Restaurant Babylon

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  ‘I was thinking sardines,’ says Oscar.

  ‘They’re a lot cheaper than turbot,’ I enthuse.

  ‘Sardines? Who the fuck wants to eat sardines? They are itty and bitty and full of bones—’

  ‘And flavour,’ adds Oscar. ‘With cucumber, beetroot and razor clams.’

  ‘Great,’ I smile.

  ‘If you’re a fucking dolphin,’ says Andrew.

  ‘Robuchon does it,’ says Oscar.

  ‘Robuchon … Robuchon.’ Andrew’s head is moving side to side slightly like a chicken. ‘Are you sure you’ve got it down properly?’ He can hardly contain his sneer.

  Although some chefs are famously generous with their recipes – and Gordon is one of them – there are others who can be a little bit more devious, withholding vital ingredients or specific techniques, just to fuck you up at the final furlong. But the world of top-drawer chefs is so small, most of them at some stage have cooked in each or everyone’s kitchen. Gordon trained with Marco, Jean Christophe trained with Marco, Marco trained with Raymond and Albert, Heston trained with Marco and Raymond for about three weeks in total, and then Jason Atherton, Marcus Wareing, Angela Hartnett and Mark Sargent all trained with Gordon who also trained with Albert. And so it goes on.

  ‘Of course I’ve got it down properly!’ Oscar looks indignant. ‘I didn’t spend a year sweating my bollocks with Robuchon to learn nothing! What else do you think I have been doing for the past twenty-two months in France if it wasn’t going from kitchen to kitchen, looking at the way they do things, watching how they work, how they plan, how they manage, picking up tips, writing them down?’ He slams his hand down on his notebook, the tops of his ears bright red with anger.

  ‘All right, fucking Ratatouille, what else have you got?’ Andrew nods at the book. ‘Go on …’

  We are, obviously, like every other place blazing any sort of trail, a ‘seasonal’ restaurant, and we try and update our menu according to what is available and fresh, but you have to be careful. It’s not so much we have that many ‘signature dishes’ but there are certain things that people expect to see on the menu when they come here. We’ve always got a bit of pigeon, a loin of venison, and a beef shank, and then you’ve got to have some fish for the ladies because they are much more likely to order fish than anything else, plus a couple of stalwart puds. Equally, you want to keep the thing fresh and looking alive. There is nothing worse than a totally moribund menu that looks like the chef’s been churning out the same old shit for months. It needs to feel like an old friend with some interesting news. You’ve also got to keep your eye on the weather. There’s nothing like a couple of hot weeks in May when you’ve still got a heavy wintery menu to completely ruin the GP. Equally you don’t sell many salads when it snows. But changing the menu can give you all sorts of problems. You can’t overtax the kitchen with too many new moves and ideas because the chefs won’t thank you for it. So you have to move relatively slowly, much like you’re turning around a heavily laden tanker, rather than a slick and well-oiled machine.

  ‘Hello, ladies!’ I look up to see Jorge waving both hands at me as he strides towards the back table with shiny shoed purpose. ‘Lovely day for it.’

  ‘For what?’ says Andrew, staring hard at Jorge, his lank hair hanging in a centre parting.

  ‘Whatever you want, darling,’ smiles Jorge. He goes over and gives Andrew a kiss on his cheek. Andrew hates it when Jorge kisses him, which is, of course, the reason why Jorge continues to do so.

  Jorge is my maître d’ and has been ever since we opened. He is camper than a Strictly Come Dancing judge and loved by everyone – except Andrew. Slim, dark and handsome, with hips as narrow as a pencil, he can work an Armani suit better than any straight man I know and he comes from southern Spain.

  ‘Jorge, d’you remember Oscar?’

  ‘Of course I do!’ He claps his hands together with delight. ‘I took him to his first gay club!’

  ‘No you didn’t,’ says Oscar, his ears pinking again.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’d been to the Shadow Lounge before?’ Jorge whispers, putting his finger to his lips. ‘Well, I never, you naughty thing.’ He looks Oscar up and down. ‘It is always the quiet ones!’

  ‘Jorge, you are incorrigible,’ I say.

  ‘If I knew what that meant, baby, I’d thank you,’ he says, walking through the swing doors into the kitchen. ‘All right, ladies?’ He greets the brigade in the same manner he greets everyone.

  ‘Morning, Jorge,’ comes the mumbled reply.

