Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  Ruth Reichl ruined it for everyone. She’s the former New York Times critic whose shtick was to visit restaurants in disguise. Once she even dressed up as her dead mother, which makes me hope desperately she ordered oysters so everyone could cluck knowingly and mutter about Freud. But gosh, so much effort. I can’t even remember the fake name I booked under half the time. I wouldn’t want to compound the stress by worrying that my prosthetic nose was about to fall into the soup. Apparently a lot of critics feel the same about hiring make-up artists and dressing as their late relatives just to go to work, because the needle has swung the other way. In most quarters anonymity is now seen as essential to the job as an ABBA pantsuit and moon boots. Common wisdom holds it doesn’t matter if the critic is recognised because they will use their extraordinary powers of perception granted by the Guild of Reviewers’ Secret Wizard Council to cut through the swirling vapour-cloud of special treatment.

  It’s true you can’t polish a turd, as the poet says. An ordinary chef can’t suddenly become a better chef. The menu can’t go from bog-awful to WOW in the blink of an eye just because someone armed with a notebook and a full quiver of adjectives walks in the door. It just can’t.

  You can, however, roll a turd in glitter. Restaurants give critics bigger servings, the best produce, the nicest table and the most attentive service, even though it can be so tortured and stiff it’s like being stuck in an elevator with the cast of Home and Away.

  I might have to go into witness protection for admitting this. It’s like selling out the Masons’ secret handshake. But OF COURSE it helps to fly under the radar and avoid the fuss and bother that can nudge an opinion in a favourable direction. To put it more scientifically: well, der. A restaurant spots a reviewer, they activate the Cognitive Dissonance button and glitter-bomb the entire area. Even after the meal the onslaught continues. I once had a chef call me the day after a meal to tell me he’d been upset because his dog died. Reviewers are—sob—only human, after all.

  That’s why it’s a natural high to rival sky-diving to occasionally sneak through a restaurant’s defences and land deep behind enemy lines without being spotted. Especially when you’re not dressed as your dead mother. It doesn’t happen often but it’s worth pursuing with the steely idealism of a Young Liberal think-tank. At the very least it’s crucial not to alert them you’re coming. I look at booking under a different name as a good chance to try on different identities. I’ve always felt like an Astrid trapped in a Larissa body, so it was nice to try it out before committing to the full transition. I’ve used my children’s names, too, so when they inevitably accuse me in their teenage years of ruining their lives with Ezekiel and Aloysius3 I can say I’ve walked in their shoes a little.

  There used to be a photo that ran with my reviews that uncannily resembled Sissy Spacek in Carrie. I loved that photo because I believe—or want to believe—I look nothing like that in everyday life except when I’m yelling at my kids for leaving Lego pieces in the shag-pile rug. The Spacek era was notable for several sleight-of-identity coups. At one banging Mexican joint I slipped through unrecognised the first time and got a few burnt end-bits of lamb for $33 frisbeed at my head by a waiter who was waiting on an important call from his agent. The second visit they clocked me immediately. The same dish was an extravagance of perfect pink meat, pouting and ready for its close-up.

  There are other benefits to realising with a sigh that they know who you are, and that they know that you know that they know who you are. You can relax and stop talking in that Russian accent. Your dining compadres can quit referring to you as Svetlana. And you can scribble away in your notebook at the table instead of having to scurry off to the loos to write notes after every course, making everyone in the place assume you’re suffering from a scorching urinary tract infection.

  All critics have their peccadilloes. I’ll generally fall into a deep, trance-like state when eating proper, authentic, rustic Italian food. A chef could put a marron on a piece of nuclear waste and I’d probably call it beautiful. Beauuu-ti-fuuul. I also love, in no particular order, a really good French baguette with sour butter, those incredibly soft leather banquettes that feel like the underside of a mushroom, and pop songs involving bagpipes. Combine them into one restaurant and I’d be a very happy person indeed.

