@GateauAuChocolat Lunch today! Chorizo & cannellini bean soup along with our famous gateau au chocolat. What a feast!
I work in a café in Belsize Village called Gateau Au Chocolat. Belsize Village is a small enclave tucked away on the junction of Belsize Lane, a hidden part of London that thankfully few tourists have found. What I love about the village is that most of the shops and cafés are independent. There’s the local launderette, the family pet shop, the delicatessen selling a mouth-watering array of cheeses, salads and pâté. It’s off the beaten track, and I like being off the beaten track.
When I enter the café, I’m welcomed by the familiar smell of freshly made garlic and rosemary bread and winter soup cooking on the stove. I walk past the front table covered in hardback cookery books, delectable covers illustrating curries from India, homemade pasta and fish marinated in herbs from Italy, barbecued meat from Australia and pies with golden crust tops from the Brits.
On the shelves that line both sides of the shop are further cookbooks. One side is divided into sections, including vegetables, cheese, meat, baking, bread, coffee, parties, health, books for kids and spices and herbs. The opposite side is divided into countries.
Our test kitchen is at the end of the shop. It’s small with white tiles, a modern cooker and stove; copper pans hang from hooks, and we have an old-fashioned mixer and white porcelain cake stands, along with a blackboard where we write up the lunch menu for the day. There are five small tables that can seat two to three people, and then a larger communal table that can sit six, just in front of our mural-painted walls of lobsters, chilli, cans of soup and olive oil bottles. There’s a squishy sofa that customers enjoy with a cappuccino and a book. There are also shelves stacked with chef magazines and olive oils for sale, along with my boss’s red wine, produced in his own vineyard in France.
I share the kitchen with Mary-Jane. Mary-Jane is in her late fifties and has worked here ever since the café opened ten years ago. She comes from St Helena, a tiny tropical island in the South Atlantic Ocean, famous for being where Napoleon was exiled and died. She’s short and plump with a mop of thick dark hair and a determined stride. When I came in for my interview with Jean almost four years ago, she was standing at the sink in her marigolds, steely-faced and certainly not about to make me feel less nervous. ‘Mary-Jane is special,’ Jean assured me, giving her a wink that she ignored, ‘but she’s not too good at …’ he clicked his fingers, ‘small talk.’ Mary-Jane shooed him away with her hand, as if he were an annoying fly, but I could see the affection between them.
She grunts when I say hello, before approaching me with the soupspoon. ‘Taste,’ she orders. I taste and give it the thumbs-up because, as usual, it tastes delicious.
Like me, Mary-Jane had had no professional experience before she began working here. Her passion for food came from her grandmother, who loved to bake. She was famous for her fruitcakes and coconut fingers – slabs of fresh sponge cut into slices and rolled in icing sugar and coconut. Granny lived with the family. Mary-Jane’s father was a farmer; he grew fruit and vegetables. When Mary-Jane talks about her childhood, it’s the one time that her eyes light up and she often giggles as if she were a young girl again. ‘Dad used to grow bananas, Polly. On a Saturday morning we’d help him pick them off the trees and bunch them together with string, and then we’d hang the bunches on the side of the donkeys’ saddles. We had beautiful donkeys, I can even remember their names.’ She smiled, as if she were standing by the banana tree that moment with them. ‘Prince, Violet and Ned. We had guava trees too: they grew wild and Granny used to make the best guava jelly. We’d eat it on toast after school.’
‘Find a boss who will make you a coffee every day,’ Jean says as I’m writing the menu on the blackboard. He’s standing by the cappuccino machine, dressed in his blue apron. Jean is in his early fifties, tall and fit from swimming every day, with brown hair and probing eyes.
When he hands me a cup I can tell he’s in a good mood. Jean’s behaviour is as unpredictable as the weather. Often he loses his cool in the kitchen, spatulas and crockery flying across the kitchen. But today he blows Mary-Jane and me a kiss before disappearing upstairs to prepare his workshop on cooking with wild mushrooms.
As I stick my apron on and begin to assemble all the ingredients I need for my cakes and pavlova, I think about how working here was only meant to be a stopgap. It was something to do to help me through the early months after my break-up with Matt, and to earn some money, but more importantly to distract me from drinking. During the early days of rehab, I needed a sense of purpose until I felt ready to think about a new career or going back to teaching. In my early twenties, when friends, including Janey, were still at university I was lost as to what I wanted to do with my life. In the end, I enrolled on a one-year Montessori teacher-training course just off Oxford Street. It was hard work, practical and written exams at the end of the year, but I still managed to keep up my drinking and smoking habits full-time, rolling out of bed when my alarm clock shrilled at me, head pounding, only to be cured by another coffee and cigarette at breakfast. I passed my exams and found work, teaching children at Barn Owls Nursery in Earls Court. I enjoyed playing games and singing alphabet songs with the children – it seems like another world now. I gave up work after giving birth to Louis, though always intended to return to teaching. After my break-up I couldn’t go back. It reminded me too much of my past. I needed something new.
