Restaurant Babylon

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  Correction. Paul was the lowest of the low. He was the plongeur and he had, as was common in those days, learning difficulties. The poor bloke was subject to much more bullying and baiting than I was. I remember he was once bet £10 to eat his own shit sandwich, which he was only too willing to do, between two slices of bread. It was appalling. Eventually, he was pushed so hard that he snapped and punched the head chef during the middle of service. I have to say it was hard not to slap him on the back and congratulate the worm for turning at last. He was fired, of course, on the spot, but he did return to reap a delicious revenge.

  The night following Paul’s dismissal we had a banquet for some one hundred and fifty people. It was, naturally, coq au vin (it was a salubrious establishment) all prepared in flats (a stainless steel dish that contained ten portions of coq). The starters were back and the mains were away, when suddenly Frank comes steaming back into the kitchen shouting, ‘What the fuck is going on? What have you done to the coq au vin, chef?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied.

  ‘It tastes of fucking Domestos!’ he yelled back, his old champagne breath getting right up my nose.

  Transpires that Paul was a lot smarter than anyone ever gave him credit for and, as he’d collected his wages that day, he’d slipped a bottle of Domestos into the coq. The shit really hit the fan that night. One hundred and fifty mains were returned and another one hundred and fifty fillet steaks were cooked very medium rare (due to time constraints) and served with a selection of ropey old battoned carrots we happened to have in the fridge.

  But now I’ve got a bar, a brasserie, and a destination restaurant with a £3 million turnover and one star. Although the star is not mine, and nor does it belong to the restaurant, and when Andrew pisses off, which he will do next week, we’ll be crawling with Michelin inspectors checking to see if they’ll give it back. But still, it’s a long way from Kidderminster. It’s a long way from Frank and it’s a long way from the shit chef with a hard head and a penchant for dumping commis in the freezer.

  That’s what I like about the restaurant business, it is all about reinvention: Gordon, Heston, Marcus, Marco, the list goes on – we’re all boys from the provinces making it in the big smoke. There’s a touch of Dick Whittington syndrome in chef world; get it right and the streets of London really are paved with gold. Get it wrong and you end up in Norfolk!

  I can hear Adam’s Aussie twang from here as I turn the corner into Jackson Street. Le Bar was an old Edwardian town house that I spent rather too much money (half a million quid) gutting and transforming into the sort of place to attract the high-spending cocktail crowd. We get the art trade from Bond Street, we get fashionistas and the hairdressers from Bruton Street and we are close enough to Hanover Square to get the Condé Nast girls as they leave Totty Towers on their way home. They favour a cocktail called a Skinny Bitch – vodka, lime and soda – which has about as many calories at the three Haribo they’ve eaten all day.

  As you walk into Le Bar there’s a long glossy black bar to the right, with plenty of fat black leather perching stools nestled along its length. We have some low leather armchairs and small round cocktail tables with low-lit lamps on the left for couples and gangs of four. Towards the back, next to the indoor palms and taller standard lamps, there are larger soft sofas and more comfortable armchairs for the serious drinkers, as well as a couple of crimson-velvet booths with banquette seating which always go first. We serve a few small plates from the tiny basement kitchen, mainly chips, fish goujons and plates of honey-coated chipolatas, along with olives, nuts and Chinese cracker things that I find utterly unpalatable, but which seem to go down well with the Totty Towers crowd. The place works. We are turning over £70,000 a week. The lighting is low and the music is loud enough not to make conversation essential.

  ‘Thank Christ!’ declares Adam as I walk through the door. In his early thirties, slim and fit, with plenty of thick dark hair and pale eyes, Adam’s the sort of bloke girls write their phone number on. He’s funny, charming and knows how to work a room. He’s also got the stamina of an ox. He quite often stays up the whole night and kicks on through to the next day. The only way you’d know is his insistence on a Bloody Mary for breakfast.

  ‘Check this out,’ he says, nodding over his shoulder.

  I follow him through the swing doors and into the toilets at the back. The black and white checked floor is covered in about two inches of water, although the white tiled walls appear to be surviving; the light bulbs around the mirrors are working but in the middle of the row of three basins, one hangs limply from the wall, swinging on its own plumbing.

