On the fourth of May, 2016, at five-ten and fifteen seconds, in a small home in Algeria, the very last of the day's sunlight pours in through the windows of a room, casting warm light over a collection of plants in pots and bottles on the floor, hanging from the ceiling and lined up across shelves. Their roots are firm in soil. They have small and large leaves hanging low and rising up, all varying in so many shades of green, all alive and thriving—a quiet miracle of a garden.
At that exact moment a young girl in Zagreb steals 200 kuna—28.17 U.S. dollars—and pockets it to give to the houseless old man she passes by each day on her walk to school.
At the very same second, in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, Martine Fauchard, a woman in her mid-seventies, reaches the apex of her orgasm, the last one of her life before she passes away peacefully in the arms of her lover, a woman ten years her junior who she met, fell in love with, and married within five months of her beloved husband's passing.
Still at five-ten and fifteen seconds, the headlights of an Eighth Avenue-bound L train make their first appearance at the Myrtle-Wyckoff Avenue stop in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Sydney Adamu, twenty-one years old, currently a student in her final year at the Culinary Institute of America, watches as the train approaches, stands aside for the passengers getting off, then steps in and settles in a seat.
Sydney should be in her Women in Leadership course, but she's skipping it in favor of forty-eight hours in New York. She plans to fill those hours with food, food, and more food. She is not a careless student, and in fact her fastidiousness and eagerness to apply what she learns—welcome at the CIA but seen by those who don't know her well as an obnoxious and overbearing personality—is evident in the itinerary she's made for herself, a document she began working on as a long-limbed, kinky-haired tween and which she refined throughout high school and her years in culinary school—adding and removing restaurants, calculating the cost of travel and each meal, writing names and one-sentence biographies of chefs—and which she finalized the previous spring, when she called each restaurant, save one, to make her reservations a year out. Now her arms and legs fit her body, though she still seems tall because of her thinness. Years of standing long hours and handling knives and heavy cookware have made her legs strong and her hands swift and sure, if not beautiful. She is still kinky-haired, but she's spent more years without a mother than she has cooking, enough to learn how to wear afros, blowouts, box braids, two-strand twists, and more. For just a couple weeks now she's had her hair styled in half-cornrows and half-box braids, the better for her to eat and work without it slipping over her shoulders and into her dishes.
Tomorrow Sydney plans to head to Russ & Daughters in the Lower East Side for a breakfast of whitefish salad with wasabi-infused roe and horseradish cream cheese on a plain bagel, with potato latkes with applesauce and sour cream; then she'll ride the F and 6 trains uptown for fresh-made croissants, babka, and donuts at Orwashers in the Upper East Side, and follow it up with a walk around Central Park, Lincoln Center, and Columbus Circle. She'll sample anything and everything delicious she sees along the way, whether it be in a shop or at a stand or food truck. For lunch she'll head back downtown, this time to Soho, where she'll have the consommè alsacienne, the sea bass, and the shrimp and green tomato vinaigrette at Le Coucou, chef Daniel Rose and restauranteur Stephen Starr's nod to old-school French dining.
For dinner she'll go Italian. Lilia is a Williamsburg spot that just opened in the winter, owned and run by Missy Robbins, who's worked at Spiaggia back home in Chicago and has earned a Michelin star at both A Voce locations. Sydney hopes in a quarter century she'll have two Michelin stars to add to the small list of women who've earned them, a restaurant to her name, and even more—she's greedy, openly so. She has no shame about it, and her work and determination match her ambition. Little pay and brutal hours, racial and gender homogeneity, and an insistence on a monopoly of her attention don't frighten her—she loves the work itself; when she has no one to keep her warm, it will keep her company. At Lilia she plans to have the cacio e pepe fritelle; grilled clams with Calabrian chile and breadcrumbs; grilled lamb leg steak with roman spices, celery heart, and pecorino; and the olive-oil cake with persimmon, grappa, and honey whipped cream. She'll eat Missy's food and it will be a bearer, like the animal bridegroom that lived east of the sun and west of the moon. She'll clamber on his broad back, grip him tight between her knees and by the fur on his neck, and he will carry her to the future she desires.