  Andrew knocks back his water and slams his glass back down on the large round table. ‘So just the sardines …?’

  ‘Well, I have a few other things,’ suggests Oscar. ‘A ceviche—’

  ‘A ceviche?’ Andrew yawns. ‘You went to France and came back with a ceviche?’

  ‘I was thinking of adding some foie gras to your pigeon.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my fucking pigeon!’

  ‘Snails with morels?’

  Andrew rolls his eyes. ‘Let’s stick to what we’ve got, shall we?’

  Oscar closes his book. He is smart enough not to push it. Andrew has one week left before he hangs up his whites in this kitchen and it’s simply not worth the tantrums and tiaras to pursue his own agenda just yet. I am not sure where Andrew’s going, but no doubt he’ll turn up somewhere. People like Andrew always do. They get given jobs on past glories, although how long they last in them is a different matter. But then London is littered with chefs who move from one job to another, some through disagreement, some because they want to try something new. It is not an industry that hands out carriage clocks and gold watches. If you stay ten years in a place people think you are a little odd. It’s good to move. Although few walkouts were quite as spectacular as Ben Spalding’s recent departure from John Salt; despite garnering great reviews for his twelve-course tasting menu, he marched. And he marched citing ‘creative differences’, in a manner not dissimilar to Johnnie Mountain huffing off after being humiliated by a rather smug Marcus Wareing on Great British Menu. There is nothing more flouncy than a chef with his nose out of joint.

  ‘Oh my God!’ exclaims Jorge, coming back through the kitchen door. ‘I can’t believe it! Sean!’ he says simply, and shakes his head. ‘Who would have thought it!’

  ‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’ I reply.

  ‘What?’ asks Andrew, looking from Jorge to me. He hates not coming to gossip when it’s piping hot.

  ‘Sean came in off his nuts on Special K and had a shit fit in the kitchen and has had to leave. He found the cauliflower terrifying!’ Jorge ticks each element off his slim fingers and then raises an eyebrow. Given his fondness for the local botoxeria, I am amazed his still can.

  ‘Is he OK?’ asks Oscar.

  ‘Does that mean I’m a man down?’ says Andrew.

  ‘Yes.’ I nod at Andrew. ‘And who knows?’ I reply to Oscar. ‘And before anyone says anything I am not getting any agency drones in at short notice. I’m pretty sure we can pick up another commis chef by tomorrow and, in the meantime, you can manage.’

  ‘Manage?’ Andrew gets up and walks past me like some sort of surly teenager in search of his games console, his shoulders hunched, his lank hair hanging like curtains either side of his face. He looks like an unkempt Afghan hound. And he’s got BO. The acrid wave follows after him, turning the air sour. God knows how he gets laid so much. It’s completely astonishing. I’ll never understand women – but with two divorces under my belt at the age forty-five, that’s a given.

  Oscar follows on afterwards. I have a feeling this is going to be a day from hell. I need a really strong cup of coffee, something that will kick me hard in the kidneys to keep me awake. That, and at least a cigarette.

  ‘Oh my God!’ exclaims Jorge. At the other end of the restaurant, I jump. ‘Nooo!’ he continues with a long loud sigh as he pores over the front of house computer system. I stare down the restaurant at his hunched silhouette, backlit by the
weak wintery sun, as he slowly drags his fingertip across the screen. ‘What a total cunt!’ His head rolls to one side. He puts his hands on his hips. ‘A total cunt. Why do people do this? Why? What is the point of it all?’ He throws his hands in the air with exasperation.

  ‘What’s the matter, Jorge?’

  ‘I cannot believe it! Some shit has given us a terrible review on TripAdvisor.’

  ‘TripAdvisor? How bad?’

  ‘One star.’

  ‘One! The cunt. Let me see!’

  9–10 a.m.

  Jorge and I huddle around the computer reading the review from ‘Moleman’ on TripAdvisor. The man is clearly a tosser. He describes our décor as ‘outdated’, our service as ‘rude and surly’; he even goes so far as to say that Jorge himself was ‘aloof and patronizing’. Needless to say, Jorge is outraged.

  ‘I’m sure I know which little bastard did this. He was fat, with small eyes like a little pink pig,’ he says, as his nostrils flare. ‘He complained about everything. He sent back the wine.’