  Adam shakes his head. ‘Can you believe it? It’s totally rooted.’

  ‘It looks bad,’ I acknowledge.

  ‘I mean how fucking fat was she?’

  ‘How d’you know it was a big girl?’

  ‘Damon said he saw her go in with some chubby chaser.’ He nods. ‘Arse the size of Texas.’

  ‘What’s the water damage like?’ I can feel it beginning to seep into my leather-soled Church’s shoes.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ says Adam. ‘The plumber’s on his way and I’ll get the cleaners to mop up. We’ll be fine by lunch – before then, probably.’

  ‘Great,’ I cough, patting down my jacket pocket for my cigarettes. ‘A couple of bulbs there also need replacing in the mirrors and how are the toilets?’ I poke my head into the cubicle.

  Running any place like this is all about the details. Are the glasses clean? Is the bar shining? Why isn’t that curtain hanging properly? Why is that mirror dirty? What’s happened to that lampshade? When were the lavs last cleaned? Where’s the loo paper? Walk into any place with any restaurateur and they just can’t help themselves. Once glance of their gimlet eye and they’ll be able to spot a crooked painting, a smeared fork and an un-plumped cushion at sixty paces. We’re worse than any thin-lipped dowager duchess with OCD. My pet-hate? Trainers. Anyone who turns up in a pair of trainers gets sent home on the spot. I came in here last week and caught two of my staff wearing them behind the bar. I sent them both up to Oxford Street with £50 each to buy new shoes and personally shoved their best Nikes in the bin. I don’t give a shit. There are standards.

  My phone goes. ‘Oh, that’s the dealer,’ I say, checking the number. ‘He’s waiting for me down the road.’

  Adam shoots me a wink and taps the side of his nose. ‘Make mine two,’ he grins.

  7–8 a.m.

  Five minutes later and I’m slowly sinking deep into the front seat of Reza’s over-heated Mercedes. It must be about thirty degrees in here and half the seat springs are broken. The number of customer backsides must have given it repetitive strain injury. There is very little air in the car and what there is is laced with leather, flatulence and Magic Tree. I start to lick ten-pound notes off from a roll in my pocket, while he takes small paper packets out of a larger plastic bag.

  ‘This is top quality stuff,’ he sniffs, scratching his luxuriantly black sideburns. His fingernails are manicured and his left pinky is squeezed into a large flashy signet ring. ‘It was all harvested at dawn. Iranian,’ he adds. ‘The quality is so much better.’

  ‘I’ve gone right off the Spanish stuff,’ I agree, counting out another tenner. ‘It’s all adulterated. I am not paying fifty pounds for ten grams of floral waste.’

  ‘It’s cut with crap,’ he laughs, ‘but look at this …’ He opens up a small packet. ‘Red gold.’

  Reza’s been my saffron dealer for three years now. He’s an affable chap with his own delivery business to half the restaurants in the capital. He also deals caviar, which I do purchase occasionally, but now that the sturgeon’s been slaughtered into near extinction by the Russians up their end of the Caspian Sea, it seems a tad unethical to take it from the Iranians, just because they’ve got a few left. I know you can get farmed eggs these days from obscure places like Uruguay, and I think even the French are having a go. But I’m a fan of those old big blue caviar tins and ev
en those old yellow-lidded pots that the Russian sailors used to sell door-to-door fresh off the docks. Also, so much of it’s been tampered and played with now it’s often not worth the expense.

  Saffron, on the other hand, we seem to get through by the packet load. It is also not cheap, around £6,000 a kilo, but when you consider it takes five hundred thousand crocus flowers to produce one kilo, you can see why. The stigmas must be hand picked between dawn and ten in the morning – after that they lose their colour and scent. They are then dried and are ready for use. Iranian saffron is darker than its European cousin, an autumnal red, and the aroma is denser.

  ‘Wow,’ I say, inhaling the sweet spicy scent. ‘It smells fantastic. One hundred pounds for two?’

  ‘Perfect.’ He yawns. ‘Are you sure you don’t fancy some caviar?’

  ‘No thanks, mate.’

  ‘Isn’t Oscar starting this week?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I hear all the gossip.’ He grins, broadly flashing a gang of golden molars that are clearly doubling as his pension plan.