But first, EMP. It's where she's headed tonight and where she'll spend the bulk of the money she's been saving up for four years. This is the one restaurant she had to call only a few weeks before, since their reservations are made on a one month basis. They have a new chef. He's young, but already holds a string of shiny accolades. A wunderkind, the kind the bright white fine dining world Sydney aims to thrive in puts through the maw of celebrity to seduce those who've never worked in a kitchen into believing it is a hallowed place. In her notebook, next to his name, Sydney's written, 'Twenty-five. Noma. Best New Chef. Just started, so not sure about him, but I trust EMP.'
At the Morgan Avenue stop two dark-skinned black boys enter the subway car bearing instruments. It is now approximately forty minutes before the event that will change Sydney's life forever, but for the moment she is oblivious to this. She glances up at the two boys briefly and thinks only that they look a few years younger than she is. She's right; one is seventeen, the other eighteen. Both were admitted to Juilliard the previous fall, not-quite prodigies, but talented enough to have been offered full scholarships. The younger boy plays the violin and comes from a long line of performers. He has an ancestor who toured the United States playing the fiddle in the mid-1800s, a great aunt who ran away from home to dance in a chorus line, cousins who appeared on Soul Train in the 1970s, a Carnegie Mellon-educated brother who's played 'Thug #3' and 'Thug #5' on two different Law & Order shows, and a mother and sister who sing in the church choir. The other boy is South African by birth and German by adoption. He plays the cello. He does not know much about his birth family, but he chose to study in New York over training with the Berlin Philharmonic in hopes of putting some distance between himself and the whiteness of his upbringing.
The train closes its doors, lurches towards its next stop. The boys share a silent look and a nod, unseen by Sydney, and together they launch into a series of instrumental renditions of pop songs. Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe' and Janet Jackson's 'Together Again,' Beyonce's 'Alien Superstar' and Clean Bandit's 'Rather Be.' The boys have done this before. Busking started out as a joke between them, but then became something else; something more, something real, and perhaps even something essential to who they are to and with one another. For them music has always been a language, but this is a new one. They created it through what they share, and to speak it they need to invite others to listen. Their music is transcendent. Passengers who were looking at their phones, haggard and mindless after a day of work, turn from them first with annoyance, then to them with interest, to them with smiles breaking across their faces. They recognize the music, and it brings them back to themselves. Joy dances between the boys, leaps from their fingers to their instruments, and from their instruments to each person in the subway car with them. It transforms the passengers into an audience, and their listening and attention in turn transforms the boys into performers. They barely stop between their songs, and it leaves their audience breathless. Their anticipation spills into their satisfaction, spiking it, and their satisfaction makes their anticipation more pleasurable for having been met. The boys don't stop at all for passengers getting on or off, but their audience claps and whistles and cheers over their music anyway, with it. Sydney claps, too, and the sound of her appreciation becomes a part of the music.
These boys will spend years as the closest of friends, calling each other late nights, sharing fears and secrets that would otherwise never be spoken. They'll exchange letters and gifts, meet one another's lovers, fly across countries to tend to each other when despair threatens or sickness falls. And after more than a decade on separate continents playing in different orchestras, they'll meet again in a city very far from New York. They'll be older, leaner from years of work they share a passion for but that pays little, with a better knowledge of their own desires and tastes. And in a quiet corner of a bustling café they'll share a cigarette, caress one another's hands, and admit their love for one another; days later they'll be married.
Of course, the boys don't know this now. And of course, Sydney doesn't either. But she recognizes the thing that lies between them, because she is familiar with love. She was raised beneath its canopy, after all.
Emmanuel and Josette Adamu had a quiet romance, boy meets girl, simple in its telling, but true. They were married five years before it was cut short. Death made Sydney an only child raised by a single father, and variations of the word—only, single—have been with her most her life—one, lone, sole, alone. She has no memories of her own of her mother; instead she has memories of the stories her father's told her. Sydney's childhood is thick with them, and from them she knows how her mother drove herself from Louisiana to the SAIC campus in a beat up '83 Toyota Corolla with 50 dollars to her name and became the first woman in her family to attend college. She knows how her parents met, that her mother had a loud laugh, what her mother liked to eat and cook, what her mother's favorite books and songs and movies were, and more.
