by Simon Wroe
Did you hear about so-and-so?
I heard . . .
Total fucking psycho . . .
Apparently at _____ he doesn’t let them use the loo during service. Blocks the door with a chair. If they piss themselves they just got to carry on. Two stars, plating foie gras and truffles with piss running down their legs.
At _____ _____, the chef put specials on that we didn’t know about. I got an order for pig’s head ravioli with pickled apple and he said, “That’s you, chef.” I had to make the whole thing from scratch. Get out the pasta machine and roll ravioli. All for one order. It fucked up the whole service.
He put a commis in the bin and poured fryer oil over him.
Eighteen hours every day. He makes them all take coke to stay on top of it.
His sous went mad and topped himself, I heard . . .
At _____ the chefs aren’t allowed to speak.
I heard he stabbed a guy and had him finish his shift.
I heard he had him clean up his own blood.
The chefs at The Swan told these tales with relish, claiming they were lucky by comparison. This, they’d say, this was nothing. They held Bob up against the scare stories and tried to tell themselves he was a decent sort after all. But they knew also that there were other chefs in other kitchens not so far away playing the same game, having the same conversation, with Bob’s name included.
Or if you left, what then? You traded one hell for another, a different kitchen with another head chef who might or might not be a cokehead or a drunk or just a good old-fashioned arsehole like Bob. There were a few good places, of course, where service was all precise movements and clean surfaces and classical music and the chef never shouted because the shame of being asked why you had done something a certain way or why it was not ready was humiliation enough. These places chefs liked to talk dreamily about.
At Hospital Road every section has their own induction stove under the worktop, with spotlighting like on film sets.
They pass all their sauces four times, till they’re superfine.
Everything is made to order, à la minute . . .
He lent one of his chefs de partie the money to start his own place . . .
Everyone sits down to eat together, before service, like a family. It’s the rule.
Yet such places were hard to find, according to Ramilov and Dave. There are no universal rules about kitchens and the sadism, or lack of it, therein. It is impossible to know the atmosphere of a kitchen from reading reviews or even eating in the dining room. At this very moment there are hapless, tortured chefs in some of the best restaurants in the city trying not to get their tears in the sorbet. And there are hapless, tortured chefs in some of the worst too.
Dibden, now flailing desperately on pastry, was one of those chefs. Six feet five inches of gangly misery, in his late twenties but with the hard-won sorrow of a much older man. He wanted to wow the world with his cooking, to be a great artist on the plate in the style of Pierre Gagnaire or Juan Mari Arzak. Unfortunately, he was inept.
“Soufflé, cockbreath!”
Dibden was from a rich family, a fact he was desperate to hide though there were too many other things to mock him about for anyone to care. Dave reminds me that in the end this revelation came out of its own accord when Dibden was sincerely, emphatically high on cheap soapy pills and bad chalky coke the night we all went to Mr. Michael’s for the first time. His family even had their own legend, Dibden confessed with unblinking, moon-eyed urgency. It was emblazoned in gothic capitals on the back of every chair around the dining table: “SUFFER.” Not the “suffer the little children” type of suffer. The “suffer” type of suffer. He had spent his whole life trying to escape that motto. This Saturday in particular, as Bob pummeled his fists in fury, it was fair to say he had failed spectacularly.
“Soufflé!”
The evening had begun so pleasantly too. An expectation bubbling over from the afternoon, laughter tinkling off the dining room glass, a curl of cinnamon and clove in the air, the warmth and camaraderie of Saturdays all around. In the kitchen, Ramilov was telling Dibden how shit he was.
“You are so shit, Dibden,” he said. “I’m going to get you a Jamie Oliver cookbook for Christmas.”
“But I don’t like Jamie Oliver,” said Dibden.
“That’s the point,” said Ramilov. “No one does.”
“I’ll have you know,” said Dibden defensively, drawing himself up to his full spindly height, “that I was taught by the best. Chef Ducasse at The Dorchester, no less.”
