One More Bite.

My new novel is truly a work in progress. Here's the first chapter.

Photo by Daniel Bradley on Unsplash

The chef had disappeared. Sold his restaurant and left town. There were rumors about where he went. Some said he flew to Lima to try to work with Mitsuharu Tsumura at Maido. Others guessed he was in Italy living on a farm in the hills of Umbria that he loved, or that he had taken a flight to Japan and was learning Kaiseki in Kyoto.

The thing was that even if someone could find him, odds were he wouldn’t talk to anyone. He wasn’t exactly the most press-friendly subject to begin with. He was dark and moody, a swirling storm coming in, shaggy hair falling over eyes the color of the sky, but a cold one, in winter. His face was hard, all angles, square jaw, sharp cheekbones, with a nose that took a few too many beatings without the benefit of a good plastic surgeon. A former boxer (that explained the nose), he was walled off, but ready to pounce at the same time. His gaze was an intimidating glower, imposing and slightly terrifying. Scratch that. Fully terrifying. But also he was brilliant. Yes, that too.

His restaurant was one of those places where the terms heritage and artisan were a given, where a full time forager trucked in fiddleheads, mushrooms and all manner of forest foods still covered in cool earth, where the fish was caught that morning, still flopping around, and the chickens were raised on high-end gluten-free vegan fare and on a first name basis with their farmers before they were lovingly slaughtered. The Zalto crystal was polished before service, and cooks were brutalized by ego and power, beaten down into excellence or emptiness or both.

The critics went nuts. Four stars in the Times, raves from New York Magazine, Food & Wine’s Best New Chef, Esquire’s best restaurant list, and of course all the stars from MICHELIN too. Reservations were booked six months in advance and dinner was $395 per person without wine. Cocktail carts roamed the dining room, piloted by mixologists in white dinner jackets shaking freezer-cold martinis, while captains rolled roving raw bars ferrying tins of osetra caviar, ruby red shrimp, razor clams, and oysters shucked tableside.

There was chilled foie gras the texture of silk crusted with crushed marcona almonds and jewel-toned stone fruits, a duck confit seared off to a golden crisp and sauced with a jus made from port, tamarind and dark cherries, a solitary Hokkaido scallop, barely touched with heat, crowned with a creamy lump of briny uni, confit of preserved Sicilian lemon and sprinkled with dehydrated Calabrian chilis, a golden tilefish with bottarga butter sauce and crispy leeks, and an Australian lamb with a smoky eggplant terrine and a 100-layer potato galette.

The wine list was exclusively French with a few bottles listed under Friends of the Chef from Italy and the North Fork. The bar served several versions of negronis and modern originals including one called The Last Exit, a mix of bourbon, dark plum, and lime juice that had made it to the Times best cocktail list. There were well-stirred Old Fashioneds and Manhattans, Paper Planes, and the like. Classics. Nothing even close to an espresso martini would be tolerated. The room was elegant, hushed, intense, fine dining as blood sport; almost The Menu but without the arson and murders.

But then after many years of excellence, the chef shocked the world and called it quits right on the heels of being named in the top five of the World’s 50 Best and getting a third MICHELIN star. He sold the restaurant and vanished; though the press tried, they couldn’t find him. And gradually people forgot about him as they do. Connor Corrigan, a name on the digital pages of every media outlet, was now collecting dust, like a bag of fancy beans aspiring to be a cassoulet forgotten in the pantry. He was gone and that chapter of the food world, everyone thought, was over.

As it turned out, the chef was not in Lima or Italy or in Kyoto. He had packed up his Lower East Side apartment, loaded up his car and started driving north away from the city, away from the honking horns and blaring sirens, away from the stony silence of his kitchen, far from the caldron of his thoughts, mostly regrets and what ifs simmering in his head.

He had a vague idea of where he was headed; a farmer he knew was working a dozen acres on the seacoast of New Hampshire, so he drove north. I95 was a straight shot to New England and when he saw a coastline that felt rugged and raw – filled with rocks the size of mountains and wide open sky, and an angry sea full of foaming white caps, he pulled into a roadside cafe and settled in at the counter for lunch. The patio opened to the water and the place had a nice vibe, friendly folks, a high school kid was wiping down a few tables he’d just cleared, and a grey haired guy in a well worn Van Halen t-shirt (David Lee Roth, not Sammy Hagar) wandered over to drop a menu, and filled a tall glass with water. It was just tap water, and Connor was happy there was no question of whether he wanted “sparkling, still or filtered tap.”

“Hey there. What can I get you, my friend?”

“Lobster roll seems like the thing to get so one of those please.”

“We make a good one, get the lobster in from the boats right across there you can see ‘em,” he said, pointing to a collection of boats in the port. You like that cold or hot?”

“Cold. Definitely cold.”

“Sure, but I gotta say the hot one is pretty darn good – just the lobster claw and salty melted butter, squeeze-a-lemon.”

“Next time.”

“Sure thing. I’m Jack, haven’t seen you here before?”

“Yeah, new to town, needed a little break from the city.”

“Ah, Boston then?”

“No no, New York City, was a chef there.”

“Oh you don’t say. Well maybe it’s fate you came in today because I happen to need a chef, mine told me today he’s retiring. Retiring! Who does that? I’m gonna work till they wheel me out on a stretcher,” he called back to Connor as walked away and stuck the dupe at the pass in the kitchen. Connor noticed his order was handwritten, the guy didn’t even have a POS. Huh.

