The sushi-grade hamachi was getting warm. It was eight o’clock, sixty of the eighty-two scheduled guests had arrived, and the fish, sliced into quarter-inch thick strips, had been sitting out a half hour on beds of toasted wheat and mesculin over pomegranate sauce. The flesh was turning from pink to white. Some of the pieces were completely white, the kind of white that screams This piece of fish isn’t very fucking fresh, is it? We knew it, but we didn’t know where the twelve missing reservees were. Strolling their Marc Jacobs-dressed babies down 7th Avenue in Park Slope?

It’s easy to turn against the well-to-do, but the problem was, in all fairness, the chefs. Sean had accidentally told different people that dinner would start at different times. He was a fabulous cook, who manned the line at a Michelin-star restaurant in Brooklyn until last year. But he could, at times, be a bit scattered mentally, a bit erratic, and prone to losing his calm, which happened that night at 8:15 P.M.

“We need to serve the fuckers,” he said, looking at the eighty-two plates now covered with whitish, semi-translucent fish. “We can’t wait any fucking longer, can we? Where are the waiters? Where the fuck are the fuckers who are supposed to take these goddamned plates?”

A band of co-eds-for-hire from a city college, masquerading as servers, stood expectantly in the doorway to the ballroom, dressed in black button shirts and pants that, depending on the girl, were proper slacks or cotton sweats with elastic waistbands. They looked at Sean with the kind of contempt and entitlement that post-secondary education breeds, perhaps rightly so, as if they’d never seen a person wound so tightly and rapidly losing his sanity. I wondered if they’d stick around. A tall brunette, the sole girl to arrive on time and understand that hamachi was yellowtail and yellowtail was not yellowfin tuna, appeared to be in charge, and I said to her, coaxingly, “We need to get this shit moving before it stops smelling fresh.”

Ten minutes later, after all of the plates had gone out, after we cooks had helped run them because the waitresses moved at a leisurely pace more befitting a Montana barbecue, Sean stood beside me at the stove. The stove was a massive flat range, intensely hot, hotter than anything I’ve experienced in my life, and sweat was soaking the handkerchief wrapped over my hair. I had five pans of tagliatelle simmering in oil, and was loading the sixth.

“I want,” Sean said, “for you to watch your language.”

“I didn’t say a damn thing to the customers.”

“Just don’t swear in front of the fucking waitresses, Tom.”

I’d guess that I’m pretty similar to a lot of home cooks who try, as much as they can, to emulate professionals, but who’ve never held down cheffing positions in actual restaurants. The aspiration may be more than a bit delusional, but that’s beside the point. When Sean Rawlins asked if I’d be game for cooking six courses for fifty people, a step up from our last supper club in which we’d cooked five for twenty-two, I was downright gleeful. He had access to a massive kitchen and a school gymnasium-turned-ballroom at a synagogue.

“Sean,” I said, “that’s fantastic. But, why only fifty?”

“Sixty?”

“How many cooks will we have?”

“Five.”

“We could each handle fifteen, I think, without problem.”

“Seventy-five, then?”

“Yes, seventy-five.”

“But, why not a hundred?”

In the end, Sean decided on eighty, roughly. Of the five cooks, he would be the only professional, or ex-pro. The rest of us—his sister and friends Lionel, Rebecca, and myself—had all gone to the same college and had at various points pursued both the culinary and literary arts. Rebecca, with a book contract, was the standout on the one side, and Sean the standout on the other. But on the day of the event, Sean’s sister stayed home to study for a GRE subject test in psychology, and Lionel, with his rumply hair and sweet if slightly cocky demeanor, called to say he got locked out of his room by his girlfriend, had no clothes, and would be unable to help prep until such a time as his situation changed. Now I’m not sure how he had cellular access but no pants—certainly we were not amused that he lacked the balls to get into his own goddamned apartment—but nonetheless, with Rebecca not be arriving until evening, all preliminary work fell to myself and Sean. For the next five hours, I would learn the following: When baking eight dozen muffins, grease the tins generously; err on the side of a bigger bowl when setting out focaccia to rise; always know where the fire extinguisher is because extinguishing a grease fire that spreads behind the metal stove shield and starts burning the wall and ceiling requires more than a handful of baking soda; and when opening a door to air out the kitchen and keep the smoke detector from going off, double-check for signs that read “Emergency alarm will sound when door is opened.”

