My Death Row Meal: Spanish Roast Lamb

I finally realised it the other night. I was wandering through the streets of Aguilas, a small, seaside town in southeast Spain, looking for a place to watch England get knocked out of the World Cup.

When I say was looking for the football, more than anything I was looking for something to eat. I hadn’t eaten all day. It was late at night. And opening times in Spain are always chaotic.

I walked back home and there she was. She was finally open. The old woman’s restaurant I’d heard so much about. The TV was on. Either she wasn’t showing the game, or it was half-time, but I was too hungry to care.

I looked at a rich-looking couple sitting outside, enjoying wine and a great spread of tapas. The hot evening air streaming down purple and the distant flicker of Venus brick-red.

Inside, the old woman was nagging at her husband to finish his cigarette and start on the washing up. He walked past me. World-weary, wine-shadowed eyes. He glanced at me with an expression that was hard to read, but seemed to say “don’t get married”. He scuttled off to the kitchen and I heard the clink of plates.

I looked at the tapas on the bar. 11.30 at night. Where else would you find food like that? I thought about Boris, the man who urged me to write a book about training to be a chef - a journey that failed miserably when I ran out of money and was forced to return to the 9 to 5 rather than the 9am to 5am.

He’d told me to buy an “old jalopy and scootle down to Spain and learn the knives”. “Spain,” I remember him saying breathlessly as he sank another oyster, “is the food capital of the world!” 

That was seven maybe eight years ago.

I ordered another beer and looked at the food again - meatballs in salsa, fried fish, hake roe, pimientos spread like oil paintings over clay. A similar hue to the sandstone cliffs that house the troglodyte caves where they once dried weed for baskets, and the hollows where the Romans fermented garum - a sort of Centurion’s Worcestershire sauce.

The old woman opened a huge metal oven, and the bar was filled with the smell of almond wood. She pulled out two huge steaks and headed to the rich couple’s table.

The game came on. No overpaid, half-time punditry from crisps-peddlers here, just adverts. Then I spotted it. The menu of the day. A huge roasting tray filled with potatoes the size of giants’ toes, and legs and shoulders of lamb - cooked not to pinkness, but to falling-away succulence.

She heaped a metal plate and put it in the wood oven to warm through, then asked whether I wanted salad to kick things off. She suggested pimientos.

A plate arrived with a basket of bread. Green and red streaks from Van Gogh’s palette, studded with black olives, and draped in garlic. Seconds later the peppers were snatched and the lamb arrived.

A whole front leg and parts of shoulder. Half a kilo of potatoes roasted not in the usual way, but more like fondant spuds - stewed in the lamb juices so the bottom was soft and the top wreathed in smoke and crisp from the fire.

It was incredible. I pulled off a huge strand of meat and munched. If I had one more meal - my Death Row Meal - this would be it. You'd hardly worry about the calories. The bone was thick, the meat was thick, the juice was thick, the fat was soon thick around my lips and hands.

The meat juices were seasoned with whole black peppercorns, sprigs of thyme and rosemary, the garlic papery and unpeeled. The taste was magical. Onions, a little white wine, but not much else. What else?

The lamb had been fattened on the nearby cliffs, munching samphire, wild rosemary and thyme. My word did this beast have flavour. I was half-way there, bursting. I picked up the leg bone like a troglodyte. Juice smeared, fat everywhere.

Uruguay scored again. “Goooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaal!” roared the Spanish commentator. His favourite part of the job. The stadium went wild. 

The dish deserved more applause. The woman asked me if I wanted postre. Just another cold beer. I washed my face, I washed my fingers, and then I told her what an excellent meal it was. She looked happy.

I sat outside, barely able to move. My stomach thrust towards Venus. The couple were now on gin and tonics and chocolate desserts. I looked at the sign. I hadn’t seen it earlier. There it was - asado cordero.

My bill came. Three beers, half a sheep and enough potatoes to sink a freighter for 16 euros. Where else in the world would you get a meal like that? Only in Spain. Only in Spain. Then the trap door fell open.

Jamie Oliver’s Twitter Account Hacked With Bogus Diet Adverts

Overweight healthy eating guru Jamie Oliver has had his Twitter account hacked with an advert for a diet fad that claims users can lose “23lbs of belly fat in one month”.

The celebrity cook tweeted a series of links to a bogus woman’s health magazine advertising the weight-shedding benefits of something called the Garcinia Cambogia bean diet.

His fans quickly noticed the hack, and minutes later Oliver deleted the messages, which said: “Lose 22lbs. of fffat in 29 days” followed by a link.

