The Pot on the Table

The fire alarm went off four times on the Thursday, which in the end was fewer than I had budgeted for.

You cannot smoke thirty kilos of rice inside a railway arch. You can smoke it nine feet outside a railway arch, in an oil drum with a piece of roofing tin over it, standing in a car park in October, if the production company’s safety officer has a method statement in front of him with a diagram on it, and if somebody who is very good at getting men in high-vis to say yes has spent two hours of his own time being charming at him.

That was Simon’s contribution on the Tuesday, and I did not thank him for it, and I should have.

By Thursday afternoon we had the drum, a bag of oak and a bag of apple, a fire blanket, a signed sheet of A4, and a twenty-two-year-old fire marshal called Ollie who had been hired for the day and was having the best Thursday of his life.

What we did not have was the rice.

“Again,” said my father, down the phone, from Camberwell, with something frying in the background.

“Dad, it’s the fourth time.”

“Then you have done three wrong things four times. Again. Tell me what you are doing, in order, and do not leave anything out because you think it is obvious.”

So I told him, in order, standing in a car park in my whites with a pot of parboiled rice going cold, and at the point where I said and then I put the lid on he made a noise like a man who has found a receipt.

“You are putting the lid on cold.”

“The lid is metal, it doesn’t—“

“You are putting a cold lid on hot rice and every bit of steam in that pot is going to run back down the inside of that lid and into the top of your rice, and the top of your rice will be wet and the bottom will burn, which is what you have been telling me for twenty minutes.” A pause. “Heat the tin first. On the fire. Then put it on. And do not lift it. Not once, Ines. I know you. Forty minutes and you do not lift it.”

“How do I know when it’s—“

“You will smell it change,” said my father, and hung up.

—

The fourth pot came off at ten past five and it was right.

Not right like a dish I had developed. Right in the way that a smell can be a room you have not stood in for twenty years: smoke and tomato and thyme and scorched onion and the specific sweetness of grains that have taken heat from below for forty minutes without being disturbed, and at the bottom of the pot, welded to it, an inch of crust the colour of a chestnut.

Simon came out into the car park holding two spoons and did not say anything for a while.

“Ollie,” he said eventually, “would you like some rice.”

“Am I allowed?”

“You’re the fire marshal. You’re the most important man here.”

We ate it standing up out of the drum lid with three spoons between four people, because Deja had come out by then, and the crust came away in sheets, and nobody said anything for about a minute and a half.

Then Simon said, “You can’t serve that.”

I turned round.

“Not on a plate,” he said quickly, holding both hands up. “Hear the whole sentence. You cannot serve that on a plate. If you put four ounces of it on a plate with a wipe of something and a leaf on it, it will be a very good bit of rice and it will be nothing, and everybody in the room will eat it politely in four seconds, and by the time they get to the car they’ll have forgotten it.”

“Then what.”

“The pot goes on the table.”

“It’s sixty covers.”

“Then it’s seven pots on seven tables and a spoon in each one, and whoever’s sitting nearest picks it up and serves the other seven people, and by the time it’s gone round, a table of strangers who have been very careful with each other for two courses have had to ask each other a question.” He put his spoon down on the drum lid. “And you fight over the crust. That’s the whole point, you have to be able to fight over the crust, and you cannot fight over a crust that has been portioned in a kitchen by a chef who has decided in advance who is having how much.”

I did not say anything.

“Also,” he said, “it goes last.”

“Last is dessert.”

“Last of the savoury. It goes after the fish and after the meat, where nobody in a restaurant that costs eighty pounds would ever put a bowl of rice, and that is exactly why it works, because by course four a room is at its most guarded — they’ve had the good bit, they’ve said the clever thing they were saving, they’re starting to think about the bill. And then four kilos of smoking rice lands in the middle of the table and somebody’s mother has to serve it.” He picked the spoon back up. “You can move a room like that. It takes about forty seconds. I have seen it twice in my life and both times it was an accident.”

I stood in a car park with a drum of my father’s rice in front of me and understood two things at once, neither of them comfortable.

The first was that he was right.

The second was that I had spent six years in a trade where I am among the best three or four people in the country at what I do, and I had never once, not in a single service, thought about a dining room the way this man thought about a dining room, and that he had been thinking about it the entire time, from the door on the first Thursday, and I had filed all of it under critic.

“Put it on the menu as my father’s,” I said. “Word for word. Tunde Adebayo’s party rice. Not inspired by, not a version of. His.”

