I was sitting in the dining room, a long rectangular space with the tables arranged in two rows with an aisle down the middle; some of the lights were already off, and only the ceiling lamp in the center of the room was still on. Patrizio was wiping down the coffee machine, Michele and Mauro were with me. Two beers and a glass of champagne sat in front of us. The clock said eighteen minutes past one in the morning. Outside, workers were dismantling the stage where Cat Power had just finished performing. A short, fat guy plunked himself down at a table near ours and took a crack at getting a free drink by whining loudly about the shitty, cheating world he was condemned to live in. At the same table sat the last lingering clients, an ineffectual young fellow and a blonde girl wearing all the colors of an impressionist’s palette. The fat guy was still droning on, his strident voice colliding with their silence like a moth against an incandescent bulb. The young fellow and the blonde ignored him, clearly irritated by his presence, until the young man went ballistic.
“Will you do me a favor and just go away?”
The fat guy turned toward us and slithered over to our table. He looked at us with sad eyes. I offered him my beer and said he could have it, as long as he stopped jabbering, because this had been a bad enough night already. He was about to sit down, but Mauro said no, he can go drink his beer outside. I looked at the guy and decided he’d be better off hating it when the lights were on instead of hating it when the lights were off, as he had declared in a long rambling speech. Without missing a beat, he grabbed a chair and went on yakking about concerts costing too much, music should be free, lightbulbs burn out way too fast, which never used to happen, lightbulbs used to last for years but now they design them so they burn out instantly, nowadays engineers are paid to design things that break right away, it’s called planned obsolescence. He pointed to the ceiling light above us, with one bulb burned out. I was bone tired. Michele was listening to the guy and agreeing with him, one softly spoken word coming gently to rest upon the next, and Mauro was dialing a number into his cell phone. The security guard from the main gate, without so much as a how do you do, strode in, lifted the fat guy up, and threw him out.
The couple near us got up and walked over to the cash register to pay, he grumbling, she checking her makeup in a round mirror she retrieved from her purse. By now it was thirty-seven minutes past one, and Mauro took a sip of champagne.
“So what happened this evening?”
“Nothing. I mean nothing went well,” I replied.
“Oh, come on. It’s not that that nothing went well. We just have to fine-tune a few things,” Michele said.
“Seven tables got up and left after waiting more than half an hour for the antipasti, one table refused to pay because they waited from eight to ten thirty for their dinner, we had to let it go and apologize, and there were complaints from everyone else. Everyone else complained,” Mauro added for good measure. Then he looked at me searchingly. Michele didn’t say a word.
“What can I say, Mauro? This was our first real test, I guess we should have imagined it, with a draw like Cat Power. I did my best, and so did Michele. Yep, it was a disaster. We’ll have to take steps, but at the start of the evening we only had six tables booked, and we’ve never had more than twenty, twenty-five customers all at once. Who knew we’d have a hundred and fifty covers?”
“We should have, Leo, we definitely should have expected a crowd that size. Actually, you guys should have. Twenty minutes into service the pass was crammed with orders, dishes were practically falling on the floor, and you two were in the weeds — you should have got your ass in gear. Why didn’t you?”
I was stunned into silence, sweat trickling down my back and my hands aching. There was no use denying it: There was an air of foreboding when Giusy entered the kitchen with news that the concert had sold out. But we felt we were in control of the situation and could handle anything, without knowing exactly what “anything” was going to be — stations ready, fridges stocked with the right ingredients, all properly portioned, tables clean, plates stacked neatly next to the pass, the boiler steaming away and the grill incandescent, dozens and dozens of skewers piled high next to it, steaks sliced evenly, resting in the fridges and ready to serve more than a hundred dinner guests. When the orders started arriving, three or four at a time, Mauro was manning the pass, calling out a code that was still foreign to me.
“Fire off 92! Three gnocchi arugula, one mixed app, one crispy lasagnette, two mixed grills, and one sirloin with yogurt. Fire, Leo! Slam it out! I need 35 on the fly! Close table 21! 42’s dying! Fire up 60 and push it out with 15! Cancel 12 in the stalls! Close 42 for God’s sake!”
