Dessert Storm
In our restaurant’s early days, I concentrated a lot on starters and main courses and, as a result, desserts were not at the top of my menu preferences. Just like every other restaurant in the area, we served the obligatory chocolate gateau, strawberry cheesecake and the essential three flavours of ice cream, vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. Very few other flavours were available on the market. The lemon sorbet was usually saved for special days like New Year’s Eve or Valentine’s Day. Our Italian wine rep brought me a sample of a dessert which, in his own words was the shape of things to come as it was very popular in the USA. Mississippi Mud Pie. The strange name was misleading as it was one of the tastiest desserts I had ever tried at that time. It made it on the menu and became an overnight sensation.
I began scouring cookery books and magazines for homemade desserts and came up with a few. Our new offerings, the toffee basket, biscuit cup, baked Alaska and strawberry shortcake became very popular. I’ll always remember a husband calling the restaurant for a takeaway cup for his wife who was at the general hospital recovering from a serious operation. I was later told that she did recover fully, hopefully with a little help from our famous biscuit cup.
Quirky (not to say peculiar or odd) customers, we have had many. One of those was one of our regulars, a certain Keith Clarke who worked as a Camerons Brewery rep at the time. Whenever we meet, I remind him of the many times when he insisted on ordering King Prawns in garlic butter for starters, main course and dessert! Karen did her best to get him to try something else but he was adamant that it was what he wanted to eat.
One evening, he shocked me by ordering a baked Alaska for his dessert. Ordinarily, I filled the dessert with ice cream, strawberries and a liqueur but on that occasion, for Keith’s dessert, I swapped the fruit for a few garlic prawns. When he dug into his baked Alaska and realised he had been had, he nearly choked with laughter. Once he understood the joke, I replaced his dessert.
On Saturday nights, after service, the staff always shared the desserts that remained unsold. On one occasion, Leanne, a chatterbox of a waitress, loved by all customers, came into the kitchen, as usual, her eyes greedily searching for any leftover desserts. I said there was half a Mud Pie left and jokingly, I added that I did not think it smelt very fresh. As she bent down to take a sniff, I gently rammed her face into the cake. Slightly shocked, she recovered very quickly, scraped the dessert off her face and chucked it at me half missing me and plastering the kitchen walls with the rest. This was the kind of thing that expert employment consultants later coined as “team building”.
Another instance of Saturday madness happened one mild Summer night when, after a long shift in our warm kitchen, all my chefs and I decided to go for a swim. The tide was out. Jason, my second chef drove us to the edge of the North Sea in his rickety Land Rover. We all dived, still wearing our chefs’ whites into the black water, cold as January. We laughed, splashed one another and pretended to enjoy the midnight dip.
A rogue seagull attacked Andrew, one of our apprentices, mistaking him for a fish in distress. The current was so strong that the next time we looked at the shimmering lights of Seaton Carew Front, we found ourselves close to the Staincliffe Hotel. We all went home soaking wet but happy that we had survived another week in the restaurant world.