Too Old To Be A Chef?

I’ve been thinking a lot about cheffing recently, and whether my idea to get back into it is part of some sort of acute mental breakdown or, far worse, mid-life crisis.

I gave up my reporting job nearly two months ago now, and I’ve got a couple of restaurant trials lined up (more on that next time) but I still haven’t really got my hands dirty. And at my age, I shouldn’t be wasting any time at all. There is so much to learn...

But perhaps it is my age? Maybe I’m scared that I no longer have the energy to cope with what is undoubtedly a young man’s game? In a recent so-you-want-to-be-a-chef-style article, Anthony Bourdain wrote that anyone entering the trade in their early 30s was already too old.

I’m already eight years past that, but I suppose it really depends on what level of cooking you’re talking about. Eighteen hour days in Michelin restaurants are obviously out. But I’m not really interested in awards. And as an old chef friend from The Gull once said to me, “the catering business caters for everyone”.

By that he meant you could still indulge your passion for food by doing anything from running a simple sandwich shop or deli or pie and mash cafe to serving up trout candy floss for wacky celebrity-based cookery programmes (Heston please don’t disappear up your arse completely).

It doesn’t have to be the long hours and stress of a restaurant, there are lots of ways of doing it. Some even have better hours than “normal” jobs.

And just because you’re running a gourmet burger van (as I've been thinking of doing) and not a high-end restaurant doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it less, or be less creative, or take less pride in your food. As my stint at the Fat Duck proved, Michelin star restaurants can be very tedious, dull places to work in just banging out the same identical dishes night after night, all for the C-word that is consistency.

You can have far more fun in a bistro thinking of ways to use up scraps – and that to me is the truest and most worthwhile form of cooking: making ordinary ingredients taste great. Surely that’s why soup was invented? And soup, after all, is the best meal in the world.

I've been wondering about which path I should take, and whether the restaurant route is really for me. Then I started thinking about some of the passionate foodies I’d met on Twitter who’d also given it all up in their 30s or 40s to follow their cooking dream, and the different paths they’d taken.

There was Matt Follas (@matkiwi), the Masterchef winner who’d given up a lucrative IT job to open his own restaurant, The Wild Garlic in Beaminster, Dorset. He loves his job, and even though he has trained up chefs to cook for him, the long hours must take their toll.

There was @MsMarmitelover, who realised she was happiest cooking and opened a successful pop-up, the Underground Restaurant, in her London flat. Nice compromise because you don't have to be open every night.

There was Dave Ahern (@CorkGourmetGuy), an Irishman who decided to retrain as a chef after years of writing about food.

There was Tim Kinnaird (@DrTimKinnaird), who for some reason had ditched his job as a paediatrician to run a cake stall in Norwich.

And there were, of course, hundreds of food writers and produce makers determined to make a living out of their passion.

Indeed, friends have been asking me why I don’t just combine the cooking and journalism. But that seems like cheating somehow. I don’t want to just write about food, I want to cook it – and besides, how much is there to say about it? It’s only food after all. The art, surely, is in the doing?

But to plagiarise Beckett, I'll find a way...

You must go on.

I can't go on.

I'll go on.

Masterchef & The Call Of The Onions

I’ve been watching this year’s Masterchef final with a tad more enthusiasm than normal. Not so much googly-eyed Alex and his wonderful use of offal and, yawn, molecular gastronomy. He’s got his life in front of him. It’s the doctor and Dhruv, who are getting on a bit and have thrown in their jobs to pursue a life in food.

Whatever the outcome of tonight’s final (and don’t worry I won’t spoil it, but isn’t it pretty obvious who’s going to win?) Dhruv and his wife have vowed to open their own restaurant, but refreshingly after he’s learnt a bit more of the trade. And the gap-toothed doctor – who’s been put off by the long hours required in restaurant work – now wants to open a cake shop in Norfolk.

The cynics among you will no doubt say they can always go back to their old jobs. But throwing in a well-paid job during a recession is a pretty brave thing to do, and it makes me feel pretty miserable about my own sojourn into cooking, and why I chose to serve raw tuna of all things during my attempt to get through the regional heats on Masterchef.

It’s been something that’s been on my mind a lot lately. Not my dismal Masterchef application. The decision to hang up my apron and go back into journalism. Alright, I had eaten through my savings. And I had fallen in love with a woman, who was used to holidays in the Caribbean rather than Cornwall. But it was one of the hardest – and easiest – things I’ve ever done, going back.

