The Idler

Kitchen

For a time, struggling as a quasi-legal immigrant writer in the East Anglian hinterland, I worked in a restaurant owned by a chef whose name one would undoubtedly recognize were I not bound by the terms of a hastily signed nondisclosure agreement.

The food prepared by this chef, whose name I’m sure one would instantly recognize, was pretty decent, and I unfortunately have no sordid tales of ants in the pudding or mice in the oven.

However, the military machine that this chef, who I know you know, had put together was quite astonishing and disturbing. Large, burly, often German men managed the restaurant’s various rooms and bars, while the chef-in-chief was an actual shouting, cursing Frenchman.

Because of last year’s well-known East Anglian labour shortage, the restaurant was forced to hire just about every warm body it could Hoover up with the aid of a classified ad in the Eastern Daily Press. People with odd numbers of limbs, folks who admitted that the mere sight of china plates sent them into epileptic fits and yes, even quasi-legal immigrant writers
were taken on.

Needless to say, the first mildly busy day was a disaster, with a barely trained staff trying to keep up with the increasing amounts of gourmet food coming out of the kitchen and, four to five times out of 10, ending up in front of the correct starving diner. Starving, because he or she had been waiting for epic amounts of time for his/her gammon steak with free-range egg. Multilingual swearing reached new heights of expression, and I was dispatched to hose down the walls and scrape all the spilt sticky toffee pudding off the floors.

Things eventually settled down, but more horrors were slower-developing. I will not attempt to describe, for example, the agony of polishing silverware for a five-course meal attended by 300 friends of a chef whom you most definitely know.

By the way, the chef whose name you have undoubtedly guessed by now was a frequent diner in her own restaurant (though, funnily enough, I never saw her behind the stove). The chef’s favourite dish? Beer-battered cod and chipped potatoes, or as some people call it, fish ‘n’ chips.

Anon