by Will Storr
Kathryn squeezed my hand and glanced at me as if to say, “enough”. Exchanging looks amongst themselves, the cooks scattered back to their stations. Minutes later, the maître d’ came in with the first orders.
“Okay, listen up,” I shouted. “Two St Jacques, two foie, one bouillabaisse.”
“Yes, Chef,” came the response, gruff, stolid and resolute.
They snapped to it, necks bent and perfect.
“Is everyone with me?” I shouted.
“Yes, Chef!”
* * *
As much as I would have loved to have rejected every aspect of la Nouvelle Cuisine, it was obvious to me that this would have been foolish. I knew that if we were going to make a dent on the world culinary scene, we would have to be reasonably sparing with our butter and our cream (unlike Max who, no doubt, had begun cooking “the new style” – deglazing with water and thickening with carrot and onion purée and so on – but had clearly secretly reneged on that promise as part of his flagellating crawl towards his three-star dream). At Glamis, we would throw off the obvious pretensions, the gigantic plates, the meat-and-fruit combos, whilst keeping the essential architecture of the style – the freshness, the lightness, the reverence for the sanctity of the ingredient in its natural state. But we would bring to it the velvet luxury of Old Europe: truffles, foie gras and portions whose size verged on intimidating and which I insisted, mainly for reasons of stubbornness, upon arranging high on the plate as I had on the day of the tasting.
I also knew that we wouldn’t be taken seriously if we didn’t prepare everything in the modern way – to order, and from a standing, naked kitchen. And that had to include sauces. As well as running the pass (I had convinced Andy to let me try and, to my surprise, he relented with only a hint of complaint), it was my job to prepare them. I insisted that Kathryn hand me the pans in which she’d cooked plump 300-gram cuts of beef, lamb or veal and equally generous portions of Bresse chicken and woodcock, so that I could deglaze them and create the jus that would anoint the final dish at my own special sauce station. Even if I hadn’t had that old tobacco pouch filled with Earl’s Leaf secreted in my tunic, I would have insisted upon working this way.
I had no doubts about my wait staff, who had been mercilessly drilled by my stern and decidedly un-French maître d’, Ms Drusilla Langton-Grey – a bony, fifty-something spinster with aristocratic roots, alarming green eyeshadow and a seemingly endless appetite for fatty offcuts, which she’d scrounge by appearing abruptly at Kathryn’s side at the sauté station, clicking her long fingernails like a hungry cricket and asking, in her deep, dry, upper-class tone, “Any trimmings, darling?”
When the coup de feu finally arrived, it was with a warm bloom of satisfaction that I found that the first table ordered two entreôte with sauce Glamis – my award-winning sauce, which Ambrose had christened after the restaurant. As I took that pristine white ticket, I wondered, yet again, was using the Earl’s Leaf somehow cheating? Did it count as such because it was unfair? What about all those customers at King who are celebrated by the world for their beauty or talent? We elevate them as if they’ve earned it. But you don’t earn what you’re born with; you steal it from God. If they were worthy of the gifts that had been passed down to them, then why wasn’t I? Kathryn had been right. I deserved this.
And there it began, for the first time, the brand-new music of my kitchen. Following the first ticket there were two more orders for steak Glamis. Then three more – a run – and two for tournedos Rossini and two for poularde à la vapeur, then three chicken stuffed with truffles, foie gras and boned pigs’ feet and then six turbot à l’amiral, which came with both a white wine sauce and a red, and then another steak Glamis and then the music reached a dangerous pitch, a kind of gnawing quiet broken by shouts of “behind” and shouts of “how long for…” and shouts of “fucking talk to me” and shouts of “where is it?” and then two turbot and a poularde and a cod for Table 12 and more pans go on and my wrist is burned, and then one Glamis, two cod and a Rossini and then have Table 9 had their starters yet and who’s this plate for and the waiters, the waiters in their black trousers and their white aprons, they wait, they wait for me in a small queue and they try not to look at me and a woodcock à Glamis and a cod for Table 5 and is this the Glamis for Table 9 yes yes I think so and has 9 got their order yet then where’s their fucking ticket and they try not to look at me but they stand there waiting for their food glancing at each other with raised eyes and whispering and ouch fuck my hand and is that over-reduced taste it taste it a little bit but fuck it and what do you want now can’t you see I’m doing it I’m doing it just be patient fuck hang on where’s that cod have we had the cod yet the cod the cod and there’s Andy here’s Andy what does Andy want it’s not that bad –
“Come on!” I shouted to the brigade. “This isn’t good enough, guys. Please! Come on!”
