Comfort Food

Chapter 1: The Risotto Heard Round the World

The pan left his hand before his brain caught up.

That was the thing nobody understood—not the network suits, not the publicist who stopped returning his calls, not the forty-seven million people who watched the clip on a loop while eating lunch at their desks. Nico "Dom" Faraci did not throw the risotto at Kyle. He threw it at the wall behind Kyle. The distinction mattered, at least to Dom, though he'd concede that the splatter pattern across Kyle's chef whites didn't exactly support the nuance.

The video was eleven seconds long. Eleven seconds out of six seasons, two hundred and thirty-eight episodes, and roughly fourteen thousand hours of tape. In those eleven seconds, you could see Dom—jaw clenched, veins roping his forearms—lift the copper saucier off the burner, pivot with the economical footwork of a man who'd worked hot lines since he was seventeen, and launch the entire contents at approximately thirty miles per hour. The risotto hit the tile with a sound like a wet slap. Kyle flinched. The camera kept rolling.

By the time Dom's agent called, the clip had its own hashtag: #RisottoRage.

By Tuesday, it had spawned a remix set to the 1812 Overture.

By Wednesday, the network's Head of Unscripted Programming—a woman named Barb Gunderson who wore statement necklaces and had the emotional range of a spreadsheet—summoned him to the fourteenth floor of a building in Burbank that smelled like recycled air and bad decisions.

"Nico," she said, which was how he knew it was over. On the show he was Dom. In meetings he was Nico. In trouble he was Mr. Faraci. But when Barb Gunderson used his first name with that particular softness, the way you'd address a golden retriever before the vet visit, it meant the needle was already loaded.

"We're going in a different direction."

"A direction that doesn't include me."

"A direction that doesn't include you."

She slid a folder across the conference table. Inside was a termination agreement, a non-disparagement clause, and a check for sixty thousand dollars—which sounded like a lot of money until you subtracted his agent's cut, his manager's cut, his lawyer's cut, three months of back taxes, and the mortgage on a house in Beverly Hills that he'd bought during Season Four when he still believed his own press.

Dom signed the papers. He did not throw anything.

Progress.

---

The house was a Spanish Colonial Revival on a street lined with jacaranda trees that dropped purple flowers onto Teslas. He'd bought it for two point one million, which his business manager had called "aggressive" and his brother Sal had called "stupid." Sal ran a diner in Ohio. What did Sal know about real estate?

As it turned out: more than Dom.

The mortgage was seven thousand four hundred dollars a month. Dom's savings account, once he paid Barb Gunderson's lawyer and his own, contained eleven thousand dollars and change. He was, by any reasonable calculation, six weeks from disaster.

He sat in the kitchen—a kitchen with a La Cornue range, a Sub-Zero refrigerator the size of a studio apartment, and a marble island that could comfortably seat the Last Supper—and ate cereal from the box. Honey Nut Cheerios. The irony of a celebrity chef eating cereal in a hundred-thousand-dollar kitchen was not lost on him, but irony, like risotto, was best served to someone who cared.

His phone buzzed. Another text from his publicist—former publicist. "Don't do interviews. Don't post. Don't exist for a while." Solid advice. He'd been not-existing for three days and was getting pretty good at it.

The house was too big. He'd known that when he bought it, but bigness had been the point. You grew up in a twelve-hundred-square-foot ranch house in Maple Bluff, Ohio, sharing a bedroom with your older brother until you were fourteen, and eventually you wanted square footage the way other people wanted love—desperately, and with poor judgment.

He hadn't talked to Sal in four months. Their last conversation had been about the diner's plumbing, which Dom had offered to pay for and Sal had refused, because Sal refused everything from Dom on principle. "I don't need your TV money," Sal had said, which was rich coming from a guy whose idea of a business plan was a napkin with numbers on it.

Dom finished the cereal. He considered calling Sal. He considered calling his agent. He considered calling a realtor. Instead, he went to bed at nine-thirty like a man twice his age and lay in the dark listening to coyotes yip in the canyon behind his house, which he would soon not be able to afford.

The phone rang at 2:14 a.m.

He knew before he answered. Not the specifics—not the highway, not the truck that crossed the median, not the fact that Sal had been driving home from a restaurant supply store in Columbus with a trunk full of napkin dispensers. But he knew the weight of a call at that hour. He knew the silence on the other end before the voice began. He knew, in the way that bodies know things before brains do, that his brother was gone.

The voice belonged to a woman named Rosie Sparks, and she was crying.

"Sal's gone, honey. He's gone."

Dom sat on the edge of his bed in his too-big house and said nothing for a very long time.

