Kitchen heroes

How many of us know that there are 'dead' areas in a restaurant, dread places where tips are fewer and less generous?

Very few food writers, and almost no restaurant reviewers, have much direct experience of kitchens, in the catering sense. Most of those glossy books with gobsmacking pictures of shellfish arranged to look like the Last Supper, and potatoes creaming in Botticelli waves, are the product of chefs who have long since graduated to executive status, promoted by success, good PR, and the tastes of the people who write the food guides. Two books by Nicholas Freeling, a thiller writer who has also seen the inside of a lot of hotel kitchens, are an exception. The Kitchen Book and The Cook Book are unusual - and delightful - in giving a sense of the working chef: a man or woman, I assure you, who is no toqued toff, but is little better than a culinary navvy.

My own experience is strictly vicarious. I have known some working restaurant kitchens as a relative insider. That is, there are places where I have been a regular enough customer to have become something like a member of the family, and therefore have had access to the darker secrets of the trade: the pressure, the appalling working conditions, the beastly, unsocial hours, the extortions of suppliers and inspectors, the vagaries of the "hired help", and such.

Recently, my experience was broadened by the daily gossip of son number three as he sweated out three summer months in an upmarket, "family-type" restaurant: hours noon to 1am; diners served, at least Friday to Sunday, well over a hundred.

Of course, I had a prurient interest in the precise drill with which correct timing was assured; the arcane business of ordering just enough so as not to run out; the arduous preparation. I learned that I should not trust the freshness of certain ingredients, particularly fish, which are bunged about between refrigerator and chef's preparation with an utter disregard for sell-by dates: what the customer doesn't know won't hurt him. How many of us know that there are "dead" areas in a restaurant, dread places where tips are fewer and less generous? And that veritable dogfights take place to avoid them? I was charmed by the secrets of getting customers to drink just a little more: by delaying the first course, by lagging between courses, by a dilatoriness in preparing tables ("We'll have your table ready in ten minutes, sir. Why not wait at the bar and we'll call you when it's ready?"). And why not? Restaurants just about break even on their food; it's the alcohol that makes the profit.

Being a chef (my son's restaurant employed three) is exceedingly hard work, for little pay. You would be surprised to learn what any but head chefs earn; it is just a bit more than subsistence. The pressure is intense and unremitting, the possibility of accident omnipresent, the atmosphere frenetic. In summer this is exacerbated by extreme heat, for an air-conditioned kitchen will result in cold food. Psychologically, the tensions are extreme, praise is rare and mistakes seldom go unpunished.

Much of this I knew from observation, but some of the fine print had not been made plain. For instance, the frustrations of working for a head chef who is plainly incompetent; and I gather that this is far from infrequent. As a cook, you can look over your shoulder and gasp at what the numero uno is doing, but you'd better suffer in silence, for the head chef can not only cost you your job, he or she (a woman figured large in my son's horror tales) can suppress the staff meal and leave you starving at the end of a hard night. Until the owner or manager comes to see these deficiencies, the head chef is boss.

Then, what happens when the manager is a plain prick - one of those accountant fellows who have come up through restaurant chains where food is valued only in cash return? What happens to originality or creativeness when you're hired and given a menu so worn with custom and stale usage that the customers eat it automatically and without thought? You may have a night when you can prepare something new; you may get compliments from out front; but will that persuade the manager to change his menu? Isn't the bother too great, the task of acquiring fresh stocks beyond the ambition of most?

Of course, there are compensations, or people would not stay. My son's restaurant had a genial owner who created a genuine esprit de corps (the Draconian head chef was finally sacked), and there is a sense in which a well-run kitchen is a family of like-minded people working intensely at a common task. But there is another sense in which even the best kitchens are places of grinding hard work. Two hours every day preparing fish cakes can become monotonous. It is the unvarying nature of the task that is, I think, the ultimate killer. It is what makes of young chefs, especially those with ambition, gastronomical vagrants who wander from job to job in the hope of having an opportunity to cook something different.

After five years of intermittent work in all sorts of places, my son's cooking ambitions wobbled - though on his one day off each week he had had fun in our own kitchen. Would, then, that food writers, and customers, had some understanding of what life in the kitchen is really like. Above all, we should not judge the experience of home cooking as in any way comparable to that of the unsung, footsore chef in the restaurant kitchen