Seedling 28: Irons, Fights and Fallout Shelters
You get used to a lot of hollering and carrying on behind the scenes in restaurants, particularly back-of-house staff hazing each other at every opportunity. They’re generally a very rowdy bunch and, really, it’s miraculous it doesn’t spill out into the dining rooms, more often. I suppose that’s why even though I’d heard the shouting before I fobbed into the office level, it hadn’t raised any alarms. But the moment I passed into the second floor space, I realised I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Melody was in a state. Her anger seemed directed at Oliver, until Mike, calmly pressing his work trousers with a blank face, waved the barman off, subtly dismissing him. Ollie skittered past me through the open door, eyebrows arched, shooting me a quick look of warning as he went. And as Oliver exited, Melody’s rage shifted rapidly to Mike.
‘And you just know better than EVERYBODY, don’t you Mike??!! You’re just so much smarter and cleverer than anyone around here, isn’t that what you think; you little shit!’
Mike didn’t flinch, didn’t even look at Melody as he adjusted the steam setting on the iron. I retreated into the prep kitchen on the left instead of daring to cross into this maelstrom.
The American pastry chef was roasting walnuts, opening the low-boy oven and shaking them around on a baking sheet. She didn’t seem surprised at all to see me fob in, rushed and still in my street clothes. Instead she crossed over to the door where I was furtively peeking out the tiny window and took a look herself.
‘Yeah. Saw this coming’. She rubbed her hands onto her apron, caramelised sugar falling onto the concrete floor.
‘What in the world is going on?’
‘Oh, we did this external event, last night, and Oliver ran out of some of the drink ingredients from the cocktail menu. Wasn’t his fault. Host added in twenty guests without telling us, but Melody tends to take things out on others’.
The chef was pacing in threatening circles, her grievances reaching ever shriller heights as Mike adjusted the crease on his trousers and moved to press the hem. If he started whistling or combing his hair, I feared a Fukishima-level meltdown.
‘I’m Sandy, by the way’.
‘Paul’.
‘Where are you from, anyways?’
‘Boston. Sort of. You?’
‘LA’. She smiled as if we shared a secret bond based on our passports. Even if Boston and LA were as far apart as Moscow and London - and equally as foreign on their faces.
Sandy crossed back to her stainless steel prep table, dusting it with flour. ‘Mike is such a dick’.
Her comment took me by surprise and I wandered towards her, away from the prep kitchen door and the chaos beyond. I think I’d been in this prep kitchen once in my three months at Seedling. It had the air of a secret speakeasy, one where, perhaps, boys weren’t allowed.
‘You don’t like Mike?’
‘You do? Well I suppose you would have to or at least pretend to if you’re going to work for him’.
‘No, I do genuinely like him’.
Sandy stopped and looked up at me with a familiarity, I have to say, I didn’t think either of us had earned. She smiled and then went back to preparing her starter.
‘Well, he is a dick. I’ve known Melody a long time. And he’s known her…like, long enough. He knows full well what she is like. But, yet here he is winding her up - and, like, enjoying it’.
The ruckus continued just outside the door. Melody had a knack for this profanity-laced monologue, much to my surprise. I couldn’t imagine it could go on for much longer. I mean, how long does it take to press a pair of trousers? Today, it felt like an eternity. And we were trapped. So was whoever happened to be in our glass-fronted office - with a prime seat to whatever was transpiring past our tiny prep kitchen window to the world.
Whenever I’d transitioned from the restaurant world to the ‘normal’ world, I’d had a hard period of adjustment - because, there are ‘rules’, there. In office environments there are norms of behaviour and social expectations not found in hospitality. It’s civil, but stifling at the same time. At least, it feels stifling after years or working in restaurants. I’ve never been through sexual harassment training or cultural sensitivity seminars working in a restaurant. I have been felt up in a crowded waiters’ station and told to keep my ‘fag ass out of my section or I’ll light you up’(New York City is always entertaining). So, yes, I’d ducked into a second floor prep kitchen to avoid an unfolding melee, but there was nothing unusual about personal attacks, emotional outbursts or pitched battles in the restaurant world.
What was unusual was Mike’s cold, dead hand, reaction.
There was a buzz and the prep kitchen’s door popped open. Omar’s lank figure trundled across the threshold, his eyes wide, the door swinging closed behind him.
Sandy and I turned to look at him.
He straightened up his eternally-slumped shoulders as if to shake off any appearance of being shaken and pushed his tiny-rimmed glasses up onto his nose. ’I think it’s almost over’.