by Will Storr
I watched him taste it, his tongue slapping twice against the roof of his mouth and his throat moving with his swallow.
“Bon, bon,” he said. “So you have been learning something here. Bon.”
I glanced back into the pan, at the simmering, savoury red pool.
“Actually, Chef,” I said. “I designed this sauce about a year ago.”
There was a fleeting muscular twitch around his eyes. “Obviously, I think what you do here is amazing, though,” I added quickly. “You and the Troisgros brothers and everyone. You revolutionised food back in the seventies.”
He gave a smiling, quizzical expression.
“So – what?” he said. “What are you saying? It’s dated, is it? What we do here?”
I was aware of his height beside me; the grandeur of the physical container which held his genius. He was wanted around the world, this man: legendary; famous; brilliant and brilliantly beside me; focused so intently on me. I had so much to tell him.
“No!” I said. “Not dated. Of course not. But, you know, nothing stays still, does it? I mean, do you ever think of what all this will turn into in the future? I mean, I love the freshness and the lightness that you do here and everything, but my aunt – well, I was brought up on rich French stews, Italian ragus – you know, fat and alcohol and wine. Have you ever thought about if you melded the two? The old and the new? I mean, it’s like this sauce – it’s not exactly healthy. It has butter and port in it. But it doesn’t fill you up like an old-fashioned roux sauce and the flavour – the flavour’s massive.”
I could feel his breathing.
“You’re going to teach me something about flavour?”
I could see all the colours of his stubble and I could see his skin, pale pink and pale yellow.
“Non, Chef,” I said. “Definitely not. Absolutely not.”
“You want me to believe that you came here, from your pitiful little college, already with all these skills?”
“But I did, Chef.”
He gave a small, bitter snort and looked dismissively at my bubbling sauce.
“Go,” he said. “Serve Le Patron. You’ve far more important things to be getting on with than making his lunch.”
Five more minutes, and this sauce would be beautiful. But not now. It was too thin.
“It’s not ready, Chef.”
He leaned down so that his face met mine.
“Go. Now.”
It wasn’t even a sauce, yet. It was soup. Under-seasoned, under-cooked, useless watery broth. It was impossible to serve this to Ambrose. If this was presented to him as my best work, I would be–
“Go.”
– finished.
And I was at one end of a tunnel, looking down into a hot pan that was very far away. Way down there, I put my finger in the sauce as if to taste it. And I left it there, stopped in the heat. Stay, stay, stay.
Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
From my great distance, I could tell there was pain. But it was okay because I was in a different place. Miles and miles and miles away, the scalding, the burning, the agony building in the bone.
“Oh! Are you having some sort of tantrum?” Max smiled. “Oh, how utterly gripping. Do carry on.”
He watched impassively. A silvery fly buzzed across his eye-line and settled on his tunic, right where he had his name stitched in cotton. He didn’t move. My jaw began to shake. I whipped my finger out of the sauce and pushed it deep into my mouth.
“Now get upstairs.”
When I came to collect Ambrose’s dishes after lunch, he didn’t even look up to greet me. As I picked up the plate, my thumb squelched into a great puckering slick of thin, leftover sauce.
* * *
It is probably hard to understand for someone who has not experienced kitchen life, but despite the vivid disappointment of having to serve Ambrose such a foul version of my sauce and despite the hunger, thirst, weakness and dread, there was also much to love.
Feeling so inextricably part of a team conjured a sense of power and family that proved quickly addictive. My first seduction was by raw ingredients. Standing at my station with the morning air around me bursting with sizzles and blooming with wonderful scents heightened my awareness of the role I had to play in transforming these unprocessed lumps of this and that into dishes that would elevate some of the most cynical and celebrated diners on the planet into ecstasy. Leaves, roots and carcasses ceased being gently decomposing artefacts of nature and took on enchanted forms. The basil I worked with was no longer a wilting plant, but the greatest fragrance I’d known. I would breathe it in and let it play grand with my imagination – fresh, playful and innocent, it was a warm wind over summer fields; a pink Sicilian dawn; sunshine through the dress of the most beautiful girl in the village. Those leaves became precious things. And my job – our job – wasn’t to slog repetitively for hours over a chopping board. It was to perform a kind of sorcery.
