Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  There were remnants of the old suburb when I started drinking at the Duke. This was a pre-renovation Duke. A pre-Ben Duke. For the old guard clinging to its dingy front bar, it was a refuge from a rapidly changing world that meant their footpaths now teemed with people confusingly called yuppies and their roads rumbled with gleaming European four-wheel-drives. They gathered around the beer-soaked barmats each evening like figures out of an Edward Hopper painting. Leader of the grizzled pack went by the name of Charlie No-Name. ‘That’s right. No-Name. With a hyphen. Mr No-Name. But you can call me Charlie.’ He had the soul of a sozzled poet and the face of Chet Baker, although sadly for the ladies it was the post-heroin Chet Baker, not the baby-faced jazz ingénue. Charlie had a Scottish brogue, an ancient ponytail tufting optimistically at his nape and a great range of waistcoats. As barflies go, he was dapper. His best mate was a Greek guy called George who spoke in increasingly incoherent drivel before finishing each evening slumped over the bar or occasionally face-down in the metal trough while his buddies thoughtfully ashed their cigarettes around him.

  It was a meeting of two cultures. One a dispirited old crew huddling against the winds of change. The other a bunch of youngsters—my mob—on a hand-wringing search for identity. It was no accident that we stumbled into this downtrodden corner pub with its faded green vinyl floors, stale beer smell and one-dollar billiard table. Our university peers were playing drinking games at college pubs but we were engaged in different coursework: the pub as political statement.

  We were gormless twats, of course, but much too young to realise. And Charlie and co kindly made room for us at their bar, even though they could have run us out without raising a sweat. Angus Macgregor, a former private schoolboy from Eltham desperate to renounce the privilege of Riverside Road despite still living there with his parents and two golden Labradors, became determined to win Charlie’s respect. His Scottish approach was rebuffed—there were none so Scottish as Charlie and Robert Burns, and that was the end of the matter—so he changed tack and went in politically. Charlie had been a stalwart of the Builders Labourers Federation before he hung up his overalls to concentrate on beer and roll-your-own durries. Angus was an arts undergrad and he gave it everything he had. I heard terms like solidarity, workers’ rights and direct action. It was stirring oratory from someone whose mum would be picking him up in an hour’s time.

  Charlie listened thoughtfully as he stared into his half-empty glass, paused, and winked. ‘How about a blow job?’

  So much for the ancien régime.

  Only a few years later that corner pub had become a sandblasted metaphor for the relentless march of an upwardly mobile world. New owners charged in like storm troopers and tweaked it with the fervour of a plastic surgeon going to work on a mid-life crisis. It was lifted, spak-filled and reconceptualised. People armed with colour swatches dashed about saying important things like, ‘We need to embrace the northerly aspect.’ It was transformed from duckling into swan, if a swan could have bi-folds, polished timber so shiny you could use it to check for parsley in your teeth, and an ‘al fresco area’ protected by a row of concrete planters too heavy for any drunken miscreant to tip over.

  The Duke was a classic case of right place, right time. Not for Charlie and his crew, who were pushed out to search for another sticky vinyl home to call their own. Even the upstairs ghost occasionally sighted by the alcoholic barman disappeared, never to be seen again. But it rode a new wave of newly moneyed people newly interested in food and wine. Once they’d eradicated the 100-year stench of cigarettes and tap beer and thrown it open to the zombie hordes of Diners Club members, it was the sort of place that prompts everyone to go ‘Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t I get the lease on that tired old pub and turn it into a goldmine?’ Why didn’t you think of it? Because you didn’t. Now shut up and stop whining.

  The news of hospitality’s rehabilitation took its time getting to Ben’s family. His mother, a proud farming-family matriarch, was very big on respectability. Waiting on other people was not her definition thereof, even when his job came with the title of ‘manager’. But it wasn’t the first time she had underestimated her son. When he moved out of home she gave him a Country Women’s Association cookbook. It was a book designed for young people with—how to put this kindly—perhaps not the full range of experience in the kitchen. A sample recipe is worth repeating in full.

  * * *

  SCOTT

  They’d met online and this was their first meeting. It seemed to be going pretty well but when I was clearing their mains he made a joke to me about how girls never look as good as they do in their profile pictures. She silently got up and walked out.

  * * *

  MIXED GRILL

  Ingredients: Two sausages, two chops, one packet of crisps.

  Method: Grill sausages and chops until cooked.

  Open the packet of crisps and serve on the side.

  Ben’s tale is just an isolated example of the prejudice waiters experience in a country with no proud tradition of the craft. And in later years his parents would be madly proud of their son, the hospitality professional. We’ll be getting to that.

  But that’s enough about him for the moment. Back to me.

  After the Base Station I had drifted into the nefarious world of catering. Catering is essentially freelance waitering. You’re in charge of your own destiny. You can pick and choose the jobs you want. And you get to perve on all the big events. Births. Deaths. Marriages. It’s like being in ‘shuffle’ mode professionally. Catering means never having to say you’re sorry. One minute you’re accidentally serving the gluten-free chicken pie to the vegan, and the next you’re outta there, packing away the heavy dishwasher-safe crockery into the back of the truck before dashing to the next job. Catering is number 668—the neighbour of the Beast.

  Working in catering blew the lid on this whole wedding caper. The ‘best day of your life’ is nothing less than a massive scam designed to bleed as much money as possible out of young couples who would be ten times better off using it as a house deposit. Mark my words: marriages fail, but real estate is forever. If it’s a wedding, everything goes up by at least 50 per cent. The food, the booze, the venue hire, even the bloody balloons. If you want to be smart about a wedding, try booking it as a cocktail party. Don’t go anywhere near the ‘w’ word. Sure, they’ll be pissed off when a woman turns up looking suspiciously bridal in a puffy white meringue gown, but just think of the savings you’ll make.

  Catering weddings is the most stressful. Funerals—whatever. Everyone’s too busy grieving to notice if the food is rubbish, and if anyone does happen to notice they can’t say anything because it’ll look like they’re not sufficiently sad. Christenings are kind of the same, if only because people seem to have lower expectations when it comes to kids. The liberal application of sparkles certainly goes a long way for the under-ten set. But weddings? Weddings are meant to be the best day of not one but two people’s lives. They’re also unofficially meant to be the second-best day in the life of the parents who’ve helped stump up the cash, and maybe the third-best day for the bridesmaids, and so on. Tot it all up and you’ve got quite a mountain of expectation. Try catering for that.

  I worked for a caterer who got into the business because friends kept telling her she was a great cook. It’s a sadly common story. Throw a few dinner parties, get a few compliments, and hey presto—a caterer is born. It’s better than being flattered into opening a bricks-and-mortar restaurant—god help those pathetic souls—but it’s still not the money-making lark it seems from the outside. By the time she’d crawled through all the red tape, however, there was nothing for it but to keep on crawling to try to recoup the set-up expenses.

  She could make a decent salmon and cream cheese blini, and her mini-quiches were excellent, but she was no businesswoman. Nor was she so good a cook that she could be trusted with the $250-a-head extravaganzas with lobster and wagyu and all the marquee ingredients people these d
ays want to wow their guests with. She was a classic case of bad ideas happening to good ingredients. Everything essentially got minced and turned into a mini-pie. Easy to see her way of thinking—everyone likes a pie, especially a mini one—but a function cannot live on mini-pies alone. And who else takes a booking for a wedding in a scout hall and doesn’t bother to check the site before the big day? Having running water in the kitchen and more than one lonely power socket for her battery of pie warmers would have been a big help. It was off to the hardware store for a whole bunch of power cords that overloaded the system and led to a complete blackout while the dance floor was heaving to ‘Love Shack’. At least the mobile DJ had his own generator.

  She took a booking for a medieval-themed wedding in the country. The couple had been university sweethearts. They’d met at a club for people devoted to medieval battle re-enactments, and he had broken down her ramparts. They were comforting proof that there is someone for everyone, and if a blushing bride sees fit to spend The Happiest Day Of Her Life™ wearing a long conical structure like an historical wind turbine on her head, that’s her business. But when the staff arrived at the wedding function, in a field, in the middle of nowhere—just the kind of place those damnable Normans might conceivably be attacking come nightfall—we were directed to a tent with the ominous words, ‘Go get into your costume.’ A maroon and gold velvet puffy-sleeved gown might have a certain arresting quality but it is not designed for the serving of pies, whether of the four-and-twenty blackbirds variety or not. The crumbs stick to the velvet like metal filings on a magnet, for one, and the heavy skirt is easily trodden on by any knight of the realm making a grab for the last wagyu mini-pie.

  It was a terrible wedding. I think everyone who had the misfortune to attend would agree. It was an unseasonably hot night and everyone was getting about in costumes that weighed ten kilos. The local mosquitoes, some of them the size of elephants, had been busy telegraphing the message that there was a whole field of fresh meat ready to be sucked. There were men in chainmail sinking very un-gallantly into chairs with rivulets of sweat pouring off them—it was my first wedding where rust was a very real concern—and women in tight corsets were gasping fags and saying ‘fuck’ a lot, which wasn’t particularly in keeping with the theme.

  The bride was blushing. Beetroot red. The poor girl was dying inside her twenty layers of velveteen drapery, and just to compound matters she was under siege from a rogue band of mosquitoes attracted to her like a tiny, buzzing death squad. As I handed around a tray of fish mini-pies I noticed one of them setting up shop on her head.

  I did, in my defence, preface my rescue operation with a ‘hold still’, but maybe I should have elaborated further to say, ‘Hold still, there’s a freakishly large mosquito sucking blood from your forehead.’ My aim was true—the mosquito died where it squatted on the bride’s face, and in dying left a sticky stripe of blood across her brow. It was not a good look; doubly so to the people across the tent who saw the bride being assaulted by a waitress.

  After that incident my saviour, my very own knight in shining armour, whisked me away on his white steed. ‘Prithee, fair maiden,’ said he, ‘dost thou wish to bide awhile at my place of toil?’ Actually, his words were something more like this: ‘Do you want to do a few shifts at the Duke?’ And thus it was back to the fray.

  — 10 —

  WORKPLACE POLITICS: A SURVIVAL GUIDE

  I highly recommend sleeping with the boss. The fringe benefits include decent shifts, free sample bottles of wine, and the occasional lift to work. The negatives include everyone else in the workplace hating you, losing your job if the relationship doesn’t work out, and co-workers snarking about the easy ride you’re on while your boss-slash-squeeze is trying to show you’re not getting an easy ride by being hard on you. Let’s just call it even, then.

  So you think it’s a good idea to date inside the workplace? Do you think it will be cosy, convenient, cute, or a dozen other words starting with C? Better rethink, sugarplum. Whether you subscribe to the gospel according to Cosmo or not, it’s Rule Number One: Don’t shit where you eat. It’s unprofessional. Yet romance in the hospitality industry is as inevitable as it is fraught. We have already established that waiting tables is a young person’s game, like enjoying the music of Katy Perry, saying ‘like’ as a form of punctuation, and midriff tops. Young people, as everyone knows, are so chock full of hormones they could be classified as clinically insane. They’re working cheek by jowl in an environment not unlike the siege of Stalingrad. It’s squeezy. A statistically significant number of hospo relationships begin because someone grabs someone else lightly around the waist to get past them behind the bar.

  But wait, there’s more. It’s a transient population. There is alcohol. There are drugs. It’s a powder keg of sexed-up pheromones waiting to explode.

  Plenty of romantic scripts play from beginning to end in the time it takes to bump the dining room out from lunch shift to dinner. The concept of discretion can be hilariously loose, especially when the air crackles with the tension of two people impatiently looking for an excuse to smash each other’s faces off in the coolroom. Any new couples prepared to go public, do be aware that while your co-workers might seem supportive, they’re actually gagging behind your back. There’s nothing so nauseating as two people being all cute during work hours, giggling as they help each other fold the napkins, touching hands over the cutlery, calling each other ‘babe’.

