Seedling 8: ‘you have no idea’
Briefing flew past, and whether it was the number of guest speakers or my underlying sense of panic that made it so, I couldn’t be sure. But, at least the parade of people – Melody explaining Jack by the Hedge, the sous chef introducing a cod’s roe starter, and of course Diana and her guests of note – at least they broke up Hannah’s questionably-researched take on world events and when or how they might weigh on the psyche of that evening’s diners.
Cosmo was all smiles and giddiness, jumping in to answer as many questions as possible during the cheese quiz. Why this kid was so excited to take on an extra shift when we’re salaried was beyond me. My gut feeling is he looked up to Mike, wanted to impress him and would do just about anything he asked..
How sweet, but he’d better haul ass, tonight.
When Beverage’s briefing block arrived and we were asked to present a product, Erich, instead, gave a dour scolding on the lack of digestifs and aquavit sales by the front-of-house. This wasn’t a one-off. Most of his briefing presentations had to do with the waiters’ ‘lack of knowledge’ and often featured challenging questions about the cocktail list that no guest was ever going to ask. Mood sank. Hannah’s enthusiastic resumption and recap of recent positive press from Time Out couldn’t lift the Erich malaise.
Four sections for waiters, and of course, two for somms. 1D would be working with Renée and Marcos, I was with Vassily and a tiny Aussie girl named Vera. The service looked straightforward enough, and it began as just a trickle of guests. Mostly, this was when the service was a bit awkward. You were too aware of when the guest sat, when they first looked at the wine list and when the food order was in. Your job was to be there and be ready, yes, but you didn’t want to look overly-solicitous, or, worse, as if you were on the hunt. You wanted to foster service that had a natural progression. This was easier to pull off with a bit of pace. You didn’t want a crazy service, no, but you didn’t want it this quiet, either.
I filled the time. I would start at one end of the dining room and then move to the other. We’d been warned that grouping in sums larger than two was not allowed. So, if 1D and I were chatting down the far end by the toilets, and Vera approached, one of us would peel off. We’d typically march through our section making mental notes of position numbers or practicing how to walk in plimsouls.
Once we arrived at the bar, we’d have a quick word with whoever, either Erich or Marty, and then spin and gaze out over the dining room, once more.
The first couple hours were straightforward, albeit a bit slow. It was boring, but for me it was a decent way to suss out timing aspects of my job; most importantly, the timing of pairings. See, Mike was keen on pairings and considered it our most important responsibility. Seedling didn’t offer a tasting menu, but our list was bespoke and by-the-glass offerings changed with the menu changes, mirroring a tasting menu. It was an unstuffy approach at our price-point, which was great, but there’d been no training or integration of that philosophy with the waiters’ order of service. Accurate timings are crucial for food and wine pairing and in better restaurants, the waiter would hold the course and not ‘fire’ it until he or she was sure the wine was down. Here at Seedling? - a foreign concept, entirely. That entire tradition was absent and the order of service was backwards, with the somms having to react to waiters; to monitor them like a hawk, punching into the till to see what was ordered and when it was fired, looking for clues like:
Is there a soup spoon? Does that mean it’s course one? Is that a steak knife I see, so course two?
It was on the somms to time the pairings and it was a mindfuck, because you never knew if the waiter had an order in, or if the guest had asked for wine, even. You’d only find out if you pinned a waiter to the wall and demanded an answer. Or sometimes, yes, they’d come to you and say ‘table fifteen wants a somm’ but you never knew if an order was already in and if you took the time to run to the till to look at the courses, you were well behind in racing the clock. And, if that course of starters or mains beats your wine course to the table, it was the somm that got the blame. And that’s why, as I was saying, I took advantage of the slower pace to monitor how the timing was, and how it varied from waiter to waiter.
