by Jim Hearn
‘Everyone friends out there?’ I ask.
‘Paris and the girls are leaving,’ Scotty says.
‘They going now?’ Jesse asks as he barges his way back into the kitchen after sucking back a cigarette.
‘Yeah,’ says Scotty as he dumps empty coffee cups and petits fours plates smudged with melted chocolate onto the waiter’s station.
18
It took me a while to get settled in Brisbane after having spent six months in a two-man tent in the middle of nowhere. Angela and I had decided to keep things reasonably casual—at least Angela had—and I eventually moved into an unoccupied corner at Bruce’s place. He’d moved on with his life and wasn’t bearing any grudges over the Gosford calamity. My greatest asset was that I was physically healthy again after so much time in the bush. And although I was a little fragile without the drugs, I was still able to function and was keen to make every step a winner.
I applied for a position as a chef de partie at the Barracks in Paddington and got the job. The section I would be running was pasta, which was fine by me. After the Pasta Man, I was keen to be thought of as an expert in anything that didn’t involve shooting up drugs. The kitchen at the Barracks was relatively new and well equipped. This was something I was unfamiliar with. The kitchens I had worked in to date had been put together in histories previous to my time on Planet Earth and had been adapted to suit their most recent incarnations. This is not an unusual phenomenon; many commercial kitchens have at least one major cooking appliance that is surplus to its current needs given that it was machinery required for a previous menu. Such implements will often trigger a new menu, dreamt up by a new chef eager to employ the unused technology. The Barracks, though, had just undergone a major reconstruction and its new owners had spent good money on the kitchen, which was designed around the idea of churning out vast quantities of pasta with ragu-style sauces that were displayed and served from a heated stone bain-marie.
The line-up at the Barracks was a three-chef affair. Head chef Kevin did the pans, Graham did sauce and fryers, and I did the pasta. It wasn’t fine dining but it did have its strengths, the first of which was that we were very busy.
What makes one restaurant busy and another one, often right next door to the busy one, a fire pit for money is not as simple an equation as some people might think. Of course when it’s pumping and the staff are busy and customers are having a great time and the owners are making plenty of money and everyone’s happy it’s easy to say what makes a restaurant successful: it’s everything we’re doing, stupid. But the actual formula is more complex. If, for instance, you take the same concept and move it to another suburb, the new rendition of the successful formula can often die a spectacular death. Sometimes those places are empty from opening night and don’t improve. The owners will spend good money from the successful enterprise to prop up the failed one, sure that in time people will catch on.
‘It’s the same as this one over here that everyone loves so much and as soon as you all find out where we are, it’s going to go off.’
But it doesn’t. So the owners close up shop, write off the few hundred thousand it cost to start up, and return to concentrate on the mystery of why this particular place is as successful as it is. And often a reasonably small thing can tip a place over from being successful to being an empty cave with candles: a new chef, a new maître d’, new decor, new menu, a bad write-up in the papers, or indeed the inverse of all those things: they needed a chef, the menu was tired, they put the prices up because they got a good review. And again, some places are just always successful, the institutions that ride out recessions, bad reviews, incompetent chefs and rude waiters. Everywhere has limits to such antics but the institutions, those truly rare beasts that thrive over decades, generally have a few things in common.
The most common trait of the institutional restaurant is one particular personality. They might own the real estate or be the chef or run the floor or just hang about the place, but the single most common thread among such successful places is one person. It’s what people think of when they think of the restaurant, and often the restaurant will be named after that person or at least will become known as a direct expression of that person’s efforts at hospitality. And whether it’s Lucio’s, Rae’s, Sergio’s, Musso and Frank’s or Betty’s Bistro, a person who has talent and sticks—which is no certainty in hospitality—will often survive and even prosper in times of cultural change and upheaval, the sheer familiarity of the place providing a light in a storm.
