One last thing. Don’t change your baby in the dining room. Not even if it’s ‘only’ a wet nappy and the baby is in its pram and you can do it more or less discreetly. It’s the principle of the thing. Bare genitals do not belong where people are trying to eat, unless you yourself have gone discreetly underpants-free—discreetly being the operative word. On the other hand, breasts—or boobs, or knockers, or cans, or whatever semi-satisfactory but still slightly wrong term you want to call them—are fine. They’re more than fine. They’re desirable. Just so long as they’re lactating. It’s amazing the number of nursing mothers who ask permission to breastfeed at the table. As if it would be reasonable to say, ‘No, I demand you go to the toilet and lock yourself in a cubicle. You and your baby should be comfortable there. The acoustics are quite nice—all that tile.’ It’s a sad indictment on society that boobs are considered all porn-y and lascivious when they’re doing what they were designed to do. Anyone who asked my permission to breastfeed at the table paid the price of being subjected to my joke: ‘Well, usually we don’t allow BYO but in this case we’ll make an exception.’ Ha. Hahaha.
In 1918 more than 100 waiters were arrested for poisoning bad tippers in Chicago. The internet told me that. The internet also told me Hitler escaped his bunker in a submarine and ended his days living in the Arctic, so I’m not sure it’s always a reliable news source. But in this case I choose to believe it. Except for one thing.
One hundred waiters. So few?
Let me tell you about someone I gladly would have poisoned.
I was working at a bona fide celebrity chef’s restaurant during the brief interregnum after Ben had fired me from the Duke for insubordination and general crapness and before I started at the Rising Damp. I was working the function one night. The functions room was upstairs. They generally are. That’s part of the reason working functions sucks (unless you’re one of the Damp’s barmen) because it involves a whole lot of running up and down stairs carrying heavy trays. It’s like doing four or five back-to-back step aerobic classes. Great if you’re Michelle Bridges. Not so great if you’re a committed smoker. Even worse, people rarely think to tip at functions. It’s called the bystander effect. The herd mentality kicks in. Someone else will have taken care of the tip, right?
It was a function of cardio-thoracic specialists. Probably not short of a coin. A sedate enough dinner. Wine consumed in mindful moderation. Salad playing yin to the roast pork’s yang. Conversation treading a professional line peppered with the odd cardio-thoracic joke (punchline: ‘and then I explained to his wife that he died of a myocardial infarct and she thought I said fart!’)
Party on. They decided when I was clearing the cheese course that they’d split the bill and leave me a tip of $100. Nice one. That was enough to pay the rent and the phone bill that week and more than enough to make the stairs feel a little less steep. They’d come prepared, too. Everyone must have stopped at an ATM en route to the restaurant to ensure there was none of that ‘just give the cash to me and I’ll put the whole lot on my credit card’ funny business. Possibly not the world’s most trusting lot, the cardio-thoracic fraternity, but I was stiffed anyway. A woman wearing a twinset handed me a single $50 instead of $150, right in front of the whole table, and that was the end of my tip. The look on her face made it clear it was design, not accident. She knew exactly what she was doing. But something underneath it was pleading and apologetic. A look to make me think, maybe she’s broke. A gambler. Alcoholic. Messy divorce. So I held fire. All I did was glare at her with the heat of a thousand suns as she and her fellow cardio-thoracic specialists filed out into the night.
If Twitter had been invented back then I would have gone home, logged on as AngryServerGirl666 and let rip with pictures of sad pandas captioned with things like ‘EVERY TIME YOU STIFF A SERVER A PANDA COMES CLOSER TO EXTINCTION’. Twitter was invented by waiters needing an anonymous forum to bitch about bad tippers. It provides much-needed catharsis, especially in America where the average waiter earns a base wage of $2.13 an hour.
In the States, tips are the difference between survival and starvation. In Australia, where the living wage is more generous without being anything to hold a ticker-tape parade about, it’s not so urgent.
So why tip, then? I could give you a hundred reasons why you should tip, even when the waiter is being paid enough to afford a new toothbrush every once in a while. I could go on about tipping being appropriate because it’s thanks for an enjoyable time, or polite acknowledgement of a difficult job, or simply because it’s a noble tradition.
