The Finale

The piece ran at seven o’clock on the Sunday morning and I read it standing at a bus stop on Camberwell Church Street with a knife roll on my shoulder, because I had left my house at ten to seven and I was not going to read it at home.

Nine hundred and forty words minus three sentences. His name on it. No photograph, which he had insisted on.

I read it twice and then I put the phone in my pocket and got the 36 to Bermondsey and did not cry, because there were forty-one things to do before noon and because I have a rule about crying on buses that I have kept since I was twenty-four.

—

A hundred and twenty covers in a railway arch.

Arch fourteen took eighty on the new plan; the production had taken arch thirteen next door for the overflow and put forty in there under a run of pendant lights, with a hole cut through the party wall in August for cable runs that Simon had spent four days arguing should be widened into a doorway. It had been widened into a doorway. That is the entire reason the night worked and nobody outside the kitchen will ever know it.

Five courses.

Flatbread and obe ata butter, his. Grilled mackerel, ata din din, green tomato — mine, the same dish as the first night, back on the menu because I put it there and because I am not superstitious and because the second time you cook a thing that beat you is the only time it means anything. Whole turbot for the table, smoked crayfish and ogbono butter, charred hispi, carved at the pass. Tunde Adebayo’s party rice, in pots, seven to a room. Plums, tiger nut, sour cream.

Brigade of nine: me, Simon, Deja, Bilal Haddad, two of mine from Ilé, two of Tallow’s, and Ollie the fire marshal, who by the finale had been at every service since week four and had been quietly taught by Deja to pick herbs and was, on the night, faster at it than one of the commis.

Room: Esme Enright and six volunteers on table one, with the speeches moved to the end at my request and Esme’s agreement and Guy Fenner’s visible discomfort. Margit Sandoz at table nine, over from Lyon, who had taught me to break down a hare in 2017 and had told me, at the time, that I had good hands and no patience. My father and mother on table four, my father in the blue shirt.

Pledges taken on cards on the tables through the night and read out at the end.

—

Guy Fenner came into the kitchen at ten past five in the afternoon, which is the worst possible moment to come into a kitchen, and I have decided to believe he did not know that.

“Ines. Simon.” He had the piece open on his phone and he did not pretend otherwise. “I’ve read it. It’s a hell of a thing to have done on the morning of a finale.”

“It was going to be a hell of a thing to have done on any morning,” said Simon.

“Miles’s contract with us ended on Friday.” Fenner said it lightly, the way you would mention a change of caterer. “That’s not a comment on any of this, it was always a six-week engagement.”

“Of course,” I said.

“The compliance matter is with compliance. I’m told there’s a paper with a date on it.” He looked at me for a second longer than he needed to. “You’ve both been very difficult to work with, and the series is the best thing this channel has put out in four years, and I have not yet decided whether those are the same sentence.”

Then he said, “Break a leg,” which nobody in a kitchen has ever said, and went out through the fire door.

Deja waited until it shut.

“Did he just tell you he sacked him?”

“He told us that a six-week engagement ended after six weeks,” I said. “Both of those are the same set of facts and only one of them is a thing he’d ever say.”

—

At twenty to seven Simon came down to my end of the pass with a tub in his hand.

“Butter’s in your low fridge,” he said. “There’s a lamp over your section that nobody has accounted for in six weeks, and your ata will tighten by nine o’clock.”

“I know. I put extra in myself at four.”

“I know you did. I saw it.” He put the tub down anyway. “Mine’s browned. It’s better.”

“Twenty pounds.”

“That,” said Simon Ashworth, “was operational.”

First ticket at seven.

—

We were seventeen minutes down by twenty past seven and it was nobody’s fault: a hundred and twenty people do not sit at once, and the second room drank for half an hour longer than the first, and that is what a second room does.

Simon had the pass.

We had drawn for it on the Friday, two knives in a pot behind Deja’s back, and he had won it, and I had said, “Fine,” and meant it about eighty per cent.

Bread away at twenty-five past. Mackerel from ten to eight, thirty-eight seconds a side on the plancha and finished under the salamander, and the first forty landed at eight minutes to eight and the second forty at two minutes past, and Deja called the third forty and I had ten portions on the plancha and the arch went quiet.

Not dark. Quiet. Bank B — six induction hobs, the whole of the sauce side, the butter, the greens — went off, along with the extraction canopy above it, and the canopy is what did it, because the canopy and bank B were on the same circuit, which is a thing no working kitchen would ever allow and every temporary kitchen in the country does.

