Page 151 of Neap & Spring

I’m doing it correctly.

Stellan stops behind me.

“Your angle,” he says.

I adjust incrementally, though I’m not sure what I’m adjusting toward.

“No.” He comes around to my side — close enough that I can feel the heat of him, way closer than necessary — and demonstrates on the board beside mine. The difference between what he shows me and what I was doing is so minor it barely exists. “Watch that,” he says. “Technique like that reads differently on a woman in a kitchen like this. This isn’t your kitchen at home, sweetheart. People notice these things. You’re already working twice as hard to prove you belong here. Don’t make it harder on yourself.”

He says it with the mild concern of someone passing on useful information. Like he’s doing me a favor and trying to help me.

Then he moves on.

I watch him work his way through the kitchen. He stops at the pastry corner, says something to both women there. I can’t hear the words, but I can see their shoulders tighten.

He doesn’t stop at any of the men’s stations.

The kitchen keeps moving around me.

I stand there with my knife in my hand, heat creeping up my neck and spreading across my face.

I replay it and try to isolate the thing that’s making my skin prickle. My technique wasn’t wrong. I know my technique, I’ve been doing this for years. No one has ever flagged it. But maybe I’m being oversensitive and he holds everyone to this standard. Maybe this is just what it is to work at the highest level.

I adjust my angle by two degrees, and I go back to the loin.

It happens again. And again. Small corrections that feel pointed. Comments that feel wrong. Standing too close, speaking too soft, calling me sweetheart in a tone that makes my skin crawl.

“You should secure your hair more tightly. Customers don’t want to think about what’s falling into their food. Women’s hair especially.”

My hair is in a bun with two pins and a net. It has not moved during service. It is not a distraction. The male chef two stations over has hair to his shoulders, tied back with a single elastic that’s half falling out. It has never been mentioned.

“The French training is showing, and not in a good way. All that delicate plating and precious technique — this isn’t a cooking school, sweetheart. I need you cooking like you’re in a real kitchen, not making pretty little dishes for your instructors to grade.”

I’ve been cooking in New York for months. I’ve adapted my technique to this kitchen’s style. I know I have because I can feel the difference. The plating he’s calling precious is identical to what the line cooks next to me are doing. I don’t say any of this.

“You’re working too hard to prove yourself,” he says one evening, passing my station after service. He stops and looks at my board, taking in the area I’ve already broken down and cleaned. “Women always do this. They try so hard everyone can see the effort. It reads as desperate. You want to last here? Stop trying to impress everyone and just do the work.”

So I keep my head down. I work harder. I stay later, come in earlier, perfect my technique until there’s nothing left to criticize.

It doesn’t help.

Some nights, I don’t even call Callum.

I tell myself it’s because I’m too tired.

What I understand about Stellan Voss, over the months I work for him, is that he is genuinely brilliant.

That’s what makes everything else possible. The food is extraordinary. The kitchen is extraordinary. Being here means something extraordinary to your career. So he can be exactly who he is and the people around him will justify it.

Including me.

He never raises his voice. Instead he has this tone — like he’s genuinely puzzled by the gap between his expectations and what he’s been given. It carries way further than shouting, and it lands way harder.

And he deploys it selectively.

I understand around three months in that it lands on me more than on anyone else at my level, and I spend another month constructing reasons for this that don’t mean what I think they mean.

He questions my training. “Are you sure you trained in Paris? It’s interesting. The technique doesn’t show it. Maybe they go easier on the women there.”