Category Archives: Restauranting

What it’s like working in a restaurant in the South of France. For a living.

La Rentrée

03 Wednesday Sep 2025

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La Rentrée, The Return (to school (implied)) is a big deal in France. I guess it is elsewhere too, but here it has A Name with Capital Letters, special supermarket displays and Special Offers from everyone including Chanel.

This year for me it meant moving house, albeit slowly. I’m still doing it, in fact, as you read this (and a special welcome to all my new readers from Germany! No idea why I’ve suddenly become popular there but Guten Morgen!).

We got back from our excellent trip to England on Saturday and I spent Sunday sorting through stuff to take to the new apartment in Palavas, dining room pictured here (left). Then on Monday morning when I tried to start my car it decided that, on balance, that was not what it was going to do.

A tow truck and a lift meant that I did arrive in Palavas in the end, and I have started settling in.

A hire car later and now all I have to do is teach my first lesson this afternoon and then I have the rest of this week to finish moving in.

For the first time in a very long time I am going to have An Office (lots of capital letters today). It will also be Roxanne and/or Scarlett’s bedroom for the few days per month they’re here, but I haven’t really had a room that was just for officing in more than a decade, and even then it quickly became a temporary bedroom. Peckham was probably the last time I had a fixed space for office stuff, in fact, so I’m looking forward to that very much indeed.

Sunrise over the east pier of Carnon harbour

This morning I had a nice long walk along the beach as the sun rose over Carnon Port, seen here from one of the long piers where the local fishermen are not very friendly. Beach walks are very good for me, I find, physically and mentally. Last year the apartment I had from February to June faced away from the beach, over the ‘Etang’, the inland lake behind Palavas. Whilst it had spectacular sunset views it didn’t face the beach and I felt less inclined to go for walks, with consequent reductions in my health; now, I step out of my French windows (which are not called that in France, they’re called ‘the door’), walk along my terrace, out through my private gate (see photo above) and onto the beach. Much healthier.

I wrote back in June about the coming holidays, and August was indeed a lovely break. I visited Paris twice, once with Roxanne and then again with Scarlett and her friend Calie to see the Disney 100 exhibition and the Hockney exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton; both very excellent, and if you’re someone who buys LV bags, please keep up the good work to sponsor my art habit.

We went to England for a couple of weeks at the end of the month staying with my splendid sister and brother in law, and thanks again to them for their always very generous welcome.

Turbot with beurre blanc at Salt House, Brighton

We visited Brighton for a few days and ate at the splendid Salt Room, where they made me a lovely turbot with beurre blanc. Everyone else, to their and above all my shame, ate beef or chicken. In the town’s premier fish restaurant, overlooking the sea. For shame.

We had a ‘Secrets of The Lanes’ guided tour of Brighton with Ric from Only In Brighton – very highly recommended indeed as a great introduction to the town and its history, and then my daughters spent all our money shopping there.

Table set for afternoon tea at Claridges hotel in London

We had afternoon tea at Claridges which is something I’ve wanted to do for a VERY long time, more than a decade in fact. I used to teach a lesson on the luxury hotel industry at Vatel, and used Claridges and the BBC documentary from 2012 as a prime example of how things should be done, so it was delightful to finally be a recipient of their excellent service; Anthony our waiter – two months into his six month internship there – performed brilliantly and will go far in the industry, I’m sure.

Ceiling of the giant greenhouse at Kew Gardens surrounded by palms

Whilst in London we visited the London Museum’s ‘Secrets of the Thames’ Mudlark exhibition in Docklands, a really fascinating experience especially the firsthand accounts from mudlarks about why they do what they do. This is something that particularly interests Scarlett, combining free stuff, mud, and making things from stuff she’s found.

We also visited Kew Gardens for the day, a very lovely place to spend walking around for a few hours. Now, the work is centered around collecting and saving endangered species for plants, rather than the shameless outright plunder that went on throughout the entire Victorian era. Still, it did give us those magnificent greenhouses.

And Bletchley Park took a day to visit properly with a second visit coming up next year, I think; we arrived after four hours touring the huts at the last one to find that it was in fact a giant hanger full of long articles and huge amounts of information about Alan Turing but without the energy we needed to do it justice.

Alan Turing's desk (left) at Bletchley park.

So, Christmas or Easter will see us returning there and visiting the National Museum of Computing next door as well.

The few items we did have time to check out were very moving, like this recreation of his desk and office. We watched The Imitation Game the night before our visit to Bletchley, and the whole experience was deeply moving. For a while there we had moved on a lot from those days of criminalizing homosexuality, and it’s deeply disheartening to see a move back towards those days. Disgraceful, even.

The Cutty Sark sailing ship at Greenwich

Our last day out was a river boat trip from Blackfriars down to Greenwich to visit the Cutty Sark and the Royal Observatory.

The entire Cutty Sark experience was very well done indeed, really bringing to life the history of the ship and the people who sailed on it. We were constantly impressed with the quality of the museums and exhibitions everywhere we went in England; art is very well done in France, but museums can be rather dry here.

John Harrison's H4 timepiece

The Royal Observatory at the top of the hill was another wonderful visit.

The chance to see John Harrison’s H4 timepiece was another moving moment; so much history is tied into this object which took him 20 years to create and then change the world completely. Without it, navigation was very much a hit (often hard!) and miss business; afterwards, the oceans were opened and we – Europeans, that is – could travel the world and know more or less exactly where we were.

We did the entire trip by train, with my kind sister and brother in law offering taxi service too; we had only one bad experience coming back from Greenwich on the notorious Thameslink service from Blackfriars. The TGVs and Eurostar from home and back again were wonderful and confirmed to me how much better they are than the truly horrible experience that flying has become these days.

And now, back to work.

The tourists are back

17 Sunday Mar 2024

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You can tell it’s almost Spring: The weather’s getting warmer (not, in and of itself, a reliable indicator in these post global-warming days); I have trouble finding a space in my apartment’s car park; and the waiters are being rude again.