Dibden returned to the tart cases he was attempting, in vain, not to break. The pastry was too crumbly. What was a mild annoyance at five o’clock could be a disaster by nine, but on this occasion Dibden in his great foolishness had chosen to overlook it. Perhaps that family motto hung too heavily about his neck; it seemed he could not resist it. Lurking in his service fridges, ready for the night ahead, a whole catalog of bodged mise awaited him: soufflé mix made with overbeaten egg whites that would explode when baked, a chocolate ganache at least three weeks old, overripe raspberries, underripe pears, quince jam that would not set, fondants that would not rise, and a crème anglaise that tasted faintly but unmistakably of garlic. His mise en place was a ticking bomb; yet after a quiet lunch, before the madness of Saturday dinner, it looked just fine. I remember learning at university about the Russian formalists, who said, in a nod to Chekhov’s gun, that if a man hammers a nail into the wall in the first act he must be hanged from it by the third. Well, Dibden was that man and he had been busy with the hammer.
“I’m going to take your mum on a package holiday to Tenerife,” said Ramilov.
“That’s not even a nice place,” Dibden protested.
“Exactly!” shouted Ramilov. “Exactly!”
The problem with pastry was that whoever worked it was unregulated. All the other sections straddled starters and mains; they had to work together on every check, which kept them in time with one another. Ramilov couldn’t drag his feet over a ravioli order if it was coming up with one of Dave’s steaks. Each cog kept the other cogs turning. But pastry was alone in the wilderness.
At five thirty Bob walked purposefully into the kitchen doing up his apron.
“Right, gentlemen, we are entering the power hour. You all know what that means. Chop chop.”
He pointed to the clock on the wall above Dibden. One hour before service began.
“You ready, shithead?” he asked.
Dibden did not have a nickname, but there was no shortage of suggestions. Ramilov thought he should be called “Bumble Stumblefuck” but it was too hard to shout quickly. In retrospect I think Ramilov was actually very fond of Dibden.
“Yes, chef!” Dibden replied. He paused and examined Bob’s countenance to see if he might be amenable to further discussion this evening. Bob liked to say that he was always there if anyone needed to talk about anything, that he welcomed questions and suggestions on all aspects of the operation. Dibden decided to try his luck.
“I’m thinking of doing some apple crisps, chef,” he said. “I thought they’d go well with the soufflé.”
“Shut up, you prick,” Bob said. Wolfishly he turned his attention to a gastro of braised pork cheeks. But he had hardly begun chewing when a sound in the plonge made him freeze. Hopping, terrified Shahram, obliged on Saturdays to work more than his customary nine hours, had turned to song.
“Mhut va fuck iffat?” he bellowed at the little man. “Are you praying?”
Through the doorway, Shahram gave Bob an edgy smile that made it clear he understood nothing that had been said to him.
“You’re not doing that in here,” shouted Bob, swallowing painfully. “I’ll have no praying in this kitchen. No pray. Get it?”
“Chef.” Shahram pulled at his crotch nervously and showed his small gappy teeth.
“And stop looking so fucking nervous,” said Bob.
“Probably wants to blow us up,” said Racist Dave.
An olive flew across the kitchen, striking Dave in the eye, causing him to cry out. Ramilov, the thrower, chuckled to himself. “Racist Dave” was another nickname he refused to endorse. What’s Dave about him? he used to say.
“Right,” Bob said, ignoring them. “Power hour. Let’s have ‘The Cage of Pure Emotion.’”
Dave, groaning quietly, wiped the oil from his eye and reached for a broken CD case next to the hi-fi. The CD was scratched to pieces, and when the hi-fi finally recognized it, it seemed to groan too. Mercilessly, it played the song all the same.
Trapped in a cage,
A cage of pure emotion.
Bob clapped his hands and bellowed the words loudly.
“Come on, chefs!” he cried. There was Bob for you—Mr. Good Times.
With some reluctance the other chefs joined in. Ramilov added a low hoarse baritone, Dave droned loudly and tunelessly, Dibden mumbled like a posh person making an excuse. The quiet dark-eyed girl watched in silent disgust.