  ‘Starts today, in fact.’

  ‘He’s a nice man,’ he says, taking my fistful of tenners and counting them. ‘I remember him from before.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I agree, looking over the maroon velvet tissue box on the dashboard and into the cobbled mews beyond.

  There, sitting on the back doorstep of the restaurant, rolling up an unsuspicious-looking fag, is one of my commis chefs, Sean. I like Sean. He’s a young lad, full of Irish charm and in the early stages of Celtic tattoos. He’s got a couple of symbols on each forearm, the plug earring, the bolt through the eyebrow, and he occasionally comes in with various shaved areas on his head. He looks exhausted.

  ‘Thanks, Reza,’ I say, getting out of the car and pocketing the saffron. ‘I’ll give you a call soon.’ Closing the door behind me, I make my way towards Sean as he lights up. ‘You all right, mate?’ I say, raising my voice as I come down the alley. He looks over; his eyes are rimmed red and his face is ashen. ‘Been here long?’ He stares up at me and I am pretty sure he is trying to focus. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Oh, Boss!’ He nods. ‘Fine, mate, fine. I went out last night and I had some sleep but, you know, I thought I’d come in early.’

  Bollocks, I think, looking at him. I know a dirty stop-out when I see one and Sean’s come straight from a club. ‘Good,’ I lie. ‘Just so long as you’re OK. You’ve got a long shift to get through.’

  ‘Tip-top, Boss.’ He sniffs, exhaling his fag smoke in circular puffs.

  ‘You coming in?’ I ask, opening the back door.

  ‘One sec,’ he says, taking another large lug on his roll-up before flicking it across the cobbles.

  I’ve met the likes of Sean many times before; they’re all keen and interested in cooking, they’ve been to college, got the skills and come to London to become the next Gordon Ramsay, with their face on the telly, their home in a magazine, and a wife endlessly photographed endlessly shopping. But they get a bit distracted by the nightlife and the club scene on the way. I had one commis chef who started here eight months ago who used to pop an E up his arse at the beginning of service. He reliably informed Andrew that it made for an easy ride, putting it up the arse, and it meant he didn’t get too high too quickly. Being a relatively straight bloke from Bradford, Andrew took a dim view of this ‘entre nous’ and Chris, I think his name was, was out on his Eed-up backside before you could say ‘come down’.

  Talk to anyone in the business and they’ll tell you there’s plenty of drugs on the scene. Mainly coke and on both sides of the pass. The chefs are doing it to stay awake; the commis chefs are doing it out of exhaustion, misery and boredom; the maître d’s are chopping out because they’re hungover from the night before; the waiters are sharpening up before a shift – and out front there are punters, girlfriends, wives, partners (both business and sexual) all hungry for a line along with their wine. It’s rife. It’s London. It’s everywhere. We’re forever getting the Evening Standard hacks coming in to swab our toilets during London Fashion Week. It’s tiresome. They just can’t help themselves; it’s quite sad really that they can’t come up with another idea.

  But coke is mainly rife in those hip places where the food is secondary to the fun: brasseries, chains, places where they flip burgers, flatten chickens and fry courgettes into chips. There, the turnover and the atmosphere are as high as the crowd and so are the chefs backstage.

  It is less usual, although obviously not unheard of, in a Michelin-starred kitchen. Although who can forget the sad death of David Dempsey, head chef at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, who fell from a block of flats after a night out on cocaine? But when you’ve got stars and staff and a soufflé that goes up or down in three and half minutes, you tend to be too much of a control freak to be under the influence of anything. Although I did hear recently that one of the hottest chefs in town at the moment has succumbed to the blow and you can begin to taste it in his cooking. It’s not quite so precise, not quite so perfect as before. But the pressure to be good and stay at the top of your game is usually reason enough to ‘just say no’ and focus. Just ask Gordon and Marco. I was told they were both ‘far too square’ to take drugs – unlike myself, who has always been a little bit partial.

  In the old days, I remember spending many an early morning quite literally sniffing my away around Covent Garden market, apologizing for my terrible ‘cocktail cold’ while feeling up the cavolo nero. We’d have loads of nights out on the pop and chop – champagne and cocaine – and lock-ins were a regular thing in the first West End restaurant I worked in, learning to turn potatoes and pick bloody frisée lettuce for fifteen hours a day.

