Dave listens intently. Or he’s trying to, at least, but Gerald is still droning on about the project goals and Dave struggles to follow. The chef arrives at the table and sets out several palm-sized clear dishes, each filled with ingredients for the meal. Finely diced chives, minced garlic, an assortment of fresh herbs and spices. Gerald had invited Dave, Susan, and Stanley to this fancy dinner so he’d have a captive audience to lay out his goals for the project they were working on. As soon Gerald was named project manager, a role that included a corporate credit card, his bloviating meter compounded. He took every opportunity to grandstand and here was another chance, with the bonus of flashing that credit card. Susan and Stanley nod agreeably to Gerald, but Dave is transfixed by the chef, now sharpening his knives with a flash of silver and a satisfying ting of metal on metal. Dave feels the heat emanating from the cooktop at the center of their table. When the scent of ginger and sesame oil hits the sizzling surface and the aromatic steam rises, Dave thinks of his grandfather.
He cooked that way, preparing all the ingredients first, dicing and chopping while he told Dave stories about his travels. His grandfather had enlisted in the Navy at a young age, “to see the world” he told Dave, but really it was to escape the poverty of his tiny, frosty hometown and to have some autonomy in his life when facing imminent drafting. Every port and city he visited, his grandfather sampled local food, collected special dried ingredients and transcribed traditional recipes to memory. “Smell that,” he would say to Dave, presenting a small dish of something to him. Garam masala, tarragon, wasabi, sumac, ginger. He would quiz Dave on the names of the ingredients he held out, asking him to describe the flavor. Often the spices elicited a story. “The first time I tried a sumac berry was in the Mediterranean. Let me tell you, the food there was divine.”
Dave breathes in sharply, savoring the familiar tingle in his nose as the chef tosses some garlic onto the cooktop. He watches the chef’s hands moving musically as he shakes the ingredients from each small dish. “…team completes the first step of this project, we should see growth comparable to what Project Goldplate saw in their third quarter. You hear that? Their third quarter. With my out-of-the box strategic planning and my….” Gerald continues. The rising steam now carries a new layer of aroma that Dave savors.
Once his grandfather’s mise en place was prepared, he began cooking, dazzling Dave with a quick pan flip or a vortex sprinkling of an exotic spice. When the cooking was complete, he’d present a dish before Dave that left his mouth tingling long after the meal had been devoured. Dave spent a few summers with his grandfather, and his mother had always been too busy to cook, so those summers he was nourished on his grandfather’s stories and culinary crafts. “One time in Tokyo, I tried fresh octopus,” he told Dave. “An arm was cut off the octopus in front of me and was still wriggling as I swallowed it. I could feel it slithering in my throat.” He mimed choking down the squiggling appendage and laughed at the face Dave made.
Dave subsists on Uber Eats, jars of bone broth soup and bar appetizers now. The last time he was in a grocery store, he was walking through the produce section to get to the shelves of boxed wine, when he overheard a woman speaking to the produce clerk. “I’m trying this new recipe for a date, and it calls for a shallot. What is that?” Dave paused and considered offering his assistance, but his distraction was momentary when he realized, he just didn’t care. Let this random woman figure it out herself.
Shot glasses are set in front of everyone around the table. Gerald pauses just long enough to tilt back his head and down a shot of Sake, before slamming the glass to the table and continuing. “… focus on these metrics and the net gains…” Dave looks at his own shot of Sake, swirling it in the glass and savoring the faint aroma as it wafts up.
Dave’s grandfather died four months ago, just before Dave was promoted to an executive position. He had been so busy with work that he hadn’t visited him in almost a year, and then he was gone and it was time to plan the funeral. His mother was drunk long before the wake started, probably since the beginning of the year, when he thought about it. Dave weaved through the wave of distant relatives and friends of his grandfather’s, all squeezed into the tired house, nursing a glass of whiskey in his hand. His grandfather would be mortified at the slices of crusting lunch meat, congealing cheese and cheap dinner rolls that his mother served. Dave selected an obviously store-bought cookie from a tray. Probably the same brand he kept in a cupboard in his musty apartment that he would snack on while standing over the sink in his galley kitchen. After one bite he surreptitiously spit it out into a paper napkin from a stack near the rolls. Bland and overly sweet. His grandfather did not bake, but Dave’s refined tastebuds still knew what a good cookie should taste like and he felt guilty eating it at his grandfather’s wake.
What happened to all his grandfather’s recipes? Some were committed to memory, perhaps a few were written down on old index cards shoved in a drawer somewhere. But most of them his grandfather crafted in the moment. “First, learn what flavors go best together. Next, use only the best in-season ingredients, only what’s fresh,” he said to Dave once. “When you know how to pair the ingredients together with a little bit of spice, that’s where the magic begins.” The magic.
“So, after we eat, let’s circle back to our goals and discuss….” As Gerald speaks, the others simply nod or say things like, “certainly” and “absolutely”.
The steam from the cooktop subsides. The chef presents a dish to each person at the table. Dave takes a bite.