Mikus is clearly the master of understatement. There is not a bit of an accident in the kitchen, there’s a fucking great car crash. It’s like something out of a Tarantino movie. First of all, Barney, the commis chef, is sitting slumped on the floor, his arm in the air, his face as white as a sheet and there are pools of blood on the floor and all over the pass. And secondly, Andrew and Oscar are rolling around on the floor, in amongst the blood, the slops of water, and the curls of vegetable peel, smacking ten tonnes of shit out of each other.
‘What’s going on?’ I just manage to refrain from shouting as I don’t want the customers to hear.
‘I’ve cut myself,’ says Barney, his head lolling slightly. ‘My finger.’ He waves a blood-soaked tea towel at me. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’
‘Well, it looks pretty shit to me,’ I say.
‘Get your hands off me!’ yells Oscar, flat on his back, pinned to the floor under Andrew’s substantial thighs. His fists are flailing, somewhat ineffectively, at Andrew’s chest. Andrew throws a big punch which lands on Oscar’s left cheek. Jesus, that must have hurt! A spray of snot and blood flies across the room. Oscar screams and pounds Andrew’s chest even harder.
‘You’re a cunt! You know you are!’ Andrew shouts, showering Oscar’s face in gob.
‘Get off me, you lunatic! You’re fucking MAAAAD!’ With one almighty push, Andrew goes flying across the room and lands, skidding into a pool of filthy water, under the sink.
‘Can someone get me a bandage?’ comes a plaintive cry from the other side of the kitchen.
‘Service! Table Six!’ says someone. I turn to see Matt, stepping over Oscar’s dishevelled, blood-spattered body to man the pass. He looks completely calm, as if he’s on a different planet. ‘Service!’ he repeats. Both Luca and Mikus stare at him, unable to comprehend exactly what he is saying. ‘Go!’ He shoves two pork, one steak, one rabbit towards them over the pass. ‘Go and serve people.’
Finally the words sink in and the two waiters pick up the trays and take them through the swing doors.
‘What the hell is happening here?’ I ask, looking from one filthy head chef to another.
‘The man’s a cunt!’ declares Andrew, getting up from under the sink. ‘I can’t work with him.’
‘You don’t have to,’ I state, trying to calm the whole thing down. ‘You’re leaving.’
‘I am leaving now.’
‘You can’t, you can’t leave now, not in the middle of service, you really can’t.’ I realize I sound like I’m begging. But the restaurant is full, all the orders are piling up, there is no way Andrew can walk. I am pretty sure Oscar would be able to get some food out but he doesn’t know all Andrew’s recipes and it’s a complication we really don’t need. ‘Honestly, mate, I’m sure we can sort it out.’
‘You don’t do that!’ sneers Andrew and points a sharp, threatening finger. ‘Cunt!’
‘Man!’ Oscar puts his hands up like he’s surrendering in a gunfight in some cheap Western. ‘All I did was borrow a knife.’
‘Not a knife, you arsehole. MY knife!’
Oscar should have known that would not go down well. Most chefs hate it when someone else uses their knives. They love their knives, often more than their children, and they’ll carry them, very sweetly and gently, from job to job, tucked up in their knife roll. They are very expensive, which is why chefs don’t like lending them out, but they are also personal, part of the craft. They are the tools of greatness and that can’t be shared. Well, that’s what a great big egomaniac like Andrew thinks. Oscar, on the other hand, just needed to chop some parsley.
Or at least that’s what I manage to glean from the brigade over the next five minutes. Oscar borrowed the knife. Andrew lost his rag and, unfortunately for Barney, he was caught in the middle and Andrew somehow managed to slice Barney’s hand during the altercation. Barney then fainted because he hates the sight of blood, which is apparently why he prefers working veg in the first place.
Chefs have fallen out over less. And some feuds have gone on for years. Gordon vs. Marco is one of those most entertaining: the language used and the methods of subterfuge have kept the rest of us riveted from the wings for nearly twenty years. It is like some game of cat and mouse or, more aptly, Tom and Jerry, with one taking a camp swipe at the other and the other flouncing a swipe back. It’s a load of old handbags really.