“So, you need a job?” Jack laughed, but kept talking. “I’ve got a good team back there,” he said, nodding to the partial open kitchen. “Chris has been with me for a couple years, he’s a solid cook but probably too green to take over the kitchen just now. It’s a pretty simple menu for someone who used to cook in the city. I’m sure you could do it in your sleep - we just do breakfast and lunch, close by 3pm every day you have your nights to yourself.”

Tracy Chapman was playing – Fast Car – and Connor took in the place: about 25 tables, maybe a dozen deuces, a half dozen rounds of four, and another six or seven red booths set up by the windows. To the side of the dining room, there was a small general store that felt like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting; a dairy case filled with cloth-wrapped cheeses, glass bottles of milk; wooden shelves made of old beams filled with scored loaves of crusty sourdough, trays of cookies, cupcakes and baked treats, and a few shelves of pantry necessities. At the cash register there was an old fashioned Ball Jar filled with Fireballs. He’d loved those as a kid. Got one from the newsstand near the F train every day after school. It felt like a sign.

“You’ve had this place a while? It feels like it has history.”

“Yes. My wife’s parents opened it back in the 50s, they took this place over from a small dairy farm. They kept the dairy and converted the farm house into a grocery and diner.

“I met my wife by accident really. She was on a vacation in Brooklyn and I was working as a waiter at Junior’s. I fell in love with her in about five seconds and followed her back here about a year later, learning the business. When her parents retired and moved down to Florida with the rest of their friends who were sick of freezing up here every winter, I took over.”

Jack skipped the part where he and Lucy tried so hard to have kids, but were plagued by miscarriage after miscarriage. Heartbroken after a stillbirth, they decided to stop trying. The kids who came into The Coast Cafe would suffice. One kid in particular, Jack’s niece Abby. She was finally coming back to town later that day. But he’d get to that.

Connor listened to Jack talk as he dug into his lobster roll – nice hunks of fresh lobster, folded into mayo, overloaded into a buttered toasted split top bun. Not bad, he thought. He’d have added another squeeze of lemon, and more salt, maybe some fresh herbs and a confetti of fried shallots over the top, but it was solid.

“You still have the dairy?”

“Yep. We still make milk – the stuff we sell here,” he said, gesturing to the dairy case in the store – and we make ice cream that the kids line up for all summer long. But the kids mostly come for the candy counter,” he said, nodding over to a collection of old wooden crates cobbled together into a Willy Wonka-ish paradise of penny candy: gobstoppers, gumballs, Hershey’s Kisses, fun-sized Baby Ruths, Pop Rocks, and Fireballs. “They come all year long and fill bags we weigh at the counter. They usually end up eating half of it before it gets weighed so it’s not exactly a profit center but it’s every kid’s favorite after school stop.”

“The lawn is nice too,” Connor said, looking through the window to the wide expanse of grass full of picnic tables with corn hole and giant Jenga blocks, kids and families spread out across the lawn, some licking cones, others eating paper-wrapped burgers, some passing around bags of candy.

“That was great,” he said, after he demolished his lobster roll, and every last fry. He got himself a vanilla cone to go and took Jack’s number. “I’ll think about the job offer. May just take you up on that.”

He did in fact; went in later that week and did a trial run; Jack hired him on the spot. It was a year later and he’d been cooking there quietly and anonymously ever since.

Winter was slow and cold and dark, but summer was bright and hot and the patio doors were always open, letting in the caws of the gulls, the salty air, and the rushing sound of the tide coming in and out. He mainly kept a low profile. Took up running, lost some weight, found a gym with a heavy bag and started boxing again. Made fucking great eggs and the best buttermilk pancakes. Baked trays of golden biscuits with flaky pages of buttery dough, made simple sandwiches from summer tomatoes with dill and flaky salt, or fried fish the local trawlers brought in on the boats, or braised pork he piled onto big rolls with a verde sauce.

The food seemed to make people happy. When he dared to look out of the open kitchen pass, he saw the same familiar faces at the counter and in the tables by the windows facing the rocky coast. He seemed to have…regulars? The best part? No one knew who he was, the local press didn’t care about a chef in his 50s making omelets and roast turkey clubs. It was as close to peace as he’d felt in years.

But at night, after one too many whiskeys in front of the fire in his one bedroom rental near The Coast Cafe, he let his mind lean back into his life before – the praise, the stars, the celebrities, but also the stress, the anxiety and the blow that sent him over the edge, the piece written by a woman at Food for Thought, a Substack of all things. Abby Hirsh. A writer who’d been around forever, writing about restaurants for her blog. She had a decent reputation, but she was really a nobody relative to the major writers. She came in a few times. Once with a man he assumed was her husband, and another time with a larger group of women who went through a lot of wine.

A week later she came out with a review that technically was good – it praised his training, his technique and presentation and the detail and grace of the service. He had been reading with a sense of dread with the knowledge that there was a big BUT coming up.

And there it was, in the last paragraph of her review. “To say there are flaws with the food at Goût would be wrong. There is nothing wrong here, there is excellence on every plate. But what is missing is something essential: heart, passion, feeling. It’s strange to have such beautiful food that is so flat it’s almost colorless. It’s like the ingredients have been stitched together into a dress that’s perfectly wearable, but that would not turn one head. And this is a place where you expect whiplash. Goût is a temple but it’s not a home. How else can I say this so it makes sense,” she wrote. “There is an emptiness to his cooking that even the most beautiful ingredients alone cannot fill.”

He packed things up after her story hit, despite the praise from nearly everyone else in the food world. He sold his restaurant because he agreed with her.