Be part of our foodie community

Gravy stains and tall tales: A real foodie journey

5 days ago

This message landed in my inbox this morning.

I honestly don’t know what to say except… thank you.

Every author hopes someone will laugh at the bits they laughed writing. Apparently one reader sacrificed a perfectly good drink in the process.

If you’re wondering whether Lies, Theft and Sh*t on the Ceiling is for you… Fiona has probably answered that better than I ever could.

(Please don’t sue me if you choke on your tea.)

amzn.to/45DFwnU … See MoreSee Less

Gravy stains and tall tales: A real foodie journey

1 week ago

Why chefs never walk properly…

I knew I was getting old the day a customer asked if I’d hurt myself.

I’d just wandered out of the kitchen to grab something from the cellar, walking with what I thought was my normal stride. He stopped me, genuinely concerned.

“You alright, chef?”

“Yeah… why?”

“You’re limping.”

I wasn’t limping.

Well… not intentionally.

I was simply walking the way every chef over the age of forty walks. A sort of slow, sideways shuffle that’s half exhaustion, half self-preservation. Somewhere between an ageing rugby prop and a pirate who’s spent thirty years making poor life decisions.

The truth is, nobody leaves hospitality undamaged. Not physically, anyway. The job takes tiny bites out of you, day after day, year after year, until one morning you climb out of bed sounding like someone emptying a cutlery drawer.

People imagine the injuries come from one spectacular accident. A pan of boiling oil. A nasty fall. Some dramatic kitchen disaster involving ambulances and television cameras.

It doesn’t work like that.

It’s a thousand stupid little moments.

Brushing your forearm against an oven because Dave left the bloody door open again.

Lifting a stockpot that weighs about the same as a teenage elephant because asking for help somehow feels like admitting defeat.

Crawling into the walk-in fridge for the fiftieth time because whoever put the cream at the back clearly has unresolved anger issues.

Twisting your ankle carrying three boxes of chips because somebody left a sack of onions in the middle of the floor. Again.

None of those things are memorable on their own. They just quietly accumulate until your body starts keeping score.

The burns are the easiest to spot. My forearms look less like skin and more like a road map of questionable career choices. Every white mark tells a story, although most of the stories are embarrassingly mundane.

“How’d you get that one?”

“Garlic bread.”

“And that?”

“Garlic bread.”

“What about that massive one?”

“Also… garlic bread.”

At some point you stop reacting altogether. You touch something that’s approximately the temperature of the surface of the sun, glance down, mutter, “Well… that’s inconvenient,” and carry on plating table twelve. The nerves packed up and left years ago.

The knees, however, are another matter.

Nobody warns you about chef’s knees.

One day you simply notice you’ve started evaluating whether it’s worth bending down to pick something up.

A spoon?

Leave it.

The floor can keep it.

It’s probably where all the others went anyway.

Professional kitchens operate under strange laws of physics. Spoons, Sharpies and tongs disappear into another dimension sometime around seven o’clock every evening. By close you’ve found three fish slices, a whisk nobody remembers buying, somebody’s vape and a mystery Tupperware lid that predates the internet… but not the bloody spoon you actually need.

Then there are your hands.

Customers expect the hands of a chef to be delicate. Artistic. The hands of someone who lovingly arranges micro herbs with tweezers.

Mine look like I’ve been arm wrestling angry badgers for beer money.

Burns. Cuts. Calluses. One finger that bends at an angle nature never intended because a freezer door once declared war on it. I suspect my fingerprints disappeared sometime around 2008. If Scotland Yard ever asks for them, they’re welcome to check underneath the grill.

The funny thing is, you stop noticing any of it. Cuts become seasoning. Bruises become landmarks. Burns become souvenirs from another busy Saturday night. The only injury that slows you down is one that gets blood in the béarnaise.

And yet, despite all this, someone inevitably leans across the pass and says the same thing.

“It must be fun cooking all day.”

I usually smile.

Because they’re not entirely wrong.

They’re just looking at the wrong end of the story.

They’re seeing the finished plate, not the twelve hours that came before it. They don’t hear the printer spitting tickets like it’s trying to set a world record. They don’t see the KP skating across a wet floor with a tower of plates. They don’t witness six grown adults conducting what appears to be an orchestral performance entirely through shouting.

What they do see is a family celebrating an anniversary. A child announcing it’s the best burger he’s ever eaten. A couple clinking glasses. Someone scraping their plate clean.

That’s the drug.

Not the food.

That moment.

Thirty seconds of watching someone genuinely enjoy what you’ve made somehow wipes away twelve hours of aching feet, stiff knees, burnt forearms and a back that now predicts rain more accurately than the Met Office.

It’s why chefs keep coming back.

Not because we’re masochists.

Although the evidence is admittedly mounting.

It’s because kitchens become your tribe. You suffer together. Laugh together. Swear together. Survive Saturday nights together. Then, after service, you limp to the bar looking like extras from a low-budget zombie film, order the first pint, compare fresh burns like schoolchildren swapping football stickers and somehow convince yourselves tomorrow won’t be quite so bad.

It always is.

And yet you’ll be back.

I know I was.

Long enough, in fact, to collect more stories than was probably healthy. They eventually became Lies, Theft and Sh*t on the Ceiling. (amzn.eu/d/09IJ74Zy)

It’s not an only a cookbook. There aren’t any celebrity chef epiphanies over truffle foam or locally foraged nettles. It’s simply the truth about life behind the pass, the glorious idiots who inhabit it, and why, despite everything hospitality steals from your body, it somehow gives you back something even better.

Just don’t ask us to walk normally afterwards. … See MoreSee Less