Toast (22 page)

The jewel in the hotel's crown was Aphrodite's, a small, formal French restaurant ‘done out' in deep purple and gold. For those of us who worked in the banqueting rooms or the cut and come-again carvery, Aphrodite's remained something of a mystery. The small tables were set with silver that glistened in the candlelight, and the waiters – dark, exclusively French or Italian and impossibly cute – moved around the tables with that easy professionalism that can spot a woman about to leave the table or a cigarette that needs lighting seconds before it happens. The place ran like a well-oiled engine. None of us from the plebeian quarters of banqueting were allowed to so much as peep behind its velvet-curtained entrance.

I longed to taste the food whose scents wafted through when Aphrodite's purple curtain swooshed open to permit a guest to enter or leave. The smells were the results of the chemistry you get when you mix brandy, shallots, cream and French cooks together with the fumes from a metholated spirit lamp. This magical whiff was the result of the then fashionable habit of cooking food in front of the guests, in a shallow copper pan over a silver spirit lamp set on a side table.

The most exalted of all lamp cookery was the making of steak Diane – batted-out slices of beef, fried with butter, finely chopped shallots, brandy, stock, smooth mustard,
lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce and, invariably, though quite incorrectly, cream. The smell from the spirit stove as the chopped shallots were being softened in the melted butter was one that is for ever imprinted on the memory of anyone who has ever been to such a restaurant. Once the brandy had ignited (a trick which never failed to impress the gin, tonic and peroxide crowd) the steak was plated, the sauce poured over and the dish put in front of the customer while the food was still sizzling.

This was show-off cooking of the highest order. Its point was to be as rich, flamboyant and alcoholic as possible. The average meal went something like this: a round of gin and tonics in the lounge bar, followed by a bottle of Asti Spumante with the first course – usually crab bisque or prawn cocktail; a bottle of Mouton Cadet with the steak Diane; and then crêpes Suzette – an equally alcohol-laden recipe of pancakes flashed at the table in brandy, orange and lemon juice and marmalade – hotly followed by brandies warmed over the spirit stoves. God alone knows how anyone got home.

I so wanted to taste that steak Diane. I could have made it myself in the staff kitchen but it wouldn't have been the same; the chichi splendour of Aphrodite's seemed an essential seasoning. In a somewhat desperate attempt I booked a table under an anonymous name for me and a sweet, doe-eyed waitress called Linda, who for some reason had become besotted with me. She had already proved herself to be up for pretty much anything. The waiters in
Aphrodite's seemed from another, distant world and were unlikely to recognise a couple of staff from the banqueting rooms. We turned up in our best clothes – she looked fabulous in navy-blue and white Laura Ashley, a black Alice band in her hair and enough make-up to qualify for the job of Buttons in a provincial production of
Cinderella.
I was less convincing, though I had shaved off the pathetic tufts of bumfluff that sprouted from my chin and of which I was strangely proud; I even went so far as to buy a new shirt specially for the occasion. I also doused myself in enough Eau Sauvage to bring tears to the eyes of anyone within six feet.

We walked briskly, heads down, through the hotel lobby and down the thick red stair carpet to the restaurant bar, trails of Christian Dior following close behind. We took our table, a tiny one slap bang in the middle of the room, where we were handed menus the size of Switzerland. Barely bothering to look at the display of dishes I ordered confidently for both of us, like I had done it a thousand times before. ‘We'll start with the seafood pancake and a crab bisque, then we'll both have the steak tartare with creamed spinach and pommes allumettes. Oh, and a bottle of Beaujolais Villages, thank you.' I couldn't wait.

The seafood pancake was rich but quite the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. Tiny prawns and juicy mussels wrapped up in a soft pancake, the creamy sauce slowly oozing out as I cut through the crêpe. Once our plates were cleared the waiter, who was, to be honest, being
a bit over-friendly with my girlfriend, pulled up his little side table. Another waiter brought several dishes on a white-clothed tray and laid them down one by one.

I am not sure exactly when I realised I had ordered steak tartare instead of steak Diane. I remember believing that the raw minced beef, the raw egg yolks and the Tabasco sauce would somehow manage to become my longed-for steak Diane right up to the moment the waiter proudly put the results in front of me. I looked down at the plate of raw, pink mince with the two perfect golden egg yolks in the middle, like birds in a nest. I suddenly realised that I could hear every voice in the room, even whispered conversations several tables away, loud and clear, yet I couldn't hear a single word my girlfriend was saying. I felt cold, then hot, then cold again. The little egg yolks seemed to be looking up at me, laughing. Then everyone was laughing. My father's face flashed across my plate, laughing. Little beads of sweat began to appear on my brow. My head started to swim. I felt as if I was drowning in a cocktail of Christian Dior and the fumes from the spirit stove on the next table. ‘Are you all right, you've gone all white?' said Linda.

