The Imaginary Dinner

Lucky Peach
Fall 2013

I met Diane in 1994, or rather she found me. It was an early spring afternoon and I was in the kitchen of my first restaurant, Babette’s. I was always in the kitchen then. It was all I knew, the thrum of rattling hoods and slamming doors, the fluorescent lights, the smell of roasting onions and just-cut herbs and long-simmered stocks. It wasn’t really much of a home, but it was mine, and when I was young I left it reluctantly.

On that day I was summoned to the front room, and when I saw Diane my wariness dissolved. I liked her instantly. She radiated energy, dark hair springing from her head in a chaotic jumble of curls, her eyes shimmering behind round glasses. She looked at me for a split second before striding forward and taking my hand in a confident, inti-mate way. “My name is Diane,” she said. “I hear you’re doing something different here. We should talk.”

And we did, about cooking and vegetables and dirt and farms and the life force of plants. She was a farm consultant and advocate, a lover of growing things and the peo-ple who grew them. She spoke in quick, explosive bursts, punctuating her sentences with vigorous hand gestures. Somehow an hour passed and by the time I returned to the kitchen I was hopelessly behind in the evening’s preparations, our conversation burning in my mind like a kind of fire that lingered for days.

I spent a lot of time with Diane in those early years. She taught me about how things grew, and why there were flavor and intensity variations in the same plants from different farms. She taught me about water, seeds, and soil, and how growing was a process, kind of like cooking, dependent on the skill of the farmer. She encouraged me to trust my instincts when I tasted, to analyze what was actually in front of me, unmediated by expectation. More than that, she inspired me with her wide-eyed enthusiasm for everything. Under the bright lights of the kitchen I could see only problems and mistakes, but for her the world was always beautiful and unscarred.

Diane was obsessive in a way that I understood. She saw the whole continuum, from seed to plate,
and was fascinated by what happened after she dropped something off. One time she showed up with mulberries so fragrant that heads turned at the far end of the kitchen when she walked in the back door. “You have to try these,” she told me, which was utterly unnecessary.

The second I smelled them I immediately dropped the squash that I was shaving into ribbons and started walking toward her. The mulberries were large, and so soft they barely held their shape when touched. Diane had laid them in a single layer on the bottom of a box lined with paper towels, not one of them stacked on top of the others. I had never seen berries handled with such reverence. “There are just a few extra; do you want them?” she asked. “You need to use them tonight. They won’t last. You can’t refrigerate them. Do something simple.”

This last instruction was delivered with way more emphasis than the situation required, because only an idiot would have transformed them in any way. They were ethereal, the thick juice bound in the barest of skins, achingly sweet with just enough underlying acidity to drive the aftertaste, and penetrating aromatics that even now I remember with exquisite clarity.

My friendship with Diane was as close as I ever came to having a mentor. I was a kid when I opened my first place, with a resumé full of mediocre kitchens. I knew what I wanted—to cook at the highest level like the chefs I’d read about in books, but I had no idea how to get there. Without schooling or training my cooking was idiosyncratic, tuned to some interior key whose origin I couldn’t explain. Despite my outward confidence, I was afraid of everything: success, failure, people, anything outside of my kitchen.

Sonoma, with its Italian heritage and casual mien, was a strange place for an ambitious restaurant in those days, an impossible place where no matter how long we stayed we would always be outsiders, and I knew that in my bones the way I knew the changing seasons. I felt the locals’ rolling eyes and gnashing teeth even as I turned away, hiding in my work. Only sometimes, late at night, did I think about escape.

As the second year bled into the third, the third year turned into the fourth, and the fourth became the fifth, the restaurant found far greater acclaim than I’d ever imag-ined. There were awards and big articles, back when newspapers and magazines were all that mattered. But our little town could not keep us busy enough to survive. When our lease ended I moved back to San Francisco, where I opened a new, shiny restaurant, full of promise. The reviews were fantastic, but after 9/11, our business wasn’t.

That restaurant changed how I cooked, or maybe I changed. I’d been burned by the failure of the first restaurant. I read other menus like tea leaves, trying to figure out what people wanted. Far away from the farms and woods I once haunted, I resorted to distributors and mail-order ingredients tucked into plastic containers. I stopped going to markets. I fell out of touch with Diane, though I don’t remember why. As I struggled to keep the business going, I found myself drifting in the kitchen, too. The food was good enough—it was interesting and creative—but it lacked something. “Soul” would be a simplistic way to put it, but it was more than that: it was the synergy that happens when there is a perfect balance between emotion and discipline, ingredients and imagination. Business dwindled, and eventually I closed the restaurant and subsided into an uneasy fallow period.

