Restaurant Babylon

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  ‘It’s all about the Russians,’ says Steve. ‘Novikov is cleaning up, that place is packed. Burger and Lobster – Russian. They’ve just got a new place in Chapel Place, £300,000 a year rent, a hundred and twenty covers.’

  ‘I know, that’s a lot of steak and shellfish,’ I humour him. ‘But if you want Russians in your restaurant you have to have a menu as long as your arm. They want the lot – sushi with their spaghetti bolognese. That’s why Nobu has a hard time in Moscow: they can’t understand why their menu doesn’t have pizza.’

  ‘I hear you,’ he agrees. ‘It’s just that they’re the ones with the money. Them and the Arabs.’

  ‘But do you want a table ordering £1,000 of food and no one touching it like they do at Zuma, just so they can drink whisky and show off to their mates how much bloody stuff they’ve got on their table?’

  ‘If they pay I don’t care!’

  ‘I do care when they are rude to the staff. I heard an awful story about some rich tosser who ended up shouting at the coat check girl in Zuma because she couldn’t find his coat. Apparently he yelled that the coat cost more than she could earn in a year. That’s not charming behaviour,’ I say. ‘I don’t think that’s a great way to behave.’

  ‘Since when have you been the litmus test of good behaviour? Two wives and more one-night stands than Barry White.’

  ‘Did he have a lot of one-night stands?’

  ‘I don’t know, but we’ve all certainly had plenty to his music.’

  Steve laughs as Damon finally arrives with our lagers and attacks his with all the zeal of a parched prisoner of war who’s just made it out of the desert.

  ‘Oh, that’s better,’ he says. ‘That other cocktail made me feel quite sick.’ I take a sip of my ice-old drink. ‘He’s a popular fellow your barman,’ continues Steve.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘People popping in to see him all afternoon.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, you know, five or six since I’ve been here.’

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘Oh, they sit at the bar, order a Pepsi or something, have a chat and then leave.’

  ‘Right,’ I say. I think Adam needs to keep a bit of an eye on Damon. ‘I went to see a new site today.’

  Steve looks at me, slightly surprised. ‘You’re not thinking of expanding, are you?’ A worried return-on-my-investment look flickers across his face.

  ‘It’s a very nice little place in Covent Garden, seventy covers, something like that.’

  ‘Covent Garden? That’s a bit off-patch for you?’

  ‘It’s a good place, I am seriously considering it.’

  ‘Don’t look at me for money!’ He puts his hands in the air. ‘I’m skint.’

  ‘Really skint or City skint?’ He smiles. ‘But anyway it’s just an idea at the moment.’

  ‘Anyone else interested?’

  ‘A few, I think. Big Pete …’

  ‘Really?’ He wrinkles his short pink nose. ‘I’d stay away from him. He’s always trouble.’

  6–7 p.m.

  The restorative forces of a pint of lager and a plate of beetroot can’t be underestimated, so when Pippa calls and tells me she’s just heard on the grapevine that one of the new Russian players has been sniffing around and is thinking of poaching Jorge, I barely break my stride. He won’t go. He couldn’t possibly go? Jorge? My old pal? The best maître d’ I have ever had? I own his arse, so why would he possibly want to go anywhere else?

  Poaching is a regular problem in this business, particularly amongst the ever-growing number of chefs agencies. They are well known for their sneaky, back-handed ability to head-hunt chefs and pinch front of house staff, which is extremely bloody annoying. But it also goes on between rival restaurants. If someone is any good it won’t be long before he, or she, will have other outfits sniffing around them. And like a lot of the manoeuvring in this business it is done with a huge service-industry smile and plenty of charm. There is an etiquette that most people stick to, because the industry is so small and goddamn interconnected. You are supposed to call the opposition and inform them that X has come for an interview, or that Y is thinking of moving across. The fact that you have been grooming, fluffing, charming the sweaty jockstraps off both X and Y for the last month or so, trying to lure them to your outfit, with incentives, financial packages and extra days off, has little or nothing to do with it. It is a bit like having an affair with someone else’s wife: the poacher makes the running but then, in the end, you have to give notice, you can’t just swoop in and grab them. At the end of the day you don’t really want to have to cross the road to avoid someone because you pinched his or her staff. As a result, there is a wonderful sort of frenemy culture, so while we all get on so famously in public, with the back slaps and the free drinks and endless puddings all round, there is plenty of shafting going on behind each other’s back.

  I walk into Le Restaurant to catch the tail-end of staff supper. They are all sitting glumly at the back, on three or four different tables, clearing their plates with little or no conversation. Gina is sitting down in the far left-hand corner, staring at her plate in disgust, picking around the edges with a fork. I smile. I wonder what sort of crap Andrew’s slopped out of the kitchen today.

  In most kitchens, staff food is pretty disgusting. The chefs resent having to feed the troops, the owners want to keep it as cheap as possible, and everyone is keen to balance the books. So staff meals are the first in line for any form of scrimping and saving. But when you think I have to feed over forty people every day, it adds up, and you can understand why they can get the remains of the stockpot plus some carrots.

  Mostly carb heavy, with plenty of pasta, using the cheapest ingredients around, the head chef (although sometimes this job rotates between the chefs) usually cobbles something together using leftovers, grog, baloney, whatever you want to call it, maybe with a few eggs or a couple of old chicken legs he’s found at the back of the fridge. Sometimes, if the chef is in a good mood, he can knock-up something delicious, as good as you would get in any nursery kitchen. Stockpot with mash and peas – but it would be fabulous mash and great peas. But if the chef is pissed off and the waiting staff has annoyed him, he’s more likely to get a load of grog and cover it in a béchamel sauce, rendering the whole lot inedible.

  Some places are very generous with staff grub. The Anchor and Hope in Waterloo, for example, give their staff incredible food and at the River Caff all their team have a sit-down dinner at eleven thirty with a glass of wine. Others, however, are actually quite shocking. There’s a place around the corner from us that gives their staff baloney, mustard and white bread from the corner shop, while the customers, the other side of the door, dine on some of the finest freshly plucked ingredients money can buy. We try to tread a thin line between finances and keeping people happy. So sometimes they might get a bit of stewing steak or a lasagne but it really depends on what is left in the budget. Today, judging by the look on Gina’s face, Andrew’s right royally pissed off with everyone and has gone for the béchamel sauce.

  ‘Everything OK in here?’ I ask as I approach the back of the room, not really wanting an answer. There is a vague murmur in the affirmative. ‘Jorge?’ He looks up at me. ‘Can I have a word?’

  I am actually not going to broach the subject of his flirtation with the Russians, I am much more interested to hear how our Mr Stone got on. Did he like his steak? Did Jorge manage to charm the pants off him? Are we going to get a shit review? Jorge replies that short of going on all fours and sucking the man off he could not have been more effusive.

  ‘You know I would, for you,’ he smiles, ‘but I don’t think he dances at my end of the nightclub.’

  ‘I don’t know, he didn’t look that fussy to me.’

  Jorge insists that he tried to give him free pudding, some wine and a little digestif, all on the house, all of which Mr Stone refused. But he left a tip and smiled and said thank you, so it was not all bad.
r />   ‘I think four stars,’ says Jorge, half-closing his eyes.

  ‘What are you? A fucking clairvoyant now?’

  ‘I just feel it.’ He shrugs. ‘Just as I know we are going to have all the annoying tables in first.’

  You don’t need to be able to see dead people to know that the the evening crowd in a restaurant are always the most irritating. Either they are coming for a ‘quick bite’ before the theatre or they are on some sort of bloody food deal. I don’t mind the theatre crowd that much. At least they are in and out, although they tend not to tip very much, and they are not going to sink a bottle of wine and chug back nose-bleedingly expensive cocktails. Thankfully, though, they don’t block the table and we can normally kick them out quite quickly and fill the space with someone else who’s prepared to open up their wallet.

  But it’s the food voucher customer I can’t bear. There are these poxy schemes all over London that discount food, which we occasionally buy into when our bookings, to put it tactfully, aren’t quite what they should be. So we sign up to something like Toptable or Taste of London, or some Evening Standard thing, where diners can come and eat for half price, or 20 per cent off, or for £30 with a free glass of champagne. And it is nearly always something that I live to regret.

  The problem is that they are always such a bunch of tight-arsed lemon suckers and they don’t play the game. The idea is that we, the restaurant, don’t actually lose money when taking the booking and letting them in, but we sure as hell never make any either. They are supposed to come and fill the place up a bit. We take them as early evening Polyfilla, plugging in the gaps and filling in the corners. But they are supposed to play their part. Which of course they don’t. They never bloody do, and I don’t know why I am ever surprised as they always, without fail, stick to the deal. They never order anything more than the sodding free glass of champagne. They will never go off the set menu. They never deviate. They only ever order their free fizz and a jug of fucking tap. You can walk past the table and see a clean mains plate, a clean pudding plate and two drained glasses of champagne. You ask them if they might want a cup of coffee, casually mentioning that you would have to charge them, and they refuse. They always bloody refuse! And they ask for the bill. They are evil and annoying and I can’t tell you how much we hate them. If I can possibly avoid letting them in, I do.

  I am not quite sure why we have any voucher tossers in tonight, especially this close to Christmas. I think Caz has hooked us with some deal with Times readers, where we give away a free drink, so I am hoping they might show a bit of class and follow up their complimentary beverage with a bottle of wine.

  No doubt they’ll order the second cheapest bottle on the list. Those who know nothing about wine always do. They’ll sit for a second, like rabbits in headlights, bamboozled by the list, too nervous about looking like a mean tightwad to order the cheapest bottle on the list, so they go for the second cheapest. It’s a given, which is why we always mark that one up higher than most. I have to say, if in doubt, go for the house. We’ve normally got a deal on it, which is dependent on volume, so we are usually quite keen to sell it. Hence the reasonable price. Don’t go for the second cheapest bottle, because we have quite obviously seen you coming.

