Kitchen Rules

We wrote the letter to Esme Enright on Wednesday morning at a folding table in the yard, because neither of us could stand to do it inside the arch, and it took two hours and nine drafts and the first eight were both of us being sorry in a way that was mainly about ourselves.

“‘We deeply regret,’” Simon read out.

“Cut it.”

“It’s a standard—“

“It’s a phrase people use when they want to have apologised without saying what for.” I took the pen off him. “Try: on Tuesday night two chefs argued at a volume you could hear from your table about whether your table deserved a decent plate of fish. That is what happened. There isn’t a version where it’s less than that.”

He looked at what I had written for a while.

“Then the next line has to be what we’re doing about it,” he said, “or it’s just a confession, and a confession is still about us.”

“Fine. So what are we doing about it?”

And that, I suppose, is how the rules got made, on the back of the ninth draft of a letter, in a car park, in the rain, with a builder’s van reversing behind us.

—

There were three.

The first one was mine. No compliments unless they are operational. Good, send is operational. That’s clean is operational. Anything past that — anything that is a person expressing an opinion about another person’s cooking — costs twenty pounds into a bucket, and the bucket goes to the Trust at the end of the six weeks.

He asked why.

“Because you are a critic,” I said, “and I have spent six years being a chef who was reviewed by you, and if you start telling me my food is good then every single thing I cook for the next five weeks will secretly be addressed to you, and I would rather cut my hands off.”

“That’s a very honest answer.”

“It’s nineteen pounds short of costing you money.”

The second was his. The review is not a subject between us. Not on camera, not off it, not sideways, not in a joke. Unless one of us asks for it directly in a room with no lens in it — in which case the other one has to answer all of it, every question, no editing.

“Both halves,” he said. “It’s one rule. You don’t get the first half without the second.”

“I’m never going to ask.”

“Then it costs you nothing.”

The third was both of ours, and the only one that turned out to matter. One person owns the pass per service. It alternates. From first ticket to last, that person’s call is final on everything — timing, temperature, what goes in the bin, what goes to the table — and the other one has no vote. None. Not an opinion offered quietly. Not a face.

“And if you’re wrong?” he said.

“Then I’m wrong in front of sixty people and a camera and I wear it, and you say nothing, and at half past midnight you can tell me exactly how wrong I was and I’ll listen. That’s the deal. The row happens after.”

He wrote all three out on the back of the ninth draft in handwriting I could not read, and then wrote them out again, legibly, because I told him to.

“Agreed,” he said.

We sent the letter at half eleven. Esme Enright replied in fourteen minutes with four lines that were kinder than we deserved and did not mention the money, which is a way of mentioning the money.

—

The first commission was Lewisham, Thursday, and the numbers were these.

Two hundred covers, twelve until two. Budget of two hundred and eighty pounds, which is a pound forty a head, which is not a challenge invented by a television programme — it is what the Larder Trust actually spends, every Thursday, in that hall, whether or not anybody is filming. On top of the two hundred and eighty there was whatever had come in as surplus that week, and what had come in that week was fourteen kilos of chicken thighs three days off code, a pallet of swede, nine trays of over-ripe bananas and forty-one tins of chopped tomatoes.

I looked at all of it laid out on the trestle tables and felt something I have not felt in a professional kitchen since I was twenty-two, which is the specific cold drop of not knowing where to start.

I cook for thirty-four people. I have cooked for thirty-four people, five nights a week, for four years. Before that I cooked for sixty. My whole craft is a room where every plate is finished by hand in the last ninety seconds of its life, and none of that is any use at all to a hall with two hundred people in it and four domestic ovens and one twenty-litre pot.

My father did three hundred out of a church hall on Coldharbour Lane every Saturday of my childhood. I watched him do it perhaps two hundred times. I could not have told you, standing in front of those tins, one single thing about how.

I went out to the bin store and rang him.

“Ines.” Tunde Adebayo answers the phone like a man who has been waiting by it for a delivery. “It is a Thursday morning.”

“Question. Two hundred people, one pot, four ovens, no gas ring. How do you get it hot at the same time.”

“You do not.”

“Dad.”

