Edward used the customer bathroom and changed into a pair of checked trousers, chef’s jacket and clogs. He put on an apron but couldn’t remember how to tie it. Jimmy corrected him, crossing the strings at the back, tying it at the front, the bib tucked inside. He paused at the front of house, took the reservation book and thumbed through it. Today promised to be much busier than last night. Perhaps there was hope. Even a broken night’s sleep had reinvigorated him and he felt full of determination. He was home now and he wasn’t going to let the restaurant fail without a bloody good fight.
It was still dark outside when they got to work. Edward opened the door to the kitchen and switched on the lights. It hadn’t changed a bit while he was away: a long, thin space with the service line arranged against one wall with a narrow pass-through opposite it. Six months after acquiring the restaurant, his father had knocked through two of the walls and extended the kitchen into what had once been a store-room. There was a cold station next to the exit door, a row of deep-fryers, two big ranges, a pull-out broiler, a salamander, a brick hearth for charcoal grilling. Opposite, and separated by a slender work space, was a long stainless-steel counter with wooden cutting boards, sinks and a new Frigidaire at the end. He lit the ranges, flames curling up the blackened wall, and Jimmy switched on the steam table. There was no way for the air to circulate in the kitchen and within five minutes the temperature had ticked up to an almost unbearable level: a wall of radiant warmth on one side and clouds of wet steam rising on the other. He remembered his first proper session in the kitchen as a fourteen-year old pot boy: he’d fainted dead away in the broiling swelter.
They went outside to the alleyway where the bins were kept and smoked their first roll-ups of the day. If Jimmy was nervous, he didn’t show it. He had always been a brilliant cook, and since Edward had been away he had become as good as Edward’s father had been.
“It’s going to be hard work today,” he warned. “We’d ideally need another two or three in the kitchen but we can’t afford it.”
“I’m back now. We’ll manage.”
They went back into the steaming kitchen. Edward opened the Frigidaire to check the ingredients: some mackerel that was beginning to turn, a tray of sickly-looking pigs’ livers, a dozen poor quality steaks. He held up a slab of meat. “What in buggery are we supposed to do with this? It’s all gristle.”
Jimmy looked up from rolling another cigarette. “I had to pay over the odds for that, too. We’ll make a nice sauce and hope for the best.”
He took out a tray filled with salted water. Two medium-sized birds, de-feathered and skinned, had been left to soak overnight. “What are these?”
“Rooks.”
“Rooks?”
‘Somerset Rook Pie with Figgy Paste. Legs and breast only––get rid of everything else, it’s bitter. You make a paste with bacon fat, currants and raisins and serve it with gooseberry jelly.”
“And it tastes––?”
“Bloody awful.”
The staff drifted in during the half-hour prior to the start of the shift. There was Pauline, a matronly East-Ender who made the fish stew and, during service, doled out the vegetables and side dishes; she had a problem with drink, and the glass at her side was kept topped up with gut-rot gin from a bottle she no longer went to the trouble of hiding. Gordon, the fry chef, had a history of mental illness and plenty of gaol-time. Edward’s father had always met him at the prison gates and offered him his job back again although it wasn’t purely philanthropic; Gordon was a devil behind the grill with unflagging energy and a high threshold to pain evidenced by the litany of burns and cuts on his arms. He kept a speed pourer topped up with rum in his rack and he sucked at it like a baby with a bottle. Stanley Smith dressed like a pirate with the arms hacked off his chef’s coat, lank hair kept out of his eyes with a faded headband and prison tattoos inked onto his forearms. He was the pastry chef, and knocked out row after row of delicate deserts. The kitchen staff had been unchanged for ten years, and it was only the supporting roles––the pot boys, the waiting staff––that were different.
They made their preparations: sharpening knives, folding side-towels into stacks, arranging favourite pans, stockpiling ice and boiling pots of water. Edward took an empty space and arranged his mise-en-place. He found a half-bowl of sea salt and cracked pepper, softened some lard, slotted cooking oil and cheap wine into his speed rack. He added breadcrumbs, parsley, brandy, chopped chives, caramelised apple sections, chopped onions and a selection of ladles, spoons and tongs. He arranged the pots and pans into a logical order and slotted his knives into a block so that they could be drawn quickly, as required. The others went about their work, well-practiced routines and roles that complemented each other perfectly. Pauline roasted bones for stock, skinned the pigs’ livers and scooped snoek from tins; Gordon blanched carrots, made garlic confit and a mayonnaise sauce with custard powder, powdered eggs and margarine; Stanley caramelised apples, lined dishes with pastry, took the plate of steaks from the larder, separated the worst and turned them into Salade de Boeuf en Vinaigrette, prepared a raspberry vinegar sauce to serve with the livers.
Edward did his best to fit in, aware that he was hopelessly out of practice. He took a bowl of scrapings and made pâté and galantine, boiled off-cuts and knocked up a strong horseradish sauce, caramelized sugar to mask the taste of over-ripe fruit. He filled a huge steam kettle with stock, a darkly simmering mixture of ground beef, meat scraps, chicken bones, turkey carcasses, vegetable trimmings, carrot peelings and egg shells.
It was awful. He wouldn’t have given any of it to a dog.
Edward went through and checked the reservation book again. They were busy for both dinner sittings. Twenty tables, four covers per table, two sittings. They would need to put out one hundred and sixty dinners. He knew it was going to be hard, bordering on the impossible, but he kept his doubts to himself.
Soon the kitchen was full of noise: profane yet affectionate insults, curses that would make a navvie blush, the bubbling of boiling water, whisks rattling against the sides of bowls, the rhythmic thudding of knives against chopping boards as vegetables and meat were diced. The ovens were turned to their highest settings and the doors left open; heat ran out of them like liquid until it seemed that the air was scorching the lungs. The temperature soared and it was soon difficult to see from the fryers at one end of the line to the ovens at the other because of the wavy heat-haze, the air squirming, like staring through the water in a fish tank.
Jimmy leant against a tiled corner, drank a beer and smoked a cigarette. He watched through a crack in the door as the diners arrived and were shown to their tables. “Here they come,” he called. The first order arrived, Jimmy taking it from Mary, the waitress, and slapping it on the pass. “One Potato Jane, one dried egg omelette, one Marrow Surprise, one Tomato Charlotte.”
That was just the first table. Things were fine to begin with but fresh orders arrived at shorter and shorter intervals and it wasn’t long before they started to back up. Starters were finished and orders for the main courses began to arrive and Edward was soon up to his wrists in meat and blood, crouching at the locker to pull out stringy steaks that already smelt as if they were on the turn. They yelled at Peter, the thirteen year old runner and pot boy, to bring more margarine and oil, and when they weren’t yelling at him they muttered at their stations, cursing, talking to the meat, urging it to cook, begging more fire from the burners, flipping steaks, poking them and prodding them to gauge how well they were done, how much longer they needed.