On the Nature of Staff Meal
And the greatness in simplicity
These aren’t the most reassuring of days for someone living in the corner of the world that I live.
I’ll not dwell on that for now though.
Maybe it’s enough just to say that comfort food has started to feel increasingly necessary lately.
That’s why this week, via an ode to that restaurant institution of the “staff meal”, I have a recipe I’ve taken comfort in for years: a good ol’ fashioned fish pie (plus a vegetarian variation).
This week the full recipe is behind a paywall (ducks for cover). If you can afford it and you enjoy my weekly newsletter to you, I hope you’ll upgrade to help fund both my running this newsletter and, you know, life generally. It’s just a few €/$ a month.
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Thanks,
Wil
PS
10 minutes before sending this I read it is actually British Pie Week this week. I want it on record that my sharing a pie recipe this week is a total accident and I am by no means organised enough to have planned this.
Bait and Switch
“I’m no Massimo Bottura,” I told the poor bastard, “but I don’t think gnocchi is supposed to, you know, dissolve that way.”
The kid was in trouble. He’d been sweating over his stove, neurotically dropping his disconcertingly orange-coloured gnocchi into the boiling water. It was clear this, his first attempt at making staff food for the team, was going arse over teacup.
“It was the sweet potatoes, wasn’t it,” I said. “The sweet potatoes you used because you ran out of regular potatoes, you bloody muppet.”
Silence.
“Not enough starch in sweet potatoes though. Too much water. You do know the others are gonna rip you to pieces for this, right?”
Yes, I was being hard on the guy. But the clueless stagiaire had a lesson to learn: you can never fuck up staff food.
But then, having noticed the inevitable tears welling up in his eyes, I realised I needed to step up. So I binned his gnocchi soup, boiled some pasta for him, and helped him make a quick tomato sauce.
Hardly rocket surgery but enough to please the team for his first attempt at staff meal.
There’d be many kitchen cock-ups over the following years for that stagiaire, but staff food only got better for him after that.
And I know this because, as you’ve probably guessed, that miserable little stagiaire was me.
In Search of Greatness
Those early days at Portland restaurant in London were not easy for me. It was my first experience of restaurant cooking, and culinary school, which I was doing side by side with the restaurant work, was zero preparation for line cook life.
Sure, I knew how to decorate a whole salmon with a little ruff of watercress, and how to make mayonnaise using only a wooden spoon, but the speed and efficiency the Portland cooks showed off remained other-worldly to me. It seemed they were playing by a set of rules written in a language I couldn’t even read.
But then I got a lifeline.
While browsing in my culinary school library one day I found a copy of Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook. What he wrote about “staff food” hit me like an axe felling an oak:
“Staff meal. Only the staff sees it. If you can make great food for these people, create that habit, have that drive, that sincerity, and keep that with you and take it to another level in the staff meal, then someday you’ll be a great chef. Maybe.”
It felt like he was talking directly to me.
This, I realised, was how I’d prove myself. I might be a poor excuse for a line cook right now, but I could try and make everyone a good staff meal.
And this, so Keller promised, would be my first step to being great.
The Joy of “Staff”
If a restaurant is restauranting properly, then barely anyone working there is ever having a very good time. I will fight you on this if you disagree.
The hours are too long. Your loved ones are invariably doing something pleasant like, I dunno, sleeping when you’re cleaning fish entrails out of bins at midnight. And the money is never enough to make up for it.
Staff food (or “family meal” if you’re cute) is the restaurant’s way of making up for it. It’s the 20 minutes of respite out of 16 hours of exhaustion. It’s the birthday card from that parent who spends the rest of the year telling you how much a jerk you are.
And, for me at least, there’s a real joy in cooking “staff” as well.
As a cook working in a country far from my childhood home, sharing the food I grew up with at staff food has always been special for me. Staff food is a chance to share something of both my home and of myself as well.
Because, what I’ve discovered as an immigrant, is that making a new home somewhere is as much a process of giving as it is learning. It’s a two-way road. Equal parts opening oneself up to change and sharing the best of yourself as well.
Staff food, in its small way, has always helped me do that.
Finding Greatness
I’ve worked in some very special restaurants alongside very special chefs who frequently made very special staff food.
But for every heavenly Chocolate Marquise I’ve been given to wolf down 10 minutes before service, there have also been things that sounded distinctly like they were plucked from the pages of a gruesome Roald Dahl children’s book.
I’m thinking of kale pie when I think of such dishes.
But this is the joy of staff food. Even the kale pie, made necessary one Saturday in 2016 at Portland because the vegan option didn’t sell that week, was really bloody good.
Because, made with care and love, even the simplest food made from the humblest ingredients is enough to be great.
This is what I got wrong when I first read those words of Keller’s. The greatness he refers to, I think, is one of prestige and reputation and, maybe, even power. It is the fine-dining kind of greatness. It is the greatness you see in magazines and the top of “100 Best” lists. It is a “greatness” you achieve one day after years of toil built on low wages and overworked underlings.
And it’s a greatness I know now I’m really not that interested in.
The greatness that matters to me begins the moment you commit to putting care into what you cook. It’s checking the seasoning at every step, it’s getting just the right amount of colour on your caramelised onions, it’s making time to reduce your sauce just as much as it needs. No watery-ness. No burning on the bottom of the pan.
Cooking with “love” or “heart” are nebulous, annoyingly trite phrases.
What they really mean is simply taking that little effort, at every little step, to turn edible into bloody gorgeous.
This is the greatness that puts smiles on the faces of everyone from dishwasher to Michelin Starred head chef to the person you’re lucky enough to be cooking for at home.
And it’s open to anyone.
The recipe I’m sharing today is the kind of simple thing I often made for staff food. And, like the best simple food, there are plenty of little steps we can take to make it truly, well, “great”.
I hope you like it.
A Recipe for Good Ol’ English Fish Pie
Like all good staff food this very English pie is entirely adaptable. The choice of fish you use is largely up to you. I’ve made this pie using meagre pieces of salmon belly trim, and I’ve made it with beautiful chunks of prime cod. You could use raw prawns or scallops. Below I give you a vegetarian variation. The process will be largely the same. This recipe isn’t far removed from the one I’ve been using since I was about 11 and it’s proved just as good for “staff” as it has for or a low-effort Sunday lunch.