Seedling 18: Lemon Twist
Mike grabbed a lemon out of the dusty cardboard box and repeatedly tossed it gently into the air for more or less the length of the briefing. Occasionally he’d look over at me and raise his eyebrows in what was more a comedic playful tone than any expression of bewilderment or concern. The rest of us, we were bewildered. And concerned.
Omar was quietly seething during the opening of the briefing. He introduced sections, announced covers(126, which made me jump in my pantaloon pants) and then asked Paulina, one of two receptionists running reception, to go through the guest notes. It took forever. Paulina is a lovely Lithuanian girl, but when the misappropriated confidence of Diana was absent, the girls’ notes dragged on with ‘and, um’ and ‘well, let’s see’ and various other examples of timid and indirect language that bogged down briefing from the very start.
‘Diana doesn’t work nights or weekends’, Hannah had informed me. ‘She has a young son and she negotiated that with Melody when she was hired. She wants to be home when he gets home from school’.
Not to seem insensitive, but I’ve never worked in a restaurant where the Head of Reception, the Head Maitre’d, is scheduled ‘off’ from the most important, most influential and highest revenue generating shifts. I just haven’t.
Though we could sense the latent anger emanating from Omar, we were perhaps more distracted by the box of lemons, itself. In an ideal world - well, by the Seedling handbook, actually - the entire dining room and mise-en-place must be completed by the time service briefing began. Not a hair should be out of place. And here we had this dusty, banged up cardboard box of lemons plunked down on the service station, the POS console, tainting the entire scene.
Paulina wrapped up her guest notes with a curtsy. We all thanked her with smiles, Marcos’ being a tad lascivious, and she returned to help Irene with the phones, at the front. Just then, Hannah rushed in with updated menus. This was very last minute and not the norm. Her wild mane of blonde hair was already starting to escape from it’s modern beehive and trail down her neck in electric tendrils, an additional worrisome sign.
I looked around. Renee was chewing on her fingernails. It was a habit she had, so I couldn’t tell if the current chomping was accelerated by the tense undercurrents, or not. Vera was still scribbling guest notes. Marcos was, of course, examining himself in the mirror. Elena, a spritely, argumentative and relatively new Polish girl looked simultaneously bored and ready for a fight(“my name is Elena, but you can call me ‘Villanelle’” she’d told me, upon our first meeting).
I glanced over at Oliver. He raised his eyebrows in a manner very unlike Mike’s. His clearly was concern. Mike - he now had his lemon on the side of the console and was running it back and forth along the edge, his long fingers catching it every time it came to the precipice, his whole demeanor disinterested in any aspect of the briefing.
Omar moved his head to one side of the group and stared. Then he moved it to the other side of the group and stared. With his stooped, poor posture, he resembled one of those slow swinging dragons from Chinese New Year. He drew in a very long breath.
What dramatic flair, I thought to myself.
‘OK, kids, here’s the deal. There are going to be a few changes, tonight. First of all’, (he motions to Hannah who passes him a menu), the Acorn squash is off the dinner menu’.
Marcos raised his hand but Omar told him to put it down.
‘Secondly, these lemons you see before you - these lemons are going in the center of each table. These are a decoration. We know what a decoration is, yes?’(some nodding). Thirdly, we are going to be practising something called smiling. Does everyone know what this is??’
There were a few more nods among the group, but no smiles.
‘Because what I am hearing is that the staff here at Seedling looks unhappy. Are you unhappy, Seedling staff?’
No response.
Omar’s voice began to harden, further.
‘When you come to Seedling, you represent Seedling. When you clock in, downstairs, you now represent Seedling. When you walk across this floor…’
Omar began pacing with exaggerated, stomping steps from the edge of the bar to the waiters’ station and back again.
‘When you walk THIS floor, you represent SEEDLING. I don’t care what happened before you walked in that door; I don’t care if you had a bad day or you fought with your partner or the Tube broke down or grandma fell down a goddam flight of stairs - this, here, is your job. And part of your job is to FUCKING SMILE’.
At this point, even Marcos was paying attention. ‘Villanelle’, however, was unmoved.
‘We are going to do a little experiment tonight, and that is called being professionals. Am I being clear?’
There were full nods in assention, including from me. And a few mumbles of ‘yes, chef’(not from me).
Omar looked to Hannah. ‘Do we have a sous chef?’.
