Part 20: Nothing Dies like Love or Restaurants
A story about chive flowers
Memoirs of a Line Cook Part 20: Nothing Dies like Love or Restaurants
When you are away, you are nevertheless present for me. This presence is multiform: it consists of countless images, passages, meanings, things known, landmarks, yet the whole remains marked by your absence, in that it is diffuse. It is as if your person becomes a place, your contours horizons. I live in you then like living in a country. You are everywhere. Yet in that country I can never meet you face to face.
John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
“Nothing dies like love or flowers,” I told the rest of the kitchen crew.
“Shut the hell up, Reidie,” Janina, a fellow line cook at Restaurant Esperanto, politely requested in response.
2 kilos of chive flowers had just been dumped in front of us. It was half past midnight. The end of a typically long Saturday and we couldn’t leave until all of them (about 2 bin bags full) had been “taken care of”.
Maybe that’s why Janina was a little more direct than usual.
If you’ve never seen a chive flower before, just picture a regular chive with a purple pom-pom stuck to the end of it. Our job late that night was to separate said pom-poms from the green stems, rinse them in water, run them through a salad spinner, and lay them out on sheets of baking paper to dehydrate by Monday morning.
If we worked quickly, maybe we’d be out by 2 am.
It was a university friend of mine who wrote “nothing dies like love or flowers.” His name was Gareth and, as well as being exceptionally Welsh and capable of drinking me under the table, which he tended to generously agree to do whenever I’d had my heart broken, he was also capable of writing the most beautifully delicate prose.
That line of his I’ve never forgotten. 15 years on now, I think I never will.
It was around that time I first read Berger’s work as well. I was 20 then and, like many overly sensitive people who listened to too much Jeff Buckley and My Chemical Romance, I was desperate for love.
But it didn’t happen. A romance would start. I would become enraptured by it, by her. And it would end. Perhaps this is why the memory of love from that time is really the memory of loss. The feeling that, having so convinced myself this other person was everything to me, the future was bereft now they were gone. That the coordinates of my place in the world had been scattered suddenly pell-mell.
This is what I read in Berger’s words.
In their absence, I saw the person everywhere.
I am 37 now. I like to think I better understand what Berger was saying. I find it impossible, for example, to think my wife wasn’t always a part of me. I see her everywhere, both in my future but also my past.
Early in our relationship, I’d confuse myself by thinking it was she I’d seen a certain movie with or visited somewhere with as opposed to the person I really had. It’s the same, I suppose, with my children. A part of me can’t fathom our son and daughter weren’t there with us when my wife and I first met. Nor, for that matter, can I believe I didn’t already love her when we first met.
I once read the phrase the “eternal present” in an old book about the philosophy of time.
I think such a phrase could best describe the function and location of love.
The chive flower gig was going well until I felt a strong desire to rip my skin off.
It was about an hour into the job and I was convinced I was either having a nervous breakdown or spontaneously becoming allergic to alliums.
Then I noticed Janina scratching at her elbow.
Then the sous chef, too.
It was about this point I noticed the walls of the kitchen in front of us, perfectly white having scrubbed them just an hour before, had started to turn an inexplicable shade of grey.
And then the realisation it wasn’t so much the walls having dirtied, but an army of tiny bugs, each no bigger than a full stop after a low-carb diet, covering them. For the past hour they’d been silently making their way there from the chive flowers we’d laid out across the work bench.
I looked under my shirt, and couldn’t believe how many were already crawling across my skin.
We worked to quickly finish cleaning the chive flowers, took turns to shower the bugs from our arms and out of our respective crevices, and eventually left at around 2:30 am.
I didn’t see those flowers again until we threw them away a week later.
No job I’ve had has altered my experience of the world as much as being a restaurant cook has. This manifested itself in both small ways and larger ones.
No matter how hard I try to get over it, I will always want to shout “behind”, “backs”, or, the Swedish, “bakom” at total strangers in grocery stores whenever I walk closer than a metre behind them.
It’s 3 years since my last restaurant shift and I still answer my son with “yes, please”, simply because that’s how we responded to each other at the last restaurant I worked at.
Work in a restaurant kitchen is less about thought than it is about instinct and reaction and habit. I don’t think it’s a coincidence many of the great head chefs I’ve worked with have referred to the movement of well functioning kitchen teams as being like that of a well-choreographed dance.
I suppose the habits are hard to shake, the steps of the dance hard to forget, even after exiting the walls of the little world that is your work kitchen. Really, it feels as though that little world bleeds out into the larger one the rest of our life plays out in.
These are habits that grow around restaurant cooks. They are habits that make us who we are. They are the habits that define the coordinates of our place in the world.
They aren’t easily broken or moved on from.
The Friday after our midnight chive flower fun, the sous chef at Esperanto got the kitchen team together just as we were setting up for the day.
At this time in the morning he’d normally be cracking jokes and making us listen to Metallica. This Friday, though, he was in and out of the kitchen. He hadn’t sung the guitar solo to “Nothing Else Matters” even once.
“Guys,” he said, “I only want you to prep for today, OK?”
“Why?” Janina asked.
“Just don’t overthink it, OK?” he replied. Each OK sounding like the crash of a bass drum.
Tomorrow was Saturday. Last time we’d spoken we’d had 16 booked that night.
We very much started overthinking it.
A few hours later, the back and front of house teams were brought together in a courtyard outside the restaurant. It was summer. This was where we’d been eating lunch for the past few weeks. Sayan, the Head Chef and owner of Esperanto got up in front of us and started to talk. He spoke in a softer, gentler voice than he normally did. Eventually, the voice quivered as the tears that fell from his eyes infected the rest of his face and Being. He had been speaking Swedish. It was these tears that told me what was happening.
The restaurant was closing.
Short of knowing the details of what he was explaining, I looked around at my colleagues and friends. Not just a few of them were crying as well.
These were tears of more than simple loss of work and income. They were tears at the coordinates of someone’s place in the world suddenly being scattered pell-mell.
The tears were replaced with smiles and drinking after service that night. The final service. The next day, instead of preparing elaborate dishes, we were cleaning fridges. We took the milk and butter home for ourselves.
The chive flowers went in the bin.
Partir est mourir un peu. (To leave is to die a little.) I was very young when I first heard this sentence quoted and it expressed a truth I already knew. I remember it now because the experience of living in you as if you were a country, the only country in the world where I can never conceivably meet you face to face, this is a little like the experience of living with the memory of the dead. What I did not know when I was very young was that nothing can take the past away: the past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Thanks so much for that wonderful post. I had a restaurant for 15 years and had to make that speech to my staff one sad day... but we stayed open for a few weeks more, and celebrated our 15 years with lots of parties ad special dinners. But, the restaurant, just like a dear friend who has left, is always with me. I love the John Berger quotes. Thanks so much for sharing it all!
I was once met with a hard stare from a nutter in a local pub when I once squeezed past with drinks and said ‘mind your backs’ ... he said ‘what do you mean, mind you f***in backs?’