With Vera, it was cake. She was somewhat of a nervous wreck, but the minute she had an order she came to me, rattled it off and then went to the till. Of course, with her Perth accent, I hardly understood a word, but it was a token. Vassily, on the other hand, was the laziest person on the floor of Seedling. He would never bother to relay information to a somm – it would have required extra footsteps. And that defined everything he did(or didn’t do). Each time he cleared menus he simply dumped them in next to the computer screen of the till, instead of taking them to reception. Desserts arrived with no silver, and he would languidly lay two spoons on a cloth and saunter over as if he was some limp-wristed gentleman caller from a Tennessee Williams play. He was from one of the Georgias, that was for sure.
So, I was learning. I watched each of them, how they worked, and then got an idea of how fast I had to pull wine and get back to the floor. And, I’d gathered, it had to be fast in general. Very fast.
And while you were working this all out in your brain, sticking and moving in a busy service, you couldn’t let the nervous energy spill over at the table. Never. Once the bar had the ticket, and once the wine appeared on the bar, you had to grab it, present it with calm assurance, and then hightail it to the somm station to open it, taste, spit and head back out at breakneck speed. There wasn’t a moment to waste.
Having taken the pulse of the staff over that first week, I could see that Cosmo and I would have a mixed bag of challenges that night. I had Vera, all good. Then I had Vassily, Count Lazy of Twattenham. I’d have to pull weight for him, all night.
It was doable. I’m a bit of a workhorse.
1D on the other hand, had a more complicated situation. Renée was like me – total workhorse. She didn’t need a helping hand, trust. But she wasn’t exactly the most diplomatic tongue in the front of the house. She could rattle 1D if she lost her temper, whether she intended to or not. Poor Cosmo was fragile, Renee was decidedly not.
And then...then there was Marco. Marco was already a liability, simply because we had mirrors hung in the dining room. But, when you gave Marco an Italian somm, things became more complicated.
For some reason, Marco – and many of the waiters, to be fair – considered themselves superior to the somms. Honestly, I’d never seen that dynamic. It should be the reverse. I was certain it was related to the London restaurant term “head waiter”. A fair few, being foreign, had taken that language and conflated it with leadership jobs like “head somm” or “head of tech development”. Really, it simply meant “waiter”. But the humble nature of the position was very much lost in translation.
This misguided title view materialised in Marco bossing 1D around, incessantly. When I first saw it happening, in the early shifts, I thought maybe they were brothers, or related – that’s pretty common in London restos. But, through a little conversation, bit by bit...no, neither of them had ever met. Marco had a distorted idea of his job, clearly, but the problem was that nobody had corrected him on it. Beyond this, he also thought he could get away with running 1D around simply out of a common language – and I knew this because he hadn’t tried to pull that shit with me. I saw it as a festering problem. Yet, nobody else seemed to notice. Or worse, nobody seemed to mind - that the heirarchy of the floor, that the very design of service, was being thrown out the window.
It made me nervous.
As the “push” neared, the crunch time, I found myself eye-balling every aspect of service, trying to anticipate what could go wrong, and what might take us down. I was dogged in reviewing the glass counts behind the bar and monitoring whether decanters were moving through the rinsing process at speed. If Marty was distracted, I would duck behind the bar and hold up one of the decanters to catch her attention, or just do a speed clean on it myself. Anywhere I could crib back sixty seconds, I went for it. I mighta looked the spaz, but I had learned that when shit hits the fan, you inevitably review every mistake you’d made over the course of a service and count up how it lead to your stumbling downfall an hour later.
And about an hour later, yes, it began. Just past eight the room started to fill. It was brisk. I definitely had control of my section, but there were a few moments when it was dicey. I was still new and finding my footing, and spending as much time hiking up my pantaloon pants as selling wine.
I was rapidly coming to terms with the idea of having permanent ‘builder’s bum’. ...
The new discovery for me was that part of the problem with the service was the sheer noise. Multiple people would come up and ask me about the status of a table or ask if they’d ordered wine and I never knew if they were duly doing their job or testing me - or simply trying to rattle me, even. Perhaps I was overly paranoid; perhaps. If it was Hannah or Vera, I figured there was a real sense of urgency. If it was Vassily or Diana, I was less apt to take them seriously. There was a bit of a power play with the latter two, and each time one of them spoke to me, they were breaking my train of concentration and my management of the section.