  It can get ugly, fast. ‘Babe’ can turn into ‘bastard’ before Tuesday’s slightly dodgy oysters turn into baked oysters au gratin on the specials board. If it doesn’t work out, someone has to quit. Few mortal souls are so emotionally sturdy they can go from shagging someone to seeing them flirt with other people while they work. There is no quick-fix rehab for the heart. You can’t simply disappear into the anonymity of a big corporation by requesting a transfer to accounts. Unless one party to the split decides to walk the plank, who stays and who goes will be a matter for the manager’s adjudication.

  I would like to take this opportunity to reaffirm that I didn’t start sleeping with the boss. I started sleeping with a person who then became my boss. An important distinction. Ben took a big professional risk in putting his girlfriend on the roster. He must have really liked me. Or been sick of my empty bank account. I must remember to ask him.

  Workplace politics. Where to start? The average restaurant will be riddled with factions whose deep roots stretch way, way back into the mists of time. Your run-of-the-mill gastropub like the Duke can be eerily similar to the former Yugoslavia, where seething ethnic tensions began about a week after the Big Bang. No one remembers the details of the actual events, but everyone claims to carry the festering wounds like a personal scar. Ask someone to explain and you’ll get something like, ‘Well, there was this bar manager, and he was late for work one day and . . . Hang on, I’ll get Gav to explain it.’

  It is vital for the newcomer to ferret out, as quickly as possible, these factions and sub-groups and shadowy cabals. It’s going to take you months to get your head around it all. The stakes are high. There are undercover agents as ruthless as the Stasi. They’ll rat you out if you so much as smile at the hapless individual marked for execution. There’s always someone marked for execution. The restaurant answer to the dead man walking. Accidentally befriend this person, and if you manage to keep your job you could be the last-tapped for staff meals for the rest of your life.

  This is why smoking is so important. Not meaning to sound like an envoy from Big Tobacco or anything—tobacco will kill you, children—but being a smoker has a twofold benefit for any hospitality worker. Most obviously, it’s the only way you’re going to get a break mid-shift. There is a tacit understanding that smoking is an addiction and that a nicotine-dependent worker must have a regular hit in order to be a productive worker. I once worked at a place where a non-smoker—an annoying, sanctimonious, bead-wearing, bike-riding non-smoker—floated the idea that she deserved a five
-minute fresh air break. Guess who was suddenly rostered on the 7 a.m. starts each day?

  Smoking is much more than the lifestyle opportunity to sit on a milk crate in an alleyway for five minutes. Smoking is your inroad into the densely compacted intrigue of the workplace. You will often be joined on your cigarette break by other staff. Use the time wisely. Make some friends. Figure out who’s currently doing whom, who used to do whom, and who’s about to do whom. This is crucial information. Crucial enough that the tax office really ought to give waiters a deduction on nicotine-related expenses.

  However, in the interests of saving a new generation from emphysema and the unsightly pant indentations caused by milk crates, here are a few guiding principles to help you on your way.

  KNOW YOUR ENEMIES

  The waitress who’s been there forever, and I mean forever

  She has been there for so long she remembers when the colour scheme was chosen. She calls the regulars ‘love’, has attained the status of neutrality—in the eyes of the kitchen she is Switzerland—and she knows where the bodies are buried. Mostly because she carried the spade. This is one mean bitch you do not want as your enemy. She can crush you, and she won’t even break a fingernail while she’s doing it. The strong women of history—Joan of Arc, Catherine de Medici, Heather Mills—were merely the test run for this broad. She protects her turf like a Rottweiler in a car yard. She has been there the longest, which means she has unofficial voting rights. Voting on what? On you, dear one. On you. She’ll be friendly at the start. She’ll be very friendly. It’s a cat-and-mouse game in which she’s trying to gauge if you’ll play nicely and not attempt to usurp her power. There’s only one thing for it. Show respect. Defer to age and experience. She wants to know you’re on her side. Play it right and you’ll be friends for life.