“You look almost happy,” Sami says.
“Then you need sleep.”
Sami grins. “Opening soon.”
“Everyone is very informed.”
“Everyone is bored. Your restaurant gives us something to bet on.”
I look at him over the rim of the cup. “You are betting on my restaurant?”
“Not me,” Sami says. “I am neutral.”
“Neutral people don’t mention neutrality.”
“I bet on a good first month and a difficult second.”
“That is oddly specific.”
“First month is curiosity,” Sami says.
“Second month is truth.”
I drink the espresso. It is hot, bitter, and exactly what it needs to be.
“Who taught you to be wise before sunrise?” I ask.
“My mother,” Sami says.
“She was unpleasant before sunrise too.”
“Then I respect her.”
“She would have hated you.”
“Wise woman.”
Sami laughs and wipes the counter with a towel that has seen too much of humanity to be clean in any philosophical sense. “You want another?”
“Yes.”
He pours it without comment. I stand there with the second coffee warming my hand and watch the market move. This is the part I never explain well to journalists, which is convenient because I rarely allow them close enough to ask. They want origin to sound poetic. They want a sentence about memory, childhood, lineage, hunger, the first time I tasted something that turned me into myself. They want the food to come from a wound or a grandmother or a coastline. Sometimes it does. Often it comes from standing in a wholesale market while your shoes stick slightly to the floor and a man insults your personality while selling you an excellent turbot.
That is less elegant, but it’s more true. Food begins before the kitchen. It begins here, in the refusal to accept the almost-good, in the willingness to be difficult because the guest will never know which thing you rejected and will still taste the consequence of having rejected it. They will not know Baptiste tried to sell me six turbot and I took four. They will not know Mireille’s tarragon changed the sauce before the sauce existed. They will not know the young vendor’s scallops were tired and that I walked away before fatigue could become a course.
They will know only whether the dish holds.
That is enough.
That is everything.
My phone vibrates in my coat pocket.
Julien.
I answer. “What?”
“Good morning to you too,” Julien says.
