Recipe for Disaster

by Miriam Morrison

  The new cooker he'd ordered arrived three days late and the maniacal youth they'd sent to install it somehow managed to cause a power failure down the whole street, a fiasco for which Jake was continuing to apologise every time he dared set foot outside.

  The first commis chef, who at interview claimed he was so reliable and keen he would rather cook than eat, sleep or even have sex, ran away three hours into his first shift and one of the waitresses sent by the agency seemed to have a vocabulary of only three words – one of which was 'fuck'. Luckily, Kirsty, the other one, was hardworking, willing and only swore in extremis, which was quite understandable. Her only drawback was a tendency to tell long, complicated stories about people no one had ever heard of. By the time Jake had worked out who was who, he found he had missed the point, if there was one.

  His supplier, who had promised the earth in edible form, delivered a case of broccoli so old it was practically mummified.

  'What am I supposed to do with this, cook it or display it in a museum? Fresh from the fields? You have got to be joking! It looks like it has come straight from Tutankhamen's bloody tomb,' Jake snarled.

  The one bright spot was the replacement commis.

  Tess had spiky blonde hair, six piercings in one ear and a stud through her nose. She was small, thin and tougher than the broccoli.

  She gave the worst interview Jake had ever experienced, being practically monosyllabic and radiating waves of such angry energy Jake had to turn the heating down. She had left school without any qualifications but with a baby. Despite this, she had never been out of work.

  Jake didn't care that she was about as chatty as a Trappist monk. The real issue was, could she cook?

  She bloody could. Not only that, she was organised, efficient and meticulously neat when she was working. She might look like her only hobby was biting people in the neck, but that was fine by him. It was as good a way as any for dealing with incompetent suppliers.

  The only slight problem was Angelica, her daughter. Now six years old, Angel, as she was called, was a plump and gorgeous blonde who combined devastating charm with a will of iron.

  Tess worked like a Trojan getting set up and even volunteered to come in on her day off.

  'Trouble is, there's no one to look after Angel.'

  Jake considered this. He knew by now that Tess burned with a zeal almost as strong as his own. She was a real kitchen junkie.

  'Well, bring her in, if you want. What trouble can one small child cause?'

  Tess snorted with derision at the stupidity of men.

  Angel arrived with a pink plastic suitcase, containing Barbie, Barbie's entire wardrobe and Barbie's pony. The doll had more clothes than Georgia.

  Angel was quite happy to sit in the office, showing Barbie how to type on Jake's computer and setting up an obstacle course for the pony with all his cookery books. But she also adopted Jake as her uncle, which made Tess blush, and she followed him everywhere, giving a running commentary on the work in progress.

  'Kim's made a big puddle, Uncle Jake.'

  He went to investigate. Kim, the vocabulary-challenged waitress, was standing by the dishwasher, which was spewing its contents over the floor.

  Kim moved her chewing gum to her cheek, in order to tackle the fine art of communication. 'It's broken. There's water all over t'floor.'

  Jake considered this. She reeked of smoke and had obviously just been out for another fag, her third that morning – he had been counting. If she had any more breaks she would forget how to work all together, if indeed she had ever known. Instead of doing something remotely intelligent and useful, like getting a mop, she just stood there, chewing. She was the sort of person who could make a cow look clever.

  Jake mulled over several approaches, but as usual, went for his favourite: the unvarnished truth. 'You are idle and inept and you smell like an old ashtray. You're sacked, so fuck off.'

  There was an audible intake of breath, but not from the witless waitress.

  'Uncle Jake, you used that word again. You said you would give me fifty pence if you said it again.'

  Jake was outraged. 'I said twenty pence, actually.'

  Angelica started to laugh and a lemon sherbet exploded out of her mouth and landed on Kim's jumper.

  'I will sue you for unfair dismissal and damage to my clothes. This place is a dump anyway.'

  'The only thing that was unfair was the fact that you were employed in the first place,' Jake yelled.

