“Not all day,” I protested. “I’ll be home this afternoon. We’re going to Sallie’s tonight.”

He looked at me a long moment. Leaning forward, he kissed me, a quick, skimpy kiss like the punctuation at the end of a sentence. A period, not an exclamation point. “See you at home.”

I watched them go, three blond heads disappearing into the crowd.

CHAPTER 9

Jo

Iwriggled my toes in Wonder Woman socks under my alcove table. It was Saturday morning, and I was putting the finishing touches on my blog. The topic—family meal—was sure to appeal to my New York hipster foodie audience. I’d posted the recipes I’d made last night next to surreptitious photos of hotel pans heaped with food.

I’d wanted my dishes to wow Chef, to prove to him I was worthy of his trust. But for most of the staff, family meal was the main—sometimes the only—meal they got all day.

“Why are we here?” Chef had asked me.

“To feed people.”

I’d noticed that when the other chefs cooked, they prepared something hearty and filling, a pasta or a stew. So, resisting the urge to impress Chef with my technique (Ha. Like that was ever going to happen), I’d made comfort food from my childhood: smothered chicken, corn bread, and greens.

“This is fucking great, babe,” Lucas had said, digging in.

Ray, the sous, had been less enthusiastic. “I would have blanched the collards,” he said. But I noticed he took two helpings.

Too bad I didn’t get a picture of that. No photos of the crew gathered like a big, happy, dysfunctional family around the table, dishwashers and back runners, cooks and servers, checking their phones, joking and talking in a mix of English and Spanish. I couldn’t post anything that would identify them. Or me.

Unless someone recognized the food. But I hadn’t photographed all the dishes, I reassured myself. No one was going to identify Gusto based on a chicken recipe that wasn’t even on the menu.

I added a call to action at the bottom of my blog—What do YOU cook for a crowd?—before reading it over. Strategic content? Check. Long-tail keywords optimized for search? Check. Links to advertisers and related posts? Check and check. I’d learned a lot since those long-ago stories scribbled in my attic room. Or even since my first blog posts, written when I was still giddy with freedom, drunk on New York, swept off my feet by the experience of working in my first real restaurant kitchen under a Michelin-starred chef. Hungry: Taking a Bite Out of the Big Apple was my love letter to the food scene in the city, written with all the sizzle of service and the freshness of infatuation.

But lately I’d had this nagging sense of . . . I don’t know. Something missing. As if I’d read everything before, on my own or someone else’s blog. The thought filled me with mild panic.

I’d always known I was going to be a writer. I did not want—I couldn’t afford—to fail. Again.