Chapter 22
London, 2010
MAGGIE GOT THE JOB working for La Pêche within a week of Jamie putting her in touch with his friend Spider, and Spider passing on her CV to the guy responsible for hiring kitchen staff. Two days later, she had a brief interview in the cramped office above the Hoxton restaurant and was told to report the following Tuesday.
She quickly discovered why she’d been hired.
It was the hottest restaurant in London, literally and metaphorically. Full every night. Full every lunch. On weekdays, they fed Hoxton gallerists with sharp haircuts and advertising execs in pointy shoes; on weekends it was Essex estate agents who came down for a big Saturday night. Over three hundred covers, every day, packed into a restaurant that seemed to vibrate because the steel-topped tables and industrial windows did little to absorb the noise of so much drinking, eating, cooking and shouting.
The shouting was particularly intense. Not out front but in the kitchen, where anywhere up to twenty chefs moved like scurrying mice around their stations, back and forth to the vast cookers that lined one whole wall: simmering, steaming, sautéing and swearing. The pressure was even worse because everyone who worked there knew that glowing reviews and a full front-of-house didn’t matter to Olivier. What mattered to him was becoming the youngest chef in history to gain a Michelin star. So there was shouting, every morning from eight, when the chefs started arriving, until midnight when those who were left peeled off their soaked, stained chef’s whites and went home barely able to speak because they were so wrung out.
That’s why she’d been taken on immediately, Maggie realized: because the attrition rate was so high and the restaurant burned through chefs quicker than the barbecued sirloins they served. Sometimes chefs handed their notice in a few days into the job; sometimes they simply didn’t show up for work the next morning. And the ones that did stick it out often turned up drunk (or high), or as the day wore on became drunk (or high) to deal with working in such a crazy environment.
It worked in Maggie’s favour because she was moved around to fill the gaps when others left. From the meat station to the shellfish station, on to vegetables, then shifted sideways again to work under the pasta chef, a short and furious man called Mario. She learned a lot within the first few weeks. She learned the quickest way to kill a lobster was to place the tip of her knife between its eyes and drive it downwards as fast as she could; she learned that slices of French butter as fat as a finger went into everything; that it was better to peel ginger with a teaspoon than a knife, taking off only the very top layer because the hot tang of ginger sits just under the skin. She carved her initials into the wooden handle of her knife in the first week because she realized that chefs could be light-fingered when it came to knives that looked sharper than their own. She discovered that the quickest way to heal a burn was to put mustard on it and not say anything. Everyone had burns, and blisters, and red rashes around their neck from their whites rubbing in the humid heat. But you had to suck it up and get on with it to avoid being labelled a wuss.
Her determination to stick it out also meant that Olivier noticed her. He would have noticed her anyway because Maggie was the only woman in the kitchen (apart from a twenty-two-year-old Mexican who lasted four days). But he also noticed her talent.
‘This is good,’ he told her, the first time he tried her salsa verde. ‘You make it?’ His tone was surprised, as if he didn’t believe that she could have done. Maggie nodded. Salsa verde was one of the first things Phil had taught her to make when she was sixteen.
After that, Olivier often summoned her over to demonstrate how he was doing something – filleting sole or making zabaglione. ‘ Ma chère ,’ he called her, which had the dual consequence of making Maggie blush and every other chef grind their teeth since Olivier never called them anything affectionate. He would spend longer at her station, and tell her that her hollandaise needed more salt or that her salmon was undercooked and should have been left for another eight seconds. Literally, eight seconds. That was how precisely Olivier ran his kitchen.
‘ Ma chère , tell me, is this good enough?’ he asked her another time, feeding Maggie a piece of seared beef from a new supplier with his fingers.
When her parents came to visit the restaurant with a colleague of her father’s, Olivier insisted that they have the best table, right in front of the kitchen. He sent Champagne when they sat and came out after service to shake their hands. ‘Your daughter, she is my best chef,’ he told them. When her father later declared that he was proud of her, Maggie realized this was the first time she’d heard him say it.
She was embarrassed about Olivier’s attention to begin with, but soon understood that the kitchen was a dog-eat-dog place. Kill or be killed. So what if the other chefs disliked her for being his favourite? She wasn’t here to be liked; she was here to learn. And she was learning under the best.
Unfortunately, although Olivier was a sublime chef, he was a less upstanding man.
The first time it happened was late one Saturday night, after all the other chefs had gone and the night porters were in the kitchen.
He was sitting at the bar with a pile of paperwork and a tumbler of whisky. Maggie was about to leave, but pushed back the kitchen door to say goodnight.
‘ Ma chère ,’ he replied, ‘nice work tonight. That canard , it was really something.’
‘Thanks, chef,’ Maggie replied, pulling on her coat and grinning. ‘I’m off, see you tomorrow.’
‘Stay,’ he ordered, nudging the bottle of Japanese whisky towards her. ‘Stay, sit, have a drink with me.’
She glanced back into the kitchen where Ramone was wiping down the splashbacks. The later she stayed, the later the night bus she’d have to get back to Kentish Town, and she hated the night bus when it was 3 a.m. and full of clubbers, high from Hoxton clubs. But he’d never asked her to have a drink with him before. ‘Sure.’
She reached for a tumbler from behind the bar, poured three fingers into it, and then Olivier nudged his own glass towards her for a top-up and patted the stool beside him.
‘You are like me, I think, Maggie.’
She shivered at that, not only because the way he said her name was so French, but at the idea that Olivier Gérard could possibly believe they were similar.
She smiled, proud that he could think so, and lifted the tumbler towards her mouth. ‘You think?’
‘I do. Similar ambitions.’
‘Maybe. I mean, I haven’t thought much beyond here, although …’
She paused and Olivier nodded, encouraging her to continue.
‘One day I’d maybe like to have my own restaurant. It couldn’t be anything like this, obviously,’ she gabbled, nervous at having spoken her secret ambition aloud. ‘But, I’d like to try, maybe something French.’
‘French?’ Olivier cocked one eyebrow.
‘Yeah. I learned to cook there, and I like the variety.’
The only other person she’d confided this hope to was Phil, who’d been instantly supportive and offered her a loan. It was classic Phil – kind and generous but impulsive, and Maggie knew she needed more experience in other kitchens first.
‘You would leave me?’ Olivier drawled, placing a hand across his heart.
She smiled shyly. ‘No, not now. Not yet. I’m talking like years in the futu—’
Maggie was silenced by Olivier’s mouth on hers, forceful and hot, his tongue tasting of whisky.
It felt like it took an age to push him away but it could only have been a few seconds.
She admired Olivier and she was proud to work in his restaurant. Part of her felt flattered that the famous, wild, admired chef had made a pass at her, especially given her patchy romantic history. But more of her knew that this was wrong, that it was a bad idea, that it was unsafe . She’d promised herself she wasn’t going to let romance derail her in the way it had her aunt.
‘Um, sorry, I just, um … I should go,’ she said, jumping down from the stool and hurrying back through the kitchen.
Except Olivier seemed to misinterpret this as coy English reserve, and he harassed her persistently over the next few months. He’d come up behind her, offering something to taste, and press his hips against her back in the kitchen. He’d reach for her fingers if they passed upstairs, in the office corridor. He once trailed his hand down her back, to her bottom, as she stood at the grill. He seemed to see it as a game; teasing her, murmuring that she’d ‘give in eventually’.
Maggie felt paralysed and increasingly uncomfortable but she wanted this job. No, she needed the job. She needed the experience, and she couldn’t leave after only a few months. So she told nobody, not even Jamie or Phil, and she tolerated Olivier’s pawing and gropings and sly touches because she didn’t want to jeopardize it, risk upsetting him, losing this role and then what? Go back to Tasty Thai?
So it continued and continued and continued while Maggie’s colleagues sniggered behind her back, assuming they were sleeping together, rolling their eyes whenever Olivier singled her out in the kitchen.
Until one morning, when she was on the bus on the way into work, and she saw a passenger reading the front page of the Sun in the seat in front of her. SIMMER DOWN, CHEF! screamed the headline, above a grainy paparazzi photo of Olivier pressing a young actress up against a wall, kissing her, one of his hands placed territorially on the wall behind her, as if he was a predator who’d cornered an animal. Maggie recognized the aggressive stance because he’d done it to her the previous week, trying to pin her up against the cold wall of the walk-in fridge. They hadn’t kissed. After that first night at the bar, she’d never let him get that far again, but it had left her feeling hunted, and a flame of anger licked inside her at the idea that he was forcing himself on others.
When Olivier arrived in late that day (having been on the phone to his publicist all morning), he sidled up to her.
‘ Ma chère …’ he began, speaking quietly into her ear, before stepping closer, pressing his chest to her back and putting one hand on the counter, trapping her.
Seconds later, there was a howl of pain as Olivier snatched his hand back and pressed it to his chest: Maggie had been beating a vinaigrette, but had plunged the fork down, piercing into his index and middle fingers.
Oliver had continued shouting while she calmly laid down the fork, then removed her chef’s jacket and threw it on the floor. She wanted to cook more than anything but she wouldn’t cook for him. ‘See you, Olivier,’ she said, walking out to a stunned silence from the chefs. At the time, the only sensation she could detect was adrenaline, but later she thought she remembered a couple of colleagues applauding.
She saw him on a TV chat show a few days later, his fingers bandaged together.
‘Oh dear, what’s happened here, Olivier?’ asked the host, holding his wrist up so the audience could see the bandage.
‘Kitchen accident,’ he replied smoothly.
That was another lesson for Maggie: some jobs in life simply weren’t worth it.