During the time we had our restaurant, we had many helpers, both in the kitchen and the dining room. Friends of ours (lets call them David and Claire), had recently split up and Claire phoned me and was rather upset at the break up. Feeling sorry for her, I invited her up for the weekend, making sure she knew we were working in the restaurant. No problem, she said, I can serve. I said that there was no need, she could just come for the weekend and have a rest. I had first hand experience of her cooking when she was with David and it was pretty awful. Anyway, I put that aside and convinced Ed it would be fine.
On the weekend, she arrived late, just before service and walked into the kitchen and asked what there was to do. This is someone who was an accountant and had never waitressed in her life. She was wearing jeans with the highest heels I’d ever seen and a long flowing long black silk top with huge sleeves that looked like something from a graduation ceremony. As quick as I could, I talked her through service and told her to help Simon and follow his lead as he was very good at his job.
The first course was soup. Simon picked up two plates and she followed him with another two, teetering on her heels as she followed him into the dining room. The first thing she did was to plonk the soups down on the table, spilling some on the white linen. As she stepped back from the table, she trailed her sleeve through the soup, spilling it on the diner’s lovely white dress.
Things went from bad to worse. Next course was pate which she took away from the kitchen before I’d finished the dish, leaving the plate with no garnish, dressing or toast. She then delivered it to the wrong table.
Next up was the fish course – I watched as the food slid backwards and forwards across the plate, nearly falling off as she tried to walk in her heels across our stone floor. She just about made it to the table without losing the lot.
By now I was at boiling point and asked Ed to give her something to do behind the bar – anything to get her out of the kitchen. Ed gave her two bottles of red wine to take to two separate tables. She mixed up our most expensive red wine with the house wine (diners were delighted!), and when she served the red wine, she poured it into glasses that had already been used for white wine. Then she opened a bottle of champagne, sending the cork across the room and nearly blinding a woman and spilling it all over the place as she tried to pour it into the glasses.
After an hour or so, she decided she needed a break. She drank two huge glasses of wine and went out to the garden to have a cigarette and came back reeking of smoke. When I mentioned this to her she broke down sobbing saying she wasn’t really over her break up with David. I couldn’t get her out of the kitchen, so I sat her on a stool in the far corner of the kitchen, and gave her a huge cup of coffee. She continued with her tale of woe as I listened and made sympathetic noises. Meantime trying to cook for a restaurant full of people.
We somehow got through the service, cleared up and came through to the sitting room to relax after a very busy night. Claire then talked and drank and drank and talked. Then she threw up. We finally managed to get her to bed around 3am and after we’d cleared up her mess we got to bed around 4am.
She was up at the crack of dawn the next day and crashed around the kitchen waking us up. She made breakfast (burnt toast and eggs and the worst coffee we’ve ever tasted) and hollered up the stairs that it was ready. We politely nibbled at the offerings, swallowed down half a cup of coffee and sat in a stupor. She offered to clear but we told that we would sort it out. She left shortly after and we went back to bed.
We lost touch over the years but we heard that she’s now married to an American who runs a restaurant in Los Angeles. Let’s hope she just looks after the accounts!
Stories from my typewriter 