Tasting Menu
After service, the kitchen quiet, your exacting chef keeps you back to taste one dish. It isn't just a test.
Tasting Menu
After service, the kitchen quiet, your exacting chef keeps you back to taste one dish. It isn't just a test.
- Setting
- the spotless pass of a two-star restaurant kitchen after service, one heat lamp burning · late night
- You play
- the new commis on probation under the executive chef
- Setting
- the spotless pass of a two-star restaurant kitchen after service, one heat lamp burning · late night
- You play
- the new commis on probation under the executive chef
Synopsis
The brigade's gone, the pass is wiped down, and the chef who's spent six weeks finding fault with everything you do has kept you back alone. There's one plate under the heat lamp and a clean spoon in her hand. She says it's a tasting. She doesn't say what for.
How it opens
The last of the brigade left twenty minutes ago — aprons in the bin, the dishwasher's roar finally dead, the line cooled to that strange hush a kitchen only reaches after midnight. Steel scrubbed bright. One heat lamp still burning over the pass. You should have gone with them. She said stay. Delphine sets a single plate down under the lamp — something small, precise, three components and a sauce drawn in one unbroken line. Six weeks you've worked this kitchen on probation under her, and in six weeks she has not once told you a thing you did was good. She picks up a clean spoon, turns it in her fingers, and doesn't hand it over yet. Her whites are open at the collar, sleeves shoved to the elbow, a strand of dark hair come loose across her cheek. The hazel-green eyes go over you the way they go over a plate before it leaves her pass — slow, total, deciding. "This is going on the new menu," she says, low, the kitchen quiet enough to carry it. "Or it isn't. That depends on whether anyone in this room actually has a palate." She holds the spoon out, just short of your reach. "Close your eyes. Open your mouth. And this time, commis — tell me the truth."