It all stems from the Harvey days when Gordon worked for Marco (1988–91) and Marco laid into Gordon so hard that Gordon started to cry. He was planning on leaving, and no one likes it when their sidekick decides to up knives, particularly if he’s a talented sidekick. So Marco shouted and Gordon cried. Although, Marco did subsequently remark: ‘I didn’t make Gordon cry. He chose to cry.’ Whatever, the animosity between the pair is continuously fuelled by little outbursts and flurries designed to wind each other up. Marco famously used to travel around with a Gordon Ramsay business card. The Ramsay was spelt ‘Ramsey’, just to irritate Gordon. And Ramsay admitted recently that he was the one who’d stolen the reservation book from Aubergine, only to blame it on Marco, apparently to prevent Marco from taking over as head chef. Marco then accused Gordon of not being able to cook because he’s always on the telly; Gordon subsequently arrived with TV cameras to Marco’s third wedding, although quite why he’d been invited in the first place is anyone’s guess. It’s ludicrous, and they are obsessed with each other; it’s a perfect case of familiarity breeding contempt. Marco is notoriously difficult to get on the phone – he never picks up – however, leave a message saying something like: ‘I hear Gordon’s …’ and you’ll never be called back quicker.
But that’s not to say that things can’t get quite tetchy. Gordon’s split with Marcus Wareing, when Marcus decided to leave the fold to set up on his own, is not quite so entertaining.
‘If I never speak to that guy for the rest of my life it wouldn’t bother me one bit. Wouldn’t give a fuck,’ said Wareing on leaving Gordon, despite the fact that Gordon was best man at his wedding. ‘My advice to him is: put a gun to my head, shoot me, put me in a box and bury me because if you don’t, I’ll come back and come back. I’ll never give up until I get where I want to go.’
The problem is that they have all graduated from the same charm school, which was started by Marco, curated by Gordon and whose head boy now is Marcus. Marco used to shout and scream and throw things and, much like children learn from their parents, so do the others. So Marco’s famous story of hurling the Oak Room cheeseboard at the wall because some poor sod had put too small a piece of cheese on it, and others of him shoving chefs in the bins for ‘time outs’ or cutting holes in someone’s uniform, like a colander, because they complained of being too hot, are legendary and a simple precursor to Gordon’s hurling oysters, chucking bottles of truffle oil, calling everyone who annoys him a cunt or covering a commis in hot risotto.
Marcus is not that dissimilar. ‘I bollocked people like Gordon,’ he said. ‘I acted like Gordon.’ But when you work off and on for someone for nineteen years, and ‘side by side, six days a week, for two solid years’, things are bound to get hot, intense and to rub off.
‘Never, ever did I get to bed before two,’ Wareing once said. ‘Never ever.’
Even the lovely, talented Clare Smyth, another Ramsay protégé, is not immune. ‘I don’t think twice about grabbing hold of a guy and screaming in his face if he gets it wrong,’ she once opined.
However, all this appears insipid child’s play when you hear that US chef and author Anthony Bourdain once had a young cook stripped, covered in blood and wrapped in cling film before popping him in the freezer. But then again, Bourdain would threaten a junior to hurry up or he would ‘tear out his eyes and skull fuck’ him.
Fortunately, Andrew is not yet at the skull-fucking stage with Oscar, but left to their own devices for a couple of hours, who knows? We all have our war wounds. Raymond Blanc had his nose, cheek and jaw broken when another chef threw a saucepan in his face. Tom Aikens allegedly branded another chef on the back with a hot palate knife and was fired from Pied à Terre. The chef ended up in A&E. The worst case I heard was of a head chef bottling a waiter. They’d been up drinking after their shift and the head chef lost it and hit the waiter over the head with a bottle. The waiter had twenty-three stiches. The police were called but no charges were ever pressed; there is a warped honour amongst culinary thieves.
I always think you are allowed to scream and shout if it’s your own house on the line. If you’ve got your own money in the place, it seems reasonable to be able to lose your temper. Which is what I am on the verge of doing if these two idiots don’t get back to work.