The other primary reason that some restaurants become institutions is because of their location. Everyone wants to eat at some point on his or her trip to the Grand Canyon, and if you own the leasehold or freehold of a joint that hangs over the lip of such a location, you’re probably going to do all right. These restaurants are known as view restaurants. It might be ocean, mountain, wilderness, canyon, waterfall, zoo, cityscape or Times Square; the restaurant might also revolve, have picture-frame windows, outdoor seating or a combination of all three. The most important thing about these institutional restaurants, though, is that they are invariably a worse dining experience than the institutional places which are named after the people that own them.
The Barracks belonged to that other great restaurant tradition, the themed restaurant. The Barracks of the restaurant’s title referred to the fact that the dungeon, which constituted the restaurant space, was previously a prison barracks. That a hotel had been built on top of where a prison barracks once stood meant that now the place was a fortitude of pleasure rather than a dungeon of despair—at least most of the time.
The pasta at the Barracks was dried linguine and came in three flavours: spinach, tomato and egg. It got cooked to al dente in a large pot of salted boiling water and then tipped out onto a stainless-steel bench with holes in it that allowed the water to flood through. Importantly, the pasta wasn’t washed, which meant it remained coated in starch.
While the pasta was still hot it would be transferred to a large stainless-steel bowl and doused in olive oil. Olive oil here is fat and its very liberal use is critical. And because olive oil is cheap (though revered) in Italy, no one thinks about the price of the oil when they are using it. And I find that is a good approach to any food I’m preparing: think about taste and pleasure first and costs when you have to. So the pasta was oily and, despite all the starch, moved freely about the stainless-steel bowl. Next I would wind a pile of linguine around the fingers of my left hand. Initially I would use a set of scales to determine that each ‘bunch’ of linguine constituted a serve, which I would place on a flat tray, each serve with a hole in the centre where my fingers had been. Pretty soon I didn’t need the scales, the single-serve portions becoming so obvious that I could determine any string of pasta plus or minus in an instant.
The serve-size bundles of pasta set quite hard as they cooled, each tray going into the coolroom until service, whereupon they would be brought out and placed above my pasta sink. A pasta sink is a large, square, stainless-steel tub with baskets—much like a deep fryer—but filled with water rather than oil. And the water would be kept at just below boiling point, which meant things got steamed up in my section. As a service progressed, the water evaporated, and I had to turn on the tap above the sink in order to keep the heating elements covered. Over the course of a three- or four-hour service the water would become so starchy from so many pasta bundles being plunged into it that it would develop a skin that would have to be scooped out with a spider and tossed. But the starch was good; it was flavour.
After the pasta was plunged into the hot water and left for a minute it would swell and go just over al dente, which is where you want it, before turning it out into a small stainless-steel bowl. Then salt flakes, pepper, fresh oregano, orange zest, nutmeg or lemon juice would be added from the rows of mise en place. Each pasta dish had its own combination of flavours and a different stainless-steel bowl. And as the service went on and the pasta water got thicker with starch
and the stainless-steel bowls became truly seasoned and the resting pasta sweated yeast and gluten, the flavours became more pronounced, more intense. And although things could tip over and go too far—blowing over into a yeasty nightmare—everyone agreed that the best pastas came out at the end of the night. It was a process that couldn’t be replicated by adding more flavours earlier in the night; it was more the combination of time, heat, fats and chemical reactions that over the course of a service built flavours into the process.
Since arriving back in Brisbane I had managed to avoid my friends who used heroin. It wasn’t hard; they didn’t dine out where I worked, and I worked all the time. Then one night Duane stumbled into the Barracks. Seeing him again after a couple of years made it obvious we’d both changed since our poorly organised drug run between Sydney and Brisbane. And despite his insistence he’d let all that go, I wasn’t entirely convinced he’d forgiven me for arriving in town—after my detour to Gosford—with no drugs and none of his money.
