I start with the pliers, delicately pulling out his nails one by one. They resist at first, then come out with a satisfying little—pop! By now Gino’s shrieking something unintelligible in Italian. It sounds like an imprecation to the Almighty to strike me dead but I continue, regardless. I throw the nails in the corner, then jump up and down so the loosened floorboards undulate like a xylophone in an earthquake. Then I go to work with the blowtorch, close and meticulous, until all that is left of their glossy tyranny is a blackened, smoking ruin.
It keeps me warm at night. But I guess the best revenge on Gino was simply that he had to be Gino. Even I have to admit that was punishment enough.
— 7 —
HOW TO MAKE NOTHING OUT OF SOMETHING
You know a sure-fire way to make money from restaurants? Start a support group for everyone who’s lost theirs chasing the ownership dream. Set a modest annual membership fee, charge a dollar for a styrofoam cup of instant coffee (extra for milk and sweetener) and you won’t look back. There’ll be tears (you can charge for tissues) and there’ll be anger (there’s nothing more comforting than carbohydrates—charge for sweet biscuits). The upshot is that there’ll be more money to be bled from that sad circle of plastic chairs in a disused scout hall than any of these guys found tapping into the Great Australian Dream of restaurant ownership.
Stick around the hospitality industry long enough and you’ll see people doing their dough in kaleidoscopic ways. Some, realising the end is nigh, choose to go out in a spectacular display of fireworks and embezzlement fury (‘If that’s how it’s going to be—cop this, universe!’) that invariably ends in furious creditors, a locksmith, and the disembodied voice of the recorded phone message advising, ‘The number you have dialled has been disconnected. Please check the number and dial again.’ You may never see this person again, although South-East Asia is probably a good place to start looking. South-East Asia is the industry version of going into witness protection.
Much like confronting death itself, staring down the barrel of fiscal annihilation is a very personal matter. Some go under with a quiet whimper, some are bitter, some sociopathic, some merely pathetic. Whatever the case, the view from the cheap seats is never pretty. Sure, there’s always another place willing to hire a waiter with a chequered work history and her own wardrobe of black and white separates. Waitering is a movable feast, after all. But watching people who have poured their life savings into a business coming to terms with its terminal diagnosis is like watching the human condition in time-lapse.
You know the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief? It’s like that, only—hopefully—without the human body at the end of it. It kicks off with denial and anger. Little explanation needed here. This is the bit where the boss starts acting more volatile than usual. Of course, he might simply have renewed his coke habit or be spending too much time with the form guide, sinking his dough on the fifth race at Randwick. Time will reveal all, but if a hitherto well-balanced person snarls ‘What the fuck’s your problem?’ when you walk in for your shift, chances are things are on the slide.
Then it’s onto the bargaining stage. This is the bit where a previously clean line of credit receives a sudden downgrading. It’s like Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s demoting a nation from a gold-plated, triple-A credit rating to BBB junk status. Sweden one day; Uruguay the next. As if there’s been a secret memo go out among the suppliers—and quite possibly there has, because these guys swap intelligence like ASIO operatives—goods are being delivered on a strictly COD basis (that’s cash on delivery—no way is the supplier going to get stiffed on two cases of pinot gris when the dining room is apocalyptically empty).
There will be meetings. The meetings might be formal: an overly cheerful bank rep fronting up to talk about that little outstanding debt. The meetings might be informal: loan sharks arriving with their glittering dead eyes and flinty air of menace. There will be other ‘meetings’ conducted in the kitchen. Loiter casually nearby and you’ll hear the head chef being implored to stay. The chef usually knows what’s going down. The chef deals with the suppliers, and probably has the closest relationship to the boss. The chef is the bellwether of the business. If the head chef position is a revolving door of sudden, unexplained departures—be afraid. Be very afraid.
Next up, depression. Look out for the chain-smoking, the quiet weeping in the office, the bottles stashed in the bottom of the boss’s bag making soft little clanks, the muffled chimes of doom, foretelling another night of self-medication on the couch.
