Total Control

Claudio Aprile is fanatical about germs and hygiene. He hates shaking hands, which all of his cooks know never to try with him. If one of the kitchen staff at Colborne Lane, Aprile’s acclaimed restaurant on the eastern edge of the financial district, ducks outside for a smoke during a lull in service, he expects them to brush their teeth before they start work again. He hates it when cooks touch their faces. He makes them wash their hands if a finger so much as grazes an eyelid. He often speaks of managing his employees with “an iron fist in a velvet glove.”

Aprile also hates it when people interfere with his vision. Last fall, he hosted a special dinner for a credit card company at the restaurant, along with John Szabo, a respected sommelier hired by the event’s promoters. “He’s everything I’m not,” Aprile says the next day. “I don’t like to glorify the dining experience. It either doesn’t taste good or it does taste good. He’s just going on about minerals and tannins, and I can see everybody—” Aprile rolls his eyes. “He served a pinot noir with the Thai beef salad, and they’re expecting me to go on about, you know, the harmony. And I said, ‘I’ll be honest with you guys: the dish you’re having was a time-sensitive dish, and John wouldn’t stop talking so now the dish has gone to shit. And the wine you’re drinking with that dish doesn’t make any sense at all. You should be drinking beer, or champagne if you want to get all chi-chi, or an Alsatian, a gewurz, something that’s fresh and clean and forward. Not a red wine.’ And everyone liked that, they appreciated it,” Aprile says. “I call things the way they are.”

Aprile is so high-strung about his food and the way it’s presented that, until recently, he rarely felt comfortable letting another cook plate his dishes: the careless placement of a single dollop of toasted amaranth or a purple shiso leaf could drive him mad. This approach has worked well for him. Colborne Lane didn’t lose money during the recession, even as other high-end restaurants fell one by one; not even the private dining room, with its 500-pound art piece of a chandelier and $25,000 mother-of-pearl table, gathered dust. Since he opened Colborne Lane three years ago, Aprile has become known as one of the most relentlessly creative and driven Toronto chefs of his generation, second only to Susur Lee.

He’s also an ambitious entrepreneur. Aprile will open a second restaurant, called Origin, early this year, right around the corner from Colborne Lane, at King and Church. The chef refused to bring on any partners in the venture; the total project cost is expected to come in at $1.3 million. He put his family’s home up as collateral to secure a sizable loan from the Royal Bank. (Aprile and his wife, Heather, have two children: Aiden, who is seven, and Isabel, who is two.) But Aprile is learning that restaurant empires come with a catch: the more places a restaurateur runs, the less control he has.

Aprile is 41, with wavy brown hair and intense dark eyes. He wears crisp chef’s whites and a black pinstriped apron; even his uniform seems to balance commerce and art. He’s one of a tiny, pioneering corps of cooks who first brought the science-driven genre called molecular gastronomy to North America. He learned many of the techniques during unpaid stints at Alinea, in Chicago, and at molecular gastronomy’s spiritual source, the restaurant El Bulli, near Barcelona.

Colborne Lane’s food is cerebral. The cooks are nearly all in their 20s or early 30s (if you’re in your 40s, Aprile says, you probably should be past line cooking). They don’t speak unnecessarily or joke around during service. If the noise level in the kitchen ever climbs too high, sous-chef Matt Blondin warns them to keep it down. Colborne’s dishes require focus and precision. Its kitchen equipment includes food dehydrators and a laser thermometer. (At one point before service, I watched the garde manger consult the Handbook of Hydrocolloids for “the hydration temperature of agar.”) Aprile’s greatest gift, however, is his innate sense of taste and colour and texture, for making every bite of a dish as interesting and satisfying as it can be. Aprile can suspend a toasted hazelnut and a couple grains of salt in a semi-solid tear-drop of warm olive oil, but he’s a chef first—he knows how to roast a root vegetable and plate it better than anybody else.

Aprile has spent the past year consciously trying to soften up a bit; he knows he has to pull back from his flagship kitchen if he hopes to get Origin off to a solid start. If he sees a problem these days, he’ll whisper in Blondin’s ear and let him handle it, instead of undermining his second-in-command’s authority with the other cooks. “Honestly, I just need to manage the kitchen and oversee it,” he says one night in mid-November. “If I wasn’t ready to step back, no way. It would be a complete disaster.”

