The dining space already looked a lot better. Green tablecloths matched the green-and-gold flags bearing the motto ORDEM E PROGRESSO hanging here and there, seeming to herald a surefire success. It was nearly dusk, the artificial light was not as merciless as the sun streaming through the filthy windows.
I’d say I was almost calm, just buzzing slightly in anticipation but without the churning stomach that comes with sheer terror. The day before, I’d bought a new chef’s uniform, which I now put on, fastening the round buttons with deliberate calm and tipping my chef’s hat jauntily to one side, like a beret. Then I wound the strings of my ankle-length apron behind my back and tied them at the front. I also had a new cotton side towel, white and thick, that I folded carefully and slipped under the apron ties, just a little to the right of my thigh. In my pocket, a joint, already rolled, and my lighter. I took a deep breath. For a split second, time stood still. For a split second, everything seemed to be waiting for me. With satisfaction, I saw a chef with my face staring back at me, serious and confident, in the reflection of the dusty window. I was waiting for me too. Okay, let’s rock and roll.
First, get the bread out of the big paper bags and slice it evenly on the cutting board lying on the big wooden table. Big, sure, but not big enough to accommodate too many tasks. Okay, one thing at a time. Start with the bread, then the appetizers, then the trays of ingredients for the orecchiette pasta sauce, the piles of plastic plates, bottles of oil and salt. For the time being, the vegetarian quiches were lying on the floor in the gastronorms. I’ll slice them as soon as the last two pounds of pasta have been served, I’m thinking, and we’ll continue like that, one step after another. While the dishes are being cleared, there will be enough time to slice the quiches, so they’ll stay warm. It will run like clockwork. The kids arrived. I liked the tone of my voice.
“Can you help me with the bread? We have to slice all of it and put it in breadbaskets, one for every four diners.”
“All of it?”
“Yeah, because later there won’t be any room to slice it. If there’s any bread left over, slice it and put it back in the paper bags, but be careful not to put them on anything damp.”
One of them started slicing (there’s only one bread knife, shit, hell, I’m thinking to myself). I grabbed the big four-way pot, noticing the slightly lime-scale-encrusted holes in the triangular baskets, and filled the pot with water from the hose curled up on the floor. I went into the dining room to check: All the flatware was where it should be, the napkins too.
There was a breadbasket every four settings. In the kitchen, the water was boiling, already salted. On the table were the appetizers ready to be placed on serving platters. We were truly ready to go. It was seven thirty; dinner service was due to start in half an hour. I straightened the napkins, brushed a few crumbs from the tablecloths, and returned to the kitchen. Time to smoke a joint. Before putting my hand in my pocket, one of the kids rushed up to me.
“Hey, Leo, people are starting to arrive, some of them are already sitting down, they want to start with the appetizers.”
“What do you mean, people are already here? Everyone has to be served at the same time. That’s no good at all!”
“Yeah, but there are families, with kids, and I think they want to start eating …”
“Right, then, we can start serving the appetizers. They have to go on those platters, one for every four guests, just like for the bread. The meatballs in the center, a little salad inside the radicchio leaves, the skewers with the tips pointing toward the center, and on the other side, the tomato boats, all lined up. Make sure you get it right. You guys, start putting the platters on the tables, that way we’ll speed things up.”
There was nowhere near enough space. Even with only three people it was difficult to move, and my helpers had never handled a dish in their entire lives. I organized an assembly line: me plating with a chubby girl who had just arrived, another kid taking the platters to the door, and the third ferrying them to the tables. We were incredibly slow. By the thirtieth platter, just about everyone had arrived, and by the sixtieth, the first guests to arrive had already been waiting a good forty minutes for the orecchiette. Children were running all over the place, completely out of control.
