IL TEMPIO
Il Tempio in (then) outer-suburban Bulleen was blessed with the soft, humid fug of all good pizza parlours. It’s a devastatingly evocative scent that always makes me want to curl up in a gently leavening ball of dough and fall asleep under a coddling blanket of sugo. Seriously, someone ought to bottle it and sell it as cologne—they’d make a killing. I remember the smell of happiness, the windows condensing with a fragrant fog, the comforting thump of the electric oven door. Il Tempio, with its rather poor mural of the first pizza being made in Naples in the 1600s, fixed my neural pathways early. I make my lasagne béchamel with white wine, extol the margherita over all other pizzas, and it remains the optimal temperature to which I heat my house, meaning the owners of Il Tempio, which still exists to this day, owe me the equivalent of Monaco’s GDP in gas bills.
THE SEA PRINCESS
A two-week P&O cruise around the South Pacific, stopping at various picturesque tropical ports to allow passengers to stock up on shell necklaces, synthetic grass skirts and cheap electronics. There’s a photo of my parents looking improbably young and glamorous at dinner, smiling at each other across a curved booth in the turquoise-carpeted dining room. They look like 1950s movie stars snapped by a society photographer. They look happy and relaxed. That’s because my sister and I are not there. My sister and I would have been watching bad Japanese dinosaur films in the cinema or trying to smother each other to death beneath beanbags in Kids’ Club. No wonder the parentals look so happy. That photo represents a sweet respite from the foul progeny who turned those two weeks of tropical bliss into hell on the high seas in a cabin that measured four square metres. Credit must go to our Fijian-Indian waiter who quickly remembered the breakfast peccadilloes of a couple of sulky Australian girls and would bring yoghurt and white toast posthaste each morning. My life-long love of individually wrapped butter portions began here.
CAFFE SPORT
Note the early use of the double ‘f’. Classy. Caffe Sport was the real-deal Italian before the whole dark-timber-mood-lighting-ciao-bella thing was flat-packed and sold at restaurant supply stores. It was on Lygon Street, back before Melbourne’s Little Italy became a cautionary tale. It was the only grown-up restaurant I remember visiting as a child, and I always—always—spilled my hot chocolate at the end of the night, which the waiters would smoothly insist wasn’t a problem at all while whisking away the sodden linen with the practised efficiency of the Ferrari pit-crew. Caffe Sport and the way it suddenly disappeared from our lives was symptomatic of modern parenting. My folks had hung grimly in there for a few years, pretending that everything was business as usual after having children, but after one too many spilled hot chocolates and tantrums over who got the cassata and who got stuck with the tartufo, they had to admit they were now the unpaid handmaidens to a couple of ravening wolverines and that life as they knew it was O-V-E-R.
BANYULE FISH AND CHIPS
Fish and chip shops do not have waiters and table service, I grant you, usually because they do not have tables. Yet any straw poll will show the fish and chip shop punches above its weight in providing early positive examples of hospitality to impressionable young minds. Why? The simple act of throwing in extra potato cakes for free. At Banyule it was a given, thanks to the kind-hearted Greek owners. Cue scenes of delight when the steaming paper package was torn open in front of Wide World of Disney on a Sunday night. Happy days.
PIZZA HUT
Not strictly from my childhood but illustrative nonetheless. An early date with my first boyfriend to Pizza Hut during its short-lived all-you-can-eat phase. Adam went a little crazy, as eighteen-year-old boy-men tend to do when computing the brain-snapping definition of limitless food. He was a machine, shovelling in slices of Super-Supreme like it was his last meal before attempting to row the Atlantic. The dessert bar tipped him over the edge. All that soft-serve ice-cream with chocolate sprinkles. He had to duck into a doorway on Bourke Street on the way home to vomit up $15.99 worth of food. I’m ashamed to admit he still got lucky that night. We dated for another year.
* * *
TREVOR
The chef was a psycho. I told him to fuck off back to his kitchen so he head-butted me and broke my nose.
