Chapter 8
Shun
The address was a mews off a side street in Clerkenwell. Maya walked past it twice before she found it. It was a narrow cobbled lane between a locksmith and a shuttered print shop, and halfway down it a single paper lantern hung over a plain wooden door. There was no sign. The lantern had one character brushed on it in black ink: 旬.
Marcus was waiting outside, hands in the pockets of the waxed jacket.
“You’re on time,” he said, approvingly.
“You told me not to be late.”
“People say that to me and then they’re late anyway. Come on.”
Inside, the room was very small and very warm. A single counter of pale, much-scrubbed wood ran its length, with eight stools in front of it. Behind it was an open kitchen no larger than Maya’s own, all of it visible, with every knife, bowl and cloth in a place that looked as though it had been decided long ago. Six of the stools were already taken. Two at the end had been left for them.
There were two people behind the counter. One was a young man in his twenties in a white jacket, who bowed slightly as they came in and went straight back to what he was doing, which appeared to be wiping a bowl that was already spotless. The other was a woman in her mid-sixties, small, grey hair cut very short, in a dark indigo apron. She looked up at Marcus with an expression of fond, mild exasperation, as if he were a cousin she had stopped expecting to behave.
“Marcus,” she said. “You’ve brought someone.”
“Aiko, this is Maya. We’re working together.”
“On the hospital.” It wasn’t a question. Aiko looked at Maya with a frank, assessing interest that reminded her, oddly, of Ruth. “I read about it. I’m sorry. Sit.”
They sat. There was no menu. Within a minute, small cups of warm tea were in front of them, and then a tiny dish of something green and glossy on a bed of crushed ice.
“Nanohana,” Aiko said. “Rapeseed shoots. Two weeks ago they weren’t ready, and in three weeks they’ll be too bitter. This week they’re at their best.” She went back to her board.
Maya ate it. It was startlingly good: bitter and sweet, with something salty underneath. She waited for Marcus to say something about the case. He didn’t. He ate slowly and watched the kitchen.
The meal went on for two hours, and in that time Maya learned a great deal about the restaurant and nothing at all about why she was there.
She learned that Shun meant the time in its season when an ingredient is at its best: a few weeks, sometimes only days. Aiko built every menu around whatever had arrived at that moment. She learned that there were only ever eight diners, twice a night, five nights a week, and that Aiko had once turned down an offer to open a second site in Tokyo. She learned that the young man was called Yuki, that he had worked at Shun for two years, and that in those two years Aiko hadn’t let him touch the tuna.
“Not once?” Maya said, when Aiko mentioned it while placing a piece of something pink and translucent in front of her.
“Not once.” Aiko didn’t look up from her knife. “He does the rice. He does the stock. He cleans the fish I’m going to cut, and he watches me cut it. He has cut perhaps four thousand cucumbers.”
Yuki, at the other end of the counter, kept his eyes on his work, but Maya thought the corner of his mouth moved.
“Isn’t that—” Maya hesitated, searching for a polite word.
“Slow,” Aiko said. “Yes.”
“I was going to say wasteful. He’s obviously good. Why not let him learn on the real thing?”
“Because the real thing costs forty pounds a portion and he’d ruin it.” Aiko said it without heat, as a statement of fact. “And because cutting the cucumber is the real thing. When he’s cut four thousand of them, his hand knows something about a blade going through something wet that it didn’t know before. Then he’ll cut the fish, and his hand will already know.” She laid the knife down and wiped it, a single stroke. “You can’t explain that to the hand. It has to find out.”
“That sounds a bit like a fortune cookie,” Maya said, before she could stop herself.
She regretted it immediately. Somebody further down the counter laughed. Aiko didn’t seem offended. She glanced at Marcus.
“She sounds like you,” she said.
“She sounds like me twenty-eight years ago,” Marcus said. “I said exactly the same thing on her opening night. Maybe the same words.” He turned to Maya. “I hate it when she does that, by the way. The cucumber line. She does it to journalists.”
“It works on journalists,” Aiko said.
“It doesn’t work on me. Tell her the other bit.”
Aiko sighed, as if he’d asked her to show her workings in an exam. She picked up a cucumber from the board in front of Yuki and held it up.
“At my old restaurant I had a kitchen of forty,” she said. “We had a training programme. Six weeks, laminated cards, a video. New cooks did the six weeks and were on the line by week seven, cutting whatever needed cutting. It was very efficient.” She put the cucumber down. “I kept records, because I’m that sort of person. In my old kitchen, cooks who came through the programme took about eighteen months before their mistake rate on the line matched the people who’d been trained the slow way. It wasn’t the knife mistakes, they learned those fast. It was the others: when to taste again, when something’s not right and you can’t say why. In eighteen months of fast training a cook sends out a great many plates. When I started training slowly again here, with one apprentice, it took two years before he was trusted with anything that mattered. But when he does start, he’ll have stopped making the kind of mistakes you can’t see.” She shrugged. “I’m not saying that’s poetry. It’s what I counted.”