  And when it comes to service? Well, I don’t need to feel clean on a spiritual level when eating at your restaurant, so please put salt on the table. If I hear one more waiter say, ‘Chef says everything is properly seasoned,’ I’ll start attacking everything in sight with one of those oversized peppermills. I don’t like a napkin unfurled into my lap. It’s infantilising, although I understand it’s an expected norm so it’s my responsibility to cover my crotch before the waiter does. De-crumbing. Another fine ritual guaranteed to elicit the old nervous joke about who’s the messier diner, and a bit like nursey wiping the table before naptime. At some of the really old-school places they’ll lay a napkin on top of the tablecloth ahead of dessert, so diners aren’t affronted by any unsightly stains while they’re eating their peach melba, but it reminds me too much of what desperate parents do when they have a toddler who’s been vomiting all day and there’s no more clean bed linen. I’ll pass on that one, too, thanks.

  Above all, I’d be utterly thrilled if I could write what I think. Some readers think I’m a chippy bitch but half the time I’m only saying half of what I’d like to be saying. In England reviewers can get away with writing the chicken curry tasted like stale toes. Thanks to Australia’s defamation laws, unless physical proof of the eating of stale toes can be produced, it could easily wind up in court with the judge trying to quantify what stale toes taste like, exactly how stale the toes had been, and then where the curry ranked on the official stale toes scale. It does tend to muzzle criticism. Only the other day I had lamb ribs that could have been the fossilised remains of a small dinosaur thrown into a deep fryer. Unfortunately, however, due to the lack of evidence that I’ve eaten dinosaur, I had to make do with a fairly toothless ‘The twice-cooked lamb ribs could have been cooked half as much’.

  They didn’t know who I was, by the way.

  You can always tell if they’ve spotted the reviewer because a flare goes up from the kitchen while a siren starts wailing and staff start running around yelling, ‘CODE RED!’ Actually it’s nothing that exciting, sadly. Everything just gets a little more awkward. It’s a bit like a very polite blind date where neither party is sure they want to stick around for dessert.

  The most disappointing meal of my life was in fact two meals that happened on the same day. Lunch and dinner. Back-to-back. Human foie gras. Don’t tell me it’s a job without challenges. A work experiment that involved flying to Sydney for the weekend to hit its top restaurants safe in the knowledge they would treat me as a regular diner. The results were fairly depressing. Apparently, even if you want to spend half the average weekly wage on a single meal, restaurants still reserve the right to treat you as the bacteria that feeds on pond scum. The food? I can’t really remember. It was . . . nice. Mostly. But the service—oh god, the memory of the service to this day makes steam belch from my ears like I’m spontaneously combusting. Lunch was at that rather famous restaurant where the barman got busted for dealing coke back in Chapter 12. The young woman at the front desk sat chatting on the phone and chewing gum while we stood awkwardly in front of her for four minutes. I timed it. Later we asked the sommelier about the difference between two wines on the award-winning list. ‘This one,’ he said, pointing at the Alsace riesling, ‘costs twenty dollars more than this one.’

  Dinner was at a corporate titan hangout where each one of the flower arrangements must have cost more than the annual GDP of Mozambique. The air shimmered with wealth. The dessert was burnt. Not just Paris Hilton perma-tanned—proper, desolate landscape-after-a-bushfire black. It was so obvious that my immediate thought was, ‘Oh, the chef must be playing some clever visual games. What fun.’ But no, it was just burnt. The waiter cleare
d away the uneaten, obviously burnt dessert without a comment. We paid our $550 bill and left. None of the staff said goodbye. Maybe that cost more.

  It pains me to admit it but I think any reviewer who doesn’t secretly enjoy the recognition—or at least what the recognition can get them, which is a related but different thing—is lying. I like knowing my $30 dessert isn’t going to be a burnt piece of shit. I like someone saying hello the minute I walk in the door and being farewelled properly—even the times when all the staff are awkwardly lined up at the door and I can pretend to be Prince Charles backstage after the Royal Variety Performance. Above all, I like not waiting for anything because I have been unreasonably impatient since birth, although I am trying very hard to be a better person.

