Restaurant Babylon

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t get anyone in there these days,’ I explain to Caz.

  ‘Oh.’ She looks a little whiplashed. It is not often she doesn’t get her own way.

  ‘Umm, sorry to interrupt,’ says Adam, tapping me on the shoulder. ‘We’ve got a problem at the front.’

  Caz shifts her skinny backside enough for me to move. I am feeling distinctly the worse for wear now. I am also shattered. I am thinking I might help Adam sort out the dregs of the party and then I might crawl back home to bed. The White Company bed is beckoning.

  At the front there are two bare-legged, short-skirted girls leaning on the coat-check desk. Adam rolls his eyes slightly before he approaches. We have both been here, so many times before.

  ‘Evening, ladies,’ I say. ‘I gather there is a little bit of a problem.’

  ‘Well, not that little,’ says the one with short dark hair. ‘You lot have nicked my coat.’

  ‘I don’t think we have,’ I say, very calmly.

  Poor Larissa standing behind the desk looks absolutely exhausted. The coat check is possibly one of the least palatable places to be in a bar, or restaurant, as these days people are so abusive. I don’t know what has happened to all those British manners and reserve, but now people arrive doused with entitlement and dripping superiority. They want it, they want it now, and don’t you know who they are? The coat check is one of those irritating inconveniences that often brings out the worst in people. For us, there’s a possibility of earning tips, which is what makes it bearable, but judging by the four pound coins in Larissa’s pathetic saucer, none of this lot are very generous.

  ‘Yeah, well it’s not there, is it?’ she says.

  ‘Did you check it in?’ I ask.

  ‘What do you think this is?’ She waves a small pink raffle ticket in my face.

  If there is one thing worse than a pissed person at the coat check, it’s a pissed person with a lost coat. I hate it when we lose a coat; the customer always gets so arsy and, you know, they are right to be. But it’s difficult. If someone actively sets out to pinch someone else’s coat there is very little we can do. They are often very calculating about it. They’ll pretend they’ve lost their ticket, they say it’s black and ask the girl to go through the coats (‘No, not that one – that one’) until they find something expensive and they’ll claim it as their own. Most coat checks are closed off these days, to stop thieves from being able to pick the ones they want in advance, but still it is hard to gauge what is a genuine mistake and what’s a deliberate fraud. This is where a door policy comes in. You want customers, but you also want people whose faces fit. It’s very subtle. But the good manager can stop trouble before it’s even got out of the taxi and crossed the road. Obviously the office party is less exclusive and not so easy to manage.

  ‘Let me have a look,’ I say, taking the ticket and opening the cupboard.

  ‘It’s black,’ she says. Aren’t they always? ‘MaxMara.’

  ‘I have looked, I really have,’ insists Larissa as she watches me climb into the cupboard. I’m sure she has but this woman is so cross and tricky she is definitely an insurance claim waiting to happen.

  ‘Anything like this?’ I ask, digging out something made of black wool.

  ‘Nah!’ she sniffs. ‘You see, I told you, you lot have lost it or nicked it. Honestly, I thought this was a posh place. I would never have trusted you lot with nothing, had I known.’

  ‘How about this?’ I pull out another black coat, thinner, that was so far at the back it was halfway to Narnia.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ she says, snatching it out of my hand. And without a thank-you or a tip or anything, she and her red velvet rump sway out of the bar.

  ‘Excuse me?’ says a rather squiffy-looking blonde, leaning backwards on her heels. ‘Have you seen Leonard?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Leonard? Our boss? His car is outside, waiting to take him back to Wimbledon.’

  2–3 a.m.

  Much like a captain of a ship is supposed to be the last man standing, you always hope that the person who is throwing the party stays soberish, maintains a certain amount of decorum and remains perpendicular enough to sign off on the bill. However, this is often not the case.

