Recipe for Disaster (2 page)

Several streets away, in front of a dilapidated building, Jake
Goldman stood with his nose twitching. It was barely
noticeable, but he was definitely getting a whiff of ancient
cooking fat. Jake wished he had been blessed with a less
keen sense of smell. Or that he was rich. Unfortunately he
wasn't, so was stuck with making the best of things, which
meant this place. It was hard now to conjure up the
excitement he had felt when he first saw the advert in
Hotel
and Caterer
. The writer had taken much care to describe the
enormous potential. With judicious juggling of tables, there
would be enough room for about sixty covers – easily big
enough for a young chef running his first restaurant. There
was a flat upstairs and even a little courtyard out the back
where he could plant herbs, maybe even grow tomatoes.
The night before, he'd hardly slept, his brain too busy
planning menus, organising his kitchen, hiring staff . . .

But then, when he arrived for the viewing, the estate
agent looked nervous, which was always worrying.

'Now, it has suffered a certain amount of neglect over the
years, but as you can see, it's in a prime position.' He waved
his arm away from the peeling paint, hoping Jake would
take in the rolling green fells peering over the rooftops of
Easedale like nosy neighbours, instead of looking too
closely at the roof. But Jake wasn't having any of it.

'The person who wrote the advert obviously suffers from
an excess of imagination,' he said severely.

The agent, who was called Eric, was new to his job. He
still suffered from an excess of enthusiasm. 'I think this is a
place with possibilities,' he began bravely.

'Oh, shut up,' snapped Jake, who never took any nonsense.

Eric clamped his mouth shut and they both gazed at the
building in silence.

A faded sign announced that this had once been Joe's
Eatery, except that some bright spark with a pen had
renamed it Joe's Artery. Fittingly, Joe himself had popped
his chef's clogs a year ago, no doubt due entirely to the
consequences of eating his own food.

Eric opened the door gingerly. A waft of stale air greeted
them. The dingy interior was painted mustard brown, to
which at least ten years of grease had stuck. Ditto the floor.
Jake's shoes made an obscene sucking noise every time he
lifted his feet, as if the yellow lino could spot a mug when it
saw one and was determined not to let him go.

Also stuck to the floor was an ancient menu, speckled
with blobs of brown sauce, like liver spots. The choice was
wide – but everything was fried, even the puddings.

Eric cleared his throat, prepared to throw some more,
admittedly puny, muscle behind the sell.

'Don't even start,' Jake warned him. 'Even if you had
Wordsworth's power with poetry you could not make this
place look any better than it really is. Are you a poet?'

Eric shook his head, his Adam's apple bobbing nervously.

'OK then. Just take me to the kitchen,' said Jake.

For a chef, a kitchen is home – a place to cook, obviously,
but also a melting pot of hopes, dreams and ambitions. Jake
knew his kitchen would witness all he had to offer, from
agony to ecstasy. Oh God. He couldn't work here, surely?
The walls continued the mustard theme, but only because
no one had bothered to clean them for years. In one corner
was a dangerous-looking contraption that might well have
been the first microwave ever made. Welded to the opposite
wall was a deep-fat fryer – a fryer so nasty it must have been
chucked straight out of hell. Jake peered in and shuddered.
It was still full of something – possibly engine oil, from the
colour. The cooker next to it was so old, it looked like it
needed a bus pass and was obviously a complete stranger to
Flash, and the few kitchen cupboards were each precariously
clinging onto the wall by one nail. There was a
scurrying of tiny feet on lino when Jake opened the door to
the dry goods larder. On the floor was a giant sack of
powdered soup mix. Jake hissed in horror. He was almost
more disgusted by this than by the mice.

'And upstairs we have the owner's accommodation – very
handy.' Might as well get it over with, thought Eric.

'Go on then. It couldn't possibly get any worse.'

Oh, smashing – more brown walls – and a hideously
stained carpet, which might possibly once have been beige.

Artery Joe had thoughtfully left behind his collection of
art. This consisted of three posters of Jordan, put up with
Blu-Tack and now peeling off the wall so that both men
were in serious danger of being engulfed by pairs of
enormous paper breasts.