  ‘I hate it when people do that,’ I sigh. ‘Like they have any idea what corked wine actually tastes like? It is quite unusual these days for wine to be corked, mostly because the stuff this sort of cheapskate arse orders comes with a screw top! But this is the worst bit.’ I scroll down the review. ‘“I was shocked”,’ I read out loud. ‘“They didn’t have tongs for the bread. This is a Michelin-starred restaurant and we had to pick the bread out of the basket with our hands!” Not their bare hands! Honestly, it’s like being in the seventies. Who has tongs for the bread? No one, except bloody First Class bloody British Airways and The bloody Hilton?’

  ‘What do they want? Gloves!’ Jorge joins in.

  ‘Well …’ I turn to look at him. ‘No tongs.’

  ‘Tongs!’ he repeats, with a look of contemptuous disgust.

  You’d be amazed how much we take bad online reviews to heart, and you’d also be surprised at how much they can affect business. All you need is a couple of snide ones on Toptable, or the Time Out website, and people start calling a little less frequently. Then suddenly you find your sales slipping – and all because some idiot wanted tongs for his sodding bread. I bloody hate those websites. And unless the reviews are libellous they won’t take them down. At least in the old days you knew who the critics were. You could grab the spankingest freshest fish with the brightest eyes (like some vacuous beauty queen banging on about world peace) the moment you saw Jonathan Meades rolling through the front door in search of a free lunch and some fine wines. But everyone’s a sodding critic now and everybody takes bloody photos of the food.

  Adam came back from a weekend in Denmark about a fortnight ago, having managed to squeeze his slim behind in for a dinner at Noma. He said the whole experience irritated the tits off him. Firstly, he was forced to eat a symphony of onions as there was bugger all to be foraged in the Danish countryside in deepest, darkest November and, secondly, the place was full of ‘Japs snapping their bloody food’. He’d moaned a lot about it. ‘Why can’t they just eat the stuff instead of photographing it? Who’s interested in a photo of food that someone else is about to eat?!’ But then again, he’s Australian, and clearly not a bloke of the Instagram age. Although he’s not alone in his hatred of food bloggers. Michel Roux gets very huffy if people start taking snaps of his creations, insisting that they should ask the permission of the chef. It is also banned in many restaurants in the States. I’m sure they’d cite creative reasons or something like culinary copyright, although no such thing exists, but really it’s because it is extremely bloody irritating. And talking of irritating, anyone who follows what people are saying about their restaurant on Twitter is insane. You need the skin of a rhino to put #yourplace into the Twittersphere, because what comes back will make you want to weep.

  ‘OK, that bloody does it!’ I declare, my jaw clenching and my blood gently coming to simmering point.

  ‘Oh no!’ Jorge leans in closer. ‘Is that an actual photo of the bread basket?’

  ‘Yup,’ I nod. ‘A bread basket with no tongs.’

  ‘It looks good,’ announces Jorge. ‘Nice selection.’

  ‘Of course it’s good! This is a bloody Michelin-starred fucking restaurant! It was handmade by Giovanna that bloody morning. It could not be any fresher or any more delicious if it shagging tried.’

  ‘But no tongs,’ shrugs Jorge.

  ‘No.’ I reach in my back pocket and pull out my mobile. ‘That’s it. I’m calling Caroline.’

  ‘Good idea,’ nods Jorge.

  Caroline is my very blonde, very pretty, very well-connected PR. She’s been on my books for three years, ever since we got our star, and she costs me £3,500 a month to retain on a print and social media basis. She has about another twenty-five clients on her books and spends her whole life eating out in restaurants. She never normally answers her phone before nine thirty, but this is an emergency.

  ‘Caz here,’ she drawls down the phone in a voice dripping with fags, fun and a £35,000-a-year private education.

  ‘Morning, Caz.’

  ‘Hi, daaaarling, how are you? I was just thinking about you. We’re coming in to see you this morning, are we? Is it ten or eleven? I was just cranking up the old BlackBerry to check.’

  ‘Eleven.’

  ‘Great, fabulous, just one thing, da-a-rling, I’ll be on my tod as Ev’s got to go to this new place we’re looking after around the corner. They think they’ve got bloody Adrian bloody Gill coming in for lunch today and they’ve only got three other bookings. So it’s an all-hands-on-deck moment, and half the office are going down to pad out the tables and make the place look super popular.’

  ‘Really? Don’t you think he’ll think it’s weird that most of the diners are thin, blonde and in their early twenties?’