Blondin, who’s 26, has a commanding presence. The way he calls orders, assembling dishes and inspecting everything before it goes out, he’s as assured as a chef 10 years his senior. “He’s going to be a very big culinary force in this city,” Aprile says. Blondin’s plating, he adds—as he watches his young sous toss a cilantro leaf, from a foot away, onto a plate of crispy wok-fried squid, where it lands perfectly—is “gangster.”

Service that night doesn’t run the way Aprile would like. When he notices one of his cooks without lime juice at his station, he asks about it, and the cook says that Blondin didn’t want lime juice. He watches a culinary college intern “manhandle a salad into submission,” as he later puts it—Aprile hates it when cooks bruise his salad leaves. “This guy is not allowed to handle food for the rest of the night,” he tells Blondin. “Teach him how to make a green salad properly.”

Later, the pastry chef substitutes liquid nitrogen crème fraîche ice cream on one of the restaurant’s signature desserts with a lighter, less voluptuous ice cream. “The only time I really freak out is when one of my dishes has been changed and I don’t know about it,” Aprile says. “Even minor stuff.”

When Blondin adds a complicated dish made with Tasmanian ocean trout to the tasting menu, Aprile, who’s mostly tried to stand back and observe up to now, can’t help but step in. The dish is taking way too long to plate. The fish is cooling off. “Is this a cold dish?” he says to the fish cook. “No,” the cook replies. “Is this a cold dish?” he asks again, 30 seconds later. “It looks like a cold dish.”

“Half the fish on the outside is dry and overcooked; half the fish is blue rare,” Aprile tells me. “It’s boiling my blood because I know what Matt is trying to achieve, but he’s not achieving it. He’s taking a dish that’s great and fucking it up.” The cook throws out the trout, which has sat for nearly three minutes now, and starts again.

When Blondin sends one of his own creations—a winter squash purée surrounding a piece of salt-cured foie gras—out to five diners before Aprile has had a taste, the chef intervenes again. “It’s a disaster,” Aprile says once he tries it. The dish is a complicated endeavour: the squash purée is made with a modified starch called Gellan, so it sets like a gelatin even though it’s hot. It comes out oversweet and flat, and you can’t easily distinguish the taste or the texture of the foie from the vegetable. “I don’t want to eat concepts. I want to eat food.” Aprile can’t seem to move past it. “This should never go out. It’s not right.”

After service, he has a talk with Blondin and asks him to decide right there whether he can follow his direction. “It went OK, I think,” Aprile says.

But with only a few months left before Origin is supposed to open, he’s worried now that Colborne Lane, the restaurant where he made his name, will fall apart when he can’t be there every night. “I don’t even know if Matt will still be here in a month,” he says. “We’ll see what happens in the next little while.”

The idea behind Origin began with what Aprile calls the “failed tomato sessions.” Over several weeks in the summer of 2007, he and a few of his cooks tried, without success, to find an out-of-the-ordinary use for local tomatoes.

At Colborne Lane, a single menu item can take months to develop: meetings, sketches, prototypes and endless testing. That approach failed on the tomato front. “At the end of the meetings, we realized, ‘Fuck, we just lost tomato season, it’s done.’ And I was like, ‘Fuck, why can’t we just cook, so it’s spontaneous?’”

Origin will be the anti-Colborne. Fresh tomatoes? Don’t overthink them. Aprile is planning simple dishes from Spain and Thailand, where he has travelled extensively, plus some Italian stuff, and classic Canadiana. When side stripe prawns are in season, Aprile wants to display them up on the raw bar in the main space’s open kitchen, on a big bed of ice, still alive and wriggling. “All we’re going to do is, we’re going to whack them in half, we’re going to put the most amazing olive oil and salt on them, and that’s it—we’re going to serve them,” Aprile says. “It’s got to be about what we’re not doing. It’s got to be different.” He intends for the restaurant to be resolutely casual. He says they’ll play the entire Black Sabbath box set some nights. He’s ordered a soft-serve ice cream machine, which he’ll feed with his own creations. (David Chang of New York’s Momofuku chain, whom Aprile admires, did the same at Momofuku Noodle Bar.)

The Origin concept is smart. One of the reasons Colborne Lane has thrived is that the room itself has always had more of a relaxed, rock and roll atmosphere than a fine-dining one. At Origin, even the food will be rock and roll: the four-star super-chef cooks his casual favourites for the masses. And Aprile doesn’t worry about the food at Origin. He fusses with it and stays awake at night thinking about it, but unlike at Colborne Lane, this sort of cooking comes naturally to him. That, and it’s a lot easier to hand off to a sous.