During my unorthodox interview at the café I felt intimidated by Jean. He sat me down and began to describe how he had cooked all over the world. ‘America was like walking into my television set, Polly, it was as if I were on Miami Vice. Have you been there?’
I shook my head, staring at my CV placed in front of him that surely showed an underachiever. As to my travelling experiences, well, I’d been stoned in France and drunk in Thailand, so drunk that I’d had a blackout for three days, waking up to find an old Thai lady trying to force me to drink some awful herb tea. Jean went on to tell me that he’d left school when he was thirteen to make his own way in the world. ‘My father, he said I could leave school if I work, not sit around doing, what is it you say …’ He clicked his fingers until it came to him, ‘sweet Fanny Adams. All I wanted to do was be a chef. And you Polly, did you enjoy school?’ he asked, finally flicking through my CV, looking fairly uninterested.
‘I wasn’t an A-grade student,’ I confided, realising there was little point pretending, my nerves finally subsiding. ‘I wrote, “Happy Christmas” on my maths mock exam paper. Got 3 per cent for that. Apparently that was for writing my name and the correct date.’
That was when Jean and I clicked. ‘You’re funny, Polly. You make even Mary-Jane laugh, no mean feat,’ he said, gesturing to her chuckling at the sink in her Marigolds, ‘but is your cooking as bad as your mathematics?’
I smiled at that, before shaking my head vigorously. ‘I can bake cakes, biscuits, pancakes, meringues, you name it, I can do it. I’ve loved cooking since I was a child, I’ve just never had this opportunity, so if you’ll let me …’
I watched as Jean scrunched my CV into a tiny ball and threw it over his shoulder. ‘I’ll give you a trial run. When can you start?’
*
Almost four years on and I’m still working here, partly because I love the job and partly because Jean allows me to be flexible, working my hours around Louis. My role is to bake the cakes (we have a selection of three, daily) and I serve the lunches and chat to the locals, all part of the job since it’s a goldfish bowl here; there are no doors to hide behind since it’s open-plan. I have to pinch myself, knowing I’m so lucky to be here, although I worked so hard in my one-month trial to prove to Jean I deserved a chance. I sweated at the oven and put so much passion into my food, telling myself I had to make this work. I’ll never forget when Jean tasted my chocolate chestnut torte and said, ‘Pure, undiluted chocolate heaven. Trial over, Polly. The job is officially yours!’ I threw my arms around him and Mary-Jane clapped.
Being here has made me fall in love with baking all over again. When I’m rubbing butter into flour to make a breadcrumb mixture I find it therapeutic; it takes me back to my happy childhood memories, cooking mince pies with Mum or apple crumble with Hugo.
I take a file out from the shelf. The first cake is a chocolate layer cake with icing. As I sift the flour, soda and salt into a mixing bowl my mind wanders to Ben. Since I went to his flat two weeks ago we’ve met again, twice. Slowly I’m discovering more about his past. His stepfather runs a men’s fashion shop in central London. When I’d asked what he was like Ben said, ‘Well, at my mum’s funeral he called me a bastard, so that should give you an idea.’ Ben’s eyes didn’t give anything away. Perhaps it’s buried too deep, just like Emily’s grief. I discovered Grace had lived in Hampshire, in a village called Crawley. ‘I called her the village witch,’ Ben had said with a small smile when describing how she’d tried to cure his smoking habits with acupuncture. It was Grace who had urged him to seek help, get out of the City and stop drinking. ‘She was the only one brave enough to tell me that I was ruining my life.’ Ben told me that he’d stayed with her for almost six months after his stint in rehab and during that time he’d helped her to get going with her acupuncture business, managing her finances and accounts. At that time Grace was alone and pregnant, so in many ways they both needed support. Ben certainly needed the distraction and Grace’s failed relationship – her boyfriend disappearing the moment she’d told him she was pregnant – had left her heartbroken. Yet she was determined to make a success of working from home, plus it would give her flexibility when her baby was born. ‘She encouraged me to think about managing other people’s finances professionally. After Emily was born I moved back to London and went on a three-year training course. I qualified as a chartered accountant. Not very rock ’n’ roll but to my surprise I enjoyed it.’
I make a well in the centre of my bowl and add the sunflower oil, sugar, vanilla extract, eggs, yoghurt and cooled chocolate, inhaling the sweet smell. When Mary-Jane isn’t looking I dip my finger into the gooey mixture. ‘Saw that,’ she says.
While Ben and I were making pancakes with the children, laughing as Ben had tossed one into the air and onto the floor, he’d asked me how I came to work here, saying he must pop by sometime and sample one of my cakes.
I told him I’d found the job through my Aunt Vivienne, who goes out with my boss, Jean. ‘Nothing like a bit of nepotism.’
He detected there was more to this. I’m learning Ben is sharp and naturally curious. ‘And?’ he pressed.
‘You know I said our family was plagued by secrets?’ I inhaled deeply. ‘I didn’t get to know about my Aunt Vivienne until I was fourteen.’
‘Long story.’
Ben had looked at Louis and Emily, now engrossed in eating their pancakes. He turned to me and shrugged. ‘We’ve got time.’