The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf, page 5
“Thought for sure Frankie was bullshitting.”
“Nope,” I said. “The ocelot that ate live chickens was real.”
“That’s a surprising detail,” she said. “Although Angela did tell me a few things about you.”
“Did she really?” I said. “Anything I should know?”
“Nah,” Stephanie said. Then she looked at me squarely. She said, “Ask me why I’m cooking rijsttafel since I’m neither Indonesian nor am I Dutch.”
“Why are you cook—”
“I am cooking rijsttafel,” she said, “because of Chef Femke De Vries.”
“Who’s he?”
“Oh dear,” she said. “Femke.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Who is she?”
Femke De Vries was a CIA graduate from ten years before Stephanie, who had pioneered her way to Paris only to find the same barriers in those all-male brigades. She’d saved enough from work in the U.S. to lease and fix up a space in Pigalle that had been an Algerian restaurant. She’d never eaten much rijsttafel prior, despite actually having Dutch ancestry. So she did her research and came up with a menu, refined and refined. And there she was running strong fifteen years later.
“It’s superb,” Stephanie said. “Like, exceptional. You like babi kecap? Pork belly? Beef rendang? It’s delicious without being up its own ass.”
“Okay, well,” I said. “I guess I should try it.”
“Tricky though,” Stephanie said. “We have the same hours.”
“Maybe some Sunday afternoon,” I tried.
Stephanie was pulling on her coat. “You know what’s cool about Femke?”
“Tell me,” I said.
“All girls. Exec through plongeur. We are a chick brigade.” Stephanie’s coat was on, her scarf too. “That’s Femke De Vries,” she said. “Nice talking.”
She was still smiling. And I thought about offering to walk her to the metro or wherever she was going. But I didn’t in the end because it seemed to me all at once like Stephanie was smiling then mainly to tell those in the bar, and perhaps one person in particular, that we’d just had the most ordinary of chats, and that she’d just said something very ordinary and friendly in the way of goodbye.
“All right,” I said. And at that point, I didn’t turn around to check who might have been watching because I thought I knew. I just watched Stephanie pull on her leather jacket, tie her scarf tight to hold her hair. She cracked the hint of a smile at me. Then I pretended to read a poster plastered onto the wall next to me while she navigated the crowd toward the door, high-fiving the doorman as she went out.
* * *
If the anchor of each day was that bar in Pigalle, the anchor of each week became those dinners that Frankie would host on Sundays at his apartment in Belleville. He had a beautiful and unusual place up there in the Twentieth, back before anyone could have predicted the area would become remotely fashionable. The streets were mostly shabby then and at night you walked there with one eye looking behind you. Nevertheless, Frankie lived in rare style, not in an apartment or a flat, but in an actual house. This was a freak find in Paris at the time and the price. In Rue des Envierges, just above the park, the house was found at the back of a wide lot that had once been the location of a large seamstress operation, closed decades prior. There was a narrow lane from the front gate lined with cottages where the different seamstresses had worked. The house, Frankie told us, had long ago belonged to the foreman. Various people came and went in the cottages. But for over five years, Frankie had rented that small house at the end of the lane. It was wide open inside, from the kitchen Frankie had installed on one wall, across the concrete floor to a sitting area with bookshelves on the other, where Frankie had also set up a long dining table. To the front of the house were glass doors that opened this space to a garden, where there were rubber trees and wildflowers, where the dining table could be moved when the weather was fine, and where Frankie parked his prized Motto Guzzi until a year or so into my time in Paris when he upgraded to a Ducati café racer.
These dinners didn’t normally involve people who worked at Le Dauphin, though I’d see some of the women who served out front show up from time to time. But others came from all over the city’s food world, cooks and chefs, butchers and bakers and fishmongers, even the odd farmer who’d come to town. The fact that Frankie knew them all is more remarkable to me now than it was even then. Young and new to everything, I just assumed someone in Frankie’s position would have such a network. And it’s possible I didn’t think any further about it in part because I was so glad to be included.
These evenings were exhilarating and refreshing in those early years. Everyone would be exhausted from service when we assembled. This much was the same as when we saw each other up in Pigalle. But at Frankie’s, the cycle of an entire week was complete. You felt the calendar fall forward as you pulled a cold bottle of La Choulette Blonde out of the ice chest, or popped the cork of a chilled Saumur-Champigny you might just have “borrowed” from the sommelier at whatever restaurant you came from.
It was my absorption into Frankie’s circle, such that I became a regular at these Sunday dinners, that gave me a first glimpse of the man’s inner complications. In the Le Dauphin kitchen, he cooked like a machine, always calm, always precise, always very fast. At home he was expansive. He chatted and joked; he was spontaneous in the menus he chose. There was no formula to Frankie’s home cooking, as it did sometimes seem at the bistro. At home he had stunning range, from exquisite white tablecloth dishes, on through the whole bistro repertoire, and from there, on occasion, down to an earthy, farm-gate cuisine that Frankie remembered from personal history growing up around Trois-Pistoles in the eastern Quebec region of Bas-Saint-Laurent.
But no matter what Frankie was making on Sundays, you could feel him pushing outward, gesturing the diner along with him, aspiring to do something that I have to assume eluded him at the helm of Le Dauphin. These feasts he’d lay out along that long pine table — and they were feasts, never one or two dishes where six were possible — these were Frankie’s expression of what he wanted us to know he was capable of doing, a broad, enthusiastic cuisine that was the truer essence of the chef in total than I think the chefs patrons had ever known to taste themselves.
In refined white-tablecloth mode, cooking out of the Michelin playbook, Frankie hit exquisite flavours with maniacally precise technique. I remember these dishes for their poise and strength, like ballet on the plate. I remember escalope de saumon for which Frankie would bone out filets, flatten them between oiled parchment, then sear for a single minute a side. You sauced that with a reduced fumet made with shallots, white wine, and vermouth, flavoured with lemon and sorrel before enriching with butter. But Frankie could go elaborate just as freely. I remember a roast duck dish, the breasts sliced thin into aiguillettes, napped with a sauce made from the roasted carcasses, flamed with brandy, then simmered in red wine reduction and demi-glace with shallots and thyme, strained off, reduced even more, then finished with crème fraiche and shaved truffles. These were the classics that would have been on menus in the most prestigious restaurants in France at that time, prepared here by a man in a red plaid shirt and denims, cooked with casual elegance and served to chefs and servers, wine sellers and favourite vendors, line cooks, even the odd dishwasher.
I remember one day sitting at Frankie’s kitchen counter with a glass of the least expensive Côte de Nuits I’d been able to find, sitting and sipping and watching as Frankie did his version of stuffed hare. He boned out three large ones, browned off the carcasses, then simmered them with bacon, herbs, and a couple of entire bottles of sweet Coteaux du Layon. In another pot he reduced a third bottle of the same wine to a syrup, then made a forcemeat with bread, caramelized shallots, mushrooms, eggs, cloves, cinnamon, a shot of Irish whisky, and a pile of blanched and minced lamb sweetbreads. I remember Frankie tasting the raw mixture with a silver spoon, then swivelling to a basket of Périgord truffles, three of which he then grated into the mixture as well.
All the while he did this, Frankie talked non-stop, so different from his low-voiced persona in the Le Dauphin kitchen. Here he was animated. He asked a lot of questions. About my family. About where I’d grown up. About the food I ate as a child.
“Beef tongue!” he said. “I love beef tongue. My mom used to smoke it. Slice it thin and serve it on dark bread with mustard and raw onion.”
“We did the long braise,” I said. “Then rice and mustard sauce. Yellow mustard, of course.”
“Right on,” Frankie said. “My mother used to braise pigs’ feet in pork stock spiked with maple syrup and Coca-Cola. Kickass good.”
From food to family, back to food, and then to men and women, sex. It seemed an ordinary progression as Frankie pulled squares of pork caul out of the refrigerator and laid them out on the cutting board.
