She blushes, looking pleased. "Well, I do love events like these. But I have to say, I've never been so invested in one as I am in yours. Usually I'm just facilitating, you know? This felt like building something together."
"That's because we built it together," I say. "You had a huge hand in this. I mean it."
"Well, if that's the case, I expect a mention in your James Beard acceptance speech," she says, grinning. "Andthisought to show your father that you're ready for New York."
"New York," I say, and the words taste different today than they usually do.
I've always known it was my next step, and that I was ready for it. Maybe my father will finally see that too. Maybe a review in theChroniclecalling his daughter a revelation will do what years of me proving myself couldn't. I feel supremely, ridiculously, stupidly proud of myself.
Margot stands and brushes off her skirt. "Okay, I have to get back inside and finish the wine menu for the Calloway wedding, but I'msohappy for you and we are absolutely meeting up later to celebrate properly."
"Wouldn't miss it," I say, beaming.
She squeezes my shoulder and heads back inside, and I'm left alone on the bench with my phone and the review and a smile I can't get rid of.
I pull my legs up and hug my knees and read the whole thing again from the beginning, slowly this time, letting every sentence sink in. After the third re-read I smile to myself and look out at the gardens. It drizzled this morning. Unusual for October in Napa, and the entire landscape feels damp and lush, so different from the warm, dry days we've had all week. The air smells rich, loamy, the scent of wet soil and greenery, fragranced by the wet roses along the stone wall and throughout the garden. Like a new beginning.
Maybe I should text Alex. He's been a massive help, and like Margot, he's one of the people who will be genuinely happy for me, who will build me up instead of finding a way to make it about themselves. Before I can text him, I see an email notification from Bethany, my father's assistant. The subject line reads:NYC Menu Finalization.
I frown. I hadn't discussed any of the NYC menu with Bethany. I've been emailing back and forth with Laurent, the current head chef who's retiring, about the transition. But we'd agreed that the menu wouldn't be finalized until I arrived in New York after the pop-up ended. That was the deal. My menu, my timeline.
I open the email and my heart sinks as I read:
Hi Isabelle,
Attached please find the finalized menu for the NYC restaurant. Mr. Beaumont reviewed your initial proposals and felt that some adjustments were needed to better align with the restaurant's established identity. He has revised and approved the attached version. The kitchen team has already been notified and prep scheduling will begin next week so they can start practicing before your arrival after the pop-up concludes.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
Bethany
I read it again, not quite believing what I'm seeing. I tap the PDF attachment with fingers that have gone numb.
It opens on my screen, laid out in clean formatting on Beaumont Group letterhead. Some of my dishes are there, but altered, tweaked in ways that strip out the things I was most deliberate about. The structure is different. The direction is entirely different.
He's removed the tasting menu format I designed and replaced it with a prix fixe, more traditional, more in line with what the restaurant has been doing for twenty years under Laurent. And he cut the dish I was most excited about, a reworking of my grandmother's cassoulet, refined for fine dining but with the heart of it intact, the duck fat and the thyme and the memory of standing on a stool in her kitchen watching her cook without measuring anything.
I had wanted to put a piece of her into that menu. A piece of my heart into that restaurant. I thought maybe if people tasted it they'd feel what I felt in that kitchen, even a fraction of it.
Gone.Replaced with something elegant but utterly soulless.
My eyes burn and I wipe them furiously with the back of my hand. I scan the email again.The kitchen team has already been notified.
The team found out before I did. He had the courtesy to inform his employees before he told his own daughter. The next head chef of the restaurant. The woman who theChroniclejust called a revelation, whose review is still glowing on my phone screen three inches below this email.
He does this. He always does this. He builds me up and then swoops in and reminds me that the building is his. And I don't know how to reconcile it, the love and the control, the prideand the interference. How do you fight the person who gave you everything? How do you tell the man who built your entire career that he's also the one standing in the way of it?
I've been working toward New York for years, andnothingchanges. Nothing ever changes. Will I ever be good enough for him to actually let go?
The drizzle starts again, light and cool on my arms and the top of my head. This morning it felt like a fresh start, the garden washed clean, the air bright with possibility. Now it feels melancholy, pathetic even, like the sky is crying on cue in some overwrought movie about disappointment.
I should go inside, call my father and tell him what I think of his finalized menu. That's what I've always done, pushed through, pushed forward, converted the anger into fuel and kept moving. But right now I don't want to move. I want to sit on this cold bench in this beautiful, indifferent garden.
It's nearly midnight when I'm finally alone in the kitchen. I made it through the dinner service, which went flawlessly despite the fact that I was barely holding it together inside. And I managed to avoid my father beyond the bare minimum required politeness when he dined at the chef's table with Olivier and some other investors whose names I didn't bother to remember.
He flies out tomorrow morning and I still haven't confronted him about the menu. I didn't have it in me to argue today, which is so unlike me that it's almost disorienting, like I'm watching myself from the outside and wondering who this passive version of myself is.