There is nothing like the loss of a major player, or indeed a part of the family, to bring the rest of the team together. We all sit round a few tables at the back while Barney and Alfonso bring out some food. It’s an odd selection. There are a couple of orders that were waiting to go out before the raid, a few rabbit, a steak, two sea bass and a pork belly, plus the most fantastic selection of puddings that had all been prepped and ready to go. There’s a temptation to see if any of them can fight and live to see another day, or tomorrow lunch at the very least – however, I can see no one is in the mood for me to be a tightwad.
Anyway, I can’t help but think this is a more civilized way of behaving. Rowley Leigh, the cleverest, most charming and one of the few men in whites ever to have gone to Cambridge University, is famous for always sitting down in his own place for a spot of supper after service. During the Kensington Place days, when it was the hottest place in town, he would often be joined by various select customers and then other chefs and maître d’s from restaurants round the corner would tip up for a tipple. Sometimes it could turn into quite an evening. Obviously, Rowley’s smart and knows what he’s doing, but you have to be so careful when it comes to the old hospitality. Before you know it you’re on the brandies, offering around the port, drinking the profits, and you’re the arsehole who wakes up with a headache, having spent over £500 of your own money at your own bar. Also, if you’re always the ‘hail-fellow-well-met’ type, then the customers begin to expect it, so if you don’t fancy a drink or you’ve got something better to do, they take offence. They’ll see it as a personal snub: you’ve turned them down for a drink, you never turn people down for a drink, you didn’t want to join their table, you’re now clearly an arrogant git with no depth or profundity. It is a lose-lose situation.
‘I can’t believe it,’ says Luca, shaking his head. ‘He was always so fun.’
‘He was certainly gay,’ interjects Andrew who always found Jorge’s exuberance, particularly the kissing, hard to handle first thing in the morning. ‘Although I will never forget him kicking a rowdy bunch of very drunk men out into the street and one of the blokes shouted at him: “I’m bisexual and I wouldn’t fuck you!” At which point he replied: “It’s my night off, darling!”’
Anna laughs. ‘My favourite was him telling you which men gave him the eye during service. They were always with women, but were always in reality gay. He says he could turn anyone.’
‘He was very good at his job,’ I conclude, taking a large slug of my wine. It’s a very nice red Sancerre. There is rather a large collection of half-full bottles on the table, gleaned from the fleeing guests. There is nothing we like more than finishing off that half you left behind, anyway. Often we’ll serve it back to you by the glass the next day. Double bubble, if ever I’ve heard it. But I don’t remember anyone ordering the Sancerre Rouge. It is one of my favourites and it’s so good I take another look. This is a brand-new bottle. ‘I didn’t know we had any of this left?’ I say to Michelangelo, who is sitting opposite me.
He smiles. ‘We have a few. For special occasions.’ Honestly, bloody barmen and sommeliers, they could hide a corpse if they had to. And I’m not joking; ask them to squirrel away something – anything – and even if it were a dead body, you could have PricewaterhouseCoopers crawling all over them like maggots looking for a flesh wound and they’d come away with nothing.
‘Well, it’s very good,’ I say lamely. ‘How many do we have left?’
‘I’m not sure.’ He does that puzzled look very well. ‘A few?’
‘Why don’t you go and get them?’ I suggest. ‘I think everyone could do with a drink. Especially Oscar.’ He is talking to Matt and hears his name. ‘You’d like a drink, wouldn’t you, mate?’
‘A small one,’ he nods. ‘Then I should really get home. We’ve got a new baby.’
‘You have?’
‘I didn’t know you were married,’ says Anna.
‘I’m not,’ he replies.
Before I have the chance to hear the details of Oscar’s domestic arrangements I get a call from Pippa who’s filling me in on the covers she’s done tonight. She’s had 63, which I suppose isn’t too bad for a forty-seater restaurant. They’ve managed to turn a few tables, but we’re not far off the Christmas season and we should be turning everything at least twice. If you think Russell Norman can get fourteen hundred covers out of seventy-seater Polpo in the first week he opened, we should be able to do a little more than one and a half tables in the run-up to Christmas.
I am seriously worried about La Table. It is not a bad site. It’s No-Ho – not quite Soho – but close enough that it should be picking up the media mafia, film and TV bods wanting an alternative to endless sticks of chicken teriyaki at Roka or flicking a salad around at the Charlotte Street Hotel. There was quite a good place on the site before we moved in. Which is helpful, as I often think it is hard to turn around the bad energy and bad karma of a place if it’s always been crap.
The top end of the Brompton Road, I think, has always been a disaster. There are always road works, there’s not much passing footfall, and nobody lives around there except the French. Nearby Racine is doing well, but apart from that, the French are so fussy and annoying when they go out, like the world owes them a fine dining experience. Honestly, I’d rather some coked-up traders than a table of French – at least I might flog some wine.