‘Listen,’ I say. ‘We’re full. We’ve just under three hours of service left. We’ve got some pop star coming in later—’
‘Who’s that?’ asks Barney, obviously feeling a little better.
‘How the hell do I know? Do I look like a bloke who follows the pop charts? Get this blood cleaned up, bandage up that hand, and let’s get on with it.’
Oscar’s pulled himself up off the floor. He looks even worse than when he came in this morning, if that were possible. His curls are flat, his face is smeared with mucus and blood, and he’s going to have a massive black eye in the morning.
‘Sorry about the knife,’ he mumbles, pulling down his filthy whites. ‘I had no idea it meant that much to you.’
Andrew doesn’t say a word. He merely reaches across to take another tasting spoon out a large silver tin full of water next to the pass and pulls out a new order slip.
‘One pork belly, two turbot, one steak,’ he says.
‘Yes, chef!’
I walk out of the kitchen slowly. I’m shattered and I am not sure how much longer I can keep doing this. I don’t want to be in the micro-managing business, sorting out domestics. I want to be one of those restaurateurs who gets texted at one in the morning, just to be kept in the loop as to how many covers each of my highly profitable restaurants has done. I want to be able to have nights off, go on holiday, see my mates, not break up fights between hot-headed idiots who can barely write their own names. It’s depressing. And not something I have been working this long in this business for.
‘All OK backstage?’ asks Jorge, looking more than a little tense. He’s got a full room to manage and barely any food coming through the doors. The kitchen is in the shit and so is he.
‘It is fine now,’ I say. ‘I’m sure we can claw it back. Just make sure the team keeps filling up everyone’s glass.’
Talking of which, I am desperate for a drink. The restorative effects of my pint of lager are beginning to wear off. I decide I might sit quietly at the bar for a moment, not something I normally do, and down a quick vodka and tonic.
‘Everything OK?’ asks Gina, seeing the look on my face.
‘Not great.’
‘We could hear a lot of it in here,’ she says. What is it with Scandis and the truth?
‘Really?’
‘It was quite loud,’ she continues. ‘I could hear a few “fucks”.’
‘Very Michelin star. Can I have a vodka? And tonic?’
‘English measure?’
‘No, something substantially stronger.’
While I sit and she pours me a drink, I feel my shoulders come away from around my ears. There is always something so cathartic about sitting at a barstool having a drink. Maybe that’s my problem – I have always found it easier to share with the person on the other side of the bar than I have with the women who followed me down the aisle. That was always Sketchley’s gripe anyway, that I was never home, and when I was, I never told her anything. Gina arrives with a short, fat drink with a squeeze of lime and plenty of ice. It is almost as if she knows what I like.
‘Here,’ she says. ‘I remember this is how you ordered it last night.’
So she does know how I like it. ‘Was that before or after the jägerbombs?’
‘Before. And anyway you only had two.’
‘Two? How come you have total recall?’
‘I don’t drink that much,’ she shrugs.
I take a long, cool glug. It hits the spot almost immediately. I feel it slip gently into my bloodstream and start to relax. Just then a flashbulb goes off outside. Then another. And another. Then there’s a strobe effect, as another fifteen to twenty go off in quick-fire succession. There’s some shouting and jostling and eventually a skinny little blond boy in a baseball cap squeezes through the revolving doors, with an entourage of eight. It appears our WKF plus extras have arrived.
They are a motley group. I am not sure what Claridge’s are doing sending them to us because I’m sure they’d be a lot happier in a brasserie, my brasserie for example, where they can get chips with everything and lots of things ‘on the side’. We don’t do anything ‘on the side’, we are not that sort of place, and we don’t do chips, either. Although I am sure the kitchen could or would, given the right price. I remember Marco once charging an arrogant yuppie (they were called that in those days) £25 for a plate of chips. He said he’d hand cut them, blanched them and deep-fried them and it had taken him an hour (not actually him, surely?) so the cost was £25. The man had ordered a plate of chips, off menu, and had not been bothered to ask how much they might be, so obviously he could charge what he fancied.
