This is my world. He’s mine to shepherd, mine to use. We shed our coats and I lead him to the kitchen, switch on the lights to reveal the clean stations, every surface dutifully scrubbed, each utensil in its place, every container labeled and put away. Every parcel of chrome shiny, every tile the purest white. He gives a little whistle. “Oh, that’s right,” I say, like it’s no big deal. “It’s been a while since you were back here.” “No one’s invited me in since.” So you were stuck, I want to say, like a vampire on a doorstep. I keep my vampire thoughts to myself.
This might be a good place to talk a little bit about restaurants, and what they mean to me. If you follow me on Instagram, you might have noticed that I'm a huge fan of the show The Bear. Some lines in the novel might resonate with the series (like the one about chefs existing in a blur of heat and chaos). But in truth, I wrote The Quiet Tenant before I had ever watched an episode of The Bear.
My slight obsession with restaurant kitchens dates back much further than that. It partly comes from the fact that I grew up in France, and chefs are revered over there. Another factor is that I love visiting places where I'm not supposed to be. I'm nosy like that. The first time I was allowed to step into a restaurant kitchen, I was around ten years old. It was my friend's birthday party, and somehow, that's what we did to celebrate, eat at a restaurant and tour the kitchen afterwads. (I have no idea how her parents pulled that off, or even thought to ask. Again: France!)
It was one of the most fun days of my entire life. As an adult, I've been lucky to eat at wonderful restaurants where a server offered to let us take a peek at the back, and it has always made my day.
When I was a student at Columbia Journalism School, I took a food reporting class, and my beat was Staten Island. Most weeks, I took the subway all the way to the southern tip of Manhattan, then the free ferry, and walked around Staten Island, the least walkable of New York City's five borrows, looking for food stories. I ended up in the kitchen (and walk-in fridge) of a Mexican restaurant where I had one of the best meals of my life. The chef had had his mother dictate the recipe for mole sauce over the phone from Puebla. To me, operating a restaurant has got to be a little bit like performance art, and the kitchen is where it all comes together. It will never not fascinate me.
In a deep twist of irony, I have never worked in a restaurant kitchen. I thought about it, briefly, back when I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, because I like high-pressure, fast-paced environments. But I thought a restaurant kitchen might fit that brief a little too well. I didn't think I could handle it. Then again, I ended up working in a newsroom, on a breaking news desk, which wasn't exactly relaxing, either.
While writing The Quiet Tenant, I got to revisit my obsession. I mean, it was almost inevitable. Restaurants are ideal settings for novels—everyone has a role they're supposed to adhere to, so if they step out of it, *things* are bound to happen. They are (as my repeated viewings of The Bear have informed me) primed for conflict, which is exactly what you want on the page.
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