Steamed

be ready. He tends to be sort of accident prone, and when he gets nervous, like when I’m not there, it gets worse. He dropped a vat of veal stock all over the floor and made a mess.”
    Josh stretched his arms above his head. “But it’s a drag, because now whenever I’m off, I’m worried about what’s going on in the kitchen at Magellan and whether or not Brian’s managing things okay. Most nights he does fine, but like, tonight, since I’m off, I’ll probably call there a few times to check in and see if he’s got questions for me. I’m not usually ever off on a Saturday night, but Maddie wanted me to have a break after working all day for the funeral.”
    “I don’t know why Tim had all that much confidence in Garrett as a chef,” I said. “I mean, enough confidence in him to give him the job. First Tim hired Garrett, then, from what I heard, Tim had you help Garrett with the menu.” I paused. “Oh God! I’m sorry. I just said the food at Essence was terrible! And you helped Garrett—” Now he was going to run away for sure.
    “No, that wasn’t me cooking, so don’t feel bad,” Josh assured me. “But, yeah, I did sit down with him and write up the menu.”
    “Why would Tim hire him if he can’t even write his own menu?”
    “Well, Tim doesn’t have to pay him that much because Garrett doesn’t have much experience. Tim works him seventy hours a week and probably doesn’t even give him health insurance or any other benefits. You get what you pay for sometimes. Garrett’s not a bad guy, though, he’s just a little bitter about the fact that we went to school at the same time and that I’m in the position I’m in, and he’s struggling where he is.”
    “So you helped out Essence? That was generous of you.”
    “Maybe... see, I like Tim, but I was a little irritated about it, because for one thing, I have enough to do at Magellan, but mostly because chefs don’t like sharing their recipes. The detective was right when he asked me about the competition between Magellan and Essence. On the one hand, I like Tim and want him to do well, but on the other hand, I don’t want him to do that well. The truth is that there’s only so much room for top restaurants in one city, and I’m only so interested in helping out the competition.”
    “But the menu at Essence looked great, so you must have helped Garrett out quite a bit?” I didn’t understand how the chef who created today’s food could have been responsible for some of the disasters I’d eaten at Essence.
    “Sort of. He had some okay ideas, but his dishes were very simple. Not the kind of high-end food Tim wanted to serve. I helped him come up with the concept for the dishes, but I let him figure out how to make everything. I’m betting that’s where the problem is—he’s been trying to cook my dishes, and he’s screwing them up because he’s frankly just not that talented.”
    He sighed and continued, “So, like I said, I basically screwed him over.” Josh looked down. “Like, he wanted to do my fennel and orange side, so I basically just gave him the general idea of how to make it. But I didn’t tell him all the ingredients, and I definitely didn’t give him step-by-step instructions. I know for a fact that instead of using fresh orange slices and fresh juice, he uses canned Mandarin oranges, which totally changes the quality of the dish. And I shave my fennel, and Garrett just chops it—which means the fennel doesn’t absorb the flavor in the same way. So,” Josh admitted, “I screwed him over.”
    “It’s like if you told me all the ingredients in a beef stew, but didn’t tell me exactly how to make it? Instead of roughly chopping the vegetables into big chunks, I might finely mince up the carrots and potatoes, which would make for a sort of disgusting stew, right?”
    “Exactly. Tim probably would’ve done better to let Garrett do his own simple food rather than try to cook something beyond him.”
    I was starting to see the detective’s point. “So you intentionally set him up to fail? And is that what Detective Hurley thinks?”
    “I probably did without realizing it. I went in there with good intentions, but Garrett copped such an attitude with me the day I showed up to help him that I guess I wrote up items I knew were mine, items I was the only one who could do just right. He was being such a dirtbag. It was just like we were in school all over again. He kept acting like he didn’t need my