There are dead spots all over town, where no amount of banker’s bonus money thrown at the hand-tiled wall will make any difference. A shite site is a shite site, haunted by the ghost of miserable evenings out. There was a place at the bottom of Portobello Road and Golborne Road, however, which had always been a disaster, playing host to a succession of failing businesses. It is now working, but it took the might of Nick Jones and Pizza East to turn that energy around.
So it’s not the site that is plaguing La Table, and I’m beginning to think that perhaps it is the menu and the lack of glittering staff. Pippa sounds miserable on the phone. There is nothing worse than a place that isn’t working. It’s depressing, debilitating and enough to drive you to drink. So I ask her over for one.
‘We’ve got a very nice Sancerre on the go,’ I suggest and she says she’ll be over as soon as she’s cashed up. Which reminds me, I haven’t been through tonight’s takings and I haven’t sorted out the tips.
Like most places we have a tronc system, where the tips are pooled and paid out at the end of the week. The amount of cash is supposed to be written down by the troncmaster, usually the manager or the maître d’, and you’re eventually supposed to pay tax on the tips. In the past, restaurants like Conran used to use the tronc to top up staff wages. So instead of paying minimum wage, there was a term called ‘housepay’, which could be anything as low as £1.88 an hour and the remainder came from the tronc. Often the service charge used to go directly to the restaurant and the waiters would only ever see cash tips, as credit card tips would also miraculously disappear.
I am quite careful with the cash, as I remember a few years ago, one maître d’ I worked for famously used to skim the tronc. He was always the most generous bloke when it came to buying rounds in the pub – perhaps it was the guilt. It was only when he went on holiday we found out what was going on. Another waiter checked the tronc only to find out it was three hundred quid short. Poor chap wasn’t as bright as all that and he’d written down the amount of money that was taken during the week before he pinched it. Eventually he was fired.
Industry standard, however, these days is for the restaurant to take the credit card tips, pop them into a PAYE account and dish them out after tax has been paid. The Revenue are so pathetically keen to get any cash at the moment that they watch you like a hawk. But it’s tempting with that much cash swilling around. You need to pay a supplier, or you’re a couple of hundred short of an evening, raiding the tronc is the easy answer. The problem is when you need to pay it back.
I suppose any port in a storm in these austere times. Recently I have noticed a couple of restaurants playing fast and loose with the service charge. Usually it’s 12.5 per cent, but at a few dinners out in the last month I’ve found myself shelling out 14.5 per cent, which is a massive £25 added to a bill of £175. I am not sure what the extra 2 per cent is for. Some very fine napkins? Or topping up the wages of the bar staff?
Tonight, due in part to our generous pop star and the swiftly exiting Russians, who were so desperate to get out of the place they chucked money at the problem, we have just over £1,000 in tips, which might be enough to bring a smile back to the faces of the brigade.
‘Can anyone smell anything?’ asks Oscar, putting down his second glass of wine. His black eye is beginning to puff up nicely.
‘Don’t start being rude about my cooking now,’ says Andrew, belching out of the side of his mouth. He must at least be three-quarters of a bottle down, not including any swigs he’s helped himself to in the kitchen.
‘No, mate,’ replies Oscar, looking rather jaded by the constant battering he’s getting from his older, much-less-wise, pissed, previous mentor. ‘There really is a bad smell coming from somewhere.’
‘You’re correct,’ nods Michelangelo. ‘It is not nice.’
‘It smells of waste,’ says Oscar.
‘Shit,’ agrees Andrew, curling his top lip. ‘It smells very strongly of shit. And it’s coming from my kitchen.’
He is right, there is an eye-watering stench and it appears to be coming through the swing doors. Andrew looks at me, Oscar raises his sandy eyebrows and Michelangelo waves his hand in front of his nose. It is my restaurant, my baby and, anyway, I am closest to the doors.
It’s only when I swing them open that the full hideous, gagging, retching, weeping, sinking hell becomes apparent.
‘Oh my God,’ I say, covering my mouth at the horror. I have never seen anything quite so disgusting in my life. The whole of the kitchen is about an inch deep in sewage. There is shit and loo paper and condoms and tampons and all sorts of effluent floating in a pool of revulsion all over the floor. The grill on the main drain, which sits just to the right of the stove, has been lifted off and is floating, rocking from side to side, in a tide of turd.
It is all I can do to stop myself from vomiting down myself and onto my shoes. The smell is intense and there is not enough mind bleach to rid myself of the vision. I close the door and, coming coughing and spluttering over to the table, the smell comes with me. It’s in my hair, in my suit. Don’t tell me it’s on my shoes?
‘Anna!’ I yell so loudly she jumps and spills her wine. ‘Get Rentokil. Now! And tell them it’s a fucking emergency.’
‘Rentokil?’
‘Yes, Rentokil!’
‘Christ? Really?’ says Andrew, flopping back on to the banquette. ‘Don’t tell me it’s the drains? Again?’
‘Tell them we need the drains jetted, we need the whole VIP fluffing fucking service.’
I run into the toilets and retch so hard I think I am about throw up my colon. There goes my beetroot salad. Despite its virulent pink, I don’t dare flush the loo. There’s no telling what chaos that might cause. I shiver. I really can’t stand the smell of shit, let alone half the capital’s excrement floating around in my one-star kitchen.
Rentokil are supposed to come and sort our drains out every two months. They come with cameras and jet blasters and it is absolutely revolting. You see all sorts down there, but mainly that the sewers are crawling with rats. When they say you are never more than six feet from a rat in London, what they mean is that your butt cheeks are literally a U-bend away from their yellow, gnashing teeth because there are swarms of the bastards, scurrying around right underneath your feet.
Truth be told, our Victorian drains just can’t cope with the stuff we put down them. And it’s mainly the fault of restaurants and it’s mainly fat. The whole system is packed with fatbergs: lumps of coagulated fat that collect in the drains under the kitchens of the West End. The situation got so bad recently that Westminster Council had to remove over 1,000 tonnes of fat from underneath Leicester Square. Like the clogged arteries of a heavy smoker, the gobs from endless irresponsible kitchens, usually from fast-frying cooking oil, had stuck to the sides of the pipes. Some of it was four feet thick in places. They eventually removed enough putrid fat to fill nine double decker buses. I am only extremely glad I was not around to see that. Nothing turns my stomach more than a lump of fat full of loo paper, old syringes and human hair; it makes me want to barf more than the smell of shit in the first place.
The other thing that is really putting pressure on the system at the moment is a weird problem particular to Soho, namely protein shakes. My mate has a place on Old Compton Street and he’s been plagued by the problem. The new buff gay clientele that his place attracts means they’ve had to call the plumbers in three times in the last six months and they have all said the same thing: there is so much protein in his customers’ urine after drinking one of these shakes that it coagulates in the drains and makes a type of jelly, which eventually blocks the drains. He now has his drains done once a month as a pre caution. We don’t have the buff, back and sac brigade, so we don’t have a protein piss problem, but what we do have is a preponderance of other restaurants nearby who regularly pour any old rubbish down the drain, so we are much more likely to succumb to a fatberg.
And it makes such a mess, as well as the stink. I remember when I was working with Maitre d’ Spencer we had an explosion during the lunchtime service. We were full, we had a hundred and fifty covers and I was on Table Ten, the VIP table, taking orders, when he tapped me on the shoulder and told me to cancel the order and help him get everyone out. The downstairs kitchen was flooded with so much effluent that it was beginning to come up the stairs. Amazingly Rentokil came and sorted the place out and we were back serving lunch the very next day. Restaurants can be amazing like that. They can fall down and get up extremely quickly: they just throw manpower at the problem.
Which is what I am about to do. No one is going to thank me for it, but there’s not much I can do. We need to be open for lunch – tomorrow.
Anna puts down the phone. ‘They’re on their way. With everything,’ she says.
‘How long?’
‘Half an hour maximum.’
‘Half an hour? OK,’ I reach in my pocket and pull out the wad of cash that was destined for the tronc. ‘Who wants to make some extra money?’ Barney’s hand goes straight up as does Mikus’s and the agency KP’s, who’s so spavin and pale and clearly straight off the ferry, he’s not looked anyone in the eyes since he’s been here.
It’s at times like this I miss Sean; despite being a drug-taking tosspot, he was always very hands on and practical in a crisis. Unless he’d been to a club, of course, then he was bloody useless.
‘Anyone else?’ I lick my finger like a car dealer and start peeling off notes. I am up to £100 when Luca finally puts up his hand.
‘Done! Great. You lot, I have to say I love you for this – and I don’t often say that – you need to get any old linen that we have and stuff what is stained or ripped or anything and stop the shit coming into the restaurant, because once it hits the carpets we’re fucked. The rest of you, hold your noses, and tiptoe into the kitchen and grab your stuff, if you can, and I’ll meet you all up the road at Le Bar for a drink. You lot – Mikus, Barney and you –’ I point to the luminously white KP, ‘you all come up there when you’re done and Rentokil are here and I’ll buy you a drink. Make sure you come,’ I nod. ‘And Barney?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re in charge.’
I just have to get out of there. The smell is making me feel so awful. I also think because I have seen the hideous hell that is behind the door my imagination is working overtime.
Free, out in the street, I shake my hair in the breeze. I am desperate to get the cloying sweet smell of sewage out of my clothes. I light up a cigarette – surely it’s better to smell of Marlboro Light than crap? Can this day actually get any worse?