Before leaving Preston, I had asked Paul (the head chef) if he could get in contact with the Liverpool hotel and try and transfer me there, so I could start as soon as I got to university. Being young and naïve, I believed him when he assured me that everything was taken care. Alarm bells should have started ringing at his suspiciously vague promises of ‘Yeah, it’s all sorted mate, no worries’, but unfortunately the bells must have been silenced that day.
I actually didn’t start work straight away – I spent a couple of weeks settling in and getting to know what sort of hours I would actually have to spend in lectures every week (gloriously, this was only six). With my student loan fast running out – yes, even after only two weeks – I decided to take the plunge and go to the Liverpool branch where, of course, they would welcome me with open arms. Well, not quite. Having found the hotel, I arrived at reception and asked for the Head Chef. They sent the Sous Chef, which was nearly as good. He, however, had never heard of me. Apparently he has heard a rumour that a KP from Preston had asked to be transferred to Liverpool, but had thought this so outlandish that he had dismissed it as nothing more than hearsay. After all, why would anyone in such a menial job not only want to carry on doing it in the first place, but also bother to go through the proper channels? I asked him if there was in fact a job for me, but he said he was busy and would send down the ‘Head KP’ to talk to me. It turned out that the Head KP was man called Tom C (he was one of those people who are always called by both their first and last names – it was never just ‘Tom’, for example). Tom said that I could start straight away, after I’d had my ‘induction’ of course. I told him that I’d done the job for a year at Preston, so he said that I could start the next day if I wanted. So really, the only qualification, official or otherwise, that was needed for the job turned out to be previous experience. I also made sure that it would be ok for me to go back to Preston ‘for a couple of weeks’ round about Christmas, as I would have to leave university halls for the Christmas break. At the time I didn’t realise that the break would actually turn out to be closer to five weeks – that might have put a different spin on my ‘interview’ had I mentioned it. Tom seemed fine with my little festive break, which was slightly surprising seeing as Christmas was always by far the busiest time of the year. If I had been hiring part time staff in September, I would have been quite eager to make sure that they would be around for the hectic festive period. Tom, I assumed at the time, was probably expecting me to walk out after a few days like most of the KPs from Preston had. We parted company after ten or so minutes, with the agreement that I would start the next day at six o’clock.
The next day I turned up in good time, only to find that the back entrance to the hotel had been locked. This presented the until then unthinkable idea of going to work through reception! Fine, I admit it, after a year of making my way through the not-very-attractive back entrance at Preston, I found the idea of arriving by reception quite exciting (this job can do funny things to a man). From reception I had to go through one of those ‘staff only’ doors into the guts of the hotel. As the hotel was only about five years old, this area wasn’t as bad as I imagine some of the old-school Victorian hotels, but it was still pretty grim. I found the changing rooms and put on my combat trousers and blue t-shirt. Yes, even though you could get clean, standard-issue KP clothes at the start of every shift, I had been sad enough to not only bring my own stuff to wear, but also to bring items taken from the Preston hotel. The problem was that most of the t-shirts handed out weren’t very nice to wear, so when you got hold of a nice one you kept it. The combats? Well, I just liked those. I also wore big heavy boots, and the bandana. The bandana was ostensibly to keep my hair out my eyes, but really I liked it because everyone always noticed it and made comments about it. Uncomplimentary ones, true, but at least it got me attention. As it turned out, I really needn’t have worried about not getting attention.
Whilst I the changing rooms I met Colin, who as it turned out I was working with that night. Colin was an enormous bloke, towering over me (and I’m about six foot five). He is now the person I automatically think of when I hear the phrase ‘gentle giant’. In fact, Colin was gentle almost to the point of dopiness. He also worked as a waiter on Sunday mornings, something which I found strange at first. I had cultivated a kind of siege mentality (that probably only existed in my head), where the kitchen was isolated from all other departments. That there was someone who worked for the kitchen and the restaurant seemed to me almost treacherous. Destroying my bizarre mindset, unfortunately, was the fact that Colin and I got on well from day one. The only annoying things about him were his inability to up his work-rate during busy periods, and his habit of asking strange and often unanswerable questions.
The best example of these traits was one shift when I was in the pan room getting absolutely hammered. Colin came in – to help me, I assumed. But no, he had decided that his priority on this desperately busy shift was to clean the plastic bucket that we kept bin bags in. Noticing my exasperated expression (truth be told, I was too much of a scaredy-cat to tell anyone to do any work) he proceeded to ask me ‘So Richie, how long’s your hair these days?’ I honestly didn’t know how to answer that question. I angrily replied, holding my hair, ‘Col, it’s this long. I don’t know how long that is exactly, do you want me to fucking measure it for you? I’m sure you can see it better than me!’ Colin looked at me with such a wounded expression that I immediately regretted losing my temper, even if it was only a tiny bit and for a very short space of time. ‘Sorry mate, I was only asking’. I was to hear this response from Col many, many times during my four and a half years at Liverpool.