And then, finally, acceptance. Or arson, an eventuality the Kübler-Ross model failed to consider. It could go either way.
Whatever your personal feelings, it’s not good for the soul to watch a person go down like the Titanic. No one enjoys working through that awful twilight zone when the writing’s not only on the wall, it’s in 10-foot-high neon letters, an emergency flare seared into the night sky. It’s professional masochism.
Anyway, the clued-in staff will have abandoned ship at the first sight of the iceberg. No shame in that. It’s the only smart move, because by this stage there aren’t enough lifeboats to go around. Don’t go feeling any misplaced sense of duty. If you’re on the books the owner has probably stopped paying superannuation to save a few hundred measly dollars a week. If you have holidays owing, you’d better grab them while you can, because you’re about to go on the holiday with no end.
Few things depress the hell out of me more than walking past an empty restaurant at 7.30 p.m., the time when it should be pumping, the kitchen cranking, the waiters bustling, the place full of bonhomie and cheer. Whatever the joint might be—upmarket, mid-market or the kind of place with ‘cheap-arse Tuesday’ daubed in fluoro lettering on the window—the net effect is always the same. There’s the empty stage-set of forlorn tables and chairs. The hopeful cluster of waiters at the counter. Doing what waiters do when times are bad—waiting. Waiting and waiting and waiting. Odds-on one of them is an owner, rostered on to cut staff costs. It’s easy enough to identify this person because even through plate glass they reek of the eau de cologne known as D’Spair. This person will eyeball you as you walk past, hoping to make like a tractor beam and pull you in against your will.
Fat chance. You think I’m going into a place with no one else in there? No effing way. I’m like everyone else. I see an empty joint, I assume it’s no good. Even if by some chance it is good, it’s no fun to eat in an empty dining room—and anyway, they’re probably forced to push dodgy produce that’s been in the fridge just a little too long.
See? Failure is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Of course, there are stories about brilliant comebacks from the abyss. They’re traded like talismans across an industry where hope is just about the only thing in short supply. David Chang made a multinational mega-success of Momofuku only after going all gonzo on his traditional Korean stuff that had been greeted by New York with an unimpressed ‘meh’. The story is carved on a stone tablet high on a mountaintop somewhere, alongside a copy of the Time magazine with his grinning mug on the cover. But if you’re going to base your business plan on a Chang-like resurrection, you might as well start writing letters to the Tooth Fairy. Best treat it as nothing more than a beguiling tale told to restaurateurs after their Stilnox has kicked in and they’re being tucked whimpering into bed at night.
So I went to work for Salvatore.
Salvatore had been the Sabatini’s head chef. Yes, yes, I know. But I’d been out of work for six months, surviving on handouts from the Bank of Mum and Dad (interest rate: guilt) and it was time to get back on it. And Salvatore had been the least-worst person there. There was an element of kindness to his broad-framed Italianness. He could dick-joke with the best of them but his flirtations were chaste, he occasionally gave me a lift home in his classic Mercedes, and he didn’t mind it when I nicked sun-dried tomatoes from the plastic container on the prep bench. So when he called and happily explained he’d ditched the well-paying, ste
ady job he’d held for more than ten years to throw his hat in the ring as what is stiffly known as a chef-patron—well, ‘yes’ seemed a reasonable answer.
* * *
ERIC
It was an outrageously expensive hotel with a sushi restaurant where the chef’s specialty was lobster sashimi. He wouldn’t kill the creature first; he’d simply lift the shell off, scoop the tail flesh out, put it back in and serve the whole lobster, which presumably had died by this time, on ice at the table. One night I put the lobster down to the usual ooh and ahhs and turned away only to hear a massive crash and people screaming. The lobster had crawled off the platter and onto the floor. The whole table went berserk.
* * *
‘Fuck that Gino,’ Salvatore exclaimed with passion, the dark circles under his eyes more pronounced than the last time I saw him, but with the unmistakable air of someone quivering on the cusp of their own destiny. ‘Fuck him. I’ve been dreaming about this for a long time. Finally I’m doing my own thing.’ He drew it out for emphasis, nurturing the consonants into a sing-song lilt. ‘Fi-na-lly.’