There are some stories her father doesn't tell her, but even as a child Sydney understands that her mother died very young. It's the explanation for why she and her father visit a grave each Mother's Day instead of buying a card at a convenience store. Sydney's learned about lupus on her own, first through Google searches, then through books and journals at the library, and it's only very recently that she's begun to feel it, how close she's getting to the age her mother died. She has a little over five years, and in six she'll be older than her mother ever got a chance to be. She tracks her life alongside what she knows of her mother's, doodles parallel lines with dots, a topological map with a definite end. At her age her mother'd already met and married her father, was already planning to be a mother, already living as a commercial artist.
In place of the stories her father cannot tell her, Sydney imagines. Her mother welcomed love, married Emmanuel after only knowing him a few months; her mother welcomed anger, flouted her parents' expectations and went to school, started a whole other life, up north; her mother welcomed her own interests and idiosyncrasies, applying to and attending an art school to study the processes and traditions of textiles. Sydney imagines Josette was so fearless, so eager for life, because she knew she'd have little of it. When she sees pairings that she's never been a part of, or at least has no memory of, mothers and daughters out eating or shopping, sometimes arm in arm, sometimes looking so much alike their relationship cannot be mistaken, Sydney imagines the person she would be had her mother lived.
She doesn't have to imagine what her mother left behind. Five years was enough for her father to never marry again. Sydney's met a few of the women he's dated. In seventeen years there've only been three, and of the three only one her father dated for more than a year, and even she was never invited over to the Adamu home for dinner. Sydney hopes her father's lied to her, has dated more women and kept it from her, because early mornings when she lies awake in her bed before her alarm goes off, she's able to be honest with herself—that sometimes the stories her father's told her leave her scared. It scares her that love can be so strong it alters the makeup of a life, leaves a person lonely for most of it. It scares her that love can be felt more deeply than anything else, make it so that after it's gone a person is left only with duller experiences. Sydney knows loves is real, but she doesn't believe in it. Instead she believes in a kitchen and what she can do in one; that belief inspires less fear in her than the knowledge she has, the reality that love can outlast life and give birth to a loneliness so deep a person might not recognize herself without it. Because her father wasn't supposed to be lonely. He'd been brave enough for love, had opened himself up to it wholly, and instead of a wife and the possibility of many children, he's lived in widowhood.
Sydney's loneliness is different from her father's. It's almost a comfort to her, she's had it so long. Like her limbs, it was too big for her when she was a child, and she stumbled over it. But it grew with her, got taller as she did, wider as she did, until it fit her; and as she learned more of the world, she learned more of loneliness, too. Now Sydney feels she's at a tipping point, where her familiar loneliness is set to outgrow her again, be bigger than her body and her imagination and her desire, and she'll have to run around trying to find ways to catch up to it, to reign it in so it's not the first thing someone sees in her. It's uncomfortable, missing someone she doesn't remember, knowing her mother so well while having spent most of her life without her. Sydney's loneliness spills into longing and she feels, sometimes, that her mother isn't hers. She wants for someone to be hers. She wants to have her own stories to tell about a person. She wants a person she knows in a way no one else does, so that when she speaks their name it means something different to her than what is heard, so that when she speaks of them it has to be a translation, an approximation, because she's the only one who knows the truth of them.
To work against this longing that's like a pain, Sydney turns again to her imagination. But instead of wondering how her mother ended up in Chicago and met her father there—is that fate, or is it choice?—she wonders about food. How would sweet plantains taste with a duck confit? Hollandaise over an open breakfast sandwich? She takes what touches her and puts it into the food she wants to make: the cadence of her steps as she walks to her classes, the look of leaves on tree branches made almost translucent from sunlight pouring through them, her father's favorite colors and her mother's hometown, the way she felt when she got her CIA acceptance letter. She makes a marriage of cuisines, Nigerian stews with Caribbean rice, Italian seafood with creole seasoning, and pairs flavors with textures. Shapes and space and shadow and color; she takes architecture, the mother of all arts, and pares it down to something essential. Every living person needs food. But even in this Sydney can sense her mother—back home she and her father have drawers and boxes full of the textiles Josette worked on for her independent projects, and her largest finished piece hangs on the living room wall.
