Hatched (30 page)

Renaissance egg dishes were often fried or stuffed or both. Amongst the relatively slim pickings from this corpus was a wonderful recipe that was almost always a hit with discerning clients, and that emerged from a cookbook of one Martino of Como. Jessica was working on one such order for an early client, as Boris observed not her technique, but the curvature of her hips and breasts. The recipe demanded that she remove the yolk from an
Ameracauna
hen egg, fry it until slightly bulbous, and then recombine it with grated cheese, mint, parsley, raisin, and more egg yolks. She then delicately replaced in the hole left by the amputated yolk, refried, and finally topped it off with ginger and orange juice.

The resulting dish looked the part of a fried and slightly garnished egg, and so was all the more enticing to the dough-dolling guest who would discover a surprise where least expected, in the humble yolk of the normal-looking egg. The only problem with this dish, of course, which again explained the presence of the pinch-hitting boor Boris, was that virtually nothing about this recipe could be done in advance, and so when a table of twelve decided to begin there, and then, say, follow-up with a baked, stuffed lobster—stuffed of course with a panoply of roe, each set off in its own garnish. Fabergé Restaurant needed manpower, and manpower, well, that was Boris.

Jessica delicately poured the fresh orange juice onto the little, eggy masterpiece, and Nate, pausing from his travail, and bathing in his own silent sense of accomplishment, participated vicariously in her creation. Nate, after all, had squeezed each orange by hand, according to John’s insistence—over all logic—that mechanically squeezed juices “taste different.” And so through those oranges Nate’s very touch joined Jessica’s, in some far-away place they both called cookery. The resulting ‘tricky egg,’ as they referred to it, had been fondled, manipulated, merged, and warmed, whereas the eggs on that fateful day in the walk-in had been crushed, shattered, obliterated, and demolished beyond recognition or repair.

I watched as Jessica handed to Amy-the-Server this work of Renaissance art, one of several dozen pieces that she would put out that evening. It wasn’t evident, perhaps, but deep within herself she smiled in satisfaction and maybe even relief. If that yolk had lost its integrity at any point subsequent to it having been mixed with the other ingredients, she’d have had to start again, a fatal blow in light of her internal timing that had known to coincide the final warming with the birth of Johnny’s little modified frittata. She looked over to Johnny, and they locked eyes with the satisfaction of coming out together, crucial in all matters egg related, as those concerned with fertilization, or thoughts thereof, can feel in the very depths of their respective inner selves.

Chapter 26

It was no wonder that the pace in the Yolk was picking up, for the bustle in the dining room was of unusual proportions, particularly by the standards of the usually steady, but seldom-raucous Saturday night Fabergé Restaurant.

Fabergé Restaurant was specifically designed for gentle flows of clientele, and not for undue barrages that would upset the fragility of the enterprise, just as the Fabergé egg was not created to sustain the prying hands of ungraceful children, or appreciated by undiscerning pirates. Lots of evidence exists for the resistance of Peter Carl Fabergé’s masterpieces to the sophistic and insensitive, but not more compelling than the story of a dealer in a Midwestern flea market who got fleeced, paying the exorbitant price $14,000 for a gold trinket that, once melted down, would only yield $500. Unwilling to take such a loss, he simply held onto his little 3.5 inch egg, leaving it to rest on its little but elaborate gold pedestal, supported by lion paw feet.

With a more critical eye, he may have realized that the egg featured three sapphires embedded in the gold, as well as a center diamond that, when gently pushed, would crack open the golden trinket to reveal a Vacheron Constantin watch. It was only in handling it, rather roughly, that he managed to trigger the masterpiece into revealing its precious cargo. Still oblivious to its importance, or to the meaning of “Vacheron Constantin” that was so carefully affixed upon the watch’s face, he turned in desperation to Google into which he typed “egg” and the name on the watch. What flickered onto his screen was the catalogue from a 1964 sale in New York that featured, as it turned out, a rare relic from Russia’s royal family, a gift from Czar Alexander III to his wife Maria Fedorovna in 1887.