A few years later, I ran into Diane while shopping for Coi, a tiny, quirky restaurant that I opened when I couldn’t find a job. I knew that in order for the restaurant to succeed I had to find acceptance in my own community, so I based the cooking on local products and referenced local culinary tropes. From the beginning, I controlled everything tightly, picking every product and creating every dish. The farmer’s market was the lifeblood of how I cooked, and it was there, on a sunny winter day in early 2007, that I saw Diane again. She looked completely unchanged, her eyes bright, her smile undiminished. She hugged me and then immediately began scrutinizing my purchases.

“Where did you get these blood oranges?” she asked. “The ones at Paredez are better.”

It was like we’d never fallen out of touch.

We began seeing each other at the markets, a few times a week. Diane’s daughter, Ally, had opened a restaurant with her husband, Laurence. Diane did much of their buying. She knew everyone, and, it seemed at times, everything. She shared information about the farmers and scolded me whenever I left a strawberry untasted. It was exhausting, but I was grateful. She was a kindred spirit, constitutionally unable to compromise.

Maybe another reason we got along so well was that we were both resolutely, unapologetically
dreamers. Like fog, we drifted above the everyday world in a haze of infinite possibility. So when she decided that she wanted to start a café, an undertaking for which she had absolutely no experience, I was neither surprised nor dismayed.

She asked me for advice, which was funny, since her daughter was the one who ran the kind of casual, much-loved place that could serve as a model. I was the one who owned an expensive, polarizing, perpetually struggling restaurant. But of course I agreed to help, because, if nothing else, it was an excuse to get together more often.

She ended up taking over a small café in an art academy. She had big plans: transforming the student diet, attracting neighborhood residents to enjoy the sweeping views, plant-ing the hillside below with a terraced herb garden. But restaurants—even small cafés—are hard. They’re pub-lic arenas where dreams are taken apart limb by limb. She fumed when the kids didn’t want to pay $1 for organic apples, struggled with staff, and generally worked too hard without making any money. She eventually gave it up, but by then we had decided to start a farm.

This new plan was met with some hesitation.

“You know,” said Ally, “my mom is not the most sensible person. You’re going to have to take care of the business side of it.” I knew that. And I felt confident that, somehow, it would all work out.

We started meeting regularly to outline the kind of farm we wanted. We talked about regions, climate, crops. I wanted some animals as well—an integrated environment. A few weeks later, Diane set up a meeting with a farm owner who was thinking of selling. We met at my house and drove north, across the Golden Gate Bridge and into the rolling hills that sprawl toward the coast. As we rounded a corner, the hillside dropped off into a tangle of gray shrub streaked with green, the valley below parched and brittle from a long, dry summer. Diane looked out the window, staring across the canyon, tapping her fingers on the armrest.

“There’s one thing I need to tell you,” she said finally. She was fighting an illness. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but at some point I may need to step away from the project. Not for many years, I hope.” I looked over at her, the expression on her face as determined as ever, and it seemed so remote, so unlikely.

We spent the afternoon walking the farm. The farmer and Diane had known each other for years, since the beginning of the modern farm-ing movement in Northern California. They reminisced about the old days, talking about friends and the history they shared, telling stories about how the area had grown and changed over the decades. Some of things I knew, many I didn’t, and I kept quiet, listening, enjoying the obvious pleasure they took in each other’s company. We ended up at his house, next to the farm, where his wife joined us.

We sat in a small room adjacent to the kitchen, drinking tea and eating cookies that his wife had made, the scent of sun-warmed Meyer lemons drifting in through the open windows. We discussed the farm and what we wanted, how we thought it could grow, how we would care for something to which he had devoted his life. As we drove back we talked animatedly of the future, seeing our lives spilling out in front of us.

The project got put on hold shortly after that, because that summer I worked harder than ever. The restaurant had finally gained momentum, and I could feel that it was our moment to become busy, if only I could try a little harder, do a little better. It left scant time for socializing, and the next time I saw Laurence was at a market in early October. He looked tired. “Diane got sick over the weekend,” he told me. “We had to take her to the hospital. Spent the last two days taking care of the baby while Ally was with her. Not a lot of sleep.”

He yawned and said that Diane was back home now and all seemed fine. He ambled off to another vendor and I didn’t think much of it. Over the next ten days we traded calls and text messages. Diane went back into the hospital and stayed there. I asked to see her. Laurence demurred. I waited.

There’s an old saw in the food media: what would you eat for your last meal? It’s a tedious exercise, the answers usually involving tins of caviar and giant lobes of foie gras,  all washed down with 1961 Lafite. But cooks ask a different question: what would we cook for someone else’s last meal? We cook at wakes and funerals. We cook for family and friends when they’re sick. When babies are born, at weddings and birthdays, we cook. But seldom do we have the chance to cook for someone we love when we know that they’re dying.