Anyway, this lot – three women in their thirties and forties who appear to be in charge and five blokes all dressed in baseball caps with their trousers hanging off their thighs – all cluster around the desk looking a little uncomfortable.
‘Hi, so sorry about all the paps,’ says one of the women with a cantilevered cleavage and lots of fluffy blonde hair. ‘Prinz Zee.’ She leans over, resting her breasts on the front desk. ‘We’re nine.’
‘Excellent,’ I lie, feeling my takings for the evening slipping through my fingers. None of these boys look old enough to drink. ‘I’ll have Jorge show you to your table.’
‘Can we go here?’ She points a pink fingernail towards two tables in the window. ‘Shove them together?’
‘Actually, those tables are booked.’
‘But we’d like to be in the window.’
I look through the glass, there are four or five photographers loitering on the pavement outside, fiddling with their equipment. The pop star obviously wants to be snapped.
I never quite understand famous people. They complain about press intrusion, then tip the press off themselves. How else would these guys be standing outside on the pavement tonight? It happens all the time. I remember a mate of mine had Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas’s security people crawling all over his restaurant for weeks before the couple came to dine. They checked the entrance, the exits, he was told on no account was he to alert the media, which of course he did not. He was also told not to put them on the tables in the window, otherwise known as the ‘glamour tables’. So he chose a quiet corner spot, only to have them breeze in and take a table at the window, where they were met by a blanket of flashbulbs. He looked out of the window and across the street, to see a bank of paps ready and waiting for their intimate close-up. He said Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, when they were together, were the same. The security was even more thorough, but this time they came in the back, arriving and leaving in separate cars. He left out the back and she did the photo call out the front.
But it is quite simple to go out to dinner and not be bothered, even if you are a Hollywood movie star. You go to your local, round the corner, or somewhere quiet that doesn’t attract that sort of crowd. I never really understand the ‘don’t-snap-me’ pics of celebrities leaving The Ivy or Nobu; if you don’t want your photo taken, don’t go near the place. However, if you want to publicize your dramatic weight loss, your new haircut or husband, have dinner at The Ivy. It’s not exactly rocket science.
I have a quick conversation with Jorge about where to place Prinz Zee or whatever he’s called, and we decide that in order to keep Claridge’s happy we’ll bend over backwards and accommodate them. We put the two fours together and split the eight towards the back of the restaurant. Which seems to make everyone happy. Especially the two ladies and their chicken-bag chum who seem to recognize the diminutive Zee. The giggle factor goes up as the pop star’s entourage approaches. I’m sure it won’t be long before they start getting their i-Phones out, sneaking photographs.
Food is beginning to come out of the kitchen again, which is rather a relief. The Russians are on the second bottle of Ruinart and it looks like the Voucher Vultures might be ready to leave. As predicted, they have turned down any extras, and it looks like Jorge is going to lose his bet. We still have a couple of tables about to arrive and we’ll turn the voucher table as soon as we can kick them out into the street, to join the paps. Prinz Zee laughs. A few more flashbulbs go off. I think I might go outside and have a word. After all, how many photos of what looks like a giggling twelve-year-old drinking Coke Zero does the Fourth Estate actually need? Suddenly Michelangelo walks past me with a small smile on his face. He is carrying a bottle of Louis Roederer Cristal at £350 a bottle towards Prinz Zee’s table. All of a sudden I find myself warming to the man.
My phone goes. It’s Adam. I walk towards the door.
‘Mate, we need you down here. I’ve got the police here and they need to speak to the licence holder.’
‘Right,’ I reply, my heart sinking. ‘Trouble?’
‘You could say that.’
I am just about to walk down the street when a party of eight people come through the door. I look at Anna, she looks at me. They are young and well dressed.
‘Hi,’ says a particularly charming-looking chap. ‘Table of eight.’
‘Yes?’ Anna sounds hesitant.
‘Jack, Jack Russell?’
I’m afraid I walk straight out the door.