Restaurant Babylon

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘And it’s Marc Jacobs.’ Trust him to be able to spot a label in a dimmed room at fifteen paces.

  ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘Why didn’t he stop? Now one of us has to sort it out,’ sighs Jorge.

  ‘She hasn’t even noticed,’ I say, looking at her leaning in, running her hands though her long, clean, blonde, blow-dried hair. She is going to hit the roof. ‘We could always not say anything?’

  ‘What, and let her go home with a warm chicken in her bag?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I think she just might guess where it came from.’ Jorge shrugs and pops his best smile on. ‘You did the dead man today, let me do the woman with a chicken in her bag.’

  I watch him go over and very discreetly whisper something in her ear. She turns, looks down, looks up, and looks horrified. But before she can really react properly Jorge has picked up the bag, covered it in a napkin and disappeared out the back. I follow up the rear.

  ‘I am so sorry, madam,’ I say, arriving at the table. ‘I can’t think how it happened. We shall obviously pay for it to be dry-cleaned. Do let me offer the whole table some champagne. On the house.’ Fortunately her friends appear to find the whole thing slightly more amusing than she does.

  ‘It’s a very expensive bag,’ she begins, looking towards the kitchen to see where it’s gone. ‘And it’s got my life in there. My mobile. Literally everything.’

  ‘I can tell,’ I agree. ‘And we shall have it as good as new in no time.’

  ‘It is new,’ she says. ‘And the lining is silk.’

  ‘Silk,’ repeats one of her friends, being a little more supportive, cocking her head to one side with concern.

  ‘I am sure,’ I concur. ‘And we will absolutely sort it out. It’s entirely our fault.’

  ‘Well, it was hardly mine, was it? I was just sitting here,’ she says.

  ‘I know, I know, and we will sort the whole thing out. Here! Here it is.’ I see Jorge come smiling out of the kitchen. ‘Here’s your bag.’

  Jorge walks towards the table carrying the black and gold Marc Jacobs bag, devoid of chicken, couscous and harissa. He has its more traditional contents in a white paper bag.

  ‘So, madam,’ he smiles. ‘Here is your phone, all fine. Your purse, all fine. Your other things, all fine and your bag …’

  That is looking distinctly less fine, I have to admit. The cherry-red silk lining is greasy and smeared and there is a distinct stench of chicken. Fortunately Gina arrives at that precise moment with a chilled bottle of Ruinart Blanc de Blanc. Not quite the bottle of house that I was after – this goes for £90 a bottle.

  ‘Some bubbles, ladies.’ I am now smiling so hard my cheeks are actually hurting. But there is so much oohing and aahing from her other girlfriends at the free fizz that Little Miss Chicken Bag is forced to join in the champagne appreciation society.

  ‘I am sure it will be fine,’ she says eventually as she knocks back a large swig of fizz. Funny how everything always looks a little better after some bubbles. No doubt we will get a massive dry-cleaning bill, but for the moment, any scene has been avoided. Which is all one can really hope for. I must remember to give Luca a bollocking at the end of the evening. How the hell he managed to pull that juggling trick off, I shall never know.

  Just then the Russian, Mr Sergeev, shoots his hand in the air and clicks his fingers. He is looking directly at Gina. She stares back at him. He clicks his fingers again. She remains rooted to the spot.

  ‘Girl!’ he demands, adding another click. ‘Girl!’

  ‘Oh, I am sorry,’ she says in her heavy Danish accent as she ambles over to the table, ‘were you referring to me?’

  ‘Girl,’ he says, nodding.

  ‘You see, it takes more than two fingers to make me come.’

  I just manage to contain my loud snort of laughter. I like her style, although I’m not sure it’s conducive to working in a Michelin-starred restaurant where the customer is always right and you have to stand and smile and suck it all up. But she has a certain something about her. Maybe Adam could use her in Le Bar?

  ‘I am sorry?’ replies Mr Sergeev, his English still clearly in need of some practice.

  ‘Good, just so long as you are,’ she says. ‘Now, how can I help you?’

  I leave the Russian ordering a bottle of Ruinart, the sight of which has whetted his appetite, and I wander past the Voucher Vulture table. They are still nursing their one glass of house champagne, despite Jorge’s best efforts, and have now moved on to pudding. They’ve all gone for the blood orange jelly and vanilla ice cream.

