Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  There was no such thing as a sommelier at the Star. Don’t be daft. We did the best we could, and some knew more than others, but there was no designated higher authority to turn to when a customer had a real, actual wine question rather than automatically ordering a glass of sauvignon blanc.

  Sauvignon blanc ruled the school. Sauv blanc, the grape derided as cat’s piss, assuming the tasting notes for cat’s piss include the words ‘passionfruit popsicle’. The missing link between wine and West Coast Cooler. The grape whose inexplicable popularity caused both islands of New Zealand to be completely razed so that entire Pacific nation is now one giant vineyard squeezing out grapes destined for the easy-drinking aisle at the local bottle-o.

  We had a competition at the Star to get it known as savvy b, much in the way chardonnay, the ‘it’ grape of the 80s, became derided as chardy. Dead easy. Within a few weeks half the neighbourhood was down with the program. ‘I’ll have a savvy b,’ purred one local mid-week tennis lady in the way she might have uttered the phrase ‘the young Paul Newman’ or ‘half-price Oroton’.

  Behind the bar it was known, less politely, as Cougar Juice. A shameful feminist slur, but it WAS the drink of women of a certain age. And it was certainly more respectful than its other unofficial name of—I almost can’t say it—Bitch Diesel.

  Funny how you can’t put something in your mouth these days without being judged for it. Fermented grapes—the crucible of class, taste and sophistication. A test set up so all but an exalted few are destined to fail. Once upon a time you would have been better off drinking beer, but the whole craft movement came along to scupper its status as a safe haven. There really is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. But it’s comforting to remember that like pretty much everything else in this world, grapes go in and out of fashion. Pinot gris is the new sauv blanc, which was the new chardonnay. Keep up, people. Or don’t keep up, but don’t let anyone make you feel bad for what you want to drink, unless it’s one of those alcopops and you’re over the age of nineteen, in which case you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

  We were armed and dangerous at the Star. Partly, although not exclusively, in case of cougar attack. The waiter’s friend is a piece of hardware soon to wind up in a museum next to the cassette tape and the floppy disk but it was necessary, children, back in the days when wine bottles were stoppered with something called corks. Subcutaneous tree bark, of all crazy things, doing a pretty good job of keeping precious wine safe from the insult of air. Difficult to imagine, and difficult to use—I was never able to open a bottle at the table without having to jam it between my knees and lever the corkscrew while going red and quietly swearing. Not such a good look, which is one of the arguments in favour of the all-conquering screw cap. Purists resisted bitterly for a while. There were mutterings about an armed resistance movement. But when everyone realised that the Pavlovian response applied to the crick-crick of a screw cap as well as the satisfying pop of a cork, everyone relaxed and got on with the business of drinking.

  Sommeliers’ joke: ‘It won’t be corked, but it can be screwed.’

  The screw cap isn’t watertight. Well, it is, but it still has problems. The wine can be oxidised. It can be tainted with sulphur. But it’s put to bed the once-common sight of three or four bartenders and assorted floor staff huddled urgently around a glass debating whether it suffered from cork taint. It happened quite often. An imperfect science at best. On one infamous occasion the bartender went to the table to deliver the collective wisdom: ‘I’m sorry, sir, but it isn’t corked.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ insisted the customer. ‘I’m sure this bottle is corked.’

  ‘Sir, it is not corked. My colleagues and I have tasted it and it’s definitely not corked.’

  To which he received the reply to which there is no comeback: ‘It’s my wine. I’m the winemaker. I promise you, it’s corked.’

  Homer wrote in The Odyssey, ‘It is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine.’ He also wrote, ‘If you serve too many masters you’ll soon suffer,’ but that’s beside the point. Even the ancient Greeks were busy judging each other over their wine choices. They celebrated some wine-producing regions, they laughed at others. They had their equivalent of Marlborough sauv blanc. But I wonder if Homer ever suffered the 250 per cent mark-up thanks to his wild wine list being stacked with unfamiliar drops? Fast-forward twenty millennia and every second wine list is bursting with exotic Spanish drops, Italian, South American. It’s enough to bring on nostalgia for the simpler time when wine was a choice out of white burgundy and claret, but the handy by-product for the restaurant is that consumers don’t have a price comparison at the local bottleshop.

