I suppose any port in a storm in these austere times. Recently I have noticed a couple of restaurants playing fast and loose with the service charge. Usually it’s 12.5 per cent, but at a few dinners out in the last month I’ve found myself shelling out 14.5 per cent, which is a massive £25 added to a bill of £175. I am not sure what the extra 2 per cent is for. Some very fine napkins? Or topping up the wages of the bar staff?
Tonight, due in part to our generous pop star and the swiftly exiting Russians, who were so desperate to get out of the place they chucked money at the problem, we have just over £1,000 in tips, which might be enough to bring a smile back to the faces of the brigade.
‘Can anyone smell anything?’ asks Oscar, putting down his second glass of wine. His black eye is beginning to puff up nicely.
‘Don’t start being rude about my cooking now,’ says Andrew, belching out of the side of his mouth. He must at least be three-quarters of a bottle down, not including any swigs he’s helped himself to in the kitchen.
‘No, mate,’ replies Oscar, looking rather jaded by the constant battering he’s getting from his older, much-less-wise, pissed, previous mentor. ‘There really is a bad smell coming from somewhere.’
‘You’re correct,’ nods Michelangelo. ‘It is not nice.’
‘It smells of waste,’ says Oscar.
‘Shit,’ agrees Andrew, curling his top lip. ‘It smells very strongly of shit. And it’s coming from my kitchen.’
He is right, there is an eye-watering stench and it appears to be coming through the swing doors. Andrew looks at me, Oscar raises his sandy eyebrows and Michelangelo waves his hand in front of his nose. It is my restaurant, my baby and, anyway, I am closest to the doors.
It’s only when I swing them open that the full hideous, gagging, retching, weeping, sinking hell becomes apparent.
‘Oh my God,’ I say, covering my mouth at the horror. I have never seen anything quite so disgusting in my life. The whole of the kitchen is about an inch deep in sewage. There is shit and loo paper and condoms and tampons and all sorts of effluent floating in a pool of revulsion all over the floor. The grill on the main drain, which sits just to the right of the stove, has been lifted off and is floating, rocking from side to side, in a tide of turd.
It is all I can do to stop myself from vomiting down myself and onto my shoes. The smell is intense and there is not enough mind bleach to rid myself of the vision. I close the door and, coming coughing and spluttering over to the table, the smell comes with me. It’s in my hair, in my suit. Don’t tell me it’s on my shoes?
‘Anna!’ I yell so loudly she jumps and spills her wine. ‘Get Rentokil. Now! And tell them it’s a fucking emergency.’
‘Rentokil?’
‘Yes, Rentokil!’
‘Christ? Really?’ says Andrew, flopping back on to the banquette. ‘Don’t tell me it’s the drains? Again?’
‘Tell them we need the drains jetted, we need the whole VIP fluffing fucking service.’
I run into the toilets and retch so hard I think I am about throw up my colon. There goes my beetroot salad. Despite its virulent pink, I don’t dare flush the loo. There’s no telling what chaos that might cause. I shiver. I really can’t stand the smell of shit, let alone half the capital’s excrement floating around in my one-star kitchen.
Rentokil are supposed to come and sort our drains out every two months. They come with cameras and jet blasters and it is absolutely revolting. You see all sorts down there, but mainly that the sewers are crawling with rats. When they say you are never more than six feet from a rat in London, what they mean is that your butt cheeks are literally a U-bend away from their yellow, gnashing teeth because there are swarms of the bastards, scurrying around right underneath your feet.
Truth be told, our Victorian drains just can’t cope with the stuff we put down them. And it’s mainly the fault of restaurants and it’s mainly fat. The whole system is packed with fatbergs: lumps of coagulated fat that collect in the drains under the kitchens of the West End. The situation got so bad recently that Westminster Council had to remove over 1,000 tonnes of fat from underneath Leicester Square. Like the clogged arteries of a heavy smoker, the gobs from endless irresponsible kitchens, usually from fast-frying cooking oil, had stuck to the sides of the pipes. Some of it was four feet thick in places. They eventually removed enough putrid fat to fill nine double decker buses. I am only extremely glad I was not around to see that. Nothing turns my stomach more than a lump of fat full of loo paper, old syringes and human hair; it makes me want to barf more than the smell of shit in the first place.
