Chefs, naturally, spend a lot of time in restaurants – not eating in them, but cooking in them. Still, on the odd occasion when we do have an evening off (which isn’t a Sunday or a Monday, when lots of good restaurants are closed), we, too, like to make ourselves a reservation somewhere – and when we do go for dinner, we do it better than you. Due to the fact that chefs are blessed with God-given swagger and mounds of sex appeal, when we arrive for dinner, we look good.
We rid ourselves of our heavy workwear, rinse off the kitchen grease, and put on our nice clothes (which are in excellent condition, because we never get to wear them). Upon arrival at our chosen establishment, we enter the dining room like polite housewives visiting their neighbours’ house in the 1950s. We sit down and peer around, absorbing every minute detail: how the tables are set, how the menus are arranged, how the front of house acts.
We smile at the general manager, because we know her secrets; we know the restaurant is not as together as it seems – that beyond the kitchen door, some form of chaos is inevitably unfolding. When a waitress arrives at our table and asks us how we are, we ask her the same question in return, and we listen to the answer. We remember that servers are, in fact, human beings, and recognise that a 19-year-old-girl working full-time in a restaurant likely wants to pursue a different career altogether, but is having to fund that dream by waiting on gentrifiers and gout-riddled old gentlemen.
We know that dealing with nice customers makes a big difference during a long shift, ergo we will never be “the pricks on table 7”. We sit back and let our arses melt into the chairs. This isn’t a rushed business lunch; this is a ceremonial banquet.
We spend our lives up against the clock, with too much to do and too little time in which to do it. Now that we’re in luxuriating mode, we aren’t going to take it for granted; it’s our turn to indulge in the romance of restaurants , and we’re not going to skip the foreplay. We peruse the menu in silence.
Laymen can never appreciate a menu like us chefs. We’re intrigued by the prices, the wording, the produce. When choosing what to order, we are tortoises, and you lot are hares; you leap through the menu, scurrying away from anything that sounds frightening.
We methodically choose jellied, fermented things. And we always order too much; it’s all in the name of research, you see. Budget isn’t in our lexicon tonight; we must support our fellow heroic-yet-downtrodden industry folk! Before the waiter walks away, we somehow resist the urge to request amends to a salad, or pass on instructions for the specific way we would like our Dover sole to be cooked, in the name of not being a complete wanker.
When the food arrives, we’re excited – not just to eat it, but to look at it. We delight in the colours and the shapes. We examine the way the Natoora radicchio is plated, the same bitter leaf we unpacked that morning in our own restaurants, because in London we all use the same suppliers.
We question everything. Where are they getting their pigeons from? What herb is in this sauce? Of course, we have opinions about the quality of every dish, but make no mistake: we will never complain . Firstly, because feedback feels like a betrayal, and secondly, because we know our pedantic comments will be relayed to a distressed chef who will taste the food and tell us, via the waitress, to politely fuck off.
We drink by the bottle, not the glass. A glass is for a solo lunch; a bottle is for any other occasion. To you, it’s a Tuesday, but to us, it’s Friday night because we have a day off tomorrow, so stop looking at us like that .
Each sip of Chablis counters yesterday’s shift, when we drank nothing but tepid Thames Water out of plastic quart containers for 18 hours straight. Every moment in the flickering candlelight helps us forget the backache we’ve got from scrubbing the bottom of the fridges out at 7am. If we’re the last table, we don’t hang around, because we know there’s a whole team of people trying to get home.
Before we leave, we might just have one more drink. Perhaps a Fernet-Branca . If we haven’t yet made it obvious we’re chefs, that should do the trick.
We tip generously, and are on our merry way – but the night isn’t over yet. There are a few places we’ll pop into on our way home to get a beer and say hello. Then we’ll go home and have sex on a full stomach – and we will do that better than you, too.
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