Soul Kitchen

TOP SPOT The first argument Milford Goodman ever had with Eileen Trefethen was about the slogan she wanted to print on her menus: More Art Per Square Inch Than Any Other Restaurant in New Orleans! He hadn’t taken the head chef job so people could come and look at art. He wanted them to pay attention to his food. “Oh, don’t be such a prima donna,” Eileen said, breathing smoke in his face. She was a tall, slender white woman who wore strenuously creative outfits and way too many pins in her water-color-auburn hair. “People know the food is going to be good. I’ve worked hard amassing this fabulous art collection, and I want people to know about it. Besides, I’m the owner, and I make these decisions. You’re the chef, and you stay in the kitchen.” To Milford, the fabulous art collection looked like a bunch of kindergartners’ paintings and strange coathooks you could put an eye out on if you weren’t careful. It swarmed all over the walls of the dining room and into the pass; he figured it would invade the kitchen unless he guarded against it. But he knew he had to choose his battles at the Top Spot. He was one of only three or four black executive chefs of fine-dining restaurants in the city, the youngest of the bunch at thirty-three, and Eileen never hesitated to remind him of that fact when he expressed any frustration. “You were a line cook when I discovered you,” she liked to say, “and you could be a line cook again, so just remember who butters your cornbread, Milford.” He hadn’t been simply a line cook at Reilly’s, the hotel restaurant that had previously employed him; he’d been lead PM cook in charge of a crew of thirty. But there was no point telling that to Eileen. She already knew it. She just had a gift for revising history to suit her purposes. After the more-art-per-square-inch argument, the feuds came thick and fast between them, but somehow they forged a working relationship anyway. Milford liked the money Eileen paid him and the creative control he had over the food. Eileen liked Milford’s cooking, and even more than that, she liked bragging about him to her rich Uptown customers. “Where ever did you find him, Eileen?” “Oh, I rescued him from an awful turn-and-burn place on Canal Street. No one had ever heard of him, of course, but really I think that’s ideal, because we can create a reputation together …” And thanks to his talent and Eileen’s ability to generate publicity, people began to hear about the Top Spot. The Times-Picayune gave it a four-bean review. Gourmet included it in a roundup of New Orleans restaurants serving Creole food with a dash of originality—but no more than a dash—the template that the rest of the country expected from the city they loved to call the Big Easy, though locals never did. The restaurant drew a fashionably mixed crowd: the black political elite Eileen knew from her days as a civil rights worker; the artists whose daubings and coathooks hung on the walls; Carnival royalty from the Garden District. Milford wasn’t famous yet, nowhere near the level of a Paul Prudhomme or a Lenny Duveteaux, but he was considered a Promising Young Chef, one to watch. On his last night at the Top Spot, Milford made dinner specials of crawfish Clemenceau, pork tenderloin with oyster dressing, and whole roasted red snapper. It wasn’t a very busy dinner shift, and after they shut down, he decided to give the kitchen a thorough cleaning. The dishwashers helped him take up the rubber mats, mop the floors, wipe down the glass doors of the coolers, and scrub all the surfaces. When the job was done, he bought a round of drinks for the crew and sent them on their way. He was standing in the kitchen enjoying the unusual spotlessness when Eileen came in, glanced around, and said, “I thought you said you were really going to clean things up tonight.” Milford knew she hadn’t had a good evening. Eileen liked to think of herself as a hands-on hostess, personally booking all the reservations and greeting the customers at the door. Of course that meant when there was a problem, she took the brunt of it. Tonight a party of ten’s reservation had disappeared; either they thought they’d called but hadn’t, or Eileen had forgotten to write it down. She found them a table anyway, but they had to wait in the bar for a while, growing increasingly restive, refusing her offer of free cocktails; they were from Utah and didn’t drink. A thing like that could make Eileen mighty tense, and when Eileen was mighty tense, you wanted to stay out of her way as much as possible. So Milford just said, “It looks pretty clean to me.” “Are you serious? Are you?” She strode across the floor, nearly tripping over the mop bucket he still needed to empty. “Milford, when I say clean, I mean clean. Look at all this crud underneath the cooler. Just look at it! Come here!” Cautiously, Milford bent over and peered under the cooler. The cement floor was stained and discolored, but he didn’t see anything that qualified as crud. “Where, Eileen?” “There, around the legs. Look how it’s all caked up.” She poked at the short metal legs supporting the old-fashioned cooler. “There must be half an inch of dirt around them—it’s disgusting! I want you to touch that! Put your finger in it!” With one large forefinger, Milford scratched at the floor around the cooler leg. “It’s just stains. You don’t wanna see it, maybe we should get one of them nice new coolers sits flush with the floor. Bet you’d save on the light bill.” At once he knew he’d said the wrong thing. When Eileen was in one of her moods, you didn’t suggest that she drop a big chunk