The Pairing

Four hours to service and my agent rang me twice, which she has never done, so I put the phone on the board between the langoustines and the ice and answered it with my elbow.

“Say the bad half first,” I said. “I’ve got eighty-two of these to break down and a fish delivery at one.”

“The network’s confirmed the format.” Roz Ballantyne talks the way I plate: nothing on the pass that isn’t doing work. “Six weeks. One shared kitchen in a railway arch. Every penny to the Larder Trust. Two head chefs.”

“Two.”

“They’ve paired you.”

I got my thumb under the shell of a langoustine and took the head off it, and the tail went into the ice and the head went into the shellfish tub, because prep does not stop for anyone’s career, mine least of all.

“Go on.”

“Simon Ashworth.”

The knife kept moving, because my hands are better than I am. Behind me Deja stopped talking to the fridge, which is how I knew she had heard the name through a phone, across a kitchen, over an extraction fan.

“The critic.”

“Former critic. He’s had a restaurant three years.” Roz did not try to sell it to me, which is the reason I have had the same agent since I was twenty-five. “I know about Sorrel. I know what those three hundred and forty words did to the four job offers that came after it. I also know the network announced the pairing to the trades at nine this morning, which means the first time you get asked about it will be this afternoon by somebody holding a microphone, and I would rather you had the ugly shape of it from me. If you walk, the breach clause is sixty thousand plus a clawback on the fee they’ve already paid. That takes Ilé’s cash flow down to the floorboards for a quarter.”

“They announced it before asking me.”

“They asked your lawyer nine days ago in a schedule annexe set in a type size designed to be missed. I missed it. That one is mine and I’ll carry it.”

I looked at my kitchen. Thirty-four covers, one sitting, a set price, five people including me, and a lease I had signed in a room above a bookmaker’s with a cheque that cleared by nine hundred pounds. It had taken four years to stop feeling like a dare I had accepted in front of witnesses.

“What’s the actual shape of the six weeks?”

“One public service a week, covers by ballot, all of it to the Trust. One commission a week set by the charity — cooking in their community kitchens, real numbers, real budgets. Then a finale. Nobody gets eliminated. There’s no trophy. It is the best-natured format I have read in a decade, and they have put the two of you inside it because they think you will take lumps out of each other on camera, and they are not wrong to think it.”

“Do you want me to do it?”

“I want you to do it with your eyes open. There’s a difference and it matters.”

Deja had gone quietly back to the mackerel. I watched her run a finger down a spine to check for pin bones she already knew were out, because I had taught her to do it that way, because that is how you make certain.

“Tell them yes,” I said. “Separate prep benches. Separate trailers, and I don’t care that it’s a car park in Bermondsey and the trailers are one portakabin with a curtain down the middle. And I want it in the contract that I have final say on anything that goes out with my name on it. Menu, plate, caption, any of it.”

“They’ll give you the benches and the curtain. The final say they’ll fight.”

“Then fight back. That one isn’t a negotiation, it’s the price.”

“Understood.” A pause, and then, in the voice she uses about twice a year: “You could simply not do this.”

“I could pay sixty thousand pounds not to do this,” I said, “which is the same sentence with the interesting part put back in.”

I put the phone face down and went back to the langoustines. Eighty-two. I got to about sixty before Deja spoke, which for her is a long time to sit on something.

“Is it the one,” she said.

“It’s the one.”

“Right.” She turned the mackerel over, laid a second one next to it, squared them up. “So what’s the plan.”

“The plan is I cook, he cooks, they film it, the charity gets the money, and in six weeks I come back here and open the doors at half six like none of it happened.”

“That’s not a plan, chef, that’s a hope with a timetable on it.” She said it to the fish, which is how Deja says things she intends you to actually hear. “I’m just saying. Six weeks is forty-two days. You’ve never gone forty-two days without telling somebody exactly what you think of them, and you’ve been not telling this man what you think of him for six years, which means it’s had time to go concentrated. That’s all. That’s my whole observation.”

“Are you finished.”

“Nearly.” She set the knife down. “Do you want me on it? The pop-up. Because if it’s me they ask, I’ll say yes, and if it’s not me you’ll get whoever the production company’s insurance likes, and that person will not know which way you look when you want a spoon.”

I thought about it for the length of four langoustines.

“It’s you,” I said. “Ask for double. They’ll pay it. They’ve already spent more on a fridge than I spent on this entire room.”

