I started on June 8 as Second de Cuisine (Sous Chef in some parlances but that’s not the same thing in French) at the Karousel restaurant of the Kyriad hotel in Lunel, over in the Hérault department.
It is not a gastronomic restaurant like those I’ve worked in previously; in France it’s what is known as semi-gastronomique. It means it’s a bit cheaper – our menu of the day is €14, €17 with coffee and wine. We do three weekly ‘suggestions’, two starters and a main; this week it’s a salad of confit de canard marinated in a blackcurrant and raspberry vinaigrette, a ‘terre et mer’ special with our home-made foie gras and smoked salmon, and breast of duck with honey and pain d’epice sauce.
We have an interesting à la carte menu, you can read the English version here and the French version here.
It’s a businessman’s hotel; we’re full during the week with many commercial travellers staying overnight – we do a special deal for a room and half-board/demi-pension and we sell a lot of menus of the day to them. We also cater for quite a few groups of 10 – 30 in our conference rooms, feeding them the menu of the day too. Weekends are quite busy with tourists at the moment, although that calms down at the end of next month. At the moment we close Saturday and Sunday mornings; when the tourists have gone home we’ll close Sunday night too. I’ll have one Saturday in three off, the first time ever I’ve had such a schedule – Saturday nights off!
We do anything from 30 to 100 covers per service which is quite exciting when there are only two of us working. Normally there are three of us in the kitchen but our Commis, Jean-Claude, had a heart attack 10 days after I started. He came back for a week and is off again for at least another month. Right now Robert, the apprentice-stagiare who was working when I arrived is filling in for him but he’s off back to school (and a stage in England) at the beginning of September. So that could be fun; Chef Alex and I did two and a half weeks on our own before Robert came back with just two half days off a week and we’re both knackered. He’s got the weekend off now, I’ve got next weekend for a big family (Delphine’s family) wedding.
I work the starters and pudding stations normally when Alex does the hot dishes and replace him doing hot mains when he’s on his days off – like this weekend. Our hours are very reasonable too, starting at 9 and finishing, normally, at 2, then from 6 to 10 in the evenings. We’re very strict about taking last orders by 1.30 and 9.30 – not like other restaurants where you’re paid for 39 hours and expected to work 60 or more without complaining. The owners here understand about unpaid overtime and, whilst occasionally, we end up doing an hour here or there we also get to leave by 9.30 on quiet nights – like I did last night.
We’re very, very happy with this job; it’s not the great gastronomic cooking I’ve done before but it’s decent, honest stuff and another learning experience. And frankly it’s been almost two years since I took the job with the Dancing Irish Wanker and, since then, we’ve been permanently waiting for The Telephone Call that will decide our futures and allow us to settle into a proper home. That waiting has driven us both nuts, being at the beck and call of people who, frankly, could care less about me and my family. Half a dozen times I’ve been offered jobs, only to have them pulled from under me at the last minute – or even after the last minute.
So that’s all behind us. We’re looking for a house around Sommières now – let me know if you hear of anything with three bedrooms and a garden – and are looking forward to a few calm and settled years living a normal, boring life. Life will be a bit tricky for the next couple of months since it would cost us about €20 a day for me to do the round trip from Avignon – double that if I came home for my afternoon nap – so I’m squatting at Delphine’s parents’ house for the time being. It’s still costing us a tenner a day in diesel as Sauve is 40 kms from Lunel, but at least there are no motorway tolls.

Come and see us, you’re all welcome.