Time to start boiling the pasta. It was a disaster. Half of the water had evaporated. Intent as I was on the appetizers, it never occurred to me to check the water level. I added more from the hose, but it was freezing cold, naturally, and the water came off the boil. This was a serious problem — a really, really serious problem. Boilers of the type used in a professional kitchen deliver a continuous flow of (boiling!) water. Whatever evaporates or is absorbed by the pasta during cooking is constantly replenished. Here I had only one big pot of freezing water and forty-four pounds of pasta. There was no option but to wait a few minutes before tossing the first two pounds of orecchiette into the water. I asked the kids to start clearing the plates, but in slow motion, giving me a bit of extra time. Even an experienced maître d’ would be hot under the collar at this point, with a dining room in such a state of turmoil, let alone these newbies. The first kid comes running into the kitchen, flushed and breathless.
“The bread’s finished! They want more!”
“Fucking hell, that bread was supposed to last through the mains too. What are they going to eat with the meatballs?”
The Brazilian master of our capoeira group, the organizer of the batizado, the Big Boss, strode purposefully into the kitchen.
“Hey, how is it all going in here, cozinheiro? Do me a big favor, can you serve the Capoiera Mestres right away? It’s muito importante, the masters are my special guests. Significa muito para mim. It means so much to me. Is good? Está bem? You want me to be tranquilo?”
“Tranquilo, yes cool. The first plates of pasta will be for them. All good with the appetizers?”
“Tudo bem, all good, it’s okay, so we wait for the pasta.”
He turned on his heels and left.
I noticed an edge of discomfort in my voice, but only for a millisecond and then it was overwhelmed by a mountain of despair. The joint lay forgotten in my pocket. It was all-out war. Bread gone. How stupid, I should have served it later, and there wasn’t any more. The water was boiling, I tossed in the first two pounds of pasta and waited three minutes, strained, then added the next two pounds. Three more minutes. Two more pounds. Three more minutes, the last batch. I stirred the first basket. The pasta was still raw. Someone came to the oval door: It was Barbara, her face framed by her curly hair.
“Need a hand in here?”
“Hell yes, I do. While I drain this pasta, can you start plating the rest?”
I turned to the pot, then turned back around to her.
“Thanks.”
Following the fateful night I dumped her to go and get myself arrested, our relations had been somewhat frosty. But now I didn’t have time to ask myself whether she was insulted, indignant, indifferent — or just taking pity on me.
Food had to start flying out of this hole, right now, and there was a lot of it. Flying out at the speed of light, if possible. And it had to be good too, of course.
I sent out what was ready, best-laid plans to hell. I ordered the kids to get the lasagna plated and out the door, just get it out. Meanwhile, I drained, stirred, sweated, and completely lost track of what was happening in the dining room. I added water to the pot, but only a little at a time because it was cold, drained more pasta, sweated, tossed another two pounds of orecchiette into the first basket, then another into the second, without waiting three minutes. A sudden realization hit me, switching on like a neon sign thrust violently inside my head: Orecchiette has the absolute longest cooking time of all dried pasta shapes, more than fifteen minutes. It was crazy to think I could cook orecchiette to order in one pot for 250 diners, an impossible task. It should have occurred to me, but it didn’t. An hour later, I was still at it, with unfamiliar faces traipsing in and out of the kitchen, some to holler a
nd others to lend a hand, including a dad begging for a plate of pasta on the run for his little daughter. Everyone wanting something. No flow, no rhythm, just a relentless stream of demands, while I fell farther and farther behind. The drums of the invading barbarian horde were drawing ever closer: What I wouldn’t give to be the fearless Pope Leo right now, raising a hand to turn back the Huns.
“Hey, when the fuck is this pasta gonna be ready?”
A voice echoed around the kitchen like a club striking metal, fiercer than any of the other complaints seeping through the damp oval door. Here comes Attila the Hun, I said to myself, and I’m up to my eyeballs in pasta.
“We’ve been waiting over an hour. There are five of us, we’ve already paid, and we will not wait a fucking hour for a plate of pasta. Some people have had theirs and some haven’t. There are people eating lasagna, and all we’ve had are the cold antipasti. What the hell is going on in here? You will serve the five plates of pasta we paid for right now! And after that, everything else that’s on the menu!”
I raised my head, continuing to stir the orecchiette, and mopped my dripping brow with a filthy side towel.
“Listen, you’re right, I’ll try to get you served immediately, we’ve had a few delays, but you’ll get your pasta right now.”
“Now means now! I’m not leaving this kitchen unless a waiter follows me with the pasta for my table!”
“Look, I’ll send it out to you right away, I swear. I don’t know what to say, I’m sorry.”
My submissive attitude only seemed to fuel the rage of the belligerent diner, who was not budging, but I feared this was merely the tip of the iceberg and that the atmosphere in the dining room was incandescent. I continued to apologize profusely, but the flow of abuse did not abate.
“Shit, man, you can’t run a kitchen like this, it’s insane!”
I realized that the damned orecchiette were sticking together, so I gave another stir to each of the four baskets in the pot and started to drain the pasta, without uttering a word, because there was nothing more to say. I didn’t need words, I needed food. Another diner peered through the door, wearing a furious expression.
“Hey you, is this pasta coming or not? It’s been a fucking hour …”
One thing at a time, one thing at a time. I had to get rid of these two, then send out everything else immediately. I had to halt the invading Huns.
“Yeah, yeah, sure thing, it’s going out right this minute. The pasta I’m draining now is for you, gimme a break, guys, otherwise I’ll never get on with it, please …”
In the meantime Barbara was stirring the tomato-and-basil sauce into the orecchiette, and starting to plate. I looked at the plates, wiped the edges clean with the same filthy side towel, placed a useless basil leaf on top, and then said to her, utterly defeated, “Can you please take these to the two who were in here just now, but serve the others around them as well, because I don’t want anyone to think that to get your food, you have to barge into the kitchen and start swearing at everyone, otherwise we’re done for.”
Adding, as she turned away, “And don’t give a damn about what order the dishes are in. We have to get food on those tables, pronto!”
An ugly clump of orecchiette lay on one of the plates that was about to be served. Boil pasta in too little water and it sticks together in the pot and stays that way, forming a mass of gluey, undercooked dough. I hoped the angriest diners didn’t end up getting them. Forget Pope Leo. I was Napoleon Bonaparte and this was my Waterloo.
I drained, stirred, sweated, and crammed more than two pounds of pasta into each basket. The water was barely on the boil now. Everything was taking longer and longer, but I kept on draining the pasta and trying to fish out the clumps of orecchiette, sending them flying all around the steamy iron-walled enclosure. I stirred, plated, and crammed more pasta into the pot, never raising my head. Barbara was joined by the two kids and the plump blonde. Someone told me the capoeira masters were demanding their quiche; they’d finished the meatballs more than half an hour ago. Many of the other diners were still waiting for the pasta. I forced myself to get into a rhythm, no point letting uncooked, poorly prepared food go out. Slow maybe, catastrophically slow, but at least let it be good, for Christ’s sake! If you make someone wait an hour and then serve a second-rate dish that’s inedible, cold and undercooked, well, you’ll soon find that someone in the kitchen wanting to break everything in sight. My plan had changed: All I wanted was to get out of there alive and cut my losses. If retreat it is, then at least let it be a dignified one, no fatalities and no smell of burning. A few casualties, undoubtedly. We’ll lose some customers who will get up from the table and furiously fling their napkins to the floor, but let’s save the others, let’s at least save them!
The kitchen was steamy, sweat was trickling into my eyes, blinding me, while I struggled desperately to preserve what was left of my dignity. Mine and the food’s. I’d lost all control of the dining room, by now everyone was serving; kind of them, for sure, but who knows what they were telling the diners, many of whom were visibly incensed. My fingers were blistered, burned by the flames shooting out at least eight inches around the bottom of the pot. In the meantime, I was nearing the last eight pounds of orecchiette. The light at the end of the tunnel! There was pasta all over the floor, grubby and slippery. But I was so in the zone that the blisters weren’t even hurting.
