Bread

I smell like bread. Like buttery, rich, brioche bread, and the yeast bubbling and foaming to burst through the bread’s golden brown crust. After 12 hours at my school’s annual pop-up restaurant as kitchen manager, I'm not surprised the scent of the kitchen clung to me, alongside the sweat of heat lamps, sizzling stovetops, and steam tables. But of every smell in that kitchen–succulent stuffed pork loin, sautéed lemon-rosemary chicken, rich gravy, fragrant toasted almond biscotti, the roast pepper sauce I splattered all over myself, and the stench of hot steam in a dish pit of abandoned food–I was surprised that the one thing that clung to me, as clear and unmistakable as summer, was the rich smell of bread.

There's a reason I am expounding so much about this olfactory experience. After months working on the restaurant as an advanced culinary student, designing the menu and testing recipes, then working on decorations and final preparations for the past week, my stress levels about the event were through the roof. This morning, my culinary teacher told me I was in charge of the kitchen; as you can imagine, it made the stress explode until I was sure I couldn't keep going. But I did. I reviewed what I knew and what we needed and came up with a plan on the fly, hoping to look like I knew what I was doing as I barked orders at my chefs like a taskmaster in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Hours later, after 6 hours of prep, 90-some tickets, a very cathartic deep clean, and a cold pizza shared with a friend in the empty parking lot, we made it through. I made it, despite feeling like an unprepared failure earlier that day. And after driving home and finally being able to collapse into bed, much to the relief of my aching bones, the only thing I was left with was the smell of bread.

The pop-up restaurant has always been special to me. It's something I've participated in all 4 years of high school, and was heavily involved in planning in my sophomore and junior years, especially my junior year. This year I was more involved on the culinary side, alongside the other two students in my advanced culinary class, who I have grown close to after spending hours in the kitchen together. After four years, the weight of this restaurant was impossible to ignore: it was the last one, one I was very responsible for, and the legacy of my friends and I. With no more pop-up restaurants to go, the scent of warm bread is the only lingering vestige of the restaurant I have. By tomorrow it will be gone, and this chapter of my life will be over.

But life is always turning new chapters, just as humans have always baked bread in the clay heat of civilization’s first ovens. This is the nature of time and life and all the things we are bound by. So I guess we just keep going, churning on and on like a spit searing in the flames of loss. I don’t really know what else to say about it. I don’t have answers, at least not now. I’ve never been good at goodbyes.