There were sixty covers still to come.

“Right,” said Simon.

Everybody in that kitchen stopped for about two seconds, and then Bilal said, very calmly, “Turbot’s in the decks, decks are on the other side,” and Deja said, “Plancha’s alive, bank A is alive,” and I said:

“Chef. I need nine minutes.”

And Simon Ashworth — who owned the pass, whose call was final, who could have spent the next ninety seconds doing what every head chef I have ever worked for would have done, which is stand at the pass and manage — said, “You’ve got nine,” and took his apron off, and went into the dining room.

—

I do not know exactly what he did in there. I know the noise.

I know that somewhere around the second minute a hundred and twenty people laughed, and that around the fourth there was a round of applause that had nothing to do with us, and I found out later that he had got Margit Sandoz to stand up and tell a room full of donors about a kitchen in Lyon in 1988 where the gas went out on Christmas Eve, and that she had talked for four minutes and been very funny, and that when she sat down he had asked my father to tell them what happens when the power goes in a church hall in Camberwell, and my father had stood up in the blue shirt and said, “You sing,” and the whole of arch fourteen had sung something.

Nine minutes. He gave me nine minutes and he came back with the room happier than it had been when he left it.

Here is what we did with them.

The butter emulsion was gone, so we did not make an emulsion. Bilal took the crayfish shells and the ogbono to the deck ovens and roasted them hard between turbot loads, and we finished the butter by hand in a bowl over a pot of water on bank A, in batches of four portions, which is an insane way to run a hundred and twenty covers and is exactly how it is done in a church hall.

The hispi had nowhere to char. So I sent Deja and Ollie into the car park with the hispi and the drum, which was already lit for the rice and already at the right heat, and they charred a hundred and twenty halves of pointed cabbage over oak in a car park in Bermondsey in October, and it came in smelling of smoke, and it was better than the version we had rehearsed for four days. Considerably better. It is on my menu now.

Turbot away from twenty past eight to ten past nine, four fish at a time, carved on the pass by me and by Bilal and taken out whole on the board to every table by whoever had hands.

The rice at twenty to ten. Seven pots in fourteen and four in thirteen, and Ollie carried one of them, and the room did the thing the room does.

Plums at half ten.

Last plate away at four minutes past eleven.

—

Bilal found me by the plancha at about half past, with a cloth and two beers, and gave me one without asking, and I took it.

“He’s not a chef,” said Bilal.

“I know.”

“No, listen, because I’m going to say it once and then I’m going home.” He drank. “I’ve worked for him three years. He is a competent cook and he will never be more than that and it is the only thing in his life he is ashamed of, and he has spent two years standing at a pass in a jacket pretending that the food at Tallow is his idea when about eighty per cent of it is mine and he knows it and he pays me like he knows it.” He nodded at the door to the dining room. “But what he did tonight at eight o’clock? There are maybe four people in this city who could have done that. Four. I’ve been in restaurants since I was sixteen and I have seen it done properly twice.”

I looked at a room through a hatch.

“Chef,” said Bilal, “he is not the cook in this partnership. He is the other half of one, and somebody needs to tell him that in a sentence he can’t argue with, and I have tried for three years and I am not the person.”

—

Esme Enright did the speeches at midnight, at the end, to a room that had not thinned by one person.

A hundred and forty-seven thousand pounds.

She read it out and then she said, without any pause at all, “And I want to say, because it will otherwise go unsaid, that in week one a donor withdrew a forty-thousand-pound match after an incident in this kitchen, and that forty thousand pounds has not come back, and will not, and I am naming it because a charity that only reports its good weeks is lying.” Then she thanked the volunteers by name, all six, and sat down.

At half past midnight I wiped the pass down myself, the whole length of it, twice, which I have done at the end of every service I have ever run and which is the only ritual I have.

Margit Sandoz came into the kitchen with her coat over her arm.

“Ines.”

“Chef.”

“Good hands,” she said. “Still no patience.” She looked around the arch, at the plywood and the induction and the doorway cut through a party wall. “But you cooked a hundred and twenty covers tonight out of an oven, a griddle and a fire in a car park, and you did it because you had to, and that is the first time I have eaten your food and not felt you counting. Whatever happened to you in the last six weeks — keep it.”

Then she went, and the room was still full at ten to one in the morning, and I stood at a clean pass in an empty kitchen with a beer I had not finished and did not want to go home.