High Season Read online

Choc and I watch as Soda walks out past the bar, his head hung low, pulling a crumpled pack of Winfield Reds from his pocket. And I say nothing, picturing instead Soda leaping up onto a moving train.

  ‘It’s you and me, old mate,’ I say to Choc.

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ replies Choc.

  ‘I’ll do the bugs and the prawns and the fish, you get the salads started and crack that crab open.’

  ‘Yes, Chef.’

  If it were any other time of year, I’d be forced to sack Soda—and Jesse—today! But because I can’t, and because they know I can’t, I have to suck it up as Soda stomps up the wooden hallway that runs beside the kitchen.

  ‘What’s his problem?’ Choc wants to know.

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I think he’s probably just a young, pussy-whipped pain in the arse who can’t stand the heat. I think that, because of Jesse, this crew is probably going to fall to shit sometime soon and there’s not much I can do to stop that happening.’

  ‘Everyone’s just stressed out, Chef,’ Choc assures me.

  ‘Mate,’ I say, ‘everyone just seems over it this year. We’ve had a pretty good run, and we need to see the season out, but it might just be time to fuck this puppy.’

  ‘Which puppy is that, Chef?’ Scotty calls out as he dumps more dirty coffee cups onto the crowded waiters’ station.

  ‘Fucking stack those plates, Scotty, or the whole thing’s going to crash and burn,’ I tell him.

  ‘Which puppy are we fucking?’ Scotty asks again.

  ‘Nothing,’ I tell him. ‘We were just talking shit.’

  ‘Vinnie said to hurry up on that fucking platter or he’ll sack you,’ Scotty adds before he walks out.

  And that is just so Vinnie Rae I can’t stand it. He would have seen Jesse go up the tunnel, followed soon after by Soda, and he’d know why they did. Because he’s a chef, Vinnie can feel the pressure in the kitchen building, it’s an intuitive thing that a chef doesn’t lose—apparently—and all that experience tells him that when things are at their most critical, it’s the perfect time to throw a firecracker into the middle of it all. He’s an expert. Really, I’ve learnt everything I know about how to get the most out of people from Vinnie Rae. The problem with Vinnie’s model, though, is he keeps pushing until everything does crash and burn. Not that he gives a fuck. I guess he figures that chefs are only at their best for a couple of years anyway and it’s better to get fresh talent through the place every so often. Nine days out of ten I’ll just sidestep Vinnie’s jab, maybe even serve it back with something extra, but it seems I’m getting slower and somehow dumber.

  And that’s the way it works. Pretty soon, a new head chef will arrive at Rae’s with a couple of his or her crew from the last place they all worked at. They’ll do a new menu and deep clean the joint, the soundtrack to their labour a constant put-down of the last crew and their piece-of-shit menu. They’ll whine to Vinnie about the state of the coolroom and the grease at the back of the stove and Vinnie will shake his head like, un-fucking-believable. And then he’ll say something like, ‘Have you done the dinner menu yet, Chef?’

  In fact, the new head chef will sound just like me in whatever new joint I land in. And I figure the reason crews crash and burn, come and go, ‘until the next gig . . .’, is because the job of being a chef is intrinsically creative. Every day is a journey into the heat, colour, movement and chaos of creating a new plate of food for every single guest who arrives at our restaurant. And every time I cook a dish, it’s a new dish. Things change. Cooking in a fine-dining atmosphere is not like working in McDonald’s where there is no room to experiment. In here, in the heat, sweat and abuse of a busy five-star restaurant kitchen, it’s a fucking circus performance each day and every night. And it’s draining. Most places have their rosters better figured out than Vinnie allows, but again, it doesn’t have my name over the door and the way Vinnie sees it is that, if he was head chef, he’d be in here at six o’clock every morning and he wouldn’t leave until midnight when the kitchen was Firedogged to within an inch of its life.

  And I don’t know what it is about today—maybe it’s the sight of Vinnie popping that consolation bottle of Cristal that he never got to drink with Paris, or maybe I’m just getting too old to dance to this particular beat—but I resolve that I’ll phone the owner of that little dinner joint in town tomorrow and sound him out about things. Just the thought of talking about a new menu with a new boss, standing inside a different kitchen with a different array of cooking implements . . . well, it’s the most inspired I’ve been for a few weeks.

