There is something naturally perfect about the inside of a properly sliced lime. Its hidden architecture is a web of wet jade, marbled with white sinew leading to its core. The rough skin outlines this soft interior, marking the border between an outward exposure of environmental turmoil and the inward perfection gestating in the heart of this fascinating fruit.
I slice hundreds of limes in a day. The tools in this trade are as important as the technique. My knives are varied and many, but there is a favourite that menaces with Damascus steel that sees the most use and thus the most care; sharpened to an edge that can cut air each night. As the blade rests on the supple exterior of a waiting lime, there is a small moment of resistance before the pressure prevails and the tempered metal sinks deep into the flesh and comes to rest on the wooden board below.
This is not without purpose. I am employed by the Black Lotus, the greatest restaurant the world has never heard of. Its secrecy and its infamy are dueling forces that ultimately cancel out their respective powers, thus making the Black Lotus a whispered legend amongst the elites and the stricken alike. There is not an atom in the Black Lotus that has not been curated to perfection. My limes are no exception.
Perfect eights every time. Thousands of slices. For cocktails. For beers. But never for desserts. That job is given to another. Just as there is a lemon slicer - a nemesis of mine - and a strawberry slicer and an orange peeler and a lime zester - another nemesis. Not to mention the cooks, the waiters, the bartenders, the polishers and the hundreds of other jobs that operate outside the eyeline of our dazed clientele. Each tiny mechanic of the Black Lotus has a master of craft looming over it, demanding nothing but perfection. Most of all The Chef, whose presence I risk the wrath of by mere thought.
I scrape the excess pulp from the soaking battlefield of my board. I can hear the diners arriving, lured by the quicksilver lexicon of the maître d'. One thousand slices from one-hundred and twenty-five limes are lined up across silver platters around my station. If I did not work at the Black Lotus, I would still slice my limes. I do not know if this desire was in me before my employment, or if it has been cultivated by my twenty years of service here. I do not care. My passion overwrites all other considerations in this dark existence. My hands are wrinkled by citrus.
Tonight I will suck the lingering tang from them and dream of slicing limes tomorrow.
Paddy Dobson
27th July 2020