—

He was at the arch before me on the Thursday, which annoyed me out of all proportion.

Halliwell Yard is four brick arches off the Bermondsey side of the river, and the production company had spent more on arch fourteen in six weeks than I had spent on Ilé in four years. New extraction. Two banks of induction where I had asked for gas and been told, very kindly, that gas is difficult for the lighting. A walk-in positioned for the camera crew’s access rather than for any human being who might need forty kilos of ice out of it at speed. Good light. Absurdly good light. The whole room smelled of new plastic and fresh joinery, and it would smell of stock and burnt sugar by Tuesday and then it would be a kitchen.

I had been there since seven, moving things. Mise stations pulled in off the wall so a person could get behind them. Walk-in relabelled top to bottom in the order you actually reach for things at half past eight on a Saturday. I had a roll of blue tape in my apron and I was up on a crate taping a label over the spice shelf when the door went.

He looked older than his byline photograph, which I noticed with an amount of satisfaction I am not proud of. Tall, narrow through the shoulders, dressed with care in a way clearly intended to read as no care at all. Knife roll over one shoulder. Tired around the eyes in a way print never shows you.

“Chef Adebayo,” he said. Carefully. Like a word he was not sure he had been given permission to use.

“Ashworth.”

“I know neither of us asked for this.”

“I asked for separate benches and I got them, so I would call it a partial win.” I stayed on the crate. It put my eyeline above his, and I would like to say that was not why I stayed there. “Let’s settle the terms before there’s a camera in this room, because there’ll be one on Tuesday and after that there will never not be one. I am not relitigating a review from six years ago on television. I’m here because the penalty for leaving was larger than my pride. That is the whole of it.”

“That’s fair.”

“I didn’t ask whether it was fair. I told you the terms.”

Something recalibrated behind his face. He set his knife roll down on the far bench — the one that was not mine, without being told which was which, which meant he had already read the room. “Understood.”

Then he looked past me at the space, and I watched him do it, and it was not a guest’s looking. He checked the height of the pass with the flat of his hand. He looked at where plates would land and where runners would have to stand, and how far that was from the door through to the dining room, and then he looked at that door for longer than anybody looks at a door.

“Four steps to the first table,” he said. “That’s a nightmare. Anything with sauce on it is arriving before the table is ready for it.”

He was right. I had not thought about it, because I had been thinking about the walk-in, and there are two halves to a restaurant and I have only ever been fluent in one of them.

“Then we hold at the pass,” I said.

“You can’t hold fish at a pass. You’ll cook it twice.” He said it absently, to the door, not to me, and then heard himself say it to me, and his entire body changed shape. “Sorry. That is — I’m aware of exactly how that lands coming out of my mouth.”

“It lands like a man who has been in a kitchen.”

“Three years. Which next to yours is nothing, and I would rather say it now than have you find it out in week two.”

“I’d have found it out on Tuesday.”

“Yes,” he said. “You would.”

Deja came in behind him with a delivery clipboard, clocked him, clocked me on the crate, and went to the fridge without a word, which is the single most tactful thing anyone has done in my presence in a decade.

I got down off the crate. There was a thing I had been carrying since Roz’s phone call and I wanted it out of me before the room filled up with people whose job it was to record everything in it.

“One more term,” I said. “You don’t apologise to me on camera. Not in an interview, not on the pass, not in a voiceover, not in a scene with somebody’s slow piano cut in underneath it. If you have something to say to me you say it in a room with no lens in it, and if you can’t find a room like that, you don’t say it.”

He went very still.

“All right,” he said.

“That easily.”

“It isn’t easy. It’s the only thing I have wanted for three years, and you have just explained to me that I can’t have the version of it that would do me any good.” He put his hand flat on the bench and looked at it. “But you’re right, and you got there in about nine seconds, and I’ve had three years.”

“I’m not interested in your apology, Ashworth.”

“I know. That isn’t actually the problem.”

“What’s the problem?”

“The problem,” he said, “is that you are the best cook I have ever eaten, and I have never once written that down, and I am about to spend six weeks standing an arm’s length away from you with a camera pointed at both of us. The only honest thing I have to say about you is the thing I’ve just agreed not to say.”

Out in the yard somebody called a ten-minute warning for a promo shoot neither of us had agreed to.

“Then it’s going to be a quiet six weeks,” I said, and picked up my knife roll, and went out ahead of him into a corridor full of lights.