Page 38 of Best Served Hot

She laughed like the tinkling of bells. “That’s sweet. But no, they always had some excuse for me, both for when I proposed collaborations and when I pitched them pieces. Our audiences were different. My idea wasn’t deep enough. They don’t take influencers seriously in that world. I’ve placed plenty of pieces in digital spaces or younger publications, but the old guard’s been stubborn.”

I frowned sympathetically. She went on. “Honestly, though, it all worked out for the best. I don’t need them.” She stopped short in the middle of the sidewalk. A guy behind her barely stumbled to a stop before bumping into her, but he actually smiled at her as he stepped around her instead of cursing. Magic. “Shoot, I meant to get an introductory video when we met up. Can we pretend we’re just meeting up on the sidewalk now and film it?”

I will do anything you tell me to do, I didn’t say. Instead I just went with “Sure.”

A few minutes later, we had videos on each of our phones of the other one walking toward us, smiling and waving. I wondered if anyone would be suspicious of how staged it was, then decided I didn’t care. If anybody following me didn’t realize how staged everything was, this could be their introduction. “Great, I’ll do a quick little explainer of what we’re doing and then post a snippet to get people checking in all day,” she said, her thumbs already flying over her phone. “The others I’ve done this with started gaining followers pretty quickly.”

Most of my followers were probably already following Jada. What did she have to gain from this? “Thanks. Also, I don’t know if I mentioned this already, but this was so nice of you to reach out. I owe you one.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t mention it. We’ve got to stick together, you know?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your boy at the Scroll has a whole team behind and around him. He’s got a network at papers and publications all over the city,” she said. I had to speed walk to keep up with her as she deftly wove her way through the crowds on the sidewalk: people sipping drinks outside a bubble tea joint, a woman having a very animated phone conversation beside a Laundromat, delivery drivers zipping past on their electric bikes. There was so much to focus on that I didn’t have the mental space to protest her calling Bennett “my boy.” “We’ve only got each other. So we have to be there for each other.”

I pressed a hand to the general region of my heart, touched. Even as she went on to say that wasn’t strictly true, because now she had a small team to manage her sponsored content and arrange her schedule. My mouth opened to joke that being on her team sounded a lot like what I did for Mr. Decker but snapped shut before anything could come out. I didn’t want to risk sounding silly.

Jada and I continued chatting as I followed her. She could’ve been escorting me to an alleyway to murder me, except that Manhattan didn’t have alleyways as such. (A major pet peeve of mine in movies that ostensibly took place here!) I told her about my older brothers, that we’d grown up in the Philly suburbs but were now scattered all over the country, here and Philadelphia and San Francisco and Austin, about the first mean comment I’d gotten that made me cry. She told me about how she’d begun reviewing food for the student newspaper at Spelman College, that she was considering starting a fashion blog showcasing the finds she scrounged in thrift and vintage stores and redid herself, that she had a twin sister who was (gasp) a picky eater whose favorite foods were white rice and plain chicken.

By the time I was sympathy-cringing at a story of how Jada baked the most basic vanilla-on-vanilla cake as a surprise for her sister’s master’s graduation only to have her sister spit it out because it tasted “too much like vanilla,” we’d arrived at our first stop. “It’s called Brother Rabbit,” Jada said of the small but sleek storefront, the hanging sign with rustic lettering upon a silhouette of a very long-eared critter. “The chef is from New Orleans and her family is from the Caribbean, so it’s like a Cajun menu with Caribbean influences.”

A bell over the door rang as we walked in together. The hostess smiled at her and greeted her by name before ushering us to a table neatly tucked away in the back. “Interesting,” I said to Jada as the hostess walked away. A small leafy plant bloomed in the middle of our table; I assumed it was fake until I brushed against it reaching for the menu. “You have a different method than me. I try to be as incognito as possible when going somewhere I’m going to review.”

“I respect that,” Jada said. She unwrapped her napkin and let it flutter neatly onto her lap. “I just figure at this point, why bother? It’s not like they’re going to totally revamp their menu for me. I’m not reviewing service. I’m reviewing the food. And I never let them give me free food, because I don’t want anyone to think I’m being bribed. I always pay.”

