See, this was why a lot of the married guys preferred to be downrange. On the job, they were used to being the baddest shits on the planet, taking names and kicking ass, the best of the best of the best…and then they got home, and they turned into these big, useless lugs. None of their skills fit, and their wives were giving them sad, woeful looks because they’d forgotten the anniversary of the day they first kissed or something.
On the thought, Chase pulled out his phone and put the previous day’s date in his calendar to pop up as an annual reminder. Yeah, that was one mistake he wasn’t going to make.
He searched “Violette Lenoir” on his phone and winced at the titles that now filled the first five pages. He paged forward, finding older articles and blog posts about her as the chef of Au-dessus. Some critics hated her, but others loved her, and one thing her food did was make people talk. The energy in it, the sense of passion, the way it evoked the city and the life of her quarter.
The web showed images of dishes where the artistic dots and squiggles and lines of sauces on a plate he associated with fancy restaurants had been taken to a whole new level. Instead of fine lines so elegant that it seemed as if looking at the food would make it faint, she had plates where color splashed across them with the drama of a young, rebel artist flinging paint. She had plates that spoke of graffiti and rebel theater and the artists’ workshops that filled her corner of Paris. A plate called “Belleville”, which evoked, apparently—he checked the blog post explanation—the funky glass studios in that area, with blown sugar for the glass. Oh, that one had come from Lina Farah, her pastry chef. The one with the suspicious cousin.
He found a three-minute video of the kitchen in full swing and watched it with some fascination. The reflexes and precision, the way those knives moved across a cutting board or sliced through a fish, the constant intense physical action. Interesting the careers people chose. A lot of these guys would probably have made good soldiers, maybe even elite ones like him if they tried, but they’d focused on feeding people instead. That worked, he guessed. They were both important jobs for keeping people alive.
And damn but Vi was hot, running that kitchen. The way she moved, the way she cared about every single thing that happened, the way she took control, with confidence and authority and no hesitation to make demands. That three-minute video clip was way too short.
More photos. There were dishes that used honey from the rooftop beehives and rosemary gardens Vi and a couple of other chefs had set up in a cooperative above their street. Dishes that honored a director friend’s ambitious, indie theater project with its dramatic, slashing style. Dishes that made him think of leather and studded boots and maybe a piercing in an unexpected place, of tattoos, of laughter and impractical ambitions and funky art.
In her hands, food wasn’t elegant and refined and as fragile as fine china. It was glorious, the source of life, abundant, rebellious. It was in love with her part of the city, with the people in it, and it was something you could sink your teeth into. Exactly the opposite of what every other three-star restaurant was doing.
And people loved it, or hated it, and said she should lose the stars she had, or said they hoped she would get her third star, that the culinary establishment had gone down the wrong path with their elegant wisps of food a long time ago, and it was time for a new generation, time for Vi Lenoir.
Or that was what they had been saying.
Now, of course…he arrowed back to the first pages of the search results. Now all they could talk about was catastrophe. “Is this the end for Vi Lenoir?” “Can Au-dessus survive?” And those were the formally written pieces. Unfortunately, Twitter was one of the first search results, and it was full of sniping, constant 140-character chatter, of ugliness and misogyny but also of people who were furious about that misogyny: “It could come from the spinach leaves! Why are you blaming the chef? #becauseshesawoman”.
He bent his head and rubbed his shoulder. Fuck.
After a wait that shouldn’t have seemed long to a guy who had been through sniper training but which somehow lasted ages, Vi finally came out with a black splint that immobilized all but the thumb and index finger of her right hand. Chase leapt up, coming to her.
“Broken, then?” He tried to reach for her forearm, so he could lift her hand up for a better look, but she jerked away and cold-shouldered him.
He cursed. “I should have ducked.”
She spun on him. “You know what you should have done? You should have not played the cocky shit who can have anyone and anything he wants, when all that time, you were planning something that would ruin my career. You’re no better than Quentin.”
He stopped stock still. Quentin…the guy who had tried to rape her? The guy who had assaulted her in her own walk-in, so that she had to bring a case of milk bottles down on his head? Kicking his ass so bad he never even looked at another woman again without flinching in fear had been next on Chase’s to-do list.
“I was not planning anything that would ruin your career,” he said between his teeth. “You were secondary.”