Restaurant Babylon

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  ‘Morning,’ I say, breezing into the kitchen.

  ‘I think you’ll find it’s the afternoon,’ corrects Andrew, whose normally waxen face is bright pink.

  ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’

  ‘The bad news?’ says Oscar.

  ‘The bad news is we’ve had the new Evening Standard food critic just turn up,’ I say slowly enough for even the likes of cloth-eared Barney to hear. ‘But the good news is, he is on his own so he is extremely unlikely to go for the full five courses.’

  ‘You’re shitting me, right?’ asks Andrew slowly, taking his spoon out of his mouth.

  ‘No,’ I reply, raising my eyebrows. ‘I shit you not.’

  3–4 p.m.

  Fortunately for Jason Stone he doesn’t order the full five-course lunch, as there’s no end of bodily fluids that could have ended up in his food. I am not joking, I have seen it done. The most extreme version of which was when I worked on the larder section in a restaurant near Stratford-upon-Avon. There were two very pretty girls on the front desk and one of the perks of their job was that they were allowed to eat a proper lunch in the restaurant at the end of service. Well, firstly all the chefs fancied them and neither of them would ever put out, and secondly, there is nothing more irritating than having to cook another couple of bloody lunches after doing a full and crippling service. And thirdly, they were so goddamn smug about it.

  So the chefs would take the two to three day-old smegma from under their foreskins and wipe it on the food. They would wipe it over the chicken after it was cooked. You can put almost anything anywhere before it’s cooked as any bacteria is killed during the cooking process. Fried food is the safest; nothing can survive the blast of a deep fat fryer so if you are ever in doubt about the food the safest thing to eat are the chips. Anyway, they’d put their fingers up their arses and stick them into the mash. They would gob and snot on the food. Sometimes you could actually see the snot on the plate, especially if the KP had been asked to contribute. The deal was that if they ate in the restaurant the girls had to clear their own plates. So we’d all sit out the back, sucking on a fag, waiting for them to finish. If they didn’t like what they were given, they’d pop their plate by the sink, but more often than not they’d eat the lot and come back and express their compliments to the chef. And what was weird, the more we dicked about with their lunch, quite literally, the more they seemed to like it. We did stop short of shitting in it, but only just.

  Not that any of my boys would stoop so low, but I wouldn’t put it past Andrew not to give the steak a gentle, spur-of-the-moment sneeze on the pass, just to prove a point. It really isn’t the done thing to come and test the kitchen right at the end of a shift.

  I can sense their fatigue as well as their seething fury as I leave the kitchen. The restaurant is emptying quite rapidly now. Only Tony and Bill are left in their Friday corner, considering the possibility of a brandy to go with their espressos and petit fours. The PAs are beginning to get a little giggly on their free champagne and the Formula One bloke is just settling up the bill. The Andersons, with their dear departed grandpa, have suggested that, having finally finished their lovely lunch, they are ready to shift the corpse. Although now, with the arrival of the media in the restaurant, I am less inclined to want to take the old boy through the restaurant and, after a short conversation with Jorge, we decide that it is far better for all concerned if we take the body through the kitchen and out the back. Jorge has already put the call in to the ambulance crew and has asked them to park up in the mews. My job is to distract Mr Stone while everyone else forms some sort of human shield.

  I am about to plonk myself down, with my brightest smile, when Jason suddenly gets up, patting his pockets like he’s about to pop outside for a cigarette. So I follow him, carefully placing myself between him and the window.

  ‘So you own this place?’ he says immediately, pulling out a Silk Cut.

  ‘Yes,’ I confirm, slightly taken aback.

  ‘Good crab salad,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you.’ I light his cigarette for him. Suddenly Gina appears from behind the bar. Her borrowed waistcoat is a little tight over her rather fecund figure.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ she smiles, ‘I have brought you an ashtray for your addiction. I think the olive trees have had enough nicotine for today.’ It is not quite the sort of Michelin-starred service I am after, but fortunately Mr Stone is so distracted by her backside that he doesn’t see the ambulance crew arriving at the back of the restaurant.

  ‘She’s new.’

  ‘I like her style,’ he replies, blowing his smoking after her.

