Seedling 6: The First Week Finished


“Hi, how are you this evening?”

    The gentleman looked up at me and stopped. Then he looked over his shoulder and around the room.

    “How are you doing with the wine list?” I continued.

    “Are you….the sommelier?”  This was a common response.

    “Yes, that’s me.”

    “Oh, Okay...uh, so…”

    It typically took the guest a few seconds to regain composure. I mean, here they were out for a posh London meal, entering the time-honoured tradition of selecting a bottle or two for dinner, juggling a whole host of issues – what will pair, what can I afford, how do I pronounce ‘Vacqueyras’, will Harold try to take over, and is my wife going to ask for a side of ice cubes?  And then I appear, presenting the new issue of who is he and why is he dressed like this?  

    Keep in mind, ordering wine in a London restaurant can be a stressful experience for a lot of people.  For all the moving minefields of a winelist, let’s be real - at the end of the day the guest simply doesn’t want to look stupid.  Perhaps you could argue that my Oompa Loopa wear defused the situation. I had graciously dressed stupid for them, so all the guest’s nervous concerns are turned upside down and on their head and everyone was put at ease.  But, no that wasn’t the case.  No, my pinstripes and pantaloons merely aggravated an already fraught and confusing situation.  And, as Hannah had often advised us, ‘some of our guests may be confused’.

    “Well if you’re trying to find something that balances being approachable and complex, then you might take a look at this Barbera. I know, you think ‘Barbera is light, high acid’, but Massa makes a more extracted version, and, with low tannins it’s more versatile when you have a larger group, such as this”.

    I know this guy knows nothing about Barbera, but let’s make him look good, yes?

    “Plus at this price”, (I draw my finger gingerly to the mid-range figure) you can feel confident in two bottles to carry you through the evening”.

    Taking a punter to a mid-range wine and doubling the sale makes everyone happy. Plenty of wine to go around, higher-margin label, guest feels cared for, and this dude will likely be tipsy enough by finish to green light a dessert wine course. Gets the job done.

    This was my approach, but because of the stupid fucking outfit, I had to work ten times harder. I not only had to know the list backwards and forwards, but I had to deliver a service that was both approachable enough to put a nervous guest at ease and professional enough to erase the funhouse image of my appearance. To my credit, I made it work. I could get over myself; I was always the guy who didn’t give two fucks, anyways. But poor Eoin, twas not the same for him. He looked miserable.

    Eoin was a strapping, macho young Irishman forced to dress up like somebody’s plush toy. In his street clothes, he was the sauntering stud, the ladies man, the consummate lothario.  So, when it came to the somm uniform, his pride just couldn’t take it.

    We’d been out for pints one night and I don’t think I’d ever seen ladies lining up as I’ve seen them do for Eoin. It was quite the gender role reversal. He never gave them a second glance. He didn’t have to. Eoin was the one being hunted. And, not only was he the hunted, he already seemed well sated to me.  He was currently having an affair with a perky blonde sous chef from Hampshire, so how much pussy could he need?

    But Erich had a different take.

    “Oh, Paul.  Eoin, Eoin, Eoin..”, Erich was smiling as he wiped down the espresso machine, one evening. “Paul, you will discover that our Eoin is downright yeasty”.

    Definite second-language vocabulary choice.

    I didn’t know precisely what he meant by yeasty, but I had an idea. It was a nasty enough image, further exacerbated by Erich’s smarmy delivery. But, to be fair, it wasn’t only Erich that hinted at Eoin’s prowess. I’d heard a lot in my first week, but assumed most of it was old news. Some improper touching with a receptionist at the soft launch, a drunken cab ride with a junior bartender, a bathroom fuck with a former waitress and oral sex during staff meal.

    Staff meal lasts a half hour.  Totally doable.

    Thus, taking all of this into consideration, the humiliation of the uniform was a lot for Eoin to accept. And each time a table was sat on his side of the dining room, and a somm was required, he looked mortified. His foot-dragging approach was tentative, shamed, and cowed; making for a very bad start each and every time.

