Restaurant Babylon

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  Michelangelo bends down and starts counting his bottles. Unlike the majority of restaurants, we do have some of our wine stock on show. Mostly, if you see racks of wine lining the walls of a packed bar, the bottles will be empty. What is not pinned down will be pinched by the customer. You’d be amazed how many bottles get half-inched, popped inside a jacket or slipped into a handbag, as someone staggers out sniggering into the street. They’re invariably drunk. Actually, they are always drunk. The power of alcohol to turn seemingly pleasant people into kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs and sex maniacs should never be underestimated.

  But I am ever hopeful that our slightly more up-market client base would not resort to such lows. Alternatively, if you ever see those racks of booze lined up on their side, lit from above with spotlights, like some art installation – don’t drink the wine. Those poor bottles of red have been sitting under those warm lights stewing away for months, if not years, and if they are not actually fizzing and off, they are not far away from it.

  So we keep some choice wines out on show and a few less choice ones below the eye level at the bar. So if someone asks for a glass of house wine they might think they’re getting a Petrus but they’re usually having a Rioja instead. We always use Rioja, as it stays freshest the longest when open to the elements.

  ‘Ah, Jorge!’ I say, walking towards the back of the restaurant. ‘Can we go through last night’s book?’

  Like most restaurants, we keep a small book in which incidents or rudeness or disagreements or any other problems are recorded, so that we can discuss them the following day. We also note if anyone famous/well known/important has been in, so if they call again we can make a table available to them, or remind them of their last visit. Our system is called the Little Black Book, but with international outfits, like Nobu, the whole thing is computerized. So if you have behaved like a cock in New York, they know about it in LA and Budapest before you’ve popped an Advil and had your breakfast. And they don’t really stand for cock behaviour in Nobu. They don’t have to; they’ve got reservations coming out of their backside and celebrities falling over the paps to get in. But they won’t tell you to your face. What suddenly happens is those eight o’clock bookings that you used to get just by emailing your PA become seven o’clock, or worse, six thirty! They’ll be terribly nice on the phone, but there really is nothing they can do. If you have a D (meaning dreadful/difficult) or a W (meaning watch) by your name on the Nobu computer, there is not much they can do for you ever again. They run such a slick operation that each restaurant in the chain (I am afraid it is really a chain – twenty-two restaurants is a chain) informs the others who has been in the night before. So when Lindsay Lohan pops into LA, having been at her favourite middle table in Nobu Berkeley St, London, only the week before, the staff can ask if she had fun last week and how was the black cod? It is slightly Big Brother creepy but slebs lap that shit up; they think everyone is interested in their every bowel movement, so the fact that the waiter knows what you ate seven days ago in London is water off their skinny backs.

  ‘So did we have anyone in last night?’ I ask, sitting down opposite Jorge while he opens the Black Book.

  ‘Lots,’ he replies facetiously.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ I sigh. ‘Anyone anyone.’

  ‘Not civilians.’ He grins. ‘We had Graham Norton and Nigella Lawson. Not eating together, of course.’

  ‘Was Scott’s full?’ I ask. He looks at me quizzically. ‘Nigella only ever eats at Scott’s. Just as Simon Cowell will only ever go to his local Italian, Edera, Mr Chow and the Cipriani – oh and occasionally The Ivy if he wants to be photographed with someone.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ shrugs Jorge. ‘I thought it was her husband who insists on Scott’s. Anyway, she was with a girlfriend.’

  ‘Right. Good.’ I’m slightly regretting my evening out now. The prospect of Nigella Lawson, without her husband, is a little too exciting for a hungover bloke at ten thirty-five in the morning. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Right, we did ninety covers and the average spend was about £80–£85 a head.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Well, it’s in the run-up to Christmas. I want to turn all those tables at least twice.’

  ‘True,’ I nod. ‘Up the booze. It would be good to get the average spend up to over £100 for the next few weeks.’

  ‘OK,’ he nods.

  ‘Anything go wrong?’

  ‘We had a walkout.’

  ‘A walkout? Smoking?’ He nods.