“We’re fucked,” Andy whispered. “We’re completely fucked.”
“We’re not fucked,” I said. “They’ll just have to wait. It’s good food. It’s worth it.”
As the minutes went by, and the trouble mounted, I forgot to worry quite so much about hiding the fact of the secret pouch in my apron. I only realised my mistake when I noticed Kathryn staring at me in bemusement.
“What?” I asked.
“Why are you sprinkling pocket fluff into your sauces?”
The world froze around me.
“That’s a fucking stupid thing to say,” I snapped.
And then the moment was broken, by, “I’m sorry, Chef.” It was one of the waiters, his fringe fashionably wavy and extending from his hairline down to his left eyebrow, fingering a tray that had two plates of entrecôte on it, the deep crusted-brown trackmarks of its cooking still visible between the chubby red slides of sauce that I’d poured over it. “Is this for Table 7?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” I said. “Just take it. Please.”
“Wait,” said Andy, approaching behind me. He pulled the tray back by its silver handles, the plates slipping a little on the purple paper liner, with its elaborate Glamis logo in gold art deco script.
“Fingerprints,” he said, examining the china under the golden glow of the heat lamps. He pressed the back of his thumb down on the meat before closing his eyes. “It’s cold.” He checked the ticket. “And are you seriously telling me these are well done? They’re still fucking farting.”
“Fuck it,” I said. “Damn.”
Not wanting to lift my concentration from my pans, I quickly turned to Kathryn who was balancing a worryingly high pile of glistening meat on a metal sitting plate.
“It’s under done, Kathryn. For fuck’s sake!”
Fuck! I stirred one pan. I tasted another. I kicked the steel wall of the unit by my feet so hard that my clogs rammed into my toes. Andy softened his face and placed his hands behind his back. What was he still doing here?
“Listen,” he said. “Why don’t I take over on sauces? You can concentrate on the pass, calling the orders. That’s what you want to do, really, isn’t it? Call the orders? That way you can keep on top of things and I can keep things moving along here.”
In my peripheral vision, I could see a torchon, dangerously near to a burner.
“I can manage.”
Was it smoking?
“Do you want me to call the orders then?” he said. “And you can concentrate on this?”
I glanced at it again. Andy followed my gaze, spotted the cloth and immediately lifted it away from the flame.
“I can manage, Andy,” I said.
He leaned further in and whispered so closely that I felt a fleck of spit on my ear: “Fucked.”
By nine thirty p.m., no plate had left the kitchen for twenty minutes. I looked up from my station to see Ambrose in his checked suit, his purple lining flashing as he paced past the line of fractious waiters.
“What the fuck is going on?” he said, his eyes bouncing around the piles of pans and meat and the wet floor and
the endless row of tickets that were hanging down in front of me.
“We’re on it, Ambrose,” I said. “Sorry. We’re on it.”
He took my arm and pulled me into the empty corridor that led to the changing rooms.
“Don’t fuck this up, little boy,” he said, his breath sour with wine and dry with tobacco. “I’ve put all my faith in you. I have risked my reputation telling the whole world and his mistress what a prodigy you are. There are people sitting within fifty feet of you right now who could break your career a thousand times over. And they will, believe me, if they don’t get fed soon.” He observed me over his pale nose and horsey nostrils. “Maybe this little factoid will help motivate you. There is only one person out there who is enjoying himself right now, and his name is Max Mann.”
