Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  But plenty of women have a thing for chefs. I’ve seen an otherwise sane woman acting all hot and bothered over some kitchen idiot who had failed Year 10 and said ‘somefink’ as if he were the Beatles. All four of them. I’ve seen a young married hottie put the moves on a TV chef like a professional assassin. I didn’t know whether to applaud or take grainy, illicit photos to sell to New Idea. And I’ve seen chefs who enlist their wives and children into their all-round good-guy media personas then act like alley cats when the cameras stop rolling. ‘The way I see it, you get chocolate cake at home,’ one such person grandly said, swaying slightly at a bar one night while his wife and kids were safely ensconsed at home. ‘But sometimes you want cheesecake.’ He seemed pleased with his food analogy.

  Can we be honest with each other? If I’m going to admit to any dating peccadilloes here, I prefer a front-of-house guy. Ah, the irony. I definitely prefer waitering as a spectator sport. But there is an addendum. Only the professional need apply. I could never lust after a bad waiter. If I met the male equivalent of me, I would recoil in horror if the he-me asked me out. There’s something about a man in an apron that just does it for me. There’s a world of psychoanalysis in there. (Is my subconscious mind making the highly assumptive equation that chefs are too aggressively male, while apron-clad waiters are in touch with their feminine side? Do I need to give my subconscious mind a stern talking-to about stereotypical gender roles?) And don’t get me started on waiters who make me laugh. Therein lies an important precept for life: anyone who can deal with the horrors of the job and come up smiling is a person worth getting to know.

  So. Ben. Ben was working at the Duke Hotel, which was a place I’d taken to meeting some friends for a boozy Sunday lunch. This guy behind the bar caught my eye. Like all garden-variety crushes, it was precipitated by a whole lot of superficial box-ticking, but after ample observation, reflection and note-taking, it became more than that. He had an energy that could power the city grid. He laughed a lot. Most tellingly, nothing ever got to him. There was plenty of time to witness this guy in action, and he could backhand a troublesome customer as gracefully as Roger Federer. More importantly, he could leave the customer smiling as well. It was a classy performance. As someone who stung with every slight, real or imagined, of every diner who thought me inferior because I was the one on my feet, it was revelatory. It was like being an Amazonian explorer stumbling through thick jungle into a clearing and discovering a whole new tribe with previously unimaginable customs.

  At the wind-up of those Duke lunches—exhausting affairs where I would laugh continually for three hours and generally carry on in a manner designed to telegraph I was an altogether fabulous individual who would make a top-notch girlfriend—I’d strategically bypass the waiter and take our bill to the bar to interact on a more personal level with Cute Barman. I was probably smiling like a juvenile delinquent allowed out on day leave, so I forgive him for never giving me more than the tenets of professionalism. He was polite and all that. But as for anything else—nada.

  Very disappointing. Especially when he should have been flirting for tips. But I have never been one to take no for an answer. In fact, I take it as a personal challenge. So I did what any self-respecting young woman would do.

  Reader, I stalked him.

  Not psychotically. Not dangerously. Not in a way to make him invoke the legal system for his protection. But the Duke did quite well financially that year out of my desire for its barman. Not that he noticed.

  And then one night he came into Base Station. With his girlfriend.

  Of all the internet bars in all the towns in all the world, they walk into mine.

  She was pretty. Blonde. Big tits. Your basic nightmare. But something wasn’t quite right. He had a beer. She had a lemonade. They didn’t talk. They sat slightly apart, faces turned ever-so-slightly away from each other. Their body language screamed Splitsville.

  I have been on one proper date in my life. It was torture. My date and I pulled out our cigarettes only to have the waitress point to the No Smoking sign. We asked for a drink only to be told the restaurant was unlicensed. It was a failure of due diligence on both our parts, and we thoroughly deserved to spend two heinous hours making small talk and drinking mocktails while silently despairing ‘Oh Lord, will it ever end?’. The modus operandi of my generation is a simple three-step process. Go out, smash a face-full of booze, and pick up.