* * *
If you’re wondering what my point is—well, it is this: it is a cardinal sin to waste the impressionable early years on fine dining. The more—ahem—‘interesting’ dining experiences will set youngsters on the road to resilience. The ability to recover from incredible setbacks cannot be underestimated if ever they have to face the hospitality jungle as a prospective employee. To use an analogy, it’s like exposing a child to bacteria. Too much and you wind up with meningitis or something similarly horrible, but the regulation doses of colds, flu and communicable diseases will do their immune systems good. Smother kids in an antibacterial fog and you wind up with weaklings. That’s the explanation my mother gave, anyway, when she locked me overnight in a room with my chicken-pocked sister. Or maybe it was a cold-hearted act of revenge for the Sea Princess.
So yes, it’s important to keep an open mind if you’re thinking of being a waiter. Sounds like something you’d hear in the porn industry, doesn’t it? Banish the thought—porn pays far better and comes with discount hair-removal. Junior Gourmand isn’t going to be interested in the skin business—not from a professional point of view, although he may turn out to be a dedicated consumer of its wares. But he does say he’d love to run a restaurant one day, or simply work the floor while he studies for a double degree majoring in commerce and taxation law (‘Thank god,’ thinks Junior Gourmand’s mother). And for that, despite the many, many hours his privileged little bottom has spent perched on the suppleness of soft leather banquettes, he will be entirely ill-equipped.
Even the straightforward indignities of the trial shift are guaranteed to send him running for the comfort of Daddy’s trust fund. The unpaid trial shift is a necessary evil. Everyone does it. It’s also illegal. As your attorney, I advise that an employer can only justify not paying a trialee if he or she is engaged in an active demonstration of skill. Translation: get someone to make a few coffees, okay; stick someone on the coffee machine for a few hours, not okay. But really, who’s checking? Cry to the Fair Work Ombudsman all you like, the reality is you either suck it up or go home.
I’ve done a few trial shifts in my time. Okay, more than a few. A significant number of trial shifts. The collective noun: an embarrassment of trial shifts.
It wasn’t like the door to the cloistered world of fine dining swung open for me after Il Crappo. Quite the opposite, in fact. The only way was down. I remained a bottom feeder, chasing job after job but always being trumped by the candidate who had a slightly better reference than the one written by Paulo where he praised my ‘punctiality’ but noted in a rare fit of honesty that I could only carry two plates. Bastard.
The trial shift is always a gamble. You’re hoping the people who are trialling you have a modicum of sympathy and a legitimate opening in their workforce. You’re hoping they aren’t simply exploiting a free, disposable pool of labour. And, if indeed they aren’t just riding the gravy train, they’re hoping for someone with the skills to pay the bills.
* * *
MATT
This young guy in his twenties was having dinner with his parents and it didn’t look like it was going very well. We decided he must be coming out to them because the dad kept going outside to smoke cigarettes and pace up and down, and the poor kid just looked stricken. Their mains arrived while the dad was outside so I went to tell him the food was on the table. He came back in, took a big swig of red wine then threw the whole glass at his son, who did a defensive move so it smashed into his hands and wrists. There were shards of glass sticking out of him and blood spurting everywhere. The mum was just screaming and we were trying to stop him pulling out the glass in case it made it worse. The parents went home separately and we put him in a taxi to go to hospital. We had to paint the walls to get rid of the
bloodstains.
* * *
It typically proceeds in the following fashion. The phone call, always genial, saying thanks for the job application, we’d like to get you in for a trial. Enough enthusiasm to make you do a little inward woohoo! This one, you think—this could be the one.
You arrive five minutes early, and the moment you step in the door the maître d’—yes, this place has a real-life maître d’—clocks you with the practised eyebrow raise of the true professional. Somehow, he knows. He sees right into your soul—your hopes, your fears, your empty bank account. You are a walking X-ray of incompetence. It’s nothing you say, although your voice has the slightly wobbly cadence of a pubescent boy who’s just discovered bum fluff on his chin. It’s nothing that you do—not exactly, although your well-practised confident smile betrays your lack of confidence. But your fear? He can smell it as if it’s stuck to the bottom of your shoe.