  ‘Salad’s are up, Chef,’ Choc informs me.

  ‘Good work, Choc. They look awesome. Really, that’s nice work, mate.’ And I’m serious. The food is clean, fresh and alive. It looks both healthy and irresistible. Great Thai food is like that. ‘Now get that platter down and polish it. And get some banana mat on it.’

  ‘Yes, Chef.’

  There’s no use fighting the endgame. I could walk out myself now—and I wouldn’t be the first head chef to walk out of Rae’s without giving notice—but I don’t want to. If I’m going to leave, I want to do so on my terms and I want a nice, long holiday before I start up somewhere else. At least a week. And at least fifty kilometres away from where I live.

  ‘Get these bugs onto the banana mat and cut up some lime for me, Choc.’

  ‘Yes, Chef.’

  ‘How are the oysters?’

  ‘Yeah, good, Chef.’ Choc hands me a freshly shucked local oyster over the pass.

  I slide the oyster into my mouth and can’t help but agree. ‘Plate me up a dozen of those little fuckers when you’ve done the platter.’

  ‘Yes, Chef.’

  ‘And fix yourself up something nice for lunch, mate. What would you like?’

  ‘I might have a steak, Chef. If that’s all right?’

  ‘Mate,’ I say with some enthusiasm. ‘I know that because we work at Rae’s we get the privilege of watching Vinnie’s lifestyle, but every now and then, we give a dog a bone!’

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ Choc says again like the polite young man he is.

  ‘Here’s the fish and chips and the prawns. Finish that platter and I’ll get our lunch underway.’

  Soda walks back into the kitchen reeking of dope, his eyes a little distant.

  ‘You joining Choc and me for lunch, Soda?’ I enquire.

  ‘We’re having a nice lump of prime rib steak with a little mushroom ragu and some fries.’

  ‘Yeah, righto, Chef,’ Soda replies, and I can tell he’s thinking: That’s right! Sometimes I have to eat things rather than just cook them.

  ‘Well, get this fucking kitchen clean,’ I instruct him. ‘Then we can sit down out the back by the pool and enjoy our lunch.’

  ‘Yes, Chef!’

  24

  A week after I signed the lease on the terrace in Annandale, the new owners at Darling Street called me into a meeting one morning and basically let me go. I’ve got to say I didn’t see it coming. To their credit, they paid me a couple of weeks’ notice plus whatever benefits I had accrued, which amounted to quite a tidy little bundle of cash. And there was a big piece of me that was pleased to end the routine. I wasn’t worried about getting more work; in the hospitality industry people come and go, restaurants open and shut, trends fly by faster all the time. If this joint decided they could find someone to do the same or better work for less money, well, good luck to them. That they went broke and shut up shop six months later was not something to celebrate.

  A lot of people are cynical about themed pubs, particularly the Irish ones, and I get that, but the London Hotel was different because it’d been in Balmain for over a hundred years. And although there was some naff British stuff scattered about the place, the London was a serious suburban hotel that had recently had some serious money spent on it. They’d hired a good head chef in Andrew and the team was turning out a very smart early-nineties menu. There was a line of four chefs, and when they put an ad in the newspaper f
or a sous-chef to replace Gavin, Gavin was still there, which meant when I got the job, the person who knew everything about the section was able to hand it over to me in an organised manner. The team was focused, clean and busy. Andrew was constantly experimenting and changing the menu and winning new friends in both the suburb and the media. I took a pay cut after Darling Street, but given the job was for a sous-chef rather than a commis chef or chef de partie, I only dropped a couple of hundred a week, and I figured the benefits far outweighed the negatives.

  I was immensely relieved to be back on a line after having been a head chef in kitchens with one or two other cooks or kitchen hands. I liked the grill section; it meant I was doing all the protein preparation and got to stand at the head of line and call the pass. Andrew took control on the two busiest shifts of the week, Friday and Saturday nights, but during the rest of the week he did sauce preparation and menu planning while I organised and cooked the pass.