Oliver then sent out a tweet to his 3.3 million followers, saying: “Whoa sorry guys looks like i got hacked!! Sorry to all looking in to it now. JOXX”

Others used the opportunity to poke fun at the TV cook, with Luke Lewis writing: “Jamie Oliver's tweets are more lucid than usual this morning.”

An hour later, and without any apparent irony, Oliver then sent out a Twitter message to his fans plugging a new “naughty, filthy” chocolate cake for one of his many restaurant chains.

“Help me guys I'm Just about to put this chocolate cake on a menu for Jamies italian & its a really painfully good naughty filthy elegant chocolate dish what can I call it ???

“It's gotta be simple but a bit slutty any ideas ? I want a naughty play of death by chocolate ... Chocolate ???? Any ideas greatly appreciated and don't hold back I think it deserves to be a big rude love #jamie xxx”.

What a waste of a golden opportunity though, as chef Neil Rankin put it - breaking into Oliver’s Twitter account and just posting spam.

Restaurant Conman Jailed For Putting Pubic Hair In Curry

I've often found it incredible the lengths some people will go to get a free drink or meal. When I started my first job working behind a bar, I was warned about a customer who was renowned for trying to cadge free pints.

He was known all around the village where I grew up. A huge, button-eyed man with the longest eyebrows I've ever seen. He always wore a grubby tweed jacket covered in fag burns, and spoke with a wonderfully-rehearsed Woosterian accent.

On my first night, he pulled up in his invalid carriage and ordered a pint of real ale. He sniffed it, held it up to the light like a real ale enthusiast in a fisherman's jumper, then turned his back to the bar briefly and downed half the pint.

He turned back with foam on his nose and a look of absolute horror on his face, coughing and spluttering, and pointing at the now cloudy pint, and demanded another one. He pulled the stunt again, but this time I spotted him dropping in a pinch of flour from his pocket.

But it was small beer compared with the fraudster jailed today for trying to get a free curry from the Jamal Indian restaurant in Middlesbrough - by doctoring his lamb bhuna with pubic hair.

Lee Tyers, 40, from Yarm, was caught on CCTV putting his hands down his trousers as he sat in the restaurant and then garnishing his food.

He told staff he'd found the hair in his food in a bid to get out of paying his £39.55 bill.

Restaurant owner Jamal Chowdhury told the court he'd known Tyers for 18 years, but was owed £110 for unpaid meals.

The crook told staff he had cash to pay, before he and a friend ordered two lamb bhunas, pilau rice, naan bread, lager, a chapati and a shish kebab.

The pair ate most of their food, and then Tyers complained to a waiter about finding pubic hair in his bhuna. They then left the curry house without paying.

Mr Chowdhury told Teesside Magistrates' Court: "I told him all the staff have black hair and this is brown - it’s not our hair."

Tyers was found guilty of false representation and jailed for two weeks and ordered to pay £39.55 compensation.

MORE: Why You Should Never Send Back Food In A Restaurant

Restaurants And The Dangers Of Using Google Translate

I just heard a rather charming tale about a group of British pensioners who have just returned from a week’s holiday in northern Italy.

One night they went to eat at a small, family-run restaurant in the hills outside Florence. The owner could speak no English, but proudly translated his menu to them using Google Translate.

But it seems he got a trifle carried away after they’d left, and sent them this message to thank them for their custom...

:: My new, bestselling food book Down And Out In South East Asia is an adventure story, spiked with a heavy dose of backpacker noir, through the eateries, street food stalls, and hazy bars of Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Down And Out In South East Asia

Well it’s finally done. The book I mean. If you enjoyed my bestselling food book Down And Out In Padstow And London, about cooking in restaurants in the UK and the larger-than-life characters that inhabit them, then hopefully you’ll like the sequel Down And Out In South East Asia.

It sees the return of failed chef and hack Lennie Nash - this time setting off to eat his way through SE Asia, with a half-baked plan to buy a restaurant. 

Along the way, Lennie encounters a host of weird characters from frazzled bar owners to Walter Mitty CIA agents to seedy sexpats to ice zombies four years over on their visa.

The book is an adventure story, spiked with a heavy dose of backpacker noir, through the eateries, street food stalls, and hazy bars of Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Anyway, I’d be delighted if you read it. It’s only out as a Kindle book to start with, and costs £1.99 - about the price of half a lager in the UK now, I’m told. Go on, you’ll have a lovely warm glow inside knowing you’ve kept me in noodles for another day...CLICK HERE

Chef 'Tried To Kill 10 Kitchen Staff By Poisoning Staff Food'

A Spanish chef has been charged with trying to poison 10 of his fellow cooks over a six-year period by secretly adding toxic drugs to staff food.