  The office party is beginning to draw to a close now. Adam has very much called the last, last, last drinks at the bar and we are trying to clear the place of the swaying, staggering dregs. There are half-drunk glasses everywhere, a couple of stray scarfs on seats, a bag, a jacket and one fluorescent pink shoe. You’d be amazed what people leave behind once they’ve had a few. We quite often get shopping bags full of expensive clothes and shoes abandoned by the tables at Le Restaurant after lunch. The owners usually come back to collect them a few hours later when they realize what they’ve done but sometimes not. Sometimes we have Burberry coats and McQueen shoes sitting behind the reception desk for months before they get claimed. We always have a couple of jackets, the odd glove and hat left behind, but fortunately no children or dogs. I remember a very old mate of mine who worked in a nightclub once telling me that when the lights came on the stash of stuff left behind on the floor was incredible. Wallets, belts, handbags, shoes, money, credits cards and an endless supply of drugs: pills, baggies of weed, and wrap after wrap of cocaine. It was one of the perks of the job to pilfer what you fancied as no one ever really expected it back. We, on the other hand, are very nice. We log everything in the cloakroom and we keep it for at least a year before either using it ourselves or sending it off to Oxfam.

  The booths are all empty now, except for the Le Restaurant gang, and there are a few stragglers heading for the door. There are two persistent groups, hunkered down on the sofas, still nursing their cocktails, who are not that keen to go. I indicate to Damon to start helping them to move on.

  Leonard’s PA, whose name is Melanie, is following me around like a lost dog, looking rather anxious.

  ‘I haven’t seen him for about twenty minutes,’ she says, mincing her hands and glancing in the direction of the waiting cab. ‘The taxi was booked for one thirty and the driver’s saying he’ll only wait another ten minutes.’

  ‘He’s wearing a pink tie, isn’t he?’ checks Adam. She nods. ‘I last saw him talking to a girl at the bar. I’ll go and have a look out the back, he might be in the Mews having a cigarette.’

  ‘He doesn’t smoke,’ she replies.

  ‘You’ll be surprised who does, particularly after a few drinks,’ he counters. You’ll be amazed what anyone does after a few drinks.

  ‘I’ll go and check the lavs,’ I say, not sure why I’m volunteering. It must be the martini making me strangely helpful.

  Checking the toilets at the end of the evening is one of the most unpleasant jobs, and something I always try and avoid. Quite apart from the terrible mess, the paper everywhere and the water all over the floor, there are the endless accidents when punters haven’t quite managed to get whatever they are doing into the bowl. And it’s never just urine.

  Oddly the women’s loos are often worse than the blokes’. You’re generally guaranteed that some sanitary products haven’t made the steel bins and, more often than not, there’s some sort of obscure U-bend blockage. Everyone always thinks that women are tidier and cleaner than men; one thing that nearly twenty years in this business has taught me is what a fallacy that idea is.

  However, if women specialize in making a mess, men are much more likely to fall asleep. Either they lock themselves in a cubicle with a view to actually using the lavatory or they simply go there for a timeout and fall soundly asleep. I remember one extremely drunk man who disappeared off to the gents during dinner at Le Restaurant. They were a party of four, so when he didn’t return after twenty minutes, his absence was glaring. His wife pulled me to one side and hissed in my ear for me to find her husband. As I walked into the loo it was patently obvious what had happened. His snores were so loud they were rattling the cubicle door. It took another five minutes to wake him and anoth
er five to get him straight enough to return to the table. I have never seen a wife more livid in my life. Her knuckles were white with fury by the time the old boy finally sat down. Their taxi ride back to Chelsea must have been fun.

  But it’s the blokes asleep with their pants down who I find the most unpleasant. Mostly you find them slumped in the corner, a turd still floating in the pan, and so not only do you have to flush the lav for them but you usually have to help them pull their pants up. I draw the line at wiping their actual arses. There are parameters and that is one of them.