When she'd applied to the CIA and gotten in, all Sydney'd felt was eagerness. She wanted to be a chef, wanted to learn alongside others who cared about what she did, and she wanted the degree that would prompt others to see her the way she already thought of herself. She hadn't thought of it as being away from home, and so the fierceness of how she missed it had come as a shock. It's something else she notes on her map, that she will return to Chicago because it has claims on her, while her mother had died there, having made it a new home after having left her old one. Sydney's first two Marches away were brutal. She is the only person in Hyde Park who knows her mother. Josette Adamu doesn't mean anything to her professors and classmates. Her father isn't next to her to mimic her mother's Southern accent, or to remind her she'd been loved by her. On her mother's birthday just a few weeks ago, he hadn't told her a story she knew so well that she helped him in the telling of it. They just FaceTimed, fifteen minutes of reminiscing, a poor imitation of celebration. This food tour, Orwashers, Lilia, EMP, and Russ & Daughters, is Sydney's answer to guard against what's happened the past few years—the way her mother's birthday followed so closely by Mother's Day scrambled her brain, made her anxious and hyperactive, searching and searching for something to ease her though she already knew nothing could take the place of a mother.
Eleven Madison Park has high walls, marble floors, wide windows that look out onto the park and are bracketed by long, pale curtains, and lighting that is both bright and warm. Around its perimeter are leather booths, and down its middle are rows of low-top rectangular tables covered in creamy white cloth. The chairs are upholstered, with curved backs and sloping arms, and sculptured greenery and flowers in crystal vases reach up high on top of credenzas. To the right upon entering, the bar is cozy to the rest of the restaurant's generous use of space, with a lower ceiling and and a lighted wall housing its liquor; but the entire place is polished, gorgeous, and bountiful. The service complements the setting. It is impeccable. Welcoming, friendly, and attentive, but not hovering or overly familiar. Sydney is brought to her seat with a genuine grin, and the maître d's clear delight in his work effects her—she wants to be delighted like him, have pride in this place as he does, and so she is and so she does. She takes it all in, even her own reaction to it, with wide eyes and a racing mind. Everything is calculated to be impressive, and even though Sydney's aware of the calculation, it works. She's never been put off by obvious effort, and here, in a place that demands her awe, she cements her own commitment to always doing her best, even at the risk of looking uncool. She makes mental notes for when she opens her own place—the kind of art she'll use, the spacing of her tables, the lighting, who she'll hire and why, and the uniforms her crew will wear. Her spot will be smaller, surely, but it will be just as great—no, better.
Her meal, ten courses, all excellently paced by the serving team: it begins with a black and white cookie, a New York City staple re-imagined as a savory treat with apple and cheddar; next is a selection of amuse-gueules stacked in a hexagonal tiffin carrier—a fava bean croquette with smoked bacon and shallots, whitefish salad (sturgeon with roe) with baby radishes, snow peas, and amaranth, morel mousse with rye crisps, and a Wellfleet oyster with caviar; then is a caviar benedict made with quail egg, caviar, ham, and spring onion, accompanied by miniature English muffins. For the next few courses she gets to choose what she wants. Sydney chooses the foie gras over the the fluke marinated with peas and grapefruit; it comes on a small bed of fava beans and beneath a sorrel leaf, with a spoonful of sorrel sauce and amaranth grains. Between a lobster pie and red snapper she choses the snapper, which comes with with mushrooms, clams, fava beans and a nettle sauce, and is topped by a potato tuille. Then is asparagus braised in a pig's bladder that's removed from it table-side, then plated with with a potato puree and black truffle. She sips on some duck and lamb broth, and then has Spring lamb variations with romaine, head cheese, and a ginger lamb broth with sides of new potatoes and morel mushrooms. Her "cheese" course is a Camembert gougère with two sauces, one made of rhubarb and the other of spring onion. For dessert she has a cranberry and pear-filled donut with mulled wine ice cream. Throughout the sommelier brings her champagne and ale that pair with each plate. To end her visit, she's given a chocolate pretzel with a bottle of apple brandy to take home, along with EMP's signature granola, and a box of chocolates and salted caramel treats.
