Adrienne bought the dress, her hand trembling as she signed the credit card slip, a combination of the price and the espresso. Once she had enough clothes to get her through the weekend, she felt better about starting this new life. This, after all, was what she had needed. A clean slate. A chance to get it just right.
2
Menu Meeting
“Let’s pretend for twenty minutes of every day that the restaurant business is about food,” Thatcher said.
Adrienne wrote on a yellow legal pad: “Restaurant=food.” She sat at one end of a very long table, a twelve-top, in the dining room with the rest of the staff-five waiters; three bussers; the bartender, Duncan; and a young female bar back. Thatcher was the professor. Adrienne was the nerdy kid who took too many notes-but Thatcher had asked her to Please absorb every word I say, so that this, the soft opening, might go as smoothly as possible.
The dining room had been completely transformed since the morning of her breakfast. The wood floors had been polished, the wicker chairs had been cleaned, the plastic sheeting was rolled up so that every table had an unimpeded view of the gold sand beach and Nantucket Sound. Landscapers had planted red and pink geraniums in the window boxes that lined the outer walls of the restaurant and in the wooden dory out front. All of the tables were set for service and the waiters (three veterans, two newcomers) had arrived early to polish the glasses. The waiters wore black pants, crisp white shirts, and long white aprons. The busboys and the bar back wore black pants and white oxfords. Duncan wore khakis, a blue silk shirt, a sailboat-print tie, and black soccer sneakers. Adrienne had decided on her new pink silk pants with a gauzy white top and a pair of Kate Spade slides that she bought off the sale rack at Neiman’s in Denver. Her black hair was short enough that she only had to blow it dry and fluff it. She would have looked okay except that morning had been so sunny and warm that she had headed off to the beach. She came home sunburned, and when she applied her fuchsia lipstick it matched not only her toenail polish and her new pants, but the stripe across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Ten minutes ago, when she’d arrived, Thatcher had narrowed his eyes at her (just the way her father would if he could see her). She was certain she was going to get a word about sunscreen.
“Diaphanous top on the first night,” he said. “Gutsy. I like it. What size are you?”
Was this any of his business? “A six.”
He nodded. “The shoes won’t work, though.” He checked his watch-she thought it was a Patek Philippe. “But you don’t have time to go home and change. Sorry. Menu meeting at table nine, right now.” He handed her the yellow legal pad. “Please absorb every word I say. You’re trailing me tonight. Soft opening. That means friends of the house. Nobody gets a bill for anything but alcohol, and everything has to be as close to perfect as possible. Then, tomorrow night, close isn’t going to cut it.”
Now he was lecturing. The professor in his Gucci loafers and twenty-thousand-dollar watch. Everyone around the table sat in rapt attention. This was the big time. The Harvard Business School of resort dining.
“I thought Fee might come out and tell you about the food, but she’s in the weeds back there. No additions tonight. There are a lot of our standards on this year’s menu but there’s some new stuff, too, and since we have two new wait-people, two new bussers, and a new assistant manager, and since the rest of you spent all winter skiing bumps or sizzling in the equatorial sun, I’m going to run through the menu with you now. Everyone’s met Adrienne Dealey, right?” Thatcher held out his arm to introduce Adrienne, and the staff turned to look at her. She blushed on top of her sunburn. “On the floor, Adrienne is going to be my second in command, taking over for Kevin who conned his way into the maître d’ job at Craft in New York. As some of you know, Fee and I might be gone more often this summer than we’ve been in years past. And Adrienne is going to run the floor in my stead and alongside of me. But let’s give her a week or two to learn what it is we do here. She has never worked in a restaurant before. Not even Pizza Hut.”
Adrienne was sure she heard groans. But then one of the waiters, shiny-bald, black square glasses, said, “Let’s welcome Adrienne.”
“Welcome, Adrienne,” the rest of the staff echoed.
Adrienne smiled at her yellow legal pad. She heard someone say, “You drink champagne.” She looked up. Duncan was pointing at her.
She nodded, overcome with a bizarre shyness. He remembered her. Hopefully, he didn’t remember her as the woman whose boyfriend had been ripping off the esteemed patrons of the Little Nell.
“You drink champagne?” Thatcher said. “That gives me an idea. Make a note to ask me about champagne. Now, let’s pretend for eighteen minutes that the restaurant business is about food.”
Adrienne never worked in restaurants, but she loved to eat in them. Until her mother died of ovarian cancer when Adrienne was twelve, her family had lived in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and her father ran a successful dental practice in King of Prussia. They used to eat out all the time-at the original Bookbinder’s in downtown Philadelphia, the City Tavern, and her mother was a sucker for all of the new, funky cafés on South Street. What was it Adrienne loved about restaurants? The napkins folded like flowers, the Shirley Temples with maraschino cherries speared on a plastic sword, seeing her endless reflection in the mirrors of the ladies’ room. The pastel mints in a bowl by the front door.
After her mother died and Adrienne and her father took up with wanderlust, Adrienne became exposed to new foods. For two years they lived in Maine, where in the summertime they ate lobster and white corn and small wild blueberries. They moved to Iowa for Adrienne’s senior year of high school and they ate pork tenderloin fixed seventeen different ways. Adrienne did her first two years of college at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she lived above a Mexican cantina, which inspired a love of tamales and anything doused with habanero sauce. Then she transferred to Vanderbilt in Nashville, where she ate the best fried chicken she’d ever had in her life. And so on, and so on. Pad thai in Bangkok, stone crabs in Palm Beach, buffalo meat in Aspen. As she sat listening to Thatcher, she realized that though she knew nothing about restaurants, at least she knew something about food.
“This year, as every year, the first thing that hits the table-after the cocktails-is the bread basket.” There was an appreciative moan, and Caren arched her eyebrows at Adrienne from across the table. “The bread basket is one of two things. Bruno! Go into the kitchen and get me two baskets, one of each, please.” The bald waiter zipped into the kitchen. Bruno. Adrienne mentally pinned the name to him. Bald Bruno, who had welcomed her earlier. His voice had a little bit of a sashay to it, like he was from the south or was gay. She would ask Caren later.
Bruno reappeared with two baskets swathed in white linen napkins and a ramekin of something bright yellow.
Thatcher unveiled one basket. “Pretzel bread,” he said. He held up a thick braid of what looked to be soft pretzel, nicely tanned, sprinkled with coarse salt. “This is served with Fee’s homemade mustard. So right away the guest knows this isn’t a run-of-the-mill restaurant. They’re not getting half a cold baguette, here, folks, with butter in the gold foil wrapper. This is warm pretzel bread made on the premises, and the mustard ditto. Nine out of ten tables are licking the ramekin clean.” He handed the bread basket to a waiter with a blond ponytail (male-everyone at the table was male except for Adrienne, Caren, and the young bar back who was hanging on to Duncan’s arm). The ponytailed waiter-name?-tore off a hunk of bread and dipped it in the mustard. He rolled his eyes like he was having an orgasm. The appropriate response, Adrienne thought. But remembering her breakfast she guessed he wasn’t faking it.