Marcus looked at Maya with an expression of mild triumph. Maya, who had been ready to be unimpressed, found that she wasn’t.
“Why did you have a kitchen of forty?” she asked.
Something passed over Aiko’s face, there and then gone.
“Ask Marcus,” she said, and went to the far end of the counter to plate something for the other diners.
Marcus told her over the next course, quietly, while Aiko was busy at the other end.
Thirty years ago, Aiko had run a group called Kaze. It started with one celebrated restaurant in Soho and became four in five years, then a central prep kitchen in Park Royal supplying all four, then plans for six more. The investors loved it and the reviews loved it. Aiko, by then, was spending more time in meetings than with a knife.
“She warned them,” Marcus said. “That’s the thing. She told the board that the brigade was growing faster than anyone could train it. The central kitchen was standardising recipes, and no one at the sites understood what had changed. She said it in meetings, she put it in writing, and she was told she was being precious. A chef who didn’t understand scale.”
“What happened?”
“The central kitchen changed a dressing. Swapped one oil for another to save money, toasted sesame for something else. The recipe card went out to all four sites. One site’s allergen sheet didn’t get updated, because the person who would have updated it had left, and the person who replaced them had done the six-week programme. A nineteen-year-old with a sesame allergy ordered a salad she’d ordered a dozen times before.” Marcus turned his teacup a quarter turn on the counter. “She was in intensive care for four days. She lived.”
“And you investigated.”
“I was thirty-eight and very sure of myself. I found the sheet, the person who hadn’t updated it, and the process step that was missed. I wrote it up very clearly.” He paused. “I also found Aiko’s memos. All of them. I put them in an appendix. The board accepted the main report and the recommendation to retrain the site staff. Nobody read the appendix. I didn’t push.”
Maya looked at him. In six years she had never heard him say anything about himself that wasn’t a joke.
“Aiko closed three of the four restaurants the following year,” he said. “Against everybody’s advice. She sold the central kitchen and paid off the investors. People said she’d had a breakdown. A year after that she sold the fourth, the original in Soho, and opened this with what she had left: eight seats and one apprentice. Business magazines did a lot of pieces about her as a cautionary tale.” He picked up his tea. “She’s had a waiting list for twenty-eight years.”
At the far end of the counter Aiko was building a dish with tweezers, absolutely absorbed. From where Maya sat it looked effortless, almost lazy. Aiko’s hands barely seemed to move, and the plate assembled itself without her. There was no hurry anywhere in the room. Yet in the two hours they’d been there, Maya realised, sixteen courses had gone out to eight people, each one at exactly the right moment and temperature, and she had never once seen anybody wait.
She watched more carefully. Aiko’s hands were moving constantly in small, economical arcs, wasting nothing. Yuki moved too, anticipating, setting bowls down a fraction before they were needed, taking things away before anyone noticed they were finished. It wasn’t slow at all. It was very fast, but so thoroughly rehearsed that from the outside it looked like stillness.
She thought of Josh’s dashboard: deployment frequency, throughput, elite. That had looked fast too.
She didn’t let herself finish the thought.
They left at half past nine. Outside, the mews was cold and smelled of rain. Marcus put on the waxed jacket and walked her towards Farringdon station without speaking.
“I don’t understand why we did that,” Maya said eventually. “We had ten days. We’ve got ten days. We spent two and a half hours eating rapeseed shoots.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“Yes. That’s not the point.”
“It’s slightly the point.” He walked with his hands in his pockets. “I go there when I’m working on something like this. I don’t go to think about the case. I go so that I stop thinking about it for long enough to see it.” He glanced at her. “You’ve been seeing nothing but this for five days. You’re very good, so you’ve been seeing it extremely clearly. But you’re only seeing it from the inside.”
“So what’s the outside?”
“I’ve no idea,” Marcus said. “That’s why we keep going back.” He stopped at the corner by the station. “Tomorrow I’d like to talk to Sam.”
“I’ve already talked to Sam.”
“I know. You asked him about the change.” He started walking again, towards the bus stop on the far side. “I’d like to ask him about the sentence.”
“What sentence?”
But he was crossing the road, and didn’t answer. Maya stood for a moment at the station entrance in the cold, and then took her notebook out of her bag and found Thursday’s page. There it was in her own handwriting, word for word, the thing she hadn’t known why she’d written down.
I read every line. I just never really know, with any of it, whether I actually know.
She’d sent it to him, she remembered, along with everything else. Unsummarised.