By the time I had slunk back, Andy was at the pass. He was calling out tickets, his voice magnificent with order and consequence. The brigade were answering him in kind. A fierce element had been introduced into the kitchen and everyone sounded, for the first time in more than an hour, hopeful. I bowed my head over my stove and tried to catch up, working for the rest of service in as much silence as was possible, avoiding the attentions of the brigade as best as I could. I made the sauces, for the rare and complex dishes that reached the heat lamps, most of which I didn’t have the skill to cook myself, and watched Andy ride that pass like a cowboy on a bucking bull.
* * *
“Come, come,” said Ambrose, sometime after eleven p.m., when all the diners had finished eating. I followed him down the short passageway and into the soothing dimness of the restaurant. After hours in the shadowless white of the kitchen, my eyes weren’t yet used to the grainy light and I didn’t have time to make out any individual faces in the crowd before Ambrose clapped three times and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the best new chef in Britain, please welcome Mr Killian Lone.”
They stood and cheered so loudly that the chandeliers began rocking on the ceiling. Their clapping was a million tiny cracks breaking the air; a dark rumble of stamping began rolling out from beneath it. There was something unnerving about the bedlam. Something desperate. They were a mob of maddened, straining people, palms hot, eyeballs wide, necks stretched and nostrils flaring. On and on and on it went. This wasn’t a collection of men, women and dignitaries who’d just enjoyed a pleasant dinner. This was unnatural. They were wild. What had I done?
“Thank you all for coming,” Ambrose shouted in an attempt to calm them down. But they continued, their stamping now synchronised, the cheers looping and colliding against whoops and whistles.
“Okay, okay, okay!” Ambrose shouted eventually. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. As I’m sure you all agree, the food here tonight was of an utterly sensational standard. And that is all thanks to this awesomely talented young man.”
Where was he? Where was Max? The silhouette of the crowd was a great black monster in the gloom, spotted here and there with the fiery trails of cigarettes and cigars. It was impossible to pick him out. I stood there as Ambrose finished his speech. When it was over, and at the end of another, only marginally less ravenous applause, the beastly crowd came for me, and I was in it, swallowed inside its walls, surrounded by its arms and legs and wide, wet, licking mouths as they whispered and thanked and pushed napkins and menus and matchbooks on me to sign with my name.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Ambrose said as he escaped, unscathed through the middle of the thing.
“Where’s Max?” I called after him.
“Gone.”
I turned into the beautifully dressed mob and stared, entranced. For the first time it seemed so insanely possible: that I might, someday, have King, Dor, Glamis and all.
38
The reviews that came in over the next couple of weeks were considerably better than spectacular. They listed the many wonders of Glamis in paragraph after adjective-choked paragraph. It was curious how the pleasure they’d clearly experienced from my sauces caused them to judge everything else with unfailing sympathy. The delays on the opening night and the mistakes I knew had gone out in every service – the sometimes sloppy presentation, the over-reduced sauces, the under-rested meat – were absent, forgotten entirely after the critics had tasted the magic of the crucial element. One even hailed our “confidence” in having only three desserts, when that paltry list was actually due to the fact that we hadn’t, yet, found a full-time pastry chef. Admittedly, my lack of enthusiasm for that project was because I hadn’t yet worked out the technicalities of successfully inveigling Earl’s Leaf into puddings.
Ambrose would come in at eight thirty every morning, fattened with clucking pride and with an armful of newspapers, which he’d already pored through for references to Glamis. At first, he wanted me to read them out during my daily team talks, but I refused. I gathered my chefs around me for one specific purpose – to impress upon them that, although Andy was running the pass, I was in charge. And, of course, to motivate them with my speeches about Max Mann. I’d work on these every day – ideas for the next morning’s address would scrap messily for precedence in my head as I cooked.
