“PICK UP!”
“Picking up,” Ariel sang out. I giggled in line behind her. Will elbowed me to shut up and I laughed harder. We were playing Go Fish. Do you have any gin? Go Fish! Do you have any Hitachino White Ale? Go Fish! The person who was without had to find and deliver it—stealthily—to the others. I had just fished Sancerre from the white wine bucket. It was still early in the night, the first tickets rolling lazily through the printer, the servers dawdling in the hutch, all waters topped off. Chef demonstrated the specials on the line, while Scott set up the expediting station. A tipsy, languorous night with my friends stretched out in front of me.
“Order in—soigné, it’s Sid’s table,” Scott yelled out. “So 23, order fire two tartares, order fire sformato, order fire foie.” He inspected plates in the window. “Pick up, 13, asparagus, 1, Gruyère 2, I’ll take a follow on the oysters.”
“Hubba, hubba,” I said. “Picking up.”
A new ticket printed and Scott glanced at it while holding out the asparagus special toward me. The poached egg on top jiggled. He kept staring at the ticket.
“Piiiiiicking up,” I said again, and reached my arms out farther to grab the plate. He dropped it to the counter and the egg slipped off. Chef looked up sharply.
Scott, drained of color, said, “The health department’s here.”
Chef set down his knife and in the quietest and most controlled of voices said, “Nobody. Touch. The. Fridges.”
The kitchen detonated. People ran. Chef flew up the stairs. From all over the kitchen things went soaring into the garbage: half a leg of prosciutto and the ropes of sausages hanging by the butcher station. Bar mops dropped into the trash like streamers. Anything that had been out, in the process of being chopped or even salted, went into the trash. Potatoes that were being sliced for fries, breakfast radishes that were being cleaned, sauces that were being divided into labeled quarts. Interns ran up from the basement with brooms and swept madly from the corners, porters tied off the trash bags, the line cooks pulled down pint containers from shelves above their stations—inside were kits with bandanas, thermometers, pencil-thin flashlights.
I had never seen such precise chaos in my life, the fear animating everyone. Zoe talked about a two-minute drill, but nobody had trained me on it. I assumed it was above my pay grade. Ariel pulled all the cutting boards off the tables and I grabbed her.
“What the fuck do I do?”
She looked me up and down and pulled the bar mops hanging from my apron string and threw them away. She held my hands and said, “You’re going to run the food. Just like you were doing a minute ago. And when you get in the dining room, you smile extra hard, and when you see a man holding a flashlight and a clipboard, you make sure he sees how pretty and happy you are. Don’t open the fridges, we need stable temperatures. Don’t touch any food, not even a lemon or a straw at the bar. That’s it.”
I nodded. She threw the cutting boards into the dish station and pulled all of the servers’ water glasses. Whatever hair-tingling exhilaration I’d been on my way to churned in my stomach. I thought about hiding in the bathroom. Pretending I had to pee and it couldn’t wait, and I would sit in there until the whole inspection was over, and I would at least know I didn’t fuck anything up. But I couldn’t. My adrenaline kicked into overdrive but then something else did too. My training.
“Picking up,” I yelled. Scott was on his knees shining a flashlight under a lowboy and sweeping with a hand broom. When he heard me he stood up and looked at the pass. All the plates were still there. He looked at me, then at the plates again. He moved the poached egg to the top of the asparagus. It had been barely two minutes.
“Pick up?” he asked.
“Picking up,” I sang out, my hands unwrapped, open like I was receiving a blessing.
—
WHAT WAS the Owner banking on? His reputation? The endurance of tacit understandings from the nineties, a sort of honor among thieves? It was hard to believe that this plebeian man in a dusty jacket had any sort of power over us, that he could cause panic in the kitchen or halt anyone from getting their calamari. He went to the bar first, and I smiled to myself as Jake stubbornly stood his ground, the inspector too large to move effortlessly back there, saying, Excuse me, and turning the cold-water faucet on, saying, Excuse me, turning the hot-water faucet on.
Will said, “That’s the essence of his evil. See how quiet he is?”
He was right. The inspector didn’t exclaim, didn’t interact. He seemed to have the most boring job I could imagine—his weapon was a digital thermometer. He opened a refrigerator door, marked a temperature. He poked into our plastic-wrapped items, and marked another temperature. He fondled the gaskets on the fridges and prodded the cracks in the ones that hadn’t been replaced yet. He lumbered down to the floor with a flashlight, nodded as he got back up. He checked the expiration dates on every single gallon of milk, every stick of butter. Looked inside every bulk dry-goods container. He went through his faucet drill at every sink, pumped all the soaps, which were full. He seemed to be moving on an invisible grid, and so I kept forgetting about him. I saw him come out of the walk-in and I thought, That guy’s still here?
I had seen my share of disgusting shit, but I was also positive we were the cleanest restaurant near the park. There were stories about the house-pet-sized rats at the places around us, or the restaurants where raw sewage backed up from the street when it rained. Sure, I cut some corners on my side work, but I watched the porters bleach out the darkest corners of the kitchen, and I watched the overnight guys arrive as I was leaving every night. Chef put the fear of God into his crew. I would have eaten off the floor without a moment’s hesitation. If the inspector had paused at any table, our virtue would have been self-evident: we put out beautiful food.
We were turning, moving delicately on tiptoe. Will, Ariel, and I weren’t getting drunk anymore, and Scott didn’t stop sweating, but it was just another service. Howard and Chef took the inspector up to the mezz and sat him at a table, where he wrote a report.
I was dropping off a rack of glasses at the service bar and batting my eyes at Jake when I saw him look past me, which he didn’t really do anymore. I turned. Howard was coming down the stairs on his cell phone. It was a fracture—managers never had phones on the floor. No one did. Howard went straight to Simone and pulled her into the back hutch. They spoke with their heads bowed. Her hand went to her chest and she nodded. When I went back into the kitchen it was silent, not like a church, like a graveyard.
Howard came in behind me and announced, “We are ending service for this evening.”
“Now?” I asked. No one responded.
“If anyone has questions be vague but firm. We are voluntarily closing for repairs. We will see them all in a few days. I will touch all the tables. Mandatory all-staff meeting in one hour.”
—