The construction of the place, on the other hand, set in a 150-year-old, heritage-designated, three-storey former flower shop, has not gone smoothly. When Aprile’s contractors opened up the ceilings in the basement, they discovered that many of the joists had been burned nearly to ashes, most likely during the Great Fire of 1904, and then covered up without structural repairs. One of the project’s consulting engineers quit for five weeks. During the week I visit the site, Origin’s designers discover a structural beam running through where the dishwasher is supposed to go, learn there will be an additional $10,000 bill for fireproofing some steel beams in the dining room (the figure later balloons to $40,000), worry over how to persuade the city’s heritage board to let them hang out a sign, and try, in vain, to get Aprile more than 13 inches of prep space at the raw station in his open kitchen. The opening date? At this point, Aprile is telling his designers he wants to launch by New Year’s Eve but is privately hoping for Valentine’s Day. Origin was initially slated to open last May.

In spite of all that, he’s admirably calm. And excited. They’ll be able to serve 400 people on the busiest nights, when the 140-seat patio is open. (Colborne Lane seats 48.) The spots around the open kitchen, set up like a sushi bar, will be staggered, so that diners can sit facing the action, but without feeling the need to talk with their neighbours (this is Toronto, after all). In Origin’s private Warhol Room (Andy Warhol is said to have visited the building in one of its previous incarnations), designer Jason Stroud, of Stroudfoot, is building an enormous, pop art–inspired chandelier out of Japanese action figures. He turned some of those charred beams from the basement ceiling into the restaurant’s hostess desk.

Aprile hasn’t seen much of Stroudfoot’s designs. They showed him conceptual sketches months ago. Though he’s obsessive about what happens in his kitchen, he’s entrusted Origin’s dining space almost entirely to the firm. It’s uncharacteristic, perhaps, but the designers aren’t Aprile’s staff. They’re accomplished leaders in their field, just like he is. “When you’re doing something creative,” he says, “the last thing you need is for somebody to come in and change everything.”

Aprile was born in Uruguay and moved with his parents and a younger sister, Viviana, to Etobicoke when he was three. His mother, Delia, was a seamstress and painter. His father, Walter, was a baker. Walter was abusive, and so when Claudio was seven, Delia packed her kids up and left him. She fell mysteriously ill not long after that, and when Claudio was 10, she couldn’t cope with the children any more. She sent Viviana to stay with another family. Claudio was sent to a foster home. The next year, his mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. He was told she was going to die. He dropped out of school before finishing Grade 10 and bounced between foster homes and group homes for most of his teen years. The only positive outlet he could find for his energy was in the kitchens where he worked.

He remembers his first job well. When Aprile turned 14, he worked as a fry boy at McDonuts, in Etobicoke. He once threw five times the specified amount of jelly into the doughnuts. He changed recipes constantly. His bosses fired him before long. Next he got a job at The Keg in Brampton, where he started out washing dishes. He once mixed every cleaning chemical he could find to mop the kitchen floors. “I was completely obsessed with coming up with my own approach,” he says. The concoction stripped the seal off the floors. His bosses nonetheless promoted him to the salad bar and the grill.

Aprile’s mother survived the cancer; he moved back in with her when he was 17 and still speaks to her every day. Chefs became his father figures. Aprile cooked for two years at Biagio, at King and Jarvis; two more at North 44°, under Mark McEwan; at Patria, a much heralded Latin American restaurant in Manhattan; and at the Rubino brothers’ Zoom Caffe and Bar, with plenty of other stops along the way. In 1998, he moved to the U.K. and was appointed executive chef at the London restaurant Bali Sugar; Madonna and Giorgio Armani were regular guests. His approach had changed somewhat from his days at the doughnut shop and The Keg, but in some ways it had also stayed the same. As one critic from London’s Evening Standard wrote, “Aprile’s dishes can sound labyrinthine or impenetrable—get a load of panko-crusted smoked trout fish cake with napa cabbage and shiso slaw, or plantain-crusted chump of lamb with butternut squash, chopstick spinach and mint-feta mojo—but prove less tangled in presentation and the parade of flavours.” He returned to Toronto in 2000, when Henry Wu hired him to take over Senses. It was here that Torontonians suddenly seemed to appreciate Aprile’s prodigious talent.

