High Season

by Jim Hearn

  Jesse’s seeming affection for Paris has me suspicious, though. Since I’ve shuffled him over to the larder section for lunch service rather than have him do woks, his usual station, I would have expected him to be rambling on in his semi-angry whine that has the rest of the world somehow indebted to him. And it’s not that I don’t relate to that, it’s just that I’m a little too old to get away with such banter now if it isn’t done in a self-deprecating way. But Jesse’s not whining, and that’s odd. Something’s going on and I don’t like not knowing what it is. Call it being a control freak or a pain in the arse or just plain nosey, but I’ve found that if I’m not up to speed on what’s happening with the crew, they often surprise me by leaving suddenly or taking a week off or performing some other random act that throws the line, and therefore the kitchen, into disarray.

  ‘How long on that som dtam, Jesse?’ I call.

  ‘Two minutes, Chef,’ he yells back.

  ‘Choc, how long on the crab?’

  ‘One minute, Chef.’

  ‘Jesse, get the salad up in one,’ I demand.

  ‘Yes, Chef!’

  ‘You like larder, don’t you, Jesse?’ I say, trying to tease a reaction out of him, something that might give me a clue as to what’s going on.

  ‘No, Chef, but I enjoyed sleeping in so I don’t give a fuck if I have to do larder.’

  ‘Jesse doesn’t give a fuck, people. Did everyone hear that?’ I call to the crew.

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ they respond.

  ‘You’ve been sleeping in a lot lately, Jesse. Have you got a new boyfriend?’

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ he says, not biting.

  ‘Well, we’d all like to meet him someday so we can see why your section has gone to shit.’

  ‘I’d bring him in, Chef, but I’m afraid you might steal him off me,’ Jesse answers.

  ‘Give me that salad,’ I order.

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ says Jesse, turning around from his section to put the salad on the pass in front of me. And as he turns, I see that he doesn’t actually look that well. He looks upset or hurt. And that’s not normally Jesse’s go. Like I said, these kids are tough, they can handle the heat, but intuitively I pull back on the piss-taking and get back to business.

  ‘Choc, clap that order out and let’s go up on table four,’ I call.

  ‘Yes, Chef.’ And Choc claps twice for the floor staff to come collect the food. (I don’t know why we clap at Rae’s rather than ring a bell like every other kitchen I’ve ever worked in, but like a lot of traditions there doesn’t have to be a reason—it’s just how it’s done.)

  Scotty comes in and collects the soft-shell crab and green papaya salads for Paris’s table.

  ‘Oh, Scotty? Vinnie called for you, mate, but we told him you were busy,’ I say.

  ‘Fuck off, Chef,’ Scotty growls.

  ‘He’ll understand, mate. I’m sure he will,’ I lie.

  ‘It’s not my fucking problem his phone’s off,’ Scotty says, shaking his head. It’s a headshake that’s resigned to knowing Vinnie won’t see it that way. Basically everything is Scotty’s fault, and while that might not be rational it’s how it is at Rae’s.

  The boys in the kitchen are all looking at Scotty and smiling slightly nervously at the thought of Vinnie turning up unexpectedly and ripping into him.

  It may seem a little juvenile or even cruel the way chefs and waiters take the piss out of each other, but it’s just a way to distract themselves from the physical punishment of working in a commercial kitchen. The life of a chef is very demanding on the body. As a person gets older, male or female, the reality of performing for sixteen hours a day, six or seven days a week, begins to lose a little of its gloss. It’s like, here I am at Rae’s on New Year’s Day after doing about ten days straight—each day a double lunch and dinner service—and my legs no longer want to play. My Achilles tendon is refusing—just straight-out refusing—to bend. And it’s not just my body; my mind is constantly buzzing with so many details that require thinking about in order to maintain a semi-organised kitchen that absolutely none of it makes any sense. My nervous system is shot after so many years in the kitchen, and the idea of not walking with a weird gait or of having a stomach that’s not contending with sixty-nine different kinds of food is a novel thought which, in my quieter moments, forms a very pleasant fantasy.