The unnamed 55-year-old assistant cook, who worked at El Lavaderu bar and restaurant in the coastal city of Gijon in northern Spain for seven years, is accused of 14 counts of attempted murder and is being held in custody awaiting trial.

His kitchen colleagues phoned police in October last year when they became suspicious after repeatedly falling ill. The only people at the cider house not to share symptoms were the suspect and his girlfriend, who also worked there.

Officers tested plates used for staff meals and found traces of calcium cyanamide, a potent chemical used to treat chronic alcoholism, the Daily Telegraph reported. It causes sickness and palpitations if mixed with alcohol and can have fatal results if taken long-term.

They are also re-examining the death of the former head chef who died from a heart attack in May 2011, and may exhume his body to see if there are traces of calcium cyanamide.

The previous owner also suffered a heart attack before selling the premises last year, and his wife suffered mysterious bouts of ill-heath. Both recovered after leaving the business.

Another chef has been to hospital three times over the last year and several other kitchen workers have frequently called in sick.

Police said they suspected "rancour" was the motive after reports there had been frequent arguments in the kitchen.

The current owner, Florentino Pérez, told Europa Press he also suffered from the poisonings but never imagined the suspect was responsible.

"People loved him," he said, adding that the chef had been involved in a number of charities in the city. He confirmed the suspect, who suffered from alcoholism, was fired a month before he was arrested, but said that was due to a slump in business.

Sushi Chef Faces 67 Years In Jail For Selling Endangered Whale Meat

A head chef faces up to 67 years in jail after he was allegedly caught in an undercover sting selling illegal whale meat at a trendy sushi restaurant in California.

Kiyoshiro Yamamoto, 48, from Culver City, is accused of nine counts of conspiracy to import and sell endangered Sei whale meat from 2007 to 2010, a violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. 

Another chef, Susumu Ueda, 39, from Lawndale, and the restaurant’s parent company, Typhoon Restaurant Inc, have also been charged. Ueda faces up to 10 years' jail, and Typhoon a fine of up to £800,000.

The now-closed Hump restaurant was allegedly filmed by the team behind Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, which features covert scenes of the barbaric annual dolphin hunt in Japan (see trailer below).


 

One of the activists had been tipped off by friends in the music industry that whale meat was being served at the £200 a head restaurant in Santa Monica. They went along there with hidden cameras during the Academy Awards ceremony in 2010, and say they were given thick, pink slices of whale on the omakase menu, where chefs choose a selection of dishes for customers to try.

In the footage, the waitress can be heard calling the meat “whale”. It was also referred to by its Japanese name, kujira. The pair put the £40 dish in a bag and sent it off for DNA analysis to the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University.

Scientists confirmed it was Sei whale, which are endangered but hunted in the North Pacific under a controversial Japanese programme that allows the killing of up to 1,000 whales a year under the guise of scientific research.

Police then carried out their own undercover operation and broke up the alleged smuggling operation. According to court papers, staff said the meat came from the boot of a Mercedes parked outside the restaurant.

Many top sushi restaurants serve unusual fish imported from Japan, and whale meat is often found in Tokyo markets. But campaigners said they had never heard of it being served in an American restaurant.

The Hump – apparently named after the aviation slang name for the Himalayas rather than the type of whale it (allegedly) sold - closed soon after the scandal.

On its website, bosses described the omakase menu as a “culinary adventure…created for you unlike any that you have previously experienced!” They added: “If you are truly adventurous (and have NO allergic or religious restrictions), we request that you leave yourself in our hands.”

Given there are only 54,000 Sei whales left in the world, it was a pity they didn’t mention ethical and ecological reasons as well.

Celebrity Chefs’ Farts: The 2013 Food Trend Everyone Missed

After being bombarded with endless listicles predicting food trends for 2013, I wonder if there’s one that’s been left off? Or let off. And by that, I mean celebrity chefs’ farts. Perhaps sealed in vac-pack bags and poached gently in a sous vide water bath at exactly 37.2C for 37 minutes and then carefully unsealed at the table to be sniffed eagerly while licking a shit-caked brick served by a cook who talks about himself in the third person?

Eau de Heston? Ramsay No.5? And what about an iPod playing the actual sound of the famous chef’s trump that created such a umami-bubbling bouquet as thrill-seeking, trendsetter diners tuck into the food his slaves have cooked in his own name?

I’m joking, of course, but it does give me the opportunity to point out once again how many bullying, megalomaniac, deviant psychos you’ll find in professional kitchens. I wrote about this in my book Down And Out In Padstow And London about the insane characters you find behind the stove and the abuse they regularly inflict on their staff.

