Food - Bee Wilson is appalled by accounts of a world lived on a knife edge
Some publishers seem to labour under the hopeful belief, despite all evidence to the contrary, that lightning will strike twice in the same place. After the unexpected success of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, every agent and editor in London was ringing up their entire acquaintance trying to commission warm-hearted and bitter-sweet sporting memoirs. Following the triumph of Anna Pavord's tulip book, the shelves of Waterstone's were crammed with tomes about other epoch-making flowers, with covers just similar enough that you might (or so the publishers hoped) purchase one of the lookalikes by accident - like impostor perfume, only not as cheap.
Now, after the success of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential (just out in paperback), the hot thing in publishing is searing accounts of the horrors of working as a chef. Step forward Cutting it Fine: inside the restaurant business (Jonathan Cape, £14.99), authored by the chef Andrew Parkinson and written by Jonathon Green. It is being plugged as the first really honest account of what it's like to slave away in "famous London restaurants" - to work 16-hour shifts in hot kitchens with brutal bosses, frayed tempers, burned, cracked hands, and sores on your bottom created by all the sweat running down your back (described here, lyrically, as "chef's arse"). But what you get from the book, which is written in that flat, self-important style of almost all works based on interviews, is not honesty but lies. Parkinson demonstrates, with a surely unintentional finality, that the entire commerce of the restaurant business is founded on mendacity: chefs lie to the customer, chefs lie to their staff and, most pathetically, chefs lie to themselves.
The lying to the customer is probably the most obvious. The basic trick is convincing the clientele that the food is worth more than it really is. Parkinson admits that he once worked "in a restaurant where the gross profit got so bad that we ended up using grey mullet (£1 a kilo) on the menu as 'Italian sea bass' (a fantasy fish). It made 95 per cent profit on each fillet we sold." Yet even when fish is accurately named, the profit margins are higher than most customers would imagine. Farmed salmon portions, for example, can cost the chef as little as 50p each, yet be sold for as much as £13. In order to perform this miracle, you have to indulge in a little window-dressing: sprigs of watercress at tuppence each; fancy, French-sounding waiters; a Provencal menu borrowed from Elizabeth David. The Holy Grail of London restaurateurs is a profit on each dish of 70 per cent and upwards. When you consider all the overheads involved in a pricey Soho restaurant - £20,000 stoves, arctic-level refrigeration, ludicrous rents, crisp napkins and shiny plates - the mark-up is hardly surprising.
All too little of this 70 per cent, however, goes to the people who actually cooked the wretched piece of salmon in the first place. Parkinson describes offering a job as chef de partie to a "typical" 28-year-old "boy". To land this plum job, the "boy" would have to be highly trained in "knife skills" and prepared to work the kind of crazy hours that mean, as Parkinson describes elsewhere, he would probably never have a relationship and might well become a drug addict or, at the very least, an alcoholic. For this privilege, he could expect a salary of £15,000. In order to square this impossible equation in his mind, the poor idiot will have to believe all the lies thrown at him by the chef and kitchen staff - that it is an industry founded on excellence, and that being a chef is somehow superior to being a waiter, even though the latter often earn far more for shorter and easier hours. Parkinson insists that restaurants have to be founded on "trust" between staff, but what he shows with his angry stories about berating the piffling mistakes made by waiting staff - such as the one who had the temerity to describe a rouille to a customer as a "yellowy cream" - is that this "trust" soon translates into contempt, paranoia and misery.
But the saddest victim in all this is the chef himself, who has been living this terrible life of delusion for so long. For example, Parkinson convinces himself that there is no "discrimination" in his kitchen because, he says, he doesn't mind ugly girls so long as they can cook, and thinks that most "gay jokes" are made "with a lot of humour". When it comes to reviews, he simultaneously claims that he takes no notice of them and that they "can try to make or break a restaurant", and writes, bitterly, that most critics spend too much time trying to be clever.
Parkinson seems keen to convince us, like Anthony Bourdain, that chefs are desperadoes, living life on the edge. What he reveals, however, is that chefs are really suffering, loquacious, self-deluding actors, trying to sound like the real stars (in this case, the Ramsays and the Whites). And if publishers ought to know one thing, it's that luvvie autobiographies have had their day.
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