Oh Broth Where Art Thou?

As soon as I stopped working, the tiredness set in and the chest infection that had been brewing turned into full-blown gammon flu (it started off as swine flu, but then I got cured).

I lay in bed wheezing, flicking through the latest cookery books. All the celebrity chefs had Christmas books out - 101 recipes for Brussels sprouts, and all that useful advice about how turkey leg meat takes longer than breast meat. Masterchef’s John Torode even had one just on beef or something. It was already half price.

Then I got a text message from Jules, saying the "air had been cleared with Graham" whatever that meant, and I could return to work. I didn't really want to go back to the heat, stress and long hours, but I missed it somehow, and besides I couldn't think of anything else to do with my life.

When I walked through the kitchen door, half expecting a punch from Graham, I glanced over to my station and spotted Marcus making mash - using my special sieve. He had a smarmy look about him too.

“I’m on veg now,” he said.

It had all been decided in my absence. I was to move onto starters under the guidance of Stewie, and then after a couple of weeks take over the section myself. Graham was being moved to sauce, cooking the meat and fish for mains.

I looked over to where Marcus was trimming broccoli into florets, and asked whether he’d remembered the parsnip chips. I knew that section inside out.

Graham turned up the next morning, and we were shoved together and made to shake hands. Something had changed - he appeared less arrogant than usual. He barely spoke for the rest of the day. Running the grill was new territory for him, and he was nervous about messing things up.

One night, I gave Stewie a lift home, and we chatted about how I was finding it on starters. He looked at me and smiled.

“You know, now Graham's learning something new...and in the same boat as you...”

He let the sentence float. I frowned, trying to read him for clues.

“If you get fast at it, I mean, well, after all the things he’s said and done to you…

I still didn't know what he was burbling on about.

"For fuck's sake," he said finally. "You can really BURN HIM! Churn out the starters! Force him to ask you to slow down – that’s when you’ll really know you’ve got him. He said the same thing to me when I started on sauce; he said ‘I’m gonna BURN you!’ But there was no way he was going to get me on sauce! But, now’s your chance...”

From that day, I made it my mission to get as fast as I could. Everything would still look good – I’d only take the short-cuts I could get away with – but the dishes would fly out as fast as those waitresses could carry them.

To make my job harder, the starters changed after the first week. Out went the boudin blanc (no doubt a throwback to the AA visit), the goat's cheese wontons, the scallops with pea veloute and white truffle oil, the confit duck terrine, and sun-dried tomato risotto.

In came tuna nicoise, scallops with vierge sauce, home-made gravlax with buckwheat blinis, smoked salmon salad, goat’s cheese parcels with sweet chilli relish, game terrine, confit duck spring rolls, and a butternut squash soup with curry oil and vegetable samosa garnish.

The restaurant was half-empty - most of our trade had gone up the road to the Rosie - so to drum up business we started offering a two-course specials menu for £12. The owner, worried about the £5 credit crunch lunch down at the Eel, wanted to cut the price to £9.95 and include dishes like sausage and mash. But Jules convinced him we’d lose our precious Rosette if we went down that route.

I had some control over the menus. There were three starters and three mains on the specials, and they had to be cheap to make. And pretty soon they were all I was making - gravlax, confit chicken terrine, smoked salmon salad, confit duck risotto, goat’s cheese parcels, and always a soup.

The soup varied between game consommé (made from the pheasant carcasses) with tagliatelle of yellow and orange carrot; mushroom soup with a morel-infused cappuccino foam; and cauliflower and smoked garlic soup with herb oil. The most popular was a tomato soup I made out of red onions and tinned tomatoes. It was described on the menu as roasted tomato soup, even though it hadn't been near an oven.

I would make enough of each soup to fill two four-litre containers. I’d start by simmering a white mirepoix of onions, celery, garlic and leeks (white parts only) over a low heat for 30 minutes. Then I’d add three or four bay leaves, and water. Once it was simmering, the relevant vegetable went in - broccoli, cauliflower, or butternut squash - then I’d remove from the heat as soon as the vegetables were cooked.

Once cooled, I fished out the bay leaves, whizzed the soup in a blender, and poured the puree through a fine sieve. I always asked to use Marcus’s secret sieve for that, knowing how much he feared to lose it.

I was told to season the soup at the end. I’d add a pinch or two of salt and black pepper, and then repeat until just right. Adding salt in gradual stages has a peculiar effect on a soup – it suddenly turns from an amalgam of lost tastes, to a clear flavour in just a few granules of salt. (If you're interested, there is a section on it in Herve This's book Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavour. He did an experiment with salt by giving people seasoned and unseasoned soups. Without the salt, they found it difficult identifying the dominant soup flavour.)

I'd then make the garnishes. For the mushroom soup, you infused three or four dried morels in hot milk, whisked it up, and spooned white foam over the soup to get a cappuccino effect. Then you sprinkled it with mushroom dust, made by drying wild mushroom stalks under the lights. For the broccoli soup garnish, you made a smooth paste of Roquefort cheese and lemon juice, and spread it over a crouton. For the cauliflower, you deep-fried a basil leaf and laid it on top in a circle of herb oil.

