Chapter Text
“Nicky?”
“It’s me. Go back to sleep, mum,” Nick replied, hushed, as he slid out of his coat.
His mother, Sarah Nelson, stood at the top of the stairs, just barely visible in the dark. “It’s two in the morning.”
“... Yes, well. I’ve just finished, so.” Nick hung up his coat and began to pry off his boots, fumbling with the laces. “Go back to sleep,” he repeated.
“You really need someone to help in the back.”
“Can we discuss it in the morning? I’m shattered.”
“That’s precisely what I’m talking about,” Sarah said pointedly, but she let it drop for now, turning to go back to her room. “Don’t stay up too much later, darling.”
“I won’t,” Nick muttered. He set his boots aside and crept as quietly as possible to the kitchen, not wanting to rouse the dog at this hour. Flicking on the light, he checked the water level in the kettle and flipped it on, then quickly peeled a banana, eating it in several large bites. He could hear past acquaintances in his head - ‘oh, you’re a chef? You must eat so well!’ - and snorted, opening the press for the crisps. Like fuck he ate well.
It had taken him ages to get through close tonight. He had sent his mum home at ten, but that was only after they had shut down front of house together. He had taken on the entirety of the back by himself, like he did every night for the past five years - with the exception of holidays, he supposed.
People thought his work was glamorous. That was laughable. Sure, the food was beautiful. That’s what the local paper had said. Called the pâté gorgeous. But they didn’t see the time it took to prep, didn’t have to spend a half hour cleaning bits of liver from the grout of the tiles when he went at it a bit too hard with the immersion blender. No one but him was up to their elbows in caustic sanitizing soap for hours each evening when he really wanted to be home watching Match of the Day.
Nick shoved the last of the crisps into his mouth and washed it down with a bit of tea that hadn’t steeped quite long enough. It didn’t matter. He needed to get to bed, anyway. Tomorrow was a shopping day, which meant he had to start even earlier. He tipped the rest of the tea into the sink, gave the mug a rinse and turned off the light, jogging up the stairs as quietly as he could.
“I’ll see you a bit, yeah?” He kissed his mother’s cheek and was out the door by nine the next day after his morning jog, hurrying to his little green Fiat and willing it to heat up faster as he started the drive to the city market. It was the end of November and it had already snowed twice. Nothing substantial, but the cold was more than enough of a match for his old car.
He could make it easy on himself today, he thought as he drove. Maybe a roasted squash soup or chowder? Well, if they could give him a decent deal on fish heads for the stock, maybe. If he did the squash soup, however, he could use up the last of the parmesan and bread from yesterday on croutons. Maybe oversized croutons, to bulk it up. Look prettier as well. He had some parsley that desperately needed to be used up. That was one dish sorted, then.
The heat finally kicked in in the car as soon as he had to park. He lingered in the cabin for a moment, holding his hands in front of the vents, wishing he had brought Nellie along. He’d get her something nice at the butcher.
“Hello Nick!” Priya greeted as he approached. She ran his favourite vegetable stall - she grew a few more exotic things, and usually gave him a fair price.
“Hiya. Have you got any squash this morning?” he smiled.
“Acorn or butternut?”
“Butternut, yeah. I need about - 11 kilos?” he estimated.
Priya smiled. “Let me get you a box, then,” she teased.
The stall was the size of his bedroom, so it felt a bit silly to refer to it as such, and charmingly minimalist, stacked very matter-of-factly with all manner of produce, with stacks of recycled boxes behind the tables for customers to utilize. She began to help him pack squash into an old crate that, from the smell of it, had once held coriander.
“Anything else?” she asked, rubbing her gloved hands together to get some life back into them.
Nick glanced about the tables. “Err, yeah, let’s do some - sprouts, I think. And I’ll take ten kilos of apples, do you have any for baking? I’ll also need onions …”
A few back and forth trips to his car with the produce and it was onto dairy and meat. He bought four quarts of heavy cream, five and a half kilos of butter - they always needed more butter - and eighteen kilograms of chicken thighs, bone in, skin on.
Now that the refrigerated items were packed in the back seat, it was time to head to the restaurant. His mother would be on her way soon - he stopped just outside the driver’s side door to text and ask if she wanted a coffee. He had just enough time before he really needed to get started, and he desperately needed it himself.
He arrived at 25 Seats just after ten-thirty, handing his mother her cup and leaving his own sitting on the wooden counter before heading out to the car to begin carting things into the walk-in.
“Nicky, sweetheart, do you want the dolly?”
“It’s all right, it’s not much,” Nick insisted dismissively, opening up the back. He pulled out the chicken, and Sarah held the door for him as he brought it inside. He had to hurry - he was parked illegally, temporarily.
“I’ll start on the produce, will I,” Sarah said.
“Mum, no, I’ve got it,” Nick yelled, balancing the chicken case on one arm as he yanked open the walk-in with his free hand.
“Oh for god’s sake, I can carry a bag of onions, Nicholas,” his mother called back, and that was that.