The other thing that is really putting pressure on the system at the moment is a weird problem particular to Soho, namely protein shakes. My mate has a place on Old Compton Street and he’s been plagued by the problem. The new buff gay clientele that his place attracts means they’ve had to call the plumbers in three times in the last six months and they have all said the same thing: there is so much protein in his customers’ urine after drinking one of these shakes that it coagulates in the drains and makes a type of jelly, which eventually blocks the drains. He now has his drains done once a month as a pre caution. We don’t have the buff, back and sac brigade, so we don’t have a protein piss problem, but what we do have is a preponderance of other restaurants nearby who regularly pour any old rubbish down the drain, so we are much more likely to succumb to a fatberg.
And it makes such a mess, as well as the stink. I remember when I was working with Maitre d’ Spencer we had an explosion during the lunchtime service. We were full, we had a hundred and fifty covers and I was on Table Ten, the VIP table, taking orders, when he tapped me on the shoulder and told me to cancel the order and help him get everyone out. The downstairs kitchen was flooded with so much effluent that it was beginning to come up the stairs. Amazingly Rentokil came and sorted the place out and we were back serving lunch the very next day. Restaurants can be amazing like that. They can fall down and get up extremely quickly: they just throw manpower at the problem.
Which is what I am about to do. No one is going to thank me for it, but there’s not much I can do. We need to be open for lunch – tomorrow.
Anna puts down the phone. ‘They’re on their way. With everything,’ she says.
‘How long?’
‘Half an hour maximum.’
‘Half an hour? OK,’ I reach in my pocket and pull out the wad of cash that was destined for the tronc. ‘Who wants to make some extra money?’ Barney’s hand goes straight up as does Mikus’s and the agency KP’s, who’s so spavin and pale and clearly straight off the ferry, he’s not looked anyone in the eyes since he’s been here.
It’s at times like this I miss Sean; despite being a drug-taking tosspot, he was always very hands on and practical in a crisis. Unless he’d been to a club, of course, then he was bloody useless.
‘Anyone else?’ I lick my finger like a car dealer and start peeling off notes. I am up to £100 when Luca finally puts up his hand.
‘Done! Great. You lot, I have to say I love you for this – and I don’t often say that – you need to get any old linen that we have and stuff what is stained or ripped or anything and stop the shit coming into the restaurant, because once it hits the carpets we’re fucked. The rest of you, hold your noses, and tiptoe into the kitchen and grab your stuff, if you can, and I’ll meet you all up the road at Le Bar for a drink. You lot – Mikus, Barney and you –’ I point to the luminously white KP, ‘you all come up there when you’re done and Rentokil are here and I’ll buy you a drink. Make sure you come,’ I nod. ‘And Barney?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re in charge.’
I just have to get out of there. The smell is making me feel so awful. I also think because I have seen the hideous hell that is behind the door my imagination is working overtime.
Free, out in the street, I shake my hair in the breeze. I am desperate to get the cloying sweet smell of sewage out of my clothes. I light up a cigarette – s
urely it’s better to smell of Marlboro Light than crap? Can this day actually get any worse?
12–1 a.m.
The office party at Le Bar is reaching its closing stages. Those who are going to cop-off for the night are already hooking up, talking to each other, moving in a little too closely, laughing just that bit too loud. The MD, whose pink tie is hanging as loosely as he is, appears to have got the blonde in the red sequin dress hemmed into a corner in a pincer movement worthy of an SAS execution squad. The remainder of the party, the great unclaimed, are left to wander around, dribbling, flopping, staggering, teetering, working a liquid face, that moment when their make-up and cheek muscles give up the ghost and gently collapse south.
Adam has turned the music down a little so it is no longer obligatory to scream loudly into someone’s ear and it is now possible to have a conversation. He finds us two adjacent booths at the back of the room and I sit down with Andrew and Oscar while the others shuffle in next door. Adam piles in the drinks. There are a couple of bottles of red, five or six vodkas and he tries to flog us the gag-inducing coffee tequila. Andrew, of course, is the first to try. I honestly think there’s nothing that hasn’t passed that man’s parched lips in the past twenty years. No liqueur is too monstrous-looking, no cocktail too lurid, no stickie too sweet. He went through a terrible absinthe stage about eight years ago, which I seem to remember we all had a go on, but he was the only one to drink a whole bottle and decide he was going to walk to Clapham, taking the direct route, through people’s gardens and over their walls. He was in quite a state, apparently, when he walked in the door. Looking at him, knocking back his second coffee tequila shot, I can’t help but think, having heard all the stories about him, that perhaps I should never have hired him in the first place.