You’re assigned to running plates. That means no meaningful interaction with the diners, simply delivering food and clearing empties. They don’t always guess at your lowly status. Some ask questions you can’t answer. The veal is from where? You’ll—erm—ask the chef! Is the bread baked in-house? You’ll find out! You look over to where the maître d’ is standing at the bar, staring over at you with an expression that makes you wonder if he just smelled a fart. He summons you over with a twitch of his finger. You’re ordered out the back, past the rugby forward line of chefs, to a cheerless alcove set up with two steel buckets and a mountain of cutlery that’s just come steaming out of the dishwasher. Your job for the next four hours will be to polish these babies until they shine. And polish you do.
You’re ignored while the other waiters have their staff meals around you, bitching and laughing about the night’s customers—the guy with the bad hairpiece on table ten, the hot mama on six. You polish and polish like your life depends on it, because you really, really, need this job, and when the mountain finally disappears and you are left sitting there alone, utterly spent and surrounded by limp polishing rags, you go wandering through the now-deserted kitchen to find the maître d’, who is laughing with a waiter over knock-off drinks at the bar. You interrupt him and nervously stammer something like, ‘Is there anything else you want me to do?’ and he looks like another fart just wafted through the room, and says something along the lines of, ‘I have to do the roster but if there’s any work I’ll call next week,’ and you know—and he knows that you know, which is precisely the effect he was hoping to telegraph—that he won’t call.
You take the hour-long tram ride home, collapse on the couch where your housemates are engaged in a PlayStation marathon fuelled by a packet of chopped-up Sudafed, and feel a part of you die inside.
But onwards you go. There’s an ad in the university employment office, which adds an ivy-clad veneer of credibility to the unskilled vacancies for cleaners, babysitters and mail sorters. Surely it must be less the hunting ground of exploiters and more a proper, bona fide pool of gainful employment for the professionals of tomorrow.
The ad is for waiting staff at a city gastropub. Gastropubs are the big new thing. Pubs with decent food, or decent-enough food. They’ve recently taken off as the latest last word in food fashion. I’m not really an expert on the subject of food fashion—at this time I consider it a rare thrill when 2-Minute Noodles launch a new flavour—but I’m vaguely aware that the gastropub is something of an allergic reaction to nouvelle cuisine, the oft-derided big-plate-small-food movement of the 1970s that saw restaurants charge a lot of money for teeny-tiny bits of food on enormous white plates, which was followed by the knee-jerk abundance of the tall food era in which dishes reached for the sky, thanks to the guiding principle ‘the higher the plate, the closer to God’, and the fusion movement—philosophically inclusive but more often than not a big, incoherent mess—running interference. Gastropubs are meant to be all about reclaiming the honesty of a bygone era when the tweed-wearing working classes could get an honest pie that wasn’t a mass-produced thing made from snouts, anuses and additive codes. Young men in flat caps stolen from their grandfathers are rediscovering the joys of corned beef and mash in unprecedented numbers.
If there was any truth to the English language, ‘food fashion’ should be an oxymoron. Our ancestors were so busy trying not to starve to death they simply didn’t have time to invent edible ‘dirt’ and spherified peas made from peas turned into gel to resemble peas. Now that everyone’s dead bored with the novelty of being able to eat whatever and whenever we want, like capricious monarchs surrounded by sycophantic courtiers, we’re allowing unspeakable things to happen to food in the name of art. I think it’s important to remember that most food fashion falls into the category of ‘stuff you queue up for two hours to eat now that you’ll fall about laughing at in two years’ time’. Or as I like to say: today’s paleo is tomorrow’s punchline.
Looking back it’s hard not to get all misty-eyed for the beautifully uncomplicated nature of the gastropub. A pub! A pub that serves food you don’t want to regurgitate! How incredible! The gastropub was never as high-concept as the acres of press coverage would suggest but, hey, it was the early 90s. We’d only just recovered from the sun-dried tomato craze.