But the prettiest by far was the game consommé. You put a small ball of spinach in the middle of a wide, shallow soup bowl, stuck a ball of yellow and orange carrot tagliattelle on top, and carefully poured the soup round it.

The butternut squash soup went on the a la carte menu and was more complicated. It came with a miniature vegetable samosa and curry oil. You put a dab of filling - curried onion and mashed potato - on one end of a strip of spring roll wrapper, and folded it into a triangle.

You made the curry oil by toasting, then grinding coriander seeds, cumin seeds, a piece of cinnamon stick, mace, turmeric, cayenne pepper and curry powder. It came out a vibrant yellow colour.

Like the herb, lemon, port, and balsamic reductions I used for other garnishes, it was kept in a squeezy bottle. A gastro-pub isn’t anything without doodles on plates. That was the difference between us and the £5 lunches at the Eel -a few pence of oil thrown on by some cack-handed Banksy.

Chefs And Restaurant Inspectors

We were half-way through lunch service when Liz, the restaurant manager, came waddling into the kitchen like an asthmatic hippo. The only time I'd seen her move quickly, was to grab someone's chips. Something was very definitely up.

“The AA inspector’s in there!” she gasped.

“How do you know?” Jules snapped. His face had turned a pale, porridgey colour.

“I recognise him from last time...he comes in sometimes with his wife and kids...but he’s on his own this time!”

“Fuck! What’s he having?”

Liz stole a chip from a plate. “No idea.”

“Well go and find out!”

She disappeared and returned with the rest of the Dereks a few minutes later.

“The boudin blanc and the lamb,” they chimed. They were all enjoying the drama immensely.

Jules looked round the kitchen in panic, and shouted at us to clean up. "I want to see bubbles everywhere!" he screamed.

Inspectors sometimes ask for a tour of the kitchen, and he was taking no chances. He ranted and raved for a bit then yelled at me to make sure the veg was perfect.

All I had to do for the first course was pan-fry some spinach in clarified butter and season it. Jules fried the boudin blanc sausage and let it cook through at the bottom of the grill. He rested it under the lights on the pass then cut it into five slices on the diagonal.

He put the slices in a circle around a small mound of spinach. He tried the spinach as he did it, and looked slightly surprised. “That’s fine,” he said. He grabbed my pan and pushed me out of the way. He wasn’t taking any chances.

He formed the warmed, red onion marmalade into a quenelle using two spoons, balanced it on the spinach, then spooned grain-mustard veloute sauce around the plate with tear-shaped twirls. It was finished off with a sprig of chervil, like most of our dishes.

The dish went out and we got to work on the lamb. I can’t remember if there were other orders at the time, but for 30 minutes there seemed to be only one customer in the restaurant. So much for everything Jules had said about "customers being more important than awards". A few minutes later, Liz returned with an empty plate and said he’d enjoyed it.

I picked out three identical broccoli florets, and cut three carrot batons to exact length. I even thought about using a ruler to measure them. I put a fresh pan of cassoulet beans on the flat-top, and heated them through. I was worried about the beans. They didn’t have the same zip as the first batch, and I’d secretly pepped them up with ketchup and Worcester sauce. I just hoped the inspector wouldn’t notice.

Jules roasted the lamb and let it rest under the lights. I was about to plate up, when he pushed me out of the way again and snarled: “I’ll do this!”

He nestled a mound of beans in the middle of the bowl and put a triangle of carrot batons around them. Where each baton joined, he placed a broccoli floret, and then put the lamb in the middle and poured jus over it.

After the meal, the inspector flashed an ID card, and summoned Jules into the dining room. He was gone about 15 minutes. None of us knew if that was a good or bad sign.

Eventually, Jules came back in with his head down. None of us looked up. Then he walked over to my station and glowered. He looked ready to bite, and I scanned my station for knives and hot pans. Then he lunged forward and hugged me.

“That wasn’t at all stressful,” he whispered.

“Really?”

“No, I was shitting myself!”

It was the first time he'd let his guard down, and for a minute he looked like a pudgy schoolboy. His eyes were red and watery.

“That was my first inspection," he said. "Well the first one as a head chef!”

We had kept our only AA Rosette. The inspector said the standard was one Rosie, bordering on two. He had asked about the boudin blanc, and Jules had to admit it was bought in. He said all the veg was perfectly cooked, but the lamb “could have been a little pinker”. I did a whooping motion in my head. The veg was perfect, Jules' lamb wasn’t.

Jules was surprised, because if anything, we served meat on the raw side, and sometimes got the lamb sent back by squeamish customers. He said my cassoulet “was nice and spicy, but the beans themselves lacked something." What the hell were you supposed to do? Grow them yourself? At least he hadn’t noticed the ketchup.

The inspector loved the chocolate marquise dessert and declared it two Rosette standard. Helsta poked her nose in the air, as brazen as a dog at a fair. Jules kissed her and gave her the evening off.

I spent the rest of the day on a high. Although my role had only been minor, I was still part of the team that had successfully defended that precious Rosie. And my veg was perfect. More than that, we were verging on two. Who said awards didn't matter?