Soul Kitchen: A Novel (Rickey and G-Man Series, Band 4) - Softcover

Brite, Poppy Z.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307237656 ISBN 13: 9780307237651

Verlag: Crown, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

A sharp commentary on race relations in pre-Katrina New Orleans and a fast ride through the dark side of haute cuisine.

Liquor has become one of the hottest restaurants in town, thanks in part to chefs Rickey and G-man’s wildly creative, booze-laced food. At the tail end of a busy Mardi Gras, Milford Goodman walks into their kitchen—he’s spent the last ten years in Angola Prison for murdering his boss, a wealthy New Orleans restaurateur, but has recently been exonerated on new evidence and released. Rickey remembers him as an ingenious chef and hires him on the spot.

When a pill-pushing doctor and a Carnival scion talk Rickey into consulting at the restaurant they’re opening in one of the city’s “floating casinos,” Rickey recommends Milford for the head chef position and stays on to supervise. But soon Rickey finds himself medicating a kitchen injury with the doctor’s wares, and G-man grows tired of holding down the fort at Liquor alone. As the new restaurant moves toward its opening, Rickey learns that Milford’s past is inextricably linked with one of the project’s backers, a man whose intentions begin to seem more and more sinister.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Poppy Z. Brite is the author of two previous books in this series, Liquor and Prime, as well as five other novels and three short story collections. She lives in New Orleans with her husband, Chris, a chef.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Mardi Gras morning dawned dank and cold. The four cooks had already been at the restaurant for a couple of hours, preparing a krewe breakfast for Rickey's mother's truck parade.

Truck parades are a Carnival Day phenomenon unknown outside New Orleans. Rather than the ornate and glamorous confections boasted by the bigger, richer krewes, their floats are basically giant wooden boxes pulled by tractor-trailer cabs that blast their air horns incessantly as they roll through the streets. Each float's riders select a theme--Louisiana Sports Legends, say, or Favorite Desserts--and decorate their trailer in foil and crepe paper to reflect it. If they are feeling flush, they might invest in theme sweatshirts too, but many of the beads, cups, and trinkets they throw are caught from other parades earlier in the season or even the previous Mardi Gras. Truck parades are a part of blue-collar Carnival seldom seen by the tourists who frequent Bourbon Street, but a certain segment of the citizenry cherishes them.

John Rickey and Gary "G-man" Stubbs were not a part of that segment, at least not today. Because they owned a popular restaurant, Rickey's mother had convinced them to put on a breakfast buffet for the Krewe of Chalmatians, so named because most of its members were from New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward or the neighboring suburb of Chalmette. Rickey and G-man had grown up in the Lower Ninth Ward, but moved away when they turned eighteen, a little over a decade ago. The only vestiges of downtown that remained were their gritty Brooklynesque accents and a certain reluctance to take any shit off of anyone, be it a lazy line cook, a purveyor delivering inferior produce, or a diner with an unjustified complaint about his meal.

Having cooked together for fifteen years and lived together for the better part of that time, Rickey and G-man knew each other's kitchen habits by heart and worked together as efficiently as two hands washing one another. To fill out their crew this morning they had recruited Tanker, their dessert guy who was secretly a crackerjack saute cook, and Marquis, who was young but learning fast. He'd started out as a salad bitch, but now they let him work the hot line on slow nights. Today he would be in charge of keeping bacon, sausage, and toast coming out of the oven, topping up the water in the rented steam tables, and cutting celery for the Bloody Marys.

Tanker had reheated the big pot of crawfish etouffee they'd made last night and was now working on a giant batch of grits. G-man, Rickey's co-chef and the true workhorse of the kitchen, was adding clarified butter to egg yolks in a double boiler to make hollandaise sauce for Rickey's eggs Sardou. Tall and rangy, with short dark hair tucked under a purple New Orleans Hornets baseball cap, G-man scowled at the sauce through the dark glasses he habitually wore in any bright light. He had tried to talk Rickey out of this fussy and time-consuming dish, but Rickey had insisted on it. The restaurant's name, Rickey pointed out, was Liquor. All their dishes contained some form of booze, a perfect concept for New Orleans. Of course they weren't sticking to the gimmick for this breakfast, but Rickey felt that at least one dish should pack an alcoholic punch, so eggs Sardou it was: poached eggs with artichoke hearts, hollandaise, and an Herbsaint-laced spinach cream.

