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For Pete’s sake, why was Beef Wellington so ridiculously picky?
Casey poked at the mess on the cutting board with the tip of his dad’s chef’s knife. Why should it matter if the sirloin was at room temperature before you seared it? As for the whole searing thing, how hot was a hot pan supposed to be, anyway? And then you had to stick it in the fridge again?
“Jeez, meat, make up your mind,” Casey muttered.
If the meat wasn’t bad enough, there were the mushrooms—oh, excuse me—duxelles, not to mention the whole puff pastry nonsense. Casey had sort of forgotten about the egg wash until the thing had been in the oven for ten minutes already, so the pastry case had split, and things had gone from oops to oopser when Casey lost his grip and half-dropped the pan when he was transferring the sorry result to the cutting board.
“Maybe I can convince Uncle Walt it’s deconstructed Beef Wellington.”
Except even a deconstructed dish was supposed to be edible. His father had featured enough of them in his Michelin star restaurant over the years, and those had always been beautifully arranged on the plate too, with sculpted vegetable garnishes and artistic smears of colorful sauces.
This thing was less Wellington and more Waterloo.
He sighed and tossed the knife aside. There was no point in cutting into the stupid thing. It would taste just as dreadful as it looked, because apparently Casey sucked just as much at presentation as he did at preparation. But all the fuss and bother just seemed so pointless. All this work for a meal that would be over in an hour—less than an hour, actually, even if the chocolate hazelnut soufflé hadn’t fallen and the tomato-basil bisque hadn’t curdled.
Well, at least the salad would be edible. Casey reached out to tweak a leaf of butter lettuce into a less precarious position in the bowl and froze.
An unidentifiable insect was waving its antennae at him, a decidedly judgmental expression in its beady little eyes. Casey marched out of the narrow kitchen into his tiny living room and threw open the sash window. Then he returned, and holding the bowl at arms-length, he crept back to the window, careful not to jostle its contents. If Mr. Judgy Antenna swan dived off the salad, Casey would spend all night tracking him down because sharing his apartment with insects? No. Just no.
He dumped the bowl’s contents—including Mr. Judgy Antenna—into the window box, where the brilliant green of the lettuce mocked the withered brown remains of the violas Casey had optimistically planted in March.
Because, yeah. Casey wasn’t any better at gardening than he was at cooking.
He closed the window and trudged back to the kitchen to wash out the bowl. Uncle Walt would be here in less than thirty minutes, expecting Casey to have recreated one of Chez Donatien’s signature menus. Since the last seven times Casey had attempted to do so had been equally unsuccessful, Uncle Walt couldn’t possibly be surprised, although he would be disappointed. And Casey hated to disappoint his uncle, who’d been much more devastated at the death of his twin than Casey had been over the loss of his father.
Donald Friel had never been a warm, paternal presence in Casey’s life. Uncle Walt had always filled that role—attending school programs, taking Casey to playgrounds and amusement parks, arriving with special treats for every birthday and holiday—while Donald had been busy with the latest in his string of restaurants.
And frankly, Casey had been glad of that, because every meal with his father had been fraught with anxiety. If he didn’t eat everything on his plate, if he talked too much, if he talked too little—and heaven forbid he dropped a fork—Donald would lay into him as though Casey had destroyed the Pietà.
Yeah, thanks for that, Dad. Casey had endured years of therapy to overcome an eating disorder, and while he didn’t have trouble eating enough to stay healthy now, he still didn’t like to eat in front of other people. Just in case.
His therapist and Uncle Walt had never figured out the reason he hated meals. They chalked it up to losing his mother so early. And since Uncle Walt loved Donald’s food, and was as proud as any fond parent of his brother’s success and notoriety, he’d never realized that Casey’s experience had been vastly different.
Uncle Walt had found visits to Chez Donatien’s kitchen exciting and inspirational. Casey had merely been terrified, although he had discovered one pertinent fact: His father was as terse, disparaging, and vicious to everyone in his restaurant kitchen as he was at home, so it meant he didn’t hate Casey per se.
He was just a really unpleasant person.
If only Uncle Walt wasn’t determined to re-open the restaurant.
But Uncle Walt had decided, in his fraternal zeal, that the best way to honor his twin—who’d collapsed with a heart attack in the middle of dinner service—was to stage a grand reopening of Chez Donatien.
With Donald Friel’s only child as the chef.
This close to an MBA, Casey could admit that it was a solid idea from a promotional perspective. However, promotional gold would only go so far, because a restaurant couldn’t exist purely on hype.
People might come once, as an homage to Donald and perhaps because they were nostalgic about his food and the Chez Donatien experience. But once they tasted Casey’s attempts at his dad’s signature dishes? They’d certainly never come back.
Glumly, he scraped the singed and flattened soufflé into the garbage pail, stuck the dish into the sink, and turned on the tap. Maybe if he let it soak for about four hours, he could chip the petrified chocolate off its fluted edges.
“Or maybe I should just toss the dish. It’s not like I’ll ever use it again. After all, three strikes and you’re out.”
That wasn’t really fair, though. Today’s trio of soufflé fails weren’t the dish’s fault, and it was really rather lovely, the porcelain a delicate rose shading to peach, like a tequila sunrise. Once he sandblasted the remains of the last choco-catastrophe off it, maybe he could use it as a planter or something.
He remembered the viola corpses. Or maybe not.
A key rattled in the front door lock, and Casey’s belly plummeted. Uncle Walt.
He glanced wildly around the kitchen, but there was really nothing he could do to salvage the situation. Maybe if he made a quick call to the falafel restaurant downstairs—but no. Donald had always looked down on anything he labeled street food, and Uncle Walt, while he wasn’t averse to taking Casey to a food cart or hot dog stand when Donald was alive, was fully embracing his brother’s culinary biases now that Donald was gone.
