Last Night In Twisted River

management; he had impressed the guests in the dining room of a beach club in Bermuda, where he’d met the proprietor of Toronto ’s venerable Wembley Hotel.

When the cook had first come to Toronto, in ’83, Patrice Arnaud was managing Maxim’s-a favorite cafe rendezvous in the Bay and Bloor area of the city. At the time, Maxim’s was the third transformation of a cafe- restaurant in the tired old Wembley. To Dominic Baciagalupo, who was still quaking from Ketchum’s dire warning that he totally detach himself from the world of Italian restaurants, Patrice Arnaud and Maxim’s were clearly first- rate-better yet, they were not Italian. In fact, Patrice had enticed his brother, Marcel, to leave Marseilles and become the chef at Maxim’s, which was very French.

“Ah, but the ship is sinking, Dominic,” Patrice had warned the cook; he meant that Toronto was rapidly changing. The restaurant-goers of the future would want to venture beyond the staid hotel restaurants. (After Arnaud and his brother left Maxim’s, the old Wembley Hotel became a parking garage.)

For the next decade, the cook worked with the Arnaud brothers at their own restaurant on Queen Street West-a neighborhood in transition, and somewhat seedy for much of that time, but the restaurant, which Patrice named Bastringue, prospered. They were doing fifty covers at lunch and dinner; Marcel was the master chef then, and Dominic loved learning from him. There was foie gras, there were fresh Fine de Claire oysters from France. (Once again, the cook failed to teach himself desserts; he never mastered Marcel’s tarte tatin with Calvados sabayon.)

Bastringue-Parisian argot for a popular dance hall and bar that served food and wine-would even weather the 1990 recession. They put waxed paper over the linen tablecloths and turned the restaurant into a bistro-steak frites, steamed mussels with white wine and leeks-but their lease ran out in ’95, after Queen Street West had gone from seedy to hip to dull mainstream in the space of a decade. (Bastringue became a shoe store; Marcel went back to France.)

The cook and Patrice Arnaud stuck together; they went to work at Avalon for a year, but Arnaud told Dominic that they were “just biding time.” Patrice wanted another place of his own, and in ’97 he bought what had been a failed restaurant on Yonge Street at Summer-hill. As for Silvestro, he originally came from Italy, but he was a Calabrese who’d worked in London and Milan; travel was important to Arnaud. (“It means you can learn new things,” Patrice told Dominic, when he decided on young Silvestro as his next master chef.)

As for the new restaurant’s name, Patrice-well, what else would Arnaud have called it? “You earned it,” Dominic told Patrice. “Don’t be embarrassed by your own name.”

For the first few years, Patrice-the name and, to a lesser extent, the restaurant-had worked. Arnaud and the cook taught Silvestro some of Marcel’s standbys: the lobster with mustard sabayon, the fish soup from Brittany, the duck foie-gras terrine with a spoonful of port jelly, the halibut en papillote, the cote de boeuf for two, the grilled calf’s liver with lardons and pearl onions and a balsamic demi-glace. Naturally, Silvestro added his own dishes to the menu-ravioli with snails and garlic-herb butter, veal scallopini with a lemon sauce, house-made tagliatelle with duck confit and porcini mushrooms, rabbit with polenta gnocchi. (Dominic made a few familiar contributions to the menu, too.) The restaurant at 1158 Yonge Street was new, but it wasn’t entirely French-nor was it as big a hit in the neighborhood as Arnaud had hoped.

“It’s not just the name, but the name sucks, too,” Patrice told Dominic and Silvestro. “I have totally misread Rosedale -this neighborhood doesn’t need an expensive French restaurant. We need to be easygoing, and cheaper! We want our clientele to come two or three times a week, not every couple of months.”