  The night after Ben and his cusp-of-ex-girlfriend appeared at the Base Station—the very next night—I had arranged to meet my friend Naomi at the Night Cat. The Night Cat was a legendary pick-up joint. It had been opened by smooth man-about-town Henry Maas as a sophisticated, cosmopolitan club for discerning people. It didn’t live up to his expectations. I read an interview once where he lamented bitterly that it was the kind of place people took backpacks.

  As fate had transpired I was running typically late and Naomi, being a very practical sort of a girl, had taken an ecstasy pill to fill in the time. I checked my backpack in the cloakroom and walked in and there she was, gabbing furiously to Ben. Come in, spinner. It was early summer, I was in my favourite dress, and the gods were smiling. It took a few minutes to get rid of Naomi and another two hours of solid work, and several bourbon and Cokes, before Ben got the look that means ‘you’re nice’ instead of just ‘you’re nice’. He told me later he’d gone out with his housemate that night to talk about how they weren’t going to bother with girls for a long, long time.

  Bully to that. Thus ensued the typical semi-alcoholic, frolicsome time that marks the honeymoon phase of a twenty-something relationship. We developed our repertoire of Things We Like To Do. There was ‘our’ cafe, ‘our’ beer garden, ‘our’ Thai restaurant (cigarette between the spring rolls and por plaa), each of which obliquely cemented an ‘us’ onto the world where previously there was an almost unimaginable state called ‘no us’.

  I tell you this simply because life has a funny way of seeming like there was a grand plan when you look at it retrospectively, when there really wasn’t. As far as I can tell, life is simply a series of coincidences the brain arranges into meaning to obscure the fact we’re all staring into the abyss.

  But Ben’s love of hospitality has impacted my life like an asteroid slamming into a planet that was innocently going about its business. I am not exaggerating. At its worst, it’s like being shackled to a prisoner who makes a run for it through a field of trip wires with a hungry German Shepherd in pursuit. At its best, it’s like peaking in a field while a waistcoat-wearing rabbit offers a tray of Mint Juleps. And all of it, whether good or bad, was entirely unexpected.

  Because not only did I not love the hospitality industry, I did not love food. Truth be told, I did not even particularly like food. I was brought up in a family where meat was brown, chicken was white, and fish and chips meant Sunday night. My older sister and I were true children of 1970s suburbia. We hated each other—there were several attempts on my life in the years 1975−78—yet in one thing we were united: food was, at most, a necessary evil. One of our earliest shared memories is of our mother begging us to eat. ‘Please try something,’ she implored one afternoon, real tears in her eyes as she gazed upon the spindly, twig-like limbs of her offspring, no doubt fearing the neighbours’ talk and the dread word ‘neglect’. Our skin was translucently white and mottled, the outline of the veins beneath glowing blue in a horrible road-map of our circulatory systems. ‘Please eat. I’ll make anything you want. Anything.’ To which Sis and I, two healthy girls who just happened to be catastrophically thin, chirped ‘no thanks’ and dashed off to do another thousand laps of the backyard pool.

  Saturdays were particularly dread-worthy, because Saturday night meant one thing: my grandmother’s lamb roast. Yes, I know, I’m a foul ingrate. And may Nanna’s soul rest in peace. But truly, her leg of lamb could have been an exhibit from a crime scene. A particularly horrid one. Maybe where the victim was immolated in a car and investigators had trouble telling where
the person ended and the vinyl car seat began. The smouldering lamb would be dragged triumphantly from the oven and once my father got to work with the electric carving knife, the interior would reveal its colour—no sweet baby pink but a genre-busting puce, with outbreaks of mission brown. For twenty-eight years that was how I thought a lamb roast should be while simultaneously shaking my head at the gustatory weirdness of the world. Compounding the travesty was the fact that my grandfather, Nanna’s husband, had been a butcher.

  Escaping Nanna’s lamb roast wasn’t at the forefront of my mind when I did the typical teenage girl, aged thirteen-and-three-quarters thing and announced I was giving up meat. Nor did it hinder it. Her roast potatoes were marvellous and the dietary switcheroo meant my ration of those golden-crisp babies was increased. Win.

