Georgia's Kitchen (33 page)

“Enjoy,” Pablo said after he finished pouring glasses for both of them.

“Go on, Georgia,” Luca said, swirling the wine in his glass.

So she did. She started with the food, describing a light summer dinner of parchment-baked orata in a
pistou
of baby vegetables, Israeli couscous, basil and heirloom-tomato salad, and lemon-rosemary gelato; and a hearty winter dinner of butternut squash and apple risotto, braised lamb shanks, smashed fingerling potatoes and wilted collard greens, and warm banana-and-chocolate bread pudding, so he’d see she wasn’t a one-season chef. She talked menu strategy, so he’d see she knew her way around food costs. She talked about the wine list, naming
off-the-beaten-path producers to appeal to the oenophile in him, and the short but steep list of house drinks, designed to fatten both the cocks-and-apps crew and the bottom line. She talked about giving uptown a chance to dine in the hood and downtown a reason to risk nosebleeds uptown. The furrowed brow slowly relaxed, the throbbing vein slashed across his forehead quieted, the jangly foot rested. He liked what he was hearing.

Emboldened, she walked him through the restaurant, beginning with the cast-bronze door handle under the portal window, the arrangement of pear blossoms by the hostess stand, the random-width pine flooring reclaimed from an old barn in Columbia County, the hand-rubbed-maple bar. Luca squinted his eyes, staring at some faraway place, so Georgia continued, moving on to the gauzy drapes and crisp linen napkins on farmhouse tables.

Nerves and nonstop talking had made her mouth dry as a mohair sweater, and she took a tiny sip of wine. The silence sliced through Luca’s reverie like a mandoline, and he flicked his hand in the air angrily, either swatting a nonexistent fly or signaling her to continue. She quickly jumped back in with her favorite part of cooking, the smells that would infuse the restaurant from open to close. Nutty olive oil, zesty herbs, briny oysters, lusty chocolate, pungent cheese, crisp greens, fresh citrus, bracing vinegar. Luca’s nose slowly stretched skyward as his eyelids drooped.

Before she could talk herself out of it, she slipped into finances, telling him how much they’d need and the breakdown between hard and soft costs, why the HVAC system was such a huge and necessary expense, justifying the need for a Pacojet. She continued with how much to allot for rent, key money, monthly payroll expenses, and time frames for the planning and
design and construction phases, including change orders. Then she hit the piece that made Luca’s eyes go wide: how much money he could expect to make in one, three, and five years. All this with less than ten
um
s.

“I guess you’re telling me your place won’t be a tax write-off, huh?” Luca said, smiling at last.

“Definitely not. We intend to make money, and we know we can.” Out of the corner of her eye, Georgia noticed Luca’s assistant waving frantically.

Luca kept smiling, but his brow wrinkled. “That’s some talk from someone who’s never run her own business.” He rapped his fingers on the table. “There are no guarantees, in business or in life. That’s a lesson we all discover at some point. Only the truly lucky won’t.”

“I think I’ve already learned this on both fronts, Luca.”

“Because you got fired once or twice? Had your heart broken a couple times? I hope you’re right, Georgia, and God bless you if you are.” He stood up. “Looks like my assistant is going to have a heart attack if I don’t end this meeting right now. I’ve already kept the councilman waiting for”—he glanced at his Piaget—“eighteen minutes, just three shy of rude.”

She thanked him for his time and handed him two business plans. He cocked his head almost imperceptibly, and his assistant strode over and removed the documents, glaring at Georgia just slightly.

“Too bad your partner didn’t show.” Luca pursed his lips and stared at her.

“Well, I’m sure he—”

“Let me ask you something. How wedded are you to this partner who can’t even bother showing up for a meeting?”

She swallowed hard. “Really, seriously wedded. Till-death-do-us-part wedded.”

Luca continued staring at her without speaking. “That’s too bad. Hard to invest in a place when you don’t know the whole management team.”

“I’m sure we can arrange something.”

But the councilman was already on his way over with outstretched hands and open wallet, and Luca’s attention had moved elsewhere. As she walked out of the dining room, she couldn’t help but wonder if she should kill Bernard, or if someone else had taken care of it for her.

The cell phone jittered across the table like a june bug, the polished marble top sending it skittering to the floor. Georgia picked it up and glared at the number showing.

