One Star

Chapter 7 — A Taste of Something

The crowd bothered him. That was the trouble — not the food, which his palate still had not forgiven, but the crowd. Victor had covered three thousand meals in this city and he had never once stood inside the kind of simple, sunlit joy he had seen on Fifth Street that Tuesday. No one at Lucia’s was performing. Nobody was photographing their plate for strangers. A man in a paint-streaked T-shirt had taken his first bite and closed his eyes and said, to no one, “Jesus Christ,” and the woman behind him had laughed like she was his sister. It had felt like a block party with better seasoning, and Victor, who had not been invited to anything in months, had gone home with the smell of grilled onion in his windbreaker and slept badly.

So he told himself it was research, and he went back on Thursday.

He told himself it was thoroughness. He told himself that a one-star review — when it came, and it was coming, he had already decided that on Tuesday, the way a judge decides before the closing arguments — had to be airtight, and airtight meant knowing the target’s habits, its regulars, its soft places. Research. He wore a different cap.

It was raining this time, a thin gray rain, and the line was shorter but still there, umbrellas huddled together, nobody leaving. The girl at the grill worked faster in the wet weather, her movements tighter, the spatula snapping against steel. She had a rag over one shoulder and a streak of char on her cheek and she laughed at something from a regular — an old man who ordered “the usual” without money changing hands in any visible way, the way it works in places where people are known to each other. She pressed an extra taco into his bag, and the old man protested, and she said, “Eat, Mr. Abernathy, you’re fading away on me,” and he laughed until he coughed. Victor watched the whole exchange from under the awning with his notebook open and his pen not moving. Mr. Abernathy. She knew his name. She knew all their names — he could see it in the way the line bent toward her window like plants toward light, everyone leaning in for their half-second of being known. It was the oldest trick in the hospitality book, and the most honest one, and it made him furious in a way he couldn’t name. He wrote: *cult of personality, counter edition.* The pen dug into the paper.

He ordered the birria this time, and the grilled corn, and he ate them under the building’s awning with the notebook open. The birria’s consommé was the color of old copper and it tasted like someone had spent six hours talking to it. The corn was charred and slathered and dusted with something he couldn’t quite place — cotija, lime, a whisper of cayenne, and beneath it all, patience. He wrote: *broth deep, layered, technically flawless.* He wrote: *corn — best street corn in the city, possibly the state.* Then he crossed out the second line hard enough to tear the paper, because a crossed-out compliment was safer than an admitted one.

It was while he was watching her plate for a family of four — two parents, two small girls, all of them leaning over the counter together, the littlest one standing on her father’s shoes to see the grill — that something cracked in him. It was a small sound, interior, like ice shifting on a lake. The littlest girl laughed and the cook laughed with her, a real laugh, head tipped back, and for one unguarded second Victor was not fifty-two and alone in a windbreaker in the rain. He was thirty-four and Elena was laughing in their old kitchen over a pot of something she had burned, waving the smoke away, saying the burned parts were the good parts, and his daughter — his daughter was —

He slammed the notebook shut.

Sentiment. It was the enemy of criticism; he had written that sentence himself, years ago, in a column he still quoted in interviews. Sentiment made you forgive the soggy fry and the tired sauce. Sentiment made you a regular instead of a judge. He had watched sentiment kill two of his colleagues’ careers — nice reviews, everybody’s friend, and then nobody believed them about anything. He would not be that. He would not.

He stood there in the rain a moment longer, getting wetter, and he made himself look at the truck the way a surgeon looks at a patient — not the laughing girl, not Mr. Abernathy’s coughing laugh, just the operation. Forty-minute waits. No seating. A menu that never changed. These were facts. Facts were safe. Facts could be sharpened. A critic didn’t need to feel anything about a food truck; a critic needed to ask whether the emperor’s new taco was worth the pilgrimage, and the answer was a column, and the column was already writing itself in his head in sentences like knives. He could feel the opening paragraph taking shape: something about penance queues, something about disciples. It was going to be beautiful. It was going to be the best thing he’d written in years, and the rain on his collar felt like a baptism into it.

The rain thickened. The girl at the window caught his eye again — that same half-second of green-gray, that same small smile for a stranger — and said, “Come back dry, yeah? The pork’s better when you’re not shivering.”

“Planning on it,” Victor said, and meant it the way a wolf means it about sheep.

Walking back to the office with the rain finding his collar, he rehearsed the shape of the review in his head. It would not be about the food. The food was too good to attack head-on — that was a rookie’s mistake, and Mama Rosa’s had taught everyone what happened when a critic aimed at the cooking and missed. No. This one would be about the line, the wait, the noise of the street, the tyranny of the beloved — the way a food truck with a cult following became a club with a membership fee paid in patience, and how a critic’s job was to ask whether the emperor’s new taco was worth the pilgrimage. He could feel the sentences lining up like knives. It was going to be a beautiful kill.

He just had to make sure he was finished with the truck first. One more visit, maybe. Research.

The lie sat in his pocket all the way home, warm as a stolen coin.