  On the other hand, things can sometimes get a little freaky. The waiter who hovered outside the toilet so I could get a personal escort back to the table—that was a bit unnecessary. Ditto the young man who told me pompously, ‘We reserve this table only for VIPs and tonight it is yours.’ Then there are the diners who like to come up and stage whisper, ‘I know who you are but don’t worry, I won’t blow your cover,’ thereby guaranteeing any cover officially blown. But the oddest one happened during an internal ultrasound for my second pregnancy. I’ve become fairly used to people saying, ‘You’re the restaurant reviewer, aren’t you?’ but it was a first to have it said by a doctor wielding an ultrasound wand (a medical term for a hospital-grade dildo) as she looked up from between my splayed legs. She loved restaurants. Loved them! Where would I recommend for her birthday dinner, twenty people, somewhere fun, etc, etc. Now, I’m not normally Miss Chatty-Pants when strangers are poking around my equator but I know my manners, and after we’d exhausted the possibilities of Mexican and moved onto Spanish she suddenly fell into the kind of heavy quiet that precedes bad news. And then she took my one hand in her two and told me the foetus had no heartbeat.

  * * *

  LENNY

  I was the manager at one of the city’s best restaurants. It was an open secret the restaurateur had numerous relationships with waitresses, although his then-wife worked alongside him. Until one particular event . . . There was a petrol strike and a TV crew descended on a petrol station to interview motorists waiting in a quickly forming queue. It was late afternoon on a day he was supposedly flat out in the restaurant, and randomly the TV presenter chose his car. Unfortunately his wife saw the interview and the very attractive waitress sitting beside him. She quickly rang the restaurant, asking where her husband was. I replied nervously that he was standing in the restaurant deep in conversation with some customers and couldn’t be interrupted. It was a pretty good effort, I thought, but she’s now his ex-wife.

  * * *

  Paella one moment, dead baby the next. Quite the turnaround. It was probably only a minute, looking back, although at the time it felt like hours, what with all the weeping and despair, when suddenly she exclaimed, ‘Oh my lord, I’m so sorry. There it is! I was looking in the wrong place. I really should have been concentrating on my work instead of talking about food!’ And indeed, there my little boy was. A tiny pulse of light emerging from the screen’s fuzzy gloom, winking at me as if to say, ‘Mum, this restaurant thing is BONKERS.’

  ______________________

  3 Not their real names.

  — 16 —

  RESTAURANT OWNERSHIP AND OTHER BLOOD SPORTS

  Despite having no previous history of self-harm, many people still want to open their own hospitality business. On hearing of such things, wise industry elders will sigh deeply and lay aside their peyote tea and ceremonial pipe to invite these individuals to their fireside. They will proffer hard-won pearls of wisdom such as: ‘You’d be better off putting your money in a nice, safe term deposit.’ Or, ‘The average restaurant lasts a couple of years . . . if you’re lucky.’ Perhaps they’ll get all technical and tell you there seems little point risking hundreds of thousands of dollars starting a business that, if everything goes well, will make somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent profit a year.

  To no avail. All the lectures and spreadsheets in the world have yet to shift public suspicions that the restaurant game is primarily about sampling Champagne vintages, quaffing oysters and showing Veronica Lake to the best table in the house.

  Even those who breathe the super-oxygenated air of the obscenely wealthy are caught up in the excitement. Restaurants have triangulated vineyards and racehorses as a must-have badge of success, which pretty much sums up the only circumstances under which I’d like to own one: strictly as a hobby, on a par with owning a polo pony named Charley and a ‘sweet little yacht’ that sleeps twelve. A casual side-project for my egregiously wealthy alter ego, designed primarily to show off to my equally wealthy friends while solving the dilemma known as ‘what to do with the spare change down the back of the couch’. And if it all goes belly-up then I can just say, ‘Well, no harm done then, old chap. Now who’s up for a round of golf?’

