Restaurant Babylon

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  I remember also a rather large elderly granny keeling over when I was working in a hotel one long, miserable summer holiday in Brighton. We had coachloads of grannies turning up for an all-inclusive afternoon tea and a dance. They’d arrive, bus-fresh, a symphony of pistachio-coloured slacks, pale purple bubble perms and soft beige shoes, exuding an odd aroma of Blue Grass, talcum powder and dust. They’d have a cup of tea and then dance to music blasted out of an old giant tape recorder sitting on a table in the corner of the room. All the women would partner each other because, or so it appeared, all the men were already dead. They’d then tuck into a cream tea before being ferried off again. Anyway, I recall a large lady making an odd squeaking noise before falling head first into her scone and another waiter and I having to haul her out of the dining room into the reception area. It was quite an odd experience, because after we’d cleaned the cream off her face we were told just to leave her there, lying on a sofa, and go back to serving the tea. By the time I had finished with the cream and scones, the body had gone.

  I had a friend who worked at Bibendum a while back when some woman collapsed in the cloakroom. She was lying on the ground, on the verge of death, being attended to by a couple of waiting staff, while someone kept a lookout for the ambulance, when another couple came in demanding their coats. My friend tried to explain the situation, asking them to hang on for a few minutes. But they were having none of it. They were in a hurry, they insisted. No time to spare. So, stepping over the body, they collected their coats, claiming they simply couldn’t wait any longer.

  ‘I am sorry to sound a little weird,’ mumbles Michelangelo out of the corner of his mouth as he walks past with a bottle of Atal Sia, Chateau Ollieux-Romanis, ‘but I think that old man is dead.’ He nods over his shoulder towards Table Six. ‘He hasn’t moved for ten minutes.’

  ‘We were just thinking that,’ agrees Jorge.

  ‘Your wine, sir,’ exclaims Michelangelo loudly, bringing the bottle to a nearby table.

  ‘Shall I go? I should go, I should really go. I’m the maître d’. But …’ Jorge turns to me, a pitiful, pleading look on his face. ‘Can you?’

  I pat him on the back. ‘Don’t worry.’

  I approach the table just as they are finishing off their starters. Needless to say, the plate in front of the old man has not been touched. They all watch me as I arrive, the mother smiles.

  ‘Everything all right?’

  I am not exactly sure what to say. Is he dead? Sounds a little brutal. What’s up with Granddad? Sounds a little crass.

  The mother replies with a wide smile on her face. ‘It’s delicious, thank you so much. Absolutely delicious.’

  ‘My sweetbreads were fantastic,’ says the father.

  ‘Where did you get the crab?’ continues the mother. ‘Is it Dorset? We used to spend a lot of time in Dorset.’

  ‘Yes, it is Dorset crab.’

  I nod and smile. There’s a pause as we all look at each other, waiting for someone to say something, broach the subject of Grandpa sitting there, with his head back, his eyes closed and his mouth wide open.

  ‘And your father, did he enjoy …?’ I look at the husband.

  ‘My father,’ interrupts the wife, as she leans in and lowers her voice. ‘Sadly, he didn’t manage to eat any of it before he died.’

  ‘So he is dead.’ I glance briefly over at the body.

  She nods. ‘Before the starter.’

  ‘Shall I ring for an ambulance?’

  ‘Isn’t that for people who are still alive?’ asks the elder boy.

  The mother leans further over. ‘We don’t want a fuss, honestly. We’ve been looking forward to this lunch, all of us together, for quite some time. He used to love these pre-Christmas treats. And it would disturb everyone else’s lunch to move him now. We don’t mind, if you don’t. We don’t want a fuss, you see. Nothing worse than a fuss.’

  I stand for a second, not sure what to say. She is perfectly right, of course. It would be a right pain to move him in the middle of lunch. The ambulance would have to be called and the tables moved to get the corpse out. It would be a palaver. And put the other diners right off their lunch. But I am not sure I could possibly sit there eating my crab salad with my expired father sitting next to me.

