The Blue Bistro by Elin Hilderbrand Page A

Pammy Ipp; she was the only girl at camp that Adrienne had told the truth—Fiona left and reappeared with a basket of rolls and the butter. So Adrienne still had not learned where the bread was kept.
    “I told him how good the doughnuts were,” Adrienne said.
    Fiona rolled her blue eyes. “Get out of here,” she said.
    Table twelve was turning out to be a real problem. Adrienne delivered the bread and butter with a smile, but a few minutes later she saw Spillman engaged in a heated conversation with the man named Dana over what appeared to be his bottle of wine. Spillman tasted the wine himself then carried the bottle, gingerly, like it was an infant, over to Thatcher at the podium. Adrienne was chatting with an older couple at table five—neighbors of the Parrishes as it turned out—but when she saw this happening, she excused herself. She wanted to know what was going on.
    “What’s going on?” she asked Spillman.
    “The guy’s a menace,” Spillman whispered. “He ordered a 1983 Chevalier-Montrachet at four hundred dollars a bottle and he claims it’s bad. I tasted it and it tastes like fucking heaven in a glass. But Menace says he has a cellar full of this wine at home and he knows how it’s supposed to taste, which is not like this. I asked him if he wanted me to decant it because the wine’s been in that bottle for over twenty years, it could probably do with a little elbow room, and he just said, ‘Take it away.’ He said they’re going to stick with cocktails. He orders the most expensive bottle on the list and now suddenly he wants vodka. Plus, he harassed me about the apps. He insisted he wanted the foie gras
cooked through.
Fiona said it would taste like a rubber tire. I hope it does.”
    Adrienne looked at Thatcher. He seemed on the verge of a smile.
    “It’s not funny,” she said. “The guy gave me a hard time about the doughnuts. He said if he wanted to eat at Krispy Kreme he would have stayed in New York.”
    “That’s an old one,” Spillman said. “I hear that one every year.”
    Thatcher checked the reservation book. “The reservation was made four weeks ago by his secretary.” He scribbled a note in the book then pointed the eraser end of his pencil at Adrienne. “Okay, that’s the last time we take a reservation from a secretary. Except for Holt Millman. His secretary is a great lady named Dottie Shore. Not only did I give her the private number, I gave her my home number. But nobody else makes a reservation through a secretary. If they want to eat here, they have to call us themselves. It’s a little late in the game to be making up new rules. However”—Thatcher turned to Spillman—“we’ll offer the wine by the glass as a special. Twenty dollars a glass, only six glasses available and that’s a bargain. We’ll take a hit on the bottle. Adrienne, I want you to offer table twelve a round of cocktails on the house.”
    Adrienne gasped. “Why?”
    “The guy obviously had an unhappy childhood. He’s angry for whatever reason, he wants something from us. We could send him out the caviar, but we don’t like him. So we’ll give him drinks. And I’m going to let you be the hero.”
    “I’d rather not go over there again,” Adrienne said. “Spillman can do it.”
    Spillman had already walked away; Adrienne watched him present the bottle to Duncan at the bar.
    Thatcher took Adrienne’s shoulder and wheeled her toward the dining room. “I’m going to let you be the hero,” he said. “Old-fashioned service. You said you knew all about it.”
    Adrienne straightened the seams of her dress and tried to straighten out her frame of mind as she headed to table twelve. She put her hand on the back of Dana’s wickerchair; she couldn’t bring herself to touch him and she wasn’t sure she was supposed to. “We’re sorry about the bottle of wine,” she said. “We’d like to buy you a round of drinks on the house.”
    “Lovely,” the woman in lavender glasses