He opened Colborne Lane in February 2007, although not without a few hiccups. The business was a partnership with Ajay Virmani, the CEO of Cargojet, who brought the money, and Hanif Harji, a young entrepreneur who is a partner in Blowfish and Kultura, and had promised front-of-house expertise. Aprile’s relationship with Harji quickly broke down. He bought Harji out, but Virmani has stayed on, as an enlightened and mostly silent investor.

Aprile hopes to own a chain of restaurants. Even before Origin has opened, he says he has a third location picked out, a 90-second walk from Colborne Lane; though he won’t discuss his plans for the spot, he lets slip more than once that he’d like to do a rustic Italian restaurant. He wants to template Origin and duplicate it in other locations. He can see himself running six restaurants a decade from now.

Restaurant empires are fraught, and Aprile knows it. For every Oliver and Bonacini (Canoe, Biff’s, Auberge du Pommier) or SIR Corp. (Reds, Far Niente) or Mark McEwan (North 44°, Bymark, One), there’s a Jamie Kennedy: a talented, well-intentioned chef who expands too fast and then falls on his face. And so Aprile’s been reading. Good to Great, by Jim Collins, about why some companies make the leap to growth and success and others never do, is a favourite. And he’s fascinated with Malcolm Gladwell’s books The Tipping Point and Outliers.

Aprile is studying the failures, too. “Most of the time, it’s believing your own hype,” he says, “listening to what everyone’s telling you to do and not really listening to your own gut. Your gut doesn’t tell you to open up seven restaurants in two years. It just doesn’t tell you that. It tells you you’re crazy.”

He also looks to business people for inspiration: Paul Oberman, the developer, who is Aprile’s landlord at Origin; Ajay Virmani, his investor at Colborne Lane. If those two men share any one trait, Aprile says, it’s that they’re always calm and analytical. Both of them go Zen in the face of adversity. He’s working to absorb that lesson.

Aprile is putting systems in place for everything—even for how often the washrooms get checked and who does it—so that nothing is ever left to chance. He wants to be able to hand his line cooks a binder with every recipe, photos of every dish, photos of their mise en place, even what the insides of the refrigerators at their stations should look like. He’s installing a video link between Colborne Lane and Origin, too, and he’s going to put 40-inch plasma screens in his office so he can watch what’s going on in both places.

His current approach—never saying hello or goodbye to his workers, and slipping in and out of his kitchen like a phantom so they never know if he’s around—can only accomplish so much. “I want to do great work,” he says. “To me, it’s like being in a band and producing an album. I don’t want it to just have one track that’s a great song. I want the whole thing, front to back, to be good. I want this company, front to back, to be visionary.”

Can Aprile do it? He’s thinking of all the right things, at least, and he’s clearly got drive and talent to burn. But the most successful restaurant companies, even when they have a super-chef at the top, rely on an inner circle of trusted managers to execute their vision. Aprile hasn’t been able to do that so far, not even with just a single restaurant to his name. He still routes every Colborne Lane e-mail inquiry to his personal BlackBerry, because he doesn’t trust his staff enough to leave them fully in charge. When I mention this, he says he knows he has to work on the control thing. “I wish I could clone myself,” he admits.

“What I’m thinking about, to make a statement, and to differentiate from Colborne Lane, is to serve a big, fat beet. Like, just one big beet, peeled, served whole on the plate, right? With everything on top of it. So it’s not sliced, it’s not fanned out, it’s not pretty.” This is Aprile talking, in a menu meeting a few days after what he’s begun to refer to as “the foie gras meltdown,” with Steve Gonzales, whom he calls Steve-O, and whom he’s tapped to become chef de cuisine at Origin.

“So it’s, like, straight up, with accompaniments?” Gonzales asks.

Aprile draws a picture. It looks like something Roz Chast would do: big, round head, frizzy mop on top. “There’s your beet, and then just dump everything on top of it.”

“Makes sense,” Gonzales says. He’s eager. Gonzales has been ready for Origin to open for months.

“So, like, it would be bold. People would go, ‘What the hell is that?’ And we’d be like, ‘That’s your beet.’”

“But if you’re eating it, I’m sure it would be great,” Gonzales says.