  ‘Excuse me?’ asks one of the men. ‘What is this?’ He points to what looks like droplets of blood scattered across the plate and another small puddle on top of the ice cream.

  ‘Oh, it is nothing, sir,’ I hear Mikus say. ‘A little extra jelly.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ he nods. ‘Because it looks like blood.’

  ‘Blood? Oh no,’ says Mikus, his ears pinking slightly. ‘It is just a little extra bit of blood orange.’

  As he walks away from the table, I grab him by his elbow and match him stride for stride back into the kitchen.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ I hiss in his ear.

  ‘Blood,’ he whispers.

  ‘Blood!’

  ‘Yes. There’s been a little bit of an accident in the kitchen.’

  8–9 p.m.

  Mikus is clearly the master of understatement. There is not a bit of an accident in the kitchen, there’s a fucking great car crash. It’s like something out of a Tarantino movie. First of all, Barney, the commis chef, is sitting slumped on the floor, his arm in the air, his face as white as a sheet and there are pools of blood on the floor and all over the pass. And secondly, Andrew and Oscar are rolling around on the floor, in amongst the blood, the slops of water, and the curls of vegetable peel, smacking ten tonnes of shit out of each other.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I just manage to refrain from shouting as I don’t want the customers to hear.

  ‘I’ve cut myself,’ says Barney, his head lolling slightly. ‘My finger.’ He waves a blood-soaked tea towel at me. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’

  ‘Well, it looks pretty shit to me,’ I say.

  ‘Get your hands off me!’ yells Oscar, flat on his back, pinned to the floor under Andrew’s substantial thighs. His fists are flailing, somewhat ineffectively, at Andrew’s chest. Andrew throws a big punch which lands on Oscar’s left cheek. Jesus, that must have hurt! A spray of snot and blood flies across the room. Oscar screams and pounds Andrew’s chest even harder.

  ‘You’re a cunt! You know you are!’ Andrew shouts, showering Oscar’s face in gob.

  ‘Get off me, you lunatic! You’re fucking MAAAAD!’ With one almighty push, Andrew goes flying across the room and lands, skidding into a pool of filthy water, under the sink.

  ‘Can someone get me a bandage?’ comes a plaintive cry from the other side of the kitchen.

  ‘Service! Table Six!’ says someone. I turn to see Matt, stepping over Oscar’s dishevelled, blood-spattered body to man the pass. He looks completely calm, as if he’s on a different planet. ‘Service!’ he repeats. Both Luca and Mikus stare at him, unable to comprehend exactly what he is saying. ‘Go!’ He shoves two pork, one steak, one rabbit towards them over the pass. ‘Go and serve people.’

  Finally the words sink in and the two waiters pick up the trays and take them through the swing doors.

  ‘What the hell is happening here?’ I ask, looking from one filthy head chef to another.

  ‘The man’s a cunt!’ declares Andrew, getting up from under the sink. ‘I can’t work with him.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ I state, trying to calm the whole thing down. ‘You’re leaving.’

  ‘I am leaving now.’

  ‘You can’t, you can’t leave now, not in the middle of service, you really can’t.’ I realize I sound like I’m begging. But the restaurant is full, al
l the orders are piling up, there is no way Andrew can walk. I am pretty sure Oscar would be able to get some food out but he doesn’t know all Andrew’s recipes and it’s a complication we really don’t need. ‘Honestly, mate, I’m sure we can sort it out.’

  ‘You don’t do that!’ sneers Andrew and points a sharp, threatening finger. ‘Cunt!’

  ‘Man!’ Oscar puts his hands up like he’s surrendering in a gunfight in some cheap Western. ‘All I did was borrow a knife.’

  ‘Not a knife, you arsehole. MY knife!’

  Oscar should have known that would not go down well. Most chefs hate it when someone else uses their knives. They love their knives, often more than their children, and they’ll carry them, very sweetly and gently, from job to job, tucked up in their knife roll. They are very expensive, which is why chefs don’t like lending them out, but they are also personal, part of the craft. They are the tools of greatness and that can’t be shared. Well, that’s what a great big egomaniac like Andrew thinks. Oscar, on the other hand, just needed to chop some parsley.

  Or at least that’s what I manage to glean from the brigade over the next five minutes. Oscar borrowed the knife. Andrew lost his rag and, unfortunately for Barney, he was caught in the middle and Andrew somehow managed to slice Barney’s hand during the altercation. Barney then fainted because he hates the sight of blood, which is apparently why he prefers working veg in the first place.

  Chefs have fallen out over less. And some feuds have gone on for years. Gordon vs. Marco is one of those most entertaining: the language used and the methods of subterfuge have kept the rest of us riveted from the wings for nearly twenty years. It is like some game of cat and mouse or, more aptly, Tom and Jerry, with one taking a camp swipe at the other and the other flouncing a swipe back. It’s a load of old handbags really.

  It all stems from the Harvey days when Gordon worked for Marco (1988–91) and Marco laid into Gordon so hard that Gordon started to cry. He was planning on leaving, and no one likes it when their sidekick decides to up knives, particularly if he’s a talented sidekick. So Marco shouted and Gordon cried. Although, Marco did subsequently remark: ‘I didn’t make Gordon cry. He chose to cry.’ Whatever, the animosity between the pair is continuously fuelled by little outbursts and flurries designed to wind each other up. Marco famously used to travel around with a Gordon Ramsay business card. The Ramsay was spelt ‘Ramsey’, just to irritate Gordon. And Ramsay admitted recently that he was the one who’d stolen the reservation book from Aubergine, only to blame it on Marco, apparently to prevent Marco from taking over as head chef. Marco then accused Gordon of not being able to cook because he’s always on the telly; Gordon subsequently arrived with TV cameras to Marco’s third wedding, although quite why he’d been invited in the first place is anyone’s guess. It’s ludicrous, and they are obsessed with each other; it’s a perfect case of familiarity breeding contempt. Marco is notoriously difficult to get on the phone – he never picks up – however, leave a message saying something like: ‘I hear Gordon’s …’ and you’ll never be called back quicker.

  But that’s not to say that things can’t get quite tetchy. Gordon’s split with Marcus Wareing, when Marcus decided to leave the fold to set up on his own, is not quite so entertaining.

  ‘If I never speak to that guy for the rest of my life it wouldn’t bother me one bit. Wouldn’t give a fuck,’ said Wareing on leaving Gordon, despite the fact that Gordon was best man at his wedding. ‘My advice to him is: put a gun to my head, shoot me, put me in a box and bury me because if you don’t, I’ll come back and come back. I’ll never give up until I get where I want to go.’

  The problem is that they have all graduated from the same charm school, which was started by Marco, curated by Gordon and whose head boy now is Marcus. Marco used to shout and scream and throw things and, much like children learn from their parents, so do the others. So Marco’s famous story of hurling the Oak Room cheeseboard at the wall because some poor sod had put too small a piece of cheese on it, and others of him shoving chefs in the bins for ‘time outs’ or cutting holes in someone’s uniform, like a colander, because they complained of being too hot, are legendary and a simple precursor to Gordon’s hurling oysters, chucking bottles of truffle oil, calling everyone who annoys him a cunt or covering a commis in hot risotto.

  Marcus is not that dissimilar. ‘I bollocked people like Gordon,’ he said. ‘I acted like Gordon.’ But when you work off and on for someone for nineteen years, and ‘side by side, six days a week, for two solid years’, things are bound to get hot, intense and to rub off.

  ‘Never, ever did I get to bed before two,’ Wareing once said. ‘Never ever.’

  Even the lovely, talented Clare Smyth, another Ramsay protégé, is not immune. ‘I don’t think twice about grabbing hold of a guy and screaming in his face if he gets it wrong,’ she once opined.

  However, all this appears insipid child’s play when you hear that US chef and author Anthony Bourdain once had a young cook stripped, covered in blood and wrapped in cling film before popping him in the freezer. But then again, Bourdain would threaten a junior to hurry up or he would ‘tear out his eyes and skull fuck’ him.

  Fortunately, Andrew is not yet at the skull-fucking stage with Oscar, but left to their own devices for a couple of hours, who knows? We all have our war wounds. Raymond Blanc had his nose, cheek and jaw broken when another chef threw a saucepan in his face. Tom Aikens allegedly branded another chef on the back with a hot palate knife and was fired from Pied à Terre. The chef ended up in A&E. The worst case I heard was of a head chef bottling a waiter. They’d been up drinking after their shift and the head chef lost it and hit the waiter over the head with a bottle. The waiter had twenty-three stiches. The police were called but no charges were ever pressed; there is a warped honour amongst culinary thieves.

