Chapter 25
London, 2015
SHE CALLED IT THE Little Fig, partly because Phil lent her the money to open it, partly because Maggie wanted her own restaurant to turn out the same kind of food: simple, unfussy, using the very best ingredients she could source: tomatoes that tasted of tomatoes; fat, juicy prawns the size of a baby’s fist; butter with salt crystals that crunched on the tongue; the softest of sourdoughs, which would make diners want to trample their own mother for another piece. All of this was harder to find in London than in Provence, but thanks to five years in restaurants after La Pêche, including an Italian in Islington, a Japanese in Soho, a trendy American diner that briefly existed in Ladbroke Grove, and a Persian place in South Kensington, Maggie had developed a network of devoted suppliers who loved her for her calm, because she didn’t shout and swear at them like the male chefs did.
The site was on the Hackney Road; a former greasy spoon run by a vast woman called Kelly who’d recently died. This meant it had a kitchen, a serving area and a restaurant floor but, since Kelly had run the café for forty years and never changed the Formica tables or lino floor, the space needed to be gutted. Maggie kept the big glass windows almost the same, with linen café curtains than ran halfway up them, but changed everything else. Jamie sourced second-hand kitchen equipment from restaurants that were closing elsewhere, and she found mismatched wooden farmhouse tables, benches and cushions, and crossback chairs at car-boot sales. She wanted people to be comfortable, above all, to while away hours in The Little Fig, eating cheeseboards and drinking wine, as if there was nowhere else they’d rather be, just as at Le Figuier.
She met Mungo on opening night. It was chaos, as launch nights always are. Jamie was doing the PR and had organized a guest list of magazine editors, food writers, TV chefs, models, It-girls and It-boys. Maggie also insisted that the locals who used to eat at Kelly’s be invited (she put up a photo of Kelly behind the bar to reassure them). And since Jamie had also already managed to get The Little Fig mentioned in various newspaper diaries, food columns and online, everyone who was asked came, keen to see the hot new place in Hackney. The resulting crowd was a hilariously eccentric combination; socialites with bouncy blow-dries pushed past elderly locals in tattered trench coats and flat caps, gazing around the space in wonder.
Maggie hid in the kitchen at first, churning out platters of bruschetta, wooden boards of salami and cornichons, cheese gougères , sun-dried tomato tartlets, chicken liver paté spread thickly on small rounds of baguette, blackened garlic prawns and cubes of lamb skewered on rosemary. Unpretentious, but a lot of it. She didn’t want any guest going hungry. She didn’t want crowds to cluster around her waiters either, desperately reaching for food as if they’d never eaten. They certainly weren’t going to go thirsty; Phil had insisted on buying twenty cases of Pol Roger for the party and she could hear the corks going off at the bar like fireworks.
At the sound of another, Maggie looked through the hatch and waved at her parents, then spotted her aunt talking to a chef friend at the bar. But the noise and the buzz on the restaurant floor was daunting. She wanted to stay in the kitchen, making sure that the trays going out were perfect.
She had another reason for hiding. That morning, an enormous bouquet of scarlet amaryllis had arrived for her, with a note from Olivier, declaring that he was ‘proud’ of her. Maggie had told Jamie that he wasn’t to be invited but she didn’t put it past him to simply show up. He was arrogant enough, she knew, to try and crash her night, and she didn’t know quite how she’d react if he came through the door. She hadn’t wanted the flowers anywhere near her, either; they were too vibrantly red, too suggestive , so she’d given them to one of Jamie’s employees who’d helped set the restaurant up that day.
‘I know this is your idea of hell but can I borrow you for five seconds?’ begged Jamie, sweeping into the kitchen with a clipboard. ‘There are people you need to meet. Two, or actually three. The food commissioner from Channel 4, plus the editor of the Telegraph Magazine because they want you for a profile. And I promised the wine buyer from Waitrose that I’d introduce you. He’s useful, come on. Everything’s under control in here.’
Maggie glanced around at her staff – Pablo, a sous-chef who’d come with her from the Persian restaurant, plus a few others she’d worked with and rated before, all bent over their stations.
