Page 24 of Aftertaste

Whenever there were quiet moments—early in the morning, before service; late into the night, after the last table left—Tony would teach Kostya technique. How to hold a knife. How to start a stock. How to see if a pan was hot enough to sear but not scorch. While he washed dishes, bussed tables, did any and every menial task—scrubbing the burnt layers of pans till his knuckles bled; carrying fifty-pound crates of shallots down into the cellar; shoving his arm pit-deep behind the walk-in to clear a decades-old air filter—Kostya watched the men and women around him, and took copious mental notes. At night, he practiced what he’d seen them do—how they tasted and adjusted their sauces; how they butchered and broke down meat; how they organized their stations; the confidence with which their fingertips seasoned, sautéed, and served.

He worked himself to the bone most days. He came in early and left late, with barely enough time between to go home, shower, and change before heading back for another shift. His only day off was Monday, when the restaurant was closed, and most Mondays he spent in the kitchen at Saveur anyway, watching Tony and Michel debate the menu, sample the week’s produce, and talk shit about the soms.

Every minute he spent at the restaurant, each time he learned a new cooking method or honed a new skill, Kostya could almost feel the possibility of seeing his dad draw closer. Whenever he got an aftertaste now, he’d test himself, making mental notes about the flavors and textures and techniques he thought had gone into the dish, and trying them out later, when the Saveur Fare kitchen was abandoned to his own private ghost laboratory.

He hadn’t actually summoned a spirit since that night at The Library, but Kostya suspected that had more to do with the other factors—the deceased’s presence and the intermediary who needed to eat the food—than it did with his cooking. He figured that, in his dad’s case, he could do the tastinghimself, provided his father ever showed up again with that liver. Though the odds of a repeat taste didn’t seem quite so hopeless now, not after that night with all the Reese’s.

He wished he could go back there, to Seyoncé, and face the psychic again. Show Madame Everleigh how wrong she’d been, not just about the aftertastes, but about him. He thought about it a lot. About her. About how gorgeous she was, and how mean. About her warnings. About what he should have said. What he might say now.

He was different; Saveur had seasoned him. Every minute he spent in the kitchen made him feel like he’d found something he hadn’t known he’d lost. He woke up buzzing. Helikedcoming to work. So much that it barely felt like work at all. He liked the chefs and the line cooks and the front-of-housers, even if they didn’t always like him. He liked the scrupulous kitchen, the way everything had its place. He liked how hauling crates and being on his feet and sweating in the kitchen heat made his body feel. He liked working with the ingredients, learning the seasons by the harvests they yielded, the treasures he unpacked. He worshipped the food.

Sometimes, inspired, he’d experiment with variations on the house specialties, swapping sauces or modifying ingredients. He found he had a gift for knowing which flavors to pair, for intuiting how textures and notes and even the shapes of foods would combine in an excited mouth. And while he’d never dream of feeding the fruits of his labors to any of the staff, he thought, by and large, that his edits had improved their dishes. It wasn’t that he thought he was a better cook, or that his measly months of kitchen drudgery outweighed their years of experience and toil. It was just that he thought he was a better taster than everyone there—Michel included.

Sometimes he’d even forget himself and toss unsolicited suggestions out to the kitchen floor. Mostly, this was met with vitriol. But once, Henri’s—the saucier’s—consternation changed to a look of surprised consideration when Kostya suggested lemon juice to resurrect a forgotten reduction that’d boiled into sludge. Another time, when Tony was swamped with a private party,he had Kostya finish his plates before sending them out to the dining room. And the sommeliers, who had a reliable hate-hate relationship with the line, found Kostya refreshingly approachable, took to shooting the shit with him after hours, and even occasionally solicited his opinions on food pairings. Even Michel—from whom he had about as much chance of extracting a compliment as he did of finding a pearl in a raw-bar oyster—had been caught actually smiling as he watched Konstantin work.

But all that still didn’t change the fact that he didn’t have any formal training and no one at Saveur was going to let him forget it. The kitchen was stacked with school snobs, which wasn’t much of a surprise, since the fish stunk from the head. Michel (Le Cordon Bleu, ’96) was notoriously nepotistic, and though he’d espouse egalitarian views about hiring the hardest-working chefs regardless of pedigree in interviews and glossy spreads fromBon AppétittoZagat, the vast majority of his kitchen came straight from fancy schools and fancier apprenticeships. Still, even with the CIA or Le Cordon Bleu or ICE behind them, Kostya’s colleagues couldn’t do a lot of what he could. Decades of ghost tasting had trained his tongue better than their big degrees ever could.