  I always think you are allowed to scream and shout if it’s your own house on the line. If you’ve got your own money in the place, it seems reasonable to be able to lose your temper. Which is what I am on the verge of doing if these two idiots don’t get back to work.

  ‘Listen,’ I say. ‘We’re full. We’ve just under three hours of service left. We’ve got some pop star coming in later—’

  ‘Who’s that?’ asks Barney, obviously feeling a little better.

  ‘How the hell do I know? Do I look like a bloke who follows the pop charts? Get this blood cleaned up, bandage up that hand, and let’s get on with it.’

  Oscar’s pulled himself up off the floor. He looks even worse than when he came in this morning, if that were possible. His curls are flat, his face is smeared with mucus and blood, and he’s going to have a massive black eye in the morning.

  ‘Sorry about the knife,’ he mumbles, pulling down his filthy whites. ‘I had no idea it meant that much to you.’

  Andrew doesn’t say a word. He merely reaches across to take another tasting spoon out a large silver tin full of water next to the pass and pulls out a new order slip.

  ‘One pork belly, two turbot, one steak,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, chef!’

  I walk out of the kitchen slowly. I’m shattered and I am not sure how much longer I can keep doing this. I don’t want to be in the micro-managing business, sorting out domestics. I want to be one of those restaurateurs who gets texted at one in the morning, just to be kept in the loop as to how many covers each of my highly profitable restaurants has done. I want to be able to have nights off, go on holiday, see my mates, not break up fights between hot-headed idiots who can barely write their own names. It’s depressing. And not something I have been working this long in this business for.

  ‘All OK backstage?’ asks Jorge, looking more than a little tense. He’s got a full room to manage and barely any food coming through the doors. The kitchen is in the shit and so is he.

  ‘It is fine now,’ I say. ‘I’m sure we can claw it back. Just make sure the team keeps filling up everyone’s glass.’

  Talking of which, I am d
esperate for a drink. The restorative effects of my pint of lager are beginning to wear off. I decide I might sit quietly at the bar for a moment, not something I normally do, and down a quick vodka and tonic.

  ‘Everything OK?’ asks Gina, seeing the look on my face.

  ‘Not great.’

  ‘We could hear a lot of it in here,’ she says. What is it with Scandis and the truth?

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It was quite loud,’ she continues. ‘I could hear a few “fucks”.’

  ‘Very Michelin star. Can I have a vodka? And tonic?’

  ‘English measure?’

  ‘No, something substantially stronger.’

  While I sit and she pours me a drink, I feel my shoulders come away from around my ears. There is always something so cathartic about sitting at a barstool having a drink. Maybe that’s my problem – I have always found it easier to share with the person on the other side of the bar than I have with the women who followed me down the aisle. That was always Sketchley’s gripe anyway, that I was never home, and when I was, I never told her anything. Gina arrives with a short, fat drink with a squeeze of lime and plenty of ice. It is almost as if she knows what I like.

  ‘Here,’ she says. ‘I remember this is how you ordered it last night.’

  So she does know how I like it. ‘Was that before or after the jägerbombs?’

  ‘Before. And anyway you only had two.’

  ‘Two? How come you have total recall?’

  ‘I don’t drink that much,’ she shrugs.

  I take a long, cool glug. It hits the spot almost immediately. I feel it slip gently into my bloodstream and start to relax. Just then a flashbulb goes off outside. Then another. And another. Then there’s a strobe effect, as another fifteen to twenty go off in quick-fire succession. There’s some shouting and jostling and eventually a skinny little blond boy in a baseball cap squeezes through the revolving doors, with an entourage of eight. It appears our WKF plus extras have arrived.

  They are a motley group. I am not sure what Claridge’s are doing sending them to us because I’m sure they’d be a lot happier in a brasserie, my brasserie for example, where they can get chips with everything and lots of things ‘on the side’. We don’t do anything ‘on the side’, we are not that sort of place, and we don’t do chips, either. Although I am sure the kitchen could or would, given the right price. I remember Marco once charging an arrogant yuppie (they were called that in those days) £25 for a plate of chips. He said he’d hand cut them, blanched them and deep-fried them and it had taken him an hour (not actually him, surely?) so the cost was £25. The man had ordered a plate of chips, off menu, and had not been bothered to ask how much they might be, so obviously he could charge what he fancied.