The grill was packed with meat and the orders just kept on coming. There was no more room for the fish, and I had to take up one of the burners with a portable cast-iron grill. I was starting to send out dishes that were only half cooked and putting skewers in the oven to finish cooking, but they were drying out and taking too long. Michele’s station was swamped with pasta, gnocchi, sauces, and dirty pans piled one on top of the other. There were peppercorns flying, sauces splashing, and wall-to-wall wreckage. Orders started going to the wrong tables, haphazardly and incomplete. New orders took the mayhem to a whole new level, spiraling uncontrollably into a black hole.
I no longer gave a shit about the plating or the salads, tossing dishes on the pass any fucking way, hoping that Mauro would fix them (he didn’t), and continuously asking, “What the hell goes with the salmon? Four steaks are ready, can they go out?”
Was the chicken in the mixed grill or by itself? Mauro was no help. Every time he’d read the orders over again from the beginning, getting me even more unglued. I tried snatching the dockets closest to me and doing them myself, but they might as well have been written in cuneiform. Some I’d randomly pass on to poor Mambo, without warning, and get him to plate the meat. Without a word, he would haphazardly throw meat on plates and race them over to Mauro, letting the mountain in his sinks grow exponentially. Meanwhile, the servers had given up scraping the dirty dishes and were simply piling them up the way they were. A disaster, a genuine out-and-out, definitive disaster. At the end we were shattered, just like the servers, and probably the customers too.
“Perhaps” — and I was only hazarding a guess — “two of us might not be enough for all these people?”
Mauro looked at me and shrugged.
“Tonight there were a hundred and forty-three customers. And according to you, the two of you weren’t enough. All right. Let’s call someone else in, another pair of hands. Do you think you’ll manage? Is that the problem? And when we have two hundred people? Will we get someone else? And if someone else isn’t enough? I hired you guys because for me, you two are enough. What do you think of the menu, is it too complicated? Is that the problem, you can’t cope with the menu? Is that it?”
Michele shook his head and didn’t say anything. No, it wasn’t the menu, I said to myself. If anything, it’s the guy expediting the orders, but I neither shook my head nor uttered a word.
“The menu is not complicated. There are six first courses and seven mains, all grilled except for the oven-baked savory strudel, and that is precooked. Three sides and three desserts, one mixed and three oven-cooked appetizers, plus a raw vegetarian one. So?” Mauro said, laying into us.
At this point I stepped in. “Well, Mauro, we need to find a way to get the food out fast and good. The workspace is too cramped. I think we need at least another chef, and I have to work the outside grill. The other chef stays inside to help Michele. And we have to find a better way of organizing the orders.”
“You’re just about right, Leo. You have to get the food out fast and it has to be decent. Not necessarily excellent, not even great. You want to know the whole story? We don’t need to be creative. McDonald’s are masterminds, their philosophy is a stroke of genius. You’re out and about, in a train station, an airport, what do you eat? A sandwich that tastes of plastic and costs four or five euros, or McDonald’s. You get a good choice, it’s hot, tastes nice, and you pay less than for the plastic sandwich. You don’t go to Mickey D’s yearning for a hamburger; you go because you’re waiting for a train and in the meantime you munch on something familiar and filling. It costs you four euros and you don’t miss your train. This has to be our philosophy: We’re feeding people who are only here for the concerts. They want to enjoy the music, and while they’re here they want to eat something DE-CENT” — he underlined the syllables with the tone of his voice — “and they want it fast and cheap. That’s why I’ve got you two in the kitchen, and not chefs with God knows what pipe dreams.”
“Are you serious, Mauro? How can you give us McDonald’s as an example? Do you want us to stuff diners with nothing but empty words? Are you worshipping at the altar of deceit?”
“Don’t lose your cool, Michele. You’re not here to create but to execute. Everything has to be preprepped,” he said. “That’s your big mistake — thinking you could cook to order tonight, with a full house.”
Michele shook his head, but he sat down again.