  'If Uncle Jake tells you to fuck off, I really think you should,' advised Angel.

  Jake escaped to the relative sanity of his office and Barbie's pony, but he only had peace for ten minutes before Angel, who was turning into a messenger of doom, reappeared. 'God's here.'

  'Well, I hope He's come to take me away from all this,' muttered Jake.

  God was actually Godfrey, who arrived for interview straight from his father's sheep farm, in a pair of wellingtons that were so disgustingly dirty Jake made him leave them ten yards outside the back door. Godfrey was at least six and half foot tall and extremely red in the face, having run down a fell to get to the interview on time.

  'I'm sick of animals crapping on me and having to stick my hand up their bums. I do all the cooking at home and I want to learn how to be a chef. I'll do anything you ask, if you give me a chance.'

  'If I do, you will, believe me. You may find your farming experience comes in handy when I ask you to stuff twenty chickens. Seeing as you are the only applicant the agency sent who can speak English, you've got the job. Still,' Jake continued, 'cooking is quite like farming in many ways. The pay is abysmal, the hours are appalling and the customers can be full of shit, so you'll feel quite at home.'

  'Er, what exactly will my job title be?'

  'Slave,' said Jake briskly. 'Basically you will do whatever I ask you to. This will include some hideous jobs that you probably didn't even know existed. But every so often, as a special treat, you'll have a sort of holiday, when all I ask you to do is peel tons and tons of vegetables until your fingers are raw. Basically, you will have only one ambition – to say with utter conviction "Yes, Chef". It is all I want to hear. If I don't hear it, I may get slightly upset and feel the need to express myself loudly and in a politically incorrect way.'

  Godfrey was so tall he lived in constant danger of knocking himself out on the extractor fan. He was immensely cheerful and willing, and didn't seem to have a temper to lose, which, in a kitchen, put his price above rubies.

  Angel fell instantly in love and basely transferred most of her affections from Jake to Godfrey. She lent him her pony and wound her arms so tightly round his legs she had to be bribed with an ice lolly so he could do some work.

  The final member of Jake's team was Hans, the barman, a skinny youth from Munich, who had started off his travelling gap year in Scotland and was supposed to be making his way south. But he had got pleasantly stuck in the Lake District at Easter and showed no signs of wanting to budge.

  Georgia was away on a fashion shoot, for which large mercy Jake thanked whichever god happened to be listening. He had to focus on opening night. The paying public gave a restaurant only one chance, and every penny he owned, plus a huge loan, was riding on this.

  Before anyone could even start cooking, they had to find things to cook with, which at the moment were still in their boxes and covering every available surface in the kitchen. Also, none of the boxes was labelled correctly so it was a bit like Christmas. Every so often someone would shout triumphantly: 'I've found the cutlery. It was in the box marked "frying pans". Oh blast, where are the frying pans then?' and so on.

  As Jake couldn't afford a restaurant manager, he went to help Kirsty arrange the tables and chairs, confident that Tess could be left in charge.

  'I don't think we should put this table here, 'cos there'll be a draught from the door. My gran went out for dinner once with her best friend, Mary. They've been friends ever since their prams collided when they were two months old. Anyway, M
ary's married to the guy that has the garden centre – the one in Easedale, of course, not the one on the way to Ambleside – you must know him – he's got a withered arm. Well, this was just before the wedding. Or was it just after? Oh, silly me – of course it was before – that's the whole point of the story –'

  'Kirsty, I feel as if I am going to take root here, which could be awkward for our customers.'

  As they pieced the restaurant together, like a giant 3D puzzle, Jake listened with one ear to Kirsty's pointless anecdotes and with the other to the dialogue in the kitchen.

  'Godfrey, why have you put the pans over there?'

  'Er, dunno.'

  'Exactly. Every time we want a pan we're gonna have to trek halfway across the flaming kitchen. Ooh, look, there's a shelf here, just next to the grill. I don't know, shall we put the wine bottles there, perhaps?'

