The Devil in the Kitchen by Marco Pierre White Read Free Book Online Page B

nationality. At the George, the chefs were British while most waiters were French or Italian. The George’s restaurants must have had a charming ambience, but in the kitchen there were battles between the front-of-house regiment and the back-of-house brigade. Usually it was just bickering, but I remember a scuffle between drill sergeant Stephan and Giovanni, the restaurant manager.
    Giovanni was in the kitchen when Stephan taunted him and it could have gotten quite nasty, but Giovanni was carrying two buckets of ice, which he dropped on the floor. As the two men attempted to hit one another, the ice beneath them formed a mini ice rink and in the end they fell to the ground, arms wrapped around each other Laurel and Hardy–style.
    Despite all this I liked Giovanni, and because of our Italian roots, we bonded. He was the staff playboy and drove a 1000cc Harley-Davidson. He was the coolest man in the hotel. In fact, he was the coolest man in Harrogate, and must have been the only one with a Harley. He had the best room in the hotel and would spend his days off lying in bed with his girlfriend, Joanna. Sometimes I’d chat with Giovanni and he would go all Marlon Brando on me, saying, “One day I will leave the hotel, Marco, and when I do, I will leave you two things: my room and my girlfriend.”
    Eventually that day came. Giovanni climbed onto his Harley, like Gary Cooper mounting his horse, and rode off into the Yorkshire sunset. I did indeed end up with his luxurious room, which meant I could move out of home. However, Joanna was heartbroken at losing her lover and I didn’t have the courage to tell her Giovanni had promised her to me.
    I was not good with the opposite sex. There was a posh university undergraduate whose name I forget and who had taken a holiday job as a chambermaid at the George. She seemed quite interested in me and I mustered up the courage to invite her to dinner in Harrogate. It was my first date and I took her to Vanni’s, an Italian restaurant in Parliament Drive, but the evening did not go well. As I was trying to make her laugh with a funny story, I waved an arm and accidentally knocked a glass of red wine onto her white blouse. A waiter sprang into action, trying to wipe away the wine with a napkin, and I sat there dying. She said, “Don’t worry,” and I paid the bill and we went back to my hotel room, the room where Giovanni had been so lucky in love. She removed her sodden blouse and I gazed at her black bra before she put on one of my white shirts. Then she removed her trousