Seedling 32: ‘Seedling: A Love Story’
The cookbook was Melody’s fourth and most recent publication. But, whereas your typical culinary tome concentrated on the creations within, ‘Seedling: A Love Story’ also chronicled the creation of the venue, itself. Interesting, reading, really. You got to see old images of the space as a government office, the stages of construction - and the innovate, crack floor staff that launched the restaurant! Of course, if you owned the book and came in to dine, you’d find none of those staff members remained. Well, there were a couple. We still had Renée and we still had Vassily. But neither of them figured prominently in this latest hardcover edition. Instead, the carefully-staged staff photos presented a Benetton ad for the twenty-first century - a diverse, eclectic and photogenic gang with heaps of good will and a modelling contract on the side.
So, no shade to Renée, but she didn’t tick any of those boxes.
(lots of shade to Vassily)
There were signed copies available to purchase at reception. And there was always a table or two that asked where you were in the book.
And I wasn’t, naturally.
But I was still at Seedling. So, whilst those eager, dimple-faced Londoners with the brilliant white smiles knew how to play the camera, they didn’t know how to play ‘Seedling’. I did, I was discovering. Because, Seedling on any given week has a staff of seventy. That’s a crazy payroll. But in six months, it had rolled through thirty-eight waiters, bartenders and head-waiters.
Even in an industry known for turnover, it was, uh, high.
Suffice to say, there were several pictures from the ‘Seedling’ book torn out and taped up the wall of the men’s changing room. A large ‘X’ was drawn across each of these opening staff’s faces, sometimes with added anecdotes or details. Not a lot of nice words on those walls. Quite a few had ‘Eoin fucked me’ in quote bubbles over their heads. That was as polite(and from what I was told ‘accurate’) as it got.
‘Eoin is yeasty’, Erich had quipped. Erich, the second member of management to have left. That’s not a bad record.
However, there was one team that hadn’t changed- the somms. Minus my addition, Mike, Kamil, Eoin and One Direction were all the original players.
Mike had done the hiring, there, not the recently departed Human Resources director, Tonya. Maybe that was key. Having worked in HR, I knew that the orders still came from the top down. If Tonya had hired on superficial parameters, she would only have been giving Melody and Jeanne what they’d asked for. And, what they’d got was turnover. Mike had, despite his misgivings, gotten a level of stability.
Now I was moving house and moving up in the same week. It was a good development and it gave me more of a sense of optimism than I’d had about Seedling in quite a while. Jeanne’s ‘people are talking about you’ made more sense, now, in retrospect. Actually, Melody had tapped me after briefing and said something similar. ‘Hearing really good things about you, Darling’, or ‘Got some nice compliments about you, recently’. I dunno. Assumed at the time one of Melody’s many spying friends had given thumbs up to my wine service.
‘Well why were you so worried in the first place??’
My mum was thrilled to hear the news. For some reason, pay rises were always more exciting for my mother than for the people receiving them. And that rise was a win. I’d kept my mouth shut at the end of my trial period and waited an extra two months. The resulting pay off was a much larger pay-rise than I’d been promised.
And here’s what’s interesting about that - all this mistrust and ill will towards Mike - it circled around me from the day I arrived, with those espousing it not understanding how I didn’t feel the same. The ‘evil Bond villain’, right? But I didn’t feel the same and I couldn’t feel the same because it wasn’t something I was experiencing. Yes, Mike and I gelled from the beginning. I came in on strong footing with my ‘secret management’ role. ‘Our little secret’. But, I also understood Mike. I had an instinct about him. And that same instinct informed my decision not to ask him for the pay increase after three months. It would be a direct affront to the head somm, whether he’d see it as craven, overly-solicitous, or brazen - I wasn’t certain how it would offend Mike, I just knew it would. And that prompted my patience.
So, I had waited. And it had paid off.
Now, I needed to make a decision on how to deal with Kamil.
‘Does Kamil know?’
The joy of a promotion and that’s the very first question I ask. With the new title also came a target on my back. Didn’t take a genius like Mike to see it.
Which is why he had a trick up his sleeve.