Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  Oh yes. That was me.

  Of course I got the job. Of course they figured out pretty much instantaneously that I had no clues whatsoever, although if they had challenged me to walk in a straight line carrying two empty plates on one arm, I could have just about managed it. They might have grumbled among themselves but the owners—snivelly little Paulo who kept a stack of Men’s Gallery vouchers by the till for his favourite male customers, and huge, impassive Antonio, his neck chains glinting like buried treasure under an impressive thatch of chest hair—were desperate or indifferent enough not to make a big issue of it.

  The food was like a copy of a copy of a copy: a faded facsimile of one of the world’s greatest cuisines. Bad food is bad food, but there’s something about bad Italian food that really makes me sad. The ‘our famous veal parmigiana’ was anything but. Even its own mother wouldn’t have recognised it. The osso bucco was like a joke played on the natives of Lombardy, who had grounds for demanding its arrest for crimes against regional pride. To wit: a lump of meat so overcooked it collapsed into a soggy pile of fibres at the merest threat of a utensil, a mound of risotto that managed to be simultaneously both gluggy and undercooked, and more of the smoothly sweet red sauce that ran through the place like blood through an artery.

  I’ve given Il Crappo a bum steer in one matter only. Standards were not so high that eating customers’ rejects was frowned upon. In fact, management tacitly encouraged it as a way of reducing the cost of staff meals. The only rule was that it couldn’t be done in sight of the dining room. Everyone knew that as soon as you hit the fire extinguisher halfway down the run, the contents of that plate were fair game.

  Oysters were the big currency at this joint. They were the filthy lucre, sent back to the kitchen with such regularity that they were obviously not the sparkling, ocean-fresh creatures of briny loveliness that are the mark of a truly great oyster. I know plenty of places where sending an oyster back to the kitchen would induce mass weeping and possibly ritual suicide from the chef who allowed them through quality control. Here it was a case of bottoms-up.

  Nino the general manager loved them. ‘Mio caro, come to papa!’ he’d croon over the suspect bivalves instead of actually doing his job and trotting out to ask the customers why they didn’t eat them. Nino was one of those guys who come in fifty-two flavours. A moody bastard, in other words. Gay with a side order of misogyny. This was a man who, when asked by a plump female customer what the gnocchi gorgonzola was like, replied, ‘The gnocchi is amazing, madam. But you are not the one who should be eating it.’

  Il Crappo was a place where management flounced about in their invisible ‘Italians do it better’ T-shirts, as insufferable as Madonna in her ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ era. As if we’d all been whisked back to the social mores of the first Roman Empire, anyone who wasn’t Italian was a second-class citizen, and if you were from the subcontinent then you weren’t even a third-class citizen, you were an actual slave. That was where the dish pig came into it.

  The French have a good word for the dish pig—plongeur. Plongeur derives from the word for a submariner—a bit of Froggy humour for you there, folks—but in Australia it almost goes without saying that the dish pig is Indian. The Nepalese community has got a bit of a foothold as well, and a few Pakistanis, too, but young men from the subcontinent have become the sherpas of the Australian restaurant world. They are to Australian restaurants as Mexicans are to the kitchens of the United States. The entire industry would collapse if they were to turn to each other one day, say ‘What the hell are we doing this for?’ and walk out. A bunch of white people would be left looking at each other helplessly, shrugging and saying ‘Nah, mate, not my job.’

  Our dish-wallahs work incredible hours for incredibly low pay, little thanks, and often outright abuse. They finish after everyone else then schlep home on public transport where the threat of physical violence from some drunk yobbo is a very real and immediate danger, before arriving at some cheap outer-suburban accommodation where they bunk in, four to a bedroom.

  You’d think they deserve a break, but Nino treated Il Crappo’s dish pig like his own guilty conscience. His favourite trick was to hurl a massive stack of plates into the sink so Vijay, a silent young man from the Punjab, would be covered in a tidal wave of gunge-slicked hot water. I can’t remember any occasion I walked into Il Crappo’s kitchen and Vijay wasn’t there, slaving at his Sisyphean task in order to save enough money so he could go home and get married and bring his new bride back to Australia to chase the dream of a better life. He copped it endlessly from Il Crappo’s Italians-do-it-better. The monkey gags, the shoving, the swearing, the sharp knives being thrown in the hope he’d reflexively catch them, the hot pans thrust into his bare hands. Vijay copped it and copped it and copped it. Plenty of the waiters silently willed him to bite back but there was a gulf between us, a bunch of middle-class white kids lying about our income to get Austudy, and him, working because his life depended on it. He never snapped, never grabbed Nino by the throat and threatened him with something deliciously violent, making his persecutor wet his pants just a little. Life is rarely so satisfying. But sometimes things just happen more quietly.

  * * *

  GILLIAN

  One of the waiters walked out of the men’s toilets. He’d gone ghost-white. I asked him what was wrong and he just pointed. So I go in there and the first thing that hits me is the smell. The rankest smell. And I went into the cubicle and someone had done a drawing on the wall using compacted shit. It must have been from a colostomy bag, that’s the only explanation we could come up with. It was even signed—it had the initials SJ inside a circle of shit. When Brian the cleaner came in after service that night, I gave him a hug and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He walked into the toilet and I heard him scream. He later said that in seventeen years of cleaning he’d never seen anything like it.

  * * *

  One day, for example, Nino’s car keys went missing. Sure, there’s a possibility he misplaced them, but he always—always—kept them on a hook next to his bag. Then they vanished. Just like that. Never to be found again. It cost him a bomb to have the locks replaced, and that was after he got a parking ticket because he couldn’t move the thing when the road he was parked on turned into a clearway at 5 o’clock every afternoon. Nino was rampaging around the joint in a scarlet fury and I caught a brief look on Vijay’s face of pure, absolute satisfaction before his protective mask went up again. It was lovely.

  From a purely selfish point of view, the dish pig is a valuable ally. He can be your eyes and ears in the kitchen. The dish pig flies under the radar so he can be a great source of kitchen gossip. No one notices him, so other staff don’t think to censor what they say in his presence. But in the end it doesn’t matter if he can do nothing for you. Being nice to this person is your duty. Every time someone is mean to the dish pig, a fairy dies.

  I couldn’t bring myself to eat the returned oysters, those rejected gobs of sea snot. But I ate the pizza, and the chips—chips being an authentic Italian staple invented by Garibaldi, if I remember my history correctly. No matter that those leftover chips could have been on the floor. They could have been sucked on by a toddler. They could have been coughed over, spat on, used as props in a re-enactment of the Battle of the Somme, for all I know. But eat them I did. It was an early lesson in how quickly the standards of the group reset your own personal compass.

  There were moments to make me question the wisdom of the herd. An entire table of sixteen staged a dramatic walk-out one night. Just after their meals arrived they stood up en masse and left, leaving a table that heaved with oysters and veal, spaghetti bolognese and eggplant parmigiana. Was it a political statement about bad Italian food? Was it performance art? Their cult-like silence was bewildering until the last person pointed to the culprit: a fat brown cockroach baked into capricciosa pizza. It could have passed for an olive if not for the legs sticking feebly out of the congealed mire.

  Il Crappo closed for goo
d only a few weeks after the cockroach incident. You’re probably assuming it was the health department but I assure you it wasn’t. All commercial kitchens have cockroaches. Most domestic kitchens have cockroaches—except yours, of course, of course—although the human inhabitants are usually unaware of the nocturnal activities taking place in the pantry and underneath the fridge. Before going into the waitering game, I once read with a thrill of horror that at any given moment a person is likely to be no more than a metre away from a spider. Such statistics no longer hold any fear. Try rats. Try rats the size of chihuahuas, their obscene little pink feet scurrying for the dark when the storeroom light goes on. Rats in a commercial kitchen? Of course it happens. Especially in the inner city, where half the kitchens back onto alleyways. Rats were accepted as a part of life in the nineteenth century when those alleyways were laid. The problem still exists, it’s just gone underground.