  I have to say I am a little shocked. We occasionally get a walkout, but we’re not the sort of place that you’d book if you wanted to stuff yourself and then run, also we’re not packed like an overrun zoo, thereby making your escape much easier. However, the smoking ban has definitely added to the number of walkouts. It’s just made it that little bit easier to slip out, although quite often they’ve left their credit card behind the bar so it is more usually a drunken amnesia than anything particularly malicious. We do miss the smokers, though. Obviously I am one of them, so I was less worried about the terrible stench and how your hair used to reek after a long night’s service. But we miss them because mostly the big smokers are/were also the big drinkers. They would sit around the table and chat for hours. They’d drink and chat, drink and smoke and chat and they’d shift brandies and cognacs. Poire William. Kummel. No one orders a Poire William these days. It’s sad: all those delicious digestives sitting on the shelf, costing me money, gathering dust since the smokers were pushed outside under a street lamp.

  ‘Big bill?’

  ‘Not huge. £135 for two.’

  ‘Do we have their number?’

  ‘It was an email booking.’

  I hate an email booking. I have to say I must have been one of the last places in town to set up a website that allowed customers to book online. There are two things that are sublimely irritating about online bookings. Firstly, they often book quite a few restaurants on the same night, to see how the mood takes them, and they are much more likely to be a no show. Secondly, they also tend to be the computer-literate type who like to review online afterwards or, worse, have some sort of annoying blog. So as a result, we are terribly nice to people who book online even if we loathe them. You have to be so careful. Having said that, I am much more likely to give away a table from someone who has booked online, my limit is about twenty minutes. Twenty minutes late and I’ll give it away. And thirdly, what’s so hard about calling? You’re about to spend, hopefully, £100 a head in the place – wouldn’t you be interested in calling up to see what they sounded like? Fourthly and finally, there are no comebacks with an email booking. You can send email request after email request for payment after a walkout but they will simply go unanswered.

  ‘That’s annoying,’ I continue. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘We had a fabulous table of Arabs who drank the best part of two bottles of forty-year-old Highland Park whisky in teacups so as not to alert their wives sitting on the next-door table.’

  ‘How much is that a shot?’

  ‘£160.’

  ‘And how many shots?

  ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘Not bad. That makes up for the walkout.’

  ‘Yep,’ he smiles. ‘And then Mr Riordan was mugged for his phone, just as he left.’

  ‘No! Mr Riordan, he’s a nice bloke. Were they waiting for him?’

  ‘The police were not sure. But it would not be the first time.’

  We’re fortunate not to have had too much passing crime through our place. There is always the odd snatched bag or purse, but because of where we are, in Mayfair, we are not like, say, The Ledbury who are, despite all their Michelin stars, right on the front line. I remember during the summer riots a couple of years back, the whole restaurant was held up by a gang who stole most of the customers’ bags, phones and jewellery. They were eventually seen off by the kitchen staff wielding rolling pins. Another time, round the corner, at the trustafarian hangout E&O, one terrified
bloke ran into the restaurant shoving a gun in his back pocket, while being chased by a gang of youths. He hid, shivering, under a table for a few minutes before being pulled out by his feet.

  ‘Linen!’ shouts the huge, burly Trev as he hurls a massive clean bundle of napery through the front door. ‘Laters!’ he yells, closing the door.

  Jorge and I walk over to inspect it. There is something quite delicious about soft linen, hot off the press. I mean, really irresistible. So irresistible, in fact, the favourite place for staff sex is in the linen cupboard. I had a mate who worked for a wine bar chain and there was practically a staff race as to who could shag on the linen while it was still warm. I can’t say I have ever managed it myself, but I can totally understand the appeal. It’s something about the smell and the fact that it is so very clean. And expensive – it costs me £500 a week to get all my laundry done, and that’s just for Le Restaurant. All in all, it’s over a grand for the group.

  Luca and Mikus pick up the heavy bundle and drag it to the back of the restaurant. All the tables are already covered and in the process of being laid, so they’ll put the napkins and cloths away for this evening’s service.

  ‘We’ve got a full house for lunch,’ announces Jorge, walking through the tables, looking at the reservations list. ‘So we need to get a move on.’

