diary
I do not even labour in food. I labour in a spreadsheet, in a hushed office where the most perilous object is a stapler and the gravest catastrophe available is a faintly awkward reply-all. And yet I woke at four in the morning genuinely convinced I had neglected to order the fish.
I suspect I merely recognise the particular disquiet of a person who has resolved that her entire worth is a task she has not yet completed. The show is not about cooking. It concerns people who mistake self-punishment for a work ethic, and I speak that dialect natively, without accent.
There is a falsehood at the centre of the whole enterprise, and the kitchen merely renders it visible: the belief that if one suffers beautifully enough, precisely enough, at a sufficiently high temperature, one will finally earn the right to rest. That the rest awaits, somewhere beyond one further immaculate service.
But rest is not a reward you unlock. It is a decision you make, generally against every instinct you possess, in a body that has confused adrenaline for meaning for so long that calm now registers as a species of danger. Peace, to the overworked nervous system, feels indistinguishable from something being catastrophically wrong.
Carmy will never rest, and neither, it appears, will my subconscious, which has appointed itself custodian of the fish. We are, the pair of us, unwell in precisely the same beautiful, high-pressure kitchen, plating our worth for a customer who departed hours ago and was never, in truth, returning.
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