  No real lover of food goes vegetarian. You can go vegetarian and then discover a love of food from within the confines of your straitened circumstances. Yum, yum, nut roast! Far more difficult—impossible, even—to be in thrall to richly comforting veal ragout, the salty toffee’d shatter of pork crackle, the quotidian delights of a roast chicken, and then one day say ‘From henceforth you are a stranger to me’.

  So there I was, a vegetarian non-lover of food—someone surviving on a diet principally composed of instant noodles (Oriental flavour preferable), spaghetti with tinned sauce and that crumbly faux-parmesan scattered on top, and Vegemite toast—who had just hooked up with a food-obsessed boy so in love with hospitality that he hung about the chefs at work, pestering them for cooking tips.

  Ben should have run for the hills at that point. To his credit he stuck around and made me a toasted cheese sandwich instead.

  I don’t believe in any sort of afterlife, but if there is a heaven all the angels will be eating Ben’s toasted cheese sandwich. He won’t mind. He loves cooking for big crowds. And his toasted cheese, while hardly the finest thing in his repertoire, is truly worth dying for. You get white bread—delicious, high-GI, ultra-refined white bread—and slather it in butter. Then you get a non-stick frypan and melt more butter. You fry the bread in the pan, then when it’s golden and buttery-crisp on both sides you introduce it to slices of cheese, which should be a combination of parmesan and good old tasty cheese. The principle is not unlike French toast, where the egg soaks into the bread so it becomes a hybrid, only here you are dealing with half bread, half cheese. The bold move is to put the cheese in direct contact with the pan so it goes all nicely caramelised and corrupted and slumps irrevocably into the bread like a 3 a.m. drunk. It’s crucial to add sea salt as it cooks. Scatter, scatter, scatter, so it melts into the sandwich. Add the final layer of cheese and melt it between the two pieces of bread, a touch more butter, and finish with more salt crystals on top. You might as well slap it straight on your thighs, but it’s totally worth the weight gain.

  But let’s fast-forward a couple of years, during which time Ben has eaten more mushroom risotto than anyone should reasonably be expected to, and patiently put up with the full gamut of vego quirks. The obsessing about gelatin, the ongoing philosophical crisis about wearing vintage leather and the plaintive question ‘Is it fried in animal fat?’ (NB: waiters will always say vegetable oil but seven out of ten times they’re lying.)

  We are on a boat. We are on a boat with his family. His family are farmers. Sheep and cattle, mostly. It’s brutally cold. A wicked southerly, which blew away the money from the Monopoly set while we were boarding, howls across the lake. The shoreline is covered in $15,140 of useless Parker Brothers denominations. And inside the small cabin, a bubbling tray of lasagne with a rich bolognese sauce has just been taken from the oven. The smell is intoxicating. It’s like in the Looney Tunes cartoons when Sylvester the Cat turns into a zombie following the scent of the Tweety Bird pie. The smell says, ‘Eat this, and you shall be made whole.’

  * * *

  CHRIS

  A guy celebrating his fiftieth birthday with his wife and kids went to the toilet and came back ashen white. It turned out he’d never eaten asparagus before so he had no clue what that unique asparagus urine smell was—he was convinced he was rotting inside and about to die. Maybe his mortality had been weighing on his mind.

  * * *

  Don’t ask me why it was that lasagne and not another that lured me back to the dark side carrying a letter of apology for my canine teeth. I’d encountered other meaty things that smelled good during those wilderness years. I’d been freezing cold plenty of times. None had tempted me to renounce the thing in my life closest to religion.

  Maybe it was osmosis. These were people completely at ease with the cycle of life and death. Let me tell you a story. When they were children, Ben’s little sister Kate had adopted a one-eyed calf. She named him Blinky, and each day she fed him warmed milk from a bottle. One night when the family was sitting down to dinner—roast beef with potatoes and gravy—their dad turned casually to Kate mid-meal and asked, ‘How does Blinky taste?’ And indeed it was the little one-eyed calf on the table that night. I didn’t say it was a good story.

