Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [6]
Within months of our opening, Gourmet did a piece on “Up and Coming” restaurants in New York, and Grappa was featured. It was a lucky accident they chose us, the kind of break that can make or destroy you in this town. The rave review on our food, however, we earned. The day after the magazine hit the stands, we had a line coming out the door at lunchtime. By the weekend, we were booked solid, two weeks in advance. We made money hand over fist, enough that by the end of our first year in business we were able to buy the first floor space above, enhance the kitchen, and expand the restaurant by eleven tables.
During those early years we weathered the storms common to all fledgling restaurants, particularly those in Manhattan. At the same time we engineered and oversaw a second comprehensive renovation. Jake and I lived, ate, and breathed Grappa. We had fully intended to start a family once Grappa had opened successfully, but we had to put those plans on hold, a decision not without a certain element of risk, given the fact I was already thirty-five and Jake was forty. Instead, we made Grappa our baby, its staff our family.
On my thirty-seventh birthday I bullied Jake into agreeing it was time to try for a baby, citing as evidence a now infamous article, published in the Sunday Magazine section and responsible for I don’t even want to think about how many ambivalent conceptions, by scores of career women in their thirties, whose biological windows were much narrower than previously believed. Jake, rather reluctantly, agreed. In retrospect, he probably was secretly heartened by the news that perhaps my biological window was already closed.
Of course, I became pregnant almost instantly.
Chloe is sleeping when I get home from anger-management class. Hope, the sitter and our downstairs neighbor, tells me Chloe didn’t fall asleep until after three, so not to worry if she sleeps a while longer.
I take out Chloe’s dinner: veal mousse with shitake puree, creamed spinach, and, in order to balance the colors and textures, souffléed butternut squash. All homemade, frozen in the tiny compartments of blue plastic ice cube trays. Before Chloe was born, Jake and I agreed our child would have a sophisticated palate. No Happy Meals, no macaroni and cheese, and—God forbid—no chicken fingers. I make her food myself, at night sometimes when I can’t sleep, as if being able to offer Chloe the pureed version of the best I can cook will somehow make up for what I fear will be all my other shortcomings as a mother.
Already at seven months Chloe has shown herself to be an adventurous eater. There’s nothing she doesn’t like. Jake, of course, has no idea. In the three months since he moved out, he’s hardly seen her. He probably doesn’t even know she’s eating solid foods. And because he’s never asked, I’ve never told him.
The few conversations we’ve had in the last three months have been about work: practical aspects of the changing of the guard from lunch to dinner, decisions about the seasonal menu changes at the restaurant, how the last shipment of baby artichokes was uncharacteristically bitter, and which one of us should be responsible for calling the supplier.
Before Chloe was born we agreed Jake would supervise dinner at the restaurant, while I would take lunch a couple days a week, just to keep my hand in, until Chloe was a little older. Since the separation, however, and my forced compliance with the terms of the Order of Protection that prohibits me from coming within two hundred