Restaurant Babylon Read online

  About the Book

  What makes a restaurant hot? Whose name do you need to drop to get a table? Why is one place booked solid for the next nine months while somewhere equally delicious is as empty and inhospitable as the Gobi desert?

  Welcome to the restaurant business, where the hours are punishing, the conditions are brutal and the Chef’s Special has been languishing at the back of the fridge for the past three days.

  This is an industry plagued with obsessives. Why else do some chefs drive themselves crazy in pursuit of elusive Michelin stars, when in reality all they’re doing is ‘making someone else’s tea’?

  Nothing is left to chance: the lighting, the temperature or even the cut of the salmon fillet. There’s even a spot of psychology behind the menu. What do they want you to order? What makes them the most money? And why should you really hold back on those side dishes?

  In Restaurant Babylon, Imogen Edwards-Jones and her anonymous industry insider lift the lid on all the tricks of the food trade and what really makes this £90 billion a year industry tick. So please do sit down, pour yourself some heavily marked-up wine and make yourself comfortable (although we’ll need that table back by 8.30 sharp).

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  6–7 a.m.

  7–8 a.m.

  8–9 a.m.

  9–10 a.m.

  10–11 a.m.

  11 a.m.–12 p.m.

  12–1 p.m.

  1–2 p.m.

  2–3 p.m.

  3–4 p.m.

  4–5 p.m.

  5–6 p.m.

  6–7 p.m.

  7–8 p.m.

  8–9 p.m.

  9–10 p.m.

  10–11 p.m.

  11 p.m.–12 a.m.

  12–1 a.m.

  1–2 a.m.

  2–3 a.m.

  3–4 a.m.

  4–5 a.m.

  5–6 a.m.

  About the Author

  Also by Imogen Edwards-Jones & Anonymous

  Copyright

  Restaurant Babylon

  IMOGEN EDWARDS-JONES

  & Anonymous

  For Rafe

  Acknowledgements

  With very grateful thanks to the wonderful Eugenie Furniss, and the handsome Doug Young and all at Transworld for their fabulousness.

  And to all those people whose time and patience I called upon during the hours and days I spent interviewing them in restaurants, bars, private clubs and at kitchen tables. I am extremely grateful, as I could not have done this without your humour, kindness and cooperation. I would especially like to thank my dear, wonderful friend Henry. What a ham!

  Prologue

  All of the following is true. Only the names and some circumstances have been changed to protect the guilty. All the anecdotes, the stories, the characters, the situations, the highs, the lows, the scams, the drugs, the misery, the love, the death and the insanity are exactly as was told to me by Anonymous – a collection of some of the finest chefs, maître d’s, sommeliers, owners and insiders working in the restaurant industry today. However, for legal reasons the stories now take place in a fictitious restaurant with a fictitious owner. Narrated by Anonymous, thousands of hours of experience and knowledge have been compressed into twenty-four. Everything else is as it should be. The chefs shout, the owners smile, and the rich just carry on eating. It’s just another twenty-four hours in one of London’s finest dining establishments.

  6–7 a.m.

  I must change that ring tone. There’re only so many times you can listen to sodding Mission Impossible without wanting to stick it in a chicken and rotisserie the hell out of it for the next six hours. Christ, my head hurts. A man of my age should not be drinking jägerbombs in some nameless Soho dive with a steel door and sweat sliding off the walls at four in the morning. It’s pathetic. I’ve been in the restaurant business long enough to know it’s either vodka or a fine red wine, and bed before the birds; anything else will make you wish you hadn’t been born. And right now I’d like to return to the cosy confines of a snug womb, never to surface again.

  Where the hell’s my phone? I sit up. My brain joins me a few seconds later. My small, smoke-choked flat comes into focus. It’s still dark outside but the orange glow of the nearby streetlight illuminates the sad, single room in all its filthy glory. I inhale and then yawn. The air smells of fags, alcohol and guilt. I was only supposed to be staying here for a few months. It was a quick pit stop before my divorce came through, but it’s been over six months now. Most of which has been spent sleeping in this crappy armchair. I’ve got a bed. Quite a nice one, actually. I managed to save it from the fire sale that was the breakdown of my marriage and it’s got White Company linen and plenty of pillows. But I just don’t seem to get into it much. By the time I get home, I’m usually too many sheets to the wind to get further than the armchair, and there I remain until morning. Or until some sod wakes me up.