Increasingly, I’d find my mind running helplessly with thoughts of him – hostile memories, strange fantasies and imagined conversations that, when I was alone in my small office, I’d sometimes speak out loud. When preparing a sauce for a dish I was particularly proud of, I’d picture him eating it and being so overcome with pleasure that he’d smile and shake me by the hand and then pull me to his breast in recognition of this connection between fellow journeymen.
At other times, I’d see him crumpled in humiliation at the flavour of my sauce Glamis. He’d throw his torchon to the ground, knowing he was beaten, knowing he’d made a mistake when he lied about me and made me eat shit, and then he’d fall to his knees and weep at this final failure and I’d comfort him, I’d stroke the back of his head and then, too late, too late, too late, old cunt, I’d take his head and throw it repeatedly to the floor, until I was healed completely by the blood and the silence.
One morning, before my team talk began, Ambrose read out a particularly mucilaginous review from Evan Parker-Scott in the Daily Mail. He ladled praise on this “prodigy of British cuisine” whose “incomparable gifts” would “finally put to rest the claims by our ancient enemy across the Channel that England is not a cooking nation”, even going so far as to suggest I be awarded an OBE. When he had finally left, I addressed the brigade.
“We’ve had some great write-ups and I know you’re all very pleased with yourselves,” I said. “But I don’t want us to be obsessing over the media. That’s the trap our friend Max has fallen into and look where it’s got him. Self-obsessed, scared, fucking fried eggs on his eyeballs. And anyway, those reviews are of last week’s dinners. Forget about them. That’s why I’ve asked that all the framed cuttings be taken down from the walls of the corridor out there. I want every night’s meals to be better than the ones before.”
There was a silence as I tried to gather up their direct attention. There were eyes to the floor, eyes to the side, eyes to each other, eyes to folded hands. But no eyes on me. None.
“Okay?” I said.
“Yes, Chef,” said one or two voices.
From behind me, Andy stepped forward.
“Thanks, Chef. That was great. All right, guys, great work this week but as Chef says, I know you can do better. Let’s get to it.”
“Yes, Chef!” they cried.
In those first few weeks, Michael Heseltine, Jonathan King and Mike Yarwood all made lucrative offers for me to cook in their homes. Barbara Windsor booked a table of eight to celebrate her divorce from Ronnie Knight. On one midweek evening, Princess Diana ate with some relative or other – at least we assumed it was a relative, as she was being generously affectionate with her guest and he definitely wasn’t Prince Charles. I declined invitations to appear on Pebble Mill at One, TV-AM and Food and Drink. Our customers, meanwhile, became increasingly ravenous for our food, some trying to book
themselves in every night for a week or more. We became fashionable with the young executives from the Manufacturers Hanover Trust or “Manny Hanny” – a glamorous bunch who some in Ambrose’s circles had witheringly christened “young aspirational professionals” or “yaps”. They all seemed to carry leather Filofaxes, drive BMWs and live in Stoke Newington. Before Glamis opened, Le Caprice, Garroway’s and the Bombay Brasserie had all the lunchtime expense account business, but now they begged for space at our tables. Eventually they would become widely known as “yuppies”, but to me, in those early weeks, they were a fascinating, beautiful and repellent new race.
But we couldn’t feed them all. At one point, Ambrose had to step in to stop a black-market auction for tables. During the third week, our reservations book was stolen, and everyone listed in it was phoned up and offered thousands of pounds for their seat. Rumours of the strangely aphrodisiacal nature of our meals spread, too, with male yaps bringing beautiful dates in the evening and hoping for a bit of “Glamis luck”, which rarely failed them. The Daily Mail ran a story about an expected generation of “Glamis babies” in nine months’ time. It became ordinary for us to find young couples having sex up against the wall in Percy Passage, which ran near the building. We’d frequently find discarded lingerie on the dirty brick floor and, once, a pair of red braces that looked suspiciously similar to those worn by Le Patron.