Hannah started for the kitchen.
‘Signor, we are five minutes past’. Marcos’ words fell on Omar’s deaf and angry ears.
‘We are going over’. He stared daggers at the Italian headwaiter.
For a moment, something washed over me. Something was sticking out in my mind about tonight but I couldn’t put my finger on it. See, I was distracted - from where I was standing, I could see Paulina and Irene alternating in taking early arrivees to the garden to wait. Irene motioned to Luca who gave a passing glance to Omar before he ran to the garden to get drink orders for the delayed guests. There were twelve tables in the garden space, more or less. It had never filled(in fact, much to Melody’s chagrin, nobody ever wanted to sit in the garden). Problem was The Salon Bar, rarely manned, wasn’t fully kitted out (nobody ever wanted to sit, there, either), so Luca had to run back and forth from the main bar behind us, delivering water, wine lists, drink lists, cocktails, by-the-glass wines, all on one simultaneous seating and all while struggling with his limited English. He needed a somm. Most of the orders would invariably be wine, even as he tried to steer them to simple cocktails for his own purposes. At the very least he needed help. I was itching to jump in, but had a feeling Omar would explode were I to do so.
In spite of Luca’s panicked face, clearly visible during his half run between bar and garden, and the ominous rumblings of some impatient guests, beyond, Omar was determined to stick to normal briefing protocol. This was the stage where normally a sous chef came out and distractedly went through the evening’s menu. Hannah handed us a copy, each - but minus the Acorn Squash, it was identical to yesterday’s dinner menu. This was pointless.
Patrick, one of the two Grange House transplants, shuffled out. He was running the kitchen in place of Melody, tonight. This guy - he was nice as pie to me, but he always seemed stressed out to the gills and there was no part of his briefing appearances that proved helpful nor reassuring. From the moment he came out from behind the line, he appeared on edge - as if he was a vampire and feared he would burst into a pile of dust were he caught outside the confines of the kitchen coven and into the bright daylight of the open dining room. But, of course, on this occasion, that would have been eleven minutes, ago. He had little to zero new information about tonights menu, except regarding the burning question of what we could offer vegetarians and vegans since Acorn squash was a no-go.
Patrick simply replied, ‘we’ll put something together’.
The sous chef shuffled away, and Omar seemed uninterested in talking or berating any further. He assigned Elena and Vera to ‘wipe down and polish’ the lemons at the Salon Bar and then get them out on the tables.
‘Dismissed’, he finished.
But now we had a real problem. Or, several. To me, they seemed obvious. And as I looked over to Mike, I could see a steely pale had passed over his face. He didn’t look concerned. But he didn’t look himself. He kinda looked like Hannah’s inscrutable Bond villain, to be honest.
See, here was the problem.
First of all, we were going to have an artificial rush. The tables that would be led from the garden to the dining room would more or less begin to order at the same time. With four sections, there could be no coordination or managing of the rate at which tickets reached the kitchen. You could try to have the waiters stagger their own orders, but they couldn’t feasibly coordinate a floor wide stagger. Secondly, Mike and I would be tasked with transferring the garden tables to the dining room, instead of beginning our normal order of service as a somm team. And, we would be transferring those tables to two waiters instead of four, as Vera and Elena were temporarily out of commission with ‘lemon duty’. Later, we would have to extract those items a second time and put them on reopened accounts when Vera and Elena came back into service.
This put us massively on the back foot.
Compounding this situation was the fact there was no system for transferring tables. Waiters would shout ‘two needs to go to eight’ or the like while running past you. To be fair, there was typically little need to do transfers. We were generally a 1.25 seating venue - meaning, one main seating. There was no pressure to turn tables and with one seating, nobody was ever waiting in the wings for their table to become available and transfers didn’t need to happen. But, thanks to Omar’s school marm performance, we were dealing with not only the initial ‘unnecessary’ push and the headache of transfers, but pressure to move seventy-five percent of the dinner groups out before that smaller ‘.25’ second seating.
So, Mike and I started the evening running between reception and the junior bartender.