“We have to have everything ready so we only need to heat it up and plate it, that’s the solution. As of tomorrow, you come in earlier, and as soon as you finish prepping, you start precooking the meat and the pasta, then store everything in the gastronorms and keep them handy. And yes, okay, you can look for another chef. If you know anyone who can start immediately, good, otherwise I’ll find someone myself.”
Mauro headed toward the bottles. He’d said what he had to say, his task was done, and there was nothing left between him and another drink. It explained the watery eyes I had noticed the first time we met. Michele and I pulled ourselves to our feet and shuffled into the kitchen. It was twenty-four minutes past two, and I was so tired I didn’t even feel tired anymore.
“C’mon, Michele, you know he’s right. And to tell you the honest truth, I don’t mind a Big Mac from time to time.”
“You must be joking. He’s turning us into canteen cooks. And the sommelier also being the manager is getting on my nerves. What does Mauro know about running a kitchen?”
“Don’t take it personally,” I said, wiping down the filthy pass with a cloth. “I think you’re both right. For now we’ll preprep and see how it goes,” I suggested, spraying the oven with oven cleaner and covering my nose and mouth with the same cloth.
Michele gathered the pans and washed them in the left-hand sink, Mambo was still washing dishes, four big garbage bags full of scraps were lined up against the glass door, and under one of them a small puddle of putrid liquid was flowing like a stream toward the grate in the middle of the floor.
“Hey, Michele, I think I know the chef we need.”
“Hmmm. Is he any good?”
“Yeah, Paolo’s a nice guy. He works out at the Tuscolana gym, you must’ve seen him at some batizado, and he was there the night of the riverboat party.”
“Paolo, right, the one with the ponytail. But doesn’t he work in a library? Is he a chef as well?”
“No, but he sidelines. He’s just finished a culinary course, and a few days ago at the gym he asked me if we needed a hand. He works at the National Library, I believe, but he’s off over the summer. How about it, should I call him tomorrow?”
“Call him, sure, that’s perfect.”
Michele had a ready smile. We continued to wipe down the doors, handles, and insides of the fridges.
I went over to the stereo and cranked up the volume of Chumbawamba’s “Enough Is Enough.” Cleanup time has a weird charm all its own. There’s something inexplicably gratifying when a filthy kitchen, food splattered on every surface, stained, greasy, and cluttered at the end of service, unfailingly turns into a shiny, new, perfect kitchen with everything in its place. I too was in my place, in a clean, tidy kitchen where a solution is found to every problem. The song lyrics seemed strangely appropriate: “Open your eyes, time to wake up, enough is enough is enough is enough.” And screw jazz concerts, screw Mauro, and screw orders. It’s only for the summer, I reminded myself — that will be more than enough.
The solution that Mauro came up with was crap. It worked for a few days, but it certainly wasn’t the secret to serving up memorable meals at the Verve. It worked because we didn’t crash and burn like we did that first, woeful night of the Cat Power concert. The orders came in, and in five, ten minutes the dishes went out. In part this was because Paolo was such a nice guy and working with him was a breeze. He’d never be a chef, but he worked like he was one. And we didn’t rub his nose in the fact that he was slow, late getting dishes out, and talked bullshit about truffles from Alba and hazelnuts from the Langhe district of Piedmont. Nor did we complain about the Fridays he took off to compete in capoeira rodas with his girlfriend. It worked because after a couple of nights, Mauro left the pass and started helping the girls in the dining room, more or less the same way he did in the kitchen: telling them which tables were waiting for their dishes and which ones still had to order, but, better still, he actually started doing his job, which was to recommend the most expensive wines. Only it was tough to match expensive wines with shoe-leather steaks or overcooked pasta. No one was hailing the solution as some kind of miracle, but no one was getting up from their table in disgust, throwing down their napkins, and demanding to speak with the manager either. And so we overcame our first hurdle. What’s more, with Mauro out of the kitchen, we could hammer out new ways of doing things and come up with our own solutions, laugh more, and add or remove things. Now at least we could feed two hundred diners quickly and without complaints. But what we really wanted to do, deep down, was leave these two hundred people absolutely wowed.