It’s a truism that most restaurants in tourist destinations simply don’t care whether or not you like the service because they’re not relying on you coming back ever again. You’re here for the day, you’ll only ever eat there once, so eat up, pay up and then get lost so they can turn the table and rip off the next customer.

So yesterday we ate, or rather tried to eat, at Trulli in Aigues Mortes, down towards the Camargue. We arrived at a quarter to one, not too late one would think, but there were only a couple of tables left among the 50 or so already occupied in the town’s central square.

We were seated, given menus and, within a quarter of an hour, had our drinks order delivered. Expensive drinks, mind you, but we’re on holiday, it’s sunny and it’s a pleasant spot. “J’arrive”, the waitress said, explaining in that illogical French way that she’ll be over some time soon to take our food order. It doesn’t mean “I’m coming right now” but “I’m thinking of setting off some time soon. Fairly soon anyway.”

So we waited. And waited. And drank our drinks. And finished our drinks. And re-read the menu. Then the waitress arrived, notepad in hand – and took the order of the table next door which had been seated a quarter of an hour after us. Then she ran, literally ran away inside the restaurant.

We waited. By now we were really hungry, so we decided just to pay for our drinks and go and get a sandwich; clearly our waitress had forgotten us and, even if she took our order now at 1340, we weren’t going to be eating anywhere near this side of 2 o’clock.

So, an hour after we sat down, she arrived. “Just the bill for our drinks please,” I said. “We’ve been waiting too long, we’re hungry and I’m annoyed that you took the order of the table next to us who were seated 15 minutes after us.”

“Ah don’t worry about that,” she said, flourishing her note pad on which sat, unmoved, the order for next door which she’d taken nearly 15 minutes earlier. “I haven’t put their order into the kitchen yet – I’ll put your order in first so you get your food before them.”

What, as the young people say these days, the actual fuck? You took their order a quarter of an hour ago, giving them hope that they’ll be eating any time soon, and the kitchen is still ignorant of their existence? N’importe quoi, as they say in French.

“Just our drink bill then,” I said, and she repeated those immortal lines “J’arrive”.

Dear Reader, she did not arrive. Not any time soon. We’d been waiting over an hour; I’d had the time to send Scarlett off to the Postcard shop to buy a postcard so I’d have the exact change for our order before, casually passing our table, our waitress said, “You have to pay inside.”

“Well it would have been useful to know that,” I said. And now she became angry and shouted. “I told you! I told you that you had to go inside.”

And I too got angry. “No you absolutely, definitely did not. You did NOT tell us to go inside.” Scarlett and Roxanne confirmed this, but she insisted, shouting loudly now. So we stood up and started moving inside to pay. I turned to our still hopeful neighbors. “You may like to know that even though she took your order 20 minutes ago she still hasn’t passed it on to the kitchen,” I told them. And she got even angrier. “That’s not true!” I’m taking it now!”

Well, both things can’t be true. The neighbors decided that a sandwich was a good idea too, and stood up to leave. I went inside to pay where the owner took my cash – the exact amount, €25.50 for three alcohol-free cocktails which were quite good – and laughed. “No tip?”

“Sure,” I said. “Don’t lie to and shout at your customers. Have a great season.”

We left, got a very nice sandwich on the way out – freshly made, lots of salad – and then went for an ice cream.

There are two ice cream parlors at the entrance to Aigues Mortes directly opposite each other. We went to the one on the left as there was no queue. Roxanne and I got our ice creams and Scarlett got a Glace Italienne, a Mr Whippy in fake strawberry flavor. Which tasted disgusting. “Taste this,” she invited me. It tasted of milk gone off.

I passed it over the counter to the server, saying, “This tastes funny. It’s gone off.” He looked at me as if I’d just passed him a turd. “No it hasn’t.” He didn’t bother tasting or smelling it.

“Smell it.”

He sniffed. “It smells of strawberry.”

“Yes. Strawberry and rotten milk,” I replied. He went to see his boss at the back of the store who sniffed it, said, “There’s nothing wrong with it,” and then threw it in the bin.

Scarlett took a regular ice cream and we left without any comment or apology.

Next time, we’ll try the ice cream parlor on the right. But it’ll be a long time before we go back to Aigues Mortes, I have to say.

No resolution

10 Sunday Jan 2010

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I keep promising both myself and a bunch of more important people to write to them, get back to them, post something here, reply to that e-mail…you get the idea. I don’t write nearly as much as I’d like to these days. In fact that’s an exaggeration, I often don’t write a single word from one week to the next; days fly by, weeks zip along nearly as fast and then it’s next year.

I still remember very clearly looking forward to the year 2000 with trepidation because I’ll be 40 that year. This year I’m 50 for doG’s sake. Eff me. Please. Talk about living in the future, I just don’t understand why my car doesn’t fly and I’m not holidaying on the moon.

Still. 2009 was an interesting year; started with me having quit a job I didn’t really like that much back at the end of 2008 and start looking for one which would bring us closer to Sauve and Delphine’s family, with us coming back to Avignon after a fantastic Christmas in England with my family where Scarlett delighted us all by almost walking properly.

She did start walking properly this year, of course, that is what children her age do. There’s a bunch – OK, over a thousand – new photos lurking between the digital camera (how long will we go on saying ‘Digital Cameras’ instead of just ‘Cameras’?), this computer, Delphine’s computer and flickr. They will onwardly progress soon.

As I did in the end, finding a job, eventually and after a number of promising but false starts, in Lunel. Second de Cuisine. Full time. And it allows us to live in Sommières which is one of the most beautiful towns in Languedoc. But. Well, this is what I wrote recently to someone I like:

So the new house is great, albeit expensive to heat – oil boiler has
just received its second 1,000 litre delivery which we hope will last
the winter. November/December was especially cold for here, down to
minus 10 some nights. The decor isn’t to our tastes, a bit ‘Clown
escaped from the circus turned decorator’ for my tastes but you can’t
have everything. We have good landlords who are doing all the little
jobs at their expense that normally I’d expect to have to do like
painting shutters and so on.