The second seduction was the struggle. The beauty of that struggle is something no culinary college can ever teach; the sense of service being like a malevolent force that exists as a humming, swelling mass on the other side of the umbilical corridor that connects kitchen to restaurant floor. As we worked through the night, we had no experience of individual diners, only the early jets of adrenaline that accompanied the first orders just after seven and then the urgency – always on the very edge of panic – as Max called more and more, the pressure building and building, and the brigade rising up and fighting back as the orders kept coming, the mind and the ears and the fingers working faster and faster, always concentrating, always watching yourself, always with your attention stretching tentacle-like to the others in the kitchen, pushing harder, pushing harder; and when we were winning, when the kitchen was communicating and the machine was fully powered, something happened. The machine became conscious; a sort of hive mind was generated. This is why it hurt so genuinely when you made a mistake. It was worse than letting your boss down. It was worse than letting your brigade down. You had sabotaged a part of yourself that you’d come to value more than anything else; the part that had become God. And when the final order was closed and service had gone well, we would look at each other – it would never be mentioned, what we’d just been through; it was all too strange and precious for that – we’d look at each other and we’d know.
Then there was the third seduction – the one I was to endure for the length of my life. When I recall how it grew, it seems to have come on both quickly and by infinitesimal degrees; with every shift, every service, every task, every minute and every breath it grew stronger, the feeling I had for that girl whose presence I had come to sense by instinct, as if it was fire.
21
It was about nine and a half hours after Max had sent me upstairs, to Ambrose, with the watery sauce. He’d actually been in a decent mood since Thursday – he’d sat for an interview with The Times that had apparently gone well – but by ten p.m. any residual levity had deserted him. He pushed past me, causing me to slip with a tray of crabmeat, a small amount of which had spilled onto the floor. I crouched to pick it up and he hissed, “Idiot!” As I was down there, a heavy pan fell off the side and hit me on the back. It could only have been knocked onto me by Max. I collapsed into the mess, stunned and partially winded, and he bent down and whispered, “How do you like that for some old-fashioned, 1970s kitchen craft?”
Come the end of service, I was taking my frustrations out on my cleaning when Kathryn approached.
“What you doing tonight?” she said, leaning back on the counter.
“Going home,” I said, pausing in the punishment that I was meting out on the world via my cloth. She’d taken off her cap and looked bright yet nervous, in a way that I had never seen before. But she looked beautiful too, in all the ways that I kept on finding myself remembering and imagining.
“Some of us are going for a Chinese, if you fancy it.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’ve got to get to
the station. Last train.”
Her smile broke down. She looked anxiously towards the approaching figure of a man – the chef with the chapped lips who had opened the door to me on the first day.
“Is he coming, then?” asked the man.
“Has to get the last train,” said Kathryn.
“Why don’t you stay at ours?” he said, wiping his hands down his flour-strewn whites. “You can kip on our sofa.”
“But don’t put yourself out,” said Kathryn. “You know, get your train. Whatever you want.” And then – I wasn’t exactly sure – but she added something like, “Don’t imagine that I give a fuck.”
It wasn’t until we were out of Gresse Street that I began to loosen up a little. I’d come to love stepping into the London night after service. The air in the kitchen was as hot and thick as tomato soup and the post-midnight city was the perfect antidote. And then there was everything else: the clubs, the stilettos, the preying minicabs, the mysterious open doorways that you only noticed after dark; the drunks, the punks, the city slicks, the ageing ska-boys, the red-laced Oi! boys and the odd stray New Romantic looking pale and vaguely terrified and in danger of tripping over his lacy cuffs. And above all this mess and mad theatre, the street lamps that cloaked everything in their dangerous, unreal light whispered in unison that the daytime world had gone away and under their watch you could try anything. Night-cast London was a constellation of a million sins and there was a thrill in walking amongst them; you could feel those sins bubbling into being around you, as sure as you could see the walls and windows and the orange-black sky. As a member of the team at King, I felt authentically part of it all; truly one of the city’s people.