The next thing I knew I was lying outside on the marble steps of the hotel, slowly coming round in the warm summer air, feeling white, cold, shaky and sticky.

To this day I have never managed to taste steak Diane.

The chefs at the hotel were all in their twenties, though some of them acted considerably younger. For many of us – and for me – it was the first time away from the watchful, hopeful eyes of our parents, which allowed us to drink, smoke and shag at will. The flip side of the coin was that we never had any clean socks or pants. It also meant we grew our hair longer than was perhaps wise. At one point mine touched my shoulders, fine when it was a bit greasy and stuck to my head, but bad news after a wash when I suddenly had more hair than Farrah Fawcett-Majors.

No one ever really dated at the hotel. You never managed to go out for a drink or to see a movie. You just worked all day, slept in the two hours you got off between clearing away lunch and setting up for dinner, then met up in bed at night. Every night. On your days off you just slept (and slept, and slept), tucked up under the sheets, trying to get over the previous seventy-two hours' work and six sleepless nights.

If the hours sound grim let me tell you that life itself was anything but. It is truly amazing just how much you can put up with when you are getting regular sex. Seventy-two hours a week is fine so long as it is punctuated with copious quantities of hot, sticky summer-nights' shagging. That, I now know, is why so many hotels have live-in accommodation. It's the only way they can get any staff. ‘Accommodation
available' after a job advertisement is the proprietor's way of letting prospective staff know that no matter how isolated the hotel they will still get laid.

The problem with having quite so much sex is that, like ice cream, you just want more and more. There is never a point at which you say, OK, enough's enough. One night, just before I went to my room, I slipped up the back stairs to the empty banqueting kitchen to sneak some supper. I had pinched a couple of soft bread baps from the carvery kitchen and fancied a sandwich with some of the rare roast beef I had seen them slicing and laying out on silver trays for the next day's conference. I thought nothing of the cold-room door being open, such sloppiness was hardly unusual among the trainee chefs. There, in front of the silver trays of cold roast beef was Terry, one of the sweeter young chefs, his back towards me. He glanced fleetingly over his shoulder, a coy, schoolboy-style grin slowly widening from ear to ear. Terry was just popping his cork into a slice of soft, rose-pink roast beef.

I get a phone call from my brother. He says that Joan has sold up and moved back to the Midlands, and she is suggesting that I move in with her. Quite where she thinks I will work in her neck of the woods is a mystery, and Adrian cracks a joke about me getting a job at the Wimpy Bar. I
don't like to point out that a girlfriend and I have just been banned from the one in Worcester after a drunken binge that ended up with her throwing up over her Coca-Cola float. I point out that they may not even have a Wimpy in Wolverhampton.

I have no idea why Joan should want me on the scene again, assuming that she has, like me, said good riddance. I can only assume that the hoped-for reunion with her family hasn't happened or has not turned out to be quite the picnic she would have wished. I am not sure why, but the thought makes me sink into a black hole. I know how much she was looking forward to meeting up with her two estranged daughters again, and indeed, just after Dad died, there had been a flurry of letters and Barbara, the eldest, had made brief contact. Joan would be distraught if this didn't work. Perhaps you can't just walk in ten years later and say ‘your dinner is on the table' as if nothing had happened.

I get a handful of coins from the bar and go to the telephone box in the staff quarters. I stand there for a full three or four minutes waiting impatiently behind a Spanish waiter, who is jabbering away at the top of his voice, the coins getting sweaty in my hand. I am honestly not sure what I am going to say, I guess I just want to know she is all right. Then suddenly, as the waiter punches another coin into the slot, I turn and walk away.

