Free The Blue Bistro by Elin Hilderbrand

people a hard time. So there. Adrienne handed out menus to the women and summoned enough courage to say, “I’ve been drinking Laurent-Perrier rosé champagne. Can I interest you ladies in a bottle?”
    “Sure,” the redhead said. “Sounds great.”
    Adrienne was afraid that if she stopped moving, she would keel over. She led the good citizens of Nantucket to their tables, handed out menus, and delivered drinks for Caren and Bruno who she could see were getting slammed. A local author came in with a party of eight. They had been barhopping in town and as soon as the author stepped in the door, she started singing along with the piano. Another party of four stepped in, among them a woman with a luscious pink pashmina who pointed at Adrienne’s shoes.
    “Great shoes!” she cried.
    You can have them,
Adrienne thought.
    Thatcher approached the podium. “I don’t want you to look right now,” he said. “But in a second, casually, studythe man to Holt Millman’s left. He is Public Enemy Number One.”
    Instinctively, Adrienne turned.
    “Don’t look,” Thatcher said. “Because he’s watching us.”
    “Who is it?” Adrienne said.
    “Drew Amman-Keller. Freelance journalist. He’s basically on Holt’s payroll writing pieces for
Town & Country
and
Forbes
about Holt and Holt’s friends. He’s been so aggressive in pursuing a story about Fiona that we had to ban him from the restaurant. But he’s not stupid. He comes with Holt.”
    “Can I look now?”
    “In a second. Let me walk away. I see table seven is drinking Laurent-Perrier.”
    “I suggested it.”
    “I want you to deliver the VIP order to Holt’s table,” Thatcher said. “In fact, I want you to deliver the VIP orders from now on. All summer. That will be your job.”
    “But . . .”
    “Go to the kitchen right now,” Thatcher said. “Don’t turn around.”
    Adrienne learned that the person making the chips and dip was a kid named Paco, the assistant to the garde-manger. Paco was gangly, pimply, wearing a Chicago White Sox hat. Adrienne went right to him for pickup, sidestepping the frenetic scene that was going on between the waitstaff and Fiona and the line cooks and Fiona.
    The kitchen, which had been so peaceful when Adrienne had first entered it, was now a house on fire. Fiona wasn’t actually cooking; she was standing in front of what Paco referred to as the pass, yelling out orders from the tickets.
    “Ordering table eight: one crab cake, two beets, one Caesar.”
    From the other side of the stoves, a cook called out, “Ordering one crab cake, chef.”
    The garde-manger, whose name was Eddie, called out, “Two beets and one Caesar, chef.” Adrienne watched Eddiereach into two giant bowls of greens to plate the salads. She was entranced by the speed and the grace of this kind of cooking. It was as amazing as watching someone blow glass or weave on a loom, and it was all the more impressive because these men were barely men. Eddie might have been legal to drink, but Paco looked about nineteen. Adrienne watched him slice potatoes on a mandolin—
pfft, pfft, pfft
—until he had a pile of potatoes in perfect coins.
    “Ordering table seven: one crab cake, one chowder, one bisque, two beets, one foie gras,” Fiona said. For such a small individual, her voice was very forceful. “And where is table twenty’s chowder? That’s Cat, people,
vamos
!”
    “You know,” Adrienne said to Paco, “this is going to a party of ten. Maybe we should give them extra?”
    “Party of ten?” Paco said. He, too, had a Chicago accent. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?” He dropped another batch of sliced potatoes into the oil. It hissed like a snake.
    “Ordering table twenty-five: two foie gras, two bisque, two crab cake, one SOS,” Fiona said. A crab cake appeared in front of her and she studied it, tasted the sauce with a spoon, then wiped the edge of the plates with a towel. She tasted a bowl of shrimp bisque and sprinkled it with