  ‘You’re shitting me, right?’

  ‘Er, no.’ What is it with posh girls and swearing? It’s like a form of Tourette’s with them. They feel compelled to put at least three naughty words into every sentence.

  ‘He’s a bloke, da-a-arling. He’ll just be delighted he doesn’t have to look at Jeremy Clarkson for the whole of lunch.’

  ‘Every cloud,’ I reply.

  ‘I know, darling,’ she laughs. ‘And you know we’d do the same for you. Only we’d never have to,’ she adds quickly, ‘because you’re the hottest ticket in town. Right up there, darling, with Dabbous and Balthazar.’

  ‘Not quite,’ I say. ‘One you can’t get a table at until hell freezes over, and the other you wouldn’t want a table at even if hell did freeze over.’

  ‘Actually,’ she corrects, ‘I had a fabulous dinner at Balthazar just the other day. Jude Law was there, as was Cara Delevingne—’

  ‘I always find the food tastes so much better when there are famous people in the room.’

  ‘Totally,’ agrees Caroline, sidestepping my attempt at sarcasm. ‘Anyway, darling …?’

  ‘We have a bit of a problem.’

  ‘Right?’

  ‘Some twat has give us a bad review on TripAdvisor.’

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘One star.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘It goes on and on, picking us to pieces, and there is a picture of our bread basket, without tongs.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with the price of anything?’

  ‘Just read the review and you’ll see.’

  ‘So, TripAdvisor?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Leave it with me. I’ll get the office to deal with it.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Bury it, darling, bury it. We’ll give you so many five-star reviews from the office it’ll be pushed down to the next page by eleven thirty at the latest. See you in a bit.’ She hangs up.

  I think I love Caroline. She’s the best £3,500 investment per month I’ve ever made. She is the same price as my second wife and a lot less hassle. I pat Jorge on the shoulder as I walk towards the kitchen. I need a cigarette out the back to cel
ebrate my minor victory over the world of tosserdom.

  My delight and small victory over the world of idiots is short lived. I walk through the surprisingly quiet kitchen. Both Oscar and Andrew are on the pass, making sure all the chopped herbs, spices and garnishes are in place. You’d be amazed at how many ‘seasoning’ options a chef needs. In the left-hand corner there are small silver containers of parsley, chives, chervil, dill, ginger, lemon purée and capers. Next to them is another selection including pistachios, walnuts, smoked almonds, shallot confit, toasted pine nuts, breadcrumbs and sea salt; there are doilies for wiping down each plate as it goes out and a bowl of water to dip the doilies in. All of these ingredients are supposed to be made fresh before service but some, I suspect, hang around for a day or two or three. Although some of them don’t ever make it through a whole service, as everyone helps themselves to the smoked almonds throughout the day.

  Outside I bump into Emmanuel, or Manu, who is sorting through piles of stinking rubbish. A gentle giant from the Congo, he’s worked with me ever since Le Restaurant opened. I stole him from Chris Bodker’s old place, The Avenue, where Manu and I were working together before I set up on my own. We have both been around the block a few times, and there is little he has not seen. He works an eight-hour shift for me, arriving to scrub down the kitchen at seven each morning and he leaves at three in the afternoon after he has washed and cleaned every single plate, glass, pot, pan, knife and fork in the place. He then does a shift for London Transport, driving a bus, which he finishes at around eight.

  Manu is a quiet, charming bloke who’s raised three daughters on his own and I often think he is the perfect response for those who argue against immigration. He works twice as hard as anyone I have ever employed and he’s legal and been living and paying taxes in this country for the past seventeen years. Granted, he is a bit of an anathema in the industry that has survived and thrived on illegal immigration for years. Although the days of employees using fake names and working off emergency National Insurance numbers are more or less over. Restaurants and hotels used to be rammed to the rafters with cowering monoglots of interchangeable origin, who were used, abused, paid about £2 an hour, and who barely ever got home to sleep. Most of the time you never quite managed to catch their name. In fact, you didn’t care what they were called, just so long as they did their job and didn’t annoy you too much. They were regularly baited just to amuse the senior staff. I remember one poor Algerian bloke who worked as a plongeur in a large kitchen I worked in being forced to eat a whole orange, peel and all. What he didn’t know was that it had been laced with Tabasco. He ended up in hospital because he couldn’t stop vomiting.