But I was still surprised to read about the actions of an apparently fairly well-known American chef who started out on a culinary mission five years ago to fart on every one of his 37 employees - including his accountant - and to chronicle his attacks in some sort of bilious journal, the same way a stalker might keep disturbingly detailed, breathless notes of interactions with victims.

The mystery carrot chopper claims to have had one or two shows on something called the Food Network, which narrows him down to about 100,000 and counting, because everyone’s a celebrity chef now aren’t they. You only have to do a quick news search on Google to find idiots you’ve never heard of donating mince pies they’ve incredibly made themselves - in their own time, and out of the very goodness of their heart - for some charitable cause and a few lines in the local paper.

The chef, who claims to have a restaurant in New York’s Meatpacking District, apparently even has a colour code for the offending farts he forced his employees to inhale, and has recorded his parps in a “rant and rave” section on Craigslist.

In the first strike, inflicted on a lowly kitchen worker on January 21 2008, he says: “It was hot as hell in the kitchen that night, sometimes I like to turn off the air conditioning to give my staff a bit of a stir, it makes their blood flow, their tempers flash, but for some reason, their discomfort turns out better quality food.

“So with all the air off, there is no air flow in our downstairs kitchen, and its small and cramped and really, really fucking hot, even in January. We have our plates in the warmer under our pass, so i was helping my hot apps guy plate a new fungi misti when it happened.

“He had the pan in his right hand, and we both reached to bend over to get the hot plate, i got there first, so he inhaled the entire hot air load that i let roar out of my pants. It was bold, loud, and completely unapologetic...”

He was so delighted, he decided to fart on the rest of his kitchen crew in alphabetical order of their surnames. One by one. And two days ago, his quest was complete.

“I think it took them out of whatever musical they thought they were living in, and made them alive, made them smell, made them want to throw up for a valid reason,” he muses.

“I think all farts should have a color assigned to them, because you know when that one fart comes out and lingers in the air and wont leave, I mean its obvious that is a green fart. Everyone should know this by now, its even documented in cartoons.

“A red fart is a spicy one, probably incurred by some type of spicy ethnic food with a great amount of chilis and onions. A yellow fart, well these are worse on the farter, than they are on the fartee. These are sick farts, the ones that are on the verge of being sharts. Just imagine the fart that comes after downing like gallon of vodka, eating like 5 gyros on st. marks, then bagging a hooker named natasha, who acts like she is from russia etc etc.”

The chef - who describes himself as “definitely known in and around NYC” and brags that he has had “several specials on foodnetwork (sic)” - promises to detail the story of each fart over the next 37 days. Well, he would have done if his odious postings hadn’t already been removed by Craigslist. If his tales are true, let’s hope there were lawyers reading...

Restaurant Apologises For Foul-Mouthed Twitter Rant At Customer

A Dublin restaurant is the latest eatery to find itself at the centre of a social media row after calling a disgruntled customer an “arsehole” on Twitter.

Cinnamon, an upmarket cafe and wine bar in Ranelagh, issued a grovelling apology and said it had disciplined the staff member who sent out the insulting tweets.

The unnamed worker saw red during a particularly busy Sunday service when blogger Sean Mongey sent out a message on Twitter, saying he had been waiting in the “pretentious crèche” for 40 minutes and his food still hadn’t arrived.

Cinnamon replied with a snooty: “We don’t have a problem that needs to be solved we are Dublin’s busiest restaurant on Sunday...Expect delays.”

When the customer threatened to take his business elsewhere, the family-friendly restaurant replied: “Please do. You’ll be one less person in the Q.”

The staff member then added for good measure: "Here's something else for you to re tweet. You're an arsehole. Why don't you come in and introduce yourself to us."

Six hours later, the restaurant deleted the offending tweets and issued an apology on its Facebook page, offering in a self-effacing style while also appearing to enjoy the attention, that it would be serving coffees for one euro for the next week to diners who mentioned “Twittergate” while ordering.

“We wish to formally apologise to the customer, who we accept had a legitimate complaint,” the statement said. "We are a very busy restaurant and this past weekend had 50% more customers than a normal weekend and were overwhelmed by this.

“Staff morale is very important to us and has been severely affected by this incident. We employ over 50 staff and would not wish to jeopardise their livelihood."

Seems a bit of a storm in a coffee cup, compared with the foul-mouthed Twitter rants an unknown blogger was subjected to last week by Claude Bosi and his celebrity chef chums after complaining about his crab starter at the French cook’s London restaurant Hibiscus.

Bosi, Tom Kerridge, and Sat Baines dubbed James Isherwood a “cunt”, with Kerridge adding: “Smash him in, chef Bosi.”