So I told him briefly about my ex when it came to answering his question about last love interests. “She was a rugby player.”
“That’s cool,” he said. “J’aime une femme dure. Was she hard?”
I wasn’t immediately sure what he meant by that.
“Big muscles in her legs,” Frankie said, looking up as if the detail really interested him.
I didn’t think Angela’s legs had been unusually muscled. “She played wing,” I said. “Super fast. High pain threshold. Runners’ legs, I guess.”
“Did she have tattoos?” Frankie asked, back to his work. “Rugby players are known for that.”
“Are they?” I said. “I mean, she did actually. One.”
“Where was it?” he asked.
“Hey,” I said. “Kinda personal.”
“Tranquille,” Frankie said, spreading his hands. “We’re friends!”
I shook my head. “It was on her right butt cheek if you gotta know. A rugby ball.”
“Oh là là!” he said. “Teo, Teo.”
I sipped my wine, unsure what to say next. But Frankie was rolling, so no need to say anything.
“Tell me about Ines,” he said.
“What about her? Good kid.”
“She likes you.”
“She’s funny,” I said. “Very smart.”
“Maybe you like her too, yeah?” Frankie said. He’d now laid out the boned-out rabbits on the caul fat and was spooning out a layer of forcemeat I’d watched him make earlier.
I shrugged. “She’s like a kid sister.”
“Really?” Frankie seemed incredulous. “She’s pretty cute. What? Is that wrong to say?”
“She’s fifteen,” I said. “And you’re kind of her boss, yeah?”
I don’t remember if I asked that last bit exactly. I describe the scene now — Frankie laying out lobes of foie gras along the rabbits with their forcemeat stuffing, rolling these up in the caul fat to make ballotine and tying them off with butcher’s twine, loading them into the freezer for a quick chill — and I want to remember that I registered some kind of ethical caution or objection, pouring myself another glass of that Côte de Nuits and tracking Frankie’s technique as he now reduced that stock and enriched it with reserved blood from the rabbit.
But maybe I didn’t. Maybe all the moral compromise I see in the situation now is hindsight. Maybe at the time I was blinded. Frankie was a complete disciple of the kitchen, consumed with this thing we were doing, doing it better than anyone I knew. That was his magnetism, why people looked at him, all those possessive glances. Was I just failing to sync that vision of Frankie as the centre of attention with a guy whose eye would snag on a young woman who seated people and bused tables at his restaurant and didn’t even show up at the pass?
Or was my silence the product of a more cynical calculus, a sense that if Ines had caught Frankie’s attention, he might be distracted from other infatuations?
“What about Stephanie?” I asked him.
He seemed to intensify his focus on the vinaigrette he was making, the whisk a blur in the aluminum bowl as the oil drizzled down, the whir of metal on metal like the sound of locust wings. Only when the emulsion was perfect did he set the vinaigrette aside and turn to the cooler for greens and radishes and address the question with his back to me.
“Stephanie is a funny one, you know this?”
I shrugged. “Funny how?”
“So beautiful,” he continued. “But so much in her mind.”
He was rummaging, hunting around in the cooler, pulling up items and putting them in a square basket on the far counter. Baby gem lettuces, hard-boiled eggs, slab bacon for lardons. He turned finally, holding the basket, looking down and beaming. “Simple food tonight, yeah?”
“Looks great, Frankie.”
Then he set the basket down and looked at me. “You want to fuck her.”
“Come on,” I said.
Frankie laughed, leaning back with his hands on his hips. “It’s not so strange,” he said. “She’s super hot. She’s tough. But I tell you something, she can see right through you.”
“Me?” I asked.
“Anyone,” he said. “She told me once, ‘At some time in my life, this is very important, I want to walk the Camino.’”
“What are we talking about here, Frankie?”
“That thing in Spain.”
“I know the Camino.”
“Right. So I said to her, ‘Sure, let’s you and I do that. We walk across Spain. We go next year, okay?’”
I waited.
Frankie started laughing. “And she saw right through me. No way I ever do that. She knows this right away. So we go out to dinner at Tour d’Argent instead, which was also pretty nice.”