“You do not get it hot at the same time, you get it hot in four goes and you hold the first three, and you hold them in the pot they were cooked in with the lid on and a towel over the lid, not in a warmer, because a warmer will dry it and a pot will not.” He said it the way you would give somebody a postcode. “And you start the last one late. Late. Everybody starts the last one early because they are frightened and then the last one has been standing an hour and it is the one the people at the back get, and the people at the back are the people who came off a shift.”

I wrote last one late on my hand.

“What else.”

“Salt it at the end and salt it twice, because it will take more than you think, and taste it with bread and not with a spoon.” A pause. “Why are you asking me this?”

“No reason.”

“Two hundred people is not no reason.”

“It’s for work.”

“Mm,” said my father, who has watched every episode of everything I have ever been on and has never once mentioned it. “Then work well. Your mother says the flat smells of onions and she blames you, which is not fair, you have not been here since June.”

He hung up before I could answer that, which was a kindness.

“Right,” said Simon.

“Don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to. I was going to ask Bernice what the queue does.”

Bernice had been at table one on Tuesday and had cleared her plate, and she was now wearing an apron and a hairnet and running the hall, and she looked at Simon with the flat patience of a woman who has been asked a lot of questions by people holding clipboards.

“The queue does what it always does,” she said. “It comes in at ten to twelve, all of it, and then there’s nobody from half past one, and the last twenty minutes it’s people who’ve come off a shift.”

“So you’ve got a hundred and forty covers in the first thirty-five minutes.”

“If you want to call them covers.”

“I’d rather not, but the man paying for the diesel does.” He was already walking the hall, and I watched him do exactly what he had done in the arch: look at the door, look at where people would stand, look at how far it was to the tables. “Here’s the problem. It isn’t the food. You could give them anything and they’d eat it. The problem is that the serving hatch is at the end, so everybody queues along the wall in front of the tables where the people who’ve already got theirs are sitting, which means for thirty-five minutes half the room is eating while the other half watches them do it in a line. That’s not a meal. That’s an audition.”

Bernice put down the ladle she was holding.

“Nobody has ever said that out loud in this hall,” she said.

“Then can we move the tables.”

“You can move whatever you like, love, it’s a hall.”

So we moved the tables, and what we cooked was this: chicken and swede braised down with the tomatoes and a great deal of ginger and scotch bonnet and thyme, in four batches from ten past nine, finished with the last of the trestle-table onions fried hard; a pot of it on every table, with a ladle, and bread, and people served themselves and each other. No queue at all after the first ten minutes. Bananas roasted in their skins with the last of the sugar, which I did, and which was the only bit of it that was really mine.

I held the first three batches in their own pots with the lids on and a clean tea towel over each lid, and I started the fourth at twenty to twelve, twenty minutes later than every instinct I have, and at ten past one it went out to the far end of the hall where four men in high-vis had just come in off a shift, and it was the best of the four, and I stood at the hatch and watched them eat it and had to go and do something in the store cupboard for a minute.

Two hundred and six people ate. We came in at two hundred and sixty-one pounds and had forty-three portions left over, which went into the freezer for Saturday.

At twenty past one, with the pots going round and the hall properly loud, Simon came and stood next to me at the hatch with a cloth over his shoulder and said, “That’s the best thing I’ve eaten in a year.”

I said, “Twenty pounds.”

“Worth it.”

“That’s another twenty.”

“Fine.” He got his wallet out and put two twenties in Bernice’s collection tin without looking at it. “I’d like to make four more payments.”

“Don’t.”

“The bananas were extraordinary and you did them in a domestic oven with a bag of sugar.” Twenty. “You tasted that braise nine times and changed it four times and nobody saw you do any of it.” Twenty. “You have not said one word about the fact that this hall is doing the thing your father did and you have been standing in it since nine o’clock looking like somebody hit you.” Twenty.

I did not say anything.

“And the last one’s free,” he said, “because it’s operational. You should be cooking for two hundred people more often. You’re better at it than you are at thirty-four, and the reason you’re better at it is that you can’t fuss, and when you can’t fuss you’re the best cook in this country, and I have spent six years wanting to write that down and not being allowed to.”

He put a fifth twenty in the tin anyway.

“That’s a hundred pounds,” I said.

“It’s a hundred pounds for the Lewisham kitchen and I’d call it cheap.” He picked up two empty pots, one in each hand, the way a person does who has carried a lot of pots. “Rule one is a good rule, Chef. I just want it understood that I intend to fund the entire Trust out of breaking it.”