  To their credit, the family didn’t make a big deal of the lasagne incident. They were no doubt looking on surreptitiously as I made the first tentative incursions into the cheesy, delicious mass, my nervousness giving way to sheer gluttonous delight. I half-expected jeering to break out around the table, but instead they kept quiet. Probably they sensed that at this stage my eating habits were like a flighty wild bird and if they made any sudden movements I would flit off back to vegetarian land and they’d have to provide an alternative dinner for me forevermore.

  Oh, it was all innocent flirtation to begin with. A sneaky spaghetti bolognese. A cheeseburger. More spag bol. But it’s a slippery slope from mince to harder drugs. One day you’re eating a sausage in bread at the election day fundraiser, the next you’re eating a bacon sarnie and by the end of the week you’re gnawing on a chop bone. I reached rock bottom a long time ago: the carnivore’s answer to living underneath a bridge in a cardboard box. I can now eat lamb’s brains despite the little veins running through them that make them look horribly like—I don’t know . . . brains—and say, ‘Mmm, creamy.’

  The most difficult part was telling my own family, whom I’d lectured, harangued and generally annoyed the crap out of for fourteen years. As the joke goes: How do you know if someone’s a vegetarian? Because they’ll tell you in the first five minutes. Reparations were in order. In particular I anticipated a big, shit-eating ‘I told you so’ from my sister. So I over-compensated. In journalistic terms, I buried the lead.

  Now, as it transpires, if you announce to your family ‘I have something to announce’, it elevates expectations somewhere north of sky-high. If you do it while the family is gathered together instead of picking them off one by one, it also creates the feeling of An Occasion. So after I announced that I had something to announce and blathered on in a generic way—there was a fair bit of material about choices, and growing older, if memory serves me right—by the time I actually got to the point, they all thought I was about to say either: I’m pregnant, I’m engaged, or I’m dying. All of which made the real news a bit of a comedown. Everyone simply shrugged and went back to talking about the football.

  A worthy lesson to learn. Best to break unpalatable news by making family members anticipate worse news. Next time there’s something bad to tell them, I’m planning to sprinkle pamphlets from an oncology unit around the house just to soften them up.

  Ben could have used a similar tactic when he dropped his own bombshell. This particular bombshell was atomic. He was giving up university to plunge into the restaurant world full-time. In the eyes of his parents this was like the Pope handing back his cassock to go clubbing on Ibiza.

  He’d been studying geology. Rocks are about as far as you can get from a human-friendly profession, and Ben was wildly unsuited to a lifetime in the outback or down a mine, but his parents wanted more for him than a lowly (in their eyes) server’s job. This was not what they had in mind for their
cherished first-born. His mother wept when he broke the news he was going full-time at the Duke.

  But Ben was a step ahead of them and, indeed, of me. He had happened along at exactly the right time, starting as a lowly busboy at the Duke when it was turned from old man’s boozer into shiny gastropub. It was one of those places that captured the zeitgeist—I mean, the mere fact that it attracts a wanker’s word like zeitgeist should tell you all you need to know. He had sniffed the wind and foretold the potential for a food-loving, people-loving kid from the country.

  The tale of the Duke was shared by many inner-city pubs during this era of renewal. It had been a respectable bloodhouse back in its day. The home of the finite possibilities of the working-class man. A drinking hole and an unofficial betting shop, a couple of cheeky pots before going home to dinner on the table. It’s there on the local historical society’s photo board, a pub just like every other that punctuated Melbourne’s grey inner suburbs with alcohol’s golden promise. That was back when the word pub meant something static, blissfully unchanging. Now only a pokies joint can hope to prompt the feeling that you know exactly what to expect when you step in the door—more of a portal, really—guiding you to another reality with its own unflappable internal logic.

  The modern pub has fractured into a kaleidoscope of subgroups. There’s the sports pub. The stripper pub. The uni pub. The gastropub. The family pub. The really fucking scary pub. It’s complicated. The pub used to be just the pub. The constant around which life ebbed and flowed. Even religion, its rival in the grand illusion stakes, ran a poor second. My Catholic forebears tell me this was rarely a problem for the priests, who understood their place in the wider scheme of things. Their relegation didn’t offend. Plenty of those priests drank themselves woolly most evenings. And they got served first, of course. God would have approved. It cemented the symbiosis: a captive audience of guilt and redemption.