  Scotty tries phoning Vinnie again. He knows Vinnie will want to look after Paris, maybe even buy her a drink. It’s not as if Scotty hasn’t got enough to worry about in terms of Vinnie’s relationships with difficult celebrities. Bret Easton Ellis, who’s telling anyone who’ll listen how cute those Australian shrink-wrapped copies of American Psycho are, is staying in penthouse one. For some obscure reason he has chosen the Byron Bay Writers Festival to launch his latest book. Apparently it’s the first writers’ festival he has attended anywhere in the world and he seems determined to make the most of the experience. On top of that, Baz Luhrmann is in penthouse two with CM and the kids, and there’s a whole scene going on between Bret and Baz because Bret, during some interview, told the audience that The Great Gatsby was never going to make a decent film; how books and films are fundamentally different things. And he knew that Baz had the rights to The Great Gatsby. This has made for a tense atmosphere during breakfast, when the restaurant is reserved for hotel guests. It’s been Scotty’s job to ensure they never cross paths. And the thing about Paris is that, while everyone loves Paris, she’s not staying in the hotel and no one bothered to tell us she was coming in for lunch.

  To add to Scotty’s stress, David Bromley is painting a wall in room seven. It’s a nude scene. Vinnie has installed Bromley’s canvases in the foyer and up the central circular staircase. Vinnie and David are old mates and when the idea of the mural came up there was a lot of good cheer about the concept of naked models functioning as muses, expensive champagne and general good vibes. It’s just that now there are six highly attractive, very tall and completely naked girls wandering about the place. Bromley is pissed off because they won’t sit still and while Scotty is not someone who would normally dismiss the demands of a naked woman, he’s not exactly relishing the added pressure of fetching tuna carpaccio with fresh wasabi for the tipsy girls. And ice cubes! What is it with models and champagne with ice?

  If Vinnie were here, it would all be sorted because he understands that hospitality begins with a host’s capacity to be hospitable. Hospitality is defined as the relationship between a host and a guest, and Vinnie is the person I’ve learnt the most from about hospitality. His genius has always been to get the best out of people while simultaneously letting them know their efforts, while good, are just below his high expectations. He is both outrageously successful and ruthlessly charming. His riches are built upon inspiring in others a previously untapped ability to do unpaid overtime, as well as his capacity to attract a stellar—and loaded—clientele.

  After a couple of successful restaurants and a raging nightclub in Brisbane, Vinnie bought the building that is now Rae’s on Watego’s in Byron Bay and took it from a million-dollar home-stay to a twenty-five-million-dollar palace. He owns other businesses, houses and restaurants, and still insists on driving a Porsche. He is a perfectionist and doesn’t suffer either fools or the too-intelligent gladly.

  Despite Condé Naste having rated Rae’s on Watego’s one of the twenty-five best boutique hotels in the world, Vinnie generally has a poor relationship with the Australian media and their various ratings systems. The Sydney Morning Herald and the more local rags mostly fail to find cause to celebrate Rae’s particular style. Not that Vinnie cares. He is a man consumed more by the mechanics of trade and the virtues of pleasure than the dull art of public relations. Which is something of a paradox, and also an uncommon trait.

  Many chefs and proprietors at the fine-dining end of hospitality are so obsessed with the status that a good review can bring that everything else, including food costs and good business sense, disappears at a hint of criticism. There appears
to be an assumption that what makes a restaurant successful has more to do with how the media represents it than with notions of what constitutes hospitality. The lack of self-respect displayed by many head chefs and proprietors at various award nights only confirms the idea that the media is somehow judge and jury of all things hospitality.

  Working at Rae’s on Watego’s isn’t for everyone. People get to see the full extent of their limitations pretty quickly. And if you do want to work at Rae’s, you catch on pretty quick it’s all about Vinnie. It doesn’t matter if you’re head chef, maître d’ or hotel manager, any praise is only ever slightly deflected your way and any problems are reason enough for rip-down humiliation. Vinnie is expert in the art of humiliation. He palpably enjoys tearing into those he perceives as having an ego problem. When things are going well, as they often are, it is only ever because he has afforded you the space to reach such heights. Never forget that you were nothing prior to arriving at Rae’s.