The junk dealer’s golden trinket was Peter Carl Fabergé’s “Third Imperial Egg,” and had it been a little more valuable for its raw materials, it would have landed up as a tiny bar of jewel—encrusted gold. As it turned out, though, the $500 value saved a $33 million Easter gift from Czar Alexander III to his wife, Maria Fedorovna, in 1887. Twenty years later, when Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, the egg disappeared. That it resurfaced at an American flea market and was purchased by a dealer in junk and scrap is emblematic of this era of vapid consumerism and rabid soul-obliterating capitalism. The authentic owners of such trinkets have been czars and, in the case of Fabergé eggs, Queen Elizabeth, the Kremlin, the billionaire metals tycoon Viktor Vekselberg, and the Forbes family. But stories like these bring solace to the helpless, like lottery tickets purchased in lieu of baby formula, allowing the poor and destitute a chance in a billion to become rich, and a billion chances to one of remaining poor until their dying day.

To protect their luster from howling crowds likely to melt them down for their weight, therefore, Fabergé eggs have been hidden behind great walls surrounding uncouth secrets, and stored in appropriately serene and unruffled settings, well-suited to their delicate and precious natures. But the restaurant that bore the Fabergé name knew no such respite from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, only the gentle gate keeping of Tina, who provided generous curtains around reservations to assure that nobody could peer into the culinary experiences that John, even withdrawn from creation, had devised.

It wasn’t that Tina wasn’t on task this fateful evening, and if anything, she seemed even more aware of lurking dangers of untold sorts that threatened to bring Humpty Dumpty to a plunging end. But circumstances that evening were conspiring against her, and an array of walk-in guests, akin to junk dealers in a Midwestern flea market, had upset her delicate machinations. Even amongst those with reservations, there were arrivals that had been expected in pairs but had arrived as trios, and there were two large groups that contained within them that great city’s royalty, including in a party of eight and even the mayor himself, who for some reason believed with the certainty of past experiences that wherever he went he would be luxuriously accommodated, often in exchange for some invisible favors to be rendered in some future time.

It was in fact during the seating of the mayor’s regal party that disaster struck for the first time that night.

The restaurant was by then approaching capacity, and everyone, including the guests themselves, were participating in the carefully choreographed dance of serving, and being served. All of the servers were engaged in the complex task of transforming themselves, chameleon-like, from gentle seductresses in the dining room who were available to satisfy any whim or bizarre request, to efficient prep-chef-style workers in the Yolk. Against the racket of the industrial fans, these beautiful bearers of Fabergé masterpieces adorned with silken panties and embroidered lace bras became proletariats on the assembly line of bread baskets, condiments, and decorative hard-boiled egg carvings that were created to provide clients with a sense of the gravitas appropriate to the ritual with which they were to be engaged.

It was in the domain of condiments and decoration that the servers had a small degree of leeway, and it was clear that there were profits to be made from taking those extra moments to make the plates more beautiful. But it was a delicate balance, between the time when the plate emerged from the flames of the oven, and when it should appear before the client, so time spent on decorating the plates was akin to a formula 1 pit stop, in which excess is measured in seconds. John’s story about this transitional moment, that horrific tale of laxatives and death, was well-known to all of the servers, and it somehow marked this decorative moment, betwixt and between oven and table, and added to the air of frenzied calm that tended to prevail, mid-shift.

Elizabeth and Amy were both in the kitchen, preparing their guests’ plates for the reception of the eggy masterpieces, under construction by Jessica, Nate, and Johnny, laboring like medieval craftsmen, as the real craftsman, John-the-Owner, was carefully sterilizing each plate as though it were an incubator to the creation of Fabergé eggs. Amidst the roar of the vents, there was an air of intensity, almost calm. The predictable then occurred: as the first round of appetizers was now consumed by a number of early arriving parties, parties who by their early arrival demonstrated a low level of culinary sophistication, a new plethora of main courses were ordered, more than half of which were lobsters, to be either steamed or baked. Boris was about to take his place in the Fabergé mechanism, and he stood like a crude executioner or pathologist on the verge of a hurried autopsy.

Somewhat unfamiliar with the layout of the kitchen, the result of his only being called in on nights destined to be terribly busy at Fabergé Restaurant, Boris was somewhat ill prepared for the first onslaught. With the first announcement from Lori-the-Server that she was in need of six roe-stuffed lobsters, he turned, rather dramatically, towards the basin of live lobsters, and, without so much as looking down into the depths of the basin, he plunged his hand downward to grab the evening’s first willing victim.

