THE SHALLOWS

Chapter 12: The Cold One

r/BellhavenEats

u/lightfeather_again · OP

Three names.

It is eight o'clock and I said eight o'clock, so here they are.

u/fish_is_brain_food

uound_enough

uookie_with_a_router

Both bowls, whichever order you want, on whichever day you want. Then you come back to this post and say which one was better, in your own words, with your own name under it. If it's the Grand's, say the Grand's. I'll still be here.

I said a glass and it was a mixing bowl. My glass broke in the sink last week and I wasn't going to drive to the store so that the internet could trust me. The picture is in the first comment: three slips, one bowl, and my hand in the frame, so you can see whose hand it is.

Nobody paid me. Nobody paid them. Neither restaurant knows this thread exists.

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u/five_and_dime

the picture is sideways. I can read one name and it isn't mine.

uound_enough

That's me, middle slip. I have never won anything in my life. Not a fifty-fifty at a hockey game, not a meat raffle, not a coin toss at a bar.

u/fish_is_brain_food

first slip is mine. I yelled on the bus. the man next to me moved to another seat, which I think was fair of him.

u/harborlight_amy

I entered this. Congratulations to all three of you. I hate all three of you.

uookie_with_a_router

Fine. Tomorrow, lunch.

u/saltflat

anyone notice who isn't in this thread. countergrain spent two days telling everybody the first post was an ad and reporting it, and now he has nothing to say. funny.

u/oldwharf_bh

he's a woodworker. he's out in the garage measuring something.

u/market_street_j

nine hundred and twenty-four dollars out of one woman's checking account so that three strangers can compare two rice bowls. four years on this sub and this is the best week it has ever had.

ueasonable_ray

Not a lawyer. Still not a lawyer. She drew it out of a bowl, on camera, and the hand in the picture is hers, and that's the whole fairness argument and it holds. The mod said one thread, so all three reviews go in this one.

u/BellhavenEats_Mod · mod

Rule 4 was satisfied by modmail before this went up. All three winners review in this thread. If there are three new posts about two rice bowls tomorrow, all three come down and nobody gets a note.

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By nine Quinn had the day's numbers on the back of a receipt: nineteen bowls on Wednesday, twenty-six on Friday, forty portions of eel in the walk-in. Forty had looked like a lot of eel at eleven o'clock the night before, standing in the cold of the walk-in with a flashlight in her teeth.

At ten past nine the back door opened and her mother came in with her sleeves already rolled and her keys already out of her bag. She went past Quinn without a word, opened the walk-in, and came back with both trays stacked against her arm.

"I'm doing the eel," Quinn said.

"You're doing the door."

Diane set the trays on the steel table and started laying the fillets out flat on towels, one hand flat on each piece, pressing the water out of it. It took the morning and half your lower back, and nobody had asked her to do it.

"I can do the eel."

"Then do it tomorrow."

Quinn stood there with the rest of it — it had been Erin's station, Erin's towels, every morning — and said none of it, and put her fist out over the tray instead. Diane looked at the fist the way she looked at the electric bill, wiped her hands on her apron, knocked her knuckles against it once, and went back to the fish.

By noon the room was full and half the room was new. The front two tables she could have written the tickets for from the doorway, and behind them it was all faces she'd never served, in town clothes, on a hot Saturday, with their phones out.

At table four a woman had her phone face up on the table and was reading it out loud to her friend. "It says down on the water. With a board by the door."

"That's here," her friend said.

The woman looked up. "Is this the place from the internet?"

Quinn put two menus down. "It's the place with the board."

"People are saying it's better than the Grand's."

"I don't know what the Grand's tastes like."

"So you're saying it is."

"I'm saying I don't know." Quinn took the pencil from behind her ear. "What can I get you."

At the door a woman in a sun hat asked her something about a post and Quinn said, "Sit anywhere," and kept moving.

