Chapter Text
The kitchen is smaller than she expected, and Beatrice is nearly hit in the face with a flying kohlrabi the minute she steps through the door. She jerks her head back, almost crashing into the door behind her in the process, reflexes the only thing that save her from getting beaned in the face with a root vegetable.
“Shit, sorry!” sounds from the direction where the kohlrabi had originated, hidden to her right behind a row of line cooks and hanging skillets. A head appears from around the corner, a lock of hair spilling artfully out from a traditional chef’s hat, black buttons half undone on a jacket that looks like it’s seen better days. “Oh, hey, are you Beatrice?”
Beatrice stares, blinks, shakes her head. “Yes,” she says. “I’m--”
“Pastry chef, right?” the chef says, materializing around the metal counter and dodging one of the line cooks blindly. There’s a dangerous-looking cleaver in one hand, and Beatrice watches warily before holding out her own hand to shake. “Finally, Ava fired the last one because she was cheating on allergens and we’ve been scrambling ever since. I’m Chanel, sous chef.”
The handshake nearly is firmer than Beatrice expects, though why she expected otherwise is beyond her, given that Chanel is a skyscraper with a meat cleaver. “Nice to meet you,” she manages to say without biting her own tongue, as polite as she can manage. “I-- well--”
She cuts herself off, looking around the kitchen. It’s cramped, line cooks brushing elbows and shoulders as they work, but no one seems bothered by it; half of them are wearing headphones and bopping their heads to the music. It’s a far cry from the kitchen she’d come from, organized and strict, a well-oiled machine of professionally trained chefs in military-precise uniforms with little room for improvisation or creativity.
“You’re coming from Per Se, right?”
“Pardon?” Beatrice says stupidly, still staring around the kitchen, and then frowns, shakes her head. “I’m sorry. Yes, I am.”
“Not what you’re used to?” Chanel raises an eyebrow and Beatrice shakes her head again, schools her face into something that would not disappoint per her mother’s exacting standards.
“It’s relaxed,” Beatrice says politely.
“You can say it’s weird,” Chanel says with a wry smile. “It’s not the way most kitchens run, we all know that.”
“I was told I would be able to meet with the chef this afternoon,” Beatrice redirects, still as politely as she can manage. She’s meant to start working tomorrow and she hasn’t even met the chef yet, outside of traded emails where she was swayed by the promise of full autonomy into leaving her position at one of the only restaurants in the city with three Michelin stars for a fledgling fusion tapas joint sandwiched between a pierogi stand and a vape shop on the lower east side that got an upstart Michelin star in its first year of operation.
(It’s not that she’d wanted to leave. She’d been there for two years after finally losing her patience with Paris and moving on a whim to New York and had walked into the pastry chef position at Per Se because Lilith had just taken over and was cleaning house and because she’d known Lilith since she was twelve years old and they’d suffered through Le Cordon Bleu and internships and too many sleepless nights studying together. She hadn’t even been looking, but Beatrice went to culinary school in France, has worked in France her whole career, and was turning out the expected French patisserie at Per Se on autopilot for two years and when the email had come in from Ava Silva about the tapas-adjacent Silva Platta looking to bring in someone to balance out their front-loaded menu, well. She’d negotiated because it’s just good business, but had made up her mind the first time she looked at a menu on their Instagram within ten minutes of receiving the first email.)
“Oh, yeah, she’s-- well,” Chanel says, frowning and glancing at the clock on the wall. “Probably almost back from the market, actually.”
“She’s shopping?” Beatrice can’t help it when her eyebrows lift. She looks at her watch and then back to Chanel. It’s half four and-- “Don’t you open at six?”
“Yeah,” Chanel says with an easy shrug. “We handle the staples, Ava doesn’t really worry about those. She tends to figure out the dailies based on whatever she finds in the market.”
“Right,” Beatrice says slowly. “But how am I meant to develop a dessert--”
The door bangs open behind her and for the second time in five minutes Beatrice is nearly hit with food-- this time, the entire side of beef wrapped in clingfilm that barrels through the door in the arms of what is, hopefully, this chef who has no idea how to plan a menu in advance.
“Whoops, sorry,” sounds cheerfully from behind the beef. A giant tote bag with vegetables sticking out of the top bangs against the door jamb. “Seriously, why are we standing in the doorway here, people?”
Chanel grabs for the beef without blinking, hauling it over one shoulder and sliding away easily, somehow not hitting anyone with her gigantic meat cleaver in the process, and Beatrice finds herself face to face with Ava Silva, culinary prodigy who came out of the woodwork and snatched a Michelin star out of thin air.
