Part Seven: The Return to the Kitchen
She wrote down the order.
She did this with the same attention she brought to orders at every table — checking her notation, confirming the wines, noting the specific dietary consideration one of the men mentioned with a slightly apologetic quality that she received without comment. She worked through the table’s full order in six minutes, which was efficient for a group of eleven.
She said: “I’ll bring the wine list for your second selection, and the first course will be approximately fifteen minutes.”
She returned to the kitchen.
The kitchen was its own world — the temperature and the noise and the specific, compressed energy of a professional kitchen at full service, a world that operated by different rules than the dining room and that she moved through with the ease of someone who had been in kitchens since before she could see over the counter. Her father’s kitchen, then the restaurants she had worked before the Bellagio Crown, then here.
The head waiter, Marco, met her at the pass. He was fifty-three years old and had been at the Bellagio Crown for twenty-two of them and had the specific quality of a man who has seen a great many things and does not startle easily.
He looked at her.
“The Moretti table,” he said.
“Eleven covers. I have the full order. The first course in fifteen.”
He continued looking at her for a moment. “I could hear the silence from the back,” he said.
“There was a translation issue,” she said. “It’s resolved.”
Marco had worked with her for fourteen months. He had the professional courtesy not to press. “The first course in fifteen,” he said.
She handed her order to the kitchen.
She stood for a moment at the window that looked into the dining room — the small window set in the door through which the staff could observe the floor without being observed. The Moretti table had resumed. Conversations had restarted, quieter than before, with a different quality to them. Don Alberto was leaning back in his chair with a glass of wine, speaking to the man on his right with an expression that was — from this distance, through this small window — something other than what it had been when she approached.
She could not hear what he was saying. She did not need to.
She went back to work.
