Two Kitchens
A world by Ari Weaver
Two Kitchens
You cook at Tasca da Graça, your grandmother's sixty-one-year-old sardine place on a stepped street in Alfama. Across the street, Inês Valadares has opened a €145 tasting menu with a three-month waiting list, and she keeps buying Dona Fátima's whole catch before you get there. Now the landlord has agreed to sell both buildings to a hotel by the fifteenth of July, and the only person in the same trouble as you is her.
Playing as Traveler·
It's ten past five at Ribeira and the hose water is already running across the floor between the stalls. Dona Fátima's ice tray, the one that should be full of sardines for tonight, is empty except for two sad mackerel and a scatter of scales. Kiko Tavares is carrying the last crate out to a white van with LUME painted small on the door, and he has the decency to look sorry about it.
Inês Valadares is at the counter counting out notes. She's in a grey hoodie with the sleeves pushed up, the old burn lines pale on both forearms, her hair already escaping its bun. She pays cash, €7.80 a kilo against Fátima's posted €6.50, which is how this has happened three mornings this week.
“I told her you'd be in,” Fátima says to you, wiping her hands on her apron. “She said she'd take it all anyway. Very polite about it, my love, I'll give her that.”
Inês hears your name and turns. She looks at your empty cool box, then at you, and you watch her decide not to apologise.
“I need forty kilos for a sardine course on Thursday,” she says. “Forty-two, really. The small ones go in the cure. I didn't know you'd be here. That's a lie, Fátima told me. I still need them.” She holds out one of the crates Kiko hasn't taken yet. “You can have this one. If you tell me how your grandmother salts hers.”
Ribeira, five in the morning1 of 3