  Vinnie insists on a certain level of adaptability in his staff. Evidence of such adaptability is expected to be displayed via daily rituals in which Vinnie injects some unexpected demand into proceedings in a bid to test a person’s capacity to absorb chaos. He does this because he figures if he can do it, you should be able to as well. It’s an expectation thing. The idea that he’s paying a chef simply to turn up and cook is anathema to his sense of value. And should a chef not be the type of person to wilfully value-add at every opportunity, Vinnie has a million great ideas that will either inspire a capacity for more mercantile thinking, or reveal a chef’s particular weakness to everyone at the hotel.

  Vinnie’s expectations are that each and every plate be crystal clean and correctly warmed; each and every sauce be perfectly executed and served in a timely fashion; and that each and every hidden corner of the kitchen be free of grease and grime. The time of day or number of staff in the kitchen has no bearing on whether these expectations are achievable. Such standards are immutable, constantly reinforced and become—in the staff with sufficient resilience—the dominant voice inside their heads.

  Of course, Vinnie realises that people have partners and children and a life outside of work, but he has no real interest in such things except in how they might affect his hotel. Spot fires from those distressed others will, on occasion, burst into flame and threaten the order of things. And during such fiery moments, benevolent Vinnie will magically appear and throw a dog a bone—or at least the appearance of a bone—but only for staff members who have survived a certain length of time.

  Perhaps the reason Vinnie demands such perfection from his staff is that, unlike us, he knows what hedonism feels like. To successfully deliver a pleasurable stay to a sophisticated clientele requires sound knowledge of what your competitors are offering. Rae’s is not the most expensive boutique hotel in the country, but it does offer a premium service at a premium location. And the thing is, none of his staff will ever know what it feels like to stay at a place like Rae’s, which is why Vinnie sees it as his responsibility to regale us with stories about all the fabulous hotels he regularly stays in and why—the implication being that we greasers don’t have what it takes to go to the next level. If only we could experience what staying in a real five-star hotel was all about!

  You will experience hedonism at Rae’s on Watego’s, as long as you don’t get stressed about abusing the platinum Amex. Given that a decent room will cost about fifteen hundred dollars a night, a reasonable bottle of champagne a thousand and dinner a couple of hundred more, it’s when you wake up and get screwed another fifty for breakfast that you’re going to be tested. Nothing comes free at Rae’s. The pain just keeps coming and it’s the guests who can continue to say yes to every little thing who are going to get close to attaining a state of hedonistic transcendence. Vinnie sees it as his job to ensure your stay is equal parts pleasure and pain. Come check-out time, you’re going to feel a little bit slapped around no matter how rich you are, and if you’re ready for anything after a weekend at Rae’s, it’s a refreshed sense of the value of modesty and the virtue of prudence rather than a feeling you’ve left an itch unscratched.

  4

  I was fifteen when I entered my first restaurant kitchen. My parents had divorced a while before, and my mother had replaced the red dirt of Mount Isa for the red lights of a different town. Somewhere along the line she’d organised this, my first full-time job. I had no comprehension of what was required of an apprentice chef and little understanding of the future implications of being there.

  Oliver’s Restaurant wasn’t exactly on the gastronomic map; it had received no stars, hats or write-ups of any distinction. And quite possibly, like many restaurants of its kind, it has long since closed and reopened half a dozen times under different names, headed by chefs dreaming vastly different culinary dreams. And dreams are what hospitality is all about. While many people like to think of hospitality as a service industry responsible for addressing the functionary needs of the body, for those on the inside it can be a weird and wonderful dreamscape of ungodly hours, ridiculous pressures, unkind owners, absurd customers, torture, humiliation and occasional moments of brilliance. The thrill of getting all the sections of a busy kitchen firing, and putting it all together on the night, is like no other thrill I know.