As we walked in the direction of Oxford Street, I made a decision to be cautious of Andy. He was walking alone, three paces ahead of us. I could guess what was going on: he was Kathryn’s boyfriend, he had guessed how I’d begun to feel about her and he thought it was hysterical.
“I’ve been offered a job,” Kathryn said, as we dodged some bin liners that were being tossed from the door of a Pizzaland. “Ambrose asked me today. It’s my last day as an apprentice tomorrow. From Monday I’m an ouvrier.”
She was wrapping her arms around herself, hugging out the cold. I had never seen her in her civvies before: she was in stonewashed jeans and, underneath her green and pink ski jacket, had on a plain white woollen turtleneck jumper.
“That’s great,” I said. “Fantastic.”
“Cheers,” she said, with a dismissive shrug. “I never thought they’d let me stay. I just thought Max was a sexist prick who thinks women are only good for carrying trays and sticking your fingers in. But when he told me, he actually smiled. He said, ‘We have detected some trace of latent talent in you’.”
“That’s amazing,” I said. “I hope I get asked.”
Kathryn surprised me by looking thoughtfully concerned.
“I saw him laying into you today,” she said.
I pushed my mouth into the shape of a smile.
“Well, it’s all part of it, isn’t it?”
“They gave me a hard time when I started,” she said. “I cut into a tureen of chicken liver pâté before it was properly cooked and Max told me to eat the whole thing. And, actually, it was delicious,” she said. “I did have to take a couple of cheeky vomit breaks afterwards, though, but credit where it’s due – Max’s food tastes pretty good even when it’s coming out again.”
“Urgh,” I said, with a laugh. “Has Patrick ever hit you or anything?”
She shook her head. “I’m a girl, you see,” she said. “For some reason, they seem to believe that it’s fine to torture female cooks in a million different ways, just so long as they’re never struck by fist, foot or flying cutlery. Chivalrous of them, don’t you think?”
We walked on in silence for a few moments, me frowning at the pavement and Kathryn pushing her hands ever deeper into the nestling blood-warmth of her coat. Even if she was telling the truth about the pâté, I thought, it goes to show that when Max gives you a hard time, it doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t make it through the six weeks. As long as Ambrose was happy, you had a chance. I wondered about my chance for a moment. I wondered what I’d do if I didn’t make it.
“How often have you made Ambrose’s lunches?” I asked.
“Oooh,” she said. “Six or seven times now?”
“Shit, really?” I said. “I’ve only been asked twice. Didn’t go very well the last time.”
“I’m sure you’ll get another chance. You deserve to.” She looked at me. “You’re quite talented.”
Quite?
“Quite?”
“Quite.”
Ten minutes later, we were all sitting down to duck pancakes and jasmine tea in an upstairs room at a Chinese restaurant which, I noted with a resonant pang of sadness, was next to the Asian grocer I’d once visited with Aunt Dorothy to buy Thai fish sauce and dried bonito flakes for a partially successful meatball experiment. The place was decorated with pictures of the Great Wall, stalking jungle tigers and Samantha Fox that had obviously been chopped out of used calendars. There was a locked door backed with a cracked mirror, a spread of damp in a ceiling corner and the musky-brown scents of hot oil, cigarette smoke and old, spilled beer. An elderly Asian man in a blue blazer, sitting by himself in the corner, kept sucking on barbecued ribs, licking his fingers then reaching under the table to scratch his crotch.
“Did you hear George Michael and his girlfriend were in tonight?” Andy said. He was pouring himself some tea and the pot was dribbling, a trickle of liquid running invisibly down the outside of the spout and re-emerging at its base, where it coalesced and fell, spreading into a translucent spill on the disposable paper tablecloth. I was attracted to the carefreeness of Andy’s mess-making; the fact that here, in fantastic contrast to the place we spent so much of our time, it really didn’t matter.
