A Shot and a Scream

TWO CENTS        |        JAN 23, 2021

A Shot and a Scream

Sometimes the only thing that helps.

JANET MERCEL


I dreamed about The Finch before ever having been there. I’d read about it since the restaurant opened in Clinton Hill in 2014, adjacent-ish to the Crown Heights apartment I’ve kept for over a decade. I knew it had earned a Michelin star within a year, notably because it was a local bistro and no one knew what to think about that. But I had never seen an image of its interior, and when I entered for the first time, I grabbed my sister’s arm. It's my restaurant, the one I've been dreaming about. I’d been writing short stories for months centered around a small Brooklyn place, I’d seen it in a literal dream. I could visualize the white brick walls and exposed, marble-wrapped kitchen as clearly as though it were real, until I walked into The Finch on Election Night 2016 and realized it was real. I have no explanation for this.

I’d been out of work for a month, having quit my design job to write full time for as long as I could swing it. My mother was already feeling sorry for me and sent enough cash for my sister and I to take ourselves to dinner without a thought as to where, which is how we ended up sitting at Chef Gabe McMackin’s marble bar, the restaurant glowing around us, for an extremely bizarre night of emotion. I clearly recall our elation and certainty that our candidate would win, with a hashing over of every fear and anxiety and disruption if she didn't. It seems wildly innocent a full four years later; the imagining of things we needn’t have bothered about, the complete lack of foresight into what would actually occur. Just about everybody was quivering with apprehension.

Gabe was running a drink special called A Shot and a Scream. You asked your server to bring you to the cold room walk-in, give you a shot of whiskey and close the door for you to scream your lungs out into the frozen void, after which you’d return to your table for dinner. It helped a lot. My sister and I watched Gabe and his team, yogi-like behind the line, as we shared plate after plate, unfussy and fresh, and it was the only sense of absolute home and security I would feel for a long while.

Late the following summer, still willfully unemployed and bootstrapping my way through a series of subletters, temporary boarders and random freelance work, what had been one of the best years of my life following my divorce was rapidly becoming one of the worst. The last few months had disassembled me. I had jumped a subway turnstile the week before because I didn’t want to spend the cost to refill my MetroCard, and it occurred to me I was wearing over $200 worth of underwear at the time. I had no idea what an isolating, fearful, humbling exercise in loss of dignity quitting my job would become, but the thought of rejoining the workforce and my former life was revolting. I was also dating, by common definition, a sociopath, who made me miserable. I did four things obsessively- write, run, think about money and eat. (Five things if you count drink.) I went upstate to my parents’ house every weekend to escape the expense of the city and whoever was staying in my apartment. When my mother asked me to go to the store for her to pick up a single carton of eggs, she would give me several twenty dollar bills and pretend she didn’t know there would be extra.

I had a recurring nightmare all through the summer that I was at a gala. Not a party. A gala. The light is near blinding. Chandeliers drip from every corner and banquet tables are set to rival scenes from Amadeus, the ones where Wolfie Mozart rolls around the floor at the palace of the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg. I am unable to enjoy a single moment, even while I gorge myself, because I know I do not have a way to get home. I am in no state to walk to my apartment, I have no cab fare, and no options. I stay in the dream for far too long, stuck in endless conversations about why I am lingering in the lobbies.

Family came to visit me at my parents’ house from out of town, one a chef, both lifelong restaurant people. They wanted to take me to my favorite place in the Hudson Valley for dinner, an impossible choice. I settled on Gaskins, in Germantown, because in summer their produce looks and tastes like they pick it fresh from the backyard an hour before. For all I know they do. I hadn’t realized I’d been talking all that loudly, sitting at the bar describing election night in the restaurant I’d dreamed before seeing it. A blonde man, unusually crisp for Germantown, sitting a few stools down leaned over. “I couldn’t help but overhear,” he ventured, “but I can tell from your story. Are you, by any chance, talking about The Finch?” It was so outlandish it felt almost expected. Surreally, they were childhood friends. He knew Gabe years before he opened his own spot, before he worked at Gramercy Tavern, or Blue Hill at Stone Barns. “Would you like to meet him? I’ll set it up.” My family shook their heads in disbelief as I took the man’s card.

