My first tastes of fine food were just that – mouthfuls, just enough that I could later describe the dishes to diners, meted out by mingy restaurateurs who ran what was then one of the greatest performances of elegance in San Francisco. On an alley nestled between two streets that ran dramatically uphill, the city’s rich clientele chose from a row of restaurants of different European provenance. It was my job to lie to them, to make them believe that these were places of sophistication when what I saw was financial collapse, internecine rivalry, and lives stalled and forgotten on that lane that appeared so charming and vivacious. San Francisco was afflicted by fog the first day I wandered down that lane, an accidental college dropout, my education placed on hold by the recession, my bank account in the low triple digits. I was freezing in the dress and thin tights I had worn, and when I found the restaurant that had placed a vague Craigslist ad, the middle-aged man who greeted me hardly glanced at my résumé. It was the first in an army of red flags. He complimented my cheekbones, my platinum blonde hair, and asked if I could start the next day – it was an easy job, one he would explain in the morning.

The restaurants in the alley were owned half by a pair of French men, the other half by Italians; their contempt for each other was a daily performance, enacted in the greetings not offered as they passed, or by the way a large party’s arrival at one of the French restaurants meant the simultaneous ignition of 10 angry cigarettes by the Italians and their employees. The evil brilliance in the scheme was that each establishment was marketed as independent – offering the finest in seafood or in paella or in New American or in authentic Naples cuisine – and my job, the most shameful I’ve ever had, was to stand before one of those restaurants with a menu in my hand, to court each potential customer with a lush description of the food. I could sell the menu so well precisely because its offerings were out of my reach, very rarely sampled but watched all day arriving on immaculate platters. The pork chop with peaches, I would say, really sings atop the goat cheese mashed potatoes, with the savoury and the sweet truly harmonised. The Dungeness crab mac and cheese marries a classic comfort food with the unmistakable zest of the sea. For six hours I stood in the same place, to my right a Spanish beauty whose Castilian lisp caught many customers, and to my left a woman who had stood there for rumoured decades, an Italian with calves like rifles who would mock my posture or voice as she whistled and waved her menu in semaphore. She still shows up in nightmares, Piera, her canine teeth exposed, one translucent platform heel turned out in an obscene show of thigh.

The American who hired me quit soon after, citing the insanity of owners, Salvatore and Paolo. I had begun to notice that eccentricity was the rule on the alley: the two Italians kept an office above, opposite the restaurants, from which they lowered everything, from financial statements to $300 bottles of champagne, in a straw basket. When a gust blew the papers toward the street, or the rope jerked and a bottle shattered, everyone put their hands to their head, cursing, betrayed by fate, but the ridiculous system was never retired. Tips were often doled out as pieces of paper that said: IOU $100, IOU $75.56, and one had to wait until Salvatore or Paolo seemed in amenable spirits to approach them with a collection of these slips. Waiters and bussers said their pay cheques bounced more often than not, and many advised me to take mine to a cheque-cashing centre rather than a bank; I was more likely to get the money that way, but only if I went to this place or that, where they still accepted Salvatore and Paolo’s cheques. When my first manager left, Paolo’s younger brother Vincenzo appeared, a tall, gleaming caricature, all cheekbones and hair gel and immaculate suede shoes. The gossip said he’d once been up for co-ownership, but had disappeared on a motorcycle for days or weeks, and Paolo had been punishing him ever since, humiliating him before the customers and employees of whichever restaurant he’d been assigned to manage.

With the earnestness of an algebra teacher, Vincenzo quickly set about dismissing the staff he found unprofessional or under-groomed or otherwise unworthy, placing two fingers at the bridge of his nose and murmuring, “Pleece. It is not acceptable. I have to ask you to pleece get the fuck out of here.” He was remarkable to watch, taking steps two at a time and corners like a jet plane without so much as tipping any of four plates rested on his forearms. He appeased angry diners with his enormous eyes and graceful bows, pouring a sancerre from a great height without spilling a drop. He could be as vicious as he was charming, and one could sense his displeasure immediately by a certain gesture and sound, a raised arm that ended in a rigid pointer finger and an “OH!” that seemed to contain all known profanities. The “OH!” –uttered at a chardonnay presented sloppily or a table clearly neglected – signified that Vincenzo was coming for you, and that his storm that would destroy the next hour for everyone, guilty or innocent.