  'You don't want to do that. They'll get all warm.'

  Then there was the sound of Tess slapping him with one of the towels she kept tied round her waist.

  '. . . and that's why you should never sit in a draught!' said Kirsty, surprising him. This was the first of her stories that actually had an ending and now he'd missed it.

  'Absolutely. I do take your point.' Well, I would if I knew what it was.

  Godfrey was horrified to discover that everything had to be washed first. 'But it's just come out of the box. It can't be dirty!'

  'You are an environmental health nightmare, you big oaf!'

  Although it hadn't seemed possible at the start, everything found a home.

  Jake came into the kitchen to find Godfrey lying on a pile of boxes, having found this was the best way to squash them flat. Also, he needed the rest.

  'Come on, my lad, the real work is about to begin!'

  Outside in the stores were even more boxes, full of the raw ingredients needed to serve sixty hungry customers every night for the next few days, until it had all been eaten and the next lot would come in.

  'It should have been one of the Labours of Hercules. We get to the end of it and everyone has gone home happy, hopefully, and then we start all over again. And so it will go on, until we are all dead or mad, or both. Then, if you are very lucky, I will let you have a day off.'

  Just when Godfrey got to the end of one pile of vegetables, he would be ordered off to find another. All the gleaming pans were pulled off the shelves, thrown onto the hobs, flung on the table to be washed, put back on the shelves for a nanosecond, it seemed, and then pulled off again.

  The kitchen was filled with a huge crescendo of orders, advice and intense discussion between Jake and Tess, and over this wafted a heavenly series of smells – frying garlic, roasting vegetables, sautéed chicken, fillet steak and pastry, sponges and mousses.

  The most wonderful thing of all, though, was that Godfrey was allowed – ordered, even – to try everything, including a lot of things he had never tasted before in his life. He didn't even mind that one minute he was tasting a fruit-filled pastry and the next, fresh mussels, which had been briefly simmered in an exquisite sauce.

  His life as a farmer hadn't been particularly full of conversation – in fact he reckoned his dad would quite happily go for a whole day without talking to anyone. So it came as a surprise to him that Jake didn't seem to mind that he had to keep asking questions and he never took the piss out of him for doing so. So, because he was intensely curious and always hungry, he felt that he had walked into the perfect job.

  Jake and Tess prepped the menu until their fingers were raw, and Godfrey's shoulders felt permanently hunched in an old man's stoop.

  'Nervous, Boss?' asked Tess, who was dicing a pile of carrots so quickly her hands were a blur.

  'Terrified,' agreed Jake.

  It wasn't so much the food – well, of course it was; it was always about the food – but what the papers were bound to dredge up about him. It didn't matter what he did, how many awards he got, someone always resurrected the story of how he had been sacked for stealing at the Capital.

  Tess must have been in mind-reading mode.

  'The reviews will be great and what if they do rake up that old crap again – everyone knows you didn't really do it.'

  Jake shot her a glance. 'You know about that?'

  'I did my research.'

  'Bloody journalists,' said Jake, chopping a cabbage in half with venom. 'Why do they call themselves that anyway?

  They are just a bunch of storytellers who cannot tell – no – who don't care that there is a difference between fact and fiction!'

  'What did you do, Chef, stab someone with a carving knife?' asked Godfrey with interest.

  'Ha! I wish I had. It was just a small incident a long time ago involving someone whose name I never want to hear again, much less see. And thank you, Godfrey, but I am not homicidal. It's true that I might, very occasionally, when slightly pissed off, chuck the odd, small utensil across the room, but –' He looked at Godfrey. 'You can get your mop and bucket out now and leave my chequered past where it belongs.'

  Jake had briefly considered having an opening night party because his bank manager told him he should. Then he realised Mr Biggins couldn't run a restaurant if his life depended on it and he should go with his gut feelings on this. He wanted the food to speak for itself. So he looked sternly at Godfrey.

  'I don't want to see a balloon or streamer anywhere near this place and I am prepared to strip-search you if necessary.'

