Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
A hearty laugh at a serious and precarious industry
to be distant and dump their parents in nursing homes. This is communicated with a light touch and much drollery.
Bulawayo has created a poignant and moving debut that glows with humanity and humour. –The Independent on Sunday IT’S USUALLY easy to spot someone who grew up in or around the hotel and restaurant business: they don’t think Fawlty Towers is a comedy. Oh, they realise it’s funny. They might even laugh like drains at it. But in their hearts they know Fawlty Towers is a tragedy, the story of a business that is only just hanging on, slowly failing, a business that won’t be there in 10 years’ time.
It is the most precarious of industries, with a failure rate so high no one ever speaks of it. The pressure on chefs, waiters and managers is unceasing. But the rewards, if you get it right, can be astonishing. Restaurateurs are gamblers as well as perfectionists. Indeed, many are barking mad.
For Imogen Edwards-Jones, it’s all sauce for the goose. This is the eighth volume of her Babylon series, each supposedly written with “Anonymous”, who turns out to be an agglomeration of people she has interviewed, with names changed to protect the guilty.
The surprise is that she hasn’t done Restaurant Babylon before. The sheer lunacy of the posh London restaurant scene, with its feuds and tantrums, its ludicrous mark-ups and frequently absurd expenditure on flowers, makes it a natural for her mischievous eye and wicked pen.
Her modus operandi is straightforward. People tell her stories, which purport to be true, and she conflates them all into a single 24-hour narrative, told by a fictional restaurateur who owns three fictional establishments, Le Bar, La Table and Le Restaurant, in central London.
At its core, then, this is journalism, but given a novelistic structure and sheen. Everything that could happen does, to the point of absurdity. Yet each individual catastrophe has the ring of truth.
Edwards-Jones gets away with stories far more bizarre than anything you would believe in a novel. Sometimes you laugh out loud at the outrageousness of it all.
So our unnamed narrator must deal with a fist-fight in the kitchen between two of his chefs, visits by a newspaper critic (lunch) and a Michelin inspector (dinner), a raid by immigration officials, a fake booking by a Mr “Jack Russell” whose phone number turns out to be that of Battersea Dogs’ Home, an explosion of raw sewage on to the kitchen floor, at least one catastrophic office party, the possible defection of his best maitre d’, and an elderly customer dying at the table, fortunately of natural causes. This is as well as all the drinking, drug-taking and sexual rampancy behind the scenes. If anyone did have a day like this one, they would spontaneously combust.
Along the way, though, we learn a few tricks of the trade. Have you ever found yourself choosing the second cheapest wine on the menu because it was too embarrassing to ask for the cheapest? Well, so has everybody. Restaurants know this, so they mark up the second cheapest especially.
And the most expensive dishes on the menu aren’t the most lucrative. It’s the side dishes that bring in the cash. If you just have a big meaty main course the restaurant is barely breaking even, but if you also have a side plate of broccoli and a mint tea afterwards, profit margins are back on course.
It is, in short, a moral vacuum, in which everyone is ripping off everyone else, doing dodgy deals, poaching staff, stealing anything that isn’t nailed down.
In more laboured hands this could have made for grim reading, but Edwards-Jones’s mission is to amuse and entertain, and behind even the most scabrous stories there’s an unexpected generosity of spirit. You end up liking these not particularly likeable people, who after all are just cooking us food. – Daily Mail