  It’s a game of trust. Like Marcello with his beloved bloody Koona-kunga-kerchunga shiraz. He flogged the stuff with the enthusiasm of a bingo caller at the RSL. But should you believe the little Italian guy who promises the wine is so smart it could win a Nobel prize? More than a few cases had crossed his front doorstep thanks to palm-greasing wine reps. Was he really so enamoured of its heady blackcurrant and plum nose, its undertones of leather and cigar-box, or did his enthusiasm stem from the fact that he was getting free plonk?

  Marcello was fired, incidentally. Even George couldn’t take the endless Marcellos anymore. Plus he’d taken to drinking Koona-kunga-kerchunga from a coffee cup during work hours. His final words as he departed the Star for the last time: ‘Tell George I’m never talking to him again.’ Amen to that. But you can’t keep a guy like Marcello down for long. He bobbed up sure enough, like a turd in a toilet bowl. Anyone buying a second-hand car in the greater Melbourne metro area, beware: ‘MARCELLO IS THE NUMBER ONE CAR SALESMAN IN THE WORLD!’

  — 14 —

  WHAT LIES BENEATH

  I used to sell clothes with a couple of girls who liked to go out to dinner with no underpants on. They came from traditional Greek families so there was really no option for getting frisky with their boyfriends at home. As for staying in a hotel—forget about it. Be sprung doing that and they would have been scrubbing floors in a convent for the next twenty years. Going pants-less was their little act of rebellion against parental control, as well as a cheap thrill to keep their frustrated menfolk dangling on the line.

  ‘Got a date tonight,’ one would chirp as we locked up the shop for the night. ‘That new Italian place. No undies.’

  ‘Better order the seafood platter then,’ the other would offer sagely before they fell about laughing at the weirdness of being good Greek girls.

  A full two decades later it’s amazing how often I’ll be sitting in a restaurant and the thought pops into my head unbidden: Who in this room is not wearing any underpants?

  Someone ought to write a PhD on the sex life of restaurants. It’s a rich yet largely ignored subject. Working title: What’s Not on the Menu: Sex and the City Restaurant. That’d be a guaranteed grant magnet in any cultural studies department. I might write to David Attenborough and suggest it as a great subject for his next TV series. I can already hear his breathy introduction—‘A fascinating anthropological study that reveals more about the secret business of the species known as Homo sapiens than most of us ever suspected’—over the opening montage of waiters unfurling white linen tablecloths. Restaurants are where a lot of the Big Stuff in life happens. Which is actually a bit . . . weird. Out there, in the open, private lives. People go to restaurants to pick up and to break up, and in between to hiss insults at each other when the official weekly child-free date night goes predictably wrong sometime around the second drink.

  The waiter sees it all. Everything. And she probably overheard that bit about the strange rash. That was unfortunate.

  I don’t think I can be alone in finding restaurants kind of awkward. Even though they’re my lifeblood, which means I spend a fair chunk of my work time feeling self-conscious. Maybe it goes back to that whole master−servant thing, which is bound to make any believer in an egalitarian liberal democracy a little itchy. Someone is being paid to bring me
food and clear away my dirty plates and refill my wineglass and silently eavesdrop on me fighting with my beloved about which of us does more housework and whose turn it is to go to parent-teacher night.

  It’s odd, right? At the very least it’s uncomfortable on top of undignified with a twist of embarrassing. Even when I’m making a match-winning point (example: ‘vacuuming the house is worth three lots of unstacking the dishwasher’) the sixth sense is calculating when the waiter has left the danger zone and open hostilities can resume. Possibly it stems from the fear of being judged by the servant. That extra dollop of humiliation on top of losing one’s shit in front of strangers. Sadly the only thing I share in common with the upper classes.

  So I’m uptight. Some people brazenly use restaurants as a sort of all-purpose pit-stop for relationship fine-tuning. They’ll pack their dirty laundry in a big bag, lug it to the table and spend the meal pulling it out item by item, holding the stains up to the light to get a better look. There’s something strange about people who don’t have the basic human decency to sit quietly and whisper horrible things at each other. Downright unnatural. They’ll be expecting the waiter to adjudicate, too. Apparently the service comes free with the meal. Or the meal comes free with the service. It’s hard to tell. One minute you’re a simple waiter, the next you’re the new Dr Ruth, parachuted into a shockingly private conversation. All friendly like, though, as if you’re old buddies just chewing the fat. ‘He thinks it’s okay to go on a surfing holiday with his mates when I haven’t had a break from the kids for the past year—crazy, huh?’ Or, ‘She said she was going back to work when the children started school but now she sits around watching repeats of Neighbours and eating Twix—you wouldn’t do that, would you?’ It’s couples counselling with a wood-fired pizza option.

  Beware, though. It’s a trap. A big, gaping, steely-jawed bear trap waiting to gouge the flesh of the unsuspecting waiter who stumbles innocently into the clearing. No good has ever come of playing intermediary between warring partners. Unless you aspire to be Dr Ruth, in which case, knock yourself out. Otherwise, assume defensive position. Avoid eye contact. Reply only in the most non-committal way, avoiding the use of all known words. ‘Mmm . . . mmm’ should do it. Just get out of there as fast as you can. Of course if they’ve been rude, you could always make like a stealth bomber and blow up the situation. That can be fun. ‘No WAY would I be going away surfing—are you kidding, mister? My brother-in-law pulled a stunt like that. My sister left him. She got the house. And the car. But don’t worry, he got the kids.’ Alternatively, try to play it smart and side with the one who’s more likely to tip. But if one person has a mascara-smeared nose and the other is fumbling for the car keys and there’s a soft acid rain falling over the table, the likelihood of any tipping action is somewhere south of zero.

  We saw some epic bust-ups at the Star. There was one woman who broke up with two men in a single night. She was having an affair with her boss. They’re sitting all cosy together, holding hands across the table, and her husband turns up in a white-knuckled fury. She’s drunk and in a fighting mood so she sweetly tells the husband to fuck off, she’s leaving him. Husband storms off, woman and boss then get all heavy. You could hear him saying he wasn’t ready to go for the big commitment, he thought it would just be a bit of fun and he never meant for her to leave her husband. So she gets her back up and now they start fighting. By the time the husband storms back in with a fake gun—we assumed it was fake but you never really know—you could tell the boss was rethinking the deal. Maybe not such a good idea to have an affair with a married employee with a psychotic husband after all. So he leaves. And the husband leaves. And she’s sitting there at the table, drunk and alone and possibly unemployed to boot, wondering what the hell just happened.

  Another couple came in for a meal and an unscripted moment of pure emotional catharsis when an engagement ring went flying through the air and landed with an expensive tinkle behind the bar. They left, ringless, still arguing, him running after her as she stormed down the street. No tip, of course.

  They came back in the next day, arm in arm, to ask for the ring. They didn’t even have the decency to look sheepish. They’d already mentally filed their huge scene as one of the adorable stories that plotted the course of an adorable relationship. The One Where She Threw the Engagement Ring. Something to laugh about in the wedding speeches. They were so in love. Simply glowing. Totally obnoxious. Just to rub salt in the wound, the guy gave this smug parting shot after we’d handed back the bling: ‘Lucky for me. This thing cost me forty grand.’ Every waiter in the joint winced and thought, ‘Shit. Should have kept the bloody thing.’

  You just don’t get scenes like that in restaurants with no liquor licence. What you get is a bunch of bored-looking people thinking wistfully about the bottle waiting on the kitchen counter for them to get home. Sweet, sweet booze. Wicked, wicked booze. The reason restaurants are built on the invisible fault line between best behaviour and outrage. In vino vitriol and all that.