But the clincher is this: just think of who doesn’t tip.
Mean people don’t tip. Hitler wouldn’t have tipped. The Manson family didn’t tip. Parking meter inspectors don’t tip. Genghis Khan? Not a tipper.
There’s a general rule of thumb that you can judge how well a person will tip based on how they want their steak cooked. The well-done crowd are misers who wouldn’t tip even if there was a gun to their head. They’d be arguing with the gunman about the unfairness of waiters expecting a tip when pretty much every other service industry (except, they’ll announce triumphantly, STRIPPERS) goes tip-free and if we head down this path we’ll fall into an economic hole like America where a huge underclass is forced to scrape by on their tips. Little do they realise that no one’s fooled by their smokescreen of political concern. They’re just cheap. The whole post-industrial construct will not collapse if someone leaves a measly five bucks on a saucer.
Speaking of which, tips should ideally fold, not tinkle. As Waz used to say, handing back a generous twenty or fifty cents to a startled diner, ‘That’s not a tip, that’s an insult.’
The worst are the people who leave notes instead of a tip. The fey: ‘A hummingbird’s heart beats 1400 times a minute.’ The righteous: a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet. The nasty: ‘You suck.’
It helps to be a regular if you’re a big tipper. Why tip big if you’re never going to the place again? Where’s the incentive? Return for the glory. Being known as a big tipper, or a big-enough tipper, means you will be looked after. I’m proposing a national database so that tipping generosity doesn’t just evaporate into the void and instead follows the generous tipper from establishment to establishment, laying down a soft carpet of anticipatory gratitude. That said, everyone should know at least once in their lives the comforting certainty of being a regular. Regulars are the butter to the waiter’s bread. They can be a solace. A confidant. Sometimes even a friend. Unless of course they’re gluten-intolerant mobile-phone addicts morally opposed to tipping but in favour of letting their children run wild. Then you’re screwed.
* * *
COLIN
It’s really irritates me how often people don’t listen while the menu is being explained. This was in a degustation restaurant that had quite a few vegetarian offerings. Are there any dietary requirements or allergies? No response. At the end of a fabulous meal one vegetarian guest said she thought the kitchen was doing amazing things without meat and what was that delicious creamy mid-course? Um, that was foie gras. What’s foie gras? It got pretty ugly after that.
* * *
— 15 —
AN UNEXPECTED REVERSAL OF FORTUNE
It is a source of general wonder that I transformed from a connoisseur of instant noodles into a professional restaurant reviewer, so here is the story in full, beginning at the start and finishing close to the end and in between featuring approximately 1400 restaurant meals about which I was paid to write. In addition it involves an ongoing battle with 5 kilograms that came along for the ride uninvited and proved so tenacious that a few weeks or a month after their last defeat I’d look down in surprise and exclaim ‘YOU AGAIN! HOW THE HELL DID YOU GET BACK HERE WITHOUT ME NOTICING?’ Always the same 5 kilos. I knew them by sight.
I promise not to chunter on about my CV. It’s an inglorious document, with a notable absence of awards and commendations. The simple matter is this: I got a job on a newspaper. Remember newspape
rs? Me too! A career chosen on the rigorously scientific basis of realising my favourite part of the day was reading the paper while drinking coffee. Ergo, I should write for a paper while drinking coffee.
Jobs in newspapers aren’t that easy to come by, even back then when they still existed. On getting an interview at A Well-Known Daily Broadsheet I celebrated with Ben in world’s best practice style by getting shickered at our favourite Thai place. The hangover the next day when we woke up, fully clothed and sprawled haphazardly across the bed like the victims of a violent home invasion, can only be described by resorting to the German. Germans have a word for every occasion. Their word for hangover is katzenjammer, which translates as something like ‘a cat in the head’. What an admirable facility for language. This was a three-cat hangover.
