22
" I walked the Greenmarket stalls during my break. The leaves were riotous but I couldn't focus on them. I only saw apples. Stacked, primed for tumbling. Empires, Braeburns, Pink Ladies, Macouns. Women in tights, men in scarves. Vats of cider, steaming. I bought an apple and ate it.
Did I understand the fragrance and heft? The too-sweetness of the pulpy flesh? Had I ever felt the fatality of autumn like my bones did now, while I watched the pensive currents of foot traffic? A muted hopelessness pressed on me. I lay under it. At that point I couldn't remember the orchards, the blossoms, the life of the apple outside of the city. I only knew that it was a humble fruit, made for unremarkable moments. It's just food, I thought as I finished it, core and all. And yet it carries us into winter. It holds us steady. "
― Stephanie Danler , Sweetbitter
28
" So Beaujolais is like this hybrid---a red that drinks like a white, we even put a chill on it. Maybe that's why it has trouble, it doesn't quite fit. No one takes Gamay seriously---too light, too simple, lacks structure. But..." I swirled the glass and it was so... optimistic. "I like to think it's pure. Fleurie sound like flowers doesn't it?"
"Girls love flowers," she said judiciously.
"They do." I put her wine down, then moved it two inches closer to her, where I knew the field of her focus began. "None of that means anything. It just speaks to me. I feel invited to enjoy it. I get roses."
"Child, what is wrong with you? There's no roses in the damn wine. Wine is wine and it makes you loose and helps you dance. That's it. The way you kids talk, like everything is life or death."
"It's not?"
"You ain't even learned about living yet!"
I thought about buying wine. About how I would scan the different Beaujolais crus at the liquor store---the Morgan, the Côte de Brouilly, the Fleurie would be telling me a story. I would see different flowers when I looked at the labels. I thought about the wild strawberries dropped off from Mountain Sweet Berry Farm just that afternoon and how the cooks laid out paper towels and sheet trays in the kitchen, none of them touching, as if they would disintegrate, their fragrance euphoric. "
― Stephanie Danler , Sweetbitter
29
" Wait until the truffles hit the dining room---absolute sex," said Scott.
When the truffles arrived the paintings leaned off the walls toward them. They were the grand trumpets of winter, heralding excess against the poverty of the landscape. The black ones came first and the cooks packed them up in plastic quart containers with Arborio rice to keep them dry. They promised to make us risotto with the infused rice once the truffles were gone.
The white ones came later, looking like galactic fungus. They immediately went into the safe in Chef's office.
"In a safe? Really?"
"The trouble we take is in direct proportion to the trouble they take. They are impossible," Simone said under her breath while Chef went over the specials.
"They can't be that impossible if they are on restaurant menus all over town." I caught her eye. "I'm kidding."
"You can't cultivate them. The farmers used to take female pigs out into the countryside, lead them to the oaks, and pray. They don't use pigs anymore, they use well-behaved dogs. But they still walk and hope."
"What happened to the female pigs?"
Simone smiled. "The scent smells like testosterone to them. It drives them wild. They destroyed the land and the truffles because they would get so frenzied."
I waited at the service bar for drinks and Sasha came up beside me with a small wooden box. He opened it and there sat the blanched, malignant-looking tuber and a small razor designed specifically for it. The scent infiltrated every corner of the room, heady as opium smoke, drowsing us. Nicky picked up the truffle in his bare hand and delivered it to bar 11. He shaved it from high above the guest's plate.
Freshly tilled earth, fields of manure, the forest floor after a rain. I smelled berries, upheaval, mold, sheets sweated through a thousand times. Absolute sex. "
― Stephanie Danler , Sweetbitter
30
" Who knew winter meant vegetables? Chef. No asparagus shipped in from Peru, no avocados from Mexico, no eggplants from Asia. What I assumed would be a season of root vegetables and onions was actually the season of chicories. Chef had his sources, which he guarded. Scott walked through the restaurant in the morning with unmarked brown paper bags, sometimes crates.
He told me that the chicories would really brighten when the first freezes came. It sweetened their natural bitterness. I could barely keep track of them. The curly tangle of frisée didn't seem the same species as the heliotrope balls of radicchio, or the whitened lobes of endive. Their familial trait was a bite---I thought of them as lettuces that bit back. Scott agreed. He said we should be hard on them. Eggs, anchovies, cream, a streak of citrus.