We have a great garden, not too big or small, room for a small
vegetable patch and we have several herb bushes already – rosemary,
lavendar and so on. And an olive tree – the olives are soaking right
now.

Scarlett is great, always curious and interested in everything, and
learning more words every day. Delphine is well but tired, new baby is
due end of July/beginning of August. She’s currently going through the
very complicated official re-education program to find a new
profession as her carpal tunnel problems mean she can’t cut flowers or
carry buckets of water any more to be a florist.

Work is very successful for me; Chef and I had a moment or two back in
October when we didn’t get on and I think we both wanted out – he was
having a hard time converting from Second to Chef and took it out on
me. He went on holiday for a week which went fine, but when he came
back he picked up one small problem (a friend of his claimed his duck
was overcooked although he’d said nothing at the time of his meal) and
blew it up into the end of the world. Now he’s fine, he’s just had 10
days off without any problems while he was away and he seems happy as
he’s been confirmed in the job.

Me, I like the work well enough and am lucky that we have Saturday
mornings and all Sunday off – except when, like this weekend, we have
to work Sunday which means we all only have half days off this week.
Can’t have everything of course.

But honestly the hours are getting me down, particularly having to
work evenings and spend so little time with Scarlett and Delphine;
every job I’ve done before has been for a limited period, albeit of up
to 9 months. As this is a permanent contract   there is no end, and
French law requires me to work a year before I can take any holiday. 3
days off last weekend is my longest break before next June.

So I’m seriously thinking about alternatives; a move to a traiteur or
a collective kitchen in a school or a retirement home or similar, or
even a move away from restaurants all together; there’s currently a
recruitment drive going on for English (among other) teachers and I’ve
filled in the papers to see what happens there. But nothing hasty at
all, I’d be content to stay where I am for a couple of years or more
even. This may just be the seven-month itch.

So yeah, I may not be a cook for the rest of my life. Or even the rest of this year. I wished, at the end of last year, for this year to be completely unexciting; that ain’t gonna happen, none of my years are ever uninteresting it seems. There’s already going to be a new baby in August and perhaps a new job now too; we’ll see.

We went for a great long walk this afternoon, through town and out along the Voie Verte, the old railway line which has been tarmaced over and turned into a decent walk from here 19 kms towards Nimes, and we really enjoyed it. We’re just starting to get to know Sommières – previously, like most people, we knew the Saturday market and that was it. Now we’re meeting, slowly, some of the people and finding the interesting corners. We do miss Avignon a lot but, as Delphine remarked this afternoon, people here say ‘Bonjour’ as you pass them in the street which they didn’t do in the big city.

And it’s great that we don’t really have any worries or major problems; yeah, more money would be nice and the washing machine appears to have given up on us after four years, but they’re not really problems. We’re all well and very happy and, as the cliché goes, that’s what counts.

Me, I haven’t been this happy in a long time, if ever. Certainly it’s the happiest I’ve been since moving to France, probably the happiest since the early ’90s, which is a long time even when you’re fast approaching 50.

So, how are you all? If we’ve lost touch, which we obviously have, I’m sorry. Email works two ways, even if it’s sometimes not evident from my lack of replies, for which I’m again sorry.

Cheers.

The new job

26 Sunday Jul 2009

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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.

Plus ça change…

30 Saturday May 2009

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I recently re-read George Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London‘ – and then re-lived it over an eight-day week in a similar Big Hotel in a town near here. Really, all you need to do to change from Orwell’s time to modern times is to give everyone a mobile telephone and you’re there.

Contrast the glamour and smoothness of the public rooms with the clamour and heat of the staff side of the buildings; the gentle jazz music and fountains playing with the crashing and banging of the pots, pans and the chef.

Ah, the chef. Young. Talented. Completely, officially, fucking mad. Generous to a fault – literally, literally give you the shirt of his back one minute and then taking your head off the next.

“Why is your fridge arranged like a fucking bordello?”

The correct answer to this question is not, I discovered, “Because you told me to arrange it like that at lunchtime, Chef.” The correct answer is mute, stupid silence as he tears you a new one for leaving him so open and vulnerable to being closed down by the health inspectors. Silly, stupid, useless you. The second part of the correct answer is to welcome his help in cleaning up the mess as you both stay behind after evening service. Cleaning a fridge which was, natch, sparkling in the first place.

Chef has a real problem. He is, as I say, young; he is also heavily oppressed by the domineering dictator of a hotel manager who doesn’t know what he wants but, whatever you’ve done, that’s not it. All his menus and pricings and decisions have to be approved at length by the director who is too busy to see him right now, come back in an hour, two hours, tomorrow.

So Chef suffers and, in turn, so does the brigade.

It doesn’t help that Chef is certifiably nuts, taking regular doses of Xanax to calm him down. Except that the last time he saw his shrink – so he tells me himself – he got into such a huge row that the shrink called the cops to get him out of his office. And now Chef’s prescription has run out and he can’t see another shrink to get another prescription until next week, but that’s fine because there’s some tablets in here somewhere – give me a hand to look would you?

‘Here’ is his studio apartment, the one where he sleeps when he’s working. He has another flat, the same distance from the Hotel in the opposite direction, where his wife and kids live and where he lives on his days off. The studio looks like a bunch of hippie students have lived in it for a month and have just stepped out for a moment to score. It is mounded up with piles of clothes and bedding, overflowing ashtrays and scraps of paper. He generously – very generously – lets me take a nap there during our afternoon break as it’s too far for me to drive home. Offers me food, drink, his bed in return for scrabbling through the mountains of junk in search of his calming medication.

We don’t find any. Bad news for him, worse for the brigade who tell me that he’s always like this; over-the-top generous one minute, screaming in your face the next. One guy’s been there a year and is building up his private catering business to the point where it’ll support him so he can leave; the other, fresh-faced and newly arrived from the north of France a couple of months ago, is looking for a new job. There’s a third but he’s off on semi-permanent sick leave at the moment.

I’m there ‘en extra’, on a temporary job ostensibly doing a trial for the permanent job which is ostensibly being offered. It started with a single shift on Sunday lunchtime, halfway through which Chef asks me to come back that evening. So I do, hanging out in his studio that afternoon.

Then he says something about working tomorrow, and I ask if he’d like me to come back? Of course, he says, didn’t anyone say? The plot unfolds: I’m to work all this week ‘en extra’, eight-days straight as a trial for this glorious permanent job. Then the next week some other guy’s coming in to do a week, trying out for the same job. Then we both come back together for two weeks to work through the Feria, the huge bullfighting festival that takes over Nimes at the end of every May. And then they’ll decide which one of us gets the job. If it looks like the season will be busy enough to hire anyone, that is.

It’s clear to me that there’s no real job on offer, they just need capable bodies in the kitchen to cover the Feria – on Feria Friday they have a group of 950 booked in for a cocktail buffet as well as doing 200 à la carte covers at lunch and then again at dinner. Right.

So I do the week, getting more worn and beaten down as it goes on. I learn some nice touches – drying tomato and aubergine skins to use as plate decoration, grinding them and dried scallop corals to powder to use similarly. And, er, that’s probably it in fact, that’s the only idea I’ll be nicking from there.

By the second Sunday I’m done, worn out and really fed up. I have one last service to go, Sunday evening. I’ve napped back at Chef’s studio most afternoons but can’t face being with him any more, so make an excuse and spend the break wandering around town and napping on a park bench. I have half a dozen excuses invented to get me off evening service and am half a second from blurting one out when I arrive and meet Chef. But I don’t. I do the service and take the bollocking about the bordel that is my fridge, then stay after service to clean it with friendly, smiley Chef.

He wants me to come back the next day. Can’t, I say. And anyway there’s Other bloke next week, right? Well, turns out he might not be what Chef is looking for but I am. So OK, come back on Wednesday, right? I mumble something which he takes as ‘Sure, love to!’ and we part with a handshake. I have no intention whatsoever of coming back, ever, to this kitchen.

There are other ways of working, other kinds of chefs. I’ve done my time with a shouty, rude, bi-polar chef before – coincidentally also in Nimes. When you get to the point where you’re shaking with fear at the thought of going to work, it’s time to move on. I’ve learned a lot of things since I started cooking for a living five years ago, but the really important thing I’ve learned has nothing to do with kitchens. I’ve learned that, if I don’t want to do something, I don’t have to. There are compelling reasons why some things have to be done but when it comes to work, there are always alternatives. I choose not to work for assholes who may be brilliant cooks but who can’t manage without violence. I’m 48 years old now and grown up enough to make these sort of choices; it may be good for my career to work in Posh Restaurant for a year, but I won’t go to work somewhere I have to live in fear, it’s that easy.

So now I’m looking, again, for a job. I have a good possibility over in Sommières, a medieval market town I visited a lot when we lived over that way. There’s an offer to work way, way over the other side of Montpellier for an English couple, running the bistro version of the Michelin-starred place, but it’s too far away from here to be practical, I fear.

And other irons warming in the fire too; two offers to stay in Avignon for the season, which could be doable. A month working in a seaside restaurant. An old, mad chef who’d love to see me back. So something will happen, quite soon I hope. We’ll see.[ad#standard]