“Because then you’re getting the meatiness of the beet, and so basically everything—the goat’s cheese, braised red onion, dill, saffron vinaigrette, beet chips—everything’s sticking on top of it.”

There’s a pause. Aprile sees Gonzales differently than Matt Blondin. At 34, Gonzales is eight years older, and he’s been working with Aprile on and off for more than 10 years. He doesn’t push the way Blondin does, either. Gonzales is a good cook, but he’s also laid back Aprile calls him the guy who all the guys want to have a beer with and all the women want to bed.

“The other thing that would be cool, but again, we’re getting a little trippy if we do it, is to syringe the vinaigrette into the beet,” Aprile says.

“That wouldn’t take long.”

“So we get syringes and the saffron vinaigrette goes right inside it. Because the problem with serving it whole is that a big part of it is not seasoned.”

“So that way it’s all seasoned.”

“No gels, there’s nothing funky. It’s just straight on—”

“Just a fucking beet.”

“A beet. And if we can even, if we can get really professional about this and, you know how the beets have, they have the little stringy root that comes off?”

“Yup.”

Aprile draws another picture, with the root this time.

“Wouldn’t that be amazing if we could leave that on there so it comes out so beautiful, so rustic. It makes a real statement.”

The beet, however it evolves between now and the restaurant’s opening, will make Claudio Aprile’s statement. Steve Gonzales will execute it faithfully.

By the third week of November, the construction is picking up speed. The contractors have finally cut through the west wall of the building to make three giant holes where the glass doors to the patio will go. The sunlight pours in during the afternoon. The giant smoke hood for the open kitchen has arrived, too, and is sitting in its protective wrapping, as big as a VW bus, in the middle of the space.

Aprile is planning to preview a few Origin dishes on his Colborne Lane menu, but he is worried that the critics will try to review them. He seems unusually distracted. He has taken $100 out of the company’s safe, as a test to see if his bookkeeper—an employee he sings no end of praise about—is paying attention. He is hardening about the Matt Blondin situation, too. Where before he used to worry about keeping Blondin happy, letting him express his creativity, now he says he doesn’t have time for that. “I’ve become very black and white, and dictatorial in my approach. I’m usually like, ‘Hey, I have an idea. What do you think?’ And I’ve stopped saying that. I say, ‘I have an idea, and I don’t want to know what you think right now. Let me open Origin and then we’ll talk about your feelings.’”

One afternoon before dinner service, Aprile says he’s been thinking a lot about his career. “There comes a point in your life where you have to re-evaluate what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. You have to ask yourself, all these things that I’ve wished for and that are happening, are they giving me any value?”

He doesn’t sound so sure. “A big part of what I miss is, when I was in London it was just me and two guys,” he says. “And the level of control and the level of confidence—because I knew every single component of every single dish. So when I met a customer, when I’d talk to them, there was not one doubt in my mind. I knew exactly what they experienced.

“Now there’s a lot of, not just doubts, but there’s moments where you’re not 100 per cent sure, because you are relinquishing some of your controls and your interaction with every single component.”

Aprile’s thoughts turn to music, and to Sting, and his first album after The Police broke up. “You know, The Dream of the Blue Turtles was a massive, classic masterpiece, and Sting had hired the most phenomenal musicians for the tour. Like, Branford Marsalis was there, all these guys who were geniuses in their own right. And they started to interfere with him a bit.

“And Sting was like, ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,’” Aprile explains. “They said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘I’ll just play by myself. Me and my guitar.’ And he went out onstage and he killed it. Without anybody.”

That’s not exactly how it happened. On that tour in the fall of 1985, Sting went out onstage alone for one song, “Message in a Bottle.” And he did kill it. But he kept Marsalis and bassist Darryl Jones and the other musicians he’d hired for all his other songs— in fact, Sting collaborated with Marsalis on four more of his albums over the next 14 years. Aprile needs Blondin, just as much as Blondin needs his boss.

Late in November, the two of them sit down to talk about the Colborne menu. They’ve been doing the same dishes for a few months now, and Aprile is eager to make a change. Blondin seems detached at first. He slumps in his chair, doodles in his notebook as Aprile speaks. When his boss asks for an opinion—Aprile says he’s been thinking about combining three elements from a single cuisine, say, Spanish, or Japanese, on a single plate—Blondin wonders whether it’ll be too hard to pull off on busy nights. And so Aprile asks him, “What do you think we should do, then?”