—
This was the power hour. The last chance to make everything right. Had you done enough to keep your head above it? Were you set? At every section chefs were topping up their service fridges, cadging chopping boards, filling the squeezy bottles with olive oil and wine vinegar, dicing butter, refreshing the water in their spoon washes, sprinkling salt on the ice cubes in the deep steel trays to slow their melting, laying damp paper towels on top of the herbs to stop them from wilting. Ramilov was demanding kisses from the waitresses in return for the complimentary bread. This was the hour to eat, if you had time, or it was the hour to get your head down and blitz through any mise outstanding. This was the hour when the slow chefs worked fastest and the fast chefs smoked. This was the hour when every chef took a gamble. Would they have enough of this or that to last them the night? How busy would their section be? Would the great collective unconsciousness that governed all their fates be in the mood for the steak or the fish pie?
On other nights of the week this in-between hour might pass unnoticed, with service dawning slowly while life, and mise, continued around it. Saturday night was different. There were no quiet sections, no empty tables. Everyone front and back of house got short shrift. At six thirty the squabbling, shit-talking kitchen fell quiet in anticipation. The radio was switched off. This was the moment when those head chefs with a taste for the grandiose might choose to give a short rallying speech to the brigade. One for all, all for one, that sort of thing. Bob rarely did, though occasionally he would remind the chefs that if he said anything personal about them during service it was not a heat-of-the-moment thing, he really did mean it.
And then . . . silence. The kitchen stood at attention like an army in the moment before battle, awaiting the first volley of arrows, listening for the first signs of attack. As the silence grew, so too did the anxiety. A deluge was coming. The longer this silence went on, the harder the deluge would be. It was an awkward, sleazy wink sort of silence; not, in fact, a silence at all, but a digest of many small noises, each lacking the particular accompanying sound that made them whole. It was the sound of absence: the absence of pans clunking on the blazing burners, of chefs’ cries bouncing off the tiled walls, of plates clattering on the work surfaces. Such stillness hung about the place, one struggled to imagine that bodies had ever whirled and jagged about it. The sheer and total industry of the kitchen was at a standstill. Ice melted slowly in the trays.
Croak!
Then, suddenly, there it was. The sound everyone was waiting for. A croak croak cutting through the empty noise. The ticket machine hacking up the first check of a long night and Bob tearing the paper off to cry . . . “Ça marche! Check on!”
This was how it always began.
The night Dibden went down, the night The Fat Man came to dinner, was no different. The early, breathless anticipation; the first rush gathering momentum as one by one each section joined the fight; the strange little bubbles of calm between the frenzies. Dibden did not get a dessert check on until seven thirty, a single order for caramelized pears and ice cream. And though the pears were harder than they should have been and took an age to cook, he produced the dish with only cosmetic mumblings from Bob about how shit he was and how he needed to play the game.
Then it got worse. Around eight there was a brief flurry of dessert checks from the early tables and suddenly Dibden had four different tickets on his grabber and was trying to cook twenty different things at once. Then Bob, as wolfish as ever, stuck his fat finger in the garlicky crème anglaise Dibden was heating on the side of the solid top and declared it fucking gash. The whole lot went in the bin and Dibden found himself in the inconvenient position of having to separate egg whites from yolks and heat cream and split vanilla pods with twenty dishes still to make while a very fat and unfriendly chef bawled in his ear about the ingenious things he was going to do to his intimate parts.
“Dibden’s sweating like a nun in a fish market,” Ramilov observed.
Dibden did not even have time to object that this was offensive to nuns.
Then it got worse. A raspberry soufflé burst in the oven and had to go in the bin and Dibden had to get another in fucking ASAP but he could not send the other desserts for the soufflé table because the soufflé would be twenty minutes and everyone else would have finished by the time it arrived. He managed to fob off a flat fondant and caramelized pears onto another table that was waiting, pushing the fondant through the pass to the waitress with the button nose before Bob, momentarily distracted by a table of mains, could speculate on its lack of height. He flicked the first spores of white mold from the top of the ganache tartlets and prayed to the god of the kitchen, a most unobliging god by all accounts, that Bob would not notice.