Lessons learned

05 Sunday Apr 2009

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2008 was a real roller coaster of a year. It started going downhill after a hoped-for cool job in Ireland with A Famous Celebrity fell through when he and especially his wife turned out to be complete and utter lying tossers. Lesson learned.
The year went back uphill with the proposition of working back in Ireland for a member of the country’s richest family – and downhill six weeks into the job when it turned out that he didn’t intend to actually pay me any wages.
We were still going uphill with the birth of Scarlett on May 1 and were literally three days from moving house to Ireland, all three of us, when the wages bombshell dropped. Scarlett was a month old and we were in the throes of packing up the house in France to go spend a month in Ireland and then move over lock, stock and barrel when I learned – accidentally – that my erstwhile employer had no intention of paying me any wages while he was away from home. And since he spends six months a year abroad for tax purposes, my salary started looking very paltry.
Coupled with the fact that Ireland had really disappointed me as a country, this was a real downer. We were prepared to accept the country’s third-world health care – it costs €70 to visit a doctor, non-reimbursable, and you pay for children as for adults – and being out in the wilds of nowhere because, firstly, I actually loved the job; cooking for the old man was a joy, he was a real pleasure to work for personally. Unfortunately those with whom he chose to surround himself were wankers of the first order, bent on destroying me quite possibly because they saw me as ‘competition’ for his favours. And secondly, the offered salary would have allowed us to save up enough money to return to France in a few years and establish our own business. Well, wages are easy to promise but harder to pay, so that one stopped dead there.
It dragged on, of course. I had to return to Ireland to collect my belongings, fortunately when there was no one in the house. I had 75 kilos of luggage, all my cooking equipment and books; when traveling over my employer had paid the excess baggage charge but there was no way I could afford that myself, so I had to get a ferry from Dublin to Hollyhead and then a train across Wales and England to London and then up to my parents’ house near Bedford. There I left most of my belongings and brought the rest home on Easyjet – 20 kilos in the hold and who knows how much stuffed into my carry-on rucksack. A real nightmare 48 hours which all but did me in, both emotionally and physically. We had really invested in the idea of moving to Ireland, even being prepared to take our one-month-old daughter there to live, only to have the idea destroyed by a lying tart. Still, lesson learned – never, ever, ever go anywhere to work without a signed contract specifying everything you want. Old men make promises their staff have no intentions of keeping.
I quickly found a job in a restaurant in Avignon which was fine, a post as Chef de Partie in a gastronomic restaurant 10 minutes by pushbike from the flat. The salary was Enough and the work interesting, although some of the characters working there were jaw-droppingly weird. The Second who managed to get fired after serving rotting fish to one of the place’s favourite clients and sending off a sample to the analysis laboratory that was, literally, full of his own shit (permitted level of the bacteria you leave on food after not washing your hands following a bathroom break: 500; actual level of shitty bacteria in sample: 30,000); the cook who was a ‘mythoman’, as the French call them, a Walter Mitty character who had, variously, a dead daughter or a daughter who was studying to be a doctor; a daughter so poorly she was helicoptered to a brain specialist in Marseilles or who was doing well at school; a collection of vintage Ferraris and Bugattis or who drove a broken-down old Alfa Romeo. Then there were the control freak managers who wanted one, not two, slices of toast served with the foie gras and the portions of salad accompanying starters to be weighed, and who refused to replace the flood-damaged and filthy kitchen floor six years after it was ruined; waiters who spent, literally, hours chatting up female customers and shagging them instead of serving food. A chef who gave me a final, written warning (with, naturally, no preceding warnings at all) when he found one spot of tomato juice on a wall in a part of the building I’d never worked in. It goes on. All restaurants are special, but this one was Special. That place was a roller coaster ride all on its own, a funfair of excitement and disappointment on the Montagne Russe, as the French call them, that was our 2008. Lesson learned: everyone who works in, and especially who runs, restaurants is Mad with a capital Flibble.
On the up again. We got married in August, a truly splendid weekend of fun and partying with many of our favourite people traveling from all over France and the UK to have a good time with us. It makes you want to get married more often just so you can see them, really one of the favourite weekends of my whole life. And especially getting to work with the marvellous Steve and Caroline preparing Sunday lunch: thank you chaps, without you none of that would have been possible, I love you dearly. Lesson learned: Friends are great, cherish them.
My contract finished at the restaurant in October and things were fine for a while. The Irish Problem had been dragging on all through the summer, with them refusing point blank to pay me the wages they owed me. It was only a couple of thousand euros, but they would have none of it. So I was forced to take them to the Prud’Hommes, the Industrial Tribunal, the Commissioners as they’re called over there. The money would have been nice but the real problem, it turned out, was that they hadn’t given me an end-of-contract bit of paper I needed to be able to claim unemployment benefit in France. Well, they hadn’t ever given me a contract either, but the e-o-c one stopped me getting any unemployment benefit money at all from the start of November until it finally arrived in February, which made for a very, very difficult three and a half months for us. The Irish turd who had fucked everything up, the old man’s secretary, had apparently had my contract on her desk all the time – well, that’s what Sources Close To… told me, sources who had no reason to lie. Why she simply didn’t give it to me I can only guess, not know. Lesson learned: trust no one.
So I had to travel back to Ireland – four flights and a car hire, thank you – to attend the Commissioner’s Hearing in a town just down the road from the old man’s castle. The Commissioner, a retired judge, listened to my story and then started on their version. They had the Lying Secretary, The Lawyer and The Barrister in attendance; the Barrister had prepared a two-inch-thick brief which the Commissioner didn’t open. Their version of what happened was incredible, a real work of fantasy, but still. I listened patiently until The Commissioner stopped them, half an hour in, and asked them to leave the room. “This will go on all day today and probably tomorrow, if the size of this brief is anything to go by,” she said. “And they’re going to lose. How about I propose to them that they give you €2,500, they can beat it down to the €2,000 you want and we can all get home for lunch?” Fine by me, but it took another half an hour to persuade Them.
So they got off with a small fine for not having given me a contract in the first place and the €2,000 I wanted all along. Plus, and I’m guessing here, probably €10,000 in lawyer and barrister costs. I liked the old man and he deserves better advisors than this, and I’m sorry he ended up losing a chef he liked. No one won this one, although I lost less than the others. Lesson learned: get it in writing no matter how sincere the promises.
The Commissioner hearing was in late November and we spent two weeks over Christmas in England with my parents, a marvellous time for them and Scarlett who adored all the attention they gave her. It’s a real joy seeing the pleasure they give to each other, this was a real Up after the Downer that Ireland had been for me, but our money worries were mounting and becoming a real problem.
When I’d taken the P45 the Irish finally sent me into the French Unemployment office, they waved it away: P45? Here we want an E301, Monsieur. Now, an E301 is a P45 with the ‘P45’ name scratched out and ‘E301′ written over the top, but that doesn’t matter. The Former Employer should have furnished me with the E301 but, obviously, that wasn’t going to happen now, so a lot of research turned up another form to fill in and send to Ireland to turn a P45 into an E301. And that didn’t arrive until mid-February.
I gave the form to the French unemployment wonks and they promptly decided to pay me half the benefit they should have done, so another 10 days passed while they fixed that one, and we finally got some money – but only after incurring I Really Don’t Want To Know How Much in bank overdraft charges and interest. Essentially all the Irish settlement money. Lesson learned: Don’t work for the Irish, don’t trust anyone, check the bits of paper you need in advance, be nice to the French bureaucrats, have an understanding bank manager.
And of course, all this time I’ve been applying for jobs. At the end of last season no one was hiring as the economic crisis started. Then, as detailed in my last post, I applied for a couple of hundred jobs between January and now and had a really bad time of all that. I was offered and accepted a job just down the road from Delphine’s parents’ home in the Gard, but an innocent e-mail from me to the employer turned out to be a threat to drag her off to the Prud’Hommes/Industrial tribunal and she refused to hire me. Lesson learned: sort out everything before you’re hired. I thought I was just confirming something already promised, but in fact I uncovered a thin tissue of lies about wages and conditions and am glad I did – I’d have finished working 6 days a week for 3 days’ worth of wages.
It has been an extremely difficult 18 months, starting back in October 2007 when we first thought we’d be moving to Ireland to work for The Famous Irish Celebrity. People, it turns out, are simply not as nice as me. They lie. They cheat. And they smile while doing it. We’ve had some terrible moments and some fantastic moments and are now hoping, sincerely, that the next 18 months will be a lot smoother and easier. We’ll see, and hope for the best. I’m lucky that Delphine has been so understanding and supportive through all of this, I really couldn’t have coped without her or with a lesser woman, so thank you very much Chérie, mon amour, sans toi je serai rien. Lesson learned: marry a good woman.
Now I’m off to Uzes to work in a new restaurant. There’s a trial period of 14 days and, if it works out, we’ll be moving over there. But it’s all in writing now, we’re not buying plane tickets or house hunting until it’s certain, and there are back-up options waiting in the wings Just In Case.
Lessons learned.