  For our creepy-crawly friends, commercial kitchens are equipped with the self-same attractions of the domestic kitchen, only supersized into a carnival of fun. Can you imagine being an everyday, self-respecting cockroach accustomed to scavenging on the often-scant offerings of nature, stumbling into a restaurant kitchen? It must be like Columbus discovering the Americas. Of course they’re going to jump on the blower to share the good news. Send more ships! Life is great over here! Come on down!

  Deal with it. Discreet visits, always conducted out-of-hours, make the exterminator the restaurant world’s answer to the mistress. He comes armed with synthetic pyrethroids instead of petroleum-based jelly, but he is the industry’s best-kept secret. Anyway, it takes more than a single incident like the cockroach pizza to be closed down by the clipboard brigade. It requires concentrated effort: a flowering of filth, nurtured over time. That greasy takeaway on the corner that’s regularly closed ‘for renovations’? I promise you, it’s trying really, really hard to cultivate a bacterium hitherto unknown to mankind.

  * * *

  RICCARDO

  A man called me over, a few minutes after I’d put his mussel and saffron risotto in front of him, and quietly showed me a metal bolt he’d found in it. I apologised profusely and asked what I could get him to replace it. He said he’d simply like another risotto, minus the bolt. I raced back to the kitchen like John Cleese in Fawlty Towers and requested they make a fresh risotto, pronto. A couple of minutes after I served him the second risotto with another round of grovelling apologies, the customer called me over and showed me the metal spring he’d found in it. It turned out the mixer had blown, sending internal shrapnel all over the kitchen.

  * * *

  The real story behind the restaurant’s end was just as timeless. Il Crappo was going down the gurgler and like plenty of desperate owners before them, Antonio and Paulo were looking for their way out. Their not-so-cunning plan was simply to slink away, leaving a trail of bad debt. It happens all the time. Liquidate the operation, shuffle the directors and hey presto—a new dawn. Creditors and employees get more or less legally screwed.

  But the kitchen got wind of it when Paulo left a loan application on the fax machine. They were planning to open a new place, in an area they touted enthusiastically to the bank as having lots of brothels and therefore a ready-made clientele. What can I say? They were classy guys. Chris, the head chef, showed me the incriminating evidence just before he and his entire kitchen brigade walked out, precipitating Il Crappo’s premature demise.

  ‘Look at what these fuckers are doing!’ he yelled, flapping the papers in his hand. ‘Taking us all for a fucking ride!’

  That was another lesson that stayed with me. A restaurant is habitually referred to in the singular. In reality it’s a complex organism of individuals, ideally acting as one cohesive whole working towards the common good (as in a beehive, or an ant colony) but in the breach more like a flock of seagulls, each one grabbing for the chip while a couple of the wilier ones look for sympathy by pulling the old fake broken leg stunt. Judging by the exalted places I’ve worked in, the average restaurant is a mutually exclusive bunch of individuals whose self-interests only occasionally overlap, and then on a strictly accidental basis. So call it the first commandment of hospitality—if you think a place is shaky, make sure you get paid after every shift, or just get the hell out.

  Still, I felt guilty for a while. That cockroach? It was my table.

  I escaped a major bollocking that night when Antonio decided to go for the pizza chef instead, the hapless guy who’d let an unfortunate member of Blatella germanica, the German cockroach, meet its maker in a wood-fired pizza oven. He was only my age, a skinny little thing, being verbally eviscerated by a fifty-year-old man-mountain who stank of stale cigarettes. A hail of spit splattered his face as he cowered in his sauce-stained jacket. Behind him, in the blind spot between the bin and the ice machine, two waiters were shovelling down oysters as if their lives depended on it.

  — 2 —

  THE BARE NAKED TRUTH

  There are kids these days who are restaurant connoisseurs. Truly. Ten-year-olds who visit high-end restaurants, order the spanner crab velouté followed by the pork belly with onion marmalade, then blog about it. Their classmates go to Little League on Saturdays. They go to farmers’ markets. Their classmates love improbable cartoons about talking penguins. They love improbable TV chef Rick Stein. Their classmates love fries. They love friands.