  I walk into the ladies, which is surprisingly tidy. Just one bin overflowing with paper towels and what looks like a pair of pants in the corner. There are two eyeliners left behind in front of the mirrors and a few suspiciously smeared lines on the windowsill and a couple on the back of the black cisterns. I have a mate who covers all the flat surfaces in his place with WD40, which basically melts any cocaine. But as someone who was/is occasionally partial myself, I do think that’s a little mean. I am in the hospitality industry, after all. Although I do remember seeing one rather canny way of putting off the drug-taking punter. There was a drinking establishment in Soho which had a hand-dryer above what looked like a very handy silver shelf. Customers would chop out their lines on the shelf only for the blasting hand-dryer to be triggered as they leant down to take the stuff. The funniest thing was to watch the people’s faces as they came out of the toilet. Their expressions of fury at the injustice of it all really were something to behold.

  ‘Leonard!’ I shout. ‘Leonard! Are you in here?’ There is one cubicle that appears to be in use. I don’t want to hang around as I am not really supposed to be in here. ‘Leonard! Is that you?’

  ‘No,’ comes a distinctly female reply.

  I close the door and move next door to the gents. The smell of alcohol and urine or alcoholic urine is overpowering. There are a couple of blokes standing with their backs to me at the urinals.

  ‘Sorry, chaps,’ I say. They both look over their shoulder at me. ‘But I’m looking for Leonard?’

  ‘What, the MD?’ asks one. ‘He was at the bar, talking to Denise, who works on reception. But that was about half an hour ago.’

  ‘Have you not seen him since?’

  ‘Fraid not.’ He shrugs.

  I come back to my table to find that most of the Le Restaurant brigade has disappeared, gone to take the night buses home to their various far-flung bedsits in undesirable and unfashionable parts of town. I am now left with the decidedly hard core. Caz, Jason, Andrew and Oscar. Caz, Jason and Andrew are all remarkably perkier than when I left them. One of them clearly has a wrap of class A that they have shared with the group because they are all significantly less burpy and bleary and are now having a very intense conversation about PR. Or rather, Caz is having an intense conversation, while the others try to get a word in edgeways. Only Oscar is very obviously the worse for wine or vodka or whatever headache-inducing combination he has moved on to. He’s not a boy who does drugs – he’s far too ambitious – and, as a result, he’s no longer capable of banter, but merely sits, his mouth slightly ajar, as he stares, with one boxed eye slowly closing, at Caz.

  ‘What you want, though, what you want, what you really want, though,’ says Caz, her finger in the air, forbidding any form of interruption, ‘is a scandal. No PR will ever tell you this, but something like a celebrity sex thing or a fight is brilliant for a restaurant.’

  ‘Really but—’ Jason leans in, his leg is jigging up and down under the table. You can see that, as a journalist, he is desperate to get in on this.

  ‘Can I just finish?’ snaps Caz. ‘You see, d’you remember when Russell Crowe had that fight at Zuma? D’you remember? When he hurled plates and everything?’

  ‘It was broken up by Ross Kemp,’ chips in Jason.

  ‘Whatever,’ says Caz. The details are tiresome. ‘Anyway, that – that went global. Gobal, totally global, round the world,’ she nods, taking a sip of her martini. ‘You can’t buy that.’

  ‘Yes but—’ starts Jason again.

  ‘And the Boris Becker in the wardrobe, or wherever it was. Also global. Completely global. You can’t buy it. You can’t buy global, you just can’t. Global is gold dust, celebrity gold dust.’

  ‘But it’s really good for the restaurant?’ queries Andrew.

  ‘Of course it is!’ replies Caz, leaning right in and ticking points off on her fingers. ‘It says this is a cool place to be. It says this is where famous people go and it also says that if you’re lucky enough, and you manage to get yourself a table, you might, just might, get to see them misbehave.’

  ‘So is all publicity good publicity?’ ask Jason.

  ‘Yes,’ she says emphatically.

  ‘Except a bad review. That’s actually bad,’ ventures Oscar.

  ‘Yes, that’s obviously bad,’ she acknowledges, turning to eye him like a velociraptor. There really is nothing more annoying than a very drunk person puncturing the premise of your argument.