  ‘OK,’ I say, rather weakly. It is hard to think what to do in this situation with jägerbomb brain.

  She nods at me. ‘When it all quietens down we can move him.’

  ‘If that’s what you’d prefer.’ I turn a little hesitantly.

  ‘Excuse me,’ says the mother, leaning her head to one side.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Could you clear his plate?’

  I pick up the untouched crab salad, trying not to get too close to the rapidly chilling corpse. The idea of his cold, dank skin gives me the shivers, but I still can’t resist a look. His eyes are not completely closed, they hover a few millimetres apart and underneath, between his short sparse eyelashes, you can see the drying whites of his eyes. His mouth is ajar, but weirdly silent, and alongside his worn yellow teeth lies his long, grey motionless tongue.

  ‘Jamie!’ the mother says to her son, picking up her fork. ‘I can’t believe you’ve left one of your scallops! Hang on.’ She nods at me, before popping a scallop into her mouth and handing me the plate to clear.

  Never have I been more grateful to get into a steaming hot kitchen in my life. I walk though the doors, lean flat against the wall and exhale. I just need to take a moment, before getting out there again with my best service-industry smile back in place.

  ‘I hear we’ve got a dead body,’ says Andrew on the pass.

  ‘Anything to do with your cooking?’ jokes Barney, from the far corner of the kitchen.

  ‘Fuck off,’ quips Andrew.

  ‘When they said lunch was dead, I didn’t think they meant it literally,’ laughs Matt, as he chucks a rabbit loin into a small blackened frying pan. He looks up; half the kitchen has turned to stare at him. ‘What?’ he says, looking a little worried. It’s honestly the first joke he’s cracked since he’s been here.

  ‘Funny,’ says Barney with an appreciative nod.

  And true. Lunch is dead. Well, not completely Grandpa dead, but certainly not as lively and perky as it once was. It depends where you are, obviously. In the West End you can still get a full lunch service in places owned by Richard Caring and Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, Dean St Townhouse, Polpo – all Russell Norman’s places – Brasserie Chavot, Angela Hartnett’s Murano, and fabulous tapas places, like Fino, have them queuing round the block. But even in those places, which are packed and bustling, lunch is not what it was. As business cuts back on expense accounts and we worry more about our waistlines, so the three-bottle lunch for two is no more. The long, languid afternoon boozathon that ended in brandies and stickies and a couple of puds is now much more likely to be a salad and a jug of bloody tap. The tables are booked, the bums are on the seats, but no one’s really getting stuck in. The leisurely drunk lunch is a distant memory, it’s like smoking inside, we’ve forgotten how to do it.

  Out of the West End, there are little pockets of lunchtime success around. Notting Hill and Chelsea somehow manage to keep their end up during the week. Bill Grainger on Westbourne Grove is rammed to the rafters with blow-dried women in skinny jeans, who merrily queue up to build their own stacked salad for £16 and spend the next hour and a half flicking it around a plate.

  But as Will Ricker once said, ‘It’s all about the women.’ And out of the West End he is completely right. His restaurant E&O has been a ladies lunching favourite since it opened in 2001. Patronized by the likes of Claudia Schiffer, Stella McCartney, Kate Moss and Sadie Frost, it is always full. There used to be a gang of girls who descended there every Friday for a ‘naughty girls’ lunch’ that would go on and on until the early evening. Their children were collected by a large Addison Lee minibus and dropped off at the restaurant, lest the school run interfered with the cocktails.

  Des
ign a menu for women with plenty of salad and fish and naughty fried bits that they can eat alongside the salad and the fish, and shove in a couple of bloke dishes, and hopefully the girls will come. And where the girls go, the boys follow. Or at least their husbands do, because women are much more likely to book the lunch or indeed the night out than the men. They decide the social life and where to go, they make the call and the bloke usually does what he is told. So if you capture the female market and cater with them in mind, you get the men as well.