  Finally I spot my phone, next to the skid-marked mirror, the rolled-up twenty-pound note, and the pile of Camel full-strength fighting for butt space in the ashtray. Oh shit, I think, looking at the flashing screen. It’s Adam.

  ‘What?’ I say, my lips cracking. My mouth is drier than a Mormon wedding. ‘This had better be good.’

  ‘It’s shit, mate,’ shouts Adam, his thick Aussie accent echoing cavernously around whichever hellhole he is currently frequenting. ‘It’s totally shit! Some fucking sturdy bird’s had a shag in the dunny and I’m up to my cock in water.’

  I frown. Talking of water, I really fancy a glass. I slowly pull myself out of the chair and, stumbling towards the kitchen sink, I trip over a pair of black high heels.

  ‘It’s unbelievable how much damage a big, fat arse can do!’ continues Adam. ‘One of the basins is totally fucked. It’s hanging off the wall, the pipe’s bust and there’s water all the way through to the gents. Mate, it’s a disaster! I’ve called Pavel six times already this morning but I think he must have pissed off back to Poland, which is a bit rich because he hasn’t told me, or you, or anyone, and now we are in the shit. Quite literally.’

  ‘There’s shit as well?’

  ‘Well, no, not literally.’

  ‘Oh.’ I look back down at the shoes.

  ‘Is Gina with you?’ he asks. ‘From the club? The one you offered a job to?’

  ‘Oh, her,’ I reply finally, as the whole sorry evening comes slowly ebbing back.

  Quite what Adam and I thought we were doing last night I do not know. Nico, the deputy manager of Le Bar, which I own and Adam runs, was going back to Italy after eighteen months of mixing mojitos and martinis, and we were giving him a bit of a send-off. Normally I tend just to show my face at these sorts of events and then bugger off, as it is not a great look to get plastered with your own troops. The last thing they need to witness is their boss getting totally legless, feeling up the waiting staff, and helping himself to the bar. It makes it a little difficult to give them a bollocking the next morning when you, yourself, are in disgrace. Also, an all-night club crawl is not really necessary for a forty-something bloke with two failed marriages behind him. It stinks of desperation.

  But, obviously, I did not heed my own advice and shall certainly regret it today. And I’ve got one of those days. I really don’t need this hangover and I certainly don’t need to be woken up at this unearthly hour.

  I am such an idiot. I can’t believe I allowed myself to be persuaded to ‘go on’. The last time Adam and I hit Soho we ended up in the very same dive we went to last night and I thumped him. Adam was being all lippy and pissed and had attracted the atte
ntion of some heavy blokes at the bar. Suited and booted, straight from work in his best Gucci, we’d had a catch-up dinner, discussing staff problems (particularly Damon, who has a whiff of the dodgy about him), and the whole thing got out of control, as it tends to do with Adam. We moved on to my divorce from Sketchley (as Adam insists on calling my ex) and on to his obsession with Pippa, or more accurately Pippa the head chef at my brasserie La Table’s tits. Anyway, it was around three and we were on the vodka tonics and these big lads covered in tats started lining up by the bar, crunching their knuckles, baring their tiny Tic Tac teeth and looking our way. Adam, full of booze, blow and bravado, whipped off his Gucci jacket and turned to me.

  ‘Come on, mate,’ he slurred. ‘Let’s get ’em.’

  Given the choice between being pummelled into a small doughball by the butch blokes at the bar or knocking Adam out, I chose the latter. I swung round and hit him so hard on the cheek that he keeled over immediately. The blokes at the bar looked stunned, and quite possibly a little disappointed that I had curtailed their fun. Adam, on the other hand, was so sodding grateful the next day, because he’d managed to get out of the bar, jaw intact, that he bought me a magnum of Laurent Perrier Rosé which must have set him back at least £90 as a thank-you. The small bruise below his right eye, he concluded, was a lot better than what might have been.

  So, given the previous welcome we’d received in the dive bar, I am amazed we went back. We must have been drunk. Obviously we were drunk.

  Alcohol is a big problem in this business. It is a major part of it. I mean, you don’t go into the restaurant industry if you haven’t a hint of the epicurean about you. It is not the sort of profession that attracts people who don’t like a good time, who aren’t a little bit greedy, or keen on their booze. I’ve worked with seven head chefs over the past fifteen years and I have taken four of them to open AA meetings. One of them was so out of control we had to hold an intervention in the kitchen with all the staff around and, eventually, we managed to persuade him he had a problem. The fact that he used to come to work drunk and was constantly swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s (why is it always Jack Daniel’s?) he kept under the pass was apparently ‘nothing to worry about’. Anyway, I haven’t spoken to him in a while. I think he’s sobered up now and is running his own place in some seaside town near Norwich.

  ‘Norfolk,’ as Adam once said, ‘where chefs go to die.’

  But chef burn-out is common. The hours, the lack of light, the stress of the kitchen – after a while they all get this vampiric waxy white look that makes them appear like they’ve recently been exhumed. The shelf life of a chef is often quite short. The trick is to catch them when they’re young and on the way up, when they’re brilliant and creative and full of energy and ideas, when they are happy to do the hours and not have a family life. Then you ditch them when they peak and plateau and have nothing left to say. The smart ones get out then; they get a nice fat hotel somewhere, with their own kitchen garden and some overpriced rooms out the back. And then there are the others who just fall by the wayside.

  I have this exact problem at my other place at the moment. I’ve had Le Restaurant for five years now and my head chef, Andrew James, is rather quickly and surely tumbling off the rails. He’s always been one of those shouty little shits who gets right in your face before he calls you a cunt. But when you’ve got a Michelin star in your pocket, you tend to get away with that sort of kitchen ‘banter’. However, in the last couple of months he’s been missing days, shouting more, whacking the commis around, dishing out the slaps and committing the most cardinal of chef sins: he’s been inconsistent in his cooking. So, after much talking and cajoling, I have managed to persuade him to walk, and I have also managed to lure his more charming and talented ex-number two, Oscar Richards, back from where he’s been training with Michel Bras in southern France. Quite how I achieved such a Ban Ki-moon feat I shall never know. But Oscar arrives in a couple of hours to initiate the handover; meanwhile I have exploding toilets in Le Bar and, seemingly, a new colleague in my bed to contend with.

  ‘So did you get to first base?’ quizzes Adam with a smutty chuckle.

  ‘A gentleman doesn’t share details,’ I declare, slightly embarrassed by the fact that I’d clearly fallen asleep in my chair before I could even take my socks off.

  ‘Oh,’ he replies. ‘Is she still there?’

  ‘No,’ I lie, peeking my head around the door to see a nest of blonde hair on one of my numerous pillows. ‘She left.’

  ‘So I’ll call Pimlico Plumbers, seeing as Pavel has pissed off into the ether?’

  ‘Isn’t there anyone else?’

  ‘I know they’re expensive—’

  ‘Just do it. I’m on my way.’

  Any excuse not to deal with the bedroom blonde. You’d have thought that two divorces and two children I barely have monthly access to would have made me a little more circumspect about pulling random women in subterranean nightclubs, but I’ve always found a pretty girl hard to resist. I remember a friend of my dad’s once telling me that when he ran a restaurant in the seventies he didn’t sleep alone for five years. They had some rooms over the top and they were constantly in use, even between courses. Customers would take a break between the boeuf bourguignon and the apple pie for a swift one upstairs.

  ‘They’re quick those Brummies,’ he used to say. ‘The pudding never got cold.’