At one o'clock there were five parties on the pad and nowhere to put them, and she kept writing them down. By two the front case was empty but for the water in the bottom of it. The cups were gone, all of them, and she took the card for them out of the clip on the case and turned it face down on the shelf behind the register, and a woman who had been standing outside for ten minutes for two cups took an iced tea instead and did not look happy about it.

There was still eel, though. The eel was the reason they were all coming, so she kept seating them, and that was the whole decision, made eleven times between one o'clock and six.

At table two a girl held her phone sideways and filmed her eel from the side and said, into the phone, "Okay. So this is the one that's twenty-eight dollars." Quinn heard it twice. Twenty-eight dollars, twenty-eight dollars, into a phone, and it was the same number she'd chalked on the board herself that morning.

The man at the window took a picture of his bowl before he ate it and another one after the first bite, and then he typed for a while with his chopsticks laid down on the napkin.

She thought about asking one of them what they were all looking at. Then the rice came up and she didn't, and after that she forgot to.

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u/five_and_dime

it's almost two. none of the three has said a word. are you all dead

uound_enough

No. We're eating. The Grand at one.

uookie_with_a_router

I'm here. Waiting on the check.

uound_enough

The Grand's eel comes in a lacquered box on a tray, with a lid and a hot towel, and the fish is soft and sweet and there is a lot of sauce. I want to be honest with everybody: it is the best eel I have ever eaten, and I have a normal job and I have eaten eel in four states, and I sat there and looked for the trick and couldn't find one. I do not see how a $28 bowl gets in the same conversation. I'm not being sarcastic.

u/fish_is_brain_food

same table, same opinion. I ordered a second one to be sure. also if you go to the Grand, don't wear a jacket, it's like sixty-two degrees in there.

uookie_with_a_router

The Grand's is the best bowl in this city and it isn't close. I've had it before and I'll have it again. Somebody is going to have to show me how a $28 bowl from the place down on the water gets into the argument.

u/two_bags_of_ice

OP is somewhere doing dishes right now. it's over, OP.

u/peel_and_eat

OP in shambles.

u/lightfeather_again · OP

They haven't eaten the second one yet. Wait until tonight.

u/peel_and_eat

she's calm. why is she calm.

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uound_enough

Okay. I have to take something back and I would rather do it in one piece than in four edits.

I sat in the Grand's dining room at one o'clock and I told all of you that a $28 bowl could not get into the conversation. It was true when I said it. I ate at the Shallows at four and now it isn't true.

The eel there is cooked closer — the edges go darker and the middle is still soft. The rice tastes like rice. And the sauce is doing something the Grand's sauce isn't doing. I don't have better words for it than that and I'm not going to pretend I do. I finished the bowl and I did not order a second one, because I did not want to be the guy who ordered a second one.

I was wrong in this thread in front of everybody. I would rather be wrong out loud than keep it up.

u/fish_is_brain_food

no. nope. I take it back. twenty-eight dollars. I'm sitting in my car with the box on the passenger seat and I am not okay.

uookie_with_a_router

I was wrong, and I'm writing it in the same thread I wrote the other thing in.

The Grand's is not the best bowl in this city. I ate at the Shallows at seven and I'm typing this with the check still on the table. The eel is firmer, the rice is cleaner, and the sauce has something behind it that the Grand's doesn't have. I called the first post an ad. I'm not calling it anything now.

u/two_bags_of_ice

all three of them. in one afternoon. sure.

u/peel_and_eat

OP was calm for six hours. OP knew.

u/saltflat

hold on. let's do a little arithmetic on this one, since nobody else will. rookie_with_a_router has been on this sub five days. eleven comments. nine of them are about router bits, one of them is about a table saw sled. this morning he was very sure the first post was an ad. this afternoon he is very sure about eel. I am just reading the numbers out loud.

u/oldwharf_bh

he's a woodworker. he's out in the garage measuring something.

u/harborlight_amy

I went in at lunch. I asked the woman at the door about this post and she said "Sit anywhere." I have been thinking about that all afternoon and I think it was the whole answer.

u/market_street_j

$924, and the $28 bowl took it. four years on this sub.

ueasonable_ray

All three reviews are in the thread. That was the one thing that was asked. Whoever the fifth account belongs to, I'm not the moderator and I'm not doing that math. Somebody is going to have to eat two bowls of eel to settle it and it isn't going to be me.

u/lightfeather_again · OP

I said what I said. Three more of you have said it now. Go eat the thing.

u/BellhavenEats_Mod · mod

Three reviews, one thread. That was the deal.

