Cookery lessons
In my last two columns, I rambled on about restaurants, their owners, their staff and their staying power. Karen is my proof-reader. Every week, I print my piece, hand it to her along with a yellow highlighter, usually while she’s watching The Chase. She glances at it for a second then puts it aside for later. Often, she will have corrected someone’s name, put right an incorrect colloquial expression or just added a comma here and there.
Last week, she handed me back the piece about what makes restaurants succeed and to my delight, there wasn’t a single yellow mark anywhere on the sheet of paper.
“Hah! You didn’t find a single mistake!”
“No but it was boring. You usually write interesting stuff, but this was like a restaurant handbook.”
Karen who was simply looking for spelling mistakes did not want to read about something that sounded like preaching. She believed that anyone who opened a restaurant had already done all their homework and yet, over the years, there has been a multitude of places in this town, which have come and gone without a trace.
Why would someone in their right mind plough their life savings into something about which they know very little? You would think that this kind of thing doesn’t happen, would you? And, yet, it does and continues happening week in week out.
Restaurants usually last as long as their primary chef remains with them. I can just picture chefs all over town forcefully asking for a rise, right now and threatening to leave until they obtain one.
Restaurants that have a better chance to last are usually run by a chef-owner and better still a husband and wife team.
Over the years, l came across many instances when, had I not been able to cook, I would’ve been left high and dry by a chef’s sudden departure.
Come to think of it, this did actually happen to me on one occasion. I employed a chef I had worked with a few years earlier at the Crossways Hotel in Thornley. He was capable enough to be relied upon to run the kitchen on Friday evenings when I got into the habit of meeting up with friends at a pub quiz in Sunderland.
One of those Fridays, I remember arriving back at Seaton at around 11 pm to find Karen extremely stressed and close to tears. The head-chef had come in to work at 6 pm, mortally drunk and departed just before the service began, leaving the kitchen to three young apprentices. Karen said that she warned customers as soon as they stepped into the restaurant that the trainee and commis chefs could only serve starters and desserts. Most of them elected to stay for dinner and ended up ordering a few starters to make up for the missing main course. That night, the restaurant turned into a tapas bar. The shape of things to come. She had tried in vain to get in touch with me, but that was before the invention of mobile phones. The shape of things to come!
The offending chef had been offered a position at a nearby hotel and never bothered handing in his notice. I only found out when the local paper carried an advert saying that the hotel had a new chef and that he had worked for Krimo’s. I was fuming but decided to place a counter-notice the following evening wishing my ex-chef a happy future at the new hotel and stating that I was back at the stove. I think that I was fuming because I had been forced to give up my free Friday evenings. I decided I would be better off training a new head-chef from the commis that I employed. It turned out to be a good move as one of them rose to the challenge and was able to deputise in my absence.
That turned out to be a valuable lesson as “promoting from within” would prove very useful in the future.
According to Karen, this will have been another boring piece of writing, but I just had to get off my chest all the pitfalls that await the unaware prospective restaurateur.