Jorge and I huddle around the computer reading the review from ‘Moleman’ on TripAdvisor. The man is clearly a tosser. He describes our décor as ‘outdated’, our service as ‘rude and surly’; he even goes so far as to say that Jorge himself was ‘aloof and patronizing’. Needless to say, Jorge is outraged.
‘I’m sure I know which little bastard did this. He was fat, with small eyes like a little pink pig,’ he says, as his nostrils flare. ‘He complained about everything. He sent back the wine.’
‘I hate it when people do that,’ I sigh. ‘Like they have any idea what corked wine actually tastes like? It is quite unusual these days for wine to be corked, mostly because the stuff this sort of cheapskate arse orders comes with a screw top! But this is the worst bit.’ I scroll down the review. ‘“I was shocked”,’ I read out loud. ‘“They didn’t have tongs for the bread. This is a Michelin-starred restaurant and we had to pick the bread out of the basket with our hands!” Not their bare hands! Honestly, it’s like being in the seventies. Who has tongs for the bread? No one, except bloody First Class bloody British Airways and The bloody Hilton?’
‘What do they want? Gloves!’ Jorge joins in.
‘Well …’ I turn to look at him. ‘No tongs.’
‘Tongs!’ he repeats, with a look of contemptuous disgust.
You’d be amazed how much we take bad online reviews to heart, and you’d also be surprised at how much they can affect business. All you need is a couple of snide ones on Toptable, or the Time Out website, and people start calling a little less frequently. Then suddenly you find your sales slipping – and all because some idiot wanted tongs for his sodding bread. I bloody hate those websites. And unless the reviews are libellous they won’t take them down. At least in the old days you knew who the critics were. You could grab the spankingest freshest fish with the brightest eyes (like some vacuous beauty queen banging on about world peace) the moment you saw Jonathan Meades rolling through the front door in search of a free lunch and some fine wines. But everyone’s a sodding critic now and everybody takes bloody photos of the food.
Adam came back from a weekend in Denmark about a fortnight ago, having managed to squeeze his slim behind in for a dinner at Noma. He said the whole experience irritated the tits off him. Firstly, he was forced to eat a symphony of onions as there was bugger all to be foraged in the Danish countryside in deepest, darkest November and, secondly, the place was full of ‘Japs snapping their bloody food’. He’d moaned a lot about it. ‘Why can’t they just eat the stuff instead of photographing it? Who’s interested in a photo of food that someone else is about to eat?!’ But then again, he’s Australian, and clearly not a bloke of the Instagram age. Although he’s not alone in his hatred of food bloggers. Michel Roux gets very huffy if people start taking snaps of his creations, insisting that they should ask the permission of the chef. It is also banned in many restaurants in the States. I’m sure they’d cite creative reasons or something like culinary copyright, although no such thing exists, but really it’s because it is extremely bloody irritating. And talking of irritating, anyone who follows what people are saying about their restaurant on Twitter is insane. You need the skin of a rhino to put #yourplace into the Twittersphere, because what comes back will make you want to weep.
‘OK, that bloody does it!’ I declare, my jaw clenching and my blood gently coming to simmering point.
‘Oh no!’ Jorge leans in closer. ‘Is that an actual photo of the bread basket?’
‘Yup,’ I nod. ‘A bread basket with no tongs.’
‘It looks good,’ announces Jorge. ‘Nice selection.’
‘Of course it’s good! This is a bloody Michelin-starred fucking restaurant! It was handmade by Giovanna that bloody morning. It could not be any fresher or any more delicious if it shagging tried.’
‘But no tongs,’ shrugs Jorge.
‘No.’ I reach in my back pocket and pull out my mobile. ‘That’s it. I’m calling Caroline.’
Caroline is my very blonde, very pretty, very well-connected PR. She’s been on my books for three years, ever since we got our star, and she costs me £3,500 a month to retain on a print and social media basis. She has about another twenty-five clients on her books and spends her whole life eating out in restaurants. She never normally answers her phone before nine thirty, but this is an emergency.
‘Caz here,’ she drawls down the phone in a voice dripping with fags, fun and a £35,000-a-year private education.
‘Morning, Caz.’
‘Hi, daaaarling, how are you? I was just thinking about you. We’re coming in to see you this morning, are we? Is it ten or eleven? I was just cranking up the old BlackBerry to check.’