of change on something, even if it would save her money in the long run. “Oh, that’s your answer for every problem in this restaurant, isn’t it, Milford? Tell Eileen to throw money at it! Eileen’s wealthy, isn’t that right? Eileen’s just holding out on you because she’s such a mean b***h! Everything would go better around here if Eileen would just loosen up the purse strings! Well, let me tell you something. I know you grew up poor, you don’t have any understanding of how these things work, but that’s not how you run a business, Milford. If I spent money on every little thing you ask me to …” She was off. Milford leaned back against the steel countertop and listened to her rant, trying to let the words roll over him without registering in his brain. If he listened to her, he’d get mad, and if he got mad, they’d end up hollering at each other again. There had been too much of that lately. He knew the waiters were gossiping about it, saying he was going to quit or Eileen was going to fire him every time they had a blowup. Eventually, one thing or the other would probably happen. He wasn’t going to let it happen tonight, though. He’d just gotten his paycheck, tomorrow was his day off, he was in a good mood, and he was going to go have a drink somewhere—not the Top Spot—and then go home and get some sleep. “Eileen?” he said when she paused for breath. “What?” “Good night.” He picked up his knife roll and walked out of the kitchen. She could empty the damn mop bucket herself, or the sous chef could do it when he came in tomorrow morning. * Eileen stood in the dining room trying to calm herself down. Everyone else had left the restaurant, and she would lock up and go home as soon as she felt capable of driving. Right now her hands were shaking and angry tears still stung her eyes. She knew she was going to lose Milford if she kept blowing up at him. He’d be incredibly foolish to quit; this job was an opportunity of the sort he’d never be likely to see again, but he was a man, and men did all sorts of foolish things if you abused their fragile egos. Never capable of apologies, Eileen decided she would do what she always did when she was afraid she’d pushed Milford too far: put a twenty-dollar bonus in his next pay envelope. She firmly believed that, if given the choice, most chefs would prefer money over respect. Behind her, a steel sculpture of a tree covered with dozens of sheet-metal “leaves” jangled softly. It always did that when somebody opened the front door. She turned, expecting to see Milford; perhaps this time he thought he’d pushed her too far. But it wasn’t Milford. A shiver of fear touched her heart. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you. Listen, I told you not to come here anymore.” * An hour after he left the Top Spot, Milford was sitting in Audubon Park watching the moonlight play on the dark waters of the lagoon. He could hear the traffic on St. Charles, and now and then a night bird would call out, but otherwise the park was peaceful. Not up for the noise and smoke of a bar, he’d stopped at a Time Saver, bought a couple of Miller High Lifes, and come out here to drink them. They had gone down smooth, and he felt better. He’d just run by the bank machine and deposit his check before heading home. He reached into the pocket of his hounds-tooth check pants, feeling for the pay envelope, and came up empty. “Aw, s**t!” Now he remembered: Eileen had handed him the envelope when he was in the middle of sautéing the brabant potatoes for the crawfish Clemenceau, and instead of putting it in his pocket or his knife roll, he’d absentmindedly stuck it on the shelf above his workstation. He thought about just getting it tomorrow, but his rent was due and he really needed to make the deposit tonight. He hoped Eileen had already left: he’d just let himself in with his key and grab the check. Irritated with himself but not really upset thanks to the beer, Milford drove back to the restaurant, parked, and walked up to the front door. A light was still on inside, and the door swung open at his touch. s**t. Well, he’d just tell Eileen he was sorry if he’d made her mad; he felt mellow enough not to care. He didn’t see her in the dining room. Hell, maybe she was in her upstairs office and he could get in and out without having to see her at all. She didn’t usually leave the door unlocked when she was alone up there, though. His basic decency overrode his desire to avoid her, and he called out, “Eileen?” Nothing. “Eileen?” Behind him, he heard something dripping. He turned and saw a dark droplet fall from one of the sharp metal branches of the tree sculpture into a spreading puddle on the floor. “Eileen!” He turned the corner of the bar and there she was. A painting of magnolias more colorful than any found in nature had been smashed across her back. A ceramic plaque shaped like a human ear lay shattered near her face—no, partly in her face. And he could see that other, even more terrible things had been done to her. A small, stealthy sound came from the direction of the kitchen. Milford burst through the swinging doors just in time to see a familiar figure disappearing through the rear exit. That was when he knew his situation was hopeless. Nevertheless, he ran back to Eileen. Before he could even lift her wrist to see if a pulse still beat there, red and blue light splashed through the glass door and bathed the dining room in its unearthly glow. “YO, BUDDY, WE SEE YOU IN THERE,” said an amplified voice. “PUT YOUR HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD AND GET YOUR ASS OUT HERE RIGHT NOW.”