Page 6 of Aftertaste

Okay, nah. That’s Food & Spirits, down the block. If you hurry you can make it!

Everyone else, we good? Last chance to bail; we got a tight schedule.

Let’s kick it!

My name’s Frankie, but I’ll answer to Kosh, Shaun, Shaunessey, Key, Shy, and, of course, Tall, Dark, and Handsome—I see you, ladies!—and I’ll be your guide today. Like the name implies, this here’s all about the culinary stylings of Mr. Konstantin Duhovny—Kostya to his mom, Bones to his buddies, KD for short.

Now if you’re on this tour, I’m guessing you know a little something about what our guy’s food can do, and you’re itching to try it for yourself, see if all the rumors are true. Well, I’ll tell you right now: they’re just the tip.

Bones is the real deal—feeds folks bodyandsoul!—and we’ll be making our way through his past together, retracing some footsteps, watching his evolution as a chef before we head on over to our grand finale—opening night at his brand-new digs downtown, reservations im-poss-i-ble to get. ’Less you’re with me.

Now, I used to work in the restaurant biz—not just in the dining room, but in the actual kitchens, right where the fire is—so I’ll get you real up close and personal with what goes down on the line. Matter of fact, I did a stint at Bones’s own spot in Hell’s Kitchen—we’ll hop on over there in just a bit—and that means you’re gonna get to hear some stories not one other food tour’s got on the menu.

We’re about a block away now—anybody got a guess where we’re headed?

Alright! Get it, girl! Somebody’s been doing her homework.

Here’s a little history for the rest of you. The Library of Spirits’s been around since ’02; started out as a mixology school, training up bartenders for the city’s best watering holes. Really raising the bar. (Sorry, man. I had to!) It’s a tiny little spot—six, maybe seven stools—and it’s a speakeasy, so don’t wake the neighbors. We get in through this indie bookstore right here. They got one of them trick shelves in back; I’ll give y’all a chance to see if you can figure out which book gets you in.

Now our guy didn’t make it to The Library till 2016, and he wasn’t here to shake or stir. He was up in the back dishwashing, going nowhere fast till this one night, when he mixed a drink that changed everything.

Y’all ready? Get excited. Let’s head on in.

CHAMPAGNE PROBLEMS

THE BOOKSTORE IScalled Bibliomecca and the bookFantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d’histoires d’apparitions de spectres, revenans, fantômes, etc.The book is old and French and horrible, all of which makes it somewhat conspicuous on the shelf of brightly colored, contemporary American fiction. When you compound this with its cracking spine, grubby dust jacket, and the fact that it sticks a solid four inches past the lip of the ledge, it seems rather miraculous that more people don’t stumble into The Library of Spirits by mistake.

But then, New Yorkers can be remarkably myopic.

The douchey weekend manager, Kevin, once told Konstantin that Mary Shelley had borrowed liberally fromFantasmagorianawhen writingFrankenstein, but he had never cared enough to confirm that fact. Kostya had no head for fiction, and no stomach at all for ghost stories. He had tasted enough phantom food over the years to hold the conviction that ghost stories had nothing in common with actual ghosts. Their writers had clearly never come in contact with a spirit; if they had, they wouldn’t make every ghost into a haunt, some creepy ghoulie come back from the Dead to wreak havoc and incite fear. That was baloney. The ghosts he encountered (if you could call it that) seemed mild mannered, even sentimental.

At least, that’s what Kostya inferred from the flavors they left in his mouth:

Poppy-seed piroshky laced with boozy rum raisins, scoop of melting vanilla soft serve, mouthful of watered-down black currant tea.Late April, walking past a funeral home in Sheepshead Bay.

Deep-dish pizza, crust crispy and layered as a croissant, pepperoni and pineapple topping, so hot it burns the roof of your mouth.Two weeks back, riding the northbound Q past Times Square.

Pork dumplings, the wontons deep-fried but eaten refrigerator cold, hint of chive, hoisin, and rice wine vinegar, kick of spicy mustard.Just that morning, stuck in Holland Tunnel traffic on his way to drop off a pallet of cheap vodka for Uncle (not his real uncle) Vanya.

These didn’t taste like the throats of people looking for blood. They struck Kostya as nostalgic. Maybe they were hungry, the restaurant options in the Afterlife not quite hitting the spot. Or maybe they just communicated with whatever receiver they had available and his happened to be a tongue. He wished there were a way to ask them, to discover what they wanted him to do with these flavors they kept pushing on him, but the moments were so brief, the tastes so fleeting, that often he barely had time to register what he had been tasting before it vanished without a trace.

Most of the time, the flavors were typical—more dead people than you’d think crave some variety of sandwich—but sometimes they were entirely foreign, hailing from cuisines Kostya hadn’t known existed, spices he couldn’t have imagined. Even the obscurest tastes would somehow disclose themselves to him, a metaphysical-ethereal-neural miracle that let him intuit the component parts of everything he tasted.

Like the chicken wings smeared withsambal oelek, which scorched his throat one night as he traversed Bryant Park by Citi Bike.

Or the warm, headyras el hanout, smothering the beef tagine he got as he handed the rent check to his frowning landlord on the third of the month.

Or the mouth-puckeringamchurin thekatiroll that visited him at the Urgent Care clinic, awaiting the results of a strep test (negative).

He’d known the names of those flavors though he didn’t know how. He had never tasted them before, had never even seen them on a menu; they were justthere, identified, companions to the aftertastes, escort ingredients simmering beneath the surface of his consciousness, waiting to be invoked. The bubbling answers to a question.

Too bad it was the wrong question.

Sure, it was nice to know what he was eating, but he’d much rather know why, or who had sent it. What he was supposed to do with it. Without all that, it was just an odd, abnormal quirk, something he’d spent the better part of two decades hiding from people who, once they got a whiff of this thing, would almost certainly insist he be committed (his own mother included).

Not that an institution—or heavy sedation—could stop the aftertastes from coming. Sometimes just hearing about dead people triggered them. Listening to some deceased’s name pronounced in reverent tones on the late-night news. Catching an overheard snippet of mournful conversation on the sidewalk. And there it would be: a message from beyond, unfurling on his tongue. Other times, there would be no prompt at all, like that morning: driving bumper-to-bumper and the idiot behind him leaning on his horn and Nirvana screeching on the radio and—voilà!—pork dumplings, dead ahead.

Kostya hadn’t stopped thinking about them. They’d been good. Like,reallygood. The kind of thing he wished he could taste again. He thought about the filling—it had just a touch of sweetness—across three boroughs as he delivered bottom-shelf booze. He thought about who would have eaten them cold, the wonton skins soggy, as he parked the truck in Uncle Vanya’s warehouse in Jersey City (Vanya’s Victuals: Proud Purveyors of Fine Food and Spirits since 1992. Cash Only!). He contemplated the hoisin and the rice wine vinegar as he rode the PATH back into Manhattan, as he wove through the tourists overrunning Times Square, as he trudged up the steps to his minuscule apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. He thought about the banality of the situation—cars, horns, traffic—and about the mad magic—ghosts, realactual fucking ghosts—as he showered, changed, and went back out to work his night shift dishwashing at The Library of Spirits.

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