    And it was a shame, because once the initial uniform shock wore off and a rapport developed, Eoin rolled right along. He clearly had a good bit of restaurant experience and the knack for multi-tasking and anticipation that one needed in this work. Whether he knew as little as Mike suspected, or whether it was just the humiliation of the pixie dress, I didn’t know.  But, I wore the same sartorial disaster, and I knew the challenge firsthand and so I was willing to give Irish the benefit of the doubt.

    1D on the other hand was a ball of joy. Not only did he carry off the uniform with elan, but he had added a tiny lavender bow to the lapel of his waistcoat.

    “I thought it was nice and Melody told me I could a keep it!”

    Goddam this kid.

    At the table, he tended to be a bit hyper, a bit too genuinely excited to be talking about wine and perhaps, to be showing off his English – which, was great. But he’d bob up and down while speaking, gesture a bit too much with his hands, and lean a touch too casually over the guest. He didn’t quite have the rhythm or organisation of thought that Eoin had, either.

    So, they were an interesting pairing. As far as Mike’s original conceit – that these two couldn’t be trusted when alone on the floor – that was obvious, even if I wasn’t officially cleared for duty.

    Up until this point I’d been doing training, watching most of the action from the sidelines. Three shifts of follows and the rest mixed on the rota with Mike. It was always just two sommeliers per shift. Seedling was set up with only one somm per each half of the dining room. Really, it wasn’t enough, and so every step counted when the room was full. Sixty covers per somm with no commis was madness – there could be no mistakes.

    To make this skeleton set up work, there was a great dependence on the bar. Bartenders received the wine ticket in station and then had to know, by heart, the glassware for that particular bottle and in which cave it lived. With a short, curated list of boutique, small production wines, there was little point in assigning bin numbers in the till system. It was a fluid list, with bin assignments changing rapidly and concentration required, as a result. Bartenders were often frantically going from cave to cave in search of a bottle whereas for Mike, personally choosing and stocking every wine, it was imprinted on his brain. Not willing to wait for the bartenders, he’d often just dash behind the bar and grab a bottle, himself.  Of course he knew the lay of the land better than anyone – he made the land, he drew the map.  And Mike understood he had this unfair advantage, and he knew the skeleton crew set-up was problematic.  So, as added flexibility, somms were allowed to call for as many wines as they wanted.  Meaning, if you’re nowhere near a computer terminal and one-hundred percent ‘in the weeds’, you just go to the bar and call a by-the-glass bottle.  Yeah, get the ticket in afterwards, mark it ‘no make’, but don’t let a sprint to the computer terminal or a queue behind Marcos and his doddering key punching sink your service.  No way.  We could even open any bottle we wanted, within reason - start a special glass pour if we thought it would create a strong pairing or lead to bigger sales.  You had to be strategic when Seedling was at full-tilt or you were not going to stay afloat.  But where there was flexibility in presenting wine, there was inflexibility on most everything else.  Mike had very specific protocols. Those protocols, decrees, included things like glassware.  If Mike wanted Valpolicella in a Burgundy glass, then you better damn well get it to the guest in a Burgundy glass. And if Mike wanted a Greek white decanted, you better damn well decant it.  And, so, when you get to the bar and that Assyrtiko is with erroneous mise-en-place or is not accompanied by a decanter, or both – you’ll know it.

    It was in those first few days that the origin of Omar’s “managerial” approach became apparent. He was taking his cues from Mike. So, it really was as if he was trying on a role, because Mike’s dictatorial leanings came from expertise and a demand for excellence, whereas Omar’s came from a place of insecurity and a misguided quest for respect.

    “Mike’s lapdog, that one,” was how Eoin described him. “Brought him in from Clove Club as a waiter and they up and make him a manager. Fair play, but he’s still a lapdog”.

    Well, there was one thing Eoin and I had in common – not fans of Omar.

    “Reneé, too. She’s from Clove Club. Wait until they all gang up on you, at once”.