New job at last!

01 Wednesday Apr 2009

Posted by in Cooking, Restauranting, Stuff

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Offered and accepted. Chef de Cuisine in a small restaurant in the Place aux Herbes, right in the middle of the medieval town of Uzes.

Getting there has been quite a journey, I have to say. I’ve been to something in the order of a couple of dozen interviews and have applied for getting on for 200 jobs since finishing at l’Auberge de la Treille last November. I turned down two jobs and still have two outstanding offers held in reserve Just In Case.

Frankly, many of the chefs and restaurant owners I met could do with taking a course or two in people management and interview techniques. One called me for interview at 8 in the morning – when I arrived two other candidates were already there and five more arrived before 8.30. He saw us in alphabetical order, not the order of arrival, so saw me at 1130, three and a half hours after I’d arrived. What a shit. Another did the same, albeit only summoning four of us for 1530. At least this one saw us in order of arrival, but WTF? Do these people really care so little about their future employees that they’re prepared to treat them like this?

Part of the problem, of course, is that in the current economic climate there are a LOT of unemployed cooks chasing fewer jobs than before, so Chefs and owners are getting cocky. I’m sure many don’t even give a second thought to the poor schmucks who are turning up like this on their doorsteps and simply treat us like dirt because, well, that works. I would refuse point blank to work for anyone who did this to me.

Equally I’d also refuse to work for any of those who called me for interview but who hadn’t actually read my CV before I turned up. So when they say things like, “Oh, you’re 48?” I understand that that means “I want a young commis I can boss around not a grown up who’ll answer back, ask ‘Why’ and have ideas that are better than mine and show me up”. Or who say, after speaking with me for 10 minutes, “Are you Belgian/German/Dutch?” Duh. Up there, top-right hand corner of my CV, the one in your hand, the one I e-mailed/posted to you last week, it says ‘Nationalité anglaise’.

And when they say, “Ah but I’m looking for someone who’s got experience of expediting 400 steak, chips and deep-fried frozen muck a day, not someone whose experience is doing 100 gastronomic meals a day,” what am I supposed to say? Your ad said ‘Seeking Second de cuisine for traditional restaurant’, how am I supposed to guess what you might want from that? Didn’t your preliminary scan through my CV clue you in a little? No? Ah, not had the time to read it? Fine, thanks for getting me to drive 150 kms for a five minute Conversation With An Idiot.

And don’t get me started about salaries. OK too late. There’s a new law in France which says that if you employ someone off the dole, you don’t have to pay their social charges for the first three months of employement saving employers about €100 a month. Fine. But only if you pay them minimum wage, €8.71 an hour. And in restaurants you get paid for 39 hours a week and the other hours you work are either ignored, or you get to take days off in lieu, or they’re paid (officially or unofficially). Just about everyone I met wants to pay minimum wage and then ‘We’ll make sure you’re OK with some cash out of the till, a few hundred euros a month/week in a good season’. Right. You wanna put that in writing? Thought not. But even if I could believe them, and frankly no one lies like a restaurant owner promising jam tomorrow, and they did give me a few hundred euros in cash every month, the problem comes at the end of the season when I have to sign back on the dole – then you only get something in the order of 70% of your previously declared salary. So 70% of minimum wage, i.e. about €800 a month. Good luck living on that with a wife and children.Because, Oh yes, no one is offering permanent contracts just six-month temporary ones “But we may be able to offer a permanent contract later on if we have a good season”. Well, I can certainly pay my rent with an offer like that, then!

Do Chefs and owners care about this? “Next please!” they cry as their eyes glaze over, you already forgotten.

I do have a lot of sympathy with owners at the moment, the French restaurant industry is deep in a hole and still digging for China. Many had pinned their hopes on a long-promised reduction in TVA (VAT in the UK, essentially sales tax) which currently adds itself at the rate of 19.6% to every restaurant bill. Former President Chirac promised to reduce it to 5.5% seven years ago, a promise taken up by President Nicholas ‘I get to shag Carla Bruni, nyah-nyah-nyah-nyahhhh-nyah’ Sarkozy during his election campaign. The reduction has finally been agreed by the EU (thank you Germany you bastards, You Must Be Stopped!) and the industry breathed a huge sigh of relief – Just in time for the summer season, hurrah! We are saved!

Er, not quite. Naturally, this being France, we can’t just say ‘TVA is reduced to 5.5% on restaurant meals’. Oh no. First we must set up a commission. And a panel. And conferences. All to decide how to implement it: should it be compulsory to reduce prices or increase wages or take on new staff? Who knows? Who gives a flying fuck? Well, the bureaucrats whose jobs depend on having enough to do that they look busy and important until it’s time for their two-month summer holidays – eating in cheap restaurants in the South of France moaning about how they’re not cheap enough. Wankers – that’s who.