None of them have apologised, as far as I know, so you have to applaud Cinnamon restaurant for doing so over a much milder mauling. But the way the blogger has relentlessly milked the story over the past few days it makes you wonder whether they might have had a point.

A Message In A Bottle To Rick Stein

You meet some very strange people in Cambodia. It’s a place full of misfits and loners. Expats escaping from something, or looking for something, and nearly always reinventing themselves in the process. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever come across such a high concentration of alcoholics, junkies, perverts, arseholes, and compulsive liars.

For instance, I met a guy the other day who said he was the executive chef of a group of luxury hotels. He walked into the bar, introduced himself, and then held court on his barstool telling us how difficult it was drumming the basics of hygiene into his Cambodian cooks. We got chatting and I told him about my dismal failure retraining as a chef and the book, Down And Out In Padstow And London, I’d written about my experiences.

I told him how the cheffing door had been opened when Rick Stein agreed to let me do a week in his Seafood Restaurant in Cornwall. The executive chef suddenly butted in.

“He’s one of my best friends!” he beamed. “He even sent me a long email when Chalky died. He loved that dog. He was devastated.”

He told me they’d done their chef training together in France, and hinted at the drunken nights they’d had. I listened on, but was thinking of something else. I’d been wanting to send the celebrity chef an email thanking him again for the opportunity he gave me, and how if he hadn’t, my book would probably never have been written.

But I’d lost Stein’s email address and knew if I sent a message through his PR people it would probably never get to him. I’d have more chance of sending him a message in a bottle from one of Cambodia’s soon-to-be-developed Robinson Crusoe islands.

So when the executive chef eventually paused to take a swig of beer, I asked if he’d mind passing my thank you letter on to the TV chef. He handed me a smart business card with his email on it.

“Not a problem,” he said, “Oh, we had some times together!”

Then he stopped suddenly and looked slightly angry and bitter.

“Do you know the difference between him and me? Do you know how he got to where he is and I didn’t?” He didn’t wait for an answer: “Luck!”

A couple of days later I wrote a thank you letter to Stein and emailed it to the executive chef. I didn’t hear anything back. Not even anything to say he’d got it. Then a couple of weeks passed and my suspicions were finally confirmed when I was back in the same Irish bar talking to the owner Ronan.

He told me the executive chef had been in a few days before and tried some of his Irish stew - a dish tongue-in-cheekily described in his bar adverts as “the best Irish stew in Cambodia”.

We’d been chatting about the best way to cook it because the price of lamb out here - $47 for a small frozen leg imported from New Zealand - makes it impossible to make. At least at a price the cheapskate losers in Sihanoukville are prepared to shell out for. Goat would have been the next best option, but we couldn’t get hold of that, and when I jokingly suggested dog meat Ronan looked appalled.

“My dog would smell it! He’d never come near me again!” he whimpered.

So I told him to use beef instead, but to throw in a few anchovies to give it a richer flavour. He made the stew with the usual chunks of carrots, potatoes and onions, and then showed me his secret of mashing up a few of the spuds and putting them in a thin layer in the bottom of each bowl, and pouring the stew on top. It was a nice touch and kept the broth high in the bowl while allowing people to thicken the thin liquor to their liking without having to do the mashing themselves.

He told me the executive chef had raved about it in the pub. Ronan began laughing, his arched eyebrows wiggling away.


“‘Oh, he said, that’s a lovely bit of lamb! That's neck fillet isn't it?’ Fucking lamb! And he’s an executive chef! People were listening, so I just played on. What the fuck could I do? ‘I love lamb!’ he says. ‘It’s my favourite fucking meat.’ What the fuck! You couldn’t make that up now could you!”

No wonder the bloke hadn’t replied to my email. It probably wasn’t even his business card. The real executive chef was probably thinking who the hell is this idiot banging on about Rick Stein. I had to get the letter to him myself. The next day, I searched through my contacts list again for the TV cook’s email, and then decided to send a message to his press department, asking them if they would mind passing my letter on to Stein in between dunking digestives.

Surprisingly, I got an email from his PA the next day. She said she had forwarded the letter to Stein. And a week or so later, an email arrived from the celebrity chef, thanking me for my letter and saying: “I've heard a lot about the book and am ordering it.”

I can’t tell you how pleased I am. I’ve always liked the man. I know I rant about celebrity chefs and say they should all be napalmed, but like Fergus Henderson or the late Keith Floyd, who sparked the pandemic of TV cooks, he’s so different from the morons that plague our screens, newspapers, magazines, billboards, government campaigns, and stock cube adverts. He’s got a brain for a start.