‘Nah, nah, I’ve moved on, Jimmy,’ he kept saying when I asked him about it. ‘Really, mate, it was a couple of years ago. Shit happens,’ he said.
And while he was correct about that, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I owed him something.
Things went really well for the first couple of hours. We sucked back a couple of beers and caught up on two years’ worth of general gossip, and then, just as things were winding down, he said he had to go meet someone. Did I want to come along? And when he said that, he glanced at me, almost imperceptibly. It was the same look that the hookers in Kings Cross used when I was looking to score.
No one works the streets if they’re not a junkie. And the streets are where all junkies end up. The street worker’s drug of choice might be coke but it’s probably smack or a combination of both—and the look from Duane on that particular evening said the same thing—it said, do you want to get on? And my uncensored and ill-conceived response was ‘Why not?’
And there were plenty of really good reasons why not but none of them flashed through my mind at the time. We finished our drinks and two minutes later were burning rubber on our way out of the hotel car park.
It wasn’t long before I was back in the drug scene of Brisbane. And I’m not sure if things have got any better for drug-injecting users up there but, back in the day, the dope was shithouse and the service far from reliable. Which was frustrating. It often meant that if I wanted to score before work I would be more than forgivably late. I wasn’t in a position to lose my job—this wasn’t the routine that saw me turn up late a few days in a row in order to get the holiday pay; this was the routine controlling me. Which is never cool. I didn’t want to acknowledge it at the time but chasing another rabbit down another hole in Brisbane meant that I was crossing another line. And this was a line that I was desperate not to fall over, because on the other side of the chalk was a suburb called Junkie.
When the hotel that housed the Barracks sold and the new owners wanted to make some changes, I wasn’t ready for what they had in mind. It appeared Kevin was on some very large folding and the new owners decided they no longer needed him, at least not on that money. It meant that when Kevin and his sous-chef Graham walked out, I was the new head chef. Fuck, don’t get me wrong, I was keen, hyped up and ready to flow—in spirit. It’s just that my body required some pretty regular medical assistance—again—that I could only half please from the pharmacy. I was perhaps too quickly convinced that I had all the necessary skill and talent to be able to pull off the whole head chef thing of what was a pretty successful, though still quite new, restaurant.
Ads went in the paper for a new team and I hit the ground smoking. It was fun, for a while. I’d always had the capacity to do the hours, no problem. Angela and I were going along sweetly and, just to cap off the promotion, I decided to go rock-and-roll with the blue-black hair dye again. I was back on some decent money and really, things could only get worse.
I didn’t change the menu very much. It wasn’t like I was some Italian kid waiting for an opportunity to reveal his region’s cuisine to the world; I was from the beef capital of Australia and had been trained in basic French cooking. I had become familiar with large prime cuts at the Bondi Hotel and fresh pasta at the Pasta Man. So what I did was palm off pasta to one of the new chefs, and moved down the line to stand at the head of things on the stove. And really, to this day, I’m most comfortable in front of a six-burner stove. I can struggle through larder or fry and even do pastry if you put a gun to my head, but the stove, with its cast-iron pans and docket spike, that’s me. I figure it’s because I like being in control when service hits. And I like it because I don’t like being yelled at. Like I said, most chefs when they’re under the pump turn into screamers, and the previous crew at the Barracks were no exception.
And it isn’t that I don’t communicate; no one can stand at the pass and call it while they cook grill section or pans and not communicate. At the most hectic times, the ability to do the job can be reduced to an ability to handle pressure; either you have it or you don’t. And a bright reader who has been around too many back streets might put it all down to the drugs but, seriously, the worst, most aggro, most regretful services I’ve called have been when I was out of it on smack or crack or piss or pills or the dreaded combination soup. Being in that state of things does not lend itself to being under pressure.
What became a normal day for me as head chef at the Barracks was to get in early and do all my prep and mise en place while I was comfortably stoned. Then, prior to service, I would have a cold shower or a swim or a micro-sleep or do whatever else I could to snap out of my drug-induced state, because service is show time, baby, and you need everything you’ve got.