Over the Christmas break, Patrice was normally closed-this year from December 24 until January 2, enough time for the renovations Arnaud had planned. The banquettes would be brightened, completely recovered; the lemon-yellow walls were to be freshly spackled. Posters from the old French Line would be hung. “ Le Havre, Southampton, New York -Compagnie Generale transatlantique!” Patrice had announced, and he’d found a couple of Toulouse-Lautrec posters of the Moulin Rouge dancer La Goulue and singer Jane Avril. Fish and chips were going to be added to the menu, and steak tartare with frites; the prices for both food and wine would drop 25 percent. It would be back to bistro, again-like those fabulous recession days at Bastringue-though Patrice wouldn’t use the bistro word anymore. (“Bistro is so overused-it has become meaningless!” Arnaud declared.)

Reinvention was the essential game with restaurants, Arnaud knew.

“But what about the name?” Silvestro had asked his boss. The Calabrese had his own candidate, Dominic knew.

“I think Patrice is too French,” Patrice had answered. “It’s too old-school, too old- money. It has to go.” Arnaud was smart and suave; his style was casual but debonair. Dominic loved and admired the man, but the cook had been dreading this part of the changeover-all to accommodate the preening Rosedale snobs.

“You guys know what I think,” Silvestro said, with an insincere, insouciant shrug; he was handsome and confident, the way you would want your son to be.

The young chef had been struck by the effect of the frosted glass on the lower half of the restaurant’s large front window, facing Yonge Street. Passersby on the street could not see through the clouded glass; the customers, seated at their tables, were not in view from the sidewalk. But the top half of the big pane of glass was clear; diners could see the red maple leaf on the Canadian flag above the Summerhill liquor store, across Yonge Street, and (eventually) those two high-rise condominiums under construction in what would be called Scrivener Square. The lower, frosted portion of the windowpane had the effect of a curtain-such was Silvestro’s convoluted reasoning for the restaurant’s new name.

“ La Tenda,” Silvestro said, with feeling. “‘The Curtain.’”

“It sounds ominous to me,” Dominic had told the young chef. “I wouldn’t want to eat in a place with that name.”

“I think, Silvestro, you should save this name for the very first restaurant you own-when you become an owner-chef, which you certainly will!” Arnaud said.

“ La Tenda,” Silvestro repeated, fondly, his warm brown eyes watering with tears.

“It’s too Italian,” Dominic Baciagalupo told the emotional young man. “This restaurant may not be strictly French, but it’s not Italian, either.” If the former Patrice were given an Italian name, what would Ketchum say? the cook was thinking, while at the same time he saw the absurdity of his argument-he whose Sicilian meat loaf and penne alla puttanesca would, after the Christmas holiday, be added to the more low-key menu.

The baffled Patrice and the shocked Silvestro stared at the cook in disbelief. They were all at a standstill. Dominic thought: I should ask Daniel to come up with a name-he’s the writer! That was when Silvestro broke the silence. “What about your name, Dominic?” the young chef said.

“Not Baciagalupo!” the cook cried, alarmed. (If the cowboy didn’t kill him, Dominic knew that Ketchum would!)

“Talk about too Italian!” Arnaud said affectionately.

“I mean what your name means, Dominic,” Silvestro said. Patrice Arnaud hadn’t guessed Baciagalupo’s meaning, though the words were similar in French. “‘Kiss of the Wolf,’” Silvestro said slowly-the emphasis equally placed on both the Kiss and the Wolf.

Arnaud shuddered. He was a short, strongly built man with closely cropped gray hair and a sophisticated smile-he wore dark trousers, sharply pressed, and always an elegant but open-necked shirt. He was a man who made ceremony seem natural; at once polite and philosophical, Patrice was a restaurateur who understood what was worthwhile about the old-fashioned while knowing instantly when change was good.

“Ah, well-Kiss of the Wolf!-why didn’t you tell me, Dominic?” Arnaud impishly asked his loyal friend. “Now there’s a name that is seductive and modern, but it also has an edge!”

Oh, Kiss of the Wolf had an edge, all right, the cook was thinking-though that wouldn’t be the most salient response Ketchum might make to the restaurant’s new name. Dominic didn’t want to imagine what the old logger would say when he heard about it. “Mountains of moose shit!” Ketchum might declare, or something worse.

Wasn’t it risky enough that the cook had taken back his real name? In an Internet world, what danger did it