When my father was alive our eating out had been confined to the Berni Inn in Hereford. We usually skipped starters (I think we once had the honeydew melon but Joan said it wasn't ripe) and went straight to steak, fat ones that came on an oval plate with grilled tomatoes, onion rings, fried mushrooms and wonderful, fat golden chips. We drank lemonade and lime except for Joan who had a Tio Pepe, and then had ice cream for afters. Sometimes my aunt would take me to the Gay Tray in Rackham's store in Birmingham where we would queue up with our gay trays and choose something hot from the counter, poached egg on toast for her, Welsh rarebit and chips for me. There had been the odd afternoon tea taken in seaside hotels (two-toasted-teacakes-and-a-pot-of-tea-for-two, please) and tea taken at garden centres (four-coffees-with-cream-and-four-slices-of-coffee-cake, if you would) and, once, a memorable tea eaten in Devon with slices of home-made ginger cake, scones, cream and little saucers of raspberry jam. But that was it really. Eating out was something other people did.

My last year at catering college I met Andy Parffrey (boxer's nose, public school, played rugby at weekends). He had a stunningly beautiful girlfriend called Lorella. ‘You can't possibly marry,' I pleaded one lunchtime over too much lager in the college pub. ‘Lorella Parffrey sounds like
something you'd eat with a long-handled teaspoon.'

Andy was no more impressed with our syllabus of œuf mayonnaise, sole véronique and sauce Espagnole than I was. We sat together, cooked together, cribbed together. We even took an evening job together at a gentle Queen Anne country house where they served cheese soup, veal cutlet and ‘desserts from the trolley'. But Andy knew about things I had never even dreamed of: restaurants where they baked salmon in pastry with currants and ginger, where pork was grilled and topped with melted Gruyère, and where they brought brick-red fish soup to the table with toasted croutes, grated cheese and rust-coloured rouille. He spoke of restaurants with names from another world: the Horn of Plenty and the Hole in the Wall, the Wife of Bath and The Carved Angel.

While Andy and I spent our weekdays together, his weekends and evenings were reserved strictly for Lorella. It took weeks of persuading to get him to go out for dinner, but when he did it became a regular thing. We clocked up visits to several of the better known local restaurants, and would often drive for an hour or more to get to some place on which
The Good Food Guide
had bestowed its prestigious ‘pestle and mortar'. Each meal was a gorgeous discovery: tongue with a verdant green sauce; crab tart with buttery pastry; fish soup brought to the table in a white china tureen; quenelles of pike as big as meringues; rabbit with bacon and mustard sauce. We had main dishes that reeked of garlic and basil and rosemary and lemon. Puddings
flavoured with coffee and bitter chocolate, almonds and elderflowers. I had never imagined food like this, presented on simple white plates without tomatoes stuffed with peas or piped turrets of potato or roses made from tomato skins. This was food that was made simply to be enjoyed rather than to impress.

Thornbury Castle was surrounded by softly striped lawns and rows of Müller-Thurgau vines. As we drove through the arched gateway, we saw a woman approaching the back door with a wicker basket piled high with field mushrooms, and a young girl in jeans and a striped butcher's apron sprinting back from the walled garden with a handful of dill fronds. Walking towards the front door, me in a rather dodgy sage-green jacket, Andy in blue pinstripe and a tie with a knot as big as my fist, we caught the faintest scent of garlic coming from the open kitchen window. The summer air was still and warm and dense, heavy with garlic, mown grass, lavender, tarragon, framboise and sudden wafts of aniseed.

White wine came in tall glasses with long, thin stems, tiny beads of condensation frosting the outside; little anchovy puffs arrived fresh from the oven with a dish of fat olives the colour of a bruise. We sat on chairs at either side of the fireplace, admiring the tapestries, the jugs of lilies and the polished panelling. The handwritten menu offered familiar things: chicken liver pâté and onion soup, but also things that were new to me: chicken baked with
Pernod and cream, salmon with dill sauce, and lamb with rosemary and apricots. I chose chicken with tarragon sauce. Andy had the veal paupiette, which arrived the size of a Cornish pasty and with a dark, sticky sauce flecked with matchsticks of tongue, parsley and gherkins. The food was like that Joe Yates had talked of, food from another world.

Then something came along that was to change everything. It was the simplest food imaginable, yet so perfect, so comforting, soothing and fragrant. The dish contained only two ingredients. Potatoes, which were thinly sliced and baked in cream. There was the subtlest hint of garlic, barely present, as if it had floated in on a breeze. That pommes dauphinoise, or to give its correct title, pommes à la dauphinoise, was quite simply the most wonderful thing I had ever tasted in my life, more wonderful than Mum's flapjacks, Joan's lemon meringue, and a thousand miles away from anything I had made at college. Warm, soft and creamy, this wasn't food that could be a kiss or hug, like marshmallows or Irish stew, this was food that was pure sex.