  We’re trying to get women in here at the moment. We’ve got a table of six of them arriving in about five minutes as one of Caz’s promotional ideas. She’s organized a series of PA lunches in the last few weeks where we’ve invited PAs from local companies for a free lunch so that when it comes to booking a table for their boss, they’ll suggest us over anywhere else. It is hard to see if the strategy is working just yet, but a table full of women is always preferable to one groaning with blokes.

  Women are also easier to sell to. I remember when I was learning the front-of-house ropes, I was taught to sell to the girls rather than the boys. ‘Women,’ so Spencer, the maître d’, told me, ‘are the weakest link.’ He was giving me a lecture on how to get the profit up on a table when people aren’t ordering. They’ve ordered their main course, but it’s steak and sea bass and the inevitable jug of tap. The GP on that is useless: too many expensive ingredients and not enough margin. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you target the women and try and sell them stuff. They’ll always pass on a pudding, but you can probably get a cappuccino in there and, with one cappuccino, at least another three mint teas follow. And once you’ve got the mint teas, go back to the pudding. They’ve committed to sit there longer, there’s at least a “one to share” to be slotted in there. Or even a little something. If they’ve had a drink, you can usually persuade them to have a glass of something on top. Champagne is always good, so suggest it, let them think they’re getting it for free, on the house, and then pop it on the bill.’

  Spencer was a whizz at popping things on the bill. He’d chance anything – an extra bottle of wine here, a starter, some coffees, a couple of extra cocktails. He always said that no one ever checked their bill properly and he’s right. They really don’t. There are those who will give it the quick once-over while deep in conversation, but mostly customers don’t. It is almost like it’s too grubby or embarrassing to check, a little bit bourgeois, so they wrap the bill around their credit card and hand it over, like a turd on a stick, without even looking at how much they’re about to pay. We could have added three bottles of claret for all they care. And with Spencer in charge, we had. Occasionally you get a retentive with a pencil who goes through the lot, totting it up on his mobile phone, and he is usually accompanied by a table of losers who ‘didn’t have a starter’. Spencer’s philosophy for that was simple: if they noticed and he got caught out, all he needed do was turn on the charm and apologize profusely. He’d whip the bill away, take the offending item off immediately, offer you a small, sickly shot of limoncello and charge it all to someone else who was too pissed to notice.

  Woe betide anyone who asked him to come up with recommendations when ordering their food or who asked him to bring a few ‘bits and pieces’ along, ‘for the table’. He’d take this as carte blanche to load your bill up with as many ‘bits and pieces’ as he thought he could get away with, and charge you accordingly. But the customers loved him because he was the life and soul.

  We are right in the heat of service at the moment and judging by the Call Away Sheet, the timing in the kitchen is beginning to slip. There’s currently twenty-five minutes between the starter and the main, with one table having slipped to thirty.

  ‘What happened here?’ I ask Luca whose table it is as he comes through the door.

  ‘Oh.’ He rolls his eyes, as he stands at the pass, loading his tray. ‘Table Four, there is a man who does not stop the bloody talking. He takes a rest in the middle of his starter. Telling some great long story, so long that Alfonso has to recook a bloody fish.’

  ‘Cunt,’ says Andrew. ‘Waste of fucking turbot.’

  ‘Turbot? Cunt,’ I agree.

  There is nothing like someone taking too long over their starter to knock the kitchen off course. As soon as your starter goes out, the kitchen is ‘mains away’ or, as they say in the US, ‘fire the mains’. Say the sole takes ten minutes, they start the pasta, the meat is resting, the garnish is being heated, someone’s on the burrata – they all have to come up to the hot plate at the same time and go out. But if you’re not finished with the starter, the meat can sit, as can the pasta (for a few minutes) but the fish can’t go cold. And unless the waiter gets back in the next few minutes the stuff has to be binned and then the kitchen is another ten minutes behind, because the sole takes ten minutes.

  You can always tell when the head chef is losing his timings and control of the kitchen. Like an air-traffic controller who’s lost the plot, they’ll stand at the pass and do a slow 360-degree turn, and come back to the same plate they were holding in the first place, having done nothing. Fortunately and somewhat surprisingly, Andrew is nowhere near the spinning stage. Perhaps he is trying to out-focus Oscar, to prove to him because of the crab salad moment that he is so on the ball he could probably out-manoeuvre Rooney at Wembley.

  Standing there, with his head down, he has four plates in front of him, which he is loading all at the same time.

  ‘Rabbit?’ he shouts.

  ‘One minute,’ replies Matt.

  ‘Hurry it up.’

  ‘Yes, chef!’

  ‘Halibut?’

  ‘Here, chef,’ replies Alfonso, delivering a small, perfectly cooked square of halibut to the pass on a silver tray.

  ‘Garnish? Veg?’

  ‘Here, chef,’ says Barney, coming to the pass with another small silver plate with five savoy cabbage leaves perfectly cooked, a small pile of baby carrots and some peas in a cream jus.

  Andrew starts to load the plate. First he places the halibut in the middle; next he layers the cabbage, eating a leaf on the way through just to make sure it is cooked thoroughly. Next the carrots are laid like a small log-pile, slightly to the side of the fish, and finally he spoons the pea jus over the top. He uses a spoon taken from his back pocket and tastes the sauce just before he puts it on the fish.

  ‘These peas are shit,’ he pronounces. ‘When were they cooked?’

  ‘Yesterday, chef.’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  ‘Yes, chef.’

  ‘Fucking yesterday! They’re dry and fucking old. Fucking chuck ’em and fucking don’t do that to me again.’ He turns to eyeball Barney. ‘Fucking useless cunt. What are you, Barney?’

  ‘A fucking useless cunt,’ repeats Barney, sloping off to his station.

  ‘A fucking useless cunt, CHEF!’ shouts Andrew.

  ‘A fucking useless cunt, chef,’ Barney barks straight back.

  Andrew turns back to his dish. The spoons goes into his mouth and back into the sauce, then back into his mouth and back into the sauce, before the sauce gets ladled on to the plate. Next comes the rabbit, placed on a small silver plate with a pan of jus.

  ‘Thank you, Matt,’ says Andrew, wiping his nose with the back of his hand before he picks up the rabbit loin and squeezes it to see if it’s cooked, before putting it back on the plate. ‘Veg!’

  ‘Yes, chef.’

  Barney comes running, with a copper pan of cauliflower purée. In goes the spoon, back out it comes, straight into Andrew’s mouth, back it goes into the rabbit jus and back into Andrew’s mouth and finally into his pocket.

  ‘Good, good.’ He nods, taking the spoon back out of his pocket and putting it into the cauliflower, before smearing the purée like a cream skid-mark across the middle of the plate. He picks up the rabbit, places it on top and then lines up seven green beans in a small pile. He then pops his spoon in and out of the sauce one more time and back into his mouth, just to make sure, before coveri
ng the rabbit and the cauliflower.

  ‘Service!’ he shouts, shoving the tray towards the other side of the pass. ‘Fucking go!’

  Luca picks up the tray and, smooth as silk, reverses through the swing doors and straight into the dining room. I wonder if the diner would tuck in with such relish if they knew exactly how their food had been put together. You only have to take one look at Andrew to retch at the idea of one iota of his saliva in your food. But he has tasted and sampled, picked and tweaked, gobbed and regobbed into everything on your plate. He is not alone; every chef has their spoon and occasionally a bit of cross-contamination occurs. Only the other day sixty-three customers left Noma with a full belly and the norovirus, which was probably a little more foraging than they’d banked on.

  It used to be worse when presentation was at its height and every little tiny weeny bit of garnish was placed on the plate. We used to call it ‘lick and stick’ cooking. How else was that little violet flower petal ever to stay on the plate? It was like laying out postage stamps. A curl of cress? Lick and stick. A slither of radish? Lick and stick. A salad leaf? Lick and stick. I always thought it was style over substance, and I always knew it was presentation over hygiene. Talking of filth, my mobile rings. It’s Adam.

  ‘Mate? Got a minute?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you pop down the road? I need to show you something.’