  This is a new breed of youngster—when the marketers get their hands on them they’ll be called something like iChild, or Kid 2.0—that simply didn’t exist a decade ago. Not even a wicked glint in that nice Jamie Oliver’s eye. I guess the reason they engender confusion, wariness, even horror, in other people is because they don’t conform to the norms of childhood. They’re more like grown-ups trapped in pre-pubescent bodies. All their parents have to do in the face of insolence is turn off Junior MasterChef and keep them from viewing other like-minded children weeping over a soufflé that just didn’t try hard enough. It’s way too easy.

  When you’ve had kids of your own, you tend to stop judging. The minute you pop that baby out you’re bathed in the great truth that parenting is a long, hard slog, that we’re all in this together and that everyone’s choices have to be respected. On the other hand, self-evidently these children are precocious, over-entitled brats whose parents really ought to send them for an emergency session in the sandpit. No one under the age of consent should be conversant in the difference between the summer and winter truffle. (‘As I said to Mama the other day, the summer truffle is just expensive dirt,’ such a child might say in the seconds before I strangle her to death with a piping bag.) These children, not to mention the families that condone such grossly antisocial behaviours, ought to take a good, hard look at their screwed-up priorities.

  Fluency in restaurants is something that ought to develop slowly, like a fossil, or a baby elephant, or a taste for prog-rock. Just as the grit creates the pearl, it is a process embedded in friction. The normal child will be tortured in a restaurant (‘restaurant’ in this case excluding anywhere that uses the phrase ‘meal deal’ and has seats bolted into the ground). To the normal under-ten set, a restaurant with linen, soft lighting and expected manners is Guantanamo Bay.

  Those kiddie food bloggers who collect restaurant bragging rights in the same way their classmates collect footy cards are an inversion of nature. It’s a lot like babies who skip the crawling stage and go straight to walking. They might give their mothers a thrill. Playground bragging rights count for plenty in this world. But they also risk having an appointment at the therapist’s office a few years down the track, thanks to missing out on an important development milestone. Back you go, kiddo: down on all fours to fill in the neural gaps.

  Ditto the mini-gourmand. Adolescents don’t bond over their fabulous, foie gras-filled childhoods. They don’t find friends by talking about friands, or artisanal bread, or first-press olive oil. They need pain. They require suffering. It is the parent’s sworn duty to give it to them. There is nothing wrong,
for instance, with the McDonald’s party. It’s a rite of passage no less significant than discovering masturbation; double points if the Happy Meal is regurgitated on the playground after a spin in one of those whirlygig contraptions built (I suspect) for that express purpose. Forget the Lego spaceship or the Star Wars light sabre with built-in sound-effects. This will be the gift that keeps on giving. That twirling vomitorium will be your child’s failsafe conversation-starter for years to come.

  By way of a control mechanism in this socio-gustatory exploration, let’s food-map my disturbingly typical Australian suburban childhood of the 1970s.

  CHINESE HAPPY DRAGON PALACE

  I think it was called the Chinese Happy Dragon Palace. Maybe it was the Happy Chinese Palace Dragon, or the Royal Dragon Chinese Happiness. Whatever it was called, the jewel in the crown of Main Street, Heidelberg, was indistinguishable from every other mid-sized, putatively Cantonese restaurant in Australian suburbia where prawn crackers come as a complimentary appetiser. You know the deal: Chinoiserie, lazy Susans, carved screens, red walls, dense carpet and a soundtrack that displayed the astonishing depth and breadth of the Richard Clayderman back-catalogue. It goes without saying that the air-conditioning was turned to Arctic. Here’s a tip: always take a jacket when you’re eating at a Chinese restaurant. You’ll be thankful when frostbite starts to attack your extremities sometime around the arrival of the beef in black-bean sauce. On which subject, please note that involuntary physical responses aren’t always due to the temperature. A Happy Dragon family favourite was the minced pork balls: battered deliciousness in a pink, gelatinous sweet-and-sour sauce that made everyone at the table cough uncontrollably. Who said MSG couldn’t be fun?