As Dibden was scooping some runny quince membrillo into a ramekin for a cheese plate, Camp Charles ran in asking about the desserts for the soufflé table that had now been waiting for thirty minutes. It seemed a reasonable question. Bob, particularly, was impressed by its reasonableness and began to demand an answer to it in language that was less reasonable. Now the mint was trembling in Dibden’s hands, his mouth was slack and his head lolling one way and then the other. Punch drunk. Spavined. Former. And all the while the machine hacked out dessert checks and everyone else was too busy with their own drastic situations to improve Dibden’s and soon Bob’s greedy fingers would poke their way into a ganache and deduce that all was not well there and his keen eyes would spy the crumbling pastry tarts and exhausted fondants and stewed raspberries and there would be separate, clearly labeled portions of hell to pay for each of them. The more mistakes Bob spotted, the more particular he became, until Dibden could not hold a plate without provoking his ire. In time there were so many orders to do and mistakes waiting to be made that Dibden did not even know where to begin and only stood there paralyzed in the middle of the kitchen, a latter-day Buridan’s ass, dying of indecision between the proverbial stack of hay and pail of water while Bob screamed blue fury at him.
In the middle of this shitstorm something happened that made everyone, Bob included, forget for a moment about Dibden and his ongoing torture. Camp Charles appeared once more at the back of the kitchen, this time in a state of great anxiety. Ordinarily the maître d’ was an unchanging façade of civility. No one, customers or staff, could tell what he was really thinking, which was a great boon in the service industry, where people were usually thinking the worst thing imaginable. Now his plump face bore signs of strain. One hand wrung the other.
“What’s the matter with you, gay boy?” said Ramilov, who loved Camp Charles unconditionally, for his constant innuendo and the professionalism he wore so effortlessly alongside it. “Why don’t you touch my arse? It’ll cheer you up.”
Under normal circumstances Camp Charles would have been delighted to take hi
m up on the offer—though he maintained he was not actually gay, just very unimpressed. “I’ve sucked enough dicks to know I’m straight,” he once told Ramilov, which was the only time I ever saw Ramilov lost for a response. But now the maître d’ ignored the invitation. “The Fat Man’s here,” was all he said.
Dave stared at Camp Charles in horror.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“The Fat Man is here,” Camp Charles repeated.
The kitchen fell silent. Bob, midway through a complicated volley of abuse to do with Dibden’s parentage, seemed to turn to stone. I craned my neck past him and saw what looked at first like a moderately sized marquee blocking the dining room doorway. As my eyes recalibrated I realized it was the largest man I had ever seen. He spotted the table the front of house was fussing over for him and began moving toward us like a ship pulls out of harbor, its movements slow but possessed of absolute authority, the great sails of fabric that were his clothes tightening and slackening with the motion. I would have remained transfixed had Dibden not made a plaintive cry for eggs and sent me off at a scramble for the dry store.
The Fat Man! A legend in the considerable flesh, here at The Swan! My hands trembled as I turned the speckled shells from their seats. I had heard all the stories. Dave said The Fat Man controlled Camden’s vast and sprawling underworld. Camp Charles said he had heard from a busboy at The Crown who had heard from the maître d’ at The Castle that The Fat Man ran a secret dining club, a club with exotic tastes. The maître d’ had been Waiter of the Year 2008, and he knew things. Others suggested he was a food critic, but Bob was not scared of critics. He bitched about them and everyone else, yet he would say nothing about The Fat Man except that his food had better be fucking soigné. Everyone had a theory on this corpulent mystery, but no one knew anything for certain, not even his real name. The only thing we knew for sure was that he had a remarkable effect on Bob, indeed on anyone who had heard of him. Several caustic senior chefs, and one sardonic maître d’, now started falling over themselves to do his bidding.