  Glenn, my first head chef, was fresh out of cooking school and had an unashamed passion for red cordial laced with methylated spirits. On the rocks. He had a ginger handlebar moustache and a temperament I would come to understand as a particular type. A busy, nervy confusion of energy, Glenn was somehow, despite his jittery nature, easy to get on with. He figured if life had sent you to the inside of his kitchen, you were pretty much fucked and there was no reason to make things worse. Glenn also possessed a capacity for kindness, though it insisted on coming undone during every lunch and dinner service. And hell really is a stressed-out, angry head chef in a no-good restaurant during a busy service. Forget about fine-dining celebrity head chefs—we’ll get to those freaks later—back there, in that out-of-the-way Townsville diner, hell had another name.

  So it happened that, as I stood in front of my first open coolroom, I found I couldn’t move. My senses were being assaulted by an unreasonable number of smells and my body refused to function until I could reorganise the odours into one thing, one smell. And that particular coolroom odour was to repeat itself over the next twenty-five years in inexplicable ways. It was as if this coolroom was all possible coolrooms; its stored ingredients, its sauces, produce, pastes, meats, condiments, cheeses, seafood and mould melded into one archetypal olfactory sensation. I’ve since cooked in Western, Eastern, Middle Eastern and Asian restaurants and, while the food has obviously tasted and smelt differently, the coolrooms all smelt like the one at Oliver’s Restaurant.

  ‘Shut the coolroom, faggot,’ said Glenn in his semi-kind, before-service voice.

  So I slid the coolroom door shut and Glenn, who had his gee-whizzo-kiddo stare on, asked, ‘Where’s the butter, fag?’ (I know it’s an offensive, puerile and ridiculous turn of phrase, but in Glenn’s world, everyone and everything was a faggot—except Glenn. If you were Glenn, you were surrounded by, as it were, homosexual objects.)

  ‘Sorry, Chef, I forgot.’

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ, fag . . .’ Glenn barged past me into the coolroom, ripped the butter from the shelf and slammed the door so hard the coolroom bell rang. There’s a bell on the outside of every coolroom door which is installed to attract the attention of people in the kitchen should someone get locked inside. Which happens a lot more than it should.

  ‘But-ter,’ Glenn droned in the manner of someone with a mental impairment, as if I didn’t know what butter was.

  So there I was, in my first restaurant kitchen, suffering my first kitchen humiliation. I was a mere kid, who had just left my eighth less-than-average school having failed half my subjects. I had absolutely no fucking idea what I was doing, or how to behave, or what constituted the difference between an outright moron
and apprentice of the year. But the thing about being confused in a restaurant kitchen, with its stainless steel and fluorescent lights and its out-the-back status, was that I was not alone. Many people like me found employment, and a life, inside their version of Oliver’s.

  ‘You’re a moron,’ said Chef Glenn, testing me.

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ I mumbled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ I yelled, more vigorously this time.

  Chef Glenn nodded, semi-impressed.

  And I couldn’t help but smile as the ageing, seen-it-all-before waiter ripped the first of many lunch checks from his order book.

  Besides the smell of a coolroom, the second archetypal smell of a restaurant kitchen is that of a burnt bamboo skewer. Chefs all over the world light the burner they want to use with a bamboo skewer lit using a pilot light or other gas burner. Then they shake out the flame on the skewer or blow it out or snub it in the wok station water and the smell . . . I don’t know what it is, I just know it’s the same everywhere and it’s the signal that the day’s work has started. Everyone knows that the six boxes of matches and two lighters that were neatly placed in the service-is-starting-get-ready positions are out the back in the storeroom with the empty beer bottles, wine glasses and ashtrays that accumulated after the end of service the night before. They’ll be shoved under dirty aprons or empty cardboard boxes.

  It’s not that every service ends in a celebration, it’s just that at the end of every service two things happen: chefs get changed out of their kitchen whites and into their street clothes, and the service that has just finished unravels in their minds and in their conversation. If it’s been a massive service, you’ll be having a drink and chatting, laughing, taking the piss and generally talking it up, and the bonhomie has been known to extend beyond the mechanics of getting changed. There’s a tipping point, which is often just a matter of agreeing to a second drink, that signals to everyone to get the fuck out now if you have to . . . and if you don’t, you’ll be going to bed with the words, ‘Where the fuck are the matches, faggot?’ ringing in your swimming brain.