Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  The friendly slacker waiter

  Everyone likes this guy. Even the chef likes this guy. Hell, you like this guy. No career waiter, he’s either an installation artist or in a band. He’s not taking this waiter gig too seriously. He ambles in five minutes late, but always in such good humour, complete with a crazy story about something that happened the night before. Gosh, he’s chilled. He makes everyone laugh. He’s good for morale. But stop. Take a good, hard look at what’s going on here. Why does he always get his dinner first? Why does he get an extra cigarette break? (‘Mate, you don’t mind if I just pop out back again? Gagging for a smoke. You know how it is . . .’) Why does he get to knock off first and sit around drinking beer while you finish scrubbing the bar? Go out drinking with this guy, by all means. He’s a helluva lot of fun. But don’t let him take you for granted, you pussy.

  The second-in-charge

  Sometimes known as the deputy manager or the duty manager, the second-in-charge is a loose cannon. This is a person inching up the slippery pole towards official management status who has gotten stuck between floors. The 2IC is a professional halfway house: neither one of the drone workers nor one of the true bosses. From within their half-life twilight zone the 2IC is always on the make. They’ll enjoy throwing their weight around when the real manager isn’t there. Favourites will be rewarded and enemies punished, but remember this: their power extends no further than the shift. Suck it up and pay no heed. It’s important to note that the manager has hired the 2IC to be compliant and bossable. This person is sent in to clean up any shit-storms that blow up. They are management’s gimp. It’s a thankless job. The manager doesn’t respect the 2IC. Neither should you.

  The waiter who started just before you

  Hey, let’s be besties! We can learn the ropes together! High five!

  Think again.

  Think about what’s going on in the mind of the waiter who used to be the most junior member of staff but now, thanks to your arrival, is just a little more legit. Finally this person has someone on whom they can pull rank. Not only that, you’re in direct competition for shifts. Repeat the maxim: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

  The hospo brat

  A new and frightening sub-species emerging from the sewers like a two-headed reptile, the hospo brat is created when Restaurantis parentis quite reasonably decide it’s time for their progeny to learn the value of hard work. In the way of all dynasties, the long game is on this pimple-faced, chronic masturbator PlayStation addict eventually assuming control of the empire his forebears worked eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, to create. There is a one-in-two chance he will end up pissing their years of sacrifice up against the wall by deciding to open a Champagne bar with gold-plated toilets and plasma screens showing Victoria’s Secret runway shows. Put yourself in the shoes of the average sixteen-year-old who knows he doesn’t have to sweat the small stuff. You know: education, maturity, figuring out what he wants to do with his life. No. It’s all going to be handed to him on a platter. No wonder this kid is swaggering about with the arrogance of the Mafioso made man—no dealing with garbage or blocked drains in the ladies’ loos for this fine upstanding young fellow—and the managers can only push him so far before he runs off to Mummy or Daddy with a fictitious story about bullying or embezzlement.

  The chef

  Ah, yes. Chefs. Finally we come to the waiter’s arch-nemesis.

  The cobra to its mongoose.

  Trapped in a sick symbiosis of misunderstanding and hatred.

  Plunging together in a twisting ball of pummelling rage over Reichenbach Falls.

  It’s an eternal mystery why chefs and waiters have not yet realised they’re actually on the same side. The real fight ought to be against the common enemy. That, of course, is the customer. The customer is the Hun, the Mob and the Mongols combined. Yet the evils of the diner are completely overshadowed by the dog-and-cat antipathy between kitchen and floor staff. Somehow the diner has become the fly that buzzes in the room while the heavy artillery blams away across the kitchen pass.

  What a waste. If the kitchen and floor teamed up, they could be formidable. Remember: World War Two would have had a very different outcome if half the German forces didn’t suddenly have to be diverted to the Russian front. What we need is a non-aggression treaty negotiated by someone up to speed on all the latest techniques in diplomacy. What’s Kofi Annan doing these days?

