Suzanne knows the feeling of egg on her face. Especially around her husband. Now ex-husband!
But this is the first time it happens with a real egg.
A sparkling short story about fresh starts and self-discovery. Don’t miss this brilliant moment of women’s fiction that will leave you grinning in delight.
“Teppanyaki for One” is available for the month of August 2026 on this site. The ebook is also available on most major online retail stores. You can also read this story in the collection Baverstock’s Allsorts Volume 2.
Teppanyaki for One
By Jessica Baverstock
I WAS USED to feeling childish in front of my husband, feeling like I had egg on my face. He was, after all, a master of the school-principal-stare over the top of his reading glasses. But it wasn’t until three months after our divorce had gone through that I managed the sensation with literal egg.
It was my first proper restaurant meal since I had achieved the status of singleness again.
The restaurant was warmer than the evening spring rain pelting down on the Melbourne streets, fogging up the floor to ceiling windows so that I didn’t realize what I was in for until I entered.
An Asian girl dressed in a gaudy floral kimono, her face painted like a 1920’s Japanese postcard, held out a plastic sleeve for me to slip my navy blue collapsible umbrella into so it didn’t drip all over the beige carpet. Then she tottered across the floor on her strange wooden sandals – ‘geta’ she called them when I asked, with the Japanese roll of the vowels – and gestured for me to follow her around a bamboo folding screen into the seating area of the restaurant.
I felt underdressed in my brown cotton trousers, plum silk blouse and matching cardigan, my burgundy patent leather handbag slung over my shoulder, taking my high-heeled black dress shoes and silver teardrop pendant out on the town for the first time since my sister’s engagement party seven months earlier. Don’t do it, I tried to tell her. But you never listen when you’re in the starry-eyed throws of infatuation. You always think it won’t happen to you.
I expected small glass tables surrounded by wicker chairs, couples giggling together over the seductive sweetness of their red wine, hiding their embarrassments behind forced chatter and salted breadsticks. I guess I was up for a little torture this particular evening. Instead I found myself walking into the cooking equivalent of a three-ring circus, complete with squeals and shouts from adults and children alike.
Or perhaps an eight-ring circus. There were eight separate islands situated around the restaurant, each equipped with a Japanese chef dressed in a white coat and those ridiculous paper hats, an iron hotplate wide enough to fry an entire fresh-caught tuna, and an exhaust hood that did nothing to suck away the smells of hot oil and frying onion. The cacophony of the cleavers and metal spatulas clanging against each other and the hotplates seemed to be a feature of the establishment as the chefs tossed and twirled their implements in the air, stopping now and then to tend to the pale, finely chopped food that spluttered or flamed in front of them.
Skirting three sides of each enormous hotplate were black Formica benches and swivelling bar stools padded with red leather. Seated on the stools, each patron, young and old, was swaddled in a white paper bib, secured by a knot at the back of their necks – their eyes and grins wide as they watched their respective chef perform.
“Please, sit here,” said the girl, pointing to the place setting in front of a vacant stool – a white plate, a silver fork on one side and pair of wooden disposable chopsticks on the other, a square disposable paper napkin, and a paper bib which the girl now unfolded and held out to me with an encouraging smile, like a mother about to spoon feed her youngest.
“Uh,” I said, my eyes darting around for the green exit sign every public establishment should display. Between the bright strip lights of the floating ceiling and the spurting flames regularly erupting like some obscene culinary theme park ride, a soft lime sign didn’t stand a chance. “I thought…”
The girl reached closer with the bib. “You sit here.”
“You see,” I continued, stepping backwards, “I was after teriyaki.”
The girl blinked her fake eyelashes over the violet pupils of her coloured contacts. “No. It is said teppanyaki.” She spoke slowly, sounding out the word through her halting accent and then smiled as if waiting for me to repeat it back to her.