  ‘So how long have you been in the job?’ I ask, a little distracted by the action behind. It is taking four men to shift Grandpa and they’re moving all the tables and the chairs.

  ‘What job?’ He looks at me, a little surprised.

  ‘I am afraid we know who you are, Mr Stone,’ I come clean.

  ‘How?’ He’s looking annoyed.

  ‘It’s our job to know who everyone is. That’s what we pay a PR for.’

  ‘Right.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘How come no one knows what Marina O’Loughlin looks like and she’s been doing it for nine years?’

  ‘She’s made it her mission to be incognito.’ He doesn’t respond. He looks down and is about to turn around and see the body being hoisted into a trolley. ‘How are you enjoying it so far?’ I blurt. ‘It must be a very interesting, very entertaining, very exciting job?’ They’ve got Grandpa on the stretcher, covered in a blanket, and are heading towards the kitchen.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he says, taking a long lug of his cigarette. ‘This the third place I’ve done.’

  ‘Great,’ I enthuse, as the late Grandpa’s feet disappear through the double swing doors. ‘Well, best of luck to you! And do please be kind to us.’ I move to walk back inside. He flicks his cigarette into the path of an oncoming taxi and follows me in.

  ‘I’ll speak as I find,’ he says. ‘Steak next.’ He rubs his hands. ‘Rare. Let’s see if they can do that.’

  I smile stiffly at him and make a mental note never to accept his booking again. The man’s a git. A short git, to boot, and he’s wearing a hideous pair of rubber-soled shoes. Looking at him, creeping back to his table to tuck into his bloody steak, you can understand why chefs suddenly see red and ban critics from their restaurants. Nobu banned Michael Winner, as did Anthony Worrall Thompson, Nico Ladenis banned Fay and Gordon banned Adrian – or at least asked him and Joan Collins to leave his establishment in a fit of feather-spitting high dudgeon. Mr Stone will sadly never find a reservation here. Unless, of course, he gives us a five-star review, then he’ll be welcomed back with free Veuve Clicquot-popping joy.

  My phone goes.

  ‘All right, mate!’ comes a jovial male voice speaking cab-Cockney. ‘Phil Crammer. I’m right outside.’

  I look up to see a black BMW double-parked between the two olive trees. There’s a loud honk of the car horn and a sky-blue shirtsleeve shoots through the sunshine roof and gives me a wave. Phil Crammer is indeed parked outside.

  An affable porky fellow with a fine-dining paunch that is barely contained by his shirt, Phil occupies a lucrative subset of the restaurant business – buying and selling properties. They are a small, eclectic group who include great characters like Frank the Yank, who deal solely in restaurant real estate. Phil spends his days eating in establishments (hence the paunch), chatting up owners and persuading them either to sell or expand their businesses. He’s been badgering me for weeks to come and look at this ‘jewel of a place’, or so he says, just on the edge of Covent Garden. Obviously I don’t have the money at the moment to buy anywhere, but good spots come up so rarely in the capital that even if you’re not in the game, you’d be a fool not to investigate.

  I have a quick word with Jorge to make sure the Andersons are looked after. He thinks I should comp them the wine. I am not sure it’ll help their grieving process but it’s good to look
generous under the circumstances. He’s also promised to give Mr Stone the full-beam maitre d’ service and to keep me updated on his progress.

  ‘Ready?’ asks Phil, revving his engine and turning down Kiss FM. ‘It’s not far from here and I tell you, mate, you’re going to fucking love it.’

  With the heating turned up high and the roof down low, we head off towards Seven Dials.

  ‘This part of town is hot right now, mate,’ Phil says, burning down the road. ‘I mean Soho is hot right now too. Hot. So hot. Ten years ago it was rocking, then later you couldn’t give anywhere away and now, in the last two years, it’s buzzing. Everyone wants a piece of it. Rents are up. I am selling leases here for over a million. I had two in the last week that went for £1.1m and another for £1.2m. A couple of years ago that was unheard of. Depends on what side of the street, obviously. Dean Street, it’s the left. Greek, it’s also the left, Old Compton it’s the right as you stand with your arse facing Wardour. But it’s gone crazy, I tell you, crazy.’ As we drive up Garrick Street, the heating in his car is beginning to freeze-dry my face. ‘I love that club,’ he says, nodding over his shoulder. ‘You been in there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should, it’s amazing. It’s a proper club, not like some of the places round here.’ We move along Floral Street and into Catherine Street. ‘Not far now,’ he adds. ‘It’s rocking round here. Balthazar’s around the corner – did you hear about the fist fight for that place?’