  The kitchen-versus-floor apartheid reaches its weird apotheosis each year at the work Christmas party. At the Duke that meant a few baskets of fries, a few rounds of beer at the restaurant itself after service one night, which put the occasion on a cheer-par with any of the other 364 nights of the year. At my very first Christmas party at the Duke, I didn’t recognise the entire kitchen crew for the first half-hour. I assumed they were some random gang of slouchy guys who’d wandered in—maybe they’d gotten lost after robbing a 7-Eleven, maybe they were a bunch of delivery drivers invited along to share a bowl of potato wedges. After service, chefs always duck out before the floor staff; it’s one of the many reasons they feel superior. I’d never seen them in their civilian clothes before, hair wetted down after a quick post-work spruce-up in the upstairs bathroom and enough deodorant to send the chemical-sensitive into anaphylactic shock.

  A couple of hardy souls attempted to make small talk across the great divide, but it was absurdist theatre without the wit, the waiting without the Godot. Each conversation sputtered out after a few exchanges. It was a bit like the story of soldiers putting down their weapons on Christmas Eve and embracing each other in No Man’s Land, but there was none of the joyfulness that makes it such a heart-warming tale, just a fervent desire to get this goodwill business out of the way so we could get back to shooting each other.

  The Christmas party was a band-aid on a malignancy. There were various secondary cancers riddled throughout the place but the primary cancer went by the name of Jonathan. He was the head chef. One of half a dozen who graced the role during my tenure at the Duke, which at times seemed more a revolving door of graceless opportunity than a proper restaurant, and certainly the most memorable, albeit for all the wrong reasons. He wasn’t that old but he was old-school, clinging stubbornly to the habits of a less enlightened age.

  Times are changing. Kitchens can now be pleasant places to work. Honest. Plenty of chefs have a handle on social expectations and prefer to lead by example. It’s the triumph of the carrot over the stick. Change is slowly coming, although it’s taking its damned time about it.

  I’m not saying that playing tricks on workmates doesn’t have some comedic merit. If the kitchen decides to leave a dessert of chocolate and caramel-striped deliciousness on the prep bench to be discovered after they’ve all knocked off for the night and it turns out to be layers of duck fat and pig fat with whipped cream on top—well, that’s funny. Empirically funny. Harmless funny. No one got hurt in the making of that joke, although the memory of the palate-coating rancidness will haunt for years to come. And if retaliation takes the form of a pint of apple cider vinegar gulped down by the chef who likes to start each day with apple juice—well, whose fault is it if he hasn’t told anyone about his stomach ulcer and winds up doubled over in the emergency department?

  Jonathan, however, had come through the ranks in the days when apprentices were bastardised as relentlessly, thoroughly and mercilessly as army recruits, and he was not going to be denied the karmic retribution owed to him. It wasn’t just the endless dick-grabbing and poetic speculation about what objects had been inserted into his colleagues’ anuses. Nothing unusual there. So long as kitchens are mostly male they’ll continue to be as dick-obsessed as the toilet queue at Poof Doof. There was a special layer of bully-boy viciousness in Jonathan that went above and beyond the call of duty. He liked to demean. He liked to humiliate.

  It’s not like he had anything obvious to be angry about. The Duke had a nice kitchen and staff who were relatively well paid. There was nothing to expl
ain why he was such an arsehole, except for the fact that he was born an arsehole and will one day die an arsehole. Possibly it was because he was a New Zealand boy working in a world of Italians and his greatest contribution to the canon was the tandoori chicken pizza. Or because the Duke’s reputation was built on two previous head chefs who had been women. Italian women. They were the bomb. They worked hard, partied hard, made some brilliant food, won a bag of awards, and were well liked and respected. They’ve gone on to bigger and better things.

  Jonathan was a pedestrian chef whose pedestrian food was never going to raise a critic’s eyebrow. He was vain—when his first child was a few weeks old he bought a Harley Davidson motorbike and started visiting a solarium ‘to set a good example for my son’—and maybe his vanity whispered in a little voice that he was not well liked and respected even less. He has not gone on to bigger and better things. He eventually disappeared into dowdy little suburban joints. Years later I accidentally stumbled into an anonymous restaurant in middle-suburbia one night and there he was. Knock me over with a feather if he wasn’t running the exact same menu. It could have been carbon-dated to 1996.