So that’s the long way round to saying I’m really, really glad to have landed a decent job in an interesting restaurant with decent employers who pay overtime and seem to want to treat their staff like human beings, not scum. Result.

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Knives

13 Friday Mar 2009

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My knives, l-r: Henckels de-boner, Sabatier palette, H. fillet, S. steel, Swiss Army turning knife, no-name Chinese cleaver (just for breaking up bones), Arcos chef's knife, A. slicer, A. bread knife, A. de-boner, Metro paring knife

My knives, l-r: Henckels de-boner, Sabatier palette, H. fillet, S. steel, Swiss Army turning knife, no-name Chinese cleaver (just for breaking up bones), Arcos chef's knife, A. slicer, A. bread knife, A. de-boner, Metro paring knife


Several people have asked me about how and where to buy knives to use in the kitchen. In a few words: find a knife shop, chat with the owner, talk about what you’re doing, ask for recommendations. Don’t go buy a Shun/Henckels/Wusthoff/Japanese set online because you’ve read they’re the dog’s nads (or perfect for removing the dog’s nads), that won’t work. You’ll buy half a dozen knives of which one or two will suit you and the rest will never be touched.
Instead, buy a knife when you need it. To start, a big chef’s knife (20-30 cms, I find 25 perfect) and a small vegetable/paring knife will get you through most jobs, and I probably use these two for three quarters of everything I do in the kitchen. Add a filleting knife if you start working with fish, a de-boner if you work with meat, a slicing knife if you need to slice stuff thinly (for example, if you start working in a kebab restaurant..) I’ve never found a vegetable peeler that lasts more than a few weeks so buy packs of three or five at a time from the restaurant wholesaler and chuck them when they’re done cutting, recommendations accepted (I prefer the ones that are shaped like knives, not those other weird ones).
Keep them sharp. This means using a steel every single time you use a knife, and getting them professionally sharpened whenever the steel no longer does its job. Almost all my knives are German Zwilling Henckels. My 25cm chef’s knife, my slicing knife, bread knife and one of my de-boners are the Spanish, Arcos brand which belongs to Henckels. My flexible deboner (the Arcos one is a solid blade) is a Henckels Premium Brand, as is my filleting knife.
I have Sabatier vegetable, small chef’s (15cm) and filetting knives but I keep them at home and don’t use them at work, they don’t hold an edge long enough.
I have Swiss Army straight-blade (the cutting edge is straight, not curved) vegetable and turning (looks like a Turkish assassin’s curved blade) knives, and a Sabatier palette knife and steel. I also have a conventional-blade vegetable knife bought from Metro, the big French restaurant supplier/wholesaler, and given to me as a present by Jean-Rémi Joly, one of my first Chefs. I use Arcos scissors at work for cutting fish fins etc.
And I SWEAR by my Bron Coucke mandolin, I use this more than some of my knives for slicing vegetables. Microplane graters in three or four different sizes.
I didn’t particularly choose these brands, I came to own them by going to the knife shop in town (here in Avignon) and discussing what I want to do with the owner. He’s very helpful. He sells the whole range of Henckels, from the cheap Arcos to the very, very expensive premium ones. So when I started I was going to cookery school I wanted something cheap and durable and he recommended Arcos. Then I moved up in the kitchen, needed a flexible deboner, he recommended the Henckels. Last knife I bought from him was the (Arcos) slicing knife which I used dozens of times a day last summer to slice marinated and smoked salmon. I also take all my knives back to him every few months to get them professionally sharpened. I used my big chef’s knife the other day to slice some dried apricots and it’d been literally months since I’d used it, so I managed to slice off almost my entire index finger fingernail with it, clean in one go, easier than cutting apricot. They’re SHARP when they come back from him.
If you’re going to do anything with your knives I highly recommend finding a local knife shop to sharpen them for you and show you how to use a steel to maintain the edge. Hand wash, dry and keep them either in a wood block (I do this with my home knives) or in a folding knife pouch, which is where I keep my work knives. Not in a drawer!
When it comes down to it, though, in the end what counts is not how good and/or expensive your knives are, it’s what you do with them. Nothing beats buying a sack of carrots and julienning/brunoising them until your fingers bleed. Search on Google or Youtube, you’ll find plenty of videos showing you good knife techniques – keep your thumb AWAY from the cutting edge!
Practice makes perfect.
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Week 18: Household cabbage – what I did at school on February 6 2006