The problems got more intense at the Barracks as the new owners became increasingly obsessed with cost cutting. I don’t know how many geniuses I’ve met along the way in hospitality who think that by saving a few bucks here and a few bucks there, by pulling some from over this and under that, that the business starts to edge down. And when it starts to edge down they become more obsessed with paperwork and costs and chefs’ hours and they lose sight of why they bought into hospitality in the first place. Everyone has to be creative about food and labour costs, but when the whole focus becomes the representation of the business rather than the business itself, particularly if it’s hospitality, it falls to shit. Paperwork in restaurants is overrated. And I can hear all the college-trained executive hotel chefs spitting out their warm tea but really, paperwork is for the pixies; it’s got nothing to do with cooking and I don’t like to see people dressed up in chef’s clobber sitting behind a desk in front of a mountain of paperwork. I figure that as head chef, if you can’t do all the shop’s paperwork in fifteen minutes at the end of the day you may as well call yourself a manager or an accountant or something else less kind. Hospitality is about pleasure and the human body, about the universal need to eat, drink and sleep. It’s not about facts and figures and numbers and costs. Put the energy into a new menu, cleaning the chairs and baking the bread, and leave the paperwork to the pinheads.
Tuesday was the busiest night at the Barracks until the new owners killed it. They thought we weren’t making enough margin on the night so they pulled the special, which was basically a two-for-one deal on the pasta. And maybe we weren’t making a fortune on Tuesdays, but we were making something and, most importantly, we were turning over vast quantities of everything just after the weekend. And weekends are where every joint makes its money—other than the business lunch model—and you don’t have to be Marco Pierre White to open on Friday and Saturday nights and do a few covers. But given that we knew we had Tuesday night to clear out the mise en place, we could prep the shit out of everything before the weekend, confident that should we not have a massive Friday and Saturday, we could clear it out on Tuesday.
Of course once the Tuesday night thing was dead they jacked the prices up for the rest of the week. It was like watching Thomas the Tank Engi
ne leave the rails. Every decision the new owners took obviously made sense in the office, but they failed to treat the punters who came and ate and drank and paid our bills as people with the capacity to make decisions. It was as if all the projections they made were somehow the truth of things and people were simply going to conform to their business plans. But that didn’t happen and pretty soon things were too quiet for a line of three chefs and then too quiet for a line of two and not long after that it was me and Stanus the kitchen hand. And she was a good old girl, more kitchen porter than kitchen hand, which meant she could function as a very reliable prep chef. The problem was that the new owners had pretty much squeezed the fun out of the joint and the more that happened the more the punters stopped coming and the more time I had to indulge in my less productive habits. And it was just as well I had the time because it took far too much of that resource to get anything like stoned in Brisbane. Every time I got ripped off or skimmed or sold ninety percent glucose that some of the locals thought was the dope . . . I could hear Sydney calling.
Although there’s a lot of years between me at the Barracks then and me at Rae’s on Watego’s today, before I left the Barracks I ate at a joint called Faces which was doing good business. It was here that I met a much younger Vinnie Rae. This was his first restaurant and had all the hallmarks of what would become his recipe for success. First of all the place was pumping; it was sexy, expensive and covered in glory. People who worked for him were doing a hundred hours a week and getting paid for forty; the food looked great on what were expensive plates and for me, it was an introduction to fine dining. And everything made sense except the wages. I just couldn’t figure out how I’d cope going back to what was an apprentice chef wage after tasting the pay cheques of a head chef. I had hundreds of dollars a week spare as a head chef to do what I wanted with. While I chose to believe that I didn’t have to use the quantities of drugs I had been for the last few years, really, the choice about those things had already been made. I wasn’t about to sacrifice five hundred a week to learn how to make a better-quality jus. No, it was the nightlife for me, baby: I was cursed with that neon gene.