  'Don't worry, none of us wants to see him naked either,' said Kirsty, pretending to shudder.

  'But why not?' asked Godfrey, who was always in search of a party and free beer.

  'Restaurants – good ones – are about having a sublime eating experience and that is what we are going to concentrate on. They are not about gimmicks.'

  So Cuisine opened quietly, without any fanfare, one Friday night. The only thing Jake did was make sure that the menu went up well in advance. People were seen licking their lips as they scanned it and because Jake hadn't put anything in the local paper, they were intrigued by the slight air of mystery that surrounded the place.

  The first night they were practically full, but Jake wasn't entirely happy.

  'I know everyone loved it, but as far as I could tell they were all tourists. We might never see them again.'

  'There are plenty more where they came from, Boss,' said Tess.

  'Yeah, but this place will have no heart if we can't get regulars in, and that means tempting the locals.'

  'They are a cautious lot when it comes to food. Give them time. I'll get my dad to spread the word,' said Godfrey.

  'What? On the fells! You said he was once up there for a week without seeing a soul,' scoffed Kirsty.

  'That's enough, you lot. We've made a sound start, so well done, everyone!' Then Jake jumped out of his skin and swore, because Godfrey had just let off a party popper.

  The owner of the London restaurant where Harry was head chef was a businessman, not a cook, which meant he was always having ideas about making more money, usually at the expense of the food.

  He had popped in to see Harry in his office that morning to discuss taking the menu in a new direction.

  'New?' echoed Harry in derision, his lip curling with barely concealed contempt. 'Fusion cooking is about as stale as turkey in January.'

  'Some of our female customers have commented that the food, though absolutely top notch, of course,' he was rather frightened of Harry, 'is a trifle rich. I was wondering about some lighter alternatives, a menu that would evoke the sunshine and healthy lifestyle of the Southern Hemisphere.'

  He was hoping it would also be lighter on the bills.

  'Our female customers don't come here to eat, and when they do they chuck it up half an hour later,' hissed Harry.

  Mr Thomas shifted awkwardly in the extremely hard chair Harry had found for him. There was no doubt Harry was a brilliant chef, but it was always touch and go whether he actually remembered he wasn't the boss. The restaurant was successful –
there was a two-month waiting list for a table, for a start – but as his accountant had reminded him only that morning, profits were still slim. Mr Thomas didn't care if his customers chose to vomit their dinner up, as long as they kept coming in and paying.

  Harry stared at him while his head seethed with insults. This was what happened when you worked for someone. You were prey to every stupid idea they had, and some of this creep's were positively cretinous.

  He couldn't just leave Harry to get on with it, could he? At least once a week he would shuffle into Harry's orbit with another 'bright idea' about generating more cash. This of course was always disguised as 'not getting stale' or 'trendsetting' or some other piece of crap culled from ten minutes of watching Jamie Oliver on the television, in between shagging his mistress. Shit, she probably lay there wishing he was Jamie Oliver.

  Harry didn't give a crap about people, but he cared passionately about his food. He was tender, understanding and respectful towards ingredients – it was the animals that talked that he had a problem with.

  Harry smiled, displaying all his perfectly capped teeth, which made Mr Thomas even more nervous. He should be. Harry was having a delightful fantasy about shoving this prick head first into the kitchen's biggest stockpot. If the wanker wanted to talk food with him, let him experience it close up first.

  He was still smiling later as he walked through the double doors into his kitchen, but that was in expectation of finding someone he could pick on. Like Caligula searching the senate for a victim to chuck into the arena, his eyes roved thoughtfully over the rows of bent heads. Everyone's white chef's hats were bobbing like snowdrops in a breeze. The thing about working for Harry was, even though you were utterly convinced you were doing everything right, there was still a good chance of a bollocking so fierce your teeth would rattle.

  Harry had mentally rewritten the Ten Commandments to keep him on track in his career. He had found he only needed two: