Book One, Page One. Daydream, Then Death.
"Quite a career jump," people always tell Jerry Wells. "Veterinarian to restaurant owner? Why was that?"
His answer has only a little bit of truth, but it ends the curiosity immediately. "I know all about cutting meat," he says.
"Really? How--oh, I guess you would," they say. Then they change the subject.
The real reason Jerry opened Katz's Best Of Restaurant is even nuttier than that. It's so absurd that he got tired of explaining it, so he came up with that other line.
What happened was that he fell asleep in his office one afternoon, with the song "Three Little Words"--sung by John Pizzarelli, as he remembers--playing on Napster. He then had a dream that he was in a diner called "Three Little Words." In the dream, he asked the lady behind the counter what the three little words were. She said, "Best Of Restaurant." She explained, with a hint of disdain, that the place had no original dishes at all, and that the only thing the chef knew how to do was duplicate the best dishes of other restaurants.
As the scenes changed in the dream, Jerry--now seated at a table--asked the waitress if they had deviled eggs remoulade the way they used to make them at Maylie's. Jerry doesn't know why that dish came up, because he only went to Maylie's once, and on top of that the restaurant has been closed for twenty years.
"I'll bet he can do that, yeah," she said, and went into the kitchen. She didn't come back. Jerry sat there and thought about the idea of such a restaurant. In the dream, it sounded brilliant.
Jerry drifted up from slumber at that point, but his thinking about the Best Of Restaurant continued. He reached for his pen and began writing down dishes the restaurant would have. Oysters Rockefeller like Antoine's. Bananas Foster like Brennan's. Crabmeat gnocchi like August. Spinach salad like Zea.
He was still doing that when a lady entered his veterinary office, holding an exceptionally limp, dirty cat.
"I rolled over my cat with my SUV!" she said, a little too loud.
Jerry took one look and knew the cat was dead. How about smoked soft-shell crabs like they do them at Christian's? he thought.
"Is there anything you can do to help my cat?" the lady asked.
"Oh, my," Jerry said. "When a cat gets run over by a heavy vehicle, it sustains so many internal injuries that even if it were alive it would be best to put him down." The lady said nothing, and stared at the cat, stroking it.
How about the hot-and-sour soup from Trey Yuen? Why couldn't the Best Of Restaurant serve all kinds of food?
"Yes, but could you please try? I'll pay whatever the cost if you can help her." Her face streamed with new tears, and she started gasping.
Jerry knew a distraught pet owner could accept this kind of news better after her frantic state returned to normal. So he agreed to do what he could. He took the cat from her arms. It was already beginning to get cold. "Call me tomorrow and we'll talk about it," he said. She left the office as quickly as she had come in.
Jerry carried the cat into the back of the building and dropped it into the reach-in freezer. It was about forty-five minutes before closing time, but this was quite enough for Jerry, and his assistant had taken the afternoon off. He turned off the lights, locked the door, and left early.
Jerry's mind stayed on the restaurant all the way home. His musings about dishes moved to chefs who might want to partner on it. Color schemes. Waiters or waitresses? Sunday brunch? Wine list?
Jerry was thinking about possible locations when he had to hit the brakes hard to stop for the light on Claiborne at Carrollton. He stopped between the two sides of Carrollton, next to the neutral ground where the St. Charles streetcar line ended. The maneuver took his attention away from his musings. And then something else caught it.
On the corner just ahead, Jerry saw that the big old neon marquee over the entrance to Roquette's Pharmacy was gone. The building--an old, tilting, narrow, stucco-walled store originally built as a K&B--was on Jerry's list of Personal Historic Sites. Roquette's soda fountain had been a stop on Jerry's bus ride home from high school. He put down hundreds of cheeseburgers, thousands of French fries, and gallons of cherry Coke at that counter. He hadn't been there lately.
A sign on the door said he never would again. He could barely read it from the car, so he drove around the block, parked, and went up for a closer look. "Closed. Prescription Records Now At Walgreens." The windows were papered over, but through the door he could see the old fountain, the counter, the tiled floors.
He recognized it instantly. It was not merely the site of all those burgers and fries of forty years ago. It was the diner in his dream of an hour so ago. It was the Best Of Restaurant.