  I am about to ask if any of them have seen a drunk, middle-aged bloke wondering around in a pink tie, when Adam arrives and whispers in my ear.

  ‘We’ve found him. And it’s not pretty.’

  ‘Where?’

  Adam can only shake his head, which is bad news, as Adam is almost entirely unshockable. Firstly, he’s been a barman and manager for over ten years and secondly, he’s Australian. I follow him past the lavatories and down into the tiny basement kitchen where we heat up sausages and pitta bread, churning out the few small plates. The skeleton staff has long since gone home. These guys don’t work beyond nine thirty to ten as the hot bar snacks are only really an early evening thing to get the punters in straight after work. He walks past the fridge towards the door to the bins.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ I say, not that keen to approach. These bins are fetid. They are full of old sausage, half-eaten Scotch eggs, French fries, slops, bread, tartar sauce, ketchup. These are not Michelin-starred bins, they’re bar bins. They are rank; they are truly awful. They are disinfected twice a day but the last thing you want to do is ever, actually, go inside the bin-room. We are a few feet away from the door and already I can almost taste the stink.

  ‘You open the door,’ I say to Adam. He pauses, his nose wrinkled, his eyes half closed like he is scared.

  ‘Must I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He pulls open the double doors and there, at it like hammer and tongs, is Leonard and his receptionist Denise. It is quite shocking. She is on her back, her red sequin dress up around her armpits, with her legs in the air, shoes still on, covered in rubbish. He is half on top of her, his trousers round his ankles, his striped boxer shorts round his calves, pumping away like his life depended on it. They both seem completely oblivious to the fact that they have been interrupted. I can only hope they have taken some sort of drug, because this is not normal behaviour.

  ‘Excuse me!’ I say, clearing my throat. They carry on. ‘Excuse me!’

  She has potato peeling in her hair; he has some chips and ketchup stuck to his thigh. Neither of them seems to care. They are oblivious to me, Adam, the smell, everything. Short of going into the room and slapping him about the face I am not sure what to do.

  ‘Fuck it,’ says Adam with his sanguine Aussie charm. ‘Let’s leave them to it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, d’you want to go in?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither do I. He can’t last much longer – he’s over fifty, for Chrissake.’

  ‘OK, then,’ I nod. ‘Another ten minutes and then we come back.’

  ‘You’re kidding me, right?’ he says. ‘I’m going off to get the rest of the gang. This is one of the most disgusting things I have ever seen! They’ve all got to come and have a look.’ I look at him, a little bit shocked. ‘Oh, come on, mate,’ he says, giving me a smack on the back. ‘Live a little. It’s got to be one of filthiest shags I have ever seen – and I mean that literally. You’
ve gotta share that with the group!’

  Adam’s generosity knows no bounds and within a few minutes most of the bar staff have nipped down to have a gawp. Poor old Leonard, he has no idea what a complete fool he’s making of himself. His taxi back to Wimbledon has long since departed, his secretary is weeping on the banquette, and half of the Le Bar staff have seen his fat, pink backside. He is going to have a little bit more than a hangover to contend with when he comes to, tomorrow morning.

  Eventually, Adam manages to decouple the couple and, after another ten minutes, they appear in the bar. It is difficult to determine if they know or realize quite what a scene they have caused. But Adam is remarkably professional and it doesn’t take long for the stinking, fetid shaggers to be dispatched off in their minicabs.

  I go back to the banquette with Andrew, Oscar, Caz and Jason, who have clearly been to the lavatory for a re-up. Andrew is beginning to speed drink as the alcohol is no longer touching the sides; Jason’s right leg is bouncing so vigorously it is drilling a hole in the floor, and Caz is having an argument with herself. Poor old Oscar is now so tired and drained and completely exhausted, his chin is resting in his hands, and he is unable to speak; all he can do is move his head from side to side playing conversational ping-pong. I sit down and take a sip of my rather warm martini.