Potpourri of Tales

Olive You

New Year's resolution: spend less time on Twitter.

But, look, it was December, so Luca figured he had a few weeks to get it all out of his system before he resolved to delete the app.

Perhaps this was why he'd actually been spending more time on Twitter than usual. As soon as there was a lull in the flow of Café customers, Luca stole a break from the kitchen and went straight to his phone. But he wasn't using his professional handle and promoting Café Douillet, (didn't need to, not when the business had been thriving for the past few months).

He was using the anonymous account that no one knew he had: @vigilinter.

And, besides, he was almost done for now. Almost done scrolling through @GenericGordon's Twitter page.

@GenericGordon ("Whitney Ellis," according to her profile) had retweeted some teenage girl's pictures of some cream puffs (Pate a choux! Disappeared in like 30 mins XD said the original tweet), tacking on pâte à BOO. could they be any flatter?

Seriously. She was going after kids, too? Luca retweeted it himself and added Pâte à Who asked you, then replied to the girl's original tweet: Great job, Kacie! Bet you're the family favorite now. So what if the cream puffs hadn't quite puffed? Luca ruined countless batches of puffs—and eclairs, and gougères, and basically everything that used the pâte à choux dough—as a kid. But here he was: chef-owner of Café Douillet, a wildly successful restaurant.

And he was not going to let some internet jerk crush a kid's dreams.

That was the whole point of this Twitter account. "@vigilinter" was a portmanteau of vigilante and internet, and he used the handle to call out Twitter jerks.

These days, he'd maybe been disproportionately targeting Whitney. He told himself that was because food was his area of expertise, but if he were being honest, it was more so because he'd be happy to burn every single food critic's career—anything even closely resembling a food critic's career, like, say, a good-for-nothing Twitter account—to the ground.

It was a food critic who'd shut down his best friend's restaurant with a single scathing review, and the wound was still fresh. It'd happened not even a month ago. Luca still remembered reading the unreasonably harsh review, trying to console a distraught Frances through the phone, listening in horror as his friend described how The Wood Hawk, his once-bustling restaurant, had to almost halve its prices and still wasn't attracting enough customers to stay afloat.

Three weeks ago, Ms. Elise White, acclaimed food critic writing for the country's most-read newspaper, had waltzed into The Wood Hawk and decided to end it.

Luca, consequently, would like to end her.

He'd looked her up—her degree was in journalism. Could she even cook, or did she just throw around culinary jargon to impress the masses? How Elise White had even risen to her status and power was a mystery—

His phone whistled. Twitter notification. Direct message.

Whitney Ellis @GenericGordon
could u not
10:47 AM

Ah. So she'd noticed him.

He shot back: What's gnawing at you? Can't eat what you dish out?

Perhaps those food puns were excessive, but if Luca didn't drown his annoyance in dry humor, it would probably come out as something far less polite. Puns were good. Puns kept him from becoming the jerk. He watched the typing dot-dot-dot symbol for a rather long time; finally, she replied.