Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [168]
Tony may be out most of the fifty thousand dollars he initially invested, but because of Ruth’s eleventh-hour rescue, he was able to save the rest of his sabbatical fund.
It was too late to save Grappa. The restaurant was so heavily mortgaged that when the scheme collapsed, a trustee was appointed to oversee the orderly shutdown of the restaurant. After Grappa folded, Tony went to Italy to cook for a year. He took Grappa’s loss hard. We both did. As for Jake, I have spoken to him only once. I called him after I heard about Grappa’s closing. Virtually all of his funds were invested with AEL, and he lost everything. I have no idea if he and Nicola will remain together, although I somehow doubt she’s the type to stick around after the money has run out. Jake now has no choice but to look for a job in someone else’s kitchen. He’ll find one—a talented chef always can find a place to cook. Before we hung up, he offered me his recipe for cassoulet. “I’ll write it down and send it to you,” he said. “I’d like to think of you enjoying it, Mira.”
True to her word, in the weeks that followed Enid didn’t bring up the restaurant again. Not once. Until yesterday.
After I e-mailed my latest column to her, she called me to follow up on the changes and to discuss the Thanksgiving spread. “It’s only a month away,” she said. “Here’s what I’m thinking. Each of the four remaining weeks we choose one dish, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, and focus on it. Teach the method and give a bunch of different interpretations. What do you think?”
“Great,” I said. “I’m on it.”
Then she asked me if I’ve given the restaurant idea any more thought. When I told her I was still thinking about it, she said only this: “Okay. Fair enough. I won’t mention it again; I promise.” This has been bothering me. I can’t stand the feeling that my own inertia could cause this idea to wither and die, yet I’m having a hard time mustering the energy to do anything about it.
Lately, I’ve found myself remembering Grappa’s early days, the most difficult parts: the huge start-up costs; the losses most restaurants experience the first year—if they even survive the first year; dealing with banks and financial types—which I hated; the hiring and rehiring of cooks and notoriously unreliable dishwashers; finding a decent laundry service.
It isn’t that I’m suffering from a dearth of ideas—I’ve got plenty of those, from breakfast joint to tapas bar, from sandwich shop to enoteca, each of which I approach with an all-consuming intensity, rather like a case of twenty-four-hour flu. Then, when the fever has run its course, I discard the idea as being too much like Grappa—or not enough.
“Listen to this,” Richard calls out to me from the living room, where he is poring over What to Expect: The Toddler Years. “It says what she’s doing is completely normal.”
I’ve just attempted to give Chloe pasta with peas and a nut-free pesto, which she’s eaten before and liked, but which tonight made her wipe her tongue with her bib and gag. Tired of her crying, I gave up, boiled her some plain noodles, and served them with a boring tomato butter sauce.
“Kids’ palates are sensitive, and most kids go through a picky phase around the age of two,” he reads. “So our Chloe is precocious, just as we’ve always suspected,” Richard says proudly. In the months he’s been living here, I’ve been surprised to discover that Richard has a real paternal streak. As his recuperation has progressed,