  The menu at the London borrowed from a cuisine that came to be labelled New British. It was lighter than a lot of the stodge that the British seem to love. New British borrowed from the Mediterranean by using olive oil rather than butter and was notable for its use of colour. It was also responsible for putting fruit back on the mains plate with things like passionfruit jus and golden apple galette. A typical dish might have been something like tea-smoked salmon with baby beetroot rosti, butter beans and passionfruit jus. You can just see the colours: the orange of the salmon with the purple rosti crust and the vivid yellow sauce. You’d finish the dish with some micro-herbs or maybe some butter beans and it would be served in a heavy white bistro bowl-plate.

  I still like a lot of the things I learnt at the London—even the pork-belly pie—but the thing I enjoyed most was being back on the line without the stress of running the show. I was comfortable cooking for ten or a hundred as long as the rest of the crew were ready for action, but at the end of the day I could go home safe in the knowledge that it would be Andrew stressing about tomorrow rather than me. I started to wean myself off the heroin by beginning the day with a few shots of alcohol. Each morning would see me order a short black espresso from the bar that I would turn into something more delicious with Kahlua or Johnnie Walker or a random combination of whatever else was in the kitchen’s alcohol supply.

  The shifts at the London were split, which is always a drag. It meant that after lunch service I would have two or three hours where, if I didn’t have to work through to dinner service in order to get my section up to speed, I would have to kill the time either by sitting at the bar in another pub down the road or falling asleep in the storeroom or . . . getting to know one of the waitresses. We were blessed at the London with some spectacularly well-presented waitresses who were all blind to my defects of character. Not since the Bondi Hotel had I been so in Cupid’s gaze. Then something happened which changed any expectations I had about how rosy my future was beginning to look.

  The new girl, who had just come back from Britain and was all milky skin and Laura Ashley, disclosed to me that she was running a habit that she just knew I would be able to help her out with. And I know blaming anyone for your problems in life is piss-weak, but Caroline . . . well, she was trouble with a capital C. In about eight days I’d gone through whatever bank I had got together and was running around Kings Cross M.A.D. It was like I’d never left. And then to compound things Andrew decided to leave the London after he had an ‘awakening’ in the form of a vegetarian meal. He decided it was now his destiny to master the nether regions of veganism. And the worst of it was that everyone thought I’d make a great new head chef. Andrew was keen to move quickly so he thought I’d do just fine too, and before I could find a good enough reason to say no, I was back in control of a busy kitchen. I had a serious habit again and a very confusing love life, given my relationships with several other waitresses were all ongoing while I maintained a drug-fuelled and hateful, junkie-blaming scene with Caroline.

  Caroline had a brother with whom she played in a band. And he loved her very much and seemed constantly worried about her. When he sniffed out I was seeing her at least a couple of nights a week, he decided that it was my fault she had decided to use again. He refused to believe that it was actually her personal flaws that saw me using again; he was just looking for someone to blame when she didn’t turn up to band practice. The thing was, despite Caroline’s fresh appearance and knowing smile, she was an alien-fucking, psycho-candy smack fiend who set an absolutely cracking pace. Pretty soon, despite my increase in pay as head chef, I was broke ten minutes after payday and took to doing some scams that neither of us should ever talk about again. How things could go from relatively smooth and organised to utter fucking chaos was a mystery to me. It was like I had turned into some sort of lightning rod for bad shit happening.

  At the time I was self-destructing, again, the early nineties recession hit. Businesses all over Balmain started throwing ‘gone broke’ parties and closing the doors. Lunches began to slow and the owners of the hotel were increasingly looking to value-add in order to keep the customers they had. As such, I was working harder and longer the quieter the joint got. And the food was good. Everyone was happy with the direction of the menu which, frankly, wasn’t that different from what Andrew had been doing. I brought in some twists and turns and pushed the New British thing a little further through the pastry section and with the amuse bouche. We were baking bread, taking apart whole fish, using off-cuts of meat and rolling pastry. Wherever we could save a buck we did, and whatever we could do to keep things moving and turning over we did.