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Diane was at the pass with her hands flat on the steel.

"What was that," she said.

"Saturday."

"That's not customers." Diane watched the room. "That's somebody saying something. Somebody says something and the room fills up. Then somebody else says something."

"They ate everything."

"They ate everything today."

She wiped the pass with the rag and went back to the fish. Her mother had the eel in a row on the grill, six at a time, glaze, wait, glaze, until the edges went dark and shiny, and every time Quinn came to the pass with a slip there were two of them already waiting under the heat lamp.

At six the pad filled again and nobody in it asked her anything.

At twenty to eight she took the last slip off the wheel, and it was the last of the forty — a man in a canvas jacket who ate standing at the counter because every table was taken, and who took a picture of the bowl before he touched it.

She locked the door at twenty past nine and stood at the register with the night's slips in one hand, because she did the count every night before she went home, and tonight the stack was too thick to hold comfortably.

Forty bowls of eel. Sixty-one cups. The stew gone, the rest of the board gone, the day bigger than the last three put together.

On the order pad she wrote EEL, DOUBLE IT and sent it to Moreau, who would answer in the morning or not, and she wiped down the pass one more time because she didn't want to look at the room.

She got home at ten past ten. Toby was on the couch in his pajamas with his feet up on the arm of it and a bowl of grapes on the floor and the television on a cartoon that was mostly noise. Somebody had fed him. By the look of the sink, more than one somebody. Whoever it was had left the light on over the stove, so she left it on too.

"You're up."

"I'm not tired." He said it with his eyes half shut, sitting up and blinking at the television like it had insulted him.

He came over the arm of the couch and got behind her without being asked, which was his whole way of asking.

"Tell me if I hurt you."

"You won't hurt me."

She sat forward with her elbows on her knees and let him work. His hands were small and warm and went at one spot, the same spot, over and over, at the top of her back where the smoke and the trays lived, and it was better than anything she would have bought.

"How was your day," he said, in the voice he used for adults.

"Busy. How was yours."

"Good." And then, a while later, "I'm the best at massages."

"You are."

The pressure went out of his hands all at once. They stopped moving and lay flat on her shoulder blades.

"Toby."

"Mm."

"Tomorrow. What do you want tomorrow. Anything out of the water."

He said something into the back of her shirt and she didn't catch it and asked again, and he turned his face out and breathed on her neck and said, "The cold one."

"The cold one."

"In the passion fruit." He got an arm over her shoulder and leaned his weight there. "In the glass. With the shrimp. I saw it on my video."

She sat with that. Chilled seafood in passion fruit marinade. There were limes in the walk-in and she'd seen the clips herself, a dozen of them, cut fruit and ice water and cold shrimp going into a bowl on somebody's counter, filmed from above, sixty seconds, and it wasn't on the board, and there was no reason on earth it couldn't be.

"Okay," she said. "Passion fruit."

He was asleep before she finished the word, breathing on her neck, and she carried him down the hall with his head on her shoulder and put him in his bed and pulled the blanket up and folded his arms over the top of it. Erin had always done that, for the reason she always gave, which was that he would kick it off anyway.

His hand came out before she made the door. She put it back under. It came out again. She left it.

In the kitchen she took the notebook off the shelf and wrote on the next clean line under the other four, Chilled Seafood, Passion Fruit, and put the notebook back where it lived, between the phone books, and turned off the light over the stove.

On her way past his room she looked in. The hand was out on top of the blanket again, curled, about the size of a plum, and it stayed that way.