The Coat Check Girl -Laura Buchwald's otherworldly tale, set in classic restaurants in NYC and New Orleans, where love and retribution enmesh the living and dead.

THE COAT CHECK GIRL by Laura Buchwald (10/22, Roan & Weatherford) is an absorbing metaphysical mystery set in 1999 New York City, with Y2K fears of computer collapse. At the “Bistrot,” long a downtown destination,  the “countdown” underscored the staff’s insecurity about the restaurant’s future. Despite the rich mahogany and red leather booths, business was down, despite regulars of many years, tourists, and occasional  celebrities, like John F/ Kennedy Jr. and his lovely wife. Such visits were decreasing, thought Josie, as she surveyed the empty room. It was early yet and she thought with compassions of Sylvie, a regular, who seemed to be teetering on senility, mixing up the present and yesteryear. 

Jose’s welcome was warm and professional. She was quick to see to customers’ needs. And she was cheerful, despite her own anxiety. At 29, Josie mourned her lost dreams for a fuller life. She was not the only one. Many of the older staff, identified with the fate of the legendary restaurant, ignoring their own unrealized futures. Derek, the bartender. was once a screenwriter of promise. While he and Josie had a past, it was now another blind alley.  Among the staff are a wise-cracking waiter of rare intelligence, still waiting to meet the love, who would focus his life. While expertly waiting on tables, a self declared actor, without audition pictures, dreamed of auditions.

Andy, the manager, always putting out “fires”and Chef, the owner, a wildly erratic man, kept all on their toes. Unsure the projected night’s menu would materialize, the staff was used to menus in flux and mystery budgets. Despite frequent announcements of hiring needed help, they were always underhanded. Josie thinks of all this, two weeks distance, after attending her grandmother’s funeral. Nothing’s changed. And she’s grieving  for the woman, who understood her like no other person. Now she is really alone. The one night, waiting for guests, there’s a beautiful woman by her stand. Josie thinks, did the owner really hire someone? She must be for the coat checkroom, it’s always a mess. 

Mia appeared at just the nick of time, she thought. For me, also, Josie thinks later.  Mia was sympathetic, concerned, and seemed interested in being a friend. Josie definitely needed one. Her abrupt mother had never been that and she had had no father in her life, after their divorce. 

The two share laughs from the hostess stand across to the cloakroom, And she’s there  when Josie’s lost in grief, with herself, and  loneliness. Then there are strange incidents. She loses a locket in the ladies room, hears laughing, sees no one. There are things missing from the kitchen that show up in the cloakroom. Odd happenings in the basement and Josie learns about the past of The Bistro in the present place. All seem oddly layered in The Bistro and her life. 

As the fate of the restaurant winds down,  and the owner-chef disappears, a temporary fill-in seems a stop-gap to what? And somehow resolution comes to the staff, as though a door magically opened.  When Mia announces to Josie she must leave to be with her young daughter in New Orleans, she invites her to come and visit with a paper of address of her family restaurant’s. When Josie decides to go to New Orleans, her own world radically changes.

There’s a double-vision in this book of history and present day, that meshes with the mysterious way we often live with time. This novel also embodies a possible world, where the living and the dead exist simultaneously, It is tangible, and reverberates with an entertaining emotional logic. Lind of like the classic “Topper” series, urbane and sensible.

 I Loved The Coat Check Girl

S.W.