Can you imagine Gordon Ramsay, James Martin, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or Gary Rhodes even talking to you unless there was something in it for them, let alone arranging for a stranger and complete novice to do a week in one of their restaurants? And the lesser known TV chefs trying to squeeze their way up the rat cage walls are even worse.

I wonder what Stein will think of my book? I think he comes across pretty well, even if I do mention him in my tirade about celebrity chefs never actually being in the kitchen. I know he’s touchy about the name Padstein too, and there’s plenty on that.

But I’m far harsher on other TV chefs like Heston Blumenthal, who I only saw once in the three weeks I worked at the Fat Duck, and that was just a glimpse of him on the stairs as he took a break from filming in the lab. He didn’t even come down to the prep room to shake our hands and thank us for working for free in his restaurant. I wonder if that nutter in the bar knows him as well?


Book Update:

I want to apologise for the very poor delivery times of the paperback version of my book Down And Out In Padstow And London. For reasons that are beyond me, Amazon have had problems distributing recent batches. It’s something to do with the wrong metadata being input, whatever that means. But Completely Novel who print my book have promised they are trying to sort it out.

I don’t know how long it will continue, but I’ve been told that books ordered through Amazon will arrive soon, and they will obviously not take your money until they do post the book to your address. To help remedy this, an eBay page has been set up to sell my book. So if you want the book in the next few days, then cancel your order at Amazon and buy the book HERE... For the eBook version click HERE...

Go Easy On The Ham Ramsay!

If Gordon Ramsay ever needed proof that he should get back into the kitchen and do what he’s good at, then he should take a long, hard look at his appalling acting in Love’s Kitchen, a film due out later this month with ‘straight-to-DVD’ written all over it.

It has already been dubbed by some movie critics as “possibly the worst film of the year”, and it’s barely June. It’s a formulaic mess of a tale about an up-and-coming London chef (played by Dougray Scott) who loses his wife in a car crash, and then moves to the countryside to turn a small pub into a gourmet restaurant as he tries to patch his life back together.

He falls in love with a beautiful restaurant critic (Claire Forlani), and is thwarted by a series of moustache-twirling bad guys, who try to drive him out of the village. Then it all ends happily ever after, if you haven’t walked out of the cinema by then.

But if the plot and toe-curling screenplay (“We all value the peace and quiet around here – I hope you’re not going to spoil it” ... “She’s mine, keep your hands off - or things could get really nasty” ... “Who do you think came to the council this morning on your behalf, and saved your bacon?”) isn’t enough to put you off, then Ramsay’s shockingly bad acting will be.

He’s so wooden, you’re half expecting the man from the Ronseal adverts to pop up. In fact, the only thing worse in the film is its original title, No Ordinary Trifle (yes, really!)

And what makes it so dire, is putting the celebrity chef in a film with such experienced journeymen. The exchanges are extremely painful, and I suggest if you are going to waste two hours of your life, then watch it on a plane because at least there’ll be a sick bag to hand.

And that’s what I mean about Ramsay’s out-of-control ego, and complete self-delusion. He has become so absorbed by fame, it makes me wonder if there’s anything he wouldn’t do for cash – however much of a pantomime horse he looks.

Ramsay hasn’t cooked in any of his restaurants for years (not since that lovely money from the TV people started rolling in) – I get the feeling that he somehow sees cooking as beneath him now – but he can still remember how to peel a carrot. And if push came to shove, I’m sure he could still run the pass at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, if the whole crew were taken ill and he was forced to work behind the stove at gunpoint.

Put Scott or Forlani in the kitchen, and they’d be as useful as a snooze button on a smoke alarm. So what makes Ramsay think he can put on the greasepaint and deliver a credible performance, anymore than Scott could serve up 40 beautifully-grilled lobsters in a professional kitchen?

Ramsay’s done loads on TV – shouting a lot like some strangely camp cartoon villain - but this is acting darling. Whoever cast him is clearly a sadist, but they’ve tried to make it easy for him, and as painless as possible for the long-suffering crew, by getting him to play himself in a sort of inspirational, Looking For Eric-style role as he urges Scott's Rob Haley to put his life back together. However the idea falls as flat as an eggless soufflé, because Eric Cantona can act, whereas Ramsay makes Vinnie Jones look like Laurence Olivier.

The whole thing is awful, and with the trailer they’ve unleashed ahead of its scheduled straight-to-DVD release in the US on June 7, and general release in the UK on June 24, it looks like the whole darn film's been crammed into a long, tedious - but unintentionally hilarious - three minutes.



