Hospitality
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 27: Food Chain
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Jim Hearn
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I was fifteen when I stood inside my first restaurant kitchen. My mother, who had replaced the red dirt of Mount Isa for the red lights of a different town, had organised this, my first full-time job. I had no comprehension of what was required or of the implications for my future there.
Oliver's Seafood Restaurant makes no dining lists of substance; it has no stars, hats or write-ups. Like most restaurants of its kind, Oliver's has closed and re-opened half a dozen times under different names and with different culinary dreams.
Dreams drive hospitality. While some people like to think of it as a component of the service industry whose responsibility it is to address the needs of the body, for those on the inside it is a weird and sometimes wonderful dreamscape of ungodly hours, ridiculous pressures, unkind owners, absurd customers, torture, humiliation and occasional moments of brilliance. The obscure thrill of putting it all together on the night, of getting all the sections of a busy kitchen firing, is like no other I know.
Glenn, my first head chef, was fresh out of cooking school and had an unabashed passion for red cordial laced with methylated spirits. On the rocks. He had a ginger handlebar moustache that never quite worked and a temperament I would come to understand as a particular type. He was a busy, nervy bundle of energy and somehow, despite his jitteriness, easy to get on with. Glenn figured that if life had sent you inside his kitchen, you were pretty much fucked and there was no reason to make things worse. He possessed a capacity for kindness, a capacity that evaporated every lunch and dinner. The weight of being vaguely kind outside service hours demanded his inner anger be given free reign as the orders rolled in. Hell hath no fury like a stressed-out, angry head chef in a busy, no-good restaurant. Forget fine-dining celebrity head chefs – in the out-of-the-way suburban business-lunch trattoria or city-fringe motel diner, hell has a name: Chef.
AS I STOOD in front of my first open cool room, I couldn't move. My senses were assaulted by an unreasonable number of smells. It's an odour which recurred over the next twenty-five years in inexplicable ways: as if this cool room were really all possible cool rooms, its stored ingredients – its sauces, produce, pastes, meats, condiments, cheeses, seafood and mould – melded into one archetypal olfactory sensation. I've since cooked in Middle-Eastern and Asian restaurants, and while the food tastes and smells different, the cool rooms all smell like Oliver's Seafood Restaurant.
‘Shut the cool room, faggot,' said Glenn in his semi-kind, before-service voice.
I slid the door shut and turned back to the kitchen. Glenn, wearing a gee-whiz-kiddo stare, asked, ‘Where's the butter, fag?'
This thing about being a faggot: it's offensive, a puerile and ridiculous turn of phrase, but in Glenn's world everyone and everything was a faggot.
‘Sorry, chef. I forgot.'
‘Jesus fucking Christ, fag,' Chef Glenn mumbled as he barged past me into the cool room, ripped the butter from the shelf and slammed the door so hard the bell rang. The bell on the outside of every cool room door is there to attract attention if someone gets locked inside, which happens a lot more than it should.
‘But-ter,' Glenn droned, as though he had a speech impediment, as if I didn't know what butter was.
Standing there in my first restaurant kitchen, suffering beneath the gaze of my first kitchen humiliation, a pubescent fifteen-year-old kid who had just left his eighth worse-than-average school having failed half his subjects, I felt like a fool. I was a kid with parents in the throes of a divorce, with no idea of what I was doing or how I should be feeling, what constituted being an outright moron or apprentice of the year. I was not alone. Many people like me find employment, and a life, inside their version of Oliver's.
‘You're a moron,' said Chef Glenn, testing me.
‘Yes, chef,' I mumbled.
‘What?'
‘Yes, chef,' I yelled vigorously.
Chef Glenn stared at me, nodding, semi-impressed.
I couldn't help but smile as the waiter ripped the first couple of lunch orders from his order book.