  The noise of the loud vacuum cleaner drowns him out as the two cleaners, dressed in navy blue all-in-one overalls, give the place the once-over before service. Both men are Kenyan and they come for a couple of hours every morning to polish the mirrors, wipe down the bar, dust the shelves and make sure the lavs are presentable.

  ‘Oh my Lord!’ screams Jorge at full volume, his splayed hands resting either side of his face in ostentatious shock. ‘What the hell!’

  His cry is enough to make the cleaner turn off the vacuum. The whole of front of house stops and turns to follow Jorge’s gaze. Standing by the mirrored doors to the His and Hers lavatories is the other cleaner, holding a bog brush in his hand. Dangling off the end of the brush, damp and crumpled and clearly made of rather expensive silk, is a pair of tiny panties. The cleaner can hardly hide his delight. Neither indeed can anyone else.

  ‘I just found them.’ He shrugs. ‘In the toilet brush.’

  ‘Ah, thank God!’ comes a very loud very posh voice behind. ‘There they are!’

  11 a.m.–12 p.m.

  It’s quite surprising for Caroline to be on time. She normally turns up in a whirlwind of chaos and extraordinary excuses, which usually involve a litany of celebrities and expensive modes of transport. Today, however, she seems remarkably organized. Dare I say, ‘on it’? Dressed in skinny, spray-on jeans, high-heeled boots, with a barely buttoned white silk shirt and a neckline loaded down with more gold chains than Mr T, Caz is not your low-maintenance, blend-into-the-background kind of girl. In her mid-thirties, she has been living with her very compliant boyfriend for the last six years. She strides across the room, chucks her camel coat over the back of a chair and, with a huge, exhausted sigh, slams her ludicrously expensive croc bag that undoubtedly has some girl’s name down on the table and places a large folder next to it.

  ‘Darling!’ she says, pulling me towards her with her whippet-thin arms. She hugs me so tightly I can smell the toothpaste on her breath and feel the individual vertebrae of her spine. For someone who spends their whole time eating out in restaurants, Caz is remarkably, perhaps worryingly, thin. She drinks like a fish so must eat less than a humming bird. How she can work in my industry and be so obviously nil by mouth is one of those delightful PR oxymorons. ‘So have you checked?’ She grins, pushing me away as firmly as she grabbed me towards her.

  ‘Checked what?’

  ‘The review!’ She quite rightly looks at me as if I am a total idiot.

  ‘Oh no, sorry, not yet.’

  ‘Well, it’s toast.’ She smiles, sitting down and double-crossing her legs over each other. ‘On the second page already. Christ, you’re now so bloody goddamn Five Star brilliant, you should have all the fucking foodies over you like herpes before the end of the day! Can I get a coffee? I’m parched!’ She looks around the room for someone to take her order. Her skinny claw waves in the air, rattling with gold. ‘Jorge! Darling! A double macchiato, milk on the side, no sugar? Thanks, sweetie, I love you, you’re such a star!’ Caz also has this habit of sounding as if any waiter bringing her so much as a Diet Coke is actually physically, completely and utterly saving her life. There’s effusive and there’s Caz.

  Jorge grins across the room at her in total adoration (they’ve been on a few Martini benders together) and nods briskly at Mikus to get on it.

  ‘OK,’ she says, turning to fix me with her turquoise gaze. ‘Before we get Oscar out here, I just want to run through a few things with you.’ She opens up her file and pulls out page after page of paper, including a two-page plan. ‘So, we are going to do a duel campaign, personal PR for Oscar – so GQ, Observer Food Monthly, Style, Style List – that sort of stuff. He’s good-looking, right?’

  ‘Hmm,’ I hesitate. I am not really sure what to say. I suppose he could scrub up. ‘Not bad,’ I say.

  ‘Good. It’s much easier if they are good-looking. Gordon, Jean Christophe Novelli, Giorgio Locatelli – they are all handsome,’ she says, looking up. ‘I mean, Marco’s career was practically made by those fantastic Bob Carlos Clarke photos of him with the meat cleaver. He looked like Michael Hutchence.’

  ‘That and a few Michelin stars,’ I suggest.

  ‘I can’t get you photo shoots if you’re a munter,’ she says, ‘no matter how many bloody stars you’ve got, darling.’

