Bone in the Throat Read Online Free Page B

from the Culinary Institute, spending a semester working in the real world for school credit. He was having what was sarcastically referred to as a Learning Experience, meaning he worked his ass off and the restaurant got some motivated labor dirt cheap. He'd shown up, like the others, freshly scrubbed, in his own new uniform, with the standard-issue black-vinyl knife roll-up under one arm and a copy of The Professional Chef under the other. But he worked like a Trojan, didn't bitch if somebody asked him to peel garlic or make hollandaise in bulk for brunch. Tommy considered asking Mel to shuck the lobsters but thought better of it.
    The bell at the delivery entrance rang. Tommy walked down the narrow hallway and pushed open the heavy trap doors to the street. It was the fish delivery. A short, unshaven driver wearing a leather truss, work gloves, and rubber boots came in with a long cardboard box heaped with crushed ice. He dropped the box at Tommy's feet, a thin stream of water from the melting ice running out onto the floor. Tommy reached inside, first removing a wheel of swordfish, then an Atlantic salmon. He weighed both on the digital scale atop an ancient chest freezer, gave the salmon a perfunctory press with his fingers, checked the eyes and gills, and signed the invoice. He gave the driver the white copy and spiked the yellow on a nail on the wall next to a stack of shellfish tags. Then he returned to the kitchen.
    Tommy could hear Barry, the manager, in the upstairs waiter station steaming milk for cappuccino. He finished his coffee and shouted "SALAAM" to the two Mohammeds as they passed through the kitchen on their way out the door. He filled up the steam table with water and, his knees resting on the clean rubber floor mats behind the line, reached under and lit the burners. He switched on the range hoods and fired up the Frialator, the ovens, and one side of the grill. In a nonstick pan, he sauteed some chorizo and chopped scallions left over from the night before, then quickly beat in some eggs with a rubber spatula. He added a little fresh cracked pepper with a few turns of a steel peppermill, slid the eggs onto a salad plate and, standing there at his workstation, ate quickly. When he was finished, he put the empty plate and the fork down on the prewash area of the dishwasher.
    Moving on to his mise-en-place, he collected the pots he would need from the overhead racks and neatly arranged the house knives next to his cutting board. He filled a stainless steel crock with hot water and dropped a handful of male and female spoons, a pair of tongs, and a spatula in it. He got a stack of clean kitchen towels from the changing room and lay them down on a shelf over his workstation.
    He went in the walk-in and hauled out a tall plastic bucket filled with veal stock, then poured the stock into a double-weight Crusader-Wear stockpot and started reducing it. He then went back to the walk-in and returned with a buspan of wriggling, one-clawed lobsters. He poured two quarts of white wine into a stockpot and added some bay leaves, some peppercorns, a bit of crushed red pepper, whole cloves, a sprig of raggedy fresh thyme. He found some vegetable trimmings in the sauté box, a drying half-onion, a few wrinkled carrots, some limp celery. He threw them in along with some leek tops and a head of garlic. He put a sheet pan over the pot and waited for the wine to cook down a bit and suck up the flavor from the spices and vegetables. He went back to the walk-in, wondering how much mileage he put in every day on his trips back and forth, then returned with a bucket of fish fumet and a bucket of peeled potatoes. The food-spattered radio cassette player was blaring an old Modern Lovers tune, "She Cracked," and Tommy bounced around in time to the music unembarrassed, as he was alone in the kitchen. "She cracked . . . I'm sad . . . But I won't. . ." he sang along. He rubbed a few red peppers with olive oil and put them on the grill