Let’s call it Niente. Nothing. Because Niente might as well never have existed. It lasted less than a year. Horrific stuff. It was like a car crash, only without the screech of tyres, the quasi-satisfying shattering of glass and crumpling of steel. Niente went so quietly into that good night the casual observer would never have realised it took the life savings and the very spirit of two decent men.
It was a business on dialysis from day one. The decisions made by Sal and his brother Ronny, who’d taken early retirement from the police force to throw his money into the venture, contravened all accepted wisdom. They also prove, as if further proof were needed, that a decent-enough chef does not necessarily make a decent-enough restaurateur.
First mistake: they leased a blank space that merely boasted four walls and a roof and built a restaurant from the ground up. This meant they needed specific opening-a-restaurant permits. They needed to satisfy specific opening-a-restaurant health regulations. They needed to jump through so much red tape that they became gymnasts of filling out forms in triplicate.
It’s fairly obvious why someone would want to throw open the doors—tah-dah!—on a box-fresh, shiny, never-before-seen space. The thrill of the new is ingrained in us all. Buying a restaurant that someone else has sweated over, nurtured and cajoled into being, is like buying a second-hand car. Where’s that beguiling new-car smell? It smells like someone else. It’s not really yours. Not for a long time, anyway, until you’ve asserted your own chips-and-gravy preferences and can eventually kick the tyres, thump the bonnet and say ‘yeah, baby’ with satisfaction.
It could be a lemon. Maybe the books were cooked beyond recognition. Maybe the genial cafe owner implored all his friends and family to eat there the week you spent observing it in action before signing on the dotted line. On which note, where the hell are all those customers now? Maybe the owner let you in on his little tax-avoidance secret: he’s been skimming 100K off the business each year. Or so he says, hoping to explain the discrepancy between the official takings and his asking price. It’s not so far-fetched. Plenty of operators do it. But do you believe him?
There are the sites haunted by the ghosts of restaurants past. Some become so perfumed with the stench of failure even the I-Chang couldn’t make a go of it. A conga line of hopefuls take it in turns to do their dough. The place will go from Greek to Japanese to Jamaican soul food to a Polish grill, seemingly each week a new cuisine, a new continent. All the while Joe Public becomes more and more suspicious and eventually crosses the street to avoid the bad juju. Any place that’s changed hands three, four times in as many years? Take my advice. Just say no, because it will never fly.
But opening something new takes time, and patience, and, above all, money. Money was the one thing in short supply for Sal and Ron. All the while they were satisfying a particularly assiduous arsehole from the council who delighted in rejecting permits on fanciful grounds (he didn’t like the choice of tiles; the wheelchair ramp to the toilets was 4 degrees too sharp), the rent was backing up like sewage in a pipe.
Niente had actually been a strip club. Rumour had it Salvatore had been a frequent visitor. Nothing unusual there—it’s not uncommon to freshen up midway through a double shift with a buttfloss-clad arse waggled in the face. It was clear that between lap dances he’d taken the time to look around and decide it had potential for his dream project. His dream was to open a restaurant just like the Sabatini. When I say ‘just like the Sabatini’ I mean ‘exactly like the Sabatini’.
This was part of Sal’s problem. The Sabatini was all he knew. After a decade working for the little dictator Gino, he was totally institutionalised. You see guys like this, they get used to the little flap in the door opening three times a day, the prison-issue tray sliding through. The paycheck turning up once a week. Someone else to make the hard decisions. To take care of the bills. In terms of running his own restaurant, Sal couldn’t even wipe his own bum. That’s the overlooked beauty of being a wage-slave. Most problems are someone else’s problem. A good restaurateur is a regular Mr Fix-It. You don’t want to be bringing in the fridge repairer unless the fridge is in need of the last rites. Same goes for the ice-machine guy, or the dishwasher whisperer. You’re pissing your profit away if you don’t know at least a few rudimentary band-aid solutions for all the gear keeping the restaurant’s engine-room humming.