“Don’t think so,” she said under her breath. But then again, she had to know. She flipped it open, holding it a few inches from her lips. “Where the hell are you? Let me rephrase that: Where the hell
were
you?”

Two tables down, a pair of blue-haired lady lunchers raised their penciled-in eyebrows at each other. “Such anger,” one of them said while the other shook her head disapprovingly.

Georgia covered the phone with her hand. “Excuse me, ladies. Boy problems.”

The women smiled sympathetically, their rouged cheeks flushing. Who hadn’t been there.

“I am finally getting off the fucking F train,” said Bernard. “I have been underground, in a tunnel. For four. Fucking. Hours.”

Georgia twirled a curl around her index finger. “I know I’m supposed to be sympathetic and all, but may I ask why you didn’t take a cab?”

“I couldn’t find one, Georgia. I looked, but I couldn’t find one. I have
never
had a problem on the subway. I allowed myself
two hours
to get to the Oven. It normally takes twenty-five
minutes to get to midtown. The train broke down. People were fainting, screaming about terrorists, it was mass hysteria.”

“Mmhmm.” Georgia bit into one of three dark chocolate truffles lolling on the plate in front of her. After the meeting, she’d fled the restaurant without so much as grabbing her coat. She’d needed air. Air and chocolate, and in that order. An arctic blast smacked her face as soon as she hit the sidewalk, and with the air part covered, she headed straight to Saks, the closest she could get to killer chocolate and cappuccino in four-inch heels and a flimsy shirt.

The province of social shoppers the city over, the eighth-floor chocolate bar was the kind of place where she could easily run into people she’d rather avoid, like her creepy freshman-year roommate, or Lo’s snooty younger sister, or, worst of all, Glenn’s mother. Fortunately, none of the above were in attendance, and Georgia had gratefully sunk into the first seat she saw.

“I know you’re furious, but please just tell me where you are. I need to hear what happened,” Bernard said.

“Saks, eighth floor. And you’re lucky I’m even speaking to you.”

“Was it that bad?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out if you play your cards right.”

The waiter stopped at Georgia’s table just as she polished off the last truffle, a strange curry flavor she didn’t care for. She ordered four more truffles and a double macchiato. All things considered, she’d done well. More than well. She barely referenced her cheat sheet and answered every trick question Luca posed. If she were the Bari godfather, she’d invest.

Two truffles later, a beleaguered Bernard walked into the café. His face was ashen, his red tie askew, his eyes puffy.

“Have you been crying, Bernard?” Even if the answer was
yes, Georgia’s sympathy for her no-show, cheapskate partner would still stagnate in the low-to-nonexistent range.

“No, Georgia, I have not been crying. I have spent the past four hours in a toilet paper roll with one hundred of my now closest friends, many of whom don’t bother to bathe or brush their teeth. Ever. Do you expect me to walk in looking fresh from a shave and a haircut at Paul Mole?”

“Have a chocolate.”

“Only if it’s laced.” He fell into the chair across from her, prompting the ladies to cluck. “With strychnine.”

“He’s cute,” one of them whispered from behind peach fingernails.

Georgia smiled.

“What was that?” Bernard asked, raking his fingers through his pouffy hair. It had probably looked good when he’d left the house five hours earlier.

“Nothing,” she said. “So.”

“Tell me. Please.”

And she did, beginning with the double drama of his not showing up and the meeting starting early, then Luca mistakenly thinking Bernard had been held up by a gunman and actually seeming excited about it.

“Great,” Bernard said. “He’d rather I get shot than pitch him?”

“Possibly.” Georgia sipped her espresso. “Actually, yes, I think he would have been happy if you’d been shot.”

She told him what she’d said about the food, the menu, the specials, the wine, the look and feel, the vibe. And how she’d handled the finances, juggling numbers and spewing them out like a regular Wharton-degreed, Wall Street whiz. As she spoke, her eyebrows danced, her hands whirred, her fingers stabbed the air. By the time her story reached its climax she had to grab the chair’s armrests just to keep from jumping out of it.

“Sounds terrific, Georgia.”

“Well, yeah, it was, until the end.” She sighed, her ebullience evaporating.

“What happened then?”

“He said it was too bad he hadn’t met my partner. He said he didn’t know how he could invest without meeting the entire management team.”