  It’s far scarier that normal, everyday people who boast neither a stock portfolio nor a working definition of a chukkah still chase the Great Australian Hospitality Dream. Anyone without the luxury of being able to install a general manager before they jet off to St Barthes will quickly discover the reality that it is about as sophisticated as the exercise yard at an Indonesian prison. Only to people lucky enough not to work in them do restaurants remain ineffably glamorous. You will work like a navvy, earn much less than everyone thinks you earn—you will be judged cruelly for taking a $20 bottle of wine to a dinner party—and you will worry. And worry. And worry.

  It’s quite heroic, in a way. These hospitality dreamers are the inheritors of the impulse that launched people into the skies in the early days of aviation, or sent explorers to take on the Arctic in home-knitted jumpers. Everyone thinks THEY will be the one to make it work. THEY will be the one to have the whole town talking, THEY will be the insta-success that results in newspaper articles and queues down the street that necessitate the ultimate accessory: a doorperson with a clipboard taking names. You know how when the TV goes on the blink every family member wants a turn pressing the button on the remote control because they alone possess the special powers that will bring it back to life? Opening a restaurant is a lot like that.

  Some people are going to do okay out of it. Some are going to do more than okay. They’ll have a nice life, a great community and plenty of perks. But to those who’ve never put much skin in the game, the only conscionable advice is: don’t choose restaurants. Choose life. Choose decent hours and an existence untroubled by staff members who phone in sick on your first Saturday off in three months. Choose a regular income and freedom from grease traps that bubble up and leave the chefs working ankle-deep in rancid fat and the dining room evacuated like Dunkirk as customers gag into napkins. Choose the sanity of a profession where colleagues treat each other with courtesy and where marriages don’t break under the strain and you don’t fall asleep on the couch while the kids beg for a game of hide-and-seek because they haven’t seen you in a week.

  And after all that, if you still choose restaurants, if you are truly committed to consummating this union, then please do yourself and everyone you know a favour and just make sure you really, really, love them.

  Alternatively, you could take the halfway-house approach and encourage someone you know to open a restaurant. It’s pragmatically evil and ruthlessly self-interested but not a bad compromise. Sure, you’ll be going straight to hell but at least you’ll be taking your money with you. Remember how when you were in Year 9 you pushed your best friend into the arms of a questionable dude so you could get off with his much better-looking buddy? It’s like that, although to allay concerns about karmic payback, maybe it’s best to choose someone you don’t really like. A frenemy. An individual you secretly despise because they love being the big guy. They can’t afford slaves, or they live in a jurisdiction where slaves have been banned, so bossing around a bunch of waiters is the next best thing. You cook a mean dinn
er party, you tell your ‘friend’; you are preternaturally learned in the ways of fine wine and third-wave coffee. There has never been anyone in the history of the world more suited to opening a restaurant. A little encouragement in the right direction and soon you’ll be among the chosen ones sitting at your favourite spot at the bar, watching the yuppie hellstorm as people wearing I’m Friends With The Owner T-shirts materialise out of nowhere for their free slice of the action.

  * * *

  GUY

  A table of four pre-ordered a bottle of Grange so it could be decanted to allow it to air. They’re the kind of customers sommeliers appreciate. But when they arrived they asked for four glasses of lemonade, then emptied their lemonade into their glasses of Grange, making it the world’s most expensive cheap-arse lambrusco.

  * * *

  Statistics that I have just made up but am pretty sure are correct show restaurant owners are 40 per cent more popular than people who don’t own restaurants. Until they go out of business and then they’re 40 per cent less popular. People don’t like being around failure. It makes them feel bad.

  You should have seen the Rising Damp being cannibalised by hangers-on until it was a skeleton with little chunks of flesh clinging onto it. God it was beautiful. Even the owners were in on the action, because they trusted each other about as far as they could kick the ice machine. Each was convinced the others were getting more in the way of largesse so they upped their ante accordingly. It was like there was some sporting trophy at stake the way they gamed the place, bringing in friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends to eat and drink and grandiosely announce to the waiters to ‘put it all on my tab’ (the owners’ tab was known as table 69, naturally). By the end they were hardly on speaking terms with each other. But they sure as hell had a lot of grateful buddies.