At six forty on the Tuesday I had sixty portions of mackerel pin-boned, scored and on trays, the ata din din was down to the right thickness with the oil come back up through it, and the green tomatoes were sliced and salted, and everything in my half of that kitchen was exactly where it was supposed to be, and I remember thinking that we were going to be fine.
Four courses. Flatbread and obe ata butter, which was his. Grilled mackerel, which was mine. Hogget shoulder with egusi and bitter leaf, which was mine. Roasted plums with tiger nut and sour cream, which was his, and which, when I tasted it on Monday, was better than anything I would have put in that slot, a fact I did not say out loud because of a rule we had not yet invented.
Sixty covers. Ballot tickets at eighty pounds, every penny to the Larder Trust, which put fourteen thousand in the room before anyone lifted a fork. Table one was the Trust: Esme Enright, who runs it, four volunteers from the Lewisham kitchen who had been given the night off and looked as though they suspected a trick, and a man called Clive Ansill who had made his money in commercial laundry and had written to the Trust in August to say that he would match whatever the six weeks raised, pound for pound, up to forty thousand.
Nobody had told me that. I found it out at ten past six from Sadie, who said it the way you’d mention the weather.
“Say that again,” I said.
“Forty thousand. If you hit it. He’s on one.” She checked her clipboard. “Also the speeches are at seven.”
“The what.”
“Ms Enright’s doing five minutes and then Mr Ansill’s doing five minutes and then you’re away.”
“Sadie. Who has told the kitchen about ten minutes of speeches.”
She looked at the clipboard as though the clipboard had betrayed her personally.
“It’s on the running order,” she said.
At twenty-five past six Simon came down the length of the pass with a tray of flatbread dough proved and cut and covered, put it on the shelf under his section, and stopped in front of me with his hands behind his back like a man about to ask for a loan.
“Two things,” he said. “One, I’ve put a tub of extra butter in your low fridge because there’s a heat lamp over your section that nobody’s accounted for and your ata’s going to tighten in an hour and you’ll want fat to let it back down. Two, I’ve never cooked for sixty people in a room with a camera in it and I would like to state that once, now, quietly, so that I don’t have to think about it again until half past midnight.”
“Nobody’s ever cooked for sixty people in a room with a camera in it,” I said. “That’s not a thing that happens. It’s a thing that’s being done to us.”
“That’s oddly comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
“I know.” He tapped the edge of my board twice with two fingers, the way you knock on a doorframe rather than a door, and went back up the pass.
The ata did tighten. I let it down with his butter at ten past seven and it was better for it, and I did not tell him.
—
Here is the thing about ten minutes of speeches at the top of a service.
It is not ten minutes. It is ten minutes that becomes nineteen, because Esme Enright is a very good speaker and the room is generous and Clive Ansill has notes. It puts every table in the room behind, and a room behind is not a room that is late — it is a room that is stopped, sixty people with drinks and no bread, and the longer they sit the hungrier and the louder and the harder to serve they get, and somewhere around the fourteenth minute a room like that stops being a restaurant and starts being an event.
Simon had the flatbread out at half past seven and it saved us. I will say that. He read the room through the hatch and went out himself with two of the runners and put warm bread in front of every table inside four minutes, and then he came back in and said, “They’re happy, they’re fed, you’ve got your time back,” and I said “Fire fish,” and Deja called it, and we went.
Mackerel on a plancha, skin down, thirty-eight seconds, then off the heat and finished under the salamander, because that is the only way to get that skin and keep the flesh from going chalky. It does not wait. You have a window of about two minutes from the pass to the table, and after that it is a different fish, and the sauce splits, and there is no version of it that is acceptable.
Twenty plates for the back half of the room went out at seven forty-one and landed clean.
Twenty plates for the middle went out at seven forty-six and landed clean.
Table one — the Trust, Enright, Ansill, four volunteers, ten covers — was called at seven fifty-one, and I plated them myself, and they went onto the pass, and then they sat there.
“Away on one,” I said.
Nothing.
“Deja. Away on one.”
“They’ve got a photographer,” Deja said, at the hatch. “Ms Enright’s doing a picture with the volunteers. Front of house says two minutes.”
I looked at ten plates of mackerel under a lamp.
“Bin them,” I said. “All ten. Refire.”
“Chef—“
“We’ve got the fish. Bin them and refire, I want them on in four minutes.”
