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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]
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