  But things have changed, as indeed has Covent Garden. Andrew or I might still pop down there for a few essentials but we are much more likely now to use our own suppliers. We used to use Secretts, Greg Wallace’s place just outside Godalming. They have great asparagus, but they’ve got a bit pricey for us, so we’ve moved on to Rushtons The Chef’s Greengrocers who, although they have a place in New Covent Garden, deliver to our door.

  We spend about £20,000 a year on veg but over £400,000 a year on meat, plus fish and wine. These are big contracts and you’d have thought that suppliers would be keen to keep them. But we had this bastard bloke who was always late with his order and consistently overweighed his produce, gently charging us a little extra every time, so we’ve recently moved to H. G. Walter in West Kensington, who supply The River Café. The legendary Caff, of course, gets first dibs at everything. The nicest grouse, the best partridge, the springiest lamb. But they’ve been with them for years and are the sort of restaurant that uses a whole prime £20 chicken to make even their most basic stocks; so you can’t really begrudge them their top spot in the queue.

  We’re looking into our fish supplier at the moment. Last week the turbot came packed in a whole load of ice that, strangely, seemed to be included in the price. And when you’re paying nearly £25 a kilo for one of the ugliest fish around and they include the ice, you know you can’t trust the sod. So I am thinking of moving to this new bloke who apparently buys directly off the boats in Essex. Ben’s Fish, I think he’s called. You speak to him in the morning, he’ll tell you what he thinks they are bringing in and it arrives shiny and spanking fresh (ice not included) at around four that afternoon. He does a few places in the Islington area at the moment, Moro, St John and Trullo, and I’m debating whether to join them. Boat to plate in less than eight hours is a good USP. Most of the fish we get at the moment is at least twenty-four hours old.

  With ingredients, it’s all about freshness and provenance. The organic argument is a little bit supermarket. In the trade, husbandry and where you’re sourcing your supply is far more important. Either your restaurant is completely organic or it’s not. There’s simply no point in shoving the word ‘organic’ in front of a dish or an ingredient and hoping it’s going to impress the henna brigade – it just makes the place look amateur. Wh
ether your beef has been butchered and hung properly and where it came from are far more important. And contrary to what the layman might think, if any of us comes across a great supplier or a source of good meat, we are much more likely to share the contact than hoard it. Great suppliers are rare and they need to be nurtured and encouraged, otherwise they go out of business. The more restaurants use the good ones, the more likely they are to survive.

  Equally, there’s nothing like a few charlatans to really put you off your coddled eggs. There’s always a crooked supplier, and plenty of crooked chefs, to keep you on your toes. The oldest trick in the book is for the chef to over order and to sell on out the back. In one of the places where I used to work, the head chef was on a percentage from the fish guy. The fish would be delivered, and a third of it would disappear and be sold on. Then the delivery guy and the chef would split the proceeds fifty-fifty. He was only caught because another delivery bloke wanted in on the scam and when they refused, he shopped them both.

  As an owner you have to be on it all the time, checking the invoices and watching the stock, otherwise you’ll wake up one day to a terrible surprise. I remember my first boss in London told me how he went to dinner once at his head chef’s flat only to find his tables, his chairs, his cutlery, his salt and pepper pots all making an appearance. His chef had lifted the lot from the restaurant. He even ended up tucking into his own meat.

  ‘I can tell you what we ate,’ he told me. ‘Pork and fucking prunes. I have never been able to eat it since.’ Eventually he fired the bloke when he worked out that he’d paid for seventy-five turkeys one Christmas and had only served twenty-five lunches.

  Theft is as rife as drugs in this business, but there are levels. Some theft is acceptable, expected even, like light-fingered bar staff walking off with the odd bottle of house white, customers pocketing the pepper or walking out with a wine bucket under their jumper, pretending to be pregnant. And some, such as my last barman, selling my wine out the back of Le Bar, or the waitress who stole £5,000 from my office, is patently not. But you live, you learn – and you watch everyone like a bloody hawk. And if something doesn’t tally up, or look right, then it invariably isn’t.