“Oh, hey, you must be Beatrice!” She’s smaller than Beatrice had expected-- though why Beatrice had expected someone taller than her, she’s not sure; it could be because of Lilith, one of the only other Michelin-starred woman under fifty in the city right now, having always towered over her; or maybe it’s because Ava’s emails had been big and boisterous and cheerful, big enough that Beatrice had somehow constructed an equally big and boisterous figure to match-- in a leather jacket a size too big with dark hair tumbling out of a backwards baseball cap and a quick easy smile.
She manhandles herself and the tote bag the rest of the way through the door and half-drops it onto the floor, blows out air through her lips cheerfully and shrugs out of her jacket, shoves the sleeves a threadbare hoody up her arms. “Man, it’s always hot in here. Nice to meet you in person!”
A hand appears, tattoos reaching from her knuckles up her forearms and disappearing into the sleeves of her hoodie. Beatrice stares at it for longer than she means to-- not for the tattoos, because she’s spent her entire career in kitchens and overly-tattooed twenty-somethings are more common in kitchens than onions, but because she's used to a certain type of chef and Ava Silva is very much not that-- before reaching out hesitantly to shake it.
“Sorry about the beef situation,” Ava says as she shakes Beatrice’s hand so hard her teeth nearly rattle. It’s only the ten years of decorum classes her parents had forced her through that keeps her expression level at the jarring impact that is Ava Silva. “I tend to try not to hit people with raw meat, I promise. At least on their first day.”
“That makes sense,” Beatrice says, as if it makes any sense at all. "Is that for tomorrow's menu?" It's the politest way she can think to ask are you really still figuring out today's menu without asking outright. Maybe she's overreacting. Maybe Ava is entirely reasonable and doesn't expect to be able to create a collaborative complimentary menu three hours before doors.
"That? Nah, that's for tonight," Ava says cheerfully. She hands the tote bag full of vegetables to one of the line cooks and jerks her head towards the back of the kitchen, flapping a lazy hand for Beatrice to follow her. "C'mon, let's get squared away, yeah?"
Beatrice blinks, staring at Ava winds her way through the kitchen, and considers Per Se and Lilith and the upsides of consistency before squaring her shoulders and pacing after Ava, long balanced strides carrying her through the kitchen and through the door to the cramped office Ava had disappeared into.
"Sorry about the mess," Ava says, appearing wholly unconcerned as she hauls a pile of what looks like tax forms out of the chair in front of the desk and, to Beatrice's immense discomfort, dumps them in a stack on the floor and leans against the desk and peels off her hoodie, waiting with a beaming smile for Beatrice to take a seat.
"It's no problem." She's lying through her teeth because Ava's office sets her skin buzzing uncomfortably. The desk is a mess of papers and what looks like drafts of menus and, terrifyingly, an open water bottle sitting on top of a closed laptop. There's a paring knife sitting inexplicably on top of one of the piles of paper.
Beatrice folds her hands into her lap to control the way they're itching to reach out and tidy the desk. "How would you like to get started? I reviewed the recent menus and had some thoughts about--"
"Right down to business already?" Ava pulls her hat off, drags a hand through her hair. "It's been, like, ten seconds, dude."
Beatrice stares up at her, hands spasming against one another. "You asked me to start tomorrow.”
"I mean, yeah." Ava scoffs, and Beatrice bristles, but not as much as she might have. Ava seems to somehow, mysteriously, be honestly perplexed that Beatrice might want to jump straight to business. "But also we could take five minutes to, y'know. Say hello. Get to know each other. We are going to be working together a lot, after all."
Beatrice doesn't gape, because she has manners, but it's a close call because the restaurant opens in three hours and the master chef just appeared with a side of beef for the apparently unplanned menu for the evening and instead of doing actual work wants to socialize.
“I don’t want to impose,” she manages to say evenly. “I had just hoped to observe and get a sense of what you have planned for tomorrow’s menu so that I can accommodate it.”
“Tomorrow,” Ava says with a pffft. “That’s tomorrow’s problem.”
A headache pulses behind Beatrice’s temples, and she fights the urge to rub at her forehead, more because it never does anything than the fact that it’s unprofessional.
“Do you always plan your menu on such short notice?” It’s the politest question she can think to ask.
“I mean, not technically,” Ava says, sucking on her teeth and staring absently at the ceiling. “And we do have a set of staples that we only rotate out every now and then. But the dailies are based on whatever’s in season, you know? And what’s available.”