“That’s the right call.”

“Twenty pounds.”

“That was operational,” said Simon, “and you know it was.”

—

Nadia came and found me an hour later with her hands in her pockets, which is how she stands when she is about to ask for something she thinks I will refuse.

“The rice,” she said. “I’d like your dad.”

“No.”

“I’d like ten minutes of him in his hall, or in his kitchen, or in a car park with a drum, anywhere he likes, on his own terms, cut into episode four before the service. Because if it goes out with his name on the menu and no explanation, a certain number of people will look at it and think she has borrowed that, and I would rather they were looking at a seventy-year-old man telling them to heat the tin.”

It was a good argument, which annoyed me.

“He’ll say yes,” I said. “That’s the problem. He’ll say yes in four seconds and he’ll wear the blue shirt and he’ll be wonderful, and then some assistant producer in Soho will cut twenty minutes down to forty seconds and choose the forty seconds where he sounds like a heritage item.”

“That’s fair.”

“Is it going to happen?”

Nadia took her hands out of her pockets.

“Here’s what I can promise and here’s what I can’t,” she said. “I can’t promise you the edit. Nobody can promise you the edit and anybody who does is lying to you. What I can do is this: I’ll shoot it myself, I’ll send you the transcript the same day, and if you tell me on the phone that the forty seconds we’ve chosen is the wrong forty seconds, I will go back and fight for a different forty seconds, and I will lose about half the time. That’s the real offer. I’m not going to dress it up.”

I thought about my father in the blue shirt.

“Ask him yourself,” I said. “Not through me. Ring the hall on a weekday morning between ten and twelve when he’s doing his orders, tell him exactly what you told me including the losing-half-the-time part, and let him decide. He’s been running a business for twenty-eight years and he does not need his daughter to protect him from a television producer.”

“That’s a yes?”

“That’s a he’s a grown man, which is the closest thing to a yes you’re getting out of me today.”

—

Deja told me on the Thursday night, after, sitting on a milk crate outside the arch with her coat on over her whites.

“I’ve been offered a job.”

I knew before she said the rest of it, because there is only one way a sous chef says that sentence.

“Head chef,” she said. “Sixty covers, new site in Deptford, a group with three others. They came to Ilé in August, twice, and I didn’t know. They want an answer in a fortnight.”

“Is the money right?”

“The money’s a lot.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“The money’s right,” she said, “and the room’s good, and the group’s not stupid, and the head of food used to be at the place I trained and he’s the reason I can make a béarnaise that doesn’t split.”

I want to say that the next thing I said was generous.

What I actually said was: “Ilé’s covers are up thirty per cent since the first episode. If you stay until spring I can restructure, I can put you on—“

“Chef.”

“—a proper number, and a share of—“

“Chef.”

I stopped.

Deja looked at me the way she looks at a plate she is about to send back, which is without any cruelty whatsoever.

“Say the other thing,” she said. “The real one. I’ll wait.”

I sat down on the milk crate next to her, in a car park, with an oil drum still ticking as it cooled twelve feet away.

“You should take it,” I said. “You should have taken it in August when they first came in. You’ve been ready for two years and the only reason you haven’t gone is that I am very good at making my kitchen feel like the only place you’d ever want to work, and I have done that on purpose, and I did it because I did not want to have to find another person who knows which way I look when I want a spoon.”

“That’s better,” said Deja.

“Take it.”

“I’m taking it.” She nudged my shoulder with hers, once. “I’m doing your six weeks first. Don’t be weird about it.”

—

We ran the rice at family meal on the Friday before service, for the whole crew, twenty-nine people: runners, sparks, Wes, Nadia, Ollie the fire marshal who had turned up on his day off, Sadie with her new contract in her bag because she had not stopped carrying it around.

Two pots, two tables, no plates. Nobody was filming.

It took about forty seconds.

I stood at the end of the room and watched a television crew that had spent four weeks being extremely professional with each other start reaching across a table and arguing about a burnt bit of rice, and I had to go and do something in the walk-in.

Deja found me in there.

“You all right?”

“It’s cold in here, that’s all.”

“Mm.” She got a tray down that she did not need. “That’s the first thing you’ve cooked in four years that wasn’t an argument with somebody.”

“Thank you, Deja.”

“I’m going to say it once more in Deptford,” she said, “when I’m famous, and they’ll print it.”