Pig’s ears and frozen turkeys
After I dropped out of Naval Architecture in1979, I decided to find work in a bid to save enough money to get back to computing which I had studied for two years back in Algeria.
Most of my student friends held part-time jobs in local restaurants. They all bragged about the money, the free meals but most of all the abundance of female customers desperately ready and willing to throw themselves at hot-blooded Mediterranean waiters.
Being a guy who liked to dabble with food, I preferred to work in the kitchen instead of front-of-house.
After a nine-month washing-up stint at an Italian Pizzeria in Newcastle, I landed a job closer to home, at a new Italian restaurant in Peterlee. It was owned by an ice cream manufacturer who, by virtue of being married to an Italian lady, thought it essential to go by the name of Raffaele instead of the original Ralph. He insisted that Mario Lanza was played on a loop in this pseudo Italian Village Trattoria to reinforce his Latin pedigree.
His photographic memory (his own words) helped him remember a multitude of Italian words and phrases. He was aware that, as I had worked with a few Amalfi expats, I too had picked up enough of the Roman lingo to sound like a Sardinian, according to a fellow Italian waiter.
Often, in front of his influential friends, local councillors and factory chiefs, he addressed me in pidgin Italian to demonstrate his cosmopolitan connections. Keeping a straight face, I usually carried out his commands very loosely, maybe pouring him a glass of red wine instead of white, knowing full well that he could not refuse it for fear of being rumbled by his admiring free-loaders.
To his credit, he was a generous man, if a little forgetful. On Christmas Eve afternoon, he always presented every single member of staff with a 12lb. turkey. The fact that the massive bird was frozen solid and would take till New Year’s Eve to defrost, was none of his concern.
New Year’s Eves at the restaurant were great excuses for a majestic festive feast. The buffet table was laden with all kinds of foods, from turkey to salmon, lobster to roast beef and heaps of salads. The centre piece was a succulent suckling pig! I called it the pet Piggy as no one was ever allowed to take a bite off him. It was just for show.
The reason was only obvious to those of us insiders who knew that immediately after the buffet table was cleared, Piggy quietly slipped back into hibernation in a chest freezer at the back of the cellar.
Piggy lay there in silence and darkness till the next banquet when he was once again thawed back to glamorous stardom.
In his frozen, brittle state, Piggy was sadly prone to shedding various parts of his body when inadvertently knocked. He often emerged from arctic rest with a missing ear or even legless.
Whenever faced with such an unfortunate accident, unfazed Raffaele donned his make-up artist’s hat, got the superglue out and calmly carried out a face-saving graft many Harley Street plastic surgeons would give their right arm for!