“Right,” I said, impressed. I wasn’t sure I knew anyone else working in the food world who could afford Tour d’Argent.
“Canard au sang,” he said, thinking back. “Very fancy. You know this dish?”
“Sure,” I said. “I mean, never had it.”
So you roast a duck and carve it, Frankie explained, keep the breast and the leg meat warm. Then you put the carcass through this machine like a potato ricer only so big it has a wheel crank handle. You load the carcass into the container of the press, you crank that handle down, crushing the carcass and out come all the juice and blood and marrow. “Oh là là! Delicieux,” Frankie said, doing the chef’s kiss with his fingers. “Very rich. Very decadent, right?”
I nodded. “Which is the point, I suppose.”
“Before we eat that night,” Frankie said. “Stephanie, she do this.” And here he nodded his head just slightly, then with his right hand cupped and his thumb extended half an inch, he touched his forehead, his lips, then his heart in quick succession.
“So she’s Catholic,” I said.
“Right?” he said. “You didn’t expect it. So much passion. So much lust and appetite. She ate that duck like … I don’t know. Like she is a starving person. I watched. I was like … wow. Such hunger is sexy, right?”
“She’s Catholic and she enjoys her food,” I said.
Which is why she didn’t come often on Sundays, Frankie explained. She had her private and peculiar habits. Evening mass on some occasions. Or surfing the bouqinistes, he said.
“She likes old cookbooks,” Frankie said. “She writes her own book one day. That’s what she told me.”
“A cookbook?”
“No!” he said. “Like a story about her life in Paris.”
“A book,” I said. “Wow.”
“Isn’t it great? She reads. She writes a book. She prays to God. She even believes in God I think, I never ask her. A perplexing, beautiful woman, very hungry for life and all things. So maybe she walks that Camino one day with someone who feels the same. That night we were together and we have a very special night.”
I sipped my wine.
“And now,” he said, gesturing to the room with a sweeping arm. “Here we are for another!”
I remember that people began to trickle in shortly after those comments. And I was eventually pulled away from the kitchen by conversations with others as they arrived. A couple of cooks from a big hotel on Rue de Rivoli. A group of young women who worked together in a patisserie in the Marché des Enfants Rouges. One of the hotel guys had brought a case of decent champagne. An entire case, almost certainly lifted. But it was open and we were drinking it. Frankie sipping a flute and singing in the kitchen. And then the food came out and I remember a brief silence falling. The ballotines of rabbit had been roasting for several hours by that point, the outsides caramelized to mahogany brown. They’d been cut into thick round slices to reveal the stuffing inside, the lobe of foie in the middle, each slice plated in pool of that reduced sauce, so dark that it was almost black. A dusting of red espellette.
The silence did not last. We fell onto that food. And when I left that evening, one of the market girls had stayed behind, the one who I recall being told made legendary macarons. She was lying back on the chaise longue in the terrace outside the house, an empty glass of wine set aside. She was looking up to the Parisian sky, one strap of her summer dress off her shoulder. I found myself following her gaze, up and up to the constellations there. One star moving. A satellite, I suppose. But I was drunk and I found myself vividly imagining the silver orb overhead, looking down. I felt seen. And I don’t mind admitting that in the same instant I envied the macaron girl for being the one chosen to stay behind.
* * *
There was one element of our kitchen slang at Le Dauphin that was unique as far as I’m aware. When tickets came in, servers would append to the table number a note indicating what sort of diners were at the table in question. These nicknames corresponded to the suits in a deck of cards. Les trèfles (clovers or clubs) were tourists. Les carreaux (tiles or diamonds) were locals. Les coeurs (hearts) were attractive diners, women or men the cooks might wish to check out based on preference. And the last suit, les piques (pikes or spades) was reserved for VIPs. There could have been other categories when you think of all possible types of diners. But there were only four suits in a deck of cards. So those were the names that servers and cooks used. And at any given moment, it seemed to explain the Le Dauphin front room pretty well.