  One thing about Jonathan, he knew how to game the system. He surrounded himself with a doltish bunch of followers. Boys, mostly, straight out of culinary school and too stupid to resist the whole ‘yes chef, no chef, how high chef’ thing. Italian mama’s boys, on the whole, like Mario, who was twenty-one and had just spent $40,000 on his car stereo and approximately one-hundredth of that on his fiancée’s engagement ring. Or Artie, the bodybuilding hulk of a chef de partie, all muscles and steamed chicken and hunger, who displayed flashes of decency but would revert to a grinning man-brute whenever Jonathan appeared.

  Not only did his crew diligently prop up Jonathan’s unstable ego, they allowed him to effectively control a power bloc. They were his bargaining chip for better pay, better conditions, whatever took his fancy, because he could threaten to walk and take the entire kitchen crew with him, and the owners knew they’d go trotting after him like well-trained dogs.

  There was a swing door separating the kitchen from the dining room at the Duke. It was a magical door, like the door to Narnia, because walking through it transported the waiters to a different land where none of the usual rules applied. There were no friendly talking mice and pretty water nymphs in this land, alas. It was more like a less-welcoming version of an Egyptian prison.

  The era wasn’t kind to waiters. The following decade saw the discovery of smears and foams, which act like high-grade adhesive and keep everything in place, but the 90s fashion was all about stacks of food reaching for the sky. The Duke boasted a signature vegetable stack—roasted eggplant, red capsicum and pumpkin smooshed together with goats’ cheese (new ingredient alert!) so precarious that it teetered like a giraffe in stilettos, constantly on the brink of collapsing on its side into an oily, goat-cheesy mess. If it fell before the hapless waiter got it out of the kitchen, Jonathan’s pupils would retract into tiny pinpricks of fury in his psychotic ice-blue eyes as he bagged out the useless . . . fucking . . . idiot . . . responsible. If it fell once it was through the magical swing door—Too bad, customer. Stack it up yourself. I’m not going back in there.

  Jonathan did have his light-hearted moments. For several weeks he happily led a chorus of Groove Armada’s electronica hit ‘I See You Baby (Shakin’ That Ass)’ every time I walked into the kitchen. I know it doesn’t sound like much but when it happens fifty times a shift, five shifts a week, it really messes with your head. It’s water-boarding with words. It’s meant to be a banging club tune but I still can’t listen to it without wanting to go somewhere very quiet and weep a little. But what was I to do? Seriously, what was I conceivably to do? Go running to my boyfriend and get him to sort it out? Go on strike? Demand the entire kitchen crew stand up and apologise to their parents, classmates and the school? Not bloody likely. The only thing for it was to put on my waterproof big girl pants, hold my head up and get on with it. And I guess in some ways I was lucky.

  Being the manager’s squeeze meant I was quarantined from some of their more creative endeavours. Jonathan and Artie cornered another waitress when she went into the coolroom to get lemons for the bar. They shut the door, turned off the light and casually talked about how easy it would be to rape her. ‘Just weirdly conversational . . . as if they were talking about the weather,’ Nella told me later. She came back out to the bar, white and shaking. Being real grown-up men, they resorted to the time-honoured defence of ‘It’s just a joke!’ when they were challenged, and naturally enough nothing ever came of it—except Nella never again went to the coolroom alone.

  Now for the $64,000 question: what do chefs think they’re achieving, exactly, by bullying staff to the point everyone pretends they can’t hear the bell? Okay, so maybe they have a dog-eared copy of Marco Pierre White’s White Heat at home, the book that singlehandedly invented the rockstar-chef and in 126 pages transformed its subject into the Keith Richards of the kitchen. All sorts of shitful kitchen behaviour owes its origins to White Heat. It really ought to be banned; it’s the Lady Chatterley’s Lover of the kitchen set. Take a close look at all the ink snaking down that young chef’s arms. ‘What would MPW do?’ is probably lurking somewhere near his wrist. Little do they know that even Marco Pierre White (who the hell goes by three names anyway?) is trapped in the prison of his own legend. Little do they know that most guys who shoot for Marco Pierre White wind up at Gordon James Ramsay, minus the fame and the wealth, the product endorsements, TV shows and international string of restaurants. Plus these guys are simply too busy being rockstars to acknowledge some central truths. That making staff afraid to go into the kitchen to the point they ‘forget’ to put in dockets is going to make everyone look bad. That it’s not the height of comedy to shove a scorching hot plate in some hapless waiter’s hands so an impression of their fingerprints is permanently soldered to it.