I got that churn in the pit of your stomach when you realise you’ve been taken for a ride. I closed my eyes, envisioning the gold embossed lettering across the red and white gift card promising dinner for one, prepaid by a friend. “Have fun. Meet a guy,” said the handwritten scrawl in blue marker. It was signed Kathryn, with a wretched little winking smiley face. Now I got why it was winking. I’d read Itou’s Teppanyaki Restaurant and my mind had drifted too quickly to sweet and tangy chicken, white rice, and perhaps a scoop of sorbet to finish.
The past year had been filled with expenses – lawyer fees, a new flat, bills that had astronomically inflated since I had been rooming with friends in my early twenties, and of course a new outfit and airfare for the wedding my sister insisted on holding in Bali of all places. Treating myself to a meal that wasn’t home cooked from expiring veggies picked up from the discount rack on the way home from work just didn’t fit the budget.
And then my boss had slipped a little red envelope into my handbag, patting me on the shoulder in her maternal way and saying I should treat myself after the ‘train wreck’ I’d been through. Funny how divorce bring out the catastrophic metaphors – you’ve almost convinced yourself this is only a bump in the road of life and you’ll come out the other side just fine, then someone likens it to newsworthy carnage.
I felt a tug on my shoulder, and opened my eyes to find the girl had tied me into the bib.
“Sit, please,” she said, gesturing to the stool.
I did as I was told.
The chef smiled at me, his podgy hands flipping and spinning his spotless hatchet and spatula. There were five vacant chairs to my left. On my right sat a couple in their mid-sixties, watching the display avidly.
“Is this your first time?” said the wife, pulling her eyes away from the juggling to meet mine. She spoke with a soft Scottish accent and smiled just enough for me to spot the lipstick marks on her front teeth.
“Yes,” I said.
“Ours too,” said the husband without moving his gaze, as if he were watching football on the telly while trying to be conversational.
“Anniversary, you see,” said the wife with a wink.
“Oh.” I moved my left hand from the edge of my plate to my lap, conscious of the indent still visible on my ring finger. That blasted band was a nightmare to get off, time having bent it out of shape.
“Anniversary!” cried the chef. “Ah, you watch.” He picked up an egg and nonchalantly tossed it up in the air. It landed on the blunt edge of the hatchet knife and cracked slightly, its clear innards dribbling down onto the hotplate where they turned instantly white. He swooped the knife across the surface, using the egg white to draw two love hearts and then an arrow piercing them.
The couple cooed at each other, the husband squeezing her hand.
I squeezed my own hand in my lap, not out of love but out of comfort. Things would be okay. Sooner or later, they’d be okay.
“Just by yourself tonight, are you?” said the wife, as the chef scraped away his artwork and deposited it in a rectangular hole cut in the corner of the hotplate.
“Yes,” I said. I felt the beginnings of an excuse forming in my throat – ‘my other half is away on business,’ or ‘he’s staying late a work again this evening, like a good little worker bee’ – and then I stopped. I let everything just hang in the air, amidst the hissing and popping of the fresh egg the chef had just released onto the hotplate. I didn’t have an ‘other half’ anymore. I was gradually becoming whole again just being alone. I felt a smile tugging at my cheeks.
“Good for you,” said the wife, reaching across and patting my arm. “A girl needs a night out on the town every now and then.”
I looked at her permed waves of grey hair and the lifetime of lines on her face. I must have been at least twenty years younger than her, yes a girl. I straightened a little in my chair. I liked that. A girl.
“Now,” said the chef, toying with the edges of the thin, bubbly omelette going ever so slightly brown at its edges, “would you like something to eat?”
“Yes please,” said the wife, grinning girlishly.
“I will show you how we eat, Teppanyaki style.” The chef seemed to smirk as he folds the edges of the omelette over with the spatula.
The husband picked up his fork in readiness.
“No need,” said the chef. “Here we serve straight from hotplate to mouth. Watch.” He dissected part of the omelette into tiny pieces, no bigger than a coin, and then scooped one up onto his spatula. “Sir, will you open your mouth please?”
