The New Pass

The environmental health officer came at ten past four on the afternoon we opened, which is not late, which is exactly when they come, and which did not stop Simon standing in the middle of a hundred and ten covers saying the word now in a tone of voice I had not heard from him before.

“Now is fine,” I said. “Now is better than Thursday. Go and be charming at him and don’t touch anything.”

He went and was charming at him. The officer spent fifty minutes in my kitchen, found two things, wrote them down, told me the probe log was the best he had seen this year, and left at five past five with the certificate in the folder, and I have it framed in the office, which I am aware is the single most tedious thing about me.

Ninety minutes to service.

—

Arches thirteen and fourteen, Halliwell Yard, SE1. Fifteen years. Signed on the twenty-second of January at four in the afternoon in an office on Tooley Street with a man from the bank on a screen and Roz beside me writing in the margins of a document she had already read four times.

Ilé, moved. A hundred and ten covers where there were thirty-four. Two rooms through a doorway that a television production widened in August for cable runs, with the pass set back six feet from the door to the dining room, because we argued about it for nine days in February and I lost.

That is the correct order of the sentence. I lost. There is a clause on page four of our agreement that says neither party holds a casting vote, and in March, over the placing of a pass, I found out what that clause costs, and I stood in a building site and swore at a man for four minutes and then went home and looked at the floor plan for two hours and rang him at midnight and said, “You’re right about the six feet and I’d like it minuted that I said so before service, not after.”

He said, “There’s no minutes, Ines. There’s just us.”

Which is the whole thing, really. That is what I signed.

—

In December he asked whether we should call it Sorrel.

He asked it properly, in a kitchen, to my face, with no arrangement behind it and nothing prepared, which is how he asks me things now, badly and out loud and usually while I am doing something else.

“No,” I said.

“Can I have the reason?”

“Sorrel was the wrong room.” I kept peeling. “Fifty-one covers, no passing trade, a cellar staircase in the middle of the floor and a rent that would have taken it under by the second winter whatever anybody wrote about it. My father stood in it in February 2020 and counted, and said nothing to me, and has been sorry about that for six years. I am not putting the name of a bad room over a good one so that the story comes out tidy.”

“That’s a better reason than mine.”

“What was yours?”

“That it would look like the end of something.”

“It isn’t the end of anything,” I said. “It’s a Tuesday in December and we’ve got a builder coming at nine.”

He lives in Camberwell now, four streets from where I have lived since I was twenty-six, which we arrived at in March after a conversation in which I said the words not yet and he said right and then did not go quiet for a fortnight about it, which is the single largest piece of evidence I have that a person can be different at thirty-four from how they were at thirty-three.

We are not good at all of it. He still, about once a month, solves something before he tells me, and I still, about once a week, hear myself deciding to be fine about a thing rather than say it. The difference is that we now both know the name of what we are doing, which turns out to be most of the work.

—

Deja has Camberwell.

The Deptford group pulled the site in February — three weeks before her start date, a lease dispute nothing to do with her, the way these things always go — and she rang me from a bus and said, very steadily, “I’m fine, I’ve got two months’ money,” and I let her finish being fine and then I said, “Ilé’s room comes empty on the ninth of March. Four years left on the lease. It’s yours at what I pay for it and I’ll go on the bank’s paperwork for the fit-out and you will pay me back at a rate you set, and if you say the word charity to me I will put the phone down.”

She opens in October. It is going to be called Boateng’s, because when I asked her what she was going to call it she said, “My name, obviously, what’s the matter with you,” which is a thing it took me thirty years and a national newspaper to learn.

—

What the six weeks cost, set down here because it ought to be somewhere and nobody else is going to do it.

The Larder Trust finished at a hundred and forty-seven thousand pounds and the forty thousand from week one never came back. Esme Enright had a card on table nine tonight and she has never once mentioned it again.

Ilé took a third fewer covers for six weeks after the clip and I stood two people down to four days for a month, and I paid them the fifth day out of my own account and told them it was a grant, which they did not believe and accepted.