  Okay, okay, the Reconciliation Commission is demanding both sides make concessions. So I’ll concede that spending every shift in a commercial kitchen might send even a well-adjusted person a little troppo. A commercial kitchen is often no bigger than your average bathroom. There’s no concept of personal space for chefs who work long hours in an inherently stressful job in the company of artificial lighting and relentlessly harsh industrial surfaces. Tile. Stainless steel. Concrete.

  This is not a plea for soft furnishings. It’s a plea for understanding.

  All the re-education programs in the world won’t be enough to deter a chef determined to cling onto his reign of terror like some moth-eaten Middle Eastern dictator. I’ve got my hopes riding on the open kitchen to be the thing that puts a bullet in the old-fashioned, zucchini-up-the-bum kind of bullying. A restaurant isn’t complete without an open kitchen these days. The mantra of the modern food age: Not only must cooking be done, it must be seen to be done. It’s all about providing eye frottage for the diners. Food porn foreplay. Accepted wisdom now holds that food tastes better after seeing people sweating to make it. The happy byproduct for waiters is a far diminished risk of receiving a stinging flick over the ear with a rolled-up tea towel from the chef.

  * * *

  MICHAEL

  It was an inexplicably popular cafe where one of the most popular items on the menu was the tuna melt, a mayo-heavy tuna salad with a bit of onion, celery and grated carrot splodged onto stale bread, then covered with a luridly orange cheese and grilled. The chefs, if you can call them that, would make the tuna salad mix in huge white plastic buckets, throwing in the ingredients and then mixing it with their bare hands (literally up to—and beyond—their elbows). One morning the chefs were in the kitchen gathered around one of the big white plastic buckets. There was a large dead rat curled up in the centre of the tuna salad. The bucket was fairly full and the owners hated waste, so there was a debate about what to do. A few thought the whole lot should be chucked. Others thought just the rat should be ditched. In the end the chef who had been ther
e the longest made the decision and picked the rat up by its tail and chucked it in the bin. He then scooped out a thin layer of tuna salad around where the rat had been lying and threw that in the bin, too. Then he put a lid on the bucket and slid it back into the coolroom, ready for the breakfast rush.

  * * *

  Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as they say. Institutionalised kitchen bastardry might have received its marching orders. If I ever start getting all misty-eyed about the old days, just shoot me.

  TROUBLESHOOTING 101: THE RETURNED PLATE

  So you’ve raised a reasonable complaint about the food and for some unfathomable reason your waiter resists taking the plate back to the kitchen for a spot of rectification? Chances are there’s a snaggle-toothed psychopath in there just dying for a chance to take out his frustrations on the poor apron-clad schmuck who bursts through the swing doors saying table three is complaining the steak is too rare.

  It’s been a tough week for our chef hero. His new iPhone isn’t synching with his iPad, his wife is giving him grief for rolling home at 3 a.m. after knock-offs, and Geelong was drubbed by Carlton in the Friday night game. He doesn’t care that the customer is always right. In fact, he’s dead sure the customer is always wrong, and the waiter bearing bad tidings is simply acting as the misguided representative of a classless dickhead who wouldn’t know good cooking if he stuck it up his arse, etc, etc.

  Take the Sabatini, for example. Mo couldn’t poach an egg if his life depended on it. This was somewhat of a handicap for a breakfast chef, although in his defence poached eggs were only just getting a foothold in the cafe landscape back in the early 90s. Scrambled was all the rage. Poached takes a bit more skill than what is essentially egg mash with a truckload of cream; no one can stuff up that one, unless they commit the rookie mistake of using too high a heat and wind up with a mound of yellow insulation material.