It’s made me wonder whether Ramsay has actually got any friends left, or whether he’s surrounded himself with sycophants like some paranoiac, tin pot dictator. You regularly see him pictured with David Beckham, watching a game like two old buddies. But why has no-one said to him: “Look Gordon, I don’t know how to say this, but have you thought of laying off for a while...I mean you’re a cook not a fucking actor!”

At the end of the trailer, Ramsay (dressed in whites for some reason) looks straight into the camera, and says: “What the hell are you lot looking at? Get back to bloody work!”

It’s advice he should clearly think of taking himself.

But the funniest thing of all is they’ve spelt his name wrong in the closing credits. Says it all really...

MORE VIDEO: Rusty Ramsay cuts finger on TV

Waiter Sues Wolfgang Puck For Being Called 'Old'

Anyone who has worked in a restaurant will know just how much abuse flies around in the kitchen, especially between cooks and waiters. Much of this is good-natured joshing, and helps wind down the long hours. But some is downright degrading.

I’ve seen the worst kind of racism and sexism in restaurants, and nobody reports it and nobody does anything to stop it. In fact, when I came up with the title for this blog, I had initial misgivings because “Chef Sandwich” is also the name given in some kitchens to an unsavory act involving an orange, a budgerigar, and a bin bag...in fact, let’s not go there.

Tales from the old-timers suggest kitchens have been cleaned up to some extent, and it was worse 20 or so years ago, but it still goes on as I’ve blogged about in the past.

But compared with brandings, hurled pots, and sexual assaults, jabs about someone’s age must barely scrape into the list? As someone who retrained as a chef in my middle years, I know all about age-related insults. I’d get it all the time.

“What’s black and lives in the oven Grandad?” was a particular favourite of mine.

And once when I sat down to rest my aching feet, an irate sous chef shouted over: “Oy Papa! Work surfaces are for rissoles, not arseholes!”

But the old age put-downs didn’t even touch the sides. It was far harder being ordered about by spotty teenagers while being paid a pittance for appallingly long hours only broken by sleep. The added nickname “Grandad” to the end of every sentence just made me smile.

And that’s why I find it baffling, and a tad amusing, to read that a 52-year-old waiter who got the chop from Wolfgang Puck’s plush steakhouse in LA has launched a lawsuit, claiming he was “subjected to various negative age-related comments” – according to TMZ.com.

David Kallman - who says he was the oldest waiter at CUT - claims his beastly colleagues would call him hideous names like "old man" and "pops" and crack jokes implying he would die soon. Grim things like: "It's not like you'll be around too long."

Seems pretty tame stuff to me, even by the standards of America’s ludicrously litigious culture, where people sue restaurants for falling off toilet seats, slipping on dry floors, or getting head-aches because their ice cream’s too cold (alright, I made the last one up.)

But Kallman is clearly confident. According to his lawsuit filed in LA County Superior Court, he is suing Wolfgang Puck Worldwide Inc, among others, for unspecified damages exceeding $25,000 (£16,000).

Sixteen bags of sand! If only I had a pound for every time I was called Grandad.

More Dolphin Anyone?

If you want proof of how much time some celebrity chefs spend at their restaurants, then look no further than everyone’s favourite squashed Bee Gee Antony Worrall-Thompson.

I cycled past his upmarket restaurant near Kew Bridge during a fitness binge before Christmas, and stopped off for a fag and a peruse of his menu.

Now I’m all for experimenting in the kitchen, and trying different ingredients...but DOLPHIN Antony? It’s not exactly PC. You’ll have Greenpeace special forces after you with a speargun. Either that or your staff – the sort every celebrity chef claims they have painstakingly trained up so well to cover in their absence – have absolutely no idea what dauphinois is.


I’m not one of those tedious grammarians who come out in a nasty rash when they see a spelling mistake, or get a hard-on when they spy a split infinitive, or who scrawl pipe-tappingly lengthy letters to the Telegraph about education today, and English as a second language, but three spelling mistakes in three dishes!

Even restaurants in back-street Beijing do better than that with their tourist menus. Baby cappers! And you’ve got two spellings of Béarnaise, by Jeremy!

Now I know AWT has a pretty good knowledge of classic dishes, and he knows there’s only one p in baby capers, and I hope no dolphin in dauphinois potatoes, but you’d think he’d at least keep an eye on what’s going out on his specials menus, especially considering his recent restaurant failures.

And as for the idiots who waffle on whenever I turn to the thorny issue of celebrity chef absenteeism about how you wouldn’t expect Enzo Ferrari to make your F40 himself, or Giorgio Armani to rip little distressed looks in your jeans, so why do you expect Gordon Ramsay to personally slave over your omelette if you eat at one of his restaurants?