    Reneé was foreign to me. I’d not worked with her directly but seen her hustle by. She was like a bull in a china shop, and I don’t care where she came from, previously - she was more like a diner waitress than fine-dining caliber. But, that said, she was competent. I had no complaints. Clearly, Eoin did.  But for my part, of those three there was only one person on my shit list, and that was Omar.

                                                                                        *

It came to a head, pretty early. My second lunch shift Mike decided the covers were low and wine sales were nearly over.

    “You can take it from here”.

    He went downstairs to ‘bang out some ordering’ and I was told to run out the end of service.

    It should’ve been straightforward – topping up wines, a few digestif sales, assist in running coffees, and general support of the waitstaff. And though I was already prepared to do far more than the job description promised, Omar set the service ablaze.

    Every time Omar passed me in the dining room he had words for me. “Top up on table six”, or “coffees on the bar”, or “tighten your trousers” or “service in the kitchen” or “eyes up” or “pick up the speed” or “keep moving” or “ no hands in pockets”, or “I want dessert silver on thirteen, now”. The dining room was at perhaps thirty percent capacity and with lunch service winding down, no less. But Omar’s attacks came fast and furious with condescension and vitriol, on the side. It didn’t matter that most of these tasks had nothing to do with somm staff; I had no choice but to try and keep up. It was nearing the end, but with normal somm duties and front of house leaving on mandated breaks, I was starting to become over-extended with supporting the waitstaff.

    Then arrived a next-level moment. Table three, a VIP West End producer wanted his bill, and he wanted it split. Marcos had disappeared and I didn’t yet have a number to log into the till. I could run the credit cards on separate hand-held machines, but I couldn’t print the bill. Omar was at the waiter station.

    “Omar, I need a bill...”

    He didn’t so much as look at me, but a finger went up in the air and he continued to count out some bills, reconciling credit card transactions.

    I stood next to him for a moment, watching as the producer on three swiveled around in irritation.

    “It’s for...”

    The finger in my face, again.

    I took a deep breath, and stood quietly next to Omar. He was playing a childish power game and though I thought I might have a move, I couldn’t give too much away. After a beat, I walked casually down the dining room, under the panel mirrors, monitoring the mounting frustration at table three. I stopped at Vassily who was pulling some dessert silver for one of his late tables.

    “Vassily, could you print me out a bill for table three?”

    He looked up, then at table three. He smirked and one of his tiny pencil eyebrows arched up in delight.

    “No, that’s Marcos’ table. You’ll have to ask him”. He shoved the drawer closed with his hip and minced off.

    In all of this, it never occurred to me to just let it go. Clearly, the chips would fall where they might and it would be Marcos and Omar that would take the fall. I know that, now, looking back. But, there’s an ex-restaurant manager living inside of me, and my mind continued to look for a way to solve this. I went to the far till in the salon bar and began typing in various numerical combinations until I could get access. “One ten” was the first to go through. “Kamil”.

    Oh, great.

    I logged Kamil into the system, printed the bill, and knowing Omar was guard-dogging the calculator, did a bit of arithmetic as fast as my elementary school mind could resurrect. I was racing against the clock, knowing any minute the producer on three might stand up and loudly demand service to a mortified audience.

    I grabbed some pen and paper and divided up the bill, manually. Taking the scraps and the credit card reader I cut through the front garden, behind the still-mathing Omar, his lips moving in silent arithmatic - and rushed up to the bar for the petit fours required to go down with any bills.

    “Marty, I need petit fours for two people”.

    Marty was a sweet, guileless Italian girl who liked to talk. A lot.

    “Paul, my favourite American! How is your first week, now?”

    “Yes, fine. Just need those petit fours”.

    “Oh, Paul, I don’t have a ticket for any petit fours”.

    I winced.

    “I know, but it’s for the producer on table three and this is really, really late, Marty”.

    Marty put one hand up and nodded to show she understood the predicament.

    “OK, but if Erich finds out, it’s my ass, okay?” She turned to the truffles with her signature snail-paced ways, gently placed them on a plate and dusted her hands against her trousers before passing them on to me.