‘Eleven.’
‘Great, fabulous, just one thing, da-a-rling, I’ll be on my tod as Ev’s got to go to this new place we’re looking after around the corner. They think they’ve got bloody Adrian bloody Gill coming in for lunch today and they’ve only got three other bookings. So it’s an all-hands-on-deck moment, and half the office are going down to pad out the tables and make the place look super popular.’
‘Really? Don’t you think he’ll think it’s weird that most of the diners are thin, blonde and in their early twenties?’
‘You’re shitting me, right?’
‘Er, no.’ What is it with posh girls and swearing? It’s like a form of Tourette’s with them. They feel compelled to put at least three naughty words into every sentence.
‘He’s a bloke, da-a-arling. He’ll just be delighted he doesn’t have to look at Jeremy Clarkson for the whole of lunch.’
‘Every cloud,’ I reply.
‘I know, darling,’ she laughs. ‘And you know we’d do the same for you. Only we’d never have to,’ she adds quickly, ‘because you’re the hottest ticket in town. Right up there, darling, with Dabbous and Balthazar.’
‘Not quite,’ I say. ‘One you can’t get a table at until hell freezes over, and the other you wouldn’t want a table at even if hell did freeze over.’
‘Actually,’ she corrects, ‘I had a fabulous dinner at Balthazar just the other day. Jude Law was there, as was Cara Delevingne—’
‘I always find the food tastes so much better when there are famous people in the room.’
‘Totally,’ agrees Caroline, sidestepping my attempt at sarcasm. ‘Anyway, darling …?’
‘We have a bit of a problem.’
‘Right?’
‘Some twat has give us a bad review on TripAdvisor.’
‘How bad?’
‘One star.’
‘Ouch.’
‘It goes on and on, picking us to pieces, and there is a picture of our bread basket, without tongs.’
‘What’s that got to do with the price of anything?’
‘Just read the review and you’ll see.’
‘So, TripAdvisor?’
‘Leave it with me. I’ll get the office to deal with it.’
‘What will you do?’
‘Bury it, darling, bury it. We’ll give you so many five-star reviews from the office it’ll be pushed down to the next page by eleven thirty at the latest. See you in a bit.’ She hangs up.
I think I love Caroline. She’s the best £3,500 investment per month I’ve ever made. She is the same price as my second wife and a lot less hassle. I pat Jorge on the shoulder as I walk towards the kitchen. I need a cigarette out the back to celebrate my minor victory over the world of tosserdom.
My delight and small victory over the world of idiots is short lived. I walk through the surprisingly quiet kitchen. Both Oscar and Andrew are on the pass, making sure all the chopped herbs, spices and garnishes are in place. You’d be amazed at how many ‘seasoning’ options a chef needs. In the left-hand corner there are small silver containers of parsley, chives, chervil, dill, ginger, lemon purée and capers. Next to them is another selection including pistachios, walnuts, smoked almonds, shallot confit, toasted pine nuts, breadcrumbs and sea salt; there are doilies for wiping down each plate as it goes out and a bowl of water to dip the doilies in. All of these ingredients are supposed to be made fresh before service but some, I suspect, hang around for a day or two or three. Although some of them don’t ever make it through a whole service, as everyone helps themselves to the smoked almonds throughout the day.
Outside I bump into Emmanuel, or Manu, who is sorting through piles of stinking rubbish. A gentle giant from the Congo, he’s worked with me ever since Le Restaurant opened. I stole him from Chris Bodker’s old place, The Avenue, where Manu and I were working together before I set up on my own. We have both been around the block a few times, and there is little he has not seen. He works an eight-hour shift for me, arriving to scrub down the kitchen at seven each morning and he leaves at three in the afternoon after he has washed and cleaned every single plate, glass, pot, pan, knife and fork in the place. He then does a shift for London Transport, driving a bus, which he finishes at around eight.
Manu is a quiet, charming bloke who’s raised three daughters on his own and I often think he is the perfect response for those who argue against immigration. He works twice as hard as anyone I have ever employed and he’s legal and been living and paying taxes in this country for the past seventeen years. Granted, he is a bit of an anathema in the industry that has survived and thrived on illegal immigration for years. Although the days of employees using fake names and working off emergency National Insurance numbers are more or less over. Restaurants and hotels used to be rammed to the rafters with cowering monoglots of interchangeable origin, who were used, abused, paid about £2 an hour, and who barely ever got home to sleep. Most of the time you never quite managed to catch their name. In fact, you didn’t care what they were called, just so long as they did their job and didn’t annoy you too much. They were regularly baited just to amuse the senior staff. I remember one poor Algerian bloke who worked as a plongeur in a large kitchen I worked in being forced to eat a whole orange, peel and all. What he didn’t know was that it had been laced with Tabasco. He ended up in hospital because he couldn’t stop vomiting.
Thankfully, things have changed since then. It’s much more difficult to employ people illegally these days, mainly because Immigration like to pop in for a little bit more than a cup of tea, on a regular basis.
Working hours are also radically different from what they used to be. The old double shift, seven in the morning to midnight, six days a week, meted out by most of the top joints, is unsurprisingly not that popular with the new sort of softer, gentler, metro-chefs who are coming through. The old cojones-of-steel approach, needing less sleep than Mrs Thatcher, drinking nothing but espressos, doesn’t go down well with the under twenty-fives. So most places, like mine, use a rota system where you do four full days, so eight until midnight, and then have three days off. It doesn’t cost dramatically more, my books just about balance, but I don’t pay overtime and I don’t get extra staff in to cover holidays. You step up to the mark or you piss off. It works out as a little bit longer that the thirty-five hours a week dictated by Europe, but thank God for the opt out.
Travel through France these days and it’s hard to find a restaurant that is fully operational seven days a week. Joel Robuchon obviously is, but there plenty who are not. Thousands of them find it hard to stay open for more than three or four days in seven. Some of them, particularly those in the countryside, only open for a long weekend. Others no longer do lunch. It is hard to keep costs down when your workforce is only allowed to work a full two and half shifts a week.
‘What’s all this?’ I ask Manu, lighting up a cigarette and inhaling like an oxygen-starved deep-sea diver.
‘Oh,’ he says, shaking his head, ‘those stupid bin men.’
He doesn’t need to say any more. Our love/hate relationship with the fine bin men of Westminster Council is one of life’s long-running sagas. They are supposed to come twice a day, every day, to take away our rubbish, which is rather plentiful. And it is not nice. It is the sort of stuff that rats and mice gravitate towards and, given half a chance, they’d move into at the drop of a bin lid. So we pay our business rates which is about a third of our rent (£60,000 a year), our refuse collection fee which is another £800 or so, plus we pay £64.50 every couple of days for fifty refuse bags, then we give the nice boys from WC enough whisky to drown a shipload of sailors at Christmas, plus endless tips, the odd £50 here, the odd bit of beef there, a bottle of vodka … Frankly, they could open their own bloody off-licence the amount of treats we give them. And still they refuse to collect our rubbish.
Either our bags are too heavy – anything over five kilos is too much for their delicate backs to contend with. Or we haven’t sorted it properly – they’ve got this new thing where they recycle food waste but we have to divide the meat from the veg, and the fish, and the bones. It is one of the top jobs in the restaurant; a pleasurable thing to have to do after a twelve-hour shift at the coalface of culinary excellence. And then some other restaurant or business decides, as they have today, to dump a whole load of shit in our backyard. And unless we sort through it, we’re the mugs who get fined.
‘What did they say?’
‘One hundred and fifty pounds on the spot unless we bag this up properly,’ Manu replies, sifting through a bag full of old plate scrapings.
‘Where’s that from?’ The sweet smell of rotting food is making me feel nauseous and my cigarette taste revolting.
‘L’Italiano, I should think,’ he says. ‘Plenty of spaghetti.’
‘They’re a bunch of bastards, that lot. We are always giving them milk and bread and butter when they’ve run out. We’re nice to them.’
‘Not always,’ replies Manu. ‘Andrew told them where to go the other day.’
I roll my eyes. That man can’t leave soon enough. What he fails to realize is that the restaurant world is a small community, which is also part of the greater community. If we live and work in Mayfair then we have to be part of Mayfair. We help each other out when we’ve run out of stuff. We give leftover food to the local Christian charity group, and we also leave stale bread outside the back door for the couple of local tramps whose faces we know. What we don’t do is pick fights with the local Italian, particularly if that Italian has been on the street for over twenty years and has no visible clientele. It is clearly a front for laundering something, because that place can’t be doing any real business. You’d need to sell a hell of a lot of carbonara and garlic bread to cover his £200,000 a year rent.