  ‘A bit,’ I say.

  ‘Extraordinary. You know Corbin and King, Rex Restaurants, thought they had the place sown up? Well, they were planning to open The Delaunay there, were practically measuring up the fucking curtains, when Richard Caring swooped in at the last minute and said to the landlord, “I can bring you Balthazar.” Like it was the Holy Grail with a heavenly choir attached. Balthazar!’ He does jazz hands over his dashboard. ‘A proven brand, all the way from America!’ he laughs. ‘Poor old Rex were kicked into touch.’

  ‘That’s a bit tough,’ I say.

  ‘But that’s restaurants for you, isn’t it? Dog eat dog, although hopefully not actually dog. Mind you, in some of these places in Chinatown you never bloody know, do you? Filth!’ He throws back his chin collection and laughs.

  I’m not sure he is right about the dog, but he’s right about restaurants being a tough business. Location is everything and when a good place comes up there’s always a fight and it’s nearly always the same blokes going for the same spots. Caprice Holdings, Rex Restaurants, Ricker Restaurants, Russell Norman is now in the mix with his ever-growing collection including Polpo, Polpetto, Da Polpo, Spuntino and Mishkin, as is Arkady Novikov, owner of the hugely successful Novikov, who is said to be keen on getting a larger foothold in London, having recently lost out to Rex Restaurants in the fight over Brasserie Zédel, which was formerly The Atlantic Bar and Grill.

  The competition between these guys is stiff. Getting the site involves a protracted and expensive beauty competition of bid and counter-bid, with each company promising more and more. The leaseholder is in an enviable position with everyone falling over themselves to get their foot in the door. Move out of Soho, Covent Garden and Mayfair and the situation is a little different, although there are pockets such as Notting Hill and Westbourne Grove where rents get up to £450,000 a year, and Marylebone and Borough, which is catching the lucrative fallout of the Shard, where the big boys still want to play. There are prestige sights like the recent Rex victory for the twenty-year-old Oriel’s site in Sloane Square. But everywhere else is lot trickier to sell.

  You have to be so careful because you may find yourself a fabulous-looking site but if the area is not right you can end up killing yourself trying to make it work. I had a mate who had a restaurant near Hammersmith, which didn’t work. He said it was caught between two zones, Chiswick and Notting Hill, and the clientele wanted to be more glamorous than they were. He said that people prefer to travel into town to eat out, they very rarely travel out – the River Café being one of the few exceptions. But it was an awful thing to see. It’s crippling to have a restaurant that’s not working because they are so expensive to keep going. But if you are not busy and your takings start to slide, it is very hard to get out of the shit. Punters don’t like eating in empty restaurants, and if they won’t come in it is very hard to drag them in.

  And the costs of setting up a place have spiralled out of control. I think you need about two million to get yourself off the ground these days. It’s insane. Half the battle is to get the site, then you have to think up what you’re going to do with it, then you have to execute it, build it within budget, then you have to find the staff, get it all right, then you have to open it, publicize it – and then Adrian Gill walks in and says it’s shit and that’s that. It’s a mug’s game really. Although if you get it right, and occasionally someone does, then it’s a licence to print money. I hear Novikov is raking it in, something like £600,000 turnover a week. I sadly can only dream of such things.

  The market is sensitive at the moment and it’s not a great idea for me to spread myself too thin. When the recession hit in March 2009 and everything fell off a cliff, my business halved over night. It’s picked up a lot since then, but it has made me a little wary of expansion. However, talk to anyone in the business and they’ll say the opposite, that it’s all about expanding, getting a brand, and rolling it out. Everyone is on about ‘roll out’. The smart chefs are always trying to get themselves out of the kitchen; they do a bit of telly, get themselves a reputation, and then they can’t drop the tea towel fast enough – they start up a few places and they’ll do the menus, chat to their chefs and call themselves a businessman. Marco and Gordon used to be everyone’s pin-ups with their shining collection of fine dining establishments, but these days it’s Jamie Oliver.