  On the day I walked past Darling Street Café and saw it closed, two other restaurants in Balmain also closed. It was distressing. Hospitality is one of the first industries hit when the economy slows down and this recession was proving to be no different. Every day, chefs would phone the London looking for work, and we didn’t have enough to keep the chefs we had.

  As the end of the year approached the owners of the hotel became increasingly keen to infuse the place with a little festive cheer and goodwill, which meant everyone in the kitchen working even harder, doing courtesy bar snacks and more elaborate canapés and a longer list of petits fours that were given away to just about everyone who walked into the joint.

  I’d taken on a couple of flatmates in order to ease the rent burden of the house in Annadale. They were both complete and utter drunken stoners. Every night would end in such an elaborate display of empties—empty bottles, bongs, ashtrays, fits and foils—that the used containers would become a work of art, a landscape of the impossible. And it was impossible in the sense that it wasn’t possible that so few people could consume so much alcohol and so many drugs and keep their shit together. You could smell the end and this time . . . well, I was just glad I’d taken on a couple of hostages.

  New Year’s Eve is a date I don’t forget any more, infused as it is with the end of things.

  After working flat-out for weeks in the lead-up to Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Caroline and I decided it was time for a celebration. We agreed to meet up at a club in Kings Cross after work. Given that I could get out of the kitchen sooner than she could finish on the floor, we agreed that I would go score and then we’d hook up. The problem was, there was no dope. Kings Cross was dry, and to say the atmosphere was fraught would be to do an injustice to the palpable sense of murderous rage and blackness that undercut everything else on the neon strip that night. The night-trippers and westies doing their drive-bys weren’t aware of how things really were, but to the regulars this was a brave new world. No one could adequately explain what had caused the drought and everyone was blaming everything from the Thai police to Sydney’s wharfies to the undercover cops and communism. It had to be a grand conspiracy. There were faces on the street that night that would usually never venture forth, leaving, as they did, the day-to-day running of their business to the working girls and other minions who also took the rap when things turned to shit. But it was like everyone had to
check out this bizarre, drugless landscape, in order to see what the strip looked like without the bluster of a ton of smack being exchanged, shot up, and generally moved from A to B.

  I don’t know why I survived to tell the tale of that particular countdown to midnight fifteen years ago. The doctors said I shouldn’t have, but at the time the everyday madness of things seemed so normal. And I still regret not taking the bright yellow envelope that the doctor pushed towards me.

  There were a couple of unique things about starting work the morning after an overdose. The first thing was that I got real tired, real early. Primordially, trapped-in-the-swampy-shallows tired. Another thing was that despite my determination never to drink, use drugs or smoke again, I had failed at each ambition by the end of lunch service. And because New Year’s Day finds everyone else hungover, there’s not a whole lot of the sympathy or understanding that the nearly dead feel is owed to them.

  Caroline was upset that I’d stood her up. She wasn’t open to the idea of politely sidestepping that reality; she really wanted to talk about it. I was fortunate in that she didn’t start work until dinner service and I had a couple of hours’ sleep in one of the empty hotel rooms upstairs before I got to tell her why I hadn’t showed at the club. It was the hope that I’d hand over the drugs she’d paid me for the day before that meant she stayed long enough to listen to my story of chewing gum and footpaths, ambulance lights and emergency wards. And while she was pleased I hadn’t used her deal, she was antsy in a way only a junkie having hung out for nearly twenty-four hours can be.

  My job as head chef at the London was becoming more tenuous by the day. My sous-chef had left a few weeks ago, and when I employed Stuart to replace him I knew it wouldn’t be long before Stuart replaced me. Stuart had been around the block longer than I had and was a nice guy to boot. He could read the signs at the interview: settle in as sous-chef for a few weeks and then, when this stoner blows it, take over as head chef. What was nice about Stu was that he was in no particular rush to be the king. He didn’t mind being sous-chef; he even seemed to like it. But when the other chefs on the line started showing him more respect than me . . . well, I wasn’t one to go down without a fight, so I cut his shifts.