All of which is to say, it came as both a surprise and not a surprise when Michel asked to speak with him before dinner service the Thursday before Christmas.

Kostya’s hands got clammy on the walk over to his office. He barely ever went down this administrative hallway; he hadn’t, in fact, stepped foot on the Moroccan floor tile since he’d first filled out his employment paperwork. His mind hummed with energy, speculating. Kostya could be getting fired. Promoted. Invited to an exclusive restaurant orgy. Framed for murder. Nominated to represent Saveur Fare as a marathon runner. His body sold to a science convention to pay for truffles by the pound.

He opened the door.

“Konstantin. Good. Come in. Sit.”

Michel looked years older than the last time they’d sat in this office, and decidedly pissed about something.

“Uh, thanks.Merci, Chef.”

His French sounded like he was asking for mercy, which,well, he wasn’t not. Kostya swallowed and sat.

“I’ll keep this brief since service is about to begin. I need a favor.” Michel pinched a tiny speck of lint from his chef’s coat and flicked it to the floor. “Henri’s sister is getting married on Saturday” (uttered with the air of discussing something decidedly perverse), “and he begged off a year ago for the wedding” (as if this were a first-degree crime), “which means we don’t have anyone making sauces that night…” (this with a sort of hopeful despondence).

“But Saturday’s the Gild,” objected Kostya, and Michel gave a small smile, pleased that he appreciated the seriousness of the situation.

Saturday, the restaurant would be shutting down for the private party to end all private parties—Bouche de Noël, the annual, by-invitation-only Christmas bash hosted by Gild, the restaurant group that owned Saveur Fare and Tutankhamen and a dozen other impressive New York institutions. The guest list was always a who’s who of New York’s culinary elite, plus the rich and famous who liked to rub elbows with them. Each year, Gild tapped one of their restaurants to host the soiree, and though it was an absolute pain in the ass of a night for the staff, it also guaranteed Gild’s generous financial support—big, fat, year-making bonuses—provided it went off without a hitch.

Because it was such an important night, Michel had called in several artisans—a sugar sculptor, a wild-game huntsman, a guy who planted pearls inside edible oysters—as well as tightening his already prong-like grip on his regular kitchen staff. Kostya was supposed to tag-team salad and cold appetizers with Fernando, with Tony running sauté, Francois on grill, and Henri razzle-dazzling everybody with the new sauces he’d been concocting. Kostya had watched him prep for the better part of a week, sticking teeny-tiny tasting spoons into goop of every imaginable color and shade and making micro-adjustments to the tune of five grains of salt or a singleturn of the pepper mill. And now he didn’t understand how no one had planned ahead, or what, exactly, Michel expected him to do.

“So, what’s the favor?”

Michel blinked rapidly.

“It appears that the gravity of Saturday isn’t lost on you. Good. Fortunately, Henri is wrapping on his sauce plan and is going to prep everything we need before he goes. It should be a simple plug-and-play, but—just in case—I’d like you on saucier.”

Kostya swallowed a throat lump so large he thought he might have ingested his Adam’s apple.

“Me?”

“You’ve impressed me. I was sure you wouldn’t, but you did. I’d like to give you this opportunity to rise to the occasion. I’ll arrange for Henri to brief you tomorrow.”

“Wow. Yes. Of course! Thank you, Chef. I won’t let you down.”

THE NIGHT OFthe party, Kostya took over saucier, Fernando worked salads solo (with a visible chip on his shoulder), and Michel made rounds in the dining room in his chef’s whites, occasionally popping his head in to give them play-by-plays or hiss at them to hurry it up.

Henri had left seven pages of meticulous notes in minuscule slant; if anyone was going down for a sauce-related snafu, it wouldn’t be him. But what Michel had described as a simple plug-and-play was nothing of the sort. There were myriad dishes presented as bites to create the desired cocktail atmosphere, each with its own accompanying sauce, some with modifications for food allergies, general aversions, et cetera, et cetera, and enough variation in the flavors that mixing up one sauce with another could be damning.

If he weren’t thoroughly convinced that Michel had no sense of humor, Kostya would have wondered if this was his idea of a joke.

---