Vincenzo was a social creature with a nickname for everyone on the alley, and when his 14-hour shift was over – he worked that long six days a week – he was invariably seated for dinner with one of his many friends. Some nights I was that companion, suddenly allowed a full portion of the lamb encrusted with rosemary and pistachio, and he was as eager to tell his stories as he was to ask questions. He was the first person on the alley I told about my ambitions as writer, the essays I had quietly begun to publish, and on the day I came into work unusually happy, having been contacted out of the blue by an agent from New York, he set to bragging so quickly that I regretted telling him. His brother, on the other hand, roamed his territory with his hands on his hips, his significant gut protruding over the enormous keyring whose jingling announced him, his gaze on whichever female curves were closest. For more than six months, there lay, in the restaurant’s cramped subterranean office, a single wedge espadrille on its side. When curiosity finally got the better of me and I asked the bartender, he rolled his eyes. Definitely one of Paolo’s girls, he said. He likes to take them down there. The question has never left me: how did she get out of there, that woman, with just one of her shoes?

The presence of Vincenzo, for me, seemed to be an organising principle around which all that was absurd and corrupt and heartbreaking about the alley could be appreciated. Yes, the money was unreliable, the booze-soaked bankers that made up the majority of the clientele sleazy, but there was a reason that people spent decades here, quitting one restaurant just to be hired at another, lingering to drink together long after their shifts were over. It was the only place in San Francisco where you could hear a minimum of three languages at once, and it offered a fine view of the triangular Transamerica building, San Francisco’s tallest. More often that not its middle was totally obscured by fog, so that the peak seemed some lone ornament placed in the sky. There was something comforting in the sound of the alley, made of so many parts, the bussers darting with piles of dishes through the tiny aisles between tables, the women like me making their pitches on loop, the hum of sewing machines from the tailor behind us, the flint of lighters catching, the half-sentence of one drunk diner rising somehow above the rest. When at dusk the strings of lights that fell down at a 45-degree angle all came on at once, creating a kind of ceiling through which to see the sky, it was hard to say the alley was not beautiful.

Vincenzo stood with me during slow periods, gossiping in his silk waistcoat, his enormous gold watch flashing as he gestured. He told me about Ted, the pathologically shy, basketball-tall chef, who had once accidentally dated a famously unpleasant, severely alcoholic hostess for six months because he simply could not ask her to stop showing up at his apartment. I took a shine to Ted, who blushed whenever anyone made eye contact with him, and learned that I could get him to talk if I asked him about a dish or technique. You just create a double boiler and melt the espresso grounds and the chocolate that way, he would say, of a ganache that had prompted innumerable compliments to the chef. The only thing a risotto needs is your absolute attention.

Because I was a fixture, only allowed to move about five feet in any direction, I became a confidante to others: Alain, a waiter,, who’d known Vincenzo 15 years, told me things in a low voice, made me promise not to let on. Did I know that Paolo had broken four of Vincenzo’s fingers in the kitchen of the family restaurant in Italy for making a salad incorrectly? That Vincenzo’s last motorcycle accident had hospitalised him, which was why his wife, Tina, forbade him to ever ride one again? That he wanted desperately to learn to swim, but had been too frightened, in two decades in California, to try?

As the months wore on, the tragic aspects of the alley became unavoidable, impossible to turn into comic anecdotes I would dole out to friends in the backyards of bars. One night, in the cigar club just around the corner from the alley, Paolo punched someone and ended up in handcuffs. A former employee was suing for unpaid overtime, and half the line cooks had headaches from an untended gas leak. Vincenzo’s 14-hour days had caught up with him, and he was either very awake and very angry or downstairs in the tiny office, sleeping in the peeling pleather desk chair. His wife called frequently, and I was always instructed to say he was busy. I tried to rouse him, once, where he slept among the pixelated photos of Ducatis he had manically printed and annotated – “Cool!” “162 horsepower!!!” – and he woke with the look of someone locked out of his home in bad weather. He never stood with me any more, only flew into fits of rage and then apologised, his contrition as dramatic as his anger. It is that I am so tired, he said, dabbing at tears with a starched napkin. One day he was ebullient, kissed both my cheeks and resumed his heron-like posture on the wall behind me, one foot hitched up, but I was suspect. That evening, while the staff ate the mediocre family meal of spaghetti with chicken, Vincenzo rolled into the empty restaurant on a motorcycle he had purchased in secret and had been parking around the alley. Tina would kill me, he explained.

