The Other Side of the Pass

Ines Adebayo runs thirty-four covers a night in Camberwell and has spent six years being extremely careful about what she wants. Then a network pairs her, without asking, with Simon Ashworth: the critic who at twenty-seven called her first restaurant technically proficient and entirely soulless, in a national paper, alongside a sentence about a grandmother she does not have. The breach penalty is larger than her pride. So she takes the job, sets her terms, and tells him the one thing she actually wants — that he never apologise to her on camera.

Simon has a restaurant, a reputation built on three hundred and forty words, and a conviction that if he can only make something good happen he can square the ledger. What he does not have is any idea how to give a person something they might refuse. Over six weeks in a railway arch in Bermondsey — a ruined opening night, a cold-store door that won’t open, and a pot of her father’s rice that changes what a room is for — the two of them turn out to be far better at working together than either of them is at being honest.

The rivalry costs money that a food charity never gets back, a book, a restaurant and six bad weeks of bookings. Getting out of it takes more than forgiveness. It takes a man learning to say a thing to somebody’s face and survive being told no, and a woman who has never asked anybody for anything learning to write four words in a text message at twenty past midnight.