“Seasonal availability doesn’t change day to day,” Beatrice says slowly.
“Well, no.” Ava has the decency to at least look sheepish, which is possibly worse than dismissive, because now she’s ducking her head and half-smiling up at Beatrice, shrugging and waving one tattooed arm lazily. “But sometimes something just clicks, you know?”
“I….do not.” Beatrice narrows her focus to Ava’s face instead of the bare tattooed skin of her arms, the unexpectedly distracting span of collarbone visible over the ripped oversized collar of her tshirt. It’s a wildly inappropriate shirt for a kitchen and on anyone else she would assume there's a chef jacket waiting to be buttoned up over it but honestly she cannot tell with Ava at all and the uncertainty is distracting. “I realize that I’m new here, but I’m hoping we can-- adjust to working with one another.”
“Yeah, absolutely,” Ava says easily. She folds her arms over her chest, mouth slanting into a smile. “I had a feeling someone coming from Per Se would have some different ideas about how to run this place.”
“I’m not looking to run anything,” Beatrice starts.
“I mean, I need someone who can balance out the menu, which is more of a partnership, don’t you think?” Ava’s head tilts, and Beatrice’s whole world tilts with it because she’s worked in restaurants for nearly her entire adult life and has very intentionally put herself into a position where she has responsibility but never too much, never once wanting the responsibility of a master chef position. And yet here Ava is, having poached her away from Per Se with the promise of a challenge and a change, tacking on some nonsensical idea of equal standing.
“I appreciate the opportunity,” Beatrice says helplessly, completely without anything else to say. She’s not used to not knowing what to say, to finding herself in situations she hasn’t prepared herself for, not since she was fifteen years old, but now she's floundering and wondering why she left a prestigious stable job at one of the most lauded restaurants in the city for this.
Ava laughs, bright and easy and filling the small room, and Beatrice fights the instinct to flinch at the sound, at the act of it. Ava Silva is so much, small but filling the corners of every room she’s in, flighty and excitable and unconcerned and everything Beatrice has never been, and a tiny sliver of Beatrice hates her just a little bit for it. A larger part of her, though, is tired of traditional work, tired of turning out different iterations of the same work for years on end. She left Paris for the same reason and life in New York had challenged her, given her something she’d been looking for-- distance from her family, from the world she grew up in, from the exhausting arrogance of the Parisian culinary world-- but it hadn’t been enough, and that’s how she landed herself in this small office with her new boss-slash-partner at a tiny restaurant with a tiny kitchen that had been lauded with it’s Michelin star for it’s unpredictable and enlightened menus.
“Me too,” Ava says, a shine in her eyes, and on anyone else Beatrice would find it cutting, find it mocking, but Ava’s presence is entirely guileless, as far as she can tell. Ava claps her hands together and twists, toe of her boot nearly crashing into Beatrice’s knee as she flails around with the stacks of papers behind her, nearly upending the water bottle for one heartstopping moment before turning back triumphantly and offering Beatrice a scribbled out draft of a menu. “Tomorrow’s menu?”
Beatrice stares for a beat too long to be professional before taking the draft. Ava’s handwriting is narrow and slanted and unexpectedly neat, but the draft is exactly as unkempt as she’d expected, some lines scribbled out and others displaced with hastily-drawn arrows to rearrange. There are a half-dozen dessert ideas inked in at the bottom, boxed in with hasty strokes and framed between two giant question marks.
It’s a good menu, even if there’s absolutely no place for the entire side of beef Ava had hauled in that Beatrice had already been planning strategies to get Ava to push out of today’s menu given the short notice. She reads through it twice, pretending she isn’t painfully aware of the way that Ava is fidgeting in front of her: fingers tugging at the hem of her t-shirt, the frayed edge of her pocket, rubbing at what looks distinctly like a mostly-healed minor burn at the base of her thumb.
“I have some ideas,” Beatrice says finally, offering the menu back to Ava, who lets out a loud breath when Beatrice finally speaks.
Ava takes the menu back and hops up to sit on her desk, once again nearly knocking the water bottle over, and graces Beatrice with a wide smile. Beatrice leans forward before she can stop herself, grabbing the water bottle and relocating it to the floor. Ava laughs, quiet and unconcerned, when Beatrice murmurs an apology, waves it away.
“Let’s get started, yeah?” Ava says, and Beatrice agrees before her better judgment can leap in and tell her that she can still go back to Per Se and a quieter life.
Beatrice’s first proper day is somehow more and less chaotic than she’d expected. Ava is late (chaotic, expected) but Chanel is early (not chaotic, expected); she only has to dodge one flying root vegetable instead of several (semi chaotic, unexpected) and, as far as she knows, no one chops one of their fingers off because they’re too focused on the music they’re listening to while cooking (not chaotic, unexpected).
Most unexpected, though, is that despite Beatrice laying awake most of the night staring at her ceiling and stopping herself from picking up her phone to text the new number saved in her phone-- one of the new numbers; she also has Chanel’s, half the line staff, and the building manager’s-- just to check and make sure Ava hasn’t gone on an adventure to Flushing and come back with a brand new menu after they hammered out one together, Ava had burst brightly into the kitchen half an hour late and announced breathlessly that she hadn’t changed the menu at all.
It’s a long night, made longer by the compounding facts of Beatrice having only drifted off to sleep three hours before her alarm went off and, like a masochist, she’d still dragged herself out of bed to go for her daily run despite exhaustion and cold weather and then to the aikido gym like usual; and that despite her having moved through more kitchens than she can count in her career, in multiple languages and countries at every possible level of seniority, she’s never felt as lost in one as she does in Ava’s.
It’s not so much that it’s cramped, though it’s been years since she had to keep her elbows in so tightly, or that it’s both louder and quieter than other places she’s worked, or that she has to keep an eye out for flying ingredients. It’s not that it’s a different type of menu than she’s used to, different cuisines, or faster table turnovers, or that she doesn’t yet know everyone’s names. It’s more that there’s Ava, constantly: checking in on the line staff, trading jokes with Chanel, materializing at Beatrice’s elbow to ask her input on a sauce-- bone marrow, Beatrice had suggested after a painful protracted moment of uncertainty and scrambling in her brain because she’s pastry and not even Lilith ever asked her for a suggestion on a sauce for an entree and Beatrice hasn’t had to think on the fly with her non-dessert brain since finishing training-- and then disappearing again with a cheerful thanks! yelled over her shoulder.
Beatrice is used to operating with autonomy after this long, autonomy afforded by her competence but also by a strictly-run operation where the menu is set more than a day in advance and doesn’t change on the fly. She can make her preparations and dole out instructions and, once she knows how her staff is operating, relax into the knowledge that she knows what will happen when and how and by whom.
Ava’s kitchen, though, hurtles along at a breakneck pace and changes, it seems, every ten minutes. By the time they make it through the initial rush of reservations and walk-ins, there’s a sharp ache between Beatrice’s shoulderblades that she hasn’t felt in years, the one that accompanied her through school and her first years working, the one that’s uncertainty translated into tension and migrating up into a constant throb at her temples, because Ava tried to adjust one of the daily specials halfway through the evening and Beatrice had nearly had a heart attack until Chanel blithely pulled Ava back on course. Beatrice is used to things moving quickly, but always in the same direction: Ava, though, jukes her way through the work that Beatrice has spent her life regimenting and it's all Beatrice can do not to fall behind.
The evening ends and Beatrice’s headache is well on its way to becoming a migraine when she drops bonelessly into the chair in the tiny room next to Ava’s tiny office that is meant to be her tiny office. She hadn’t expected one and had argued she didn’t need one, but now she’s grateful for Ava’s insistence because her head is killing her and she still needs to discuss tomorrow’s menu with Ava and all she wants to do is go home and stare at her ceiling and weigh her options of going back to Per Se because she’s not sure she can handle Ava’s galloping gallivanting approach to work.
“Hey!” Ava appears in the doorway, two espressos balanced in one hand and what looks suspiciously like two glasses of whiskey in the other.
“Hello.” Beatrice doesn’t groan, because she’s an adult and a professional and it’s almost embarrassing to be this exhausted after one night working, but she comes close. “Did you want to review tomorrow’s--”
“We’re fine for tomorrow,” Ava says dismissively. She steps further into Beatrice’s office and holds out the hand with the coffee cups. She grins, easy as anything, when Beatrice regards them suspiciously. “It’s decaf, don’t worry. I learned the hard way that there is a time for decaf and it’s at two in the morning.”
Beatrice sighs and accepts the coffee, leaning back in her chair. “Thank you.”
“First day, yeah?” Ava’s grin widens and her eyebrows lift. “Figured we should, like, celebrate. Or toast, or-- I don’t know. Apologize for the insanity.”
Beatrice sips at her coffee delicately, lest she say anything absurd like you run your kitchen like a hyperactive toddler. Ava doesn’t seem offended, instead hopping up to sit on Beatrice’s empty desktop, one leg sprawled lazy across it and back leaning against the wall. She offers Beatrice one of the whiskeys, glass dangling in front of her lazily.
“No, thank you,” Beatrice says, eyeballing it like it’s a grenade. “I don’t drink.”
“Fair enough.” Ava shrugs and dumps it into the other glass, toasts Beatrice with it easily. “To surviving your first night in the hellmouth.”
Beatrice laughs without meaning to, quiet in the quieting restaurant, and obligingly taps the edge of her coffee cup against Ava’s whiskey.
“It’s not that bad,” Beatrice says before she can realize that she actually means it. It’s not. Even when a waiter dropped an entire souffle on the floor or one of the line cooks completely scalded one of the sauces, no one yelled or cursed or dressed them down until they cried. It’s chaotic, but kind, and Beatrice hadn’t realized that a professional kitchen could run like that. “At my first job as a station chef, the saucier yelled so much at one of the cooks that she had an asthma attack and then he had a heart attack. This is almost mild in comparison.”
A bright peal of laughter sounds from Ava, filling the room. It’s almost too loud for this late, for the emptied restaurant, and Beatrice’s stomach twists in an unfamiliar uncomfortable way, but she smiles into her coffee regardless.
“Okay, well.” Ava takes a swig of her whiskey, drops her head back against the wall Beatrice’s desk is crammed against. “So far no one has had an asthma attack or a heart attack in this kitchen.”
“That you know of,” Beatrice says drily. Ava snorts, shakes her head, points at Beatrice with her whiskey.
“Don’t you dare,” she says, but she’s smiling, that same big easy smile she’d had whenever she appeared at Beatrice’s elbow throughout the night to do something ridiculous like ask her opinion about something. “So, how’d it go? Did we pass the test?”
“Well,” Beatrice says, tilting her coffee cup until the espresso nearly spills out one side, and then back again. “I nearly got stabbed in the ribs with a paring knife, but given that it was an accident and I wasn’t actually stabbed I’d say…B plus.”
“You know, I feel like I should be offended at not getting an A,” Ava says. “But since you nearly had your own little heart attack here last night, I’ll take the B plus as a win.”
“I did not,” Beatrice says indignantly, as if she hadn’t laid awake the entire night wondering what chaotic disaster she’d signed herself up for.
“Yeah, sure.” Ava snorts into her whiskey. “Whatever you say.”
“To be fair, you were changing your menu two hours before opening.” Beatrice wishes she’d kept the retort locked behind her teeth, because it’s her first day and Ava is the reason anyone at all is here, including Beatrice, and insulting her boss-- even if her boss insists they’re partners-- is hardly a winning strategy to a successful working relationship, but Ava laughs, easy like she always does, and it unwinds an inch of the tension that had been ratcheting tighter and tighter between her shoulderblades since yesterday.
“Gotta keep you on your toes, Bea,” Ava says, throwing back the rest of her whiskey and hopping off her desk. “Now get out of here.”
She raps her knuckles against Beatrice’s desk-- clean, because Beatrice had taken an extra ten minutes to scrub it with Lysol when she arrived earlier; immaculate, with only her tablet and the drafted menu for tomorrow they’d agreed on-- and points at her.
“Good night,” Beatrice says, because it’s the polite thing to do, because she still doesn’t know how to talk to someone like Ava, because she still doesn’t know what she’s doing here or how to be here.
Ava glances over her shoulder, grin easy as anything, and salutes her lazily. “Night, Bea. See you tomorrow.”
She disappears to her own office, and Beatrice sits for long seconds staring at her half-empty coffee and the menu on her desk. Her heel taps rapidly on the floor, half wanting to follow Ava and confirm the menu again and half refusing to because she can’t have a working relationship with Ava if she doesn’t trust her.
In the end, she finishes her coffee and, lazily-- because it’s two in the morning and because her whole body aches with exhaustion and because this restaurant is a barely-controlled chaos and because, well, she’ll be here early tomorrow anyways and can clean it up then-- leaves it on her desk, shrugs into her coat, packs away her tablet. She pauses in the doorway to her office, glancing to the right to where Ava’s door is open and the light still on, and takes half a step towards it before thinking better of it. Her fingertips tap rapidly against her palm, nerves and uncertainty making her twitchy.
They don’t stop until she’s walked the ten minutes to the train and waited another ten for it to arrive.