An unusual thing for Gaskins and The Finch to share is that both exteriors are painted the same vibrant cobalt blue. A distinct choice, one applied to a former tattoo parlor, street level of a Brooklyn brownstone and the other to what is, essentially, a barn. When I approached the Brooklyn version several weeks after my upstate dinner, I was uncertain what I was doing there. I’d been introduced to Gabe as a writer working on a book about a restaurant, (who isn’t?) but without any real assignment or assignation. He’d invited me to join that day’s prep-meal meeting to observe, but why was I being allowed to waste these people’s time? I ran out of my last seconds to fret when a reddish, greyish topknot in white chef’s scrubs emerged from the bulkhead doors next to the entrance, carrying a crate. “You’re Gabe,” I said to the topknot. “I am,” he said brightly, and invited me inside.

***

Almost exactly three years later, I see the post on Instagram. “IT’S TIME. I am overwhelmingly grateful for the opportunity we have had to serve our community for the last 5 and a half years at The Finch...it’s been an honor..” Etcetera.

The closing announcement is full of words I’ve read too many times in the last six months. I add it to the literal list of establishments I love whose doors are shut forever. I think a lot about the day I voted for a Democratic president in 2016, when we had a safe, anonymous space to grieve and commiserate and generally freak out.

I wait until another election has passed, more hopeful, but ultimately no less ulcer inducing, to call Gabe. He’s living in the Connecticut house where he grew up, an hour’s drive from his role as Executive Chef at the magnificent Troutbeck in Amenia, N.Y. He’d already taken on the gig well before he closed his own restaurant, and for now, it’s his primary focus. From the phone, he is, unsurprisingly, chopping something. “Chicken chickpea stew,” and I can hear his knife on the block, on the “rosemary, and carrots, and potatoes,” and in the background hollering about something, Jasper, his five year old, who I met at The Finch when he was a wee thing and his mother brought him by on a walk.

“You know, I never ate at The Finch? I never made the space to be still and enjoy that moment for myself. I regret that deeply.” It closed in June, and it’s maybe taken this long for him to fully acknowledge how he feels about it. “You go about the rhythm of your normal day, but it’s like a toothache. You can ignore or bury it, but it’s not off the table. My family can tell, it’s affected my tone, and my ability to reason throughout the day.” It is, as he describes, a trauma. My heart has busted open a thousand times watching the food industry struggle, but there is a release in hearing someone put words to it firsthand.

“It’s a day to day, living hand to mouth business, figuring out how to make it thrive over however many years. I carried the fear of closing with me as long as we were open.”

***

I had never heard of a sea bean before the server next to me handed over the prehistoric green stalk. An hour before, I’d been briefly announced to the team as a visitor who loved their restaurant, who, for whatever reason, would be an honorary member of the team that night, and was accepted unquestioningly. We sat listening to the origins of the salty, marsh-dwelling vegetable, curious as schoolchildren. There was some kind of unexpected savory jelly passed around on spoons, the flavor of which is lost to memory. At dinnertime, everyone scattered and I was ensconced on a counter stool in full view of the line where, every few minutes, one of the servers would stop by to chat.

And then inspiring one of the single most mixed emotions of my life, unbeknownst to him, Gabe placed both hands on the counter in front of me and said with purpose, “Are you hungry?” Nothing would have prevented me from eating anything on (or off) that menu, but I was, that night, as broke as I have ever been. Cripplingly, humiliatingly broke. No excuse for the less than $50 in my bank account broke. Zero clue as to how to handle it should a single expense come my way broke. I didn’t want to presume that my humiliation would be spared, but what I could do but accept? I hesitated for .3 seconds before answering honestly,“I’m starving.”

