Running a restaurant is no easy feat. Maintaining creative control, juggling financial concerns, and managing a top-of-their-game staff, being a restaurateur stretches a chef far past their intended skillset. It requires building an impeccable support system of equally driven and self-sacrificing individuals. These are people willing to forgo their own creative satisfaction, personal lives, and financial stability in order to work together toward something great.
Not everyone understands that self-sacrifice, but cartoonist Katriona Chapman appears to understand it quite clearly. Her new book, The Pass, examines just such a team as they navigate the successes and pitfalls inherent to a new(ish) restaurant. From financial upsets to winning awards, The Pass quietly observes the highs and lows of the crew behind Alley, a seemingly hip and upscale restaurant spearheaded by chef Claudia, her creative partner Lisa, and their nature-forward head bartender, Ben.
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The Pass isn’t an exceptionally action-packed book; these highs and lows aren’t large and dramatic so much as intimately captured. It’s a book looking at heart rather than bold strokes. Its characters’ inner lives take up more space than the restaurant itself – we don’t linger on the intense stresses of a packed house dinner rush and instead concern ourselves with the after-hours conversations, which tend toward upward ambitions and interpersonal intimacy.
This makes the book a quiet but deeply fulfilling read. The reader becomes deeply invested in Ben’s community gardening, which takes up as much narrative space as a prestigious cooking competition Claudia enters. Emotional weight is given to Lisa’s creative fulfillment: she has taken on more managerial duties despite being a chef herself, and Claudia’s gentle nurturing and insistence that she take back some control of the menu is endearing, sweet, and life-affirming. And this is to say nothing of Lisa’s exhausting family life (and very slight pill addiction).
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The book is deeply realized, and incredible emotional depth is built up around small moments that read as deeply authentic, lived, and fretted over. Moments – like a brief kiss shared between two co-workers, somewhat accidentally – read so truthful to the life of a restaurant worker that they must have been observed by the artist first- or second-hand. All that stress and achievement works up a lot of emotional static, and it is only human to try to resolve some of that emotion through drink and human contact.
Chapman’s painterly, storybook illustrations cement that humanity – these characters are rendered softly, tenderly, and while this isn’t a book of action-packed scenes, a great deal of action is portrayed in the framing of kitchen scenes. Plating of dishes read as nuanced, subtle motion is implied as a flourish is performed with a ladle.
The Pass is a quiet but moving work, and it will read as deeply familiar to those who have been in the restaurant trenches. It is the story of a small business in dire straits, and of the people who run its ever-complicated human mechanism. These are all small moments, but to those inside them, they feel overlarge and profoundly troubling.
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