And Simon, at the other end of the pass, said, “Don’t bin them.”
I did not turn round. “Say again.”
“Don’t bin them. Send them.” He came down the pass. He had flour on his forearms and he was drying his hands and he was speaking quietly, which I registered and did not care about. “That table has been sitting for fifty-one minutes. They’ve had bread and nothing else. If you bin those and refire you are asking the ten most important people in this room to wait another six minutes while they watch every other table eat, and they will not be thinking about the temperature of the fish, they will be thinking that they are being managed.”
“The sauce has split.”
“Then send it without the sauce and tell them why.”
“I am not sending a split plate to the chair of a charity on the first night of a—“
“You are not sending anything,” he said. “That’s the trouble. You’re making a decision about a room you are not standing in.”
Which was, I would find out later, when I watched it, the exact moment the audio got clean, because Wes had come round the end of the pass for a wide and the boom operator had drifted with him, and the two of us were standing four feet apart at raised volume in an open kitchen with a hatch in it.
“Fifty-one minutes is your fault,” I said. “You approved a running order with ten minutes of speeches on it and didn’t tell the kitchen.”
“Yes.”
“So don’t stand there and—“
“Yes,” he said. “It’s my fault. It’s entirely my fault and I’ll say so to anyone who asks. And it is still true that the best available thing to do right now is send those plates, and you know it is, and you would rather be right about the fish.”
I sent the plates.
It would be easier to say he bullied me into it, and he did not. I stood there for four seconds and did the arithmetic and he was right. A split sauce and a fish nine minutes off the heat is a bad plate. Ten people watching fifty other people eat while somebody rebuilds their course is a bad night, and the night was the thing we had sold.
So I said, “Away on one, no sauce, tell them the sauce is coming separately,” and Deja called it and it went.
He took it out himself. All ten plates, three trips, and on the third he stayed at the table and crouched down at the corner of it in his whites where I could see him through the hatch, and said something to Esme Enright with his hand flat on the cloth, and the whole table laughed. Then he came back through the door and picked up a cloth and wiped down his section and did not look at me once.
I watched table one eat a fish I would not have served my father. Two of the volunteers cleared the plate. Ansill left half of his, and set his knife and fork at four o’clock, which is a thing people do who have been taught to, and which tells you precisely nothing.
That was that, and if the evening had ended there I would have gone home annoyed and slept fine.
—
Hogget landed at twenty past eight and was the best thing I have cooked in a year. Plums at half nine. The room stood up at ten to ten and applauded the kitchen, which they do, and which means nothing, and which I have never once been able to be cynical about while it is happening.
At twenty past ten Esme Enright came into the kitchen and went round all six of us and thanked us by name, having learned all six names, which is a thing very good people do and almost nobody does.
At twenty to eleven Nadia found us by the walk-in.
She had her phone in her hand and she had already been outside, because there was rain on her shoulders and she had not noticed it.
“Clive Ansill’s withdrawn the match,” she said.
I said, “Because of the fish.”
“No.” She looked at me, and then at Simon, and she did not do the producer thing of softening it. “He left at ten past nine. He heard you. The hatch is open, the kitchen’s four steps from table one, and both of you were audible, and what he heard was two chefs having a row about whether his table was worth cooking properly for.” She turned the phone over. “He’s written to Esme. He says it was a very good evening and he doesn’t doubt anybody’s commitment and he doesn’t want his name attached to something that is being made as a piece of television about two people who dislike each other. He says it with more tact than that. That’s the content.”
“How much,” Simon said.
“Forty thousand. Which is roughly nine months of the Lewisham kitchen, before you ask, because I asked.”
Nobody said anything.
There was a stack of dirty trays behind me and the extraction was still roaring and in the dining room somebody was stacking chairs, and I stood in a kitchen I had spent a week making good and could not think of one thing to say that was not about me.
“Does he know it’s off the back of one row,” I said, eventually. “Because it was one row. We had one row.”
“He was in the room for the one row,” said Nadia. “That’s all he’s got. That’s all anybody’s ever got.”
She put her phone in her pocket.
“Esme’s not going to say anything to either of you,” she said. “She’s going to be extremely gracious about it tomorrow, and she’s going to go back to her office and work out which of the four kitchens she’s shutting for a fortnight in January. So it’ll be me that says it, and then I’m going to go home. You have five more weeks. Whatever the two of you are doing, it now costs money.”