Kathryn tilted her head towards me. “Andy gets all the gossip. He’s worked everywhere.”
“Really?”
She was resting her left hand on the table, five or six inches closer to me than seemed strictly comfortable.
“He’s trained in some of the best kitchens in London and Paris, with the best chefs.” She looked at him. “You’re working your way through the stations, aren’t you?”
“Just learning pastry now.” He waved his hands in front of me, like a stage magician casting a spell. “Mastering it.”
I watched Andy bite into his pancake. A stray curl of spring onion shot from the end. I hadn’t realised he had so much experience. I found myself sitting up, a little, in my seat. There were so many questions I wanted to ask him.
“Anyway. George Michael, if you’re interested, ordered a deer and tangerine,” he said, his mouth half full. “Apparently he paid more attention to his food than to his blonde. Max was delighted, naturally. He was out there like a shot, bidding him bon appetit. He’s such a star-fucker. Well, he would be given half a chance. When it comes to fucking, Max mostly just concentrates on the wait staff.”
I looked at Kathryn to gauge her reaction to this unlikely allegation. She raised her eyebrows in amused confirmation. Andy began trying to peel another papery pancake off the small stack with the tine of one of the forks that had been provided alongside the chopsticks. He turned to me. “Have you heard about his little accident? You know he’s got one of them pregnant?”
“Really?” I said.
“This Russian girl,” nodded Kathryn. “Wannabe actress or something. She had to quit work because she started to show. Max has paid for it to be ‘dealt with’.”
“That’s good of him,” I said.
“Oh yeah, very good,” said Andy. “Paid her a fortune, apparently.” He mimed someone picking up a telephone and spoke in an exaggerated Russian accent. “Hello? Is that Nigel Dempster? I got a leeeettle story for you… God, Nige would kill for a story like that.”
What was he talking about?
“I wouldn’t lo
ok so shocked, Killian,” Kathryn said. “Max is a right terror. It’s common knowledge. Did you know the waitresses aren’t allowed to wear underwear? Unwritten rule. You should see them on the restaurant floor, bouncing around inside their tight little dresses. I can see why he does it. It’s good for business. We could put six varieties of corned beef on the menu and we’d still be booked solid for the next year.”
Andy leaned forward with a grin, savouring the delicious evil of what he was about to tell me.
“He has them round for parties over at Ambrose’s,” he said. “I went to one of them when I was working with Nico. They’re bloody hideous. It’s basically Max, the wait staff and all Ambrose’s rich mates every Saturday night snorting coke and shagging. They’ll be at it now, I guarantee it. Ambrose will be boring them shitless, reminiscing about his glory days in the 1950s – those faraway times when he could still get a hard-on. And Max? Well.” He leaned in even closer. “Did you know he tries to whore the waitresses out to his powerful mates? I’m not joking. He tells them which fat millionaire is after them and makes it very clear he considers extra services to be part of their official duty. There was this gorgeous Lancashire girl, a couple of years ago, engaged to some fella or other. Tara – she was about nineteen. Some pissed-up old tycoon took a shine to her, and Max makes it clear what’s expected. But she wouldn’t have it. She told him she was getting married in a fortnight, so he tells her the only reason the waitresses work at King was because it gave them the chance to ‘fuck themselves rich’. Tara was out of a job within the week. Bit of a dampener on the old wedding. Plenty of them have gone through with it though. Lots of them with him. I bet he’s inching towards Ambrose’s spare room with a new recruit as we speak.”
As he’d been talking, I had been thinking about all the years I’d loved Max. The piles of interviews I’d kept in neat shoeboxes under my bed; the pictures from the Radio Times and the Sun that I’d glued to my wall; the video tapes of his television appearances. I remembered how I’d tried to mimic the way he sat and smiled and held himself about the shoulders.
