There are plenty more rib-ticklers where that came from, but I suspect that the appetite for tales from old Bohemia and old Labour is a specialist taste these days. If people went to the Gay Hussar only because it is a relic of a lost London, the restaurant would be all but empty. It’s packed most days, and not only by nostalgics who can still remember Nye Bevan in his prime but by customers looking for a virtue that restaurants with far higher profiles and prices can’t supply: conviviality.
In my experience, if restaurant critics have a fault it is that they overestimate the importance of food. I have been to two Michelin-starred restaurants. The first, Juniper in Altrincham, was like a laboratory. I felt as if I should have put on a white coat before entering, and could not wait to leave. In the second, a Gordon Ramsay joint, the atmosphere was not as clinical but it was no less stifling. Diners sat in devotional silence, as if they were praying in a cathedral rather than enjoying a meal. If anyone had roared with laughter or raised their voice, it would have seemed a blasphemy.
Even though its Hungarian cuisine is fantastically unfashionable, the Gay Hussar prospers because there have been too many drunken lunches over the decades for it to succumb to prudery or chef worship. Even the hearty Hungarian food—the salamis, pâtés, pickled herrings, roast geese and ducks, Wiener schnitzels, dumplings, stuffed cabbages and strudels—is only unfashionable to the minority who take food faddery and dieting seriously. Most would consider it a feast.
‘In French restaurants, the plates look like a work of art, but an hour after you’ve eaten, you’re hungry again,’ Carlos, the head chef, explained as he sighed about man’s infinite capacity for folly. ‘What’s the point of that? Eat here, and you know you’ve eaten.’
Well said, I thought, as I followed him down to the kitchen.
IT HADN’T OCCURRED TO ME until I got there that, at 6ft 1in and with a paunch, I was too big for the job. Space is tight in most restaurant kitchens for the brute economic reason that the owner needs to pack in as many tables as possible for paying customers. In the Gay Hussar, it is not only profit maximisation but also the demands of Georgian builders which cramp the cooks. Land has always been expensive in central London, and eighteenth-century developers cut costs by building tall, narrow houses. There wouldn’t be much room to cook whatever floor the kitchen was on. As the only plausible floor for it is the basement, a low ceiling intensifies the claustrophobic atmosphere.
If you imagine a narrow rectangular space packed with appliances, you will get an idea of the design. An oven with hotplates fills most of one side and a large sink fills much of the other. Down the middle is a kind of extended butcher’s block, a run of surfaces for chopping and preparing. It forms two narrow corridors down the length of the kitchen. Storage cupboards that have been hammered into every available space overhang the aisles. When hot pans are moving and sharp knives whizzing, the last thing a head chef wants is a lumbering innocent waving his arms about.
Carlos put up with my intrusion with good grace. I offered to wash up, but he was happy for me to experiment with a sweet-pepper salad. I did not think I’d have any difficulty. I have cooked for twenty-five years. Not lunch and dinner every day, but four times a week, often more. I halved a pepper and took a knife to the seeds and pith with what seemed to me to be the delicacy of a brain surgeon. After three, perhaps four, seconds, Carlos intervened and showed me how to chop peppers properly. He halved ten and put them in the sink. I was to run water over each half, stick my hand in, yank out the innards in one movement, flip over the pepper and slice it horizontally into perfect pencil-thin strips that would melt into the dressing.
‘Like this…see…easy.’
The kitchen knife, which I had handled with nervous respect, flashed up and down half an inch away from his fingers. I couldn’t do it. After forty minutes of chopping, I was faster than when I started but still ten times slower than Carlos. Also my strips were—er—not quite comme il faut. Put it like this—if, during a recent visit to the Gay Hussar, you found the sweet-pepper salad to be on the clunky side, then that was one of mine. It was the same story with the onions. Again, I had several decades’ worth of what I assumed to be hands-on dicing experience. Again, I could not match the speed or the consistency of a proper cook. As for trimming veal, by the time I’d finished with it the fatted calf looked anorexic, so much meat had I thrown away with the gristle.
All around me, the kitchen went through its daily rhythm. Preparation and cleaning begin at 8 a.m. and carry on until midnight. The peaks are between 12.45 p.m. and 1.30 p.m., and 7.30 p.m. and 8.15 p.m., when nearly all the meal orders come one on top of the other. The kitchen goes quiet and everyone concentrates.
For all their resistance to nouvelle cuisine and nouvelle labour, the customers are not without their eccentricities. ‘Number two wants to know where our veal is from,’ shouts a waitress. ‘It’s all right. It’s from Holland,’ Carlos tells her, and turns to me and says, ‘They’re worried about foot-and-mouth. We get asked all the time.’
‘But humans can’t catch foot-and-mouth,’ I mutter.
I checked with the waitress. They were worried about foot-and-mouth. And blue tongue.
When the pressure was on, I got out of the way and watched from a corner of the kitchen. ‘Never work for a liberal newspaper, they’ll sack you on Christmas Eve,’ runs the old Fleet Street maxim. But observing the cooks and waitresses at the Gay Hussar, I could see that working in a left-wing restaurant was about as good as it gets in the drone’s trade of catering.
I don’t want to romanticise it. Just before the lunchtime rush, the cooks and waitresses put their pounds in for the Wednesday lottery. Like low-paid workers everywhere, they were clutching at a fourteen-million-to-one chance of escape. They asked me whether I wanted to join the syndicate. I didn’t think I could. I’ve dismissed the National Lottery as a tax on the stupid and the desperate so often that I could recite my stock piece in my sleep. But Nick, they said, there was a cook here who won. Not the big prize, but £67,000—enough for him to retire. The story of his good fortune kept the others going, and inspired me. This was a lucky kitchen!
I duly put my pound in, and we duly lost.
However gratefully its staff would seize the chance to escape the grind, the Gay Hussar remains a happy workplace. Everyone has known everyone else for years. John Wrobel confessed to occasionally shouting at the waitresses, but, he said, ‘they just shout back at me’.
They’re lucky that they can. I recommend that anyone who eats regularly in restaurants should spend time in a kitchen. Obviously, every decent person already knows that you should never be rude to waiters and always leave a tip. (The tip should be bigger, incidentally, if you are not happy with your treatment: bad service is a sign of an understaffed and therefore overstressed kitchen.) But it is only when you see catering from the other side that you realise that the media’s celebration of the chef as a bully is sickening in its cowardice.
While I was working, I heard the story of an acclaimed chef who branded a young member of staff with a hot knife. He had to lie low for a couple of years, but he’s back running a celebrated restaurant and no one mentions his past. People in the business told me that in his kitchens Gordon Ramsay is not the foul-mouthed thug of his Tff appearances. He just plays the bully for the cameras to please the watching mob. Whatever their behaviour in private, chefs such as Ramsay and Marco Pierre White have fostered the idea that, in order to be a culinary genius, you must abuse your staff. So successfully has the hounding of subordinates been marketed in various ‘reality’ documentaries, the leader of one of the teaching unions said her members were finding it hard to convince children that bullying was wrong, when the television told them that ‘celebrity status and money can be acquired on the basis of shouting at and swearing at and humiliating others’.
At least in a school, factory or office, there are places to hide. The kitchen, by contrast, is a perfect environment for the sadist because there is