"Splooge," Rickey muttered as he tasted the spinach. Not as tall as G-man and a little paunchy from a lifetime of sampling his own dishes, he was handsome enough to have been anointed a glamour boy by the national food press, but his features were sharpened by a nervous tension that seldom left him even when he was drunk or sleeping. "Baby food. All this fucking shit is baby food. It's giving me flashbacks to when I had to work hotel brunch."

"So why'd you sign up?" said Tanker. "More to the point, why'd you sign us up? Nobody said you had to make breakfast for three hundred."

"It's not three hundred. I mean, they got like three hundred people in the krewe, but not all of them are gonna show up."

"You hope," G-man said.

"My mom made a signup sheet, OK? We got one-eighty coming in. We scoop it and poop it, they eat it, everybody's happy."

"Yeah, but why'd you agree to it in the first place?" Tanker persisted. "I mean, you're a prima donna, Rickey. You hate this kinda shit."

"I know it." Rickey pushed the blue bandanna up on his forehead and thumbed a stray drop of sweat out of his left eye. "But it's my mom, dude. She never asks me for anything."

"Except a couple grandbabies," G-man said. Rickey's mother had been doing her best to ignore G-man's role in her son's life for years now.

"Yeah, well, you know she's never getting 'em, so I figured we could do this for her. Besides, these clowns are paying pretty good."

"I think my momma wishes she'd quit getting grandbabies," said Marquis. "My sister, she just done had her fifth."

"Jesus."

"And the daddy don't help her out nohow."

"Same one for all five kids?" Tanker asked.

Marquis glanced up at him, seemed to measure whether such a fatuous white-boy question deserved any response at all, said, "Nah, dawg," and went back to laying out strips of bacon on a sheet pan.

G-man, the youngest of six children from an Irish-Italian family, silently counted himself lucky that his parents already had an even dozen grandchildren. Otherwise, his mother probably would have been pushing him and Rickey to get a kid from somewhere or other despite her strict Catholic beliefs. Of course, owning a restaurant was a lot like having a five-hundred-pound baby that never grew up. Originally financed by local celebrity chef, multimillionaire, and all-around shady businessman Lenny Duveteaux, Liquor was running under its own steam now, and they hoped to buy Lenny out with some money Rickey had inherited under strange circumstances the year before. Most of the inheritance was tied up in a piece of Texas property, however, and Lenny still owned twenty-five percent of Liquor. Fortunately, he was busy with his own two successful restaurants and mostly left Liquor alone.

Rickey put the spinach cream in the lowboy refrigerator at his station and headed back to the walk-in cooler to get a case of eggs. The other cooks had begged him to use a powdered mix for the scrambled eggs--it would have made his life far easier this morning, and if Rickey's life was easier, theirs were too--but such a shortcut simply wasn't in his nature. He might be a bit of a whore, he supposed, but he was no shoemaker. He would scramble the eggs slowly and gently in a double boiler, adding a knob of butter now and then, until they took on the perfect creaminess that was the only acceptable consistency for scrambled eggs as far as he was concerned. If the Chalmatians just shoveled the eggs into their hungry maws, too drunk to notice the difference, he would still have the satisfaction of knowing he had done them right. That satisfaction was one of the major things he lived for.

In the three years since it opened, Liquor had become not just a popular restaurant but a trendy one. Between Lenny's machinations, food-press enthusiasm, a prestigious James Beard award, and a couple of healthy doses of controversy, it was now one of the best-known new restaurants in New Orleans. (In a city where several eateries had been in business for a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307237656
• ISBN 13: 9780307237651
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar