Michelin star already in the post, apparently

In Which: Our Hero Toils For Days To The Rapture Of Norwich's Formerly Moribund Culinary 'Scene', Storms Up A Cook, And Stoves A Hot Slave (In The Face).

I spent the last week or so working in a kitchen. Unfortunately The Wine Cellar lost two kitchen staff in the space of a week (either because they weren't paid on time or because they cannot stand Alistair, or more likely both), the same week that the head chef went on holiday. There was literally no-one around to cook the food, so Alistair and I stepped up to the task, despite neither of us having every worked in a kitchen before. I stepped foot in one a couple of times, but only to try and steal food so I don't think that counts.

Proof.

Surprisingly it was quite fun, the food went down well enough, and to my knowledge, nobody has died as a result. Working in a commercial kitchen is pretty good because everything you could possibly need is lying around in droves around you, which is splendid if, like mine, your style of cooking generally involves chucking as many ingredients at as many utensils as is humanly possible. And then some chump cleans up after you! Brilliant. Cooking in a commercial kitchen sucks, because everything is slightly hotter than you expect or want it to be. I've never sweated so much for so long in my life. My hands are now hairless rubbery blistered wrecks, because the ovens are just carved out of huge blocks of steel, so as soon as one is turned on, the whole sodding thing becomes a million degrees.

Here's the menu we cooked:

Soup de Jour - my favourite soup. Shame no-one knows French in a restaurant pretentious enough to bill itself as making french infused cuisine...

On top of which I added my amazing special of spiced tomato and red pepper soup, acclaimed by some to be the best soup to ever leave the kitchens. I also cooked spaghetti carbonara, although this didn't quite work out as anybody planned.

Al wrote on the menu 'Chicken and bacon spaghetti carbonara in a creamy sauce.' Firstly we didn't have any fucking spaghetti lying around at all. The only pasta we had was Penne. Useless wrinkly tubes of Penne.

One of the weird things about working in a kitchen is that everything needs to be sort of half cooked, and left there so that it can be quickly finished off if someone orders it. This presents a constant challenge because half cooking pasta involves somehow, at precisely the right moment, swapping all the boiling water in the pan with ice cold water, leaving the pasta in tact, and not down the sink. Something which I spectacularly failed to do by virtue of the fact I forgot about the pan until all that was left was a vat of boiling squelch.

Al asked me how I was going to time cooking the dish, and the following conversation ensued:

“Well I'll fry the bacon and chicken with some onion, now, and when it gets ordered, I can chuck it in with the pasta and add the cream and eggs and just-”

“Eggs?"

“Well yeah, I'll put them in at the last minute and gently warm it through so it gets hot but doesn't cook too-”

“You're putting eggs in?”

“Well yeah, it's carbonara...”

“What, so...”

“Do you even no what carbonara is?”

Pause

“Not really, no.”

“Well for a start, it doesn't have cream in it. Or chicken for that matter. Or Penne.”

“Shit.”


After all that, no one fucking ordered it anyway.

An absolute triumph. Kitch levels went through the roof when I was asked to make duck wraps for 50 people. Not sure my tacky Chinese vibes fit into the middle class winebar theme though. At least it's authentic though, right?