While wandering the streets I noticed I was the only one looking around, the heads were all down and my meandering was causing chaos. I bumped into people disrupted human traffic flow and even caused a few people to avert their gaze from the ground, I was the small town weirdo who wanted to say a friendly hello to passers by. My Brother helped me out with practicing pronouncing e’s so I didn’t face life in London as Bin who wrote with a pin he also hooked me up with some studios catering work. I had knives and some skill with them so ended up getting paid more than the driver who got me the job.
The old rocker chef, designed and preparing food that rivaled the quality of sound system he had in his kitchen, I really liked his scotch quail eggs and later copied his stuffed chicken wings. After helping prepare a gourmet buffet lunch I couldn’t believe the continued requests for scampi and chips. This scampi stuff must have been amazing, straight out of the freezer, a brief stint in the fryer resulting in a kind of fishy tasting watery mush glob. I never gave real scampi a chance after tasting this English favorite.
Two weeks into my experience as a dosser, it all made sense well the 400 quid made me happy as I could convert it into NZ dollars and think I was earning a fortune. A few nights out and a sublet later I was slapped with the cost of living my grace period was up, it was time to be independent and support myself.
Live in pub work manages to trap many antipodeans, offering low wages and bad accommodation it doesn’t make sense. I guess I fell into it like many because it was easy, killed two birds with one stone, job and abode.
After an hours “training” I had learned everything; take product out of the freezer and destroy it in the microwave, fryer or merrychef. My enthusiasm for cooking was being destroyed by merrychef cooking. A kind of microwave furnace hybrid that was essential to creating terrible gasto pub wannabe food.
Recipe – Caramalized onions
Chop an onion and deep-fry it in non-specific animal fat until well colored.
My fellow staff enjoyed the daily specials like procuttio wrapped chicken with mushroom duxselles but the punter’s orders continued to read; steak and ale pie with microwave frozen veg, sausages and mash with “caramelized” onion gravy.
Each week TNT magazine brought hope of a job that would save me from deteriorating mental health. I had decided any job involving rush hour tube commuting was likely to cause serve depression or multiple homicides. It meant the years of studying economics was fairly useless to my employment prospects. Cooking was what I wanted to do, despite the pitiful wages and this skill wasn’t part of the requirements of a London live in pub cook.
My hope of an escape rested on an advert requesting a chef for Southern Spain, the restaurant was close to a ski field, I didn’t need any more details just the job. So I set about a program of persistent harassment, daily emails with titles progressing from keen kiwi to the keenest and phone calls bordering on begging one day and demanding the next. Two weeks later I reined victorious and was booked on a easy jet flight to Malaga.
Before I left London we barbequed in the snow, people started asking me about the job and place and I realized maybe some of those details might be important. How much are they paying you? Who are you working for? Are you going to be able to cope without any Spanish? Where exactly is it? “You’ll end up working for someone like Basil Faulty”.
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