My fellow hacks, of course, were delighted and ribbed me about “how the dream was over”. They said it broke their hearts to see me eating canteen food every day. But one news shift gave me nearly the same amount of money as a week spent cooking. I carried on a few days here and there knocking out dinner party dishes for rich clients (they used to bring in their own dishes so it looked like they’d cooked it themselves) kidding myself that I’d soon be back, maybe with my own restaurant or pub, but in the end I gave up the cheffing and before I knew it was working in news full-time on a good pension and decent health care.

The cooking went and my girlfriend left too. But it wasn’t all about her. I think the moment I finally lost faith in cheffing for a living was when I put my back out lifting a stock pot and had to spend my whole day’s pay on a 30-minute physio session. The physio spent 10 minutes of it on the phone talking about an injured horse.

And so here I am now, three years later, with a house and a mortgage. Well, it’s more of a building site really but it’s getting there. I bought it for the kitchen mainly, and put in a stove so big it could hold its own in a 40-cover restaurant. But I miss the cooking.

Like I said, it’s been filling my thought s a lot recently – the call of the onions. I only have to watch a Floyd re-run and it all seems so possible again – making a living from the thing you love, being a bon viveur without a care in the world, unshackling yourself from the mortgage and opening a little bistro somewhere, banging out good old fashioned classics from the attic. Coq au vin, cassoulet, venison stew with dumplings and dauphinois, razor shells like they cook them at that fish market in Barcelona, pan-fried lemon sole with butter sauce, proper steak and kidney pudding, I could go on.

Falling into bed with shattered limbs, and sleeping the sleep of the just. A trade where talent is rewarded, and promotion comes with hard work rather than the ability to brown nose the boss. And it’s the creativity I miss as well. I got disillusioned at the time, realising that the higher you got in the restaurant industry, the more it was about consistency and the ability to knock out the same identical dishes, whatever Hell unleashes. Yet there was still an art to it. Far more than the new world of formulaic, Twitter-fed, desk-bound journalism anyway. Or what passes in its name these days.

When I returned to the newsroom a few of the hacks muttered, “well, at least you’ve been learning something useful for the past two years.” The others just thought I’d been to prison. And I had learnt something. I was never going to be Marco Pierre White, even the flabby, out-of-practice, stock cube-hawking, crisp-peddler you see on your screens now, but I could throw a decent dinner party and serve up a damned good steak. In fact, I’d learnt a huge amount in those two years, and I sorely regretted not trying harder.

And that’s what I’ve been thinking about. Ludicrous, I know. But maybe I should have one last go? Put a lodger in the spare room, and hope to pay off the rest of the mortgage with a cooking job? Or just rent out the whole house and get a live-in cooking job near the sea?

I never did find that fisherman’s shack I wanted to cook at. Shucking scallops on the quayside, and haggling over crabs. My knife skills are still passable – I’ve been keeping them up to scratch, chopping onions and prepping tomato concasse in the evenings. But would I be brave enough to throw it all in again? There are only so many times you can go back. This time it might be permanent, this time it might have to work or I might find myself in my 60s with no house and just the state to lean on.

I want success, not TV shows or books or recipe columns, just contentment. But however hard I try I just don’t seem to find the courage. I asked to go part-time, but they said no. I asked to do freelance shifts, but they said the new boss would see it as disloyal giving up a “good job” to become a shifter. The only way was to give it all up, finally, and throw myself into cooking.

Maybe move to Spain and learn Spanish and cook tapas and go out after work with the crew and be happy? Not bitch about the boss and being overlooked for promotion. This winter has taught me one thing – I hate the cold and repressive gloom. You forget when you find yourself in a job like mine with no windows, that there are a number of ways to live your life, even in cheffing. I’ve been thinking about that guy I worked with at the Fat Duck who worked on billionaires’ yachts in France. He had a happy life, even if he was woken up at 3am to make sandwiches for pissed Russians.

But then the fear and doubt set in and I see it painfully for what it is – a man, ahem, approaching middle-age giving up a well-paid job, with a good pension and decent health care, and a nine-day fortnight, for a badly-paid job, with long hours and no guarantee of happiness.

Ah, the call of the onions. If only I could find the courage to get back out there again, and do it properly this time. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel alive. Offices do that to you, especially ones without windows. So, what do you think? I'd like to know, really I would...

The First Rule About Kitchen Scraps Is...