The bathroom was painted the sort of yellow that would
make you feel as if you were taking a bath in a bile duct.
Neither of them wanted to look down the loo, but both were
drawn to it, inexorably. It looked like a test tube for
biological warfare.

All chefs are gifted with a vivid imagination. They have to
be. Even the very best have been asked at some stage of
their career to make a five-star meal out of a piece of bilious looking
stewing steak. This was about as bilious as it got.

'It's perfect – I'll take it,' said Jake.

Eric leaned against a wall to get over the shock. He tried
to be quiet, but he couldn't help himself. 'For the love of
God, why are you doing this?'

Jake tried to lean nonchalantly against the wall too, but
his legs were suddenly shaking too much to hold him up.
He slid down and came to rest gently on the carpet, where,
despite its griminess, he decided to stay for a while, just
until things had calmed down.

'You see a crumbling wreck – I see my future, and it is
glittering.'

'Well, actually, structurally it's perfectly sound,' began
Eric, then he stopped and peered closer. 'That's it – I
thought you looked familiar! I've seen you before. You
were in one of the Sunday mags a few months ago – the big
piece about new and upcoming chefs. My girlfriend was
drool – looking at it. You're famous!'

'Don't be silly,' said Jake irritably. 'It was just an article
and I won't be doing any more of those any time soon.'

'Why ever not? Are you mad? Didn't you get loads of cash
for it?'

Jake's eyes gleamed with the fervour of a man who has
seen brighter visions. 'I've got more important things to do
than waste time trying to get rich!'

'So is it a difficult job then? How did you get started?
How many A levels do you need?' Butter up the clients, fake
an interest in their lives, his boss had told him.

'None. It's got to be all in here.' Jake patted his chest.
'Good cooking comes first from the heart.' He grinned. 'It's
a good thing too – I didn't last long at school.'

'Why not?'

'I was chucked out for assaulting another kid,' said Jake,
drawing his brows together in what he hoped was a fierce
look. It wasn't strictly true, but it wouldn't do any harm to
give Eric the impression that Jake was a man who couldn't
be pushed around. Then he sighed. He'd had a long
journey to get here and it didn't make for a glorious story.

He'd actually had an uneventful time at school,
successfully avoiding the bullies, but not getting much out
of lessons, apart from cookery. He was sixteen and learning
for the first time how to make a marinade when the only
other boy in the class – who was only there because no other
teacher would have him – had spat his chewing gum into
Jake's mixing bowl and called him a retard for actually
showing interest.

Jake couldn't have cared less about the insult, but: 'Take
that out, you idiot! If you do it again your head will follow,'
he said, shoving Wayne's hand in the bowl. The marinade
was full of red-hot chillies and Wayne came out in a horrible
rash.

Jake refused to apologise. 'Why should I? I'm not at all
sorry. The school has benefited since Wayne's been off sick
because we've all been able to get on with our work in
peace. I should be given an award for services to education,
not punished. If you don't back me up, I'm leaving.'

They didn't, so he did. It didn't take him long to get his
first job in London, mainly because no one else wanted it.
There was a tradition in catering that anyone who worked
as a kitchen porter was either mad or a smack head – who
else would choose to wash hundreds of dishes in a hideously
overheated kitchen when they could be somewhere else,
having a life?

The head chef, Denis, was a six-foot bruiser from
Birmingham who had a bottle-of-whisky-a-day habit. He
would roar round the kitchen like a mad bull, tossing
insults and saucepans over his head like confetti. His
attitude was simple – he hated everyone. When it got too
much for him, he would sack someone.

His second in command was an anally retentive beanpole
who only had one love – his sauté pan. He would never let
Jake or anyone else near it. He would wash it up himself,
tenderly, as if he was bathing a baby. He had furtive eyes
because he spent all day thinking of new places to hide it.

True to form, the chef sacked Jake about a dozen times,
but he just kept turning up for work anyway. He did
nothing but wash up and chop enormous buckets of
vegetables until his hands were bleeding. Sick of this
behaviour, Denis promoted him.