‘You look nervous,’ says the young guy behind the bar when I front up for an interview, his hair neatly parted on the side like the past thirty years never happened. He’s dressed like an extra from a Dean Martin film. White shirt, black bow tie, black pants, shiny shoes. It’s reassuring that this is the sort of place that trusses young people up in outfits their grandmothers would love. ‘Have a drink while you wait.’
Why thank you, clean-cut young man. It’s not a good look, potentially, but Gary the manager is nowhere to be seen and it might calm the nerves. A vodka tonic, thanks.
‘Don’t worry,’ smiles my new friend. His name is Julian. I can almost smell the private school on him. ‘You’ll be fine.’
Gary finally appears. He’s your typical ex-footballer prototype—tall and well-built but running to seed. He seems distracted, engages in perfunctory chit-chat for a few minutes, then asks if I can start a trial shift right away. Yes, my hoped-for future employer, yes I can.
And it goes well. It goes exceedingly well. Table after table of identikit businessmen in their grey suits and red power ties would attest that I don’t drop things, mess up orders, or ruin their power lunch by spilling a single precious drop of the McLaren Vale cabernet. It goes so well that Gary gives me the thumbs-up as he dashes out the front door and says Felicity is going to have a chat to me before I go home.
Yay-hey.
But Felicity is apologetic. Felicity, a pretty redhead with freckles and sparkly earrings, makes me think I’m about to get the old don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you routine. The routine that says the past five hours of my life have been for nothing except to chip away a little bit more at my rapidly diminishing stock of self-esteem. Not exactly. Turns out Felicity is concerned about something else. ‘Sorry about this,’ she says, biting her bottom lip, ‘but Gary says your skirt needs to be shorter. He was too scared to tell you himself.’
‘My skirt?’ My skirt is probably 6 inches above the knee. I’m no seamstress, but I’m pretty certain the technical term for this is ‘short enough’. Felicity indicates, however, that it could stand to have another 4 inches lopped off.
Right.
While I’m computing my skirt’s impending diet, she starts on the positives. There’s lots of work available. I can expect some decent shifts each week. In fact, why don’t I stick around for a private function that evening? Trial over. They’ll pay me.
Still percolating the disjunction between the Rat Pack-styled bar staff and my shrinking uniform, I do. The function begins well enough. It’s some college old-boys’ football club reunion. Mate. Maaaate. The first hour is taken up with hauling trays of Carlton Draught through the crowd. I’m called ‘love’ too many times to count. Occasionally one of the guests will murmur in my ear that he nee
ds a light beer, as if scared he’s going to be called out as a purse-carrying nancy boy by his full-strength buddies. Occasionally a hand brushes my bum, although it’s impossible to tell if it’s due to malice aforethought or the closeness of the crowd. Whatever. It’s no worse than the 96 tram in peak hour.
Across the room I spy my new pal Julian pulling the blinds down on all the windows. Curious, I think. It’s very un-gastropub to have blackout shades. It’s not like it’s World War Two or anything. Julian turns and gives a nod to Gary, who’s appeared behind the bar. Gary grins and flips a switch and the lights dim low and ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’ comes blaring through the PA system. I hate ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’. The lyrics are nonsensical (what the hell is a ‘source companion’?) and it rhymes ‘dancer’ with ‘cancer’. Obviously the work of semi-literate German Eurodance idiots, but my little digression is arrested when three women burst through the bar doors and start performing a sort of high-stepping cheerleader routine, only with no clothes on.
And this is the precise moment when my skirt realises its insignificance in the wider scheme of things. My skirt doesn’t need to sweat the small stuff. These men don’t care if my skirt is 2 inches or 10 inches above the knee. They don’t care if my skirt is made of expensive silk or cheap polyester. All eyes are on the three pairs of impressively fake tits cavorting with their owners on the bar.
Prick with a Fork Page 3