Anyway, back to my first shift. I was given the usual cursory tour of the kitchen, which was much the same as the one at Preston. I then asked about the dreaded job list, only to be told they didn’t have one! This was the first clue that working at Liverpool was going to involve even less work than at Preston. The hotel really was a lot quieter, which surprised me. The Preston hotel had been a bit out in the country, which made it ideal for weddings but not, you would have thought, receptive to much passing trade. The Liverpool one, however, was right in the city centre and so I expected it to be heaving most of the time. Thankfully, for one reason or another, the hotel was dead most of the time – exactly what I want from a workplace.
Right, yes, I’m supposed to be talking about my first shift. Now, I was used to strange looks and comments from people on the streets, but nothing had prepared me for the reaction of the chefs. True, the chefs at Preston had made the odd comment about my appearance, but it was just part of the general piss-taking that happened to everyone. For one reason or another, the Liverpool chefs reacted as though I was like some kind of bizarre but essentially harmless alien. To be fair to them, I suppose I did look a bit strange. I had very long curly hair by this stage, which I wore with a stars and stripes bandana and I shaved maybe once every couple of months. This, coupled with my size and the fact that I was a student, made me as different from the chefs as, I suppose, an alien. And perhaps even more than all this was the fact that I wasn’t a Scouser. That’s right, the fact that I came from a town about forty miles away was enough to make me seem like a foreigner. Of course, I wasn’t the only non-Scouser in the hotel – most of the waiting-on staff were students from all around the country, and most of the housekeeping staff were from all around the continent, but there seemed to be something about my northern accent that intrigued a lot of people. I wasn’t even the only non-Scouser in the kitchen – the senior sous-chef was from Nottingham (funnily enough, the Head Chef and senior sous chef were never Scousers, the whole three and a half years I was there. Co-incidence?). Seeing as how Nottingham doesn’t have much of an identity that can readily be ridiculed, I was to be the subject of endless references to flat caps, whippets, meat pies, and all the other things you might associate with a stereotypical ‘Lancashire lad’. I really didn’t mind though – it made me feel like one of the team, and most of the jokes were either so ill-thought through as to be ineffective, or actually witty enough to be genuinely funny. Not many fell into the latter category though.
Having said that, most people were friendly towards me. It would be some time before I became a sort of unofficial kitchen ‘mascot’, but I liked to think that the chefs (outsiders from the rest of the hotel) recognised me (a wannabe outsider from society – oh, how I blush now at how rebellious I thought I was) as something of a kindred spirit. In fact, whenever anyone from a different department made fun of me (which happened very frequently), the chefs would jump to my defence, saying thing like
“Don’t take the piss out of Ricardo, that’s for us to do!”
I think the overall effect was to make me seem like some kind of simple mute, incapable of defending himself.
I don’t know why I was always referred to as ‘Ricardo’, but it started very soon after my first shift and stuck right up until I left. The strange thing was that it was always said with a ‘comedy’ northern accent, preferably with some other northern stereotypes. A typical example would be,
“Ay up Ricardo, I said ay up Ricardo! Chuffin’ tatties our kid!”
It was the Fred Elliott-style repetition that did it for me. Even after several years of this utter nonsense, I would still end up helpless with laughter after it had been shouted about half an inch from my face at the start of every shift. And I do mean every shift. I did try to helpfully point out that ‘chuffing’ is more of a Yorkshire word, but, funnily enough, it didn’t do much good.
The ‘comedy’ accent was usually done by Darren. He was from Nottingham, so I delighted in telling him that he was ‘neither fish nor fowl’ – in other words, neither a northerner nor a southerner. I admit this was shamelessly playing up to my given role as token northerner – I wouldn’t exactly use that phrase in day to day life – but I have to admit, I just enjoyed getting a laugh.
The main piss-taker in the kitchen was called Tom R, a middle-ranking chef who was probably the most offensive man I’ve ever met. Meeting Tom also reinforced my theory that most Scouse men are called either Tom or Rob. Out of a kitchen brigade of maybe fifteen or sixteen people, there were three Toms and three Robs. For this reason, it wasn’t only Tom C who was always known by his first and last names. No subject was taboo, no person to helpless to escape from Tom. Despite this, Tom was well liked by almost everyone, even the waitresses for whom he would often save his crudest comments. I remember one day when Tom asked a waitress to get him some clean plates ‘or I’ll bend you over, spread your cheeks and ram it up you!’. Before you think this just sounds unpleasant, in fairness he did say it towards a waitress who gave as good as she got, and certainly didn’t appear offended in any way. You might think that Tom’s continuing popularity could have been down to his good looks or charming manner, but Tom wasn’t exactly a Brad Pitt look-alike and he really was that offensive almost all the time, so I’m not sure why he was so popular. Having said, I always enjoyed working with Tom as he’d always make you laugh sooner or later, if only in despair at his sheer vulgarity.
So who were the other chefs and KPs when I started? Well, I can’t remember many of them. This may not sound too reassuring (these are supposed to be memoirs after all), but there is a good reason for this lapse. Most of them left a couple of weeks after I started (I hope it was nothing personal). The Head Chef had got a job at another hotel and had decided to take the majority of his kitchen staff with him. Really, this was a good thing for me because I wasn’t the ‘new guy’ for very long before they had to bring in almost a whole new brigade.
One of the porters who stayed was Andy, who for some reason was held up as an example of everything a good KP should be. Now Andy undoubtedly worked hard, but he only had to do Monday to Friday, day shifts. No, really. I don’t know how he’d managed to wangle this deal with head chef, but he never ever had to work a busy weekend or evening shift. Does this sound like a rant? Well, sorry, but I suppose it is really. I wouldn’t have minded too much about his cosy deal with powers that be, but to be constantly told how hard Andy worked really stuck in my craw. Of course, I had no real reason to complain, as I only did three shifts a week and they were on Monday to Wednesday when it was rarely busy, but I still managed to convince myself that I was being deeply wronged.
The man himself was what I had come to expect from most KPs – actually a very quiet man who was always on the edge of the joking in the kitchen, never quite confident enough to fully join in. He also had what remains the most impenetrable Scouse accent I have ever heard. Several times working with Andy I just had to laugh along with whatever he said, as it would have too embarrassing to ask him to repeat himself yet again. And he did work hard – he never really stopped from when he arrived to when he left – which was always at least an hour early, another cushy deal he seemed to have worked with the chef. In fact, now I think about it, there was a lot to admire about Andy’s lifestyle. True, he didn’t have the greatest job ever, but he was finished by about half two every day and he was almost unique in the industry in having every weekend off, which as far as I gathered he would spend doing what he loved most – fishing. So although I am, in a way, complaining about the man, that doesn’t mean I didn’t envy him slightly. Andy was the notional ‘second in command’ of the KPs after Tom C; a title was only slightly more meaningless than ‘Head KP’. ‘Second in command’ really just meant that Andy was second-longest serving KP – the chain of command wasn’t exactly fiercely meritocratic.
One of the first things I noticed about the Liverpool hotel was that there was nowhere to hide. The chemical store room was more of a cupboard, and anyway it was far too close to the kitchen for comfort. Luckily the staff room was on the same floor as the kitchen, and only a thirty second walk or so. I spent as long as possible in there every shift, and I liked how it was always the same old faces in there every day. Being thoroughly unsociable, I just read my paper and didn’t talk to anyone. I did the like the idea though, of a sort of lazy bastards’ meeting place, where we were all so lazy as to not even speak to each other – a simple of nod of recognition was plenty. One day, however, I had spent so long I the staff room that even one of my fellow slackers was moved to tell me to get in the kitchen and do some work. I was tempted to reply that I was hung-over, but wisely reconsidered this option. A lot of the men who worked there were obviously hard bastards, not to be messed about with by a skinny (yes, I was still quite skinny in those early days) student only a few weeks out his parents’ house.
Also, the fact that I (ostentatiously) read the Guardian whilst in the staff room was something else that marked me out as something of an oddity. I tried to make it clear that I only read it because at university it was less than half price and I, as a student, was always out for a bargain. This didn’t wash, though, and I was considered a poncey intellectual by most of the kitchen staff. The fact that this clashed somewhat with what they normally ridiculed me for – being a simple northern lad – wasn’t enough to put anyone off.
It only took a few weeks in the job for me to be landed with what was my true reputation and, dare I say it, legacy. I had simply carried on with my habit from Preston of eating/tasting anything I could get my hands on – think of it as an education for my palate. Used pans in the pan room, plated back from the restaurant, food from buffets ready to be thrown out – I simply had no standards. The fact that most of this food was actually really good stuff that would otherwise be thrown out was my fig leaf of an excuse, but it was really just down to my incurable greediness. I had just read Kitchen Confidential and was starting to have a real interest in food that would shortly become a true passion. I honestly believe that for most of the three and a half years I was there I knew the restaurant menu as well as any of the chefs, and was able to judge how good the sauces were from the pans that came back to me. I kept these thoughts to myself in the early days, as I didn’t really want to give everyone another reason to see me as an oddball.
So after the clear-out of the kitchen brigade, I was left looking like something of an old hand. New chefs came and went, but the KP rota never changed very much. Now in the year that I had worked at Preston there had been around seventeen different KP’s who had come through the doors. I was expecting a similarly unimpressive labour turnover at Liverpool, but it turned out that for some reasons KP’s hardly ever left the hotel. I suspect that most of us realised that we had it easy and so had no real reason to want to leave.
Wilson Picked It 