  All you need to destroy the veneer of civilisation, built up layer by layer over many millennia by noble human endeavour and sacrifice, is (in my case) around four vodka tonics. Or three shots of tequila. Or three-quarters of a standard bottle of wine. Restaurants can be funny places to work because they’re a lot like San Francisco. On the surface stable enough, but the next big quake could hit at any time.

  As my undies-less former colleagues showed, the sex life of restaurants is mostly shadowy and subterranean. It’s something you need to go looking for. Pop your head under the table. Go lurk in the toilets. Something will turn up. But every so often bad behaviour bursts to the surface in a spectacular display of such wonderful wrongness you half expect the whole restaurant to raise placards with marks out of ten. I recently saw a couple sitting at the bar of a Spanish tapas joint celebrating the end of the working week with a hand job. Too much sangria, I guess. First her hand disappears in a crotchward direction then her arm begins doing the old piston action. Better than a floorshow. He looked like he was really getting somewhere, too, until the waiter turned up with their food. It was pork, which seemed fitting.

  * * *

  GENEVIEVE

  I was sitting down with a supplier one day in the empty dining room and the chef, a notorious pants man, bolted in. I’ve never seen someone look so terrified. He was so scared he was completely oblivious to the fact he’d run out of the kitchen clutching a bunch of dried spaghetti in one hand. He ran up to me and just kept saying, ‘Please help me . . . you’ve got to help me.’ He could barely talk. He was just stammering and shaking, and all the while holding so tightly onto this bunch of spaghetti. So it turned out that he’d been having an affair with the girlfriend of the sous chef. He’d even sent the sous chef home early so he could have sex with his girlfriend—all matey, like ‘Why don’t you take the rest of the night off?’ Evil. So the sous inevitably found out and came after him with a big knife. He really would have killed him, I have no doubt about it, if he’d managed to catch him that day. It was almost unfortunate we had to fire the sous chef instead of the head chef. It was kind of unjust, although I guess that’s what happens if you pull a knife on someone.

  * * *

  The chef’s change room at the Star saw its fair share of action. It was next to the functions room. A celebration, an open bar tab . . . the perfect recipe for drunk shenanigans. Two women got more than they bargained for when the entire kitchen crew burst through the door just as they were getting to third base. News of Sapphic action going on where they stored their smelly street shoes had filtered down to the chefs, so they downed tools in the middle of service and charged. The battle scene from Braveheart had nothing on Damien and the gang hoping to see some girl-on-girl action. It was a happy hunting ground for the bartenders, too. Waz was caught going down on some girl—I mentioned earlier he was always a very giving kind of guy—and Robbie took an unscheduled break from a twenty-first in the functions room to shag the birthday gi
rl. No extra charge, either.

  It’s an unofficial part of the job to be complicit in sexual misadventures. Not as a party to them, necessarily, but—for example—a practised waiter can tell where people want to sit the minute they walk through the door. People automatically look at the table they want. Businessmen will want the biggest table, to accommodate their enormous bollocks. With couples, round tables are more popular than square. Maybe roundness suggests intimacy while sharp lines are too brisk to be romantic. People carrying on in flagrante delicto will want to sit somewhere secluded, naturally enough. It can be a surprise exactly who wants to be in flagrante, whether delicto or not. The most unexpected people. It’s one of the follies of youth to imagine elderly people as uniformly sexless. It’s unfair and untrue, but even Dr Ruth would forgive the assumption about this old gent—yes, a gent—in his uniform of grey flannel pants, blue blazer and trim white moustache. Once a week he’d eat lunch at the Duke with a woman about a decade younger, which would have made him around seventy-five. Forgive me if I describe her as a ‘librarian type’—librarians are sexual deviants by and large, but it’s a lazy shorthand for describing her cardigan and pearls, court heels and sensible permed ’do. A right proper gent having lunch with his lady wife, discussing the grandkids while planning their next European river cruise? Not exactly. We ran into him one night at a different restaurant. He came in with another elderly couple and a woman who looked like the Dowager Empress of India. It couldn’t be, could it . . .? Oh yes. His wife.