“Interesting,” I said again, for lack of anything else to say.

She slipped me a half smile. “You don’t have to copy what your boy and his friends are doing. We’re a whole different thing.”

What did she mean by that? Before I could ask, she had her phone out and was speaking into it. “Friends, I have been meaning to come to Brother Rabbit for so long, you don’t even know. But I’m so freaking thrilled to finally be trying the . . .”

Should I also be making a video? I went to pull out my phone, then realized I couldn’t be talking at the same time that Jada was talking, then re-realized that she was holding her phone out, prompting me to look into it. I instinctively pasted on my biggest smile and gave it a wave. When she nodded almost imperceptibly, I launched into my own spiel, only a split-second pause at the beginning when I realized I couldn’t just echo her. “Ever since I started following Chef Brenda, I’ve been intrigued by . . .”

I was glad the hostess had put us in this little back nook shaded from the stares of the other restaurant-goers. I didn’t say that to the camera, though. Jada lowered it and tapped her fingers on the screen. “I’m posting it to my story. You can share it. It looks good if we do a mixture of shared content and filmed content, so you can do the next update.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said. The waiter came by to take our order. I reached for the menu, realizing as I read it through that Jada was only giving hers a cursory look over. “Do you know what you want to try?”

“Do I.” Jada’s entire face lit up as she went over the dishes she’d heard good things about or that seemed particularly exciting or novel. I found myself agreeing with everything she said. So she ordered, and as the waiter went away, I returned to our conversation from earlier.

“So what you were saying before, about us being a whole different thing than the traditional publications . . .”

She stared at me patiently, waiting for me to go on. I kind of hoped she’d take over from where I’d trailed off and elaborate on what exactly she’d meant. Instead, I fumbled. “Because I feel like I do my best to be like one of their food critics. Like, staying as anonymous as possible, all of that.”

Jada grinned at me. “If you really wanted a dog, you wouldn’t get a fish and expect it to walk on a leash and cuddle with you, would you? No. Fish might look gorgeous in a tank and be interesting to watch, but they just won’t do what you want from a dog. If a fish tries to do everything a dog can, it’ll fail miserably. So let the fish be the fish.”

And then maybe buy that fish a yoga class. “Are we the fish or the dog?”

“We’re influencers,” Jada said. She brushed a loose braid behind her ear. “And we have so many unique strengths in what we do. You’ll miss out on what makes our job truly great if you spend all your time trying to be a pale imitation of something else.”

I was saved from having to respond by the arrival of the appetizers. “Let’s take our pics.”

It was nice to be out eating with someone who knew the importance of getting just the right light and just the right angle, and didn’t make me feel even a little bad for taking so long. Who didn’t protest about having to stop mid-bite for a great shot and even suggested angles that looked better for each particular food. Honestly, it made me feel a little disloyal to Alice, because she was as great as you could expect a layperson to be. But I was willing to bet that she’d rather have Kelsey than me by her side when it came to . . . I don’t know, debugging code or writing a new library or something.

Though being real, I would’ve eaten beside Mr. Decker if it meant this food. Even though we had ordered light, ordering light for a food reviewer meant ordering a roughly normal amount of food. We noshed first on flaky biscuits that melted in my mouth when slathered with a combination of sweet cream butter, smoky bacon butter, and a spicy drizzle of local honey infused with chiles. Then on a salad, crunchy chunks of iceberg and romaine bathed in a coconut-lime vinaigrette, studded with chunks of roasted squash, sunflower seeds, and crispy pork belly that melted into bacon fat on my tongue.

I sat back with a sigh as the waiter cleared our plates away. It had taken tremendous willpower, but I’d managed not to finish all of the food. “When you talk about unique strengths in what we do, what exactly do you mean?”

“We get to work for ourselves,” Jada said bluntly. “Forge our own paths. Nobody’s telling me that I can or can’t cover a particular restaurant, or take a certain angle on a story. I get to run my own brand and my own look.”