  Jamie did it all slightly the other way and managed to irritate everyone who had ever been to catering college while he did it. Everyone was jealous, green, livid, they kept on thinking why did Pat Llewllyn spot that lisping knob? What’s he got? Which was another way of saying: Pick me, Pat, pick me! But Jamie was smart, very smart, he did the books, the TV shows, he worked hard – and he’s a nice bloke, actually. He did Fifteen and then he did Jamie’s Italians. The Holy Grail! A brand! That works! Which he has rolled out all over the country. He’s got over thirty of them now and he owns, so I’m told, about 70 per cent of the company. Apparently he was turned down by various investors, so he thought, sod this, and put his own money in. You see, smart chap. Raymond Blanc has done the same. He’s got his Brasserie Blanc brand all over the UK, in Bath, Bristol, Oxford, Leeds. The Soho House Group, apart from expanding internationally, is also ‘rolling out’ their Chicken Shop and Pizza East brands. And of course there’s Carluccio’s. What I wouldn’t do for a brand!

  ‘So, what do you think?’ Phil slows the car down to a gentle kerb crawl as he passes a small, blue-fronted restaurant. ‘It’s Greek. I mean, Christ, no wonder it’s failing. Who wants to eat Greek? When was the last time anyone said to you, “Hey! Let’s go out and have a Greek? D’you know what, I’m starving, I could murder a Greek”? Feta? Retsina? I ask you! You never want to eat that shit, not even in fucking Greece!’

  He rocks with laughter, and slaps my thigh, encouraging me to join in. Yet all I can think is, poor sod, he’s probably been here since 1972 when everyone loved a Greek. They’d chow down moussaka, smash a few plates and have a right old laugh dancing in a circle with their pals. And now he’s sitting here, much like the bowler hat makers of Great Britain, wondering where all the customers have gone.

  ‘But the spot rocks, don’t you think?’ says Phil, mounting the pavement with his car. ‘Look,’ he nods up and down the street, ‘theatres, plenty of offices, literary agency around the corner and plenty of tourists. Top spot.’

  ‘I agree.’

  It is a good spot, very good, in fact. I can feel my heart beating in my chest. I hate it when that happens because it usually mean
s I want to spend money that I don’t have.

  ‘What are the figures?’ I ask, getting out of the car.

  ‘Not bad,’ he says. ‘It’s seventy covers, basement kitchen, they’re looking at an £800,000 premium, negotiable obviously, and the rent is £90,000 a year and your rates are a £27K. It’s good. It’s right for round here. You can have some tables in the street, get those hot lamps out. Little bar inside …’

  ‘Who else have you shown it to?’

  ‘A few. No one as, you know, as top notch as yourself.’ He pauses on the threshold. ‘Shall we go in?’

  Once inside, I realize I am completely correct. The place must have opened around 1972 and no one has redecorated it since. The walls are painted a turquoise blue that is peeling around the edges. The dark bentwood tables and chairs are covered in matching turquoise check tablecloths and cushions, the small windows down the side, encaged with black metal bars, are swathed in matching check curtains. On the walls there are a few old posters from the Greek Tourist Board in cracked, yellowing Perspex frames. Next to the posters are some twisted hanging ropes and a few large, green, glass fishing floats. The ruby carpet is sticky underfoot and the place smells of bleach, fried food and stale cigarettes – which is a feat, since no one’s legally been allowed to spark up in here since July 2007. At the back the nautical theme continues with smaller glass floats hanging from the bar. There are three bottles turned upside down – of gin, vodka and whisky with brands I have never heard of. Behind the optics is a collection of curled, faded postcards pinned to a corkboard, depicting various scenes from the Greek islands.

  Phil shakes hands with the owner who must be about a hundred and five years old and comes up to his armpit. Dressed in a white open-neck shirt and black slacks, he has a large Saint Christopher nestling into his grey chest hair. We exchange smiles and pleasantries and he escorts us through the restaurant. Somewhat optimistically all the tables are laid for supper (or perhaps they were laid for lunch) and, in the middle of each, sits a bevelled beer glass full of breadsticks, sealed in white, waxed wrappers.