    “Thanks, Marty, you’re a life saver!”

    I took a bit of misdirected abuse from the producer, but that’s as far as it went. Neither guest stood up and made a scene, no managers were involved, and Marcos, well, he was never the wiser because he was “in the toilet” for the length of it. More on that at a later date....

    By the time I took payment and returned to the waiters’ station, Omar was folding his cashout materials into three tidy manila envelopes. I handed him the credit card slips.

    “Table three”.

    Omar flipped between the two credit card slips and the bill.

    “Paul, how is it that ‘Kamil’ printed this slip when he’s, to my knowledge, in Slovakia?”

    “No idea”.

    Omar logged on to the till.

    “Kamil is mysteriously logged on. Hmm..”

    Man this guy’s such a joke.

    “Would you like to explain how you have a bill printed out by ‘Kamil’”

    “No, not really”.

    I figured if I turned heel and left he wouldn’t have the balls to follow and I was right. I walked casually past the kitchen line, fobbed myself into the interior stairwell and I stopped. It was only my first week. In the eyes of staff I knew I was faring well. Easy-going, competent, no-drama, and good for a few laughs. But, in that moment, there in the peeling paint of the interior stairwell, I was ready to explode. Truly, I was ready to bin my pantaloons and waistcoat and walk straight out across Waterloo Bridge and back to my crackhead flat.  And worst of all, it was all because of some half-wit manager wannabe with “useless” to be someday, undoubtedly, etched across his tall, lanky grave.

    Unfortunately, this was the very moment Mike came up the stairwell.  “Hey, service done?”

    I had to imagine something showed in my face. But if so, Mike didn’t see it.

    I was about to kick off and I didn’t know if it was taking advantage of a moment or being complete reckless.

    “I need to talk to you for a second”.

    “Ok”.

    I thought we would step out somewhere private, but it was obvious we would stay there, in the stairwell. Mike made no movement.

    I retreated.

    “Nah, no, nevermind”.

    “Sure?”

    “Yeah, no it’s not a big deal. I’ll figure it out. Not a big deal”.

    Mike shrugged his shoulders and fobbed himself into the restaurant.  I stood there another moment. I hated being this angry. And I resented being made so. I really, truly resented Omar forcing me to lose my cool, and getting in the way of my plan to return to wine. Because, that was really how I saw it – the grand plan - and I was trying desperately to focus on the big picture. Now, I was having concerns. Yes, today I was not walking out. I had managed to pull myself back from the brink. But tomorrow could be different. And if I walked out on this job and my handshake agreement with Mike, then my entire plan went to shit and that fucktard Omar would be to blame.  He, or my temper.

    I needed to have a re-think. I needed a strategy.

    I fobbed back in and headed towards the somm station at the end of the bar. Mike was giving Marty some grief on the state of the bar nuts.

    Omar looked over at me, briefly, then away.

    Mike started talking me through the list changes, pages to be replaced, etcetera. I tried to concentrate, knowing that Omar was replaying events in his head and knowing I was being drawn into some game that I was way too old and way too experienced to be involved in.

    Vassily then came by with a chipped glass he’d found on one of the tables, passing it to Mike with a mumbled “found this”.

    “Mike ran his thumb over the chipped base and passed it to me.

    “Want it?”, he asked, and then headed off to reception to check covers for the dinner shift, not waiting on an answer. It was one of the Burgundy stems, a good quality Schott-Weisel globe, and a small treat after a rough service. I put a piece of tape around the stem and had started collating the pages, when Erich arrived for evening service.

    “What’s this?” He picked up the glass and examined the tape I’d wrapped around it.

    “Chipped base, Mike said I could take it home”. I thumbed through page seven, ‘French Reds’.

    “Oh don’t be starting that shit...” and with that he dropped the stem into the broken glass bin and I heard it shatter.

    Yes, I definitely had to have re-think. I most definitely needed a strategy - because that was my first week finished, and I felt nearly finished, myself. 


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