My wine-based flirtations with the sexy chef are starting to cause problems

Our secret sommelier discusses the perils of falling in love in the workplace – and trying to seduce your crush with fine wine

As mine and Max’s flirtation intensifies, I find ways to use service to my advantage (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Something very bad has happened. I’m not doing well. I’m being curt with customers and cutting corners; I’m rushing some orders and forgetting others. It’s not making me easy to work with. I’m not proud of myself, not least because it’s horrifically clichéd: I have a crush on a chef.

It’s a tale as old as time. A woman working front-of-house, a male chef. She (me): loquacious, personable, charming; he (let’s call him Max): laconic, surly, driven. Our flirtation has been going on for a while now – he comes to find me in the office to ask my opinion on a new dish, I offer him my wine glass after service, just to taste. He rolls his eyes in my direction when the host tries to flirt with him, I return it when one of the directors tries to flirt with me. We’ve developed a vocabulary of meaningless inside jokes – everything is now a wink and a nudge.

It started on my first day. Max had been working on menu development for a couple of weeks before I arrived, new and panicked. The first thing I noticed about Max was that he seemed incredibly competent. No, that’s a lie – the first thing I noticed about Max were his forearms. He was rolling up his sleeves as I walked in. OK, I thought, that works.

In contrast to Max’s cool control of the kitchen, my wine department was chaos. Half the stock was wine that I had ordered, half of it was back-stock ordered by the directors. I spent my first week knee deep in boxes, bottles and spreadsheets, trying to make sense of the space and the list before we opened.

A few days in, Max leaned his head round the door: “So, you’re in charge of the wine?”

“Yes, that’s me, I’m in charge of the wine.”

He looked me up and down: “Cool.”

A few minutes later, he had returned to the cellar with a bottle of Frank Cornelissen’s Susucaru Rosato. “Have you ever tried this?”

“Did you take that from here? Is it mine?”

“No, it’s my own, I’m taking it to dinner.”

This wasn’t a bit of casual conversation; this was a move. To explain: Frank Cornelissen is to wine as Wes Anderson is to film. The wines are just outside of the mainstream, whilst being incredibly well known. He’d managed to tell me that he knew a bit about wine and wanted to impress me in two short sentences. I was annoyed by how well it worked. I was smitten. He’d given me an in, too. I would seduce him with wine.

Wine service in this restaurant, as in many, goes like this: you order a bottle of wine, which I fetch and present to the table. You: “Yes, yes that’s the one.” Then I take it over to the waiter’s station, open it, pour a taste for myself to make sure it’s not corked, spoiled, or just plain wrong. Then I return to the table and pour you a taste. You: “Hmm, ahh, very good, thank you.” Then I pour you your glasses.

As mine and Max’s flirtation intensifies, I find ways to use service to my advantage. If I open a wine that is rare, or interesting, or especially delicious, I will pour a particularly healthy taste before I return it to the customers who ordered it.

Once they’ve safely received their wine, I grab my tasting glass and head to Max. I then do a sort of mating dance at the kitchen door, puffing up my chest and making mewing noises until he notices me. When he finally looks up, I say (nonchalantly): “I’ve got this 1999 Montepulciano, you have to try it, it’s amazing and you’re, like, the only person here who’ll care.” I do this maybe four times a service. Max, obviously, loves it – but I am getting in the way quite a lot. He is the busiest man in the restaurant and I am being what we in the industry refer to as “a f***ing nuisance”.

Max is the head chef. He expedites, telling the chefs who needs to be cooking what, and when. He is their quality control, tasting every dish that goes out into the restaurant, but he also plates most of the food. If a chef has a problem, he is the person they go to. If a food runner, waiter or manager has a problem, he’s the person they go to. Traditionally, the only people who don’t need to spend time talking to the head chef are sommeliers, at least not during service. I, however, have to spend huge swathes of time loitering at the pass because I have a job to do.

It’s 11pm when the general manager asks to speak to me in the office. I know for certain I’m in trouble. I’ve dropped the ball more than once this evening, and every time she’s been the one to pick up the slack. She looks serious as we sit down together.

“I’m so sorry I know tonight I’ve…”

She interrupts me, mid-sentence: “For f***’s sake, will you just ask him out already.”