  The psychology of a menu is fascinating. If you look at it carefully, the way it is worded, the way it is laid out, you can see what the restaurant wants you to order. We’ll pop a box around it, place it in the top right-hand page, give it a longer billing so it sticks out. We’ll also try and spread the suggestions across the board so no one part of the kitchen is more overloaded than the other. If one part of the kitchen is being slammed while the others are idle then we’re deeply in the shit.

  The other week I was out at some groovy Spanish tapas place in Borough and I saw ‘black rice’ all boxed up and pretty sitting in the corner of the menu, like a sexy siren on the rocks beckoning diners over. It was a ‘house special’ priced at £6.80 and I thought no wonder they’re keen to flog it. £6.80? It really is money for old rope/rice. The GP on that is outrageous. Equally, you can practically hear the whole kitchen weep when everyone at the table orders the black cod. It was hiding away in the menu, it wasn’t boxed, we’re not supposed to sell as many as that! At about £100 a kilo, you lose 40 per cent of that when you defrost it, so it effectively sets you back £140 a kilo, making it the most expensive thing coming out of the kitchen but with the least amount of mark-up. The margin on that is enough to make anyone close up shop.

  Expensive wines are a similar story. Low down the list, we mark them up four or five times. So your £5 bottle of wine in the off-licence is £15–£20 at the table. But with expensive wines we tend to go for a cash mark-up. So a bottle of ’79 Petrus that is £1,270 a bottle in a wine merchant would probably cost around £2,000 a bottle at the table, which is not even twice the price, but is a handy £720 cash mark-up, enough to keep the wolf from our door. So often the more expensive the wine, the better the value to the customer.

  Not that any of these early birds are ever going to go anywhere near a bottle of wine, let alone expensive wine. It’s the set menu, the tap and the free glass of fizz. My only hope is that I can get them in and out of here as quickly as possible.

  Turning tables is key to our industry and it is the most inexact science. On a busy night most places try and have about 80 per cent bookings and 20 per cent walk-in. The thing about a walk-in table is that you can turn it three times in a night as opposed to a booked table which, in a smart restaurant, you can only really turn twice. There are some places in the centre of town where the ten-thirty dinner booking does exist and you can really keep the pressure up on the kitchen right till the very end. But here, in gentle Mayfair, outside of Soho and Covent Garden, we can only really stretch to turning a booked table twice and sometimes we don’t even manage that.

  However, in an ideal world, you turn the booked table twice and the walk-in three times. With the walk-in your aim is to do: six thirty to eight, eight to nine thirty, and then nine thirty to eleven. That is obviously a very tight fit and you can only get away with it if you have a bar where you can park people and a selection of tables where you can juggle an overrun to eight fifteen and nine forty-five. You also need to have a maître d’ who is charm personified, plus a hot restaurant where the customers are desperate enough for you to be able to call the shots. The process is relatively simple. You astound the customer that you might actually have a table: he is so lucky there was a cancellation, what with all those fabulous reviews (despite the fact that you have six tables going begging), but you say he can have it only on one condition, that you have to have it back by eight. Usually the customer is so pleased, delighted and amazed that you can fit him or her in that they will agree to anything. This charade is repeated three times in the night, and hopefully these tables have really paid their way and made up for the table of four who were all on some sort of special needs diet and drank nothing but a jug of tap for the whole night.

  Obviously there are customers who get pissed off with the idea of turning tables. We have some very privileged, very entitled people living in the capital these days who think that once they have booked a table they can do with it what they like. They can add to it, take away from it, and think it is their right to stay there as long as they like, despite the fact that when they booked the table they were told we’d need it back at nine thirty. I may be in hospitality, but it is still a business. My tables need to work for me. In most restaurants you won’t get more than an hour and a half cheek-time. You don’t need two hours and if you do, then the kitchen is not working properly. Restaurants are in the business of selling food. They give you a slot and if you don’t like it, don’t go. We can’t have a guy sitting there not eating or drinking when we have other customers. What sort of business is that? You wouldn’t sit in a doctor’s surgery, chatting away, reading the free magazines, while a queue of people built up behind you waiting to be seen.

  There are loads of places these
days which won’t take bookings. Polpo, Bubbledogs, Bill Grainger. Personally, you wouldn’t find me queuing up anywhere to spend my own money, but these places are packed. Their only problem is they have to rely on the goodwill of the customers to bugger off. If you have a no-bookings policy it is much harder to get rid of the squatters or campers. There may well be a queue of snappily dressed hipsters waiting at the door, but you can’t move the other table on, as no out-time has ever been discussed or agreed upon. It’s at times like this that the maître d’ earns his money.

  Or indeed this. I look up to see two couples walking in through the revolving door, brandishing their Times vouchers.

  ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.’ Jorge genuflects and minces his hands. I wonder if he might actually be able to kill them with kindness? ‘Your table? Can I offer you a drink? A bottle of water?’

  ‘Thank you,’ replies a slim, bespectacled bloke who appears to be the designated Alpha male. ‘A champagne for me.’ He nods around the table. ‘A champagne? A champagne?’ He looks back at Jorge. ‘I think we’ll all have a champagne.’