  Jorge arrives with a tiny cup of extremely strong coffee with a small jug of foamed milk and two little brownies, fresh from the oven, all on a small silver tray.

  ‘Oh Jorge!’ says Caz, her shoulders hunching with so much pleasure that they touch her earlobes. ‘You are an angel! And a lifesaver! Thank you!’ She picks up the small cup, ignores the milk, the sugar and the brownies and knocks it back in one. ‘Darling,’ she says, looking at him through lowered Princess Diana lids. ‘Could you be a poppet and get me another one?’

  ‘And can I have one?’ I suggest. It is only my place, after all.

  ‘Of course!’ replies Jorge, immediately. ‘Two doubles.’

  ‘If that is at all possible, darling, thank you.’

  ‘I should hope so,’ I reply. ‘This is a restaurant. So?’

  ‘Yes, right, so,’ continues Caz, looking back down at her plan. ‘I’ve been thinking about La Table and Le Restaurant and how to pick things up a bit. So a social media campaign to go alongside the print media campaign and a sales and marketing campaign. So that is B to B, B to C and quite possibly C to C.’ She looks up. ‘How do you feel about giving a free glass of champagne to everyone who has over three thousand Twitter followers just so long as they Tweet about dinner at Le Restaurant afterwards?’

  ‘How would I feel? Fleeced?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be that many. All you need are a few big names coming in, India Knight, Caitlin Moran, those sorts of people, Richard Bacon – he’s got over a million – and then they’d tell all their followers.’

  ‘Would they do that?’

  ‘Perhaps not those three exactly, but I can get others to do it.’

  ‘And after they have told their followers, what do the followers do then?’

  ‘Retweet – that sort of thing.’

  ‘Retweet?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘But would they come? Book a table?’

  ‘Oh, we can’t guarantee that, but it would generate interest. And traffic. Lots of traffic. We might even manage to get you trending.’ She smiles and nods vigorously, as if that would be a brilliant idea. ‘It’s good to be trending.’

  ‘Back to the B to B and B to C?’ I have to admit I am a little confused.

  ‘Business to business, business to consumer and consumer to consumer, which is the hardest. We could get everyone in the office
to “Like” you on Facebook – we haven’t done that yet, I don’t think. Gosh, that’s bad, sorry!’ She pulls a little face. ‘You are on Facebook, aren’t you?’ I nod. ‘Good – I’ll get that sorted straight away. We’re always “Liking” and “Forwarding” on Facebook. We’ve got over forty thousand friends between us.’

  Thankfully, Jorge arrives with another shot each, while I consider the concept of having over forty thousand friends. We both down the doubles in one this time. The coffee is strong and a little bitter. My body gives an involuntary shiver.

  ‘I was thinking of a pop-up?’ she says, looking at me quizzically. ‘A pop-up?’

  ‘I know what a pop-up is.’

  ‘Well, a pop-up. Everyone’s doing them and they don’t last long, obviously, because it is a pop-up, so it’s a good way to maximize the PR without much outlay. I have a friend involved in Freeze. Freeze? The art fair? And we could do a Le Restaurant pop-up there. The place is crawling with media desperate to fill their pages with stuff so it’s a good place to be. Also, you’ve got a good crossover from your art clients who drink at Le Bar, so it would be good to get them in here as well.’

  I have to admit that Caz is probably right. It is not a stupid idea. Freeze could be good for us. Although I have to admit I find the idea of a pop-up rather loathsome. I never really understand the point of them. They only appeal to hideous food bores who want to wang on about how they’ve been somewhere that was so hip, so cool, so transient that it is no longer there. It’s disappeared up its own culinary rectum in a puff of dry ice.

  ‘Good idea,’ I say finally.

  ‘Leave it with me and I’ll speak to Ev,’ she says. ‘Now.’ Big smile. ‘How do you feel about drunch?’

  ‘Drunch?’

  ‘It’s very big, very now, very much the new brunch. It’s very French and La Table is French, very French. Well, it’s a brasserie.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘So how about a drunch menu on Sundays?’

  ‘But we’re closed on Sunday. It’s one of the few days off the staff have and, anyway, what is drunch?’