---

He booked the first flight out of LAX, which left at six-fifteen in the morning and connected through Chicago. He packed a carry-on with two days' worth of clothes because he planned to be back by Thursday. Funeral, paperwork, whatever needed signing. Forty-eight hours. He'd done longer stints on location shoots.

Maple Bluff, Ohio, was the kind of town that looked like a stock photo of small-town America—brick storefronts, a courthouse with a clock tower that was perpetually seven minutes slow, and a population of 4,200 people who all knew each other's business and most of each other's secrets. Dom had left at eighteen with a scholarship to the Culinary Institute of America and a conviction that he would never, under any circumstances, come back.

He'd been back three times in twenty-three years. Twice for Christmas, once for their mother's funeral. Each visit had confirmed his original thesis: Maple Bluff was a place you survived, not a place you stayed.

The rental car was a Nissan Sentra that smelled like pine air freshener and resignation. He drove through town with the windows down, past the hardware store and the barber shop and the VFW hall, past the elementary school where he'd gotten into his first fight and the parking lot behind the Dairy Queen where he'd gotten into his last one, and pulled up in front of Faraci's Family Restaurant at eleven-forty in the morning.

The diner looked exactly the same, which was both comforting and depressing. Same red vinyl booths, same Formica counter, same neon sign in the window that said OPEN in letters that buzzed like a trapped wasp. His grandfather, Enzo Faraci, had opened the place in 1962 with six hundred dollars, a marinara recipe, and the stubborn optimism of a man who'd crossed an ocean. The building was narrow and deep, wedged between a bakery and a defunct shoe repair shop, with a kitchen that was roughly the size of Dom's walk-in closet in Beverly Hills.

He sat in the car for a full minute, hands on the steering wheel, breathing.

Then he went inside.

The lunch rush—such as it was—consisted of maybe fifteen people scattered across booths and counter stools. The air smelled like coffee and grilled onions and something deeper, something that lived in the walls: decades of garlic and olive oil and bread dough, a smell so specific to this place that Dom's throat tightened before he could stop it.

Rosie Sparks was behind the counter. She was sixty-three years old, built like a fire hydrant, with silver hair pinned up in a bun and reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She'd worked at Faraci's since Dom was in diapers. She'd taught Sal to make coffee. She'd taught Dom to tie his shoes. She was, in every way that mattered, the third Faraci sibling.

She looked up when the door chimed and her face did something complicated—relief and grief and anger all at once, like a slot machine that couldn't decide where to land.

"You're here," she said.

"I'm here."

She came around the counter and hugged him so hard his ribs creaked. She smelled like Shalimar perfume and bacon grease, and Dom held on longer than he meant to.

"The boy's upstairs," she said when she pulled back. "He hasn't come down since yesterday."

"The boy" was Sal's son. Dom's nephew. A kid he'd met exactly twice—once at his mother's funeral, when the boy was six, and once via a FaceTime call two Christmases ago that had lasted four awkward minutes.

His name was Gabe. He was thirteen years old, and Dom had no idea what to say to him.

"I'll go up after lunch," Dom said.

"You'll go up now," Rosie said, in a tone that did not invite negotiation.

Dom went up.

---

The apartment above the diner was small and cluttered and smelled like Sal—Old Spice and motor oil and the particular musk of a man who worked fourteen-hour days and didn't own a diffuser. There were dishes in the sink, a Cavs jersey draped over a chair, and a pair of reading glasses on the kitchen table next to a stack of bills held together with a binder clip.

Gabe was in his room. The door was closed. Dom knocked.

No answer.

He knocked again. "Gabe? It's your uncle. Dom."

Silence. Then, very quietly, the sound of a camcorder rewinding.

Dom tried the handle. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open and found a small, dark-haired boy sitting cross-legged on a twin bed, holding a battered Sony Handycam like it was a life preserver. The room was covered in movie posters—Spielberg, Scorsese, Miyazaki—and the desk was buried under tapes and cables and a laptop with stickers on it.

Gabe looked up. He had Sal's jaw and their mother's eyes, dark and watchful, and he regarded Dom with the expression of someone cataloging evidence.

"Hey," Dom said.

Gabe raised the camcorder and pointed it at him.

"You don't have to film me."

Gabe did not lower the camcorder.

Dom stood in the doorway, hands in his pockets, feeling enormous and useless. He was forty-one years old. He had hosted a television show watched by millions. He had cooked for governors and actors and once, memorably, for a sitting vice president who'd sent back the soup. And he had absolutely no idea what to do with a grieving thirteen-year-old who communicated exclusively through a lens.

"I'm sorry about your dad," he said.

Gabe's finger found the record button. The red light blinked on.

Dom let himself be filmed. It seemed like the least he could do.