The husband obliged, his eyes darting to his wife in trepidation. She simply smiled back. She must just be a smiley person in general.
With a quick snap of his wrist, the chef somehow propelled the nugget of omelette through the air with such accuracy that it landed almost squarely in the husband’s mouth.
“Oh, bravo!” cried the wife.
I found myself clapping, bouncing in my chair with excitement. I hadn’t felt like this in years – bright, alert, happy, unafraid.
Then the chef turned to me. “How about some for you, madam?”
I froze, my hands in mid-air. “Oh,” I said. “I don’t think I can really do that.”
“Nothing to it,” said the husband. “Really. Just open your mouth. He does the rest.”
So I obeyed, opening my mouth, feeling a draft entering me as if I were breathing in fear again.
“Here it comes,” said the chef. With another flick of his wrist the small, yellowy white ball came hurtling towards me.
I moved to catch it, but instead it bounced off my cheek and landed on the bib where it slid slowly downwards until it landed in my lap.
“Another,” said the chef, his spatula already primed.
Before I could protest the egg was airborne and I once again tried to catch it. This time it bounced off my nose.
“I’m really not very good at this,” I said with a laugh, picking up the napkin to wipe at my face. I looked away for a moment, not wishing to catch the chef’s eye in case he took it as an invitation to try a third time. And then I saw him.
My husband – well, my ex-husband now – dressed in the double-breasted, grey wool-and-silk-blend suit he always wore when trying to impress, being led down the centre of the restaurant by a twenty-something woman who was all legs and cleavage wrapped in a slinky red frock.
“Robert,” I said as he passed. I couldn’t stop myself. It just came out.
He stopped and looked across at me, the wide eyes moving from assessing the horror of his surroundings to the shock of recognising his ex. “Suzanne,” he said, formal as ever though he couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice. He never had settled into the comfort of calling me Suzie. Perhaps that would have been too much like an adult-to-adult relationship – two equals sharing a life.
His ‘Plus One’ battered her eye-shadow-laden lids at my husband then turned to see what had caught his attention. “Who’s this, babe?” she drawled, as if she had secreted chewing gum into her cheek before she spoke.
I had to stifle a guffaw. I had known this man inside out for over two decades. There was nothing about him that would even register on the ‘hunk’ or ‘babe’ index, were there indeed such a thing. He had never possessed a swimmer physique and deskwork had brought on a hunch. He was pale as the inside of a coconut, due to him being obsessively vigilant about skin cancer. His only redeeming features for someone of the young, supermodel-wannabe set was that he had a red Mazda midlife crisis convertible he’d somehow smuggled through divorce proceedings and he still had most of his hair, even if it was now turning peppery.
“Oh, it’s no one, Celia,” he said, turning away as if to keep walking.
She leaned forward to look at me, pulling heavily on his arm. “You’ve got something on your…” She pointed a red acrylic nail in the direction of my cheek.
“Yes,” I said, wiping at it with my napkin. “Egg.” I grinned. I had expected to feel trapped, to feel utterly devastated at being caught in such a situation. But it was liberating. Even enjoyable. Somehow, strangely, enjoyable.
“Don’t let me keep you,” I said, waving them onward. “Enjoy your meal.”
“Thanks,” said Celia, taking one last look at my cheek before tugging her Catch of the Day off to the other side of the restaurant.
I watched his back for a moment longer and grinned some more. Then I turned back to my chef, who had almost finished the omelette.
“One more time,” I declared, and opened my mouth to let everything in.
“Teppanyaki for One” is available for the month of July 2026 on this site. The ebook is also available on most major online retail stores. You can also read this story in the collection Baverstock’s Allsorts Volume 2.
“Teppanyaki for One”
Copyright © Jessica Baverstock
Cover and Layout copyright © Jessica Baverstock
Cover design by Jessica Baverstock
Cover art © yupiramos/depositphoto.com, aleksangel/depositphoto.com, chorniy.iwan.gmail.com/depositphoto.com
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