The victim, as it turned out, was not willing, and its IQ exceeded, at least for that moment, that of Boris, who was running on instinct rather than planning, on speed rather than sanity, on habit rather than awareness.

The lobster, rather than offering its hind half, shored up and displayed its great right claw and then, in a movement rather more dexterous than Boris’s, his left. Unbound by the colored elastics that are made to prevent such eventualities, it seized Boris’s hand in two places, biting the very hand that had snipped its elastic handcuffs earlier in the shift in imitation of Nate’s pre-Lobster Olympic ceremonies, an act as insane as Nate’s and similarly construed to impress Jessica.

Over the hush and the roar of the kitchen, Boris exuded a great roar, a roar so great, so powerful, so profound, that it was heard all the way to the prep table, and beyond, to the area around the walk-in, the condiment and decoration station, and further, to John’s Hobart station. Then, in a display of its mighty power, this roar audaciously headed for the swinging doors that, unguarded by those yelping dogs of hell in Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, let loose the sound, first between the frame and the doors and then, multiplied by vibration, right through the heavy wood.

The stage of humiliation, degradation, and destruction was now set. The eyes of Homer’s chorus, in this case the kitchen proletarians, all turned to Boris. Agamemnon, the warrior king upon Odysseus’s and Achilles’s battlefield, was played on this night by John, whose gaze pierced the steam and landed upon the figure of the bulking, towering, pinch-chef Boris. Terror filled the hearts of everyone witness to this drama, staged in the very Yolk of Fabergé Restaurant.

Not to be outdone by a spider of the sea, a creature fit for boiling and piling into heaps of corporal rubbish, Boris gave play to his mighty grip and gave free rein to untethered emotions of hatred and vexation. As the two claws dug bone-deep into his thumb and forefinger, Boris’s flesh was turned into a lobster-red fountain of blood and gore. Boris seized the lobster’s torso, and with the strength welled-up by pain, he ripped the lobster in half, dividing it between the tail section and the heavy shell.

Tina heard the primitive roar from the kitchen, and hastened towards the swinging doors that divide the dining room from the Yolk. Then, summoning surprising strength for someone so tiny and precious, she pushed open the great door of this Yolk turned Hell.

She was met by half of a lobster, in flight. The unexpected assault from an aerial crustacean caused her to duck so histrionically, that the perfect skirt upon her china-doll hips rose up, revealing the lacy pink of her thong, its soft, silken material perfectly situated between the cheeks of her perfect posterior. The audience in the dining room was thus treated to a vision of cultured perfection down below, and from above, the embodiment of a primeval pre-human, pre-Cambrian, pre-conscious world.

Boris, in the anger of vengeance, had heaved the decorticated lobster at the very moment when Tina had opened the door, giving it not the freedom of the sea, but, in its lower half, the gift of flight in lieu of the steamy death for which it was destined.

The lobster landed between tables six and seven, nary a few inches from the mayor’s newly shined, patent-leather shoes. Tina, who had fallen to her knees before the door to the Yolk, directed her hapless gaze over her shoulder and towards her dining room, and, oblivious to the vision she offered to those who were still fixated upon her elevated skirt, she remained immobile and in shock. Amongst those most intently fixated upon Tina was, of course, Jude, who unabashedly gawked with lascivious desire at Tina and the glory she revealed.

The impulse of chefs like Boris in times like these is to pick up the dropped or thrown or otherwise misplaced food item, cover it with cheese, broil it, and ensure that it’s served to the unwitting client post haste. Accordingly, he tore off the two claws that were still digging into his right hand, tossed them into the trash bin, grabbed a towel to wipe his blood-soaked hand, and marched with determination to the forbidden sanctuary where Fabergé Restaurant’s masterpieces are ingested (and paid for). His bulking, sweating, formidable self appeared before the hushed guests. He halted before them, and then stared downwards with hatred upon the carcass that lay slightly quivering upon the floor. He bent down, scooped it up, looked around the room, made a kind of inappropriate and final bow, and then hurriedly retreated back through those great, wooden doors that stood between his current employment and his future despair.