With the day’s purchases unloaded and the car parked several blocks away, Nick locked the door behind him as he entered and picked up his cooling coffee, taking several large swigs. “Oh. Here,” he sniffed, fishing the handful of receipts from his pocket and placing them on the counter. “Before they accidentally get washed again.”
“I’ll put them under the counter for now,” Sarah agreed, collecting the tickets. She tapped them on the countertop to stack them together, her eyes on her son all the while, frowning. “... I’m going to stay to close with you tonight,” she said after a beat.
“Mum. You don’t need to, it’s not a big deal,” Nick insisted, falling onto one of the counter’s high stools. Fuck, it felt good to sit for a moment.
“Darling, you can’t keep this schedule all the time. You need help.”
“It’s really alright. Look at this place, it takes no time at all to close,” he insisted, gesturing. Their little restaurant, named for the amount of patrons it could hold at a time, was long but narrow. You practically walked straight into the counter when you entered, and they had crammed as many tables as they could along the opposite wall, with three four-seater high-tops at the back. The counter had five stools, and his mother handled coffee and drinks from behind the counter - and back beyond that was Nick’s miniscule kitchen. Barely functionally large enough to serve 12, let alone twenty-five. But he made it work.
“Nicholas, you were here until two last night. That’s unacceptable. You can’t run a kitchen if you’re falling over from exhaustion!” Sarah insisted, glancing down and stapling the stack of receipts together.
“All right. Say I do hire someone. When am I going to find them, exactly? I haven’t got the time to vet a bunch of teenagers who’ve watched Kitchen Nightmares and thought gosh, that looks like a laugh, I’ll give it a go.”
“I’ll do it for you,” Sarah huffed, glancing at him. “I’m sure you trust your mother to hire someone?”
“Fine. That sounds great, please do,” Nick muttered, willing himself to stand. “And then when they quit when they realize how shit it all is, we can go back to what we know works.”
“I’ll put something up on the Facebook page, why don’t I?” Sarah suggested, ignoring his attitude.
“That will really draw them in, mum,” Nick agreed, downing his coffee and tossing the cup into the bin as he headed back to the kitchen.
Nick washed his hands and pulled down his navy apron from its hook, tying it around his waist. Then he retrieved the box of squash, hauling it up onto the counter, and gave them all a rinse in the prep sink while the ovens warmed up. If he made the soup first, he could keep it at temperature for service. He’d need the ovens freed up by the evening for the chicken, anyway, and he had eleven kilos of squash to roast first.
Between halving, de-seeding, oiling, and arranging squash on the baking sheets, he glanced out at the dining room now and then. His mother had taken down all the chairs, wiped all the tables, and then sat at the bar on the laptop, clearly carefully composing what would be their help wanted ad. He shook his head and began to slide tray after tray of butternut squash into the warmed ovens to roast for the next forty minutes.
He was in the middle of dicing more onions than he ever thought possible when his mother called him back into the front of house. “Nicky? Do you want to take a look at it?”
Nick washed his hands quickly and came out drying them with brown paper towels. “Let’s see,” he agreed. Sarah moved her chair a bit so that he could read it:
25 Seats is seeking a dedicated and enthusiastic individual to join our kitchen. If you're ready to bring your passion for food to a small and welcoming restaurant environment, we'd love to hear from you. Please submit your experience to [email protected] or drop by in person. Nicholas and Sarah x
“... mum, you don’t have to sign it. It’s not a letter,” Nick said after a moment.
“I think it makes it more personal like that, don’t you?” she asked, looking up at him from where she sat. “No?”
“It’s fine,” he conceded. It wasn’t a battle he was willing to fight. He didn’t particularly want to hire anyone in the first place, so the less appealing the advertisement, the better.
Sarah tapped on the keyboard. “There! It’s done,” she announced, sounding satisfied. Nick nodded, sighing to himself, and his mother’s smile dropped.
“... Oh, Nicky. I know you prefer it to be just us, but we really need someone here who can help you with the things I can’t,” she said. “If you don’t like them, they can just - I don’t know, they can wash the dishes. Surely even that would be a great help.”
“... yeah, no, it definitely would be,” Nick admitted with a thoughtful shrug.
“Good. What’s the menu tonight, darling? I’ll start doing the sign.”
It had begun to rain by four, when Sarah unlocked the door and set the sandwich board advertising the night’s menu under the awning where it wouldn’t get wet. Their first reservation for the night arrived not long after, and soon Nick was dishing out vivid orange soup topped with garlicky croutons, delicate leaves of parsley, and a bit of pan-crisped pancetta he’d forgotten they had.
The soup was outselling the meat dish tonight - roasted chicken thighs with apples, accompanied by honey-glazed brussels sprouts - and Nick watched the stack of dirty bowls began to pile up beside the three-compartment sink dolefully.
It began to taper off around eight, as people left restaurants for pubs, and Nick came out into the dining room to have a look at things, taking off his apron as he did. “How was it?” he asked his mother.
