Page 33 of Don't Remind Me
I lifted my menu. “Then as someone with the inside scoop, what do you recommend?”
She met my gaze over the papers. “What do you like?”
“Whatever’s good.”
Her eyes narrowed. “It’s all good.”
“So let’s get it all.”
“What?” She gave a surprised laugh.
I flipped over the menu. The back side was all drinks and desserts. There weren’t that many entrées. “One of everything. We’ll share, and anything we don’t finish, you can take home.”
“Their servings aren’t small,” she warned.
“Then I guess you’ll have dinners for the week.”
She looked unconvinced.
“Come on,” I urged. “It’s been way too long since I had good Italian food.”
“Was that when you lived in Italy?”
“That’s definitely where I had the best. There have been a few good places since. Nowhere that boasted the best tiramisu in the state, though.”
She glanced to the side and bit her lip, a little color rising in her cheeks. My pulse kicked up.
The server returned and placed a plate of eggplant slices rolled with ricotta cheese in front of us, along with two smaller plates and rolls of silverware.
“You ready to order?”
I looked at Dani.
She held my gaze, sucking me in to where nothing else existed. Just the sea-green swirls of her eyes and the hint of a smirk pulling at her lips. Then she peered up at the server and said, “We’ll have one of everything.”
“So what madeyou want to become a chef?” Dani asked. She scooped some pasta puttanesca onto her plate, one of the six dishes currently covering our table. We’d rotated through the appetizers already, the servings we’d decided to save compiled onto a single plate to make room for the entrées.
She’d set about the meal with the kind of organized approach I’d come to expect from her, taking a single spoonful of each dish to start so she could sample a little of everything before returning to the ones she enjoyed most.
I respected it. Even more, I appreciated the way she embraced the experience. Whether she’d initially done it to humor me or not, she’d fully committed, and every time she leaned forward to breathe in the aroma of a dish before tasting it, I was hit with the urge to reach across the table and kiss her.
Not that I would. This wasn’t that kind of meal. The kind that two people who were into each other shared as a lead-in to something more.
I wasn’t even sure it qualified as a meal between friends. More like a celebration between colleagues. Temporary colleagues at that. Who knew what would happen after the symposium was over? She might not step foot in Ardena again.
I pushed aside the sinking feeling in my stomach and scraped a pile of gnocchi onto my plate. My method was to go for whichever dish had my mouth watering the most.
“It mostly happened on accident,” I said in answer to her question. “After high school, the only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to go to college, so I got a job at a pizza place in my hometown.”
My parents had loved that. Their problem child throwing away his future to be a dishwasher. They took my not wanting to go to college as a personal affront to them, one I still didn’t think they’d gotten over. In their world, a Michelin star would never be worth more than a college degree.
“I started off washing dishes and helping with food prep. The owner was this older guy with the patience of a saint who showed me how to hold a knife and julienne a pepper. And doing it, something just clicked. I think I liked the structure of it, having a clear objective I could accomplish each day.”
It didn’t matter if the objective was only to chop a box of onions. Knowing I’d completed it to the standard set out and that I’d contributed in some way to the result going out to customers gave me a satisfaction I’d never found anywhere else.
“Eventually, I started cooking on the line,” I continued. “I still remember the first time I saw someone enjoying a dish I made. It’s all I’ve wanted to do since.”
Maybe it was because I’d spent most of my childhood feeling like a fuckup. Like I’d gotten so used to expecting anything I did to be met with disappointment that realizing I could do something others might not only appreciate but actually admire was this seismic shift. One I was probably still coming to terms with. All I knew for sure was how grateful I was that Frank had hired and mentored me the way he did. I owed all of my accomplishments to him.