BEYOND THE COOL room, the second archetypal smell of the kitchen is that of a just-blown-out bamboo skewer. Chefs all over the world light skewers off pilot lights or a gas burner to light the burner they need at that moment. Then they shake off the flame, or blow it out, or snub it in the wok station water, and the smell...I don't know what it is; I just know it's the same everywhere and means the day has started and it's time to get to work. Everyone knows the six boxes of matches and two lighters that were neatly placed in their service-is-coming-get-ready-positions are out the back in the storeroom with the empty beer bottles, wine glasses and ashtrays. They're shoved under dirty aprons or empty cardboard boxes and they'll be retrieved in time, by the apprentice, before service and well before the owner or restaurant manager turns up.
It's not that every service ends in a celebration; it's just that at the end of every service, two things happen: chefs get changed out of their kitchen whites and, in the process of this changing, this metamorphosis back into street attire, the service that has just gone unravels in their minds and in their conversation. And if it has been a massive service, if you've just been slammed, you'll be having a drink and chatting, laughing, taking the piss and generally talking it up, and this moment of bonhomie has been known to extend beyond the mechanics of getting changed. There's a tipping point, perhaps as simple as agreeing to the second drink, that signals to everyone: get the fuck out now if you have to...and if you don't, you'll be going to bed with the words Where the fuck are the matches, faggot? ringing in your ears.
My first pay cheque stretched far enough to buy a carton of beer and some fancy Italian deli food which I thought I knew about. Of course I got outrageously drunk and danced and vomited and drank some more – on a beach in Townsville, home of Oliver's. I have a vague yet pressing sense the night ended in tears: childish, transitional tears about the confusion and hopelessness of my past life which necessarily involved my parents and siblings. Alcohol seemed to bring me undone in this fashion each time I drank. I remember older, wiser heads patting me on the back, ruffling my hair, telling me that it'd all work out: that I'd be fine; I'd see.
Yet what I came to see was that despite working like an adult, taking on responsibilities and more hours than was reasonable or sane, I was a kid who couldn't come to terms with what had gone before. I was both a child and a teenager, and my family crisis informed who I was, and was probably the reason I drank so much so young. Hospitality for me is and has always been a transitional space: kitchens come and go; people slide in and out of a chef's life ‘until the next gig'. My capacity to leave, to not stick it out, to come undone and move on, was a fitting continuation of a pattern from childhood.
WHEN MY PARENTS divorced, it was my mother who left my father. This fact, about who leaves, is perhaps the most telling signifier at the end of every relationship. Many couples like to say that it was mutual, that each of the parties came out of it with their pride and self-respect intact, but anyone old enough to have fallen in love knows that's bullshit. Someone gets done over and someone does the doing over. So, as the song goes, my mother, after having six children and not missing a Sunday mass in sixteen years, well, we were told that she'd been bold with Harry, Mark and John...and before the song closed out, she found herself working in brothels around Kings Cross.
The thing about being a prostitute is that for most people, it's a fantasy life, something only ever imagined, read about or seen on television. But, backstage at least, it's like most other jobs. There are the usual dramas, boring bits, good days and bad; but there aren't a whole lot of people you can talk to about what happened at work. Unless you're my mother and you don't care what other people think and you never pause to reflect on how your actions might affect other members of your family. No, if you're my mother, you tell anyone who'll listen about what Bob did to Jane and she did to him and they did to her. My mother had no capacity to wonder about how her actions might affect others; this fault line in her personality ran deep, and grew wider and longer, as if she hoped one day she might wake up and find she'd split in two. Only she never did, and it was left to me to work out what it meant to have a mother who worked as a prostitute.
As such, my early years in the kitchen were a kind of double life. It wasn't that I felt that I needed some mystery, some other secret world to feel good about myself or keep people guessing – I wanted nothing more than to be able to focus, draw my attention to what was happening in front of me – it's just that this other world, the world of my unconscious, my childhood dreams and memories, seemed to wash over everything, creating a haze through which I would attempt to pull myself together in order to survive financially and, with any luck, learn something about what it meant to be a chef.