Last Night In Twisted River

“Monkfish, the poor man’s lobster,” Xiao Dee explained.

“What’s the name of your restaurant in Iowa City?” the cop asked.

“Mao’s,” Xiao Dee answered proudly.

“That place!” the motorcycle cop said. “You get the drive-by vandalism, right?”

“Occasionally,” the cook admitted.

“It’s because of the war,” Xiao Dee said defensively. “The farmers are hawks.”

“It’s because of the name!” the cop said. “Mao’s-no wonder you get vandalized! This is the Midwest, you know. Iowa City isn’t Berkeley !”

Back in the truck that would forever smell like all of Pell and Mott streets on a bad morning (such as when there was a garbage strike in Lower Manhattan), the cook said to Little Brother, “The cop has a point, you know. About the name, I mean.”

Xiao Dee was hopped up on chocolate-espresso balls, which he kept in the glove compartment with all the receipts and ate nonstop when he drove-just to keep himself fanatically awake. If the cook had more than two or three on the sixteen-hour drive, his heart would race until the following day-his bowels indicating the pending onset of explosive diarrhea-as if he’d had two dozen cups of double espresso.

“What’s the matter with this country? Mao is just a name!” Xiao Dee cried. “This country has been getting its balls cut off in Vietnam for ten years! What does Mao have to do with it-it’s just a name!” The provocative pink ribbon Spicy (or the other girl) had tied around his ponytail had come undone; Xiao Dee resembled a hysterical woman weightlifter driving an entire Chinese restaurant, where you would surely be food-poisoned to death.

“Let’s just get home and unload the truck,” the cook proposed, hoping to calm Little Brother down. Tony Angel was trying to forget the image of the monkfish swimming through sesame oil, and everything else that was afloat in the back of the truck.

The vat of sea water had spilled; they’d lost all the mussels. There would be no sake-steamed mussels in black-bean sauce that weekend. No oysters Rockefeller, either. (To add insult to injury, by the time Xiao Dee and the cook got back to Iowa City, Ah Gou had already chopped the spinach and diced the bacon for the oysters Rockefeller.) The sea bass had perished en route, but the monkfish was salvageable-the tail was the only usable part, anyway, and Ah Gou served it sliced in medallions.

The cook had learned to test the freshness of the Scottish salmon by deboning it; if the bones were hard to pull out, Ah Gou said the fish was still pretty fresh. The lap xuong sausage, the fresh flounder, and the frozen squid had survived the near collision with the bus, but not the shrimp, the scallops, or the crabs. Ah Gou’s favorite mascarpone and the Parmesan were safe, but the other cheeses had to go. The bamboo mats, or nori rolls-for rolling out the sushi-had absorbed too much sesame oil and Tsingtao beer. Xiao Dee would hose out the truck every day for months, but it would always smell of that near accident over the Mississippi.

HE’D LOVED THAT TIME in Iowa City -including those road trips with Xiao Dee Cheng, Tony Angel was thinking. Every night, on the menu at Avellino, was an item or two the cook had acquired from working with Ah Gou at Mao’s. At Avellino, the cook indicated the French or Asian additions to his menu by writing simply, “Something from Asia” or “Something from France;” he’d learned this from Ah Gou at Mao’s. In an emergency, when all the fish (and the oysters and mussels) had perished before Saturday night, Ah Gou asked the cook to do a pasta special or a pizza.

“Something from Italy,” the menu at Mao’s would then say.

The long-distance truckers who stopped off the interstate would invariably complain. “What’s this fucking ‘Something from Italy ’ about? I thought this was a Chinese place.”

“We’re a little of everything,” Xiao Dee would tell them-Little Brother was usually the weekend maitre d’, while the cook and Ah Gou slaved away in the kitchen.

The rest of the staff at Mao’s was a fiercely intelligent and multicultural collection of Asian students from the university-many of them not from Asia but from Seattle and San Francisco, or Boston, or New York. Tzu-Min, Ah Gou’s relatively new girlfriend, was a Chinese law-school student who’d been an undergraduate at Iowa just a couple of years before; she’d decided to stay in Iowa City (and not go back to Taiwan) because of Mao’s and Ah Gou and the law school. On Thursday nights, when Xiao Dee was still suffering the jazzed-up aftereffects of the chocolate-espresso balls, Tzu-Min would sub as the maitre d’.

