So this chap calls me up. He’s got my details from a website where I’ve put my CV saying I’m looking for a job as a personal, family chef. He’s down between Antibes and Nice and has, he says, “A very interesting proposition” and I will love the job. It doesn’t occur to me to think that he wants anything other than a chef for his family, so we agree that I’ll see him the next daty.

Short version: He wants me to be sous/Chef/Exec (pick a title, any title) in his grilled chicken restaurant. I don’t, we parted our ways
with him owing me 35 euros.

The full version is worthy of an entire dinner party, if not a book on ‘How not to open a restaurant and how not to pick your chef’, but the highlights:

I arrived, 20 minutes of his story about being a recovering lung cancer victim; then 15 minutes of life story (apprentice FoH Savoy, Ritz, Barclays) in mid-70s, then 18 years in Azores as governmental tourism adviser, then 6 years in Uganda as failed coffee plantation owner (chased out by ‘business partner’ the Foreign Minister, walked out with just the clothes on their backs via Kenya), then – first mention of cooking – six years around Nice/Antibes giving private cookery lessons in Asian cuisine to French people.

Then six months ago his wife (nice Indian lady) sees an ad for a restaurant for sale, they buy it with savings from Uganda which they’d hidden in Switzerland.

His six years teaching Asian cookery have taught him that (a) French people like Asian food and (b) French restaurants sell rubbish roast chicken because they don’t put enough salt on them.

So he’s opening a restaurant based around this fantastic new chicken grilling machine which he’s found which will cook 27 chickens in 30 minutes, three lots of nine chickens with different marinades/rubs/spices. The secret will be that the chickens will be brined for 2 hours before being spatchcocked and nuked.

He will also be serving three kinds of moules (French only eat marinieres, they love all my new spicy recipes), three kinds of sate (French love etc etc) and a French ‘plat du jour’, which is where I come in – I get to build up a database of 90 different PduJ so that in 18 months time he can start selling his concept as a franchise.

Me: “So, you’re not looking for a personal chef for your family then?”
Him: “No no, you’re the person we want to run the restaurant, you’re perfect, you’re grown up, you’ve had the right experience” etc etc
etc.

So he drags me to see the restaurant, stopping at the bank on the way to get some cash to pay my 95 euro travel expenses (which I had to ask
for, always a bad sign when they don’t offer it automatically).

The restaurant is upstairs from a Tex Mex/Barbeque restaurant and well hidden by their gigantic signs. It’s next door to a fish restaurant, the only building between it and the pebble beach at Villeneuve-Loubet. Over the road is an immense Chinese/Thai restaurant (est. 1977) which does 120 covers on quiet Wednesday evenings, Sunday lunch it turns its 100 tables three times.

Just down the road is a French bistro restaurant. Next door is a HUGE ‘Moules Frites à volonté 12 euros’ restaurant.

So his plan is to do better Asian food than the 30-year established Chinese/Thai over the road, better barbeque than the Tex Mex downstairs, better fish (you know how to cook fish, Chris?) than the fish restaurant on the beach, better Moules than the all-you-can-eat warehouse next door, better traditional French bistro food than the bistro next door. “We’ll beat them all at their own game”.

The restaurant is still very, very much ‘under construction’ – builders have been on holiday, were due to start back this week but were very absent on Monday. Opening in three weeks.

He has all the recipes and is going to mastermind the kitchen, but wants me because since his two cancer ops and four chemotherapies he can’t lift heavy weights. There will be a commis and a plongeur. There will be a choice of half a dozen desserts du jour, all made in house by his wife.

Me to her: “Ah, so you’re a patissier?”
Her: “Well I cook a lot at home, cooking in a restaurant is just a question of scaling up what you do for dinner parties.”

Final kicker: as I’m leaving he hands me my travel expenses, “Sorry I’ve only got 60 euros, the cheques I paid in at the weekend haven’t cleared yet, I’ll send you a cheque.”

Right. And apparently I shouldn’t worry about my salary because although officially it’s only half what I’ve been used to earning for the past year (a third, actually, but I only know that because I can do sums) “There will be plenty of cash from the daily takings, we’ll be skimming off that to make up your salary.”

So anyway, I start September 1 as Executive Almighty God Chef in Johns (no apostrophe) Restaurant in Villeneuve Loubet.

(This is a joke – no, I’m NOT starting there. And now, two and a half weeks after the interview he hasn’t replied to any of my calls or e-mails about the €35 he owes me. Not even to the registered letter I sent asking for it. So, if John Sellers contacts you to offer you a job – RUN AWAY, he’s a scammer.)