Simon’s book is dead. Marbury and Byne went quiet in nine days, exactly as advertised. The spring festival residency went. Two restaurant groups that had been talking to him about consultancy stopped returning calls in the week after Christmas and one of them wrote a very warm email explaining why, which he has kept.

Tallow is Bilal’s. Completion was the fourth of February. He has kept the name and changed nine dishes and put his mother’s photograph by the till, and the green tiles are still on the wall, and I have eaten there twice and both times I had to go outside for a minute, and both times he pretended not to notice, which is the kind of thing that makes a great head chef.

Miles Casswell is writing a memoir. It has been announced. There is a paragraph in the announcement about a career spent, I quote, holding the line on standards. I read it on a Tuesday and was angry for about forty minutes and then had a delivery to check.

And one thing I did not price in: after the piece ran, three chefs wrote to Simon. Not to be kind. To say this happened to me too, in 2011, in 2016, in 2019, and I have never said so, and I am not going to now, but I wanted one person to know. He has not shown me the letters. He told me they exist and that he replies to each of them properly and that it takes him about two hours each and he does it on Sunday nights, and I have never asked to read one.

—

At twenty to six he came and found me at the pass with a piece of paper folded in half.

“This isn’t for publication,” he said. “It isn’t for anybody. It’s not going on a wall and it’s not going in a frame and you don’t have to say anything about it, and if you’d rather not have it I’ll put it in the bin myself and we will never discuss it.”

Three hundred and forty words, handwritten, on lined paper, in biro.

It is a review of a plate of food. It is dated the sixth of June, which was the Friday of the staff tastings, and it describes a dish I sent out that night: mackerel, ata din din, green tomato. It gets the sauce wrong in one place — he thinks there is more vinegar in it than there is — and he is right about everything else, including a thing about the tomato that I have been doing on instinct for four years and had never had words for.

The last line is: This is the food of a cook who has stopped answering anybody.

I read it standing up at my own pass with a hundred and ten covers due in eighty minutes, and then I folded it and put it in the inside pocket of my knife roll, where it is now.

“Three hundred and forty words,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You counted.”

“I counted three times,” said Simon, “and then I took out a semicolon.”

“Good. You have a problem with semicolons.”

“I know.”

“And while we are here,” I said, “you are wrong about the vinegar. It’s tamarind. It’s been tamarind since February and you have eaten it twelve times.”

“That,” he said, “is going to bother me all night,” and went out to turn the lights up in thirteen.

—

The menu goes up on a board by the door and there are two names at the bottom of it, and mine is second, alphabetically, which was Roz’s idea and has annoyed me since January.

Under the board, in smaller letters: Party rice — Tunde Adebayo. He is on table one tonight in the blue shirt with my mother and my aunt Folake and four people from the church, and at half four he came into my kitchen, put his hand on the top of the deck oven to feel the heat through the door, and said, “Mm,” which from my father is a review.

Ollie is on the pass section. He left the safety company in January and started here in February on a commis wage and asks four questions a day, which is three more than anybody else and two more than I want.

Bernice came at half five to drop off a card from the Lewisham hall, and would not stay, and I made her take a bag of rice.

Nadia Sharpe is on table sixteen at nine o’clock with her husband. She is not making anything at the moment. The compliance report came back in March, thirty-one pages, and found that the access log showed what it showed and that the consultant’s engagement had already ended, and recommended four changes to rig protocol, all four of which have been adopted across the network, which means that somewhere there is a form a runner now has to sign before anybody tapes anything, and that form is the whole of what we got, and I have decided it is not nothing.

She sent me one line when it came out: A record, then. You were right about which one was mine.

—

Doors at seven.

At six fifty-five we did the line-up, which is nine people in whites and four on the floor, and I said the covers and the allergies and the two dishes that had changed since the tasting, and Simon said the table numbers and the two birthdays and the thing about the step by the doorway that we are still going to fix, and then there was the four seconds there always is.

I looked down the length of a pass that I had argued about for nine days and lost.

“Right,” I said. “Let’s have them in.”

And he opened the door.