“To be honest, I have no ideas right now. I haven’t looked into anything,” Blondin says. His response looks a lot like a sulk. But over the next 20 minutes, Aprile’s excitement pulls Blondin in. Aprile wants to do a menu that uses the economic recovery as a metaphor, progressing from simple dishes like pizza and chicken wings (but Colbornized, of course) to decadent stuff, like caviar and lobster. They talk about retro dishes, like devilled eggs and pepper steak. Aprile wants to do a steamed pudding, but not one that you just steam in thekitchen—he wants to do a steamed pudding that sits on top of a little steam machine somehow, so when the waiter takes the lid off it in the dining room, the entire space fills with the smell of ginger, allspice and mulled red wine; theycould even serve it with liquid nitrogen ice cream, which they’d prepare tableside, so you’d get steam and fog all at the same time.“I like the idea. It’s a pretty good idea. Awesome,” Blondin says, with the beginnings of a smile.

“All right, well you know what, add some flesh to the menu, and send me an e-mail,” Aprile tells him at the end of the meeting.“We’ll bounce it around a little, play around with it a bit, and come up with a few ways to execute it.”

“Of course,” Blondin says. “Beautiful.”

The construction at Origin is going better, too. The contractor and designers figured out the dishwashing area situation, so there won’t be any problem with a structural beam running through it, and the contractor says he’ll raise a joist that would have forced Aprile’s cooks to stoop to get from one part of the prep area to the other. The $40,000 fireproofing spray? It looks like Aprile’s landlord might spring for the cost. And back at Colborne Lane, the bookkeeper discovered the missing $100, of course. Aprile says he knew he would all along.

One night before service at the end of November, Steve Gonzales sets up a station in the corner of the kitchen for the Origin preview menu. The evening doesn’t start well. The crispy ricenoodles for the Thai beef salad went into the deep fryer before theoil was hotenough, so rather than crisping up, they just absorbed the grease. The meat cook isn’t putting enough of a sear on oneside of the flank steak, and Gonzales’s avocado and tuna slices look a little ragged. Aprile fixes the problems, talking quietly with his cooks, letting them know how he wants things done.

Gonzales reminds Aprile that he’s having a few friends into the restaurant for dinner. He’s going to give them some of the Origin menu. Except that a few of his friends are vegetarians, so he’s going to sub in roasted mushrooms for the chorizo on the man-chego risotto plate, and seared bean curd for the tuna in the salad. “I meant to ask you,” Gonzales says.

Aprile hesitates before answering. “OK. That should be all right,” he says, tentative. He thinks for a minute. “It’ll be all right. Just leave this sacred after tonight. I don’t want to mess around with it until, like, we haven’t even opened and we’re already subbing stuff out for people.”

Aprile works at the station now, lost in his thoughts as he figures out the beef salad. Slowly, he layers chunks of mango, been sprouts, coriander and mint onto a long, thin dish. He cuts a piece of flank steak across the grain, then arranges the slices along the base. He spoons Thai peanut sauce over the dish; it’s a favourite recipe of his, made with peanut brittle, fish sauce, lime juice, lime leaves, galangal, bird’s eye chilis, tamarind and water. He pulls a bundle of long, white puffed rice noodles from a bowl and lays them over top.

Aprile once told me that when he’s creating a dish, he works on it until it’s good, and then he starts sending it out at service, tweaking each new iteration as the night progresses. He hates those early prototypes. He hates himself for making them. But then a few hours later it’ll start working out and he’ll begin to feel it, and he’ll go home that night and won’t be able to think of anything else. He’ll cook it in his head as he sleeps. “That’s the problem: trying to sleep, because I have so many things that are just tossing around,” he said.

The way he plated that beef dish doesn’t quite look the way he wants it, and so Aprile pulls off the slices and then tosses all the other ingredients together in a bowl, in a jumble, and lifts them as a mass onto a round plate. Then he lays the beef slices across the salad and adjusts the mint and the coriander and the noodles so the dish looks less affected, and seasons it the way he wants. He looks more at peace at that moment than I’ve seen him. He’s completely in control.

Aprile walks off to talk to some friends in the dining room. When he comes back, Gonzales is cutting up an avocado. Aprile rushes over to him. “No, don’t do it like that!” he says. Gonzales looks up, about to apologize. Aprile is smiling.

“Just kidding,” he says. “It’s good.”