Page 6 of Best Served Hot

“Affirmative.”

“I think we should go to the shaobing stand first. The Times just ran this whole feature on the cook yesterday after his Beard Award nomination, so I think the lines will be longest there.”

Alice nodded, and we set off. I goggled at everything we passed, wanting to stop and try it all. It seemed like most vendors had stuck to a street food theme this year, which made sense. We passed booths handing out empanadas bursting with traditional fillings like shredded beef or cheese and less traditional fillings like five-spice pork and tofu or buffalo chicken. Hot dogs charred crispy on the grill and piled high with pineapple relish and chicharrones and cheese sauce. Cool cups of ceviche, the translucent chunks of fish and shellfish just barely cooked in a bath of citrus juice and onion.

I wanted it all.

But it would have to wait, because the lines were indeed longest at the shaobing stand, stretching all the way past the next nine booths. I took a quick video of the line to share, then stood at the end.

Alice nudged me with her elbow. I winced. She had very sharp elbows. “Is that Jada Knox over there?”

My heart leaped. Be cool, Julie. Be cool. I swiveled my head as slowly and coolly as possible, glancing coolly off into the distance as if thinking hard, picking coolly at my cuticles—there! Jada Knox was standing right there, grinning into her phone and waving an empanada around in the other hand as she talked rapid-fire to her followers.

“You know, I always assume that all influencers are using filters and things to make themselves look better online,” Alice said thoughtfully. “But she’s just as pretty in person.”

Jada Knox was the queen of New York City restaurant-reviewing streamers—a small niche, sure, but one she’d dominated. I might have over fifty thousand followers, but I was fingerling potatoes compared to Jada Knox’s four hundred thousand. If we were comparing our follower counts to potatoes, then she was one of those five-pound bags of Idaho potatoes I eyed at the grocery store but couldn’t bring myself to lug all the way back over the sidewalk to my apartment.

“She seems to really like that empanada, from the way she’s smiling,” I said. Though it was hard to pay attention to her mouth when she had literal art painting her eyes: her eye makeup was beyond on point, an ombré of glittery pinks fading to purples that looked like a sunrise on her deep brown skin. Her dress matched it perfectly, a puffy pink skirt with flouncy sleeves that looked like something Glinda the Good Witch might have worn for an afternoon picnic but was somehow absolutely perfect both on her and for this occasion, and her box braids were tied up in an elegant bun. I was suddenly warm with how bad my hair looked, how sweaty I was in the armpits. Jada Knox didn’t look like she’d ever sweated in her life. “We should definitely get one later.”

Alice was already staring at her phone. “I’m going to see if she tells us what flavor she got.”

“She might not actually be posting right now, just recording,” I said, turning back to the line and stepping forward as it jumped ahead. “Though I guess she could be live . . .”

I trailed off as I focused on the person in front of us, another familiar face. Only this one I wasn’t used to seeing in my feed, literally sparkling as they talked up the city’s best food. No, this was one I wasn’t supposed to know at all. I’d last seen it pressed up against Emerson Leigh’s cheek, smiling for a photo.

Bennett Richard Macalester Wright, literally so close to me that I could smell him, the clean scent of soap and spice cutting through the grease of the doughnut stand beside us.

I hated that he smelled good.

I hated that he looked good, too. Those wire frame glasses flashed in the sunlight high above me; I wasn’t close enough to measure for sure, but I probably came up only to his angular chin. He must share the same superpower as Jada Knox, aka knowing exactly what to put on his body to make him look his best for any particular occasion, because the way his blue plaid button-down and pressed khakis hung on his skinny-but-not-spindly frame was Just Right. He stood with two other guys, both white, both dressed like him; the other two guys were laughing with each other, but Bennett stood on the outskirts, a faint smile on his face. What the heck was he even doing here? A street food festival wasn’t exactly the Scroll’s scene.

I nudged Alice maybe a little harder than I had to, just to make up for the fact that my elbows were decidedly rounder than hers. Then leaned in to whisper in her ear. “That’s Bennett Wright right there.”

She pulled away, wincing. “You spit in my ear.”

“Sorry.” It was a consequence of having to whisper loudly enough to be heard over the hubbub around us. We inched past the doughnut stand and were blasted full in the face by taco steam. Not that I was complaining. If all exfoliation steam smelled like tacos, sign me up for a spa day right now. “Did you hear me, though? That’s Bennett Wright in front of us.” She blinked at me, uncomprehending. I sighed. “Bennett Wright, the new reviewer for the Scroll!”

“Oh!” She blinked again, her eyes widening. “What do you want to do? Should we post a video and out him? Wait, how do you even know what he looks like? Didn’t he hide all his photos online and things, which you’d think would be impossible, considering we live in the Internet age?”

I quickly explained yesterday to her. Her mouth dropped open as I spoke. “Please tell me you brought me one of Emerson’s flyers. Do you think she’d take me seriously if I asked her about yoga for the mice in my kitchen?”

“I have one, but I left it at work,” I said. “Yes, she probably would, and she’d choreograph an entire routine for them. And it’s Emerson Leigh. She goes by two names, like Katy Perry.” Which was something that had always rankled me a tiny bit. Didn’t Emerson Leigh take up enough space in this world without that extra little bit of time it took to say an extra name? “Did you know Perry isn’t Katy Perry’s last name?”

“Now I do,” said Alice. “Kelsey has a first name for a last name. Courtney. That’s her full name, Kelsey Courtney.”

“Who’s—” Right, Kelsey was Alice’s new coworker. “That’s a pretty name.” But we were getting way off topic here. “I don’t think we should make his image public. That’s going too far.” No matter how much I loathed him, there was a code of conduct among food writers. I could still be professional. And the Scroll probably wouldn’t be happy with me if they heard I’d outed their main reviewer; I could wave goodbye to ever writing for them.

But it wasn’t like there were only two options here. The corner of my lip twisted mischievously.

I had to tamp it down a minute later when I stepped up to their group. The two guys Bennett was with stopped talking mid-sentence and swiveled to look down on me like I was an empanada filled with crushed cockroaches. If I hadn’t been on a mission, I might have shriveled in my fashionable sneakers. I tossed my head to the side, trying to feel more confident, and fulfilled the exact opposite of my goal when tendrils of flyaway hair stuck to the sweat on my forehead. “Heyyyy,” I said, trying to sound as much like Emerson Leigh as possible. Confident. Friendly. Oblivious. “Do you guys know who John Waterford is? The name sounds sooooo familiar.”

They exchanged glances, eyebrows raised like, How stupid is this chick? Or at least the two random guys did. Bennett was squinting at me, like he knew me from somewhere. That’s not possible, I told myself. There’s no way a reviewer from the Scroll follows you. Though he didn’t have to recognize me from JulieZeeEatsNYC, did he? Maybe he’d seen me the same way I’d seen him, from a photo of me with Emerson Leigh. Curse all those selfies she made me take.

Stop overthinking, I ordered myself. Stick the landing.

“Yeah, I know who John Waterford is.” It was the guy in front who’d spoken: blond, pink-cheeked, and wearing a pastel yellow polo with the logo of a rhino on the chest, which probably meant it was from some fancy brand I didn’t know. “He’s one of the most famous chefs in the world. He’s even a judge on Chef Supreme.”

Yes. Obviously, I knew all that. But I fixed my face into a look of wide-eyed, O-mouthed surprise, the same one Emerson Leigh gave me when I told her I’d “summered” as a child in the same house I “wintered.” “Oh! Wow! Because I just heard that he’s at the crepe booth down there”—I leaned out of line and pointed back toward where we came, at the opposite end of the festival—“doing an impromptu cooking demonstration!”