Jake resigned and got a job at a French restaurant. This
was a serious establishment. Everyone carried knives, lots of
them. It was wise to get along with these people. It wasn't
the sort of place where you could have opinions about
things. Only once Jake had forgotten this and offered a
tentative view on the chef's choice of herbs for a sauce. He
still shuddered when he remembered how chef Bill Mackie
had turned on him.

'Listen, tosser, I want your blood, sweat and tears, not
your opinions. You don't move a muscle unless I tell you to
– you don't even go for a piss without permission – and the
only words I ever want to hear from your fucking gob are
"Yes, Chef". Is that clear?' Jake had replied that, yes, it
absolutely was. Off duty, he fantasised about throttling Bill,
but always forgot this at work, because he was learning so
much.

Bill showed him how to set up a proper
mise en place
. This
was the Houston control centre of a commis's life, his work
station, and all hell could break out if it wasn't in order. If
Jake didn't have an immaculately laid out line of salts,
peppers, oil, wine, cream and herbs set up at the start of his
shift, at some point during service he would turn into a
gibbering wreck, unable to cook even an egg. Bill could spot
stray crumbs from miles away, it seemed, and he always
knew when Jake was slicing the cucumber too thickly,
without having to turn round. Jake guarded his station like
a tiger with cubs and knew he was becoming a pro when he
too took to hiding his favourite knife.

One day Bill came in and said: 'On your knees, sonny,
and kiss the toes of my rotting clogs.'

'Yes, Chef,' said Jake, kneeling down. He knew everyone
was laughing. It was always fun when someone else got
humiliated.

'Right, sonny. You've turned into a real pain in the arse.
You're always breathing down my neck, getting in my way
and I wish I'd never said you could ask questions. Of
course, there's nowt you could ask me that I don't know,
but I can't be bothered, and anyway, you make my head
ache. I'm sick of it and think you should fuck off to catering
college. Luckily, a few people owe me favours. Of course
you're an idiot, so you're bound to fuck up the interview.
It's tomorrow – if you can find the way.'

The interview was for a place at the most prestigious
catering college in the country. It took a few seconds to
dawn on Jake that Bill was giving him the chance of a
lifetime. Someone actually believed in him. Jake grinned
and kissed Bill's smelly, stained clogs, not caring that
everyone was roaring with laughter and someone was
taking a picture.

The magazine Eric had mentioned described Jake's
career as a meteoric rise through the ranks. Jake had smiled
wryly when he read this. It had actually taken years to learn
a craft that was as old as the history of man. He had lost
weight, gained an enormous overdraft and burned and cut
himself so often, all the staff at A & E knew him by name.

'It's been a hard road and a few bad things happened to
me on the way,' was all he now said.

Eric glanced down at a particularly disgusting-looking
stain on the carpet. It seemed to him that bad things were
still happening to Jake. 'I still don't understand,' he said
plaintively. 'If you were successful and famous in London,
what the hell made you decide to come here, to the back of
nowhere?'

Jake was just about to answer, when they heard a voice.

'Jake, are you up there?' called a woman from outside, in
a tone that suggested that if he was, he really shouldn't be.

Jake pulled up the sash window gingerly, and stuck his
head out of the peeling frame. 'Georgia! I'm here!'

Eric leaned over and hit his jaw painfully on the
window ledge when he saw a staggeringly beautiful blonde
was getting out of a taxi and looking round.

'Oh. My. God,' she said, loud enough for the men to hear
her.

'That's my girlfriend. Funnily enough, I think she feels
the same about this hole as you do,' said Jake cheerfully.
'Wait there, darling, and I'll come down. You are not going
to believe this place.'

'You've got that right,' muttered Eric, hurrying after
him, clearly desperate for a closer look at the girl. Surely he
was hallucinating – her legs couldn't be that long?

'Hello!' said Jake, giving her a peck on the cheek in a
casual 'I can do this any time I want' way that made Eric
frown. Georgia was a stunner. Today, dressed in something
by Stella McCartney that she'd pinched from a recent photo
shoot, she was turning so many heads there would be a
collision at the traffic lights soon.