‘Pablo, you all right?’ she said, wiping her hands on her apron.
‘Go meet your fans,’ he told her with a smile.
‘Off,’ Jamie said, untying her apron from the back and tugging it over her head like a fussing mother. ‘And come here. You’ve got something …’ He reached towards Maggie’s face and peeled a small piece of coriander from her cheek.
She followed him, pushing through the throngs of people, smiling shyly and catching snippets of praise until Jamie stopped in front of two suited men. ‘Mags, I’d like you to meet Charles Burnett, editor of the Telegraph Magazine. Charles, please meet the most talented new chef in London.’
They shook hands before the other man introduced himself.
‘Hullo, I’m Mungo, I’ve come along as his plus one. I hope you don’t mind. Terrific party.’
Maggie smiled. ‘No, I don’t mind at all.’
They were old school friends, Charles explained, before telling her what a triumph the restaurant was already, ‘and at just twenty-five, I believe that makes you one of the youngest chefs on the circuit.’
Maggie tried think of something clever and amusing to reply, but all she really wanted to do was return to the kitchen.
‘Yes, no, that would be wonderful, thank you,’ she murmured when Charles asked if she was up for an interview and photo shoot.
‘And might we be able to persuade your aunt to join? A photo of you together, a cooking dynasty, would be magnificent.’
‘I’d have to ask Phil. I don’t know how long she’s ov—’
‘I’ll handle this,’ said Jamie, before turning to Charles and peppering him with various questions.
His friend Mungo, noticing Maggie’s discomfort, leant in towards her. ‘I don’t much like parties, either. Much less my own parties.’
She smiled gratefully. ‘They’re always overwhelming, somehow, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, exactly. And one never gets to talk to anyone, or at least not the people you want to. I expect you’d rather be backstage?’
Maggie smiled again. He seemed kind and unthreatening, this tall, suited, well-spoken man. ‘I don’t mind talking to some people, just …’ She stared around the room. ‘I want to make sure everyone’s eating enough.’ She caught her mother watching her and waved. ‘Two seconds,’ she mouthed. Veronica would want to know who he was. As Maggie approached thirty, her mother was increasingly obsessed with her love life, as if her daughter was a carton of eggs approaching her best-before date.
‘We’ve eaten like kings. That chicken liver paté! Look out, Jean-Joseph Clause.’
‘You know about him?’ Maggie was surprised. John-Joseph Clause was an eighteenth-century French chef, the man who’d invented foie gras, who she’d read about one summer in an old recipe book on the Le Figuier shelves.
‘Historian. Sort of. I dabble.’
‘Food historian?’
‘Not exactly. I work in property but I’m extremely greedy so I like reading about food. I’m reading this extraordinary book about a French baron at the moment, called Baron Brisse. Have you come across him?’
She shook her head.
‘You must read it. It was translated a hundred years or so ago, by a British writer who discovered the menus of this enormously fat French baron and decided to translate them, and he talks about paté in there.’
‘It sounds wond—’ she started to reply, before Jamie interrupted, tugging on her chef’s jacket.
‘Mags, I need to take you on again. But thanks, Charles, we’ll be in touch. And nice to meet you, Martin.’
‘Mungo,’ Maggie corrected, ‘nice to meet you both. Eat, drink, please.’ She smiled at Charles, and then Mungo, rather wishing that she could stay there talking to him.
The next day, more flowers arrived at the restaurant. Congratulatory bouquets of roses and lilies, of tulips and carnations. Pink flowers, yellow flowers, orange and white flowers. So many flowers that they ran out of containers to put them in, and Maggie stuck a few stems each into the many, many empty Pol Roger bottles that were bagged at the back of the restaurant, then spread them along the bar. But among the floral deliveries that kept coming to the restaurant was a more slimline parcel containing a second-hand book: The Table of Baron Brisse .
‘To the most exciting chef in town,’ began a handwritten notecard tucked inside the cover, ‘please enjoy this when you get a moment away from the kitchen. And might we then meet up and discuss it? Thank you for a tip-top party, Mungo Lemon.’