Drink orders had gone in with Paulina, Irene or Luca, but we had no idea who had opened the table and neither did the two girls nor the Calabrian. None of them had a personal POS code; they just used the generic Salon Bar ‘open table’ function. None of them even knew the table numbers in the garden. ‘Uh, I think that one in the corner’, would be all the info I would get, or ‘It was fat lady…you know which one I talk about?’ Basically, the start of service was me running between tables and describing what I thought the wine or cocktails were that I’d seen on the table and the two girls craning their necks between phone calls and arriving guests, wracking their brains over the original order and/or me asking Luca, looking up between cycles on the glass washer, equally confused and overwhelmed. You could argue I shouldn’t care if everything was properly added - wasn’t my fuck up. But leaving my real boss, Mike, aside, Omar was quizzing me on what was where and who went to wherever. If any check had been opened between reception or Luca and it didn’t find a home, I knew my neck was on the line. However, I was also protecting Luca and the girls at reception, because half the drink orders were never rung on the till and those that were, were wrong. I couldn’t blame them, really - Paulina and Irene weren’t trained on the POS system and they didn’t exactly have time to amble their way through menu screens and ‘modify’ keys while answering phones, greeting guests, taking coats and being thrown drink orders by surly suburbanites who couldn’t figure out job descriptions in a tony London restaurant.
Elena and Vera came back into the dining room after what seemed an interminable ten minutes. They were moving rather leisurely, gossiping, completely disengaged from the reality the rest of us were living in. They split up and started delivering the (newly shiny)lemons to the tables. Perplexed guests would engage them in conversation, first asking why they were dispersing lemons and then spinning into the oft-discussed uniform, ‘how long have you been open’, ‘Is Melody in the kitchen’, etc. And while Vera and Elena were chatting away, a whirlwind was spinning by them. Marcos trying to run two sections like an errant Keystone Cop, and Renee stomping by in complete control but bleeding rage. Luca was trying to get as many decanters of sparkling and still water up on the bar as he could with each table now having been sat simultaneously, while Oliver was racing back and forth as Mike verbally called all incoming orders, not even having time to get to the computer system, himself.
My heart was racing and I was busy enough, but seeing Mike moving at - let’s say, less than a leisurely speed - had me further panicked. There was pretty much nothing Mike couldn’t do, and to see him running wines from the bar to tables with a furrowed brow and no tickets didn’t bode well.
However, my start wasn’t as punishing.
Being the junior member on the floor, I had the ‘windows’ section, the banquettes, which are almost always saved for VIPs and regulars - and those types didn’t typically come in this early. It was me, Renee and Elena(whenever she was finally officially back on the floor). A quieter section and a stronger team - so I had it easier than Mike, in that respect.
At this point I’d only been bogged down with an assortment of deuces not requiring that much attention and two four-tops; one with Champagne service(and the slow pours that accompany it) and the other with three different wines for four different guests. In service, Mike didn’t like bottles on trays, so we would carry two bottles on one long arm, palm facing out, our fingers spread wide holding them at the bottom punt, lined up like soldiers, labels displayed to the guest. For the four-top taking glass pours, I could carry the third in my pouring hand and break protocol slightly by setting that bottle down on the center of the table, briefly, while I poured the first two wines from my left arm, one by one. There are fine restaurants in London that would frown on all of this - particularly the not using a tray. But, two glasses held at the stem on one hand, scissored between index and middle finger and a bottle of wine in the other hand - it was far more personable and far less awkward than struggling with a tray unnecessarily, just out of tradition. And, for wines by the glass, we poured at the table using the mise-en-place glasses that dressed the dining room, so we rarely needed to change glassware unless it was a bottle sale, and even that depended on the wine.
And it was this scenario pushing Mike to the wall.
Table thirteen was an eight-top and they’d ordered two different wines, a red and a white, out of the gate. The white was an inexpensive Bourgogne from Prudhon and the red was another wallet-friendly bottle, Chateau Micalet Haut-Medoc. He needed to present both bottles, but he also needed to remove the ‘neutral’ mise-en-place glasses I mentioned - the Burgundy needs a Burgundy stem, and the Micalet requires a tall red. This meant he had to make three trips back and forth from the bar and somm station. The first is to present the two bottles. The second was to pull the mise-en-place glass and at the same time place a Burgundy stem in its place; eight glasses off a tray and eight back on. The third was to return and add eight more tall red stems for the Micalet from a second tray that he’d cleverly asked Oliver to have pre-prepped. So, those were the three additional steps before he returned to the bar, once more, opened the two bottles, tasted for faults and returned to table thirteen.
If, at that point, you are being sat with additional tables or have another guest waiting on wine service, you’re in trouble.
