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There was no hanky-panky between them in the kitchen at Avellino -at their mutual insistence-though everyone on the staff (Loretta, of course, included) knew that Tony Angel and Celeste were a couple. The lady friends the cook had met at The Book Cellar had since moved on, or they were married now. The old joke Tony cracked to the bookseller was no longer acted upon; it was an i
It had been easier to meet women in Iowa, Tony Angel was remembering. Granted, he was older now, and Brattleboro was a very small town compared to Iowa City, where Da
Da
In ’74-the Year of the Tiger, Tony thought-Xiao Dee had convinced Spicy to ride along to Iowa City with them, all the way from Queens. Spicy was fortunately small, but it was still a tight squeeze in the truck’s cab, and somewhere in Indiana or Illinois, Spicy figured out that Xiao Dee had been seeing a woman in Bethpage-“that Nassau County cunt,” Spicy called her. The cook had listened to them argue the rest of the way.
Somehow, thinking of Iowa City and Mao’s had made Tony Angel consider that Avellino lacked ambition, but one of the things the cook loved about his Brattleboro restaurant was that it was relatively easy to run; real chefs, like Ah Gou Cheng and Tony Molinari and Paul Polcari, might find Avellino unambitious, but the cook (at fifty-nine) wasn’t trying to compete with them.
One sadness was that Tony Angel wouldn’t invite his old friends and mentors to come visit him in Vermont, and have a meal at Avellino. The cook felt that his Brattleboro restaurant was unworthy of these superior chefs, who’d taught him so much, though they probably would have been touched and flattered to have seen their obvious good influences on the menu at Avellino, and they surely would have supported the cook’s pride in having his very own restaurant, which-albeit only in Brattleboro-was a local success. Since Molinari and Polcari were retired, they could have come to Vermont at their convenience; it might have been harder for the Cheng brothers to find the time.
Ah Gou and Xiao Dee had moved back East, this on the good counsel of Tzu-Min, the young Chinese lawyer who’d married Big Brother-she’d given him some solid business advice, and had never gone back to Taiwan. Co
One day, Tony Angel thought, maybe Daniel and I can drive down to Co
“What’s the matter, Tony?” Celeste asked him. (The cook was crying, though he’d not been aware of it.)
“Nothing’s the matter, Celeste. In fact, I’m very happy,” Tony said. He smiled at her and bent over his red-wine reduction, savoring the smell. He’d blanched a sprig of fresh rosemary in boiling water, just to draw out the oil before putting the rosemary in the red wine.
“Yeah, well, you’re crying,” Celeste told him.
“Memories, I guess,” the cook said. Greg, the sous chef, was watching him, too. Loretta came into the kitchen from the dining room.
“Are we going to unlock the place tonight, or make the customers find a way to break in?” she asked the cook.
“Oh, is it time?” Tony Angel asked. He must have left his watch upstairs in the bedroom, where he’d not yet finished the galleys of East of Bangor.
“What’s he crying about?” Loretta asked her mother.
“I was just asking him,” Celeste said. “Memories, I guess.”
“Good ones, huh?” Loretta asked the cook; she took a clean dish towel from the rack and patted his cheek. Even the dishwasher and the busboy, two Brattleboro high school kids, were watching Tony Angel with concern.
The cook and his sous chef were not rigid about sticking to their stations, though normally Greg did the grilling, roasting, and broiling, while Tony watched over the sauces.
“You want me to be the saucier tonight, boss?” Greg asked the cook.
“I’m fine,” Tony told them all, shaking his head. “Don’t you ever have memories?”
“Da
“Yeah, Da
The “Pop” had its origins in Iowa City -the cook liked it.
Barrett was originally from England; though she’d lived in the United States for years, her English accent struck Tony Angel as sounding more and more English every time he heard it. People in America were overly impressed by English accents, the cook thought. Perhaps English accents made many Americans feel uneducated.
Tony knew what his son had meant by Barrett not appreciating the dog story. Although Da
Tony Angel was glad that his son wasn’t coming to di
Tony Angel used an old Stanley woodstove from Ireland for his pizzas; he knew how to keep the oven at six hundred degrees without making the rest of the kitchen too hot, but it had taken him two years to figure it out. He was refilling the woodbox in the Stanley when he heard Loretta unlocking the front door and inviting the first customers into the dining room.
“There was another phone call,” Greg told the cook.
Tony hoped that Daniel hadn’t changed his mind about coming to di
The old logger had gone on and on to Greg about the miraculous invention of the fax machine. God knows for how long fax machines had been invented, the cook thought, but this was not the first he’d heard about Ketchum wanting one. Da