17 Sunday Aug 2008

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French bureaucracy is complicated for a number of reasons, not least the fact that it’s charged with keeping French bureaucracy going. In the UK, 11% of the workforce works for the government in one capacity or another – policemen, nurses, bureaucrats, whatever. In France, the percentage is 24%. Twenty-four percent! A quarter of the workforce which does nothing productive at all, just spends its days providing fodder for the nation’s stand-up comedians and moaners. Blimey.
So today at school we spend an hour learning about the French judicial system which, according to the bureaucrats who organise the French educational system, I need to know about before I’m safe to unleash on the omelette-and-chips buying French public.
Like much of the civilised world, French government is divided into Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches (are you asleep yet? Try reading this in a hot, stuffy, sunlit classroom after getting up at 6 am, working in a hot kitchen all morning and then stuffing yourself with stodge at lunchtime) and the separations thereof  “As detailed in the 5th French Constitution of 1958, the fundamental text of the Republic, of the state of law and democracy,” I noted before nodding off. And then I woke up and drew this huge diagram of the French judicial system, the eight tribunals and all the rest of it. Blimey. No really, blimey.
Anyway. Luckily this morning was much more interesting. The cookery we learn at school is very traditional; the recipes largely date back to Escoffier and the early 20th century, some beyond that. It’s the basis of French cuisine from which everything since has sprung – this is how Escoffier made a fond de veau, veal stock, no one has found a better method so this is how we do it now is what we are told at school. The French are, quite rightly in my view, very proud that their cuisine is the foundation of most cookery in the Western world and, naturally, insist that theirs is the best version of it available.
In a way it’s reassuring; these methods have been tried and tested by generations of chefs over more than a hundred years so they work and work well; equally it’s discomfiting to realise that, if your recipe doesn’t work it really is your own fault and it’s really you who’s done something wrong.
I am most discomfited by things which are supposed to rise and foam, everything from whipped cream to bread. So today I have the cold sweats as we approach the pâte à brioche which we are going to use to make a favourite snack dish of many French people, the saucisson brioché, sausage in a (brioche) bun, i.e. posh hot dogs.
Frankly I’d much rather make the saucisson, a process that interests me much more than baking simply because I know I can do it. I’ve already written about how Pascal, the nice chap with whom I share a workstation at school, whips my cream for me while I cut his potatoes into pretty shapes. My inability to make things rise extends to bread too I’m sure, since every time I’ve tried making it myself at home – either manually or in a bread machine – I’ve managed to produce only doorstop-quality lumps of flour and water so unleavened the ancient Israelites would be proud of me. Although if one of my loaves fell on them out of the sky they’d end up with concussion rather than a decent feed. I have no idea why I can’t make bread or decently-risen cakes; I have warm hands, I have acid sweat, I am stupid – all are possibilities and, indeed, true in at least two of the three cases. The fact remains that, in the rising stakes, I’m a non-starter.
So brioche, Chef Garnier assures us, is easy. Anyone can make it. It’s almost as easy as profiteroles, he says. My profiteroles always end up as flat as my Yorkshire puddings, I tell him, and have no reason to think that my brioche will be any different.
We’ll see, he says.
The lesson starts with a discussion of flour types; today we’re using what is known in France as Type 45 or Farine de Patissier, since it is very rich in gluten, the protein which gives it the strength to stay up once it’s risen. “This is very white flour,” he tells us. “Even whiter than English skin.” Har har, whatever would he do without the English guy to tease? Anyway, the higher the number the less gluten the flour has, Chef tells us. Right.
So we sieve the flour and form it into two adjacent rings, one large and one small. These are fontaines, which literally means fountains but translates better as wells, to receive, in the large one, the majority of the liquid and eggs; the smaller one takes the yeast dissolved in a little of the warmed milk; the large well takes the sugar and, importantly, the salt. Mix the salt and yeast and the former kills the latter and your dough will not rise. Hmm. Perhaps salt from my sweaty hands is killing the yeast? But then why am I equally incapable of making cakes rise when using levure chimique, baking powder?
Anyway. We mix up the two wells separately for a couple of minutes, adding the salt, sugar and eggs to the large well before mixing the two fontaines together. The mixture, we are warned, must be neither too dry nor too humid; it must have body, Chef says, and you give it body by battering it against the steel worktop, throwing it down and lifting it up like some sort of alien blob, thumping it down to Give It Body. It’s done when it no longer sticks to the counter, apparently, but the fault in the process here is that, until it no longer sticks to the counter, it sticks to the counter. And your hands, clothes, hair, face and anything else it touches. So much for Escoffier’s great recipes.
But eventually I wear my dough out enough so that it gives up (most) of its hold on me, my clothes and the worktop and I add little parcels of softened butter (beurre en pomade en petits parcelles) before leaving it to rise for half an hour at 30-35 degrees. At which point we ‘chase out the carbonic gas’, as Chef translates it (badly) for me before allowing it to rise again.
Roll it out, wrap it round your sausage (Missis!), paint it with egg yolk and everything in the oven for 45 minutes or so until it looks just like the ones they sell in the shops. Well, a misshapen version of one they sell in the shops, one which only my mother could love and even she would be caught selling it surreptitiously to the dog under the table when she thought I wasn’t watching.
Still. Chef deems them all Good Enough to let us out to lunch and we trek off to the school canteen to eat, well, saucisson brioché. What a coincidence. I am careful to choose a slice from one not made by me and quite tasty it is too, if you ignore most of the pastry and eat the bought-in saucisson inside.
And avoiding the stodge is a good idea, it turns out, since there’s that aforementioned class on the French legal system immediately after lunch.
We eventually escape with our lives after a nice nap to spend the afternoon making ‘Chou de ménage’, household cabbage. What?
Household cabbage, it turns out, is a cabbage cut into quarters and then used by Chef as an example of ‘Braiser par expansion’, braising by expansion whereby the delicious taste of the cabbage expands out into its cooking medium (can you spot the fatal flaw in this argument, children? Can you?)
Anyway. Trim your cabbage, cut it into four equal quarters, rinse it in vinegared water to kill the beasties, blanch in boiling water for a few minutes, refresh in iced water, drain, cut off the root which you’d left to hold the whole thing together while it cooked (oops), fry off your Garniture Aromatique (onions and carrots cut into a nice macedoine), add the cabbage wrapped with bacon or couenne (the membrane which surrounds a pig’s stomach – very useful for holding together things which would otherwise float off and do their own thing – pop it into your casserole dish and cook it in the oven at 200 degrees Centigrade for an hour and a quarter. Blimey. All this for braised cabbage? Ah, but the lessons are about braising and wrapping and making a macedoine with everything the same size. It’s just a shame that we couldn’t have learned these lessons on something edible.
Still. We finish off the afternoon with some Pommes Fondants, melting potatoes. The object of which, of course, is not to finish up with melted potatoes. Well, not until they arrive in the client’s mouth that is. We start with large potatoes, 7-8 centimetre jobbies which we cut in two and then turn so that they’re all the same size and seven-sided shape and then cook in a buttered dish in the oven, moistening it regularly with ‘fond blanc’, white chicken stock (i.e. stock made from unroasted chicken bones – as opposed to fond brun, which is made with roasted bones) so they sit up to their waists in it. Except that, at the end of the cooking time (an hour or so) the liquid should all be just evaporated and your spuds barely coloured. So get that one right or turn your pommes fondants into pommes on fire.