It takes Sydney over four hours to eat it all. Had she been impressed before? No. Each bite of the four hours she spends eating reveals this to her, that her initial impression had just been amusement, like her eye catching on glitter before her gaze lands on a natural pearl, lustrous and iridescent. There is no calculation in the food, in how it's made and how it tastes; there's only a dazzling, astonishing marriage of knowledge, talent, and skill.
At first she tries to note ingredients and methods of cooking, but then her judgement is so well pleased that she can't focus on the process. She needs all of her attention for the meal itself. It is sublime. Everything falls away in front of it, like rock off a cliff being hit by the sea—her anxieties, her awkwardness, her eagerness. Her loneliness. All of it, gone. All that's left is pleasure. Sydney is suffused with it. She feels hot with it. She'd be embarrassed, but her meal leaves no space for anything other than goodness. She feels grateful. She eats everything, scrapes her knives and forks along each plate, sucks very last bit of sauce off the tines. She gives each course its due, first appreciating the presentation and then closing her eyes and breathing deeply when the food is in her mouth so that all her senses can take part in her eating. The food is a revelation. It looks beautiful, tastes beautiful, feels beautiful. It is delicious, and that…that's impressive. Having eaten it, she is transformed.
Towards the end of her meal, the maître d invites her to tour the kitchen, where she can see the chefs at their stations and meet the chef de cuisine. 'Twenty-five. Noma. Best New Chef. Just started, so not sure about him, but I trust EMP.' But now Sydney is convinced. Not by EMP, but by him. In six years she'll make a different decision, but now she shies away from meeting him. She wants the experience of her meal to be inviolable, just her, the food he made her, and the gratification it brought her.
She leaves the restaurant blindly, all her senses still with her meal. She wanders the dark of the city slowly, makes her way through the park. She wonders about the CDC she chose not to meet. Does he feel the way she does when she's cooking? That it's an act of creation unlike anything else because it involves making beauty a person can taste, making beauty that will serve as literal nourishment? Does he both lose and meet himself in front of a stove, grow beyond his body so that he's no longer confined to it, but instead is boundless and free, honest and sure? Does he anticipate the reaction his food will get? Did he anticipate what he would do to her? She knows already that she won't go to any of the other restaurants on her list. Whatever she'd been looking for she'd found in the meal she'd just had, and anything following it cannot stand before it. Sydney is so well sated that it's hard for her to think about want. Recognition, a star or maybe two, she still wants these. But her desire has been refined, redefined. Acknowledgement of her talent and skill is expected and will be wonderful. But doing to someone what's just been done to her, changing a person, making a person feel so good with her food—now Sydney knows that's what she has to offer the world. Doing for others and doing it through food, that's the best of herself. She will offer sustenance and care to the people she feeds, and through this act of service she'll skewer their loneliness as well as her own, and usher in joy.
Around her, the night is uncharacteristically chilly for May. She doesn't have a jacket with her, but Sydney feels at one with the world. She is at one with the seat beneath her, the maple, ginko, linden, and London plane trees around her, and the night sky that stretches like a hand to hold all New York's lights and life and noise. She is experiencing a small miracle. Her loneliness is away from her, and with it, her need to prove that she is good. She exists, simply, and doesn't need to offer justification. She is full of love. She is so full of love. The taste of her meal lingers in her mouth, on her tongue. She touches fingers to her lips and with that same mouth she speaks aloud the name of the chef who'd made her a meal that brought her perfect satisfaction. "Carmen," she says, "Carmen Berzatto."