Though I was busy, the thought crossed my mind, several times - Should I ask Mike if I can help in any way? But, bottom line is it didn’t feel safe. I’d not worked with Mike under this much pressure and I couldn’t tell if he’d be offended; I couldn’t know even if I’d be able to help, and wouldn’t know how he’d react if I went to help and then fucked up. And, I didn’t know if I could spare a few minutes to help Mike and not end up in a deeper hole, myself.
So, I stayed out of it.
It was just as well, because there was no assistance on the floor from either manager. I could hear the kitchen imploding all the way from the somm station. Omar had gone in to expedite the line when he heard Patrick devolving into profanity. The tickets were coming in fast and furious, as expected, all at the same time.
‘Hannah - I want Hannah,’ Patrick barked at Omar, who didn’t have time to be offended. I was decanting a 2011 Brovia ‘Villero’ Barolo, watching as Omar stalked up to Hannah with his textbook stoneface and stooping posture. It was hard to listen in over the rising cacophony of this Thursday in November, but Hannah’s response was along the lines of ‘Omar, no, there is no way. I have got to get these tables transferred, now, or or we’ll have a disaster, later on”. She was dealing with Vera and Elena resuming their sections and getting those tables back over to the two girls.
Omar gave up, throwing his hands in the air with the dejected meme of ‘nobody listens to me’.
Hannah looked up, suddenly. Her eyes narrowed, another long strand of blonde hair unfurled down the left side of her face. She popped up on her tippy-toes and put a hand in the air, trying to get someone’s attention from behind the console.
‘Vera! Vera!’.
The Aussie girl was leaving the bar, a decanter of sparkling water in one hand and still in the other, but turned towards Hannah and the console and waiter station.
Hannah was now visibly irritated. ‘Vera, you have to sign in. I can’t transfer anything until you’re signed in!’
Poor Vera, she turned back towards the bar and then back towards the dining room, flustered and not knowing where to go or what to do with her full hands and four foot ten frame, her apron practically dragging across the hardwood.
‘Nevermind. What’s your employee number?’
‘Uh, 170’.
Hannah punched it in. ‘OK, fine’.
Vera headed back out on water duty, her pace much-quickened since first returning with shiny lemons.
I finished the decant, slugged the sediment clogged funnel into the station sink, cleaned the original bottle and then headed back to my section - but stopped at the front of the bar.
‘Luca, I just opened the last Brovia. Can you restock when you get a chance?’
I was pretty sure I’d get to a second botle of Barolo on this six top; they were just getting rolling on table thirty-six. Here was one of those opportunities to stay ahead, and I was still sweating. Luca could run the three flights down to the cellar when he had a quick gap. According to Mike’s calculations, it’s three and a half minutes down and up if you do it at a full run - and he expected all of us to do it in that time.
Just then a crash came out of the kitchen.
“MARCOS!!”
Hannah dropped everything and ran for the line. Renee looked up from crumbing table twenty-two. Elena was pulling napkins from the main waiter’s station and let out a stifled laugh. Like them, I already knew what had happened. I could see Marcos at the far POS terminal down near the restaurant entrance. He was leafing through his notepad, licking his fingers in between pages and tapping his pencil against his forehead. Marcos was handsome, I guess. I mean, we know he thinks he’s an adonis, but he had this - I dunno, for me, he kinda looked like a young, thinner version of Blackbeard the Pirate. He had jet black hair and a matching short-cropped beard and moustache, but with these piercing green eyes. He was very slightly overweight, but only in so much as one of his ilk would consider appropriate. He once said to me, ‘Paul, a man without a belly is like a Mercedes without a badge’.
That type of egoism led to Marcos doing what he wanted instead of what he was asked, very often.
Watching him leisurely poke away at the computer and stroking his neck like he was caressing the leather-bound steering wheel of an E-Class, the situation was clear. Marcos had held all his orders so that he could get through the heavy seating easier and then punched them in at the exact same time, kitchen be damned. Patrick’s rabid scream had echoed throughout the dining room, but when Hannah came up to me an hour later, lightly touched my arm, and asked if I thought any of the guests had heard it, I replied:
‘Uh, let me think. Who? Patrick? Uh..no? No? No, I don’t think so, no. Nothing to worry about!’ (I must be going soft around poor Hannah).