I hardly saw 1D for the two hours that ensued. We rushed past each other with nary a look, but every time we coincided at the bar, stacked up on Barolo and tall reds, I could look over at his fresh face and feel a distinct sense of ownership and camaraderie. There were more than one or two smiles exchanged as we embraced the panic and rush of a fairly busy service; and, it had to be said, knowing we had it.
It was only towards the far end of the “push” as Mike had termed it, that problems came aground. There was a confluence of later tables arriving early and earlier tables arriving late. It was reason for concern. And, it wasn’t just me. Renée, with her no-nonsense personality, betrayed the first sense of a problem.
“See that, Paul? That’s a triple seat at the end of a rush. See them all sitting? And that, that is our head maitre’d. How do you like that? HEAD maitre’d!!
Renée didn’t speak out of a need for commiseration or reassurance. She was simply angry. Had Diana just slammed Renée with a combo of late and early arriving tables? Yes. Table 13, 16 and 27 meant eighteen sat in unison. Now that might not seem a lot for some reading this, but for this level of service, or, more importantly, for the streamlined number of people working the floor, we were in for problems. And as Renée was working with Cosmo, things were about to go solidly sideways for 1D.
Vera and I were starting to experience our own moment of panic. We were triple sat, as well – though not quite in the large numbers of Renée. Vera was good, so that was a plus - but sharing the windows side of the dining room meant she had to walk through Vassily’s under-served section and pull weight for him the same way that I did. So, when you worked side by side with Vassily, you could count on thirty-percent more workload to begin with, and a triple seating was just cruel icing on the cake.
I was cranking along as best I could. Staying ahead was becoming increasingly hard, and I caught table three out of the corner of my eye. They were cleared of menus, and the wine list was open. I had no idea how long their order had been in and couldn’t know unless I made the long trek to the kitchen and eyed the printed ticket. Instead I went to the far computer terminal and opened the check. Vassily had the full order in and it was two courses, meaning the starters would fly with an immediate firing of the course, but I might need to sell wine across the full meal and that ate up time. I tried to memorise the entire order.
Position one cod’s roe and squab, position two heirloom tomatoes and Middle White.
“Paul, I need menus at reception!”
Diana grabbed a handful of Vassily’s discarded dinner menus, shook them in my face and strode back towards the front entrance. I looked over the order, again and moved to table three, racing over and then slowing as I came within their field of vision.
“Hello, there. How are you doing with the wine list, so far?”
We went through the normal confusion over my pirate wear and then finally delved in and agreed on glass pours of rosé Champagne and Vinho Verde on the starters, and a bottle of Côte de Brouilly for the mains. It was painless enough, but I was sweating knowing I had a few other tables to attend to.
Table thirty-two – menus gone. Wine list open..
I raced past them and aimed for the computer terminals. Both were occupied, one by Renée, and one by Marcos who always took ten minutes to put in an order; mouthing things to himself, squinting and then paging back through his orders in calm confusion. I waited for a beat, then gave up. Crossing back to to the bar and through a line of food runners coming out of the kitchen pass.
Backs! backs!
‘Marty, I need the Chartogne-Taillet and the Aphros on the bar, one glass each’
Marty nodded and went about it. I headed back to the kitchen line to find the ticket on thirty-two. The pass was a mural of white and yellow dupes and I concentrated, starting at the top of the wall-mounted rack where newer orders should be.
Thirty-two, got it - oysters to share, lamb seat one, squab seat two.
‘Don’t touch that plate, these are NOT ready to run!’ It was directed at me and I looked over at the decidedly American accent to see the pastry chef frazzled and seething at the same time. Hannah, trying to expedite the line, jumped.
‘Of course, no problem’.
The pastry chef clearly thought I was running food, which makes no sense, because if one followed Hannah’s logic, the uniform scheme was quite ingenious and clearly defined. This pirate? Obviously, a somm. Hannah looked over at me in worry, perhaps sensing the start of an argument. Strands of her blonde hair were starting to come loose from the tight bun she wore, falling in wild directions over her shoulders and around her ears. This was a telltale sign of impending disaster, I’d learn later, but for now I just gave her a wink and turned on heel.