Exactly two hours had elapsed since I tossed the first two pounds of pasta into boiling water. Meanwhile, the guys had begun slicing the vegetarian quiches and the lasagna, and anyone near enough to hear my orders was plating as best they could. Out of the corner of my eye I was checking the dishes that were going out, while I hurriedly took out the meatballs. Then I just gave up. Surrendered. I let whoever was handling the food get on with it, hoping they had some idea of what they were doing. Partly because it was obvious that I had lost it and didn’t have a clue what I was doing anymore. Every now and again I’d pathetically try to say something.
The big aftmost window was completely fogged up over a thick layer of dust, creating hideous thick black streaks; good thing too, because there would no longer be a cocky face smiling back at me under the jauntily tilted chef’s hat, now soiled with tomatoey red splotches. I wasn’t shouting out orders anymore, I was begging with a whimper.
The Brazilian master showed up again two or three more times. Two or three? I lost count. The last time, he didn’t say a word, nor did I, we just looked at each other. The first plates went to his fellow masters. They — albeit excruciatingly slowly — had eventually been served everything, including fruit salad and dessert.
The meatballs and quiches were polished off, empty gastronorms were strewn all over the place, on the floor, on the table and on the still steaming pot over a now mercifully cool stove. I was ladling fruit salad into red plastic cups while Barbara put together the desserts, in the end all jammed randomly onto platters, a few on each table. By now only a few diners were still seated; half past eleven had come and gone. I was soaked to the skin. My uniform was spattered with sauce and starch from the pasta water. My side towel was nowhere to be seen, my hands were red and sweaty, and in the kitchen, it looked like a huge arancini kamikaze had blown itself up. And we were the victims.
I managed to pull myself together and started to plate the last desserts in the correct order, cleaning off smudges of chocolate with a paper towel, in familiar movements that brought me back — at least somewhat — to my senses. Because even when you’re drowning in shit, when the service is unsalvageable and has arguably gone to the dogs, when you have wall-to-wall dockets that seem to be written in Sanskrit, you must never give up. You have to grit your teeth and keep on going. In the end, somehow, you’ll make it out of there. These were sayings I’d heard before, many times, but it took until this evening for them to start making sense. I was exhausted, but it felt as if only an hour, at most an hour and a half, had elapsed. In fact, it had been more than four hectic hours.
&nbs
p; A tall, frizzy-haired fellow appeared in the kitchen, nice regular features and a candid, slightly boyish expression. He smiled at me.
“So, you’re the chef who organized the function.”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Well, earlier I was royally pissed off with the dickheads who were putting out dishes at a snail’s pace after the antipasti, which were good, by the way. Then I snuck a look in the kitchen and saw you were doing it all single-handed! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I even asked the curly haired waitress, the cute one, if you were on your own with no help. Anyway, I gave the servers a hand out there, but I didn’t want to leave without meeting you and congratulating you.”
“You really mean that?”
“Look, I’m not bullshitting you. I’m a chef too, and I’ve seen you at a couple of training sessions.”
The oxygen started flowing again and nourished my aching muscles, and even though I was fully aware of the dimensions of tonight’s fiasco, I basked in these words of praise. I thanked him a little tepidly, grateful that at least his orecchiette weren’t all glued together. Dog tired, I started tidying up, suddenly remembering that I still had a joint in my pocket. Reaching in all I found was some brown gunk. Crap. Barbara, just as weary, smiled at me wordlessly, then came up, planted a kiss on my cheek, and headed off to clear up the dining room.
Another guy wandered into the kitchen. Forty-something, longish wavy gray hair, a boxer’s squashed nose, and good-humored eyes. I’d seen him helping out with the dishes and giving orders to the improvised waitstaff.
“Do you happen to have a joint?”
“Sure. Here.”
He passed me a small metal box containing papers attached to the lid with some Scotch tape.
As I listlessly gathered up my kit, the joint hanging from my lips, words began pouring out of me.
“I shouldn’t have put so much bread out on the tables at the start, I should have kept more sliced in the bags. I should have brought more pots so I’d have a steady supply of hot water, and then, shit, I should have chosen a different motherfucking pasta shape, anything but orecchiette.”
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