That was the second mistake. Not only had they gone to the huge expense of installing a commercial kitchen, being a typical chef Salvatore had needed the best of everything. Nothing second-hand for this little black duck. It’s easy to see his way of thinking. I mean, this was it. His workplace for the next fifteen years, until he retired to Noosa or the Gold Coast with his golf clubs and a whole wardrobe of checked shorts and white slip-ons. Why not enjoy a little comfort, a huge coolroom, a reliable ten-burner oven with no hot or cold spots, a super-duper ventilation system that could suck the dentures out of a mouth, an ice machine that could have reversed the thinning of the Arctic shelf.
They did take one punt that deserves respect. They’d chosen a stretch of shops best described as up-and-coming rather than fully arrived. Call it the eternal appeal to the gods of real estate. A busy restaurant paying too much rent is not a profitable restaurant. Only the landlord is the winner. Anyone who leases on a strip described as ‘hotter-than-hot’ in the food glossies is a fool unless they get some unbelievable sub-market deal. Ha. Like that’s going to happen. Sal and Ron rolled the dice on lifting the fortunes of a tired shopping strip not too far from the Sabatini.
Yet it was somehow just plain wrong. Wrong by way of Wrongtown. Imagine a well-known work of art. The Mona Lisa, for example. Then ask your average five-year-old to replicate that painting. That was Niente. I don’t believe in the Chinese art of feng shui, the practice of harmonising the environment through negative and positive energy flows. But I do believe in crimes against interior design, and here they were manifest in every strange nook and cranny constructed with cheap fibreboard (‘To texturise the space,’ Sal explained) and in every bilious daubing on the wall. Basically they’d senselessly tried to replicate the feel of a rather bijou, old world cafe in a huge 200-seat former warehouse-slash-strip-club.
And Ron. Oh god, Ron. Ron was out of his depth from day one. A huge former cop complete with authentic drug squad moustache, now crashing around behind a bar trying to come to terms with not-so-newfangled drinks like the Cocksucking Cowboy. What’s that they say about old dogs and new tricks? His hearing was totally up the spout, too. It was a liability in the force—it’s good to be able to hear someone yelling they’re going to shoot—and it was a liability here. ‘Ron? Ron? RON!’ Sign language wasn’t able to convey the kind of detail needed in ‘a chardonnay, two espresso martinis, and a bourbon and Coke, no ice’. We tried to communicate in writing but he didn’t have the best eyesight, either, and was always losing his glasses. Sal bought him one of those cords
so he could hang his bifocals around his neck but he didn’t want to wear it. Said it made him look too old. The sweet bird of youth had flown a couple of decades earlier, but who was I to tell him?
There weren’t so many customers to worry about Ron’s glacial drinks preparation, anyway. Sal took to skulking nervously around the bar. A chef outside of his lair is a dangerous thing. Unnatural. Seeing a guy in chef’s jacket and clogs cooling his heels in the dining room is like going to the zoo and seeing the door to the tiger cage hanging open. It unnerved the few customers they did have.
Conversations with Sal became increasingly awkward.
‘So Sal . . . how’s it been going?’ I’d venture at the start of each shift, trying to keep the cheer in my voice even though the quiet pall of doom hanging over the joint indicated he was facing his own personal Hiroshima.
‘We did twelve covers on Thursday night and sixteen on Friday,’ he’d say, groping for the bright side of the moon. ‘Last Friday we only did eight. That’s gotta be a good sign, right?’
‘Totally. That’s an excellent sign.’
‘Yep. Yep.’ He was there but he wasn’t really there. Behind his bushy monobrow and the wreaths of cigarette smoke, there was a brain torturously computing the money it cost him to open each day, every hour, every minute.
* * *
ANDREW
I used to work at a really fashionable restaurant in a super-trendy but pretty gritty area. It was opposite a methadone clinic and all the staff were expected to eat their meals in the alley behind the restaurant surrounded by a sea of human faeces and needles.
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