“Tom,” Sean said, at four p.m., after Lionel had finally arrived, “I’m going to get some caffeine. Would you like some?”

I asked for an iced coffee. It was too hot in the kitchen to drink anything warm. While Sean and Lionel went to fetch it, I stayed behind shaving carrots, softening them in water and sugar on the stove, and then distributing them evenly on a baking pan to go in the oven. I was hoping they’d crisp into brittle, sweet curls that we could use as toppings for the date cake dessert. Just after I got the carrots in the oven, my girlfriend called from Seattle. We’d been dating coast-to-coast for half a year, and she was in a frisky mood. She wondered if I had any time.

“Of course I have time,” I said. “You can’t fault a cook for needing to use the bathroom.”

“Never,” she said.

“It would be criminal.” In my mind that was not such an exaggeration. Food and sex, for me at least, are vitally connected—I started learning to cook in college after all because short stories weren’t getting me laid. I figured poached swordfish and the like would serve me better with women, which turned out to be true, though the enjoyment of cooking for its own sake soon replaced any ulterior motive.

When I arrived back in the kitchen, Sean and Lionel were still out and the carrots had burned. I spent the next half hour salvaging what unsinged whisps of orange I could and dropped them in the food processor to make a sort of carrot sugar dust that we never ended up using, though the taste was not bad. Sean, finally coming through the doors with coffees in hand, looked at the burnt carrots, saw that they were more brown than anything, and pronounced them unfit. I told him I didn’t give a goddamn, and that was true.

The rest of the night went off without many problems, excepting the last-second cleaning of several hundred plates, knives, forks, spoons, and water and wine glasses that had been collecting dust in the closets, and the hamachi scare. Sean also had a brief moment, after all of the food had gone out and all of the feedback from customers had been superlative, of going into a screaming fit with an old acquaintance who had walked into our kitchen uninvited and a bit drunk, looked around, and started questioning how clean were the counters and how kosher the food. I spent the next quarter hour trying to assure him that everything really had gone well and to forget about the bitch, but I wasn’t surprised at the end of the evening when Sean announced both to the guests and to us that this would be his last supper club. He spoke graciously, and the relief and joy in his face was evident. He’d left professional cheffing because of the physical and emotional stress of it—the cooking game as he called it—and now not even the occasional one-night, fixed-menu stand was easy enough for him.

I don’t fault him there. In 1671, Francois Vatel skewered himself on a sword because the fish he’d ordered, to be served at a banquet for Louis XIV, was late. And in 2003, paranoid that he might lose one of his three Michelin stars, Bernard Loiseau, chef and owner of La Cote d’Or in Paris, committed suicide. Notably, Marco Pierre White returned his Michelin stars in 1999 while he was still regarded as one of the world’s greatest chefs, because he feared that the stress of continuing to cook might kill him. He now owns numerous restaurants, has a reality TV show, and is rather well off on the whole. So the choice to leave the game seems a good one. But I think Sean’s reason for it was best, and simplest.

“I just don’t like the kind of person it makes me,” he said.

We were drinking beers at a bar on 7th Avenue, toasting the end of the supper club. I sat on the lid of my forty-gallon pot, filled now with my smaller pots, pans, knives, and an apron soaked in oil and dishwater.

“You’ll miss it,” I said.

He shrugged.

“I used to want to go into it myself, but my feet are so goddamned tired.” It was past one in the morning, and we’d been cooking since before noon. “I don’t know how you did it every day. I wonder if I could.”

“Sure, but it isn’t worth it.”

I haven’t seen Sean since that night. We talk occasionally, and I’m wondering if I could carry on these types adventures on my own, or if I should ever give the cooking game a real chance. I’ll keep you posted.

By Tom McCafferty