Diane was dying. I knew this, but I still couldn’t believe it. I kept waiting for the call that everything was fine. I was distracted with work and a new baby, and I pushed the anxious thoughts away until, all in a rush, it would hit me that I might not see her again, and for a few minutes the world would dance around jittery, unsettled, lapsing uneasily back into order. I remember the weather that fall. It didn’t start raining until late, the sum-mer petering out into a tepid limbo, everything washed in cool, vacant light. I felt like I was floating, unable to stick to the ground. The restaurant was doing well, but success had come so late that I almost didn’t recognize it.

For a while, there was talk that Diane would be able to leave the hospital for a visit. It might have been that I imagined it, or that I took the barest shred of a suggestion and turned it into an actual possibility, but I immediately started to think about what I could cook for her if we could have one last meal. I began to obsess. While driving and shopping and washing dishes and peeling carrots I kept imagining, over and over, what that dinner would be like. I pictured our dining room at home, the towering trees lining the road outside the windows and the city buildings in the distance, glowing like rubies at sunset. I saw the candles being lit as the last daylight drained from the room, everyone sitting around the rough-hewn wood table talking and eating and drinking and laughing, even though there was so little to laugh about.

I kept writing and rewriting the menu in my mind. How could I make a meal that expressed everything I knew and remembered and felt about her? How could I compress fifteen years of emotions into a few small plates of food? How could I say goodbye? I started thinking about her favorite farms. I could use ingredients from each one, grown by people she’d known and loved for decades. Each radish, beet, and leaf of spinach would bring with it memories of walking through fields and pulling vegetables from the dirt, the smell of basil in the August heat and loamy earth after a December rain, the meals and parties and talks.

It couldn’t be too fancy. I knew she liked simple food. I imagined a kind of paean to the California cooking she was used to, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t me. I don’t think like that or talk like that or cook like that. I wanted complexity, balance, intensity; I wanted the kind of purity that was really concentration, the kind of simplicity that contained within it everything. My thoughts kept drifting toward alchemy, the ingredients she loved made somehow to taste more like themselves, released from the constraints of their physicality so they could float, dance, sing. I wanted to create a meal so beautiful, so transcendent, that it could make time stop for one night.

I knew that this was a kind of insanity. It wasn’t real but I couldn’t let go of it, returning over and over to each little detail—the antique spoons that we would use for the soup and the flowers in the corner of the room—as if through force of will I could coax the impossible into being. The last meal I cooked for Diane turned out not to be much of a meal. It was jello.

“So, buddy,” Laurence said one day, “Diane wants you to make some jello. Think you can handle that?” This was something of a joke. By that point in my career I had gelled just about everything that didn’t move.

“What flavor?

“Grape.”
I bought red flame grapes, sweet and aromatic, and cooked them with water and a little sugar. It needed something, so I added syrup flavored with quince. A touch of lime juice, strain, set with gelatin. It was delicious. I called Laurence.

“It’s ready,” I said. “Can I bring it by the room?”

“No,” he said. “I’ll come get it.”

She loved it, he told me later. She told all the nurses that I had made jello for her. She only ate about three bites, but it made her happy. I asked again if I could see her. Again he said no.

“She’s…not herself. It would be hard.”

It had started to really sink in that I might not see her again, and I thought about our last encounter, at the market. She had wanted to stay and talk but I was in a hurry, and conversations with her were never short. I made my excuses and pushed on, into the day that became night, into another service, cooking, cursing, sweating, driving home exhausted and drained and collapsing in bed, like I’d done a million times before. And as I thought about that moment it all came spilling in, everything I had given up, the weddings and parties that I’d missed, the time I hadn’t spent with friends, the vacations never taken, the relationships I’d let wither. I’d piled every bit of my emotional being onto plates and bowls and for myself, for my real life, so little remained. I never thought it would be too late, and now it was.

When the call finally came I was standing in the alley behind the restaurant. It wasn’t actually
a call, but a text: “Diane passed away this morning. Ally and I were there. It was peaceful. Love to you and the family.”

It was mid-afternoon on one of those crystalline days that make tourists decide to move to San Francisco. The crisp fall light angled between the buildings, brushing across the laundry that hung from the windows above, swaying gently in the soft breeze. I stood there, frozen, staring at the walls of the opposing building, the rust-red paint flecked with dirt and debris, the bricks chipped and faded, the once-gaudy mural of dancing girls now half-menacing, half-forlorn. A couple stopped to take a picture of the Transamerica Pyramid piercing the skyline above.

“Hey, chef, everything okay? I got a question about the lamb sauce.”

I looked up to see one of my cooks standing outside the kitchen with a quizzical look on his face.
I nodded, shoved the phone into my back pocket, and followed him through the doorway, back into the bright lights of the kitchen.