‘Do you need any help with that, Manu?’ I ask, inhaling the last of my cigarette.
‘Don’t worry, Boss,’ he says as he pulls out a handful of what looks like chicken bones. ‘They’re a man down in the kitchen already. I’m sure I can cope.’
‘If you’re sure,’ I say, feeling more than a little guilty about not putting a pair of gloves on and helping him myself.
‘No worries,’ he replies.
I hesitate for a second, but then my phone goes. It’s Adam from Le Bar.
‘All right, mate,’ he states, rather than asks. ‘Just calling to say the toilets are fixed. The big-bird basin is back on the wall. You can use it, but not sit on it just yet because the putty’s got to dry.’
‘Good work.’
‘Shall I put a no shagging sign on it just in case someone else fancies a go?’
‘I don’t think that’s necessary, do you?’
‘You never know!’ he laughs. He’s been in this business far too long. ‘The cleaners are on the water so we should be OK to open.’
‘I’ll come over and check in an hour or so.’
He hangs up and I step back inside the kitchen. Everyone is hard at work. We have five main sections in all: meat, also known as sauce, fish, larder, veg and, of course, pastry. Each of these is headed up by a chef de partie. Matt is on meat sauce. The most senior of the chefs de partie, he has the most important section. He has been with us for just under six months and came to us via the three-star Michelin chef Hélène Darroze at the Connaught. A Kiwi in his late twenties, he is brilliant, organized, unflappable and rather overqualified for us, but I think he is enjoying himself. Although it’s hard to say as he’s not a Chatty Cathy type. He’s in, out, and back on the tube to Barnet every night. He’s not a bloke who likes to hang around. Alfonso, who’s on fish and been with us for two years, is brilliant with salmon. He can fillet the whole thing in just over five minutes, which includes removing the pin bones.
We have Davide on the larder, which is effectively anything cold – confits, terrines, salad. He’s Andrew’s Gallic sidekick with a vicious temper and a face full of sweaty blackheads. I fully expect him to walk when Andrew leaves next week and I have to say I’ll be quite chuffed to see the back of him. His attitude stinks as much as his breath, and his teeth are black from the amount of coffee he imbibes on a daily basis.
Giovanna, our pastry chef, is as delightful and as charming as she is round. And there is Barney on veg, the lowest position in the kitchen hierarchy. He is legumes. But he is a nice legume, an enthusiastic legume, who has the kid charm of Jamie Oliver.
As well as the chefs de partie we have, or should I say had, three commis chefs. Stacy, straight out of college and a nice, jolly girl from Bristol; Andrea, a taciturn Italian from Bologna, and there was Sean. These three are supposed to float around the kitchen helping the chefs de partie and doing what they are told. But what usually happens is that Stacy spends her whole day making ravioli or fettuccini and popping them into the boiler. Andrea is usually on sauce or jus, and Sean spent most of the time putting small bits of cabbage into blanch or puréeing the potatoes, parsnips or swedes. I am not sure I can see Oscar filling in for him.
‘Everything OK?’ I mumble as I walk through, hoping for the path of least engagement.
‘Um, excuse me,’ pipes up Oscar. My heart sinks. ‘Can I have a word?’
‘Absolutely, whatever you want,’ I lie. Fortunately, thankfully, my phone goes. It’s Pippa over at La Table. ‘Sorry.’ I nod to Oscar. ‘I’ve got to take this.’ I step through into the dining room.
‘Hi there?’
‘Morning,’ she replies. She is sounding a little circumspect and not her usual ebullient self. ‘Um. I have a girl here,’ she says. ‘Her name is Gina.’
‘Gina?’
‘She says she knows you and she says that you offered her a job?’
‘Oh! Gina! Right, shit! That Gina.’ I pour myself the remainder of the bottled water at the round table.
‘Yes, that Gina,’ continues Pippa who is perhaps not quite as au fait as Jorge, or indeed Adam, with my management techniques. ‘Well, what do you suggest that I do with her?’