged, but even if they didn’t I’d still want to have her here. That’s the kind of guy I am, John. I’ve been called to do more than feed people. I’ve been called to enrich their lives.”
Letitia looked up at me with unfocused aquamarine eyes. She was pretty but she had the expression of a smalltown beauty queen who has just been hit on the head by half a brick. Some instinct told me that Tony Le Renges wasn’t only using her as an iceberg lettuce tearer.
“We take pride in the supreme quality of our food,” he said. Without any apparent sense of irony he opened a huge freezer at the back of the kitchen and showed me the frozen steaks and the frost-covered envelopes of pre-cooked chili, ready for boiling in the bag. He showed me the freeze-dried vegetables and the frozen corn bread and the dehydrated lobster chowder (just add hot water). And this was in Maine, where you can practically find fresh lobsters waltzing down the street.
None of this made me weak with shock. Even the best restaurants use a considerable proportion of pre-cooked and pre-packaged food, and fast food outlets like McDonald’s and Burger King use nothing else. Even their scrambled eggs come dried and pre-scrambled in a packet.
What impressed me was how Mr. Le Renges could sell this ordinary, industrialized stuff as “wholesome, hearty food, lovingly cooked in our own kitchens by people who really care” when most of it was grudgingly thrown together in giant factories by minimum-wage shift-workers who didn’t give a rat’s ass.
Mr. Le Renges must have had an inkling about the way my mind was working.
“You know what our secret is?” he asked me.
“If I’m going to come and cook here, Mr. Le Renges, I think it might be a good idea if you told me.”
“We have the best-tasting burgers anywhere, that’s our secret. McDonald’s and Burger King don’t even come close. Once you’ve tasted one of our burgers, you won’t want anything else. Here—Kevin—pass me a burger so that John here try it.”
“That’s okay,” I told him. “I’ll take your word for it. I had a sandwich already.”
“No, John, if you’re going to work here, I insist.”
“Listen, Mr. Le Renges, I’m a professional food hygienist. I know what goes into burgers and that’s why I never eat them. Never.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I’m not suggesting anything. It’s just that I know for a fact that a proportion of undesirable material makes its way into ground beef and I don’t particularly want to eat it.”
“Undesirable material? What do you mean?”
“Well, waste products, if you want me to be blunt about it. Cattle are slaughtered and disemboweled so fast that it makes it inevitable that a certain amount of excrement contaminates the meat.”
“Listen, John, how do you think I compete with McDonald’s and Burger King? I make my customers feel as if they’re a cut above people who eat at the big fast-food chains. I make them feel as if they’re discerning diners.”
“But you’re serving up pretty much the same type of food.”
“Of course we are. That’s what our customers are used to, that’s what they like. But we make it just a little more expensive, and we serve it up like it’s something really special. We give them a proper restaurant experience, that’s why they come here for birthdays and special occasions.”
“But that must whack up your overheads.”
“What we lose on overheads we gain by sourcing our own foodstuffs.”
“You mean you can buy this stuff cheaper than McDonald’s? How do you do that? You don’t have a millionth of their buying power.”
“We use farmers’ and stockbreeders’ co-operatives. Little guys, that the big fast-food chains don’t want to do business with. That’s why our burgers taste better, and that’s why they don’t contain anything that you wouldn’t want to eat.”
Kevin came over from the grill with a well-charred burger patty on a plate. His spots were glowing angrily from the heat. Mr. Le Renges handed me a fork and said, “There … try it.”
I cut a small piece off and peered at it suspiciously. “No shit?” I asked him.
“Nothing but one thousand percent protein, I promise you.”
I dry-swallowed, and then I put the morsel in my mouth. I chewed it slowly, trying not to think about the manure-splattered ramps of the slaughterhouses that I had visited around Baton Rouge. Mr. Le Renges watched me with those glittering blowfly eyes of his and that didn’t make it any more appetizing, either.
But, surprisingly, the burger actually tasted pretty good. It was tender, with just the right amount of crunchiness on the outside, and it was well-seasoned with onion and salt and pepper and the tiniest touch of chili, and there was another flavor, too, that really lifted it.
“Cumin?” I asked Mr. Le Renges.
“Aha. That would be telling. But you like it, don’t you?”
I cut off another piece. “Okay, I have to confess that I do.”
Mr. Le Renges whacked me on the back so that I almost choked. “You see, John? Now you know what I was talking about when I told you that I was called to enrich people’s lives. I keep small farmers in business, and at the same time I give the people of Calais a very important community venue with the best food that I can economically serve up. Well, not only Calais. I have Tony’s Gourmet Burgers in Old Town and Millinocket and Waterville and I’ve just opened a new flagship restaurant in St. Stephen, over the river in Canada.”
“Well, congratulations,” I coughed. “When do you want me to start?”
* * *
I dreamed that I was sitting by the window of Rocco’s restaurant on Drusilla Lane in Baton Rouge, eating a spicy catfish poboy with a cheese fry basket and a side of brown gravy. I had just ordered my bread pudding when the phone rang and the receptionist told me in a clogged-up voice that it was 5:15 in the morning.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked her.
“You asked for an alarm call, sir. Five fifteen, and it’s five-fifteen.”
I heaved myself up in bed. Outside my window it was still totally dark. It was then that I remembered that I was now the chef de petit dejeuner at Tony’s, and I was supposed to be over on North Street at 6 a.m. sharp to open up the premises and start getting the bacon griddled and the eggs shirred and the coffee percolating.
I stared at myself in the mirror. “Why did you do this to yourself?” I asked me.
“Because you’re a nitpicking perfectionist who couldn’t turn a blind eye to three mouse droppings at the Cajun Queen Restaurant, that’s why. And they probably weren’t even mouse droppings at all. Just capers.”
“Capers schmapers.”
It was so cold outside that the deserted sidewalks shone like hammered glass. I walked to North Street where Chip had just opened up the restaurant.
“Morning, Chip.”
“Yeah.” He showed me how to switch off the alarm and switch on the lights. Then we went through to the kitchen and he showed me how to heat up the griddle and take out the frozen bacon and the frozen burgers and mix up the “fresh squeezed” orange juice (just add water).
We had only been there ten minutes when a young mousy-haired girl with a pale face and dark circles under her eyes came through the door. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Anita. You must be John.”