It was around the time of Vincenzo’s deterioration that the financial complications became finally untenable; three consecutive pay cheques bounced, and I had enough IOU slips to build a papier-mache canoe. I went in early one day to confront Paolo, before he’d begun drinking, found him two restaurants down from mine and asked to talk. He crossed his arms over the cushion of his gut and said, So talk. First I demanded what I was owed, in a voice cold and restrained, but then I wavered, trembling with the humiliation of it, and it was this that inspired his reply. Bella, he said. We are a family. Not a rich, famous family, but family. When you get married, we buy your wedding dress. A big one. Fluffy.

I would retell this later at dinner parties, a punchline that always got a laugh – a big one?! Fluffy?! I just want my two thousand dollars! – but at the time it terrified me, that I could be considered part of the whole circus, that he thought I would remain there. The recession raged on, and the résumés I sent out never received a reply. I began to write behind the menu I had to hold up. My unhappiness had become apparent, something customers commented on as they settled at another restaurant. Sometimes I dashed to the kitchen to cry, feigning the need to ask about the mushrooms in the cavatelli. A cook named Luis often walked me to the train and kissed my forehead. Not sad, he would say. Happy. Yes, I’d reply, firmly, as though receiving a foolproof tip on the removal of a pernicious stain. In my off hours, I was wild in the way only the unhappy can be, drinking opium tea with my feet dangling off the roof of a seven-storey building, laying on the grimy floors of warehouses where friends in bands worked and reworked contrapuntal bass lines.

One morning shift I walked into the alley and knew, immediately – by the brisk way people were moving as they dragged out the tables – that something had happened. When I arrived at my post, a man half Vincenzo’s height greeted me with a sneer. I am restaurant’s new manager, he said, his tie dangling halfway down his crotch, and sniffed in the way of someone who has never before enjoyed a position of authority. Giancarlo.

The bartender was eager to fill me in on what I had missed on my night off, a brotherly showdown to end all brotherly showdowns. It had been, on the surface, about recent patterns, the money owed Vincenzo, the overtime he was expected to endure, the way Paolo sat all day, sampling every glass of wine on offer, until he was ready to pick a fight. It had ended, everyone was quick to confirm, with a chorus of no-you-get-the-fuck-out-of-heres, with Vincenzo detaching his desktop computer and stomping down the lane, wires and routers trailing him. But I knew it was much older, about the role Paolo had given Vincenzo 30 years before in a land-locked Italian village, about the boy who had started work in his new country the day he arrived and had never set foot in the Pacific.

It did not take long after that for me to go. Giancarlo was as intelligent as a parakeet, and blessed with the same interest in repetition as discourse. I’m quitting, I said. Quitting, quitting? When my point was finally clear he stormed off, slapping at the nicotine patches on his upper arms, trying to hurry relief.

Protected by the cushion of time, two novels published, my life across the country in New York rooted and well-watered, I still think of The Alley, wonder who that girl was who survived there, where the bankers said things like, beautiful, but what’s with the bitch face, as they passed me and I had to beg for what I was owed. I’m not in touch with anyone from those days, but when I taught myself to cook it was always in homage to Ted, who had to bend under every doorway, who could produce the exquisite in an environment where plates and punches were regularly thrown, who reddened at any praise and turned back to his work. I had no idea where to start, and I owned no proper knives, but the goal, when I began to learn, was Ted’s pork chop with peaches. When I move through Manhattan during rush hour, it’s Vincenzo I think of, how he leapt and bowed and swivelled and side-stepped.

On visits to San Francisco, I’ve sometimes walked dangerously close to it, considered strolling down, hearing the poor girls describing the menu, finding Vincenzo where he has inevitably returned. OH! He would say, cursing me out for disappearing, then offering me whatever was on his plate. But I’m filled, then, with the silliest of fears, that somehow I’d be conscripted, my life since then erased, fulfilling a dictum I often heard when someone left, that it might be a month, it might a be a year, but that they would be back, having forgotten all about the alley that was soul-eviscerating, remembering only how many conversations were possible, in the course of any evening, with so many people.

All names have been changed; Kathleen Alcott is the author of the novels Infinite Home and The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets