Fed up

the same way I did. In the chaos of getting plates and serving platters to the table, he let everyone get in a few spoonfuls of food and practically had to swat Robin away from the gnocchi. He also remembered to set aside gnocchi with butter only for Leo. I grimaced when I saw Marlee double-dip her spoon back into the bowl. How uncheflike! Between her dirty fingernails and germ-sharing tasting method, I wondered how this woman’s restaurant ever passed a health inspection.
    At last it was time to film the dinner scene. The large dining room was painted a deep green that I hoped wouldn’t be too dark for the camera. Francie and Leo took their seats on delicate Windsor chairs at a round wooden table beneath what I thought was a fake crystal chandelier. The table was too small for the generously proportioned room and too chunky for the chairs. The piece of furniture that dominated the dining room was a gigantic sideboard with little mirrors and elaborate carving. It seemed to me that the dining room, like the kitchen, had been assembled bit by bit, without any sort of overall plan or theme to guide the selection of elements, none of which had anything in common with any of the others. While I’d been busy in the kitchen, someone had tried to impose eye appeal on the unfortunate dining room by creating an attractive table setting. The matching runner, place mats, and napkins were made of a Victorian-looking fabric with stylized flowers and vines on a black background. The stainless flatware was heavy and oversized— at a guess, the pattern had the word Hotel in its name—and each of the two places had two stemmed wineglasses, one large and one small. Someone, maybe Marlee, had opened two bottles of wine, one red and one white, and had placed them on the table. Although I knew very little about wine, I knew that red wine, or at least some red wine, was supposed to be opened ahead of time so that it could breathe. But white wine? And wasn’t white wine supposed to be cold? Or at least cool? I didn’t ask. Fortunately, as I reminded myself, the show was more about food than about wine; it certainly wasn’t supposed to be about interior decorating.
    As Josh served Francie and Leo, I noted that he deserved a lot of credit for seamlessly putting together separate dishes for a couple with radically different food preferences. Leo’s plate of halibut and buttered gnocchi, Francie’s plate of lamb chops and pesto gnocchi, and a platter of roasted vegetables all looked divine. Probably because of the shared vegetables, I had the sense of one coordinated meal, not just a collection of separate items. Leo’s willingness to eat the vegetables had surprised me, since they’d been cooked in the same roasting pan as the lamb, as Leo knew. Leo had participated in the cooking, he’d seen the vegetables in the roasting pan, and Josh had even pointed out that they’d been cooked with the meat, but Leo had said that they were fine for him. I’d heard him myself. In any case, now that the main course had been served, the table looked beautiful.
    Nelson’s camera light shone on the pair of diners. Looking jovial and pleased with himself, Leo poured white wine into his own glass and red into Francie’s. Then, just as Leo raised his glass, presumably to make a toast, Robin stopped him. “Wait!” she cried. “We need to get some good footage of the dishes before anyone eats them. Marlee and Digger? Why don’t you carry everything back to the kitchen, to the breakfast table, and Nelson can shoot the plates there, where the light’s better.”
    “Sure thing,” Marlee said as she handed the vegetable platter to Digger and then removed Francie’s and Leo’s plates. “While we’re at it, we’ll sneak a little taste for ourselves from the leftovers in the bowls.”
    Josh, I knew, would take it as a compliment that another chef wanted to sample his food. My private thought was that Marlee was hungry. I certainly was, and I suspected that everyone else was, too.
    Digger sighed as he carried away the platter. “At this rate, the food is going to be dead cold by the time they get to eat it.”
    He wasn’t kidding. It must’ve taken Nelson ten minutes to film the food that had been taken away, and when it was finally returned and Leo and Francie finally got to take their first bites, Nelson stopped them and announced that they’d have to reenact their first tasting. Poor Josh looked ready to wring someone’s neck, and