"Don't trust the French with your vegetables," Scott said. "The Italians know how to let something breathe. "
― Stephanie Danler , Sweetbitter
32
" In Marseille you could walk down to the docks in the mornings. They had urchins, still alive. An offhand exchange, a few francs for this delicacy. The rocks are littered with debris, empty shells opened with a knife, rinsed by salt water, and sucked dry on the spot. Men taking lunch with bottles of their hard house wine, watching the boats move in and out. It's the ovaries---the coral ovaries. They are supposed to transfer a great power when you consume them. Absolutely voluptuous, the texture, absolutely permanent, the taste. It stays with you for the rest of your life."
She went toward the door, pulling her hair back. She looked at me thoughtfully. "There are so many things to be blasé about your youth, your health, your employment. But real food---gifts from the ocean, no less---is not one of them. It's one of the only things that can immerse you safely in pleasure in this degraded, miserable place. "
― Stephanie Danler , Sweetbitter
34
" What would your last meal be?" I asked suddenly. That was a night when I thought it would be all right if my life ended.
"A really long omikase. Like at least thirty-four courses. I want Yesuda to cook them himself. He puts the soy sauce on with a paintbrush."
"Salmon pastrami from Russ and Daughters. A ton of bagels. Like three bagels."
"In-N-Out double double."
"I'm thinking about a Barolo, something really ripe and dirty, like from the eighties."
"ShackBurger and a milk shake."
"My mom's was veal scallopini and a Diet Coke."
"Nonna's Bolognese----it takes eight hours. She makes the pappardelle by hand."
"A roast chicken---I would eat the entire thing by hand. And I guess a DRC. When else would I taste that kind of Burgundy?"
"Blinis, caviar, and crème fraîche. Done and done. Some impossible Champagne, Krug, or a culty one like the Selosse, drunk out of the bottle."
"Toast," I said, when my turn came. I tried to think of something more glamorous, but toast was the truth. I expected to be mocked. My suburban-ness, my stupidity, my blankness.
"What on top?"
"Um. Peanut butter. The raw kind you get from the health-food stores. I salt it myself. "
― Stephanie Danler , Sweetbitter
36
" I've never felt anything like it. I usually have trouble..."
"Coming?"
"Well, yes, I mean, it's fine by myself. But hard. At other times. With people. But this time it wasn't... difficult."
"Well, great. He's had a lot of practice."
"Don't be mean."
"I'm not, but you want me to act like great sex is the end of the world."
It is the end of the world, I thought. "No. But it feels big. I can't explain it, I feel, womanly or something."
"You think it's womanly to get fucked?" She had her clawed tones out and I retreated.
"I don't want to argue about gender theory. I just feel like something real happened. And I wanted someone to talk to about it. Like a friend."
"Let me guess," she said, tapping the spoon against the tablecloth. "He beat you up a little bit, called you a slut, and you thought that was really edgy, another spoiled white girl who wants to get slapped around because she always got everything she wanted."
"Fuck, Ari." I shook my head. "It must be hard. To have already sized up the world, to already have written it off completely. Is it just so fucking boring all the time?"
"Pretty much, Skip."
"I would rather be called a slut by him than deal with the shit I get from the women here." I picked up my bowl. "Also, you're fucking white. By the way. And you don't get a medal for being gay. "
― Stephanie Danler , Sweetbitter
40
" Yes, we were starving. Scott waved the menus away and we got the waiter's attention---he proceeded to order an obscene amount of food off the "real menu," which wasn't printed.
Two-dollar beers that tasted like barely fermented, yeasty water. We salivated. There was no coursing---in ten minutes plates started pounding the spinning tray at the center of the table and we fought among ourselves. Conch in a hallucinatory Sichuan oil, a nest of cold sesame noodles, a wild, red stew that Scott called ma po tofu, cold tripe ("Just eat it," Scott said, and I did), crackling duck, dry-sautéed green beans, skinny molten eggplants, cucumbers in scallion oil... "
― Stephanie Danler , Sweetbitter
