"Roma Norte runs on café de olla, gas trucks, and a stove that lights itself"
Camille Laurent is twenty-five, a Québécoise sous-chef who labels everything in a kitchen that can't run away. In May, at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Montréal, a pan of duck fat went up in her hand and she froze, and a nineteen-year-old commis grabbed it with his bare hands. Eleven weeks later she's cooking breakfast through a hatch at Hostal La Cocina Loca in Roma Norte in exchange for a bed in the pantry. Her old chef wants an answer about running his new restaurant by the first of December. The kitchen belongs, in every way that matters, to Doña Chayo, who has cooked there for forty-seven years, fed the rescue brigades through that hatch in 1985, and still keeps her Day of the Dead altar up because the flowers haven't said it's over. One morning, the new smart range lights its own griddle under a food photographer's foam board. She freezes again. Jojo, a cruise-ship line cook on holiday, puts it out.
Then the guests arrive for Friendsgiving. Gavin Pruitt is twenty-four, from Scottsdale, sixty-one thousand followers as GavTheGrillFather, and his apron says LET HIM COOK. He intends to deep-fry a frozen turkey the way his dad did every year, until the garage thing. Sunny and Raj, two Canadian cousins with a turkey fryer and a handheld gas detector, would rather do it thawed, dried and outside, and the detector starts shrieking at the back of the new range the minute Raj walks in. Before long there is a fry-off. Itzel, the receptionist writing a thesis on seismic risk, says Mexico City is a bowl of Jell-O. Maureen, a retired Australian teacher who has been staying one more week since March of last year, is taking bets on which turkey catches fire. In the corner of the courtyard, a four-metre papier-mâché Catrina stands with her arms held out.
The warnings get louder. Tickets print themselves in the empty kitchen overnight. On lotería night the oven blows its door clean across the courtyard and into the Catrina's skirt, a quarter of a second after Maureen ducks. The owners send their Head of Community and Vibes with a ring light, and she would much rather film a heritage story than disconnect the stove. On Thanksgiving morning, Camille's flight home leaves without her. By evening the courtyard is ready for thirty-one guests: Chayo's mole, a mariachi band, a roof of piñatas, and two turkeys that were never supposed to meet.
Age: 25
Type: Québécoise sous-chef who fled a Michelin kitchen
Fatal Flaw: Labels everything that can't run away, except the fire in May
Role: Protagonist
Age: 24
Type: Grill-bro TikToker from Scottsdale
Fatal Flaw: Believes a frozen bird locks in the juice
Role: Guest
Age: —
Type: Cook of forty-seven years, and the kitchen's rightful owner in all but paperwork
Fatal Flaw: Doesn't take down the altar until the flowers say so
Role: Keeper of the kitchen
Age: 29
Type: Cruise-ship line cook on holiday
Fatal Flaw: Physically incapable of standing on the wrong side of a kitchen window
Role: Ally
Age: 26
Type: Receptionist and seismic-risk grad student
Fatal Flaw: Counts how many of us will fall over, for her thesis
Role: Ally
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Café de Olla"
The kitchen was on the east side of the courtyard, through an arched doorway with a bead curtain, and it was the only part of the building that still felt like hers.
For forty-seven years this had been Fonda Chayo. Before it was a hostel, before the building had pink paint and a hand-lettered sign with a cartoon of a flaming frying pan, before any of it, it had been a kitchen with six tables and a hatch in the wall—la ventanita, the little window, a square opening a metre across, where the office workers and the taxi drivers and the girls from the typing pool on Calle Durango had leaned in to shout their orders. ¡Doña, dos de chicharrón en salsa verde! ¡Una sopa de fideo! She had fed half of Roma through that hatch. During the earthquake of '85, when the buildings on Álvaro Obregón came down like wet cardboard and the whole neighbourhood was out digging with their bare hands, she had fed the rescue brigades through it for nineteen days, day and night, from a single gas ring and a borrowed cazo, and never charged a peso.
The hatch was still there. Now the guests used it to collect their breakfast.
Everything else had changed.
When the Americans bought sixty per cent of the building from Don Arturo's heirs, the year before, they had gutted her kitchen and filled it with steel. A walk-in cooler with a round porthole window like a submarine. A dishwasher that spoke. A great black-and-chrome range with six gas burners and a griddle, which the young man from the company had called the Smart Chef Suite, as if it had been to university. The burners lit themselves when you tapped a picture on a tablet. The hood above it roared and filtered and, according to a sticker, would "automatically suppress flare-ups using advanced wet-chemical technology." Everything was connected to everything else. Everything talked to the little white disc on the shelf above the range.
The young man had called the disc the Partner Hub.
Chayo called it El Chismoso. The gossip.
It sat up there between her veladora of the Virgin of Guadalupe and a bottle of Valentina hot sauce, round and white and smug, about the size of the lid on a jar of chiles, with a soft blue ring of light that breathed slowly in and out, and it listened. That was the whole of its job, as far as she could tell. It listened to everything. It listened to her talk to the radio. It listened when Itzel cried on the phone to her mother. It listened to the guests at night when they thought the kitchen was empty and came to eat cold rice out of the pot with their fingers. And then it told someone. She didn't know who. But she had been married for thirty-one years to a man who played dominoes at the Salón Los Cocuyos every Thursday, and she knew what a gossip looked like when it was thinking about who it was going to tell.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Hostal La Cocina Loca, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Amazing vibe, amazing food, the pozole was the best I ever had. Oven door flew out of the kitchen during bingo which was crazy but nobody got hurt so honestly 10/10 experience. Doña Chayo is a legend. Would recommend!!!" — Jannik, 22, Leipzig
☠ "calibration complete. thank you, jannik." — @HostelReaper
☠ "fry-off noted. two entrants. one method. exposure: high." — @HostelReaper