“We did quite well, I think,” Sarah said, printing a report from their fancy contactless till. She looked over the slip of paper, then handed it to Nick to let him have a go at studying it.
“By the way,” she continued, “would you believe someone came out in the rain to answer our advertisement?”
“Already?” Nick mumbled disbelievingly, more interested in the numbers in front of him.
“Yes. Of course I was much too busy to sit down with him, but I’ve asked him to come back tomorrow before we open so that we can talk to him.”
“We?” Nick asked, glancing up.
“Don’t you want a say in the interview?”
“Not particularly, no.”
“Well, all right then, I’ll do it myself,” Sarah shrugged, then looked up with a smile as customers queued to pay. “How was everything this evening?” she asked, as Nick gave the couple a brief smile and slunk back to the kitchen. He wasn’t the extrovert his mother was.
He sent her home just after ten despite her protesting. Nick turned up the music in the back and sang along to ABBA as he began rinsing bowls - and plates, and tray after tray covered in spices and chicken fat, pans sticky with honey glaze and loose sprout leaves. He wiped everything down with sanitizer, ran cleaning cycles on the ovens, locked the walk-in, swept and mopped the floors - and by the time he was done and everything reset for the next day, it was nearing one-thirty.
Not quite as bad as the night before, he thought to himself as he locked the restaurant, pulling up the hood of his Carhartt jacket. He yawned and began the long walk to the car, taking a moment to remember where he had parked.
He’d do something less sticky tomorrow, he decided. The dishes had been a nightmare. He’d not thought through how much grease chicken thighs released, even though they were the superior cut. There was still a bit of parsley, maybe sole meunière. If James had sole tomorrow, anyway. And if it wasn’t too cold. No one wanted fish dishes in the cold, except maybe bouillabaisse … But it might be best to do something quick cooking. He didn’t want to interview whoever was coming in, but there was no way he’d let them go through the process without him at least checking them out from the kitchen. Or maybe he should opt for something hands off, something braised …
Nick collapsed into bed at two-thirty after tea and a bowl of instant porridge, up at seven to do it all again. After breakfast and his morning run with Nellie, he grabbed his keys to head to the market.
“Nicky, do you think you’ll be to the shop by eleven?” Sarah called from the kitchen as he started for the door.
“Er - yeah, suppose I can be?”
“That’s when the boy’s coming round, the one who answered the advertisement? I’d really like you to be there to meet him,” his mother said, coming around to stand in the foyer with him as he pulled on his non slip boots. Nick glanced up at her, tugging on the tab at the back of the right one to get it on.
“Sure. Yeah,” he huffed. He’d say whatever to appease her and get on his way at the moment. “Was thinking sole meunière?”
“If you can get a good price, yes. It’s not too cold today,” Sarah agreed with a smile. She hugged him quickly. “See you soon, darling.”
“Take your time,” Nick said, and was out the door.
It wasn’t quite as cold, but it began to rain again as Nick did the morning shopping, and he quickly changed his menu after glancing at the weather forecast. They’d do something warmer tonight. He upped his fish order and stopped for tomatoes, leeks, fennel, garlic, and herbs, chatting briefly with Priya about plans for the holidays.
He pulled up outside the restaurant just after eleven, grabbing his box of shellfish from the boot - it smelled like seawater now, great - and hurrying under the awning to get out of the rain. The glass door of the restaurant was slightly fogged from the temperature discrepancy, but he could see someone sitting at one of the two-seaters with his mother, a man, with his back to the door.
Nick nudged down on the handle with his elbow to open it, balancing the box of ice and seafood, and both his mother and the guest looked up as he pushed it open with his back. The young man got quickly to his feet, rushing over. “Here, let me -” he said, grabbing the door and holding it open.
“Er - yeah, thank you,” Nick huffed, glancing up from adjusting the weight of the damp box in his arms.
He found himself looking into the bluest eyes he’d ever seen.
Nick’s Roasted Butternut Squash Soup
2 kg butternut squash
1 tbsp coriander
½ tsp cumin
½ tsp cinnamon
2 yellow onions
2 carrots
2 sticks of celery
3 cloves garlic
1 fresh red chilli
2 litres chicken or vegetable stock
Olive oil
Salt to taste
Preheat oven to 200C (400F). Halve and deseed the squash. (For at-home cooking ease, you can optionally peel and cube squash first - simply adjust your roasting time to ~30 minutes.) Place the squash cut side up on a baking tray and brush with olive oil, then season with coriander, cumin and cinnamon. Roast until soft, about 40 minutes. Remove and allow squash to cool enough to handle.
In the meantime, finely dice celery, and peel and finely dice onions, carrots and garlic. Dice (and optionally deseed) the chili. Add olive oil to a pot and sauté vegetables, garlic and chili until soft.
Using a large spoon, scoop cooked butternut squash from the skin and add to the vegetables, then add stock. Bring the soup to the boil, then lower to a simmer for 20 minutes. Using an immersion blender or food processor, process the soup until smooth. Season to taste with salt, serving with a drizzle of olive oil, croutons, and fresh parsley, if desired.