They didn’t have a radio at Mao’s, Tony Angel was remembering as he surveyed the place settings at Avellino, which on that late-spring ’83 night was not quite open for business but soon would be. At Mao’s, Ah Gou had kept a TV in the kitchen-the cause of many cut fingers, and other knife or cleaver accidents, in the cook’s opinion. But Ah Gou had liked sports and news; sometimes the Iowa football or basketball games were televised, and that way the kitchen knew in advance whether to expect a celebratory or dejected crowd after the game.

In those years, the Iowa wrestling team rarely lost-least of all, at home-and those dual meets brought an especially fired-up and hungry crowd to Mao’s. Daniel had taken young Joe to most of the home matches, the cook suddenly remembered. Maybe it had been the success of the Iowa wrestling team that made Joe want to wrestle when he went off to Northfield Mount Hermon; quite possibly, Ketchum’s reputation as a barroom brawler had had nothing to do with it.

Tony Angel had a Garland eight-burner stove, with two ovens and a broiler, in his kitchen at Avellino; he had a steam table for his chicken stocks, too. At Mao’s, at their busiest, they could seat eighty or ninety people in an evening, but Avellino was smaller. Tony rarely fed more than thirty or forty people a night-fifty, tops.

Tonight the cook was working on a red-wine reduction for the braised beef short ribs, and he had both a light and a dark chicken stock on the steam table. In the “Something from Asia ” category, he was serving Ah Gou’s beef satay with peanut sauce and assorted tempura-just some shrimp, haricots verts, and asparagus. There were the usual pasta dishes-the calamari with black olives and pine nuts, over penne, among them-and two popular pizzas, the pepperoni with marinara sauce and a wild-mushroom pizza with four cheeses. He had a roast chicken with rosemary, which was served on a bed of arugula and grilled fennel, and a grilled leg of spring lamb with garlic, and a wild-mushroom risotto, too.

Greg, the cook’s young sous chef, had been to cooking school on Ninety-second Street in Manhattan and was a fast learner. Tony was letting Greg do a sauce grenobloise, with brown butter and capers, for the chicken paillard-that was the little “Something from France ” for the evening. And Tony’s two favorite waitresses were on hand, a single mother and her college-student daughter. Celeste, the mom, had worked for the cook since ’76, and the daughter, Loretta, was more mature than the usual Brattleboro high school kids he hired as waitresses, busboys, and dishwashers.

Loretta was older than most college students; she’d had a baby her senior year in high school. Loretta was unmarried and had cared for the child in her mom’s house until the little boy was old enough (four or five) to not drive Celeste crazy. Then Loretta had gotten into a nearby community college-not the easiest commute, but she’d arranged all her classes on a Tuesday-Thursday schedule. She was back home in Brattleboro, still living with her mom and young son, from every Thursday night till the following Tuesday morning.

Since the cook had been sleeping with Celeste-only for the last year, going on eighteen months-the arrangement had worked well for Tony Angel. He stayed in Celeste’s house, with Celeste and her first-grade grandson, only two nights a week-on one of which, every Wednesday, the restaurant was closed. The cook moved back into his apartment whenever Loretta came home to Brattleboro. It had been more awkward last summer, when Celeste moved into Tony’s small apartment above Avellino for upwards of three or four nights at a time. A redhead, with very fetching freckles on her chest, she was a big woman, though not nearly the size of either Injun Jane or Carmella. Celeste (at fifty) was as many years older than the cook’s son, Danny, as she was younger than the cook.

There was no hanky-panky between them in the kitchen at Avellino -at their mutual insistence-though everyone on the staff (Loretta, of course, included) knew that Tony Angel and Celeste were a couple. The lady friends the cook had met at The Book Cellar had since moved on, or they were married now. The old joke Tony cracked to the bookseller was no longer acted upon; it was an innocent joke when the cook asked the bookseller if she knew any women to introduce him to. (She either didn’t or she wouldn’t,