Read A Taste of the Nightlife Online
Authors: Sarah Zettel
A Taste of the Nightlife
Table of Contents
A DEADLY DILEMMA
By the time I hailed a cab to take me and my four bags of fresh produce back to Nightlife, the sun was well up and the city wore her gaudy daytime face. My sleepless night dragged at me, but fresh food and the fellowship of my peers had taken the desperate edge off my outlook. I would make myself breakfast and do some experimental cooking until noon. Who knew? Word of our little drama might actually draw in dinner gawkers. We should be ready, just in case.
I paid off the cabbie at the front door and set down my overflowing paper bags on the sidewalk to fish my keys out of my purse. I cranked the lock, shouldered the door open, and froze.
A man’s body lay sprawled on the floor, right in front of the host station. His arms were thrown out wide and his blue eyes stared at the ceiling. Two big red holes gaped against the white flesh of his throat.
He was very obviously dead.
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First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, July 2011
Copyright © Tekno Books, 2011
ISBN : 978-1-101-51631-7
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To Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Bela Lugosi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I very much want to thank Esther M. Friesner and Lisa Leutheuser for their help in making this book happen. I also want to thank Vanessa Sly for taking the time to share her experiences in the world of professional kitchens, and Chef Alex Young and the crew at Zrman’s Roadhouse (especially Javier), who let me into the kitchen to see the Friday night dinner rush firsthand. Additional thanks are due to Joseph Fodera of Worldwide Security Consulting, Inc., who helped me get Charlotte properly arrested in New York.
In addition, and as always, I’d like to thank the Untitled Writers Group and the Excelsior Writers Group for their patient and helpful commentary.
And finally, I’d like to thank Marty Greenberg, the wonderful person who made this book possible.
1
“Charlotte! We got Anatole Sevarin!”
I replied to this news with the most reasonable words in the most reasonable tone I could manage:
“Get out of my kitchen!”
In case you think I overreacted, let me tell you that my kitchen is in the back of Nightlife, the restaurant I co-own with my brother, Chet. It was Chet who had just charged shouting past the hot line in the middle of the dinner rush.
“Did you hear me?” My brother waved his cell phone over his head excitedly. “Anatole Sevarin!”
I heard him. I also heard:
“Fire two duck!”
“Pick up twelve! Pick up nine!”
“Where’s my carpaccio?”
“Nineteen one and two want those specials no ’shrooms.”
It was Friday night and the house was packed. Because we cater to vampires, paranormals and their guests, our dinner rush happens later than at most places, even in autumn, but I’d already been on my feet for eight hours. My sous chef, Zoe, was out because her mother was in the hospital (note to self: call, find out diet restrictions, send decent food), so I was doing her job as well as mine. We had way too many order tickets on the “dupe slide” over the cold prep station, and in another hour the vampire theater crowd would be out looking for someplace to eat. We had to get those full tables served, satisfied and cleared.
So I looked up at my brother and said, “Get. Out. Of. My.
Kitchen!
”
“Robert’s seating him at table twenty-four.” Chet grinned so widely I could see his fangs.
Did I mention my brother’s a vampire? Which—aside from the fact that he didn’t belong there—was why I really didn’t want him in my kitchen; never mind if the city’s most prominent undead dining critic had just walked in without a reservation. Chet has a tendency to forget how flammable he is these days. He says I forget how fast he is. I say they’re called flash fires for a reason, and I am not going to sweep him off the floor. He can just lie there and be ashy. He says the health inspectors would write me up.
I say then he’d better stay the hell out of my kitchen.
You can see that of the two of us, I am the reasonable one.
Right then, however, he just stood there grinning like an undead idiot, and I knew he wasn’t going to move until I acknowledged his news. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, but I could hear the ticket machine chattering away and on the stove three sauces and two gravies started to bubble ominously.
“I’ll talk to you after rush!” I told “Now,
get
!”
Seemingly chastened, my brother slunk toward the door, but between one eyeblink and the next, he’d whisked back, grabbed me, swung me around and set me down.
“Yes, Chef!” he called, already gone.
The kitchen had gone unnaturally quiet. As soon as my vision cleared, I was greeted by the unprecedented and most unwelcome sight of my staff standing still.
“What?” I demanded. “Have we closed early?”
“No, Chef!” the crew chorused.
“Tonight we are
perfect
—get me?” Anatole Sevarin wrote the dining column for
Circulation
, the number one city paranormal publication, in print or online. There was no point in treating him as less than a VIP just because Chet had ticked me off. “And I see all the plates for twenty-four, before they go out and when they come back!”
“Yes, Chef!”
I stepped back up to my station in the middle of the hot line, ignoring some highly suspicious grins.
The cacophony resumed.
We got Anatole Sevarin.
My heart sang as I tasted our special scarlet-eye gravy for seasoning and added a grind of pepper.
We got Anatole Sevarin!
Nightlife has come a long way from the time when Chet was sleeping days in the walk-in refrigerator to save rent and we had to deal with antivamp protesters on our doorstep. The idea of “night and day” dining establishments is still relatively new. It’s been ten years since the Equal Humanity Acts recognized vamps, weres and other “human derived paranormal peoples” as, well, people. The idea that humans and vampires might be willing to sit down together at a table, in public, is one that still gets pooh-poohed around the restaurant world. In fact, the words “freak show” have been used more than once.