But sitting there, chugging back a filthy drink, Andrew, I am pretty sure, would argue he’s not a big boozer searching for oblivion in something that is 45 per cent proof. He’d say he was just ‘decompressing’. There is a huge mythology surrounding chefs and the need to ‘decompress’ after a service. It’s the adrenalin, they say, it’s like running a marathon with your eye on the clock, in the heat, with all that talent, all that pressure of expectation, all those turbot to plate. We can’t just go home, have a shower and go to bed! So you hear endless stories of chefs’ ‘decompressing’ routines. Some of them are very Knight Rider and involve flogging a motorbike around town for an hour. Others are a little less dramatic and involve watching the telly for the next three hours. Or indeed, the very popular jogging home via a decompress-fuck with a handy waitress at a nearby restaurant. Some go to the Groucho Club, and others go home and drink a pint of red wine and smoke ten fags in total silence in the dark. Although my favourite is the jolly fellow who just went home to sleep, no drama, no histrionics, no need to decompress; no wonder he is no longer behind the pass. In fact, he now owns a few rather successful restaurants of his very own; cooking was apparently not for him.
‘So how actually was France?’ Andrew asks Oscar, as he slithers down on his elbow. ‘All that fine dining shit is dead, you know.’
‘Not in France,’ says Oscar, reaching for a vodka and tonic. Clearly the baby is going to have to wait. ‘In France they’ll go out to dinner and spend something like 800–900 euros on dinner for two in a two- or three-star restaurant.’
‘They’ll pay that?’ I ask.
‘Yeah,’ he nods. ‘They’ve got loyal customers who come out once a month and shell out that sort of cash. But they don’t do that here.’
‘No, it’s not our thing. No one is going to pay that for a bit of supper, no matter how many fucking stars it’s got,’ agrees Andrew, nodding away.
‘It’s all about Spain,’ says Oscar. ‘The Spanish are on the rise. The elBulli may be closed but I had the eight-course tasting menu at El Celler de Can Roca in Girona last summer and it was amazing, right down to the olives on the bonsai trees. There’s some wit in Spanish cooking and so much skill. It was voted the best restaurant in the world and you can see why.’
‘That’s not my thing.’ Andrew looks like he’s swallowed a wasp.
Oscar takes another swig of his vodka. ‘But London is rocking. Honestly, I can’t tell you the difference since I have been away. The atmosphere is different and there are so many restaurants.’
‘It’s all gone Polpo as far as I am concerned,’ says Andrew. ‘Small plates, all convenient, no booking. Some hard drinking, some delicious food, some good chat. In. Out. Fuck off. Polpo, da Polpo. They are all fucking packed.’
‘Yeah, packed with facial hair.’ I roll my eyes. ‘I went to the Social Eating House the other day, Jason Atherton’s new place, and I literally couldn’t move for tweeds and three pieces. There’s hip, there’s hipster and there’s food hipster.’
‘You should have waited a few weeks,’ says Oscar. ‘When that crowd have moved on to the next pop-up.’
‘If you want hipster,’ grins Andrew, ‘have you tried The Clove Club in Shoreditch Town Hall?’
‘Instagram cooking,’ says Oscar. ‘Literally, food porn for bloggers. They don’t eat it; they just rub themselves up next to it, photograph it and pop it on the Net. Doesn’t taste of anything.’
‘I thought it was quite good,’ Andrew chips in.
‘Really? I’m quite bored with photo-food, I have to say,’ replies Oscar.
‘What, already bored?’ I chip in. ‘But this little wave has only just started.’
‘I suppose it’s better than smears,’ laughs Oscar.
I look at Andrew; fortunately he is chuckling in agreement, unaware that most customers would put him in the smear category. There is nothing he likes more than creating some sort of vegetable purée skid mark on a plate before placing some meat/fish/fowl on top.