  Outside, and the streets of London hang heavy with a chilly, dank fog. It is the last week of November and there is that distinct cinnamon whiff of Christmas in the air. The restaurant business loves Christmas. It adores it almost as much as a gift-paper-shredding three-year-old, high on sugared almonds. and it makes us feel just as ill. All year long we wait for it; gagging for it because in many an establishment up to 90 per cent of our annual profit can be made in the last four weeks of the year. It is a licence to print money. But it is also the most exhausting, ball-aching twenty-eight days of your life. If you can survive Christmas in a kicking West End joint, you can get through almost anything.

  I have three places in the West End – Le Restaurant, Le Bar and La Table – and, at all three of these venues, we’re preparing to welcome the festive season in with the largest bear hug and the sleightest of hand, as we pat you on the back and dip your pocket at the same time. You give: we take. But hopefully you’ll be so gently anaesthetized by fine wines and bonhomie, you won’t feel a thing until your credit card statement at the end of January.

  My bachelor pad, such as it is, is above La Table – the newest addition to my nascent empire. A forty-seater brasserie serving premium quality soups, salads and steaks with all-day lattes of every intolerant special need, we are mainly after the yummy mummy market as there is a private school handily not far from the site. We are turning over a useful £28,000 a week but the rent is a steep £4,000, so I have a chat booked in with Pippa and her tits today as we’ve got to have a little re-think about our margins. I need to get our GP (gross profit) up or we’re in trouble.

  A ten-minute walk up the road on Jackson Street, just near Conduit Street where Mayfair teeters towards Soho, I have a bar and a restaurant at either end of the road. Le Restaurant, my pride and joy, my pain and the mistress of both my divorces, was the first place I opened. A sixty-cover restaurant, it took ten years of graft to get there and another two years to get a Michelin star, which we have managed to retain for the last three. Although quite how we made the grade last year is anyone’s guess, what with Andrew’s inconsistency and Sketchley’s feather-spitting front-of-house attitude towards any pretty girl who walked into the room. And bearing in mind we were well-reviewed by A. A. Gill in the Sunday Times, Giles Coren in the Saturday edition of The Times and Fay Maschler in the Evening Standard, we had plenty of them, holding the porky hands of fat-walleted businessmen as they swung through the revolving door.

  Not bad for a bloke from Kidderminster with two O-levels (Pottery and Geography) and a BTEC from Stratford College. Back
then I wasn’t really focused on the job, it was just something to do, with my limited options and qualifications. I remember using my Escoffier, Le Guide Culinaire, to roll my joints on. Pages from Hering’s Dictionary of Classical and Modern Cookery and Saulnier’s Le Répertoire de la Cuisine were used for roaches between lessons. But, you know, I was seventeen years old and my parents had more or less washed their nice middle-class hands of me: what else was a lad to do except get drunk at lunchtime and waste the afternoons freeze-drying his books in the new-fangled machine they’d just taken delivery of at the college?

  And then, after learning some rudimentary knife skills and how to spatchcock a partridge, I was released into the wonderful world of West Midlands cuisine, where the women were blondes, the carpets were shag pile, and the cars were almost always Jags. Not that this culinary cabal was remotely interested in receiving me.

  The first place I worked, a symphony of pale pink napery and mock Tudor beams, I was bullied, beaten and locked in the chest freezer for three hours in my first week. The second week I was bundled into the walk-in fridge and forced to stay there shivering and shaking next to thirty-one prawn cocktails for the next five hours, half of my whole ten-hour shift. When I was finally released, with blue lips and a cock the size of a button mushroom, no one uttered a word.

  The worst night came a couple of months later. It was a fine-dining fortieth-birthday-party extravaganza. Some bloke, big in car dealerships, had taken over the place and I was ordered to do eighty-five Parma Ham and Melon. I made the mistake of leaving half a blue label on one of the melons and the restaurant manager – Frank was his name – came marching back into the kitchen and shouted: ‘What fucking cunt chef fucking cunting did this?’

  I made the foolish mistake of owning up. I said I was terribly sorry. I think I even grovelled.

  Then the head chef said, ‘Yes, you will be fucking sorry.’ And he head-butted me, knocking me out cold. I hit the deck and was dragged out by my feet, and put back into the walk-in fridge for the rest of service. I was the lowest of the low.