I was interning at the time on Australia’s Only Daily National Financial Newspaper. To say any more would be to risk revealing its identity. Suffice to say you did not call in sick when trying to get a foot in the notoriously heavy door of the media industry—with or without a cat in the head—so, feeling like Ernest Shackleton confronting the soul-destroying wastes of the Antarctic, I summoned every reserve of courage and embarked on the perilous journey to Collins Street. I sometimes wonder if the great man ever faced a similar dark despair to the one I experienced when dashing off the 96 tram to vomit behind a Moreton Bay fig in the Carlton Gardens. Or whether the Shack ever temporarily escaped his world of pain by entering a place deeper than sleep—a refuge known as unconsciousness—as I did later that morning in the Telstra annual shareholders’ meeting.
The plush seat at Hamer Hall was a kind host. Far kinder than I deserved. It proved so comfortable I wound up with my head flung backwards, mouth open, and snoring like a narcoleptic warthog. The reason I know I was snoring is because one snore was so loud it woke me up. At least the hangover anaesthetised the humiliation. ‘I have to go . . . to the dentist,’ I announced to the bemused journalist assigned to show me the ropes as the shareholders argued about their annual dividend. A clever ruse indeed. I went home, slept for two hours and went back to the office as if nothing untoward had happened.
Word of that misadventure thankfully didn’t spread. I was given a job as a cub reporter and sent off on the merry hell of news reporting, chasing ambulances, police, politicians and, for a brief but thrilling time, an errant gang of private-schoolboy hedge-burners. There were several long months on the graveyard shift desperately hoping for some terrible crime to be announced over the police scanner to alleviate the boredom, but sadly I was denied the gangland murder for which my compatriots all prayed. The only lasting lesson to emerge from the carrier wave’s electromagnetic fuzz and crackle was the depressing number of people who deliberately overdose on paracetamol. Especially on a Saturday night.
I’m getting to the food. As usual, it is Ben’s fault. At the very least, an open-and-shut case of accessory to the crime. For it was he who drew my attention to the newspaper’s cheap eats guide, whose kind editor was known as willing to take a chance on a greenhorn. Hey, I’m cheap, I reasoned with unflappable logic. And I eat.
My first review was a trembling disquisition on a St Kilda cafe, full of praise for the ‘heady aromas’ of baking bread and the virtues of sitting in the window to ‘watch the passing parade’. Clearly a talent to watch. To bookend those crimes against the cliché, I’ll declare it was the first step on a journey of discovery. I’m petitioning for leave to use the word ‘journey’ here, on the undertaking it be used strictly in the pre-food TV sense. These days a terrine can constitute a journey, which makes a twelve-hour lamb shoulder an epic adventure. Hyperbole has taken its place on the table next to the pepper and salt.
Among the many clichés of food writing—or of food writers—the hoariest is that one must have been raised on good food in a family well versed in the pleasures of the table. Not like the Junior Gourmands in their expensive restaurants. They are a breed apart, an exotic butterfly of a diner. What I’m talking about here is ‘honest’ food. That’s the telling word. I’m not exactly sure what constitutes ‘dishonest’ food, but honest food evokes a vegetable patch, a lemon tree, an apron-wearing mother with freshly baked things for the children’s return from school, the sticky glee of the pasta dough that Nonna would lovingly make using the rolling pin smuggled through enemy lines in World War Two. This is the clay from which food writers are formed. It’s the very blood pumping through their veins, making their career path as pre-ordained as eye colour.
My family, by way of shuddering contrast, was prone to panic when it came to food. Food was essentially fuel, a base requirement of survival, but it was also tied up in a measure of failure. A deep well of insecurity about the pleasing of others. Food was a display of love we felt somehow unsure of giving, which turned family occasions into little more than an opportunity to sit around the table passive-aggressively apologising to each other.
‘I’m sorry the chicken’s dry.’
‘It’s not dry.’
‘No, it’s dry. I left it in too long. Damn.’
‘It’s fine.’
(Small voice) ‘It’s . . . dry . . .’
‘I SAID IT’S FINE NOW WOULD YOU PLEASE SHUT UP AND LET US EAT.’
Eating at our house was not relaxing.
Oh, my father did his best. He was the one who really loved food, despite some legendary failures. He once served up an all-white meal—chicken, cauliflower with white sauce, and mashed potato. Everyone who witnessed it couldn’t help but deflate a little, like a day-old party balloon. An early lesson in colour being integral to the enjoyment of food. Poor Dad. He didn’t stand a chance in a family of three sanctimonious women hell-bent on his eternal salvation through the eating of Fibre and Green Things. ‘Only you understand, don’t you, mate?’ he’d say sadly to the dog, his sole male ally. The dog would wag his tail and slobber happily, because he was in on a secret.