‘I had a mate who worked for Simon Hopkinson at Bibendum – you know, who did The Good Cook TV show and book? He’s an awesome chef.’
‘Yeah,’ agrees Andrew. ‘He’s pretty good—’
‘And he said he taught him all the stuff that was correct and what was not bloody correct. Like foam? Isn’t that the stuff you get rid of when you skim something? Why would you use that? Smears? Why would you drag a sauce across a plate and off the side when the plate is supposed to be clean? Sprinkling? There are times when a nice sea salt works well, but you should season with the right amount of salt in the first place.’
‘No, you’re right,’ nods Andrew, laughing and knocking back the tequila. ‘Don’t forget the powders and the granitas.’
‘Although I did have the most amazing oysters with grapefruit granita and caramelized seaweed in a pub in Kent.’
‘The Sportsman?’ asks Andrew.
Oscar nods. ‘It’s a grotty pub near the sea but the chef Steve Harris makes his own butter, harvests his own sea salt and grows his own veg. The lamb we had came from a field next door but one from the pub and he does a twelve-course tasting menu for £65.’
‘Sixty-five quid? How can you make money on that?’ I ask.
‘Small portions,’ they both reply.
This sudden outbreak of harmony is a little disconcerting. If only I had got them drunk this morning, we might have all had a much easier time of it.
‘Everyone OK?’ asks Adam, slipping on to the end of the banquette. There is nothing he likes more than the suggestion of a lock-in, and he’ll do his damnedest to keep it all going. ‘Can I get anyone any cocktails? Drinks? Vodka?’ He glances at me to see if it’s OK. Quite frankly, I’m tired, I have one failing restaurant and one that is currently full of shit; I don’t care how much drink he serves, just so long as my glass is not allowed to run dry.
‘I’ll have a martini,’ I say.
‘Really?’ He looks at me a little surprised. He knows I mean business.
‘You see – talent copies and genius steals,’ says Oscar, draining his glass. ‘Oscar Wilde said that.’ He waves his finger at Andrew. ‘It’s OK if someone takes your idea and moves it on. But if they take your idea and do not
hing with it, they just copy it, then not only is it extremely irritating, but it is unlikely to work, because you need energy to make things work and if it is not your idea you are much less likely to put the effort in.’ Andrew looks a little lost at this point. He’s a great chef but he’s not that brilliant when it comes to ideas. ‘OK, take Polpo.’ We both nod. ‘The mini clipboard for the wine list? The exposed brick? From the Fatty Crab in the US, and the bar? You’d never guess it was from Williamsberg. But you know he’s taken it and he’s moved it on. You are allowed to do that. What you are not allowed to do is copy.’
They both nod sagely.
‘Do you know what I hate?’ I pipe up.
‘What?’ ask Oscar.
‘A twelve-course tasting menu. There is nothing more depressing than being the last sod in the restaurant with your Addison Lee car waiting outside while you have to work your way through the last of the three desserts. It is it not my idea of fun. It’s crap.’
‘So you’re a Polpo bloke then,’ grins Andrew, about to welcome me on to his team.
‘No,’ I shake my head. ‘I’m too old to queue. I like a good table, some nice lighting and good, charming staff.’
‘Corbin and King,’ says Oscar. ‘Or a bit of Nick Jones.’
‘I always see those two as the Paul Newman and Robert Redford of the London scene. Zuma’s Arjun Waney is Omar Sharif. Nick Jones is Steve McQueen.’ Andrew pauses.
‘And you are?’ I ask.
‘Javier Bardem,’ comes back his very obviously well-considered reply.
‘And I’m Brad Pitt,’ smiles Oscar.
‘And I’m Angelina Jolie.’ I smile. ‘The thing is, the age of the super-chef is actually dead. It’s all about the owners now.’ They look at me as if I’m joking. I’m not. ‘Does anyone really know, or indeed care, who is cooking in any of Chris and Jeremy’s places? Who’s the chef at Cecconi’s? Who’s cooking tonight at Zuma? No one really knows. There are still a few big names rattling around but mostly the chefs have gone back into the kitchen.’
Restaurant Babylon Page 20
