Salty Quail Eggs and the Jailbreak Langoustine

A look back at this line cook's biggest kitchen mistakes

Dear reader, thanks for joining me for another edition of The Recovering Line Cook.

If you’ve read my Memoirs of a Line Cook, you’ll know that stories serving largely to embarrass myself in front of you all is pretty standard for this newsletter.

This week I want to make that effort particularly explicit and share the most ridiculous mistakes I made in restaurant kitchens, the ones I thought would get me fired and ostracized from the international chef community.

Hopefully it brings you a smile at least.

When I told my wife about these cock ups at the time, she always said I’d laugh about it one day.

Let today be that day!

Wil

Your faithful line cook

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A passing inability to count

The kitchen screw up I remember most is the one that still makes least sense to me.

I was 32 when it happened. I’d been living abroad in Sweden for 2 years by then. Since my emigration had required a new passport, the application for which requiring at least some rudimentary number work, I can confidently say I had known how to count for at least 2 years.

This proved otherwise in the run up to Christmas in 2018.

I was working the Christmas buffet with a particularly miserable cook called Mårran. That was actually his nickname, which comes from the Swedish for a Moomin character known as The Groke in English. The Groke is a sad and lonely character in the Moomin universe, known for eating people and leaving the grass dead wherever they’ve walked over it.

It was an appropriate nickname for this particular Swedish chef as well.

I was handing over my section to Mårran after a morning shift one day and he took the opportunity to bark some orders for me to carry out before I left. I’m making it sound as though Mårran was my boss. He wasn’t. He just liked telling people what to do. Being British, and profoundly afraid of conflict, I tended to put up with it from him.

And so I got about cleaning up, icing some cakes, and, most importantly, I got 16 lamb roasts in the oven. They needed to slowly cook for the next few hours at precisely 55°c for a reverse sear kind of thing.

In that brief period, I learnt that something happens to even moderately capable people when working under the angry eye of a forty-something, grumpy, Swedish chef.

I carefully placed the lamb in the oven. I repeated the temperature he had directed (55°c) and carefully dialed in the number. In that moment, so focussed was I on his directions, all my training and experience seemed to fade away among nerves and over-thinking. Somehow 55°c became 155°c. That’s what I was certain Mårran had said.

And then I closed the door.

An hour later he almost looked delighted at how badly I’d fucked up.

I didn’t know how to react. I just couldn’t understand how I’d both forgotten how to count and that meat would be dreadful cooked to 155°c. I packed the overcooked lamb away, told the head chef downstairs what had happened, and went home.

Staff food was a source of agony to me for days after that.

We were served variations on overcooked lamb for a week.

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A block of salt to start, please…

I most treasure my years working in fine-dining, Michelin Star restaurants, not for the techniques and skills I may or may not have learnt. I treasure them for my being able to witness first-hand the ridiculous things that go on in them.

One such restaurant was the, now closed, Esperanto in Stockholm.

One of the fun perks of cooking at Esperanto was the fact we cooks were also called on to serve guests their food. I always got a sense our guests loved this. They clearly enjoyed being able to talk to us directly, not just through waiting staff, and to ask us how the (occasionally weird) things we served them were made. And I loved it, too. Chatting with guests also made me feel like the FOH job was easy compared to what I had to do everyday.

Until, that is, I got it wrong.

One day I was serving a couple sat toward the back of the restaurant one of their first little amuse bouches (snacks as we called them). The snack in question was a boiled quail’s egg marinated in soy sauce and served with a little dip of leek mayonnaise. Most “fine-dining” of all was the dainty little cup it was served in. A cup made entirely out of salt that had been set into solid shape by mixing it with a touch of egg white and dehydrating it overnight.

Quail eggs, vibrant leek mayo, and those salt cups

I served this to the two guests, a young, friendly couple if I remember correctly, and walked back to my section at the kitchen.

I was stood next to the head chef when the restaurant manager approached us a few minutes later. Try as she clearly did, she hadn’t fully hidden the frantic skip in her step.

“Who served the eggs on 3?”, she said, her head arching back and forth to try and make out the people sitting at table 3.

I told her I had.

“Did you tell them not to eat the salt cups, Wil?”

I looked to the head chef who had already started giggling.

“I believe so,” I told her. “Why wouldn’t I have?”

(Pro tip, if you aren’t confident of being able to say yes to something, but not brave enough to say no, “I believe so” is a truly great arse-covering compromise.)

The truth is I did not believe so. And I knew why I wouldn’t have.

“Well,” she said, “the cups aren’t at their table anymore.”

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Life finds a way

I’ve been lucky enough to cook in some very special restaurants. I still think time spent in a restaurant kitchen is a privilege. It’s hard work, but it’s still a privilege.

That was certainly the case for the first place I ever cooked. A small restaurant called Portland in Central London.

The cooks were great, the menu was beautiful and, seriously, the ingredients we worked with couldn’t have been bettered. We had the best vegetables come in from around Europe and the freshest fish every day from the Cornish coast. As the commis on the team, a lot of my work was of the less interesting variety. Putting away deliveries in the basement kitchen, shaving pig heads, that kind of thing. One day the sous chef was excited to get delivery of some live langoustine from Scotland. They were just stunning. They had been delivered in a polystyrene cold box in which each blushing-pink critter had been stood upright in their own little cardboard prison cell. Having sent the polystyrene back with the delivery guy, the sous chef told me to get them in the fridge and properly covered.

I admit at this point I may have let my bleeding-heart animal-lover side get the best of me. Surely “properly covered”, after their arduous journey from Scotland, meant no more than a damp tea towel?

Surely they needed to finally get some air?

An hour or so later, going back downstairs to the walk-in fridge after helping the team upstairs in the service kitchen during a busy lunch (which at that point amounted to handing the head chef hot plates) it looked as though the floor had come alive.

But no, the floor wasn’t alive. It was nothing more than an army of langoustine who had escaped from their decidedly not “properly covered” cardboard prison.

I say that was a cock up. The fact I didn’t get pinched by any of them as I frantically imprisoned them once again over the following 20 minutes probably remains one of my greatest culinary triumphs.

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And all the rest…

I could go on and on. I could tell you about the time I was so anxious I’d left a handful of scallops in the wrong fridge at work that I used my key to enter the closed restaurant on a Sunday and ended up setting the alarm off.

It cost the business something like 500$ following the emergency security service call out.

And I could of course go on about all the cooking gone wrong. The burnt bechemels, the things forgotten in ovens, the infinite times a sauce on side request was remembered at precisely the point it had been poured on the plate.

But we’d be here all day.

Writing a food newsletter largely amounts to making me sound like I know what I’m doing in the kitchen. And I often do, I hope. But I promise, I only know how to cook anything by cooking something badly first, maybe even a few times.

Try, fail, it doesn’t matter. Try again, fail again. Just try to fail better the next time.

Or something along those line.

Slowly cooking a quail hung by the neck over hot coals is not the easiest of techniques… after many failures I managed it though (at Esperanto sometime in 2018)

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Thanks for joining me this week.

After a bit of a pause in recent weeks, all due to a change in my working life away from this newsletter, I’m back to full speed. Coming up you’ll see lots more recipes, kitchen stories, and assorted food writing from me. If you can support my work doing that, please become a paid subscriber.