Being a complete wog, my father had it ingrained in his DNA to love all meats that had been smoked and cured into salty bliss. Items verboten by us, the ones who loved him most. He and the dog would often disappear on long walks to the park, an activity approved by the House Committee for Healthy Activities, but their idyll was busted when my sister went fossicking in his man-bag and turned up an indictment of deli wrappers bearing exciting labels like ‘salami’ and ‘prosciutto’. If only we’d known he wasn’t going to make it past the age of sixty-seven, we would have said, ‘Go on, Dad, knock yourself out. Eat the mortadella . . . Enjoy it. Please, please enjoy it.’
Dad would have loved my job.
Mike Dubecki would have been waving pompoms in the grandstand as I graduated to the proper restaurant guide—farewell, abject land of the cheap eat—and then scuttled up the ranks from the merest, cling-on, entry-level restaurants to the gastrotemples where people genuflect to the chef as a modern genius and nervously ask to take a snip of hair for their home shrine. An edible education. Maybe the more you get to know, the more you love to eat: a very clever chicken-or-egg food metaphor for you there. Or maybe simply it’s the more prosaic result of the stomach gradually stretching through overuse, eventually requiring the purchase of several pairs of control underwear. I certainly discovered I shared my father’s prosciutto gene and cheese chromosome. I also discovered that food isn’t a quasi-mystical subject but something that can be learned using the forensic approach of the rounds reporter who is thrown into transport, or health, and starts off knowing very little and ends up knowing quite a lot. As a wise colleague said when I dithered nervously in the face of the offer of the top, bees-knees, full-time reviewing job: ‘It’s food. It’s either delicious or it’s not.’
He was right. Start at delicious and go from there.
Along the way I’ve learned plenty of stuff. Stuff by default and by accident and very much on purpose. Stuff the conspiracy of food books, magazines and newspaper supplements will not explicitly say. A lot of it feeds into General Revelation 101 that the main reason restaurant coo
king shits on home cooking is that chefs are on very cosy terms with all the evil things that make food taste good. Even when they’re pretending to be concerned for your blood pressure and glycaemic index, it’s usually little more than a sneaky bit of PR spin. So much restaurant cooking is like the moment in The Wizard of Oz where the curtain is pulled back to reveal the little man with the levers. It tastes good because—oooh, all that butter. All that salt. It’s not rocket science. Even salad. You learn that salad should be seasoned. That’s why restaurant salad tastes better than home salad. It’s the salt. Salt makes things delicious. More of those addictive little white crystals.
You also learn that you shouldn’t be afraid of heat. In restaurant kitchens there are flames sheeting for the sky, like a test-run for hell, which sadly means trying to get restaurant results on a domestic burner can be like trying to win the Indy 500 in a go-kart. You learn that the better the restaurant, the more tepid the food. Especially the meat. You learn the fundamental rules of ordering, such as not ordering risotto in general, or seafood on a Monday, especially when it’s on the specials list, and that it can actually be surprisingly difficult to find a really good steak—particularly when what you want, above all else, is a really good steak. You learn the importance of acid to a dish, that chicken is generally a meat for boring ditherers, that most kitchens overcook swordfish, and that a jus by any other name would still be gravy with tickets on itself. You learn that anyone who cheats by putting crackle in a deep fryer should be publicly flogged, that duck fat is generally wonderful, and that all good pasta is ugly in a beautiful way.
The list goes on. There’s plenty of bullshit, too. Not all truffles are created equal, although they are all presented with hilarious solemnity at the table (partly to justify the $30 ‘supplement’). You could argue that instead of being a by-word for luxury, foie gras is just liver that’s gone to fat camp, that the whole wagyu thing has well and truly jumped the cow shark. But in the end, the only three prerequisites for the job are to love food to the point of gluttony, to keep an open mind, and be prepared to eat the head cheese. Mmm . . . head cheese.
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