“So I’ll fly to Bari or something,” Bernard said, flipping his fork into the air and watching it crash onto Georgia’s truffle-filled plate.

“That’s what I told him.”

“You did? And what’d he say?”

“He didn’t. The meeting was over.” She felt flat, like a half-drunk bottle of champagne forgotten in the fridge, a celebration that never quite got off the ground. She’d had Luca, she knew she had. The meeting started on a prickly note, but as soon as she mentioned her orata, his taste buds kicked in. By the time she’d moved on to finances, he was there, envisioning himself at the restaurant’s primo table, swirling a glass of Vietti Barolo, surrounded by the usual bevy of blondes, only these girls were younger, prettier, blonder than the current crew. When she told him how much they anticipated the restaurant would gross, Luca’s eyes boinged out of their sockets, hanging there for a second before ka-chinging back into place. If his assistant had suddenly shuffled over with an attaché case stuffed with unmarked Benjamins, Georgia would barely have batted an eye. Alas, no briefcase materialized, no deal was struck. Instead, the meeting ended with a whimper, the recollection that half the management team was missing and the dreaded promise to be in touch.

The only thing to do, she told Bernard, was to hope he’d call,
and if he didn’t, to wait enough time before calling him. And to start looking for alternative investors.

“What time is he leaving?” Bernard asked.

“Four.” She looked at her watch. “Fifteen minutes.”

He grabbed Georgia’s macchiato, draining it in one gulp, jumped up from his chair, and sprinted out of the café, knocking into a display of holiday chocolates. “Keep your cell phone on!” he shouted right before pitching onto the escalator.

“Where are you going?” she yelled. But he was already gone, the top of his head disappearing into the sea of shoppers.

The ladies looked at her, their mouths agape. This was more excitement than they’d seen in months.

“Men,” Georgia said to them, shrugging her shoulders. She flagged down the waiter and ordered a replacement macchiato.

“Can’t live with ’em,” one of the ladies said.

“Can’t live without their credit cards,” the other finished. They erupted into throaty laughter.

“Georgia Gray?” Carrying multiple shopping bags in one hand and a crimson Birkin in the other was none other than Huggy Henderson. A cashmere cape, decorated with a jewel-encrusted brooch, was draped over her shoulders.

Smiling, Georgia stood to greet her. “Huggy. It’s good to see you.”

“You too, dear. The last time I saw you, you were cooking at that Marco restaurant downtown. After that review, I think it’s safe to assume you’ve moved on?” Huggy rested her bags on the ground. “Mind if I take a seat? My feet are killing me.”

“Please do.” Georgia sat down, her eyes resting on Huggy’s croc pumps, which would set her back at least a month’s rent. “I left Marco a long time ago.”

“Left?”

“Was fired.”

“There’s nothing shameful in being fired, Georgia. Don’t you let anyone tell you there is.” Huggy removed her cape. “And what are you doing here? I don’t see any shopping bags.”

“No, no shopping for me. I just finished a meeting and was craving chocolate.” She looked at Huggy fiddling with the Chanel scarf at her neck, her nails the perfect shade of shell pink. For the first time in her life, Georgia understood what it meant to have a lightbulb go off in her brain. “Actually, this might interest you. I’m opening a restaurant. I was meeting with an investor.”

“How brilliant! Please let me know when you open. Do you have my card?” She unlatched her bag and pulled out a leather card case. “I’ll send all my friends.”

“Thanks, Huggy. Actually, we’re still raising money. I have a great partner, and we have a great business plan, if you—”

“Waiter!” Huggy called suddenly. “Truffles. Six of them. All dark. And a black coffee. Large.” She turned to Georgia. “Did you know that dark chocolate helps you lose weight? Not milk, not white, just dark. Especially around the tummy. It’s absolutely true.”

“No, I didn’t hear that,” Georgia said. “So, we’re looking for investors now. The idea is to open an eighty-seat, market-driven restaurant on the Upper East Side—”

Huggy turned to her. “Are you telling me this because you think I might be interested or because you think I might be an investor?”

Georgia sipped her espresso. “Hopefully both?”

“Sadly, I’m in no position to invest in anything, dear. Larry and I, well, let’s just say that
sociopath
made off with most of our money, just as he did with everyone else’s. That greedy…” Huggy bit her lip.