Today's Reading

The curly headed cook has four small saucepans working on the stovetop and something going on in the ovens beneath; the bearded one slices white-fleshed fish fillets into portions, sneaking frequent glances at the digital thermometer that monitors the doneness of whatever's in the refrigerator-sized oven behind him. There are just three dedicated cooks working service, and these two prepare most of the dishes. Another man, the restaurant's polisher, a white painter's cap skewed loosely on his head, replenishes piles of dishes and clusters of glasses on the shelves and in the cubbyholes built into and around the kitchen and bar. From a separate workstation off to the side comes the third cook, a woman in her early twenties who sets two earthenware bowls on the pass, takes a single giant stride back to her area, then pivots and returns in a flash with a wire basket filled snugly with sliced bread and a small plate bearing housemade butter. The cooks constitute a three-person three-ring circus, the performers endlessly repeating their intermittently intersecting routines.

There's no door to the kitchen, just a gap where the pass ends, and there stands Tayler, the chef de cuisine. Tayler is thirty-two. Her dirty-blond hair has been piled atop her head and wrangled into a scrunchy. Gargantuan glasses frame her face, suggesting an egghead, which is funny because the adjective she most often applies to herself is silly, which also is funny because her kitchen self—white jacket, roving eyes, mechanical pencil perennially poised at the ready—radiates seriousness. A gauzy white bandage, snug as papier-mâché, hugs her left hand where she sliced herself earlier in the day, just hours from escaping the week unscathed. (The restaurant is closed on Sundays and Mondays.) Like a boulder around and over which a white river rages, Tayler may be the only staff member not racing about. In the dining room, hosts shepherd guests to tables; servers dispense advice, enthusiasm, food, and drink; diners dine. In the bar, cocktails are concocted; wine is poured; bottles are retrieved from cube-shaped refrigerators, glowing from recesses in the wall overhead. In the kitchen, the crew generate the same handful of courses over and over, like a musical round.


The heartbeat of Wherewithall's kitchen is the hand-off of a chit—a three by five-inch rectangle of thermal paper—from server to chef. This transaction prompts the staggered preparation of all the dishes for a party, whether one guest or six. When the restaurant does robust business, the heart pumps constantly and orders flow incessantly, metronomically (fingers-crossed emoji!), one behind the other, nudging each other along; on a busy night, at any given moment, a few dozen dishes will be in various states of preparation. This makes tracking the progress of a single dish from start to finish—as we are about to do with Dry-Aged Strip Loin, Tomato, Sorrel—a mindboggling proposition, unless we home in on a newly arrived chit and the Rube Goldbergian chain reaction it initiates.

And so, there's Nooshâ Elami, one of Wherewithall's four servers on duty tonight: an extroverted Iranian American in her early thirties, dark black hair gathered in a ponytail, features accentuated by mascara, gold hoop earrings, and overlapping gold and silver necklaces dangling. It's now about a quarter past eight and she's at Table 12, a deuce* along one of two columns of tables separated by an enormous rectangular planter lush with jade pothos plants, banquette seating built onto three of its sides. Waiting for her there are a man and a woman—clearly a couple—in their early forties, chattering away. Nooshâ delivers a cocktail, The Last Word (made here with mezcal), for him, and a glass of Riesling for her.

* table for two

"I don't see any allergies or aversions on your reservation," says Nooshâ, scanning their chit. "Is that right?" (At Wherewithall, chits are preprinted and paperclipped to each party's menus at the host podium where they're kept in a small box. They are given to the server when the corresponding party arrives and is seated. If applicable, allergies and aversions would have been captured in the online reservation notes or over the phone, and reflected on its chit. But there's no harm in redundancy here since the consequences of a true allergy include...well...death.)

"Anything goes," says the man, grinning ingratiatingly. "Let it rip."

Had modifications been necessary, Nooshâ would have annotated the chit by hand, indicating which member(s) of the party they applied to, according to position number (place at the table). For example, "P1 celiac" or "P2 veg" (for vegetarian); this system enables the kitchen to be sure servers deliver bespoke dishes to their rightful diner.

Offstage, Nooshâ presents as confident and authoritative. In the dining room, she prides herself on calibrating her service style to suit each party in her care: With obvious "foodies," she toplines food descriptions, lest she imply that a proud foodie doesn't know their rouille from their romesco. To enthusiastic novices—her favorite—she spoon-feeds primers on esoteric ingredients and preparations, offers wine pairing recommendation(s), and invites questions. Over the years, she's developed an intuition for who's who: "I don't think about it," she says. "It's hard to even describe how I know, but that's something that makes a good server—you know what a table needs. It's their body language, how they're looking at me, how interested they seem, what else is going on at the table." Nooshâ herself is a gastronome, game to try anything, with the idiosyncratic exception of lunch meats, to which she confesses a life-long aversion. A natural predisposition toward hunger makes her especially voracious. She also appreciates a glass of quality wine or a well-balanced cocktail. These predilections contribute to her ability to key into and connect with guests' culinary literacy or lack thereof.
...

Join the Library's Online Book Clubs and start receiving chapters from popular books in your daily email. Every day, Monday through Friday, we'll send you a portion of a book that takes only five minutes to read. Each Monday we begin a new book and by Friday you will have the chance to read 2 or 3 chapters, enough to know if it's a book you want to finish. You can read a wide variety of books including fiction, nonfiction, romance, business, teen and mystery books. Just give us your email address and five minutes a day, and we'll give you an exciting world of reading.

What our readers think...