We were doing an early Christmas lunch for the local CID when things came to a head with Graham. I was finding it hard taking orders from a stroppy 19-year-old, and he would go berserk if I didn’t follow his exact instructions.

He was the most childish, and the most talented chef in the kitchen. And when I had started at the Gull all those weeks ago, Jules had warned me: “When he gets wound up, just ignore him, don’t say to him ‘calm down’ or anything, it just makes him worse...”

It seemed a pretty strange thing to say. But I'd given Graham a wide berth, ignored his tantrums, and he'd swiftly made me his bitch.

What irritated me most was his mumbling. And with my poor hearing and the extraction unit going all day and night, I found it impossible to hear his orders. Sometimes I pretended not to hear, but most of the time I just watched his lips move from across the room.

He would quickly raise his voice and get angry. He’d moan about how he hated cheffing, and wanted to do something else, anything else, with his life, but he still had a huge amount of pride in the food that went out. He had more pride than anyone else – even the star-chasing Jules.

It started when Cathy, the most obnoxious of the waitresses, wandered in half-way through service. She'd been touched up by a couple of the drunken rozzers, and her face was as sour as ever...

“Who sent out the terrine?”

She knew full well who was on starters, but she liked to stir things up.

“I did,” said Graham, slowly turning round to eyeball her. “Why, what’s wrong?"

“Well one of the customers would have preferred it if you’d taken the cling-film off.”

There were a few seconds of silence.

“Fucking hell!” he shouted, suddenly exploding, and kicking a fridge door. “Can we have that with a bit more sarcasm next time! It’s not as though this job’s not hard enough…”

He went into his usual tantrum about how he loathed cheffing. Then he exploded again five minutes later.

“The starters have gone on table four,” he mumbled at me from across the room.

“Sorry?”

“THE STARTERS HAVE GONE ON TABLE FOUR!” he screamed.

The change was more irrational than usual, and a hot flash of anger rose up inside me. This jumped-up, scary-looking gobshite was young enough to be my son. I rarely lost my temper, but I had a limit. I faced him from across the counter.

“Listen, we both don’t want to lose our temper!”

He walked over and stopped suddenly, his werewolf face next to mine. Just a chopping board and a knife separated us. His eyes took on a relaxed, dangerous look and he started nodding. He looked like he was trying to change into a wolf.

“I’m not losing my temper!” he screamed.

“That’s enough!” shouted Stewie from somewhere near us.

We both went back to work. But Graham made comments for the rest of service about the “repressive atmosphere” in the room.

Afterwards, Stewie took me aside as we cleaned down, and gave me a chat about how commis chefs weren't supposed to answer back. He told me to bite my lip next time, and just say 'yes, chef'. But he knew full well how hard I was finding it dealing with Graham.

“I’ve had to face him down a couple of times," he confided. "But if he ever went toe-to-toe with me, it’d only happen once...” he added menacingly.

It happened that night in the walk-in chiller.

I went across the road to stock up on purees when the chiller door closed behind me. The lights went out, a fan started whirring, and I was blasted with icy air. The panic hit straight away, and I heard muffled laughter outside.

I don’t know how long I was in there, long enough to get frostbite in my fingers and toes. I picked up a metal oil barrel and battered the door, but the noise was drowned out by the fan. Eventually light shone in and the door opened. Graham had taken a few steps back and was watching me carefully.

“That’s for answering back!”

"You what?"

His face changed again, and he leapt forward and grabbed my whites and pushed me back into the chiller.

I wasn't going back in there. I was terrified enough already...

I don’t know where it came from – it wasn’t a conscious decision as such – but my forehead slammed into his cruel mouth. He looked shocked. His lip was split and his mouth filled with blood. He swung at me, but I ducked. I wanted to strike back but my hands were frozen and I could barely form a fist.

His next punch hit, and then the next, but the adrenaline was pumping and I couldn’t feel a thing. Then he grabbed me, kneeing upwards to my groin, and tried to wrestle me to the floor. He was far stronger and soon the muscles in my arms were flagging as he spat and snarled.

He ripped a chunk of hair from the back of my head, and I spun round and elbowed him in the face. Then the rest of them burst in and separated us. It took three of them to hold Graham down until he stopped snarling.

Jules returned the next day and told me to take a couple of weeks off until things had calmed down. He told me it would be unpaid leave, but said that was my fault for "letting things get out of hand with Graham".

It would be the first time I’d been home for nearly three months, and I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there.