One by one, casually as though I were in my mother’s kitchen, things appeared in front of me, sometimes a full dish, sometimes a leftover fragment as I watched the cooks make dinner for everyone else in the restaurant. Japanese knotweed and radishes with flowering dill. Chicken liver mousse with baby cipollini. A Plate of Orange Things, roe and small peppers over, I think, crudo. I watched Gabe compose singular calendula petals on the plate with the specificity of shojin, while musing, “I haven’t served this before. No one has tasted it yet.” My eyes went wide when he set it in front of me. “You will be the first.”

I counted twelve plates before the last one, fat, dark cherries and burnt lemon powder, and I was so full I was afraid I’d faint. The shy young cook who had stood closest all night grinned when he saw my eyes about to roll back in my head and spoke to me for the first time. “You did real well,” he said, raising his eyebrows to show he was impressed to watch me put away enough food for three people.

I had arrived at half past five in the afternoon and stayed on my stool until nearly eleven o’clock. Not for one moment was I allowed to feel uncared for, but with each bite, my misery mounted as I nursed a single twelve dollar glass of Grüner Vetliner and tried not to envision what would happen if I were charged for a single additional item. Panicked thoughts drifted through of who I might call to provide their credit card number over the phone. When I was presented with the check for that one glass of wine, I nearly cried with relief. I signed, leaving a tip down to the last dollar in my account, and limply walked the mile home to my apartment to lie on the floor for an hour, too full to move, the first time in half a year I’d allowed myself to feel joy untethered to shame.

***

It’s now been almost a year since dining out was a generally accepted activity, since we had safe spaces to disappear into and stopping into the local spot on your way home from work was de rigueur as a comfort and coping mechanism. “We need a stage in order to exist. We need our audience,” Gabe is saying from his Connecticut kitchen. “I couldn't function as a pick up or drive-thru.”

“Why were you so nice to me? Why was everyone so welcoming and willing to make time? Could you tell that I was miserable? And lonely? And had nowhere to go and just wanted someone to talk to me?” I need to know. I’d always been curious in those months I wore unhappiness like a brand, if anyone else could see that I was flickering at such a low wattage.

“I mean...all of the above. To be a part of that, your life in the middle of all these things. You carry it with you when you walk in. Being able to pivot for that kind of improv, juggling the other side while building a beautiful dish? It’s the ‘you locked yourself out of the apartment with nowhere to go’ situation. Let me take care of you.”

***

Every Sunday afternoon that summer, I boarded Metro North or Adirondack Trailways, canvas bags overflowing with however many now squished up vegetables and wilting flowers as I could carry from my mother’s gardens, a duffel rubbing my shoulder raw, and headed straight to a different restaurant in Brooklyn, where three of the bartenders were my good buddies, my best friend and her roommate lived in the apartment upstairs, and a solid handful of people I love lived within a ten minute walking distance.

I rarely texted anyone I was coming, or checked to see who was around, because come hell or highwater, people would start to filter in when the sun dropped. There was always going to be a face or two or three that I desperately needed to see, jammed cheek to jowl at the bar, subliminally saving me a seat, ready to spot me a drink or deliberately overpour me one.

I am a prickly, tricky person to be around when I am unhappy. The people I love filled in the cracks as best they could, but I do not accept comfort well. Tangibles, and strangers, are easier. There were several days that year that the thought of walking in that place was the only reason I got out of bed in the morning. It had little, if anything, to do with gustatory distraction, but it was a better excuse than most.

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Janet Mercel is a design, food, and features writer from New York currently based in Los Angeles. You can find her on Instagram posting mostly about those things @starwix.

Image of The Finch by Jill Capel, a longtime food industry veteran and watercolor illustrator in Philadelphia. (She is also the author’s sister.)

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