Well, at least they’d spell Ferrari correctly on the badge.

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.

Bullying In Kitchens

"It's not so much the assaults and hurled pans, it's the bullying I can't stand," a tearful chef once told me. And it's true - it happens a lot in professional kitchens. It's the continuing circle of revenge. Cooks get bullied, then they get their own back on those below them.

One commis was called in on his day off by an irate sous chef, travelled across London on a succession of buses and tubes, and when he got into the kitchen was bollocked for not cling-filming something in his fridge properly. They made him recover it and sent him home. All that way for something that would have taken them a few seconds to put right. He left when they set fire to his pony-tail.

It was the same at the Gull. Ironically, Jules' sister, who ran a bistro nearby, had sent Jim the potwash to our kitchen because she was worried he would get bullied anywhere else. But after a couple of months, the protection wore off, and the other chefs got irritated by his slowness...

Jules had given me a set of keys to the kitchen. He told me he was sick of seeing my veg supplies piled up outside the door, and it was my job to open up. That meant getting up half an hour earlier. Jim was usually already there. He’d be standing at the top of the stairs, sucking on a cigarette, and in no hurry to get out of his biker gear. He only drove a moped but from the bright yellow and black leathers he wore you’d think it was a Hornet.

“Hello there!” he would say each morning. He could never remember my name, but was always pleased to see me.

Jim lived with his sister a few miles up the road, and was probably the worst plongeur in Cornwall. If you asked him to peel some spuds, you'd be lucky to get 40 by lunchtime. I never said anything - I always felt sorry for him - but sometimes Graham would pick up a potato and mock him, and challenge him to a race. Graham could peel a spud in under four seconds.

Jim's pace didn't quicken during the heat and stress of service either. He'd lumber past like a zombie with outstretched pans, chanting his favourite catchphrase, “Coming through! Mind your arses!”

"Coming OUT, mind your arses, more like," someone would shout.

Jim wore the same T-shirt every day - with 'It’s not a bald patch – it’s a solar sex panel' emblazoned across it. He couldn't read or write, and had no idea what it said. We even had to fill in his timesheets for him.

He joined on the same day I did, and after a few weeks had come out of his shell, and that’s when the bullying started. It seemed fairly mild to start with, nothing like I was getting anyway, but I felt sorry for him all the same, and guilty about not doing more to stop it. I still feel guilty about it now; sometimes I lie in bed and think about it, and wish I'd made a stand.

It was Jim's job to make the tea, but he never remembered, and this was a favourite for those dreadful fuckers Graham and Jules.

“Jim,” Jules would begin. “Jim! Jim!”

Eventually he’d look round, blinking through steamed-up glasses. “Hello there,” he’d say, drying a plate in slow motion.

“Do you play golf, Jim?”

“I have done, yeah.”

“You know when you start a game, Jim, what are those plastic things you use?”

He thought for a minute and dried half a plate. Then Graham would join in. “You know those plastic things you stick in the ground at the start of each hole.”

“Haven’t got a clue. Do you know Jules?”

Stewie would wander over and whisper something in his ear, and he'd shout “tee!” and then there'd be a chorus of “thanks very much Jim, I’ll have two sugars!”

Most times, Graham would start it off.

“What rhymes with toffee, Jim?”

“Don’t know…”

At some stage, a plastic yellow duck appeared in the kitchen. It squeaked when you squeezed it, which terrified Jim for some reason. When no-one was looking, he’d throw it in the bins at the top of the car park, but the duck always found its way back. Some days it hung from the hose by his sink, and he’d have to spend the day with its angry, cartoon face boring into his bottle-end glasses.

One morning, Jim was reaching for the huge tub of Nescafe above the sink when he shrieked. A yellow face was peering out of the coffee powder.

“That fucking duck,” he squealed. “He gets everywhere!”

It returned a few days later, frozen in a bucket of water that Jim was asked to retrieve from the freezer in the haunted dry store across the road. Its angry eyes looked up at him through the ice...

Graham switched the lights off and locked the door. He made terrible quacking noises, and threatened to throw him in the pond, and Jim wept like a child. His sister had to come and get him. I know the hairy-arsed pros among you will think this fairly mild compared to some of the stories you hear in kitchens, but I'll never forget the sound of that noise Jim made. It was the sound of a pig in a barn fire.

:: This blog eventually became a bestselling book, called Down And Out In Padstow And London by Alex Watts, about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Rick Stein's kitchens in Padstow. You might like it if you're a foodie or have ever entertained the ridiculous idea of entering the padded asylum of professional cooking. It's here on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book if you want a read...