So, now we had both Hannah and Omar on the line, Mike in the weeds, Vera in the weeds, Renee slightly above water, and Elena…well, wherever she wanted to be; while Marcos was, as per normal, leisurely preening his way through service. Me, I was now in decent shape. My section was under control, and in no small part by my being a bit creative.
Tables that wanted wine service but needed pushed - well it could be done. But you had to go counter-intuitive to the employee manual. For example, the sitcom actress on table four couldn’t make up her mind on a glass of white and like most, well, let’s say, ‘B’ list celebrities, she was drawing it all out for a bit of attention. Would it have helped if I’d admitted recognising her from her role as the obnoxious but charming working class Au Pair that endears herself to a wealthy Manhattan family? Or would that have had me stuck at the table further? Probably would have gotten me stuck. So instead, you offer her a taste of two different wines, which sounds like more work. But, no, it breaks the conversation. This is how it goes:
I extracted myself from her sphere, topped up the Chanrion Côte de Brouilly on twenty-two, got the bottle order off of table two(Montirius Vacqueyras, way over delivers, by the way) and swung to the bar. Here, I called the Vacqueyras and two Burgundy stems(Mike’s preference on this wine), as well as asked that two different by-the-glass bottles be put on the bar, add one mise-en-place glass. While Luca is peeling through the caves trying to remember where the Montirius is, I place the two by-the-glass white wine bottles in my left hand, labels out, gripping the punts - put the additional stem in my right hand and head back to table four. The additional stem goes down and the two wines get poured, side by side. The guest is now engaged, not wavering and eating up time, no matter the motive. Here she has exhibit A - and exhibit B. Typically you get a quick decision and I did, this time, as well. It was the Aprhos Loureiro. Done. The actress asked to keep the taste of the rejected wine, which is fine - because it gave me back my right hand and on this return journey to the bar, I was able to remove a dessert wine glass from thirty-one. By offering that actress a taste, though it appears a time suck, I freed myself up to service four tables in five minutes.
Buying time to save time. And like I said to Cosmo that one evening - ‘this is your section, you control it’.
And those little moves had me - I mean, I hesitated to say it - had me succeeding.
Tonight, there were a few advantages. There were no particularly large groups competing for attention at the ‘windows’ section in the way Mike had had. I was also covering tables for the unstoppable workhorse we called ‘Renee’ and the salty but, hey, pretty competent Elena. That made my life easier. Still, I felt successful, you know? Granted, I wasn’t being thrown wrenches by either Omar(trapped on the line) or Kamil(probably under a hooker), but this was not a straightforward service by any stretch of the imagination. And, I’d handily succeeded.
I was standing at the console and double-checking all my open tables - ensuring there were no errors or missing items. From this main waiter station, I could survey the entire room as I went through each, one by one.
‘You using Bob, or can I get in there’.
Mike meant the calculator. Gossip travelled fast across the Seedling-sphere.
‘Nope. Here you go’. I slid it across the console and the waiter’s station.
‘What are you doing for Christmas?’
Mike’s question took me by surprise.
‘Well, I just figured I’d be here’.
‘Nah,’ he replied. ‘We’ll be closed from Christmas Eve on. Reopening for New Year’s, yeah, but that’s one night and I have to be here, obviously. And Kamil doesn’t like visiting family, much. He’ll work New Year’s. You should take it’.
He was adding up some wastage stats from the kitchen. Looked like they may have had a few fuck-ups during the rush.
‘Um, okay. I mean, I don’t expect it - as the new guy’.
‘It’s not charity, trust. We get so short-staffed in London you end up stuck with massive holiday pay outs or rollovers, come fiscal. Trust me - take it. Just go see Mum in Ireland or whatever girds yer loins’.
Mike stopped. ‘I apologise. I shouldn’t use gird your loins and Mum in the same sentence’. He cracked a wicked smile. Sometimes he was running his very own sitcom, up there in that big brain of his. ‘Well, we managed to sort that tonight, didn’t we?’
I’d already gleaned Mike wasn’t one for flattery. He didn’t give it. He wouldn’t receive it. This was very close to a compliment for him.
‘I guess so. It’s done at least’.
Mike tossed ‘Bob’ into the top drawer of the console. ‘Bloody manufactured chaos. And all because of that stupid review’.
As he walked away, it all came flooding back to me.
Oh my God. I forgot. That review I read last night after ‘Police Chases’….this was all about the review…