I followed two of the food runners out, again.
Backs! Backs!
Straight to the bar, grabbed the bottles for table three and their two glasses and got a bit of stink eye from Erich as he slapped a sprig of mint and dropped it into a Collins glass. My heart was racing as I poured the slow, moussy Champagne, ticking away the minutes between the arrival of their starters and the dire need to get to thirty-two. As I finished with the Vinho Verde, the starters arrived behind me. Not able to get past the runners I made for the far end of the dining room and the rear terminal, punched in the two glasses of wine with a ‘do not make’, one- handed. Then I created a second ticket for the Brouilly with a ‘hold’ designation. 1D came up behind me, breathless.
‘Can I get in? Are you done? I really need a computer’.
‘All yours,’ were about all the words I could spare before I raced back to the bar, dropped the two bottles, and rounded back to thirty-two. They weren’t drinking. Vassily had merely neglected to remove the list, making me think there was a pending order and wasting precious time. I went through some niceties, then turned to find table two flagging me down.
‘Could you tell our waiter we need our bill? We’ve asked twice, already’.
Somehow I had to get to Vassily, wherever he was in the room. I could knock it out, but couldn’t check the bill for accuracy. If something was off, it’d be my head. Hannah could print the bill, but she was stuck on the line. The dining room, effectively, had no manager.
“I’ve had enough of this!”
There were some crashing sounds from the kitchen, and then a silence. Melody had walked out. So, no manager, and now, no chef.
From across the room, I sensed another problem. 1D had poured just three glasses of an eight-top and was now deep in conversation with the host. Something was wrong. The guest gestured several times to the bottle of white and 1D nodded several times. He looked nervous. And he looked like he might not fully understand the man’s English, as well. Cosmo started back towards the bar and I shadowed him, passing Vassily as he languidly folded a guest’s napkin.
‘Vassily, bill on table two’
‘Can you do it?’
‘No’.
1D and I arrived at the bar at the same time. He was fully enveloped in the cone of panic.
‘Marty, this wine is by-the-glass, now’.
It was a sixty-eight pound bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. I had a feeling I knew what had gone awry, but asked, anyway. ‘What happened?’
Cosmo’s eyes looked blank. He was buried. I could hear the din of his section from here.
‘The man, he says it is corked. But, I don’t think,’ he paused. ‘I do not think it is corked.’
Renée charged past us, throwing out a “what is happening on sixteen, people?!” 1D was about to melt down.
I looked into my section. Thirty-six had a list open, but menus still down. Vera was taking them through the specials, so I could buy time, there. Table six needed topped up on their bottle of rosé. I had five minutes to help Cosmo, more or less.
‘Okay, first thing you do is just clear those three glasses you’ve poured, okay? Just get them off the table. You pull and I’ll talk to the host’.
1D went for a tray and I started over.
“Hi, sir, how are you?”
He looked up and with a matching uniform to 1D, I think he was unsure if we were the same person, or not. When Cosmo arrived behind me and started swapping out the partially-filled wine glasses his confused stare waned.
“I’m fine, but that wine certainly isn’t. It’s corked, and I’m a little surprised we were served it, to be frank”.
We were a new restaurant and we had a lot of press, so some of our guests were coming in spoiling for a fight, determined to prove glowing reviews were unwarranted and Seedling was certainly not up to their ‘standards’.
“Well, I do apologise, but the wine isn’t corked. It’s an unusual Sauvignon Blanc that uses native yeast and some barrel ageing. We love the Bellbird for pairing purposes, but it’s a bit of a marmite situation”.
Brits love marmite comparisons.
“Whatever it is, it’s not right”.
“Well, let’s do this. Why don’t I have you taste a Sancerre we have by the glass. It won’t be quite as high acid as some New Zealand Sauv Blanc, but this vintage was warm and you do get that Kiwi gooseberry, grassy quality. Would that work?”
“Is there not another Sauvignon Blanc?” He piqued his voice at the end in an attempt at outrage; a suggestion of disbelief that we didn’t have more Sauv Blancs.
I didn’t even blink.
“Well, it’s Sancerre Blanc which is one-hundred percent Sauvignon Blanc, as you know, and it does come in under the Bellbird. Let’s try it”.
I began walking before he could protest. I had no intention of waiting for his answer. Cosmo had been waiting near the toilets, watching from a safe distance and trying to make out what was going on. He followed me down the columns side and we both tried to get around Marco who was standing far out into the passageway while he tried to refill some sparkling water. Table twenty-three smiled and called me over.
“Hi, we were just wondering if Melody is in the kitchen, tonight?” The lady was plastered in pancake make-up, red lipstick and all beaming smiles; clearly a fan of Melody’s cookbooks.
“She was”. I smiled and carried on.
When we got to the bar, I explained to 1D we would give him a taste of the Boulay Sancerre and then just sell a bottle off of that.
“Okay, I’ll get one to present,” and as 1D went to punch in the ticket I stopped him.
“No, no, you don’t have time. Just take the glass pour bottle and let him taste, then present a full bottle while I’m opening up a new one for you. You’re too far behind to get in before the first course. Marty, could we have the Sancerre on the bar, please”.
Erich turned from wiping down the back bar and leaned over the dry sink. “Where is the ticket for this?”
Like I said, somms don’t need a ticket; not to call a by-the-glass wine, not even to pull and open a fresh bottle from the cave. Erich knew all this. But I’d gleaned he wasn’t a big fan of Mike, so the wheels were turning in many different directions.
“Erich, we don’t have time, we’ve got a refused bottle on sixteen”.
“Yes, I know, a returned sixty-eight pound bottle that we are now stuck with. I want a ticket on this and I want this bottle sold off”.
I reached over the bar and grabbed the Sancerre, myself - it’s bright yellow capsule an easy target - popped the cork off of it and handed it to 1D. He was in shock.
“Nice attitude, Paul”.
Cosmo was still standing there, unsure of whether he should be trusting me or fearing Erich. I leaned in slightly towards 1D, locking eyes.
“This is your section and this is your table,” I started “you are responsible for it and not Erich. You decide your terms of service, nobody else. You wanna get this done before the first course?”
“Yes”.
“Then go”.
1D took off down the long run of the restaurant.
“What the Hell is your problem, Paul?” Erich spat each word with the condescension and disdain of a man whose bluff had finally been called.
“You’re fucking up his service, Erich, and when you fuck up his service, you fuck up mine - and I’m not having it”.
“You’re an asshole”.
“You have no idea”.
Marty laughed and then stifled it. She immediately turned and grabbed some coffee tickets as cover, jangling porcelain saucers as she went. I rounded the corner of the bar, opened cave two, and pulled two bottles of Boulay Sancerre. Cosmo arrived behind me; he swapped me the glass pour bottle for one of the unopened. As he headed back out to present, I whipped the second bottle open for a quick check on cork taint. It was clean. 1D was back and I passed him the newly opened bottle, then returned his unopened one to the cave. I tapped the back bar to get Marty’s attention and gave the by-the-glass Sancerre a shove; it slid across to Marty by the coffee station and she put it back into the chiller. Crossing to the computer station..(backs! backs!) ...I punched in the Sancerre as a “do not make” on 1D’s code. I looked towards table sixteen and saw he was just pouring for the last guest when the two runners arrived with starters.
“Pete, you using that computer”
“My name is Paul, and yes”.
“Oooh, well la di da!”
Marcos stood looking over my shoulder as I paged up on sixteen’s bill, highlighted the Bellbird Spring Sauvignon Blanc and then coded it ‘void’ on the manager’s function, ‘no waste’.
‘Hey, how did you do that?’.
‘Shhhhh.’
And with that, service was pretty much over. I topped up the rosé on six, sold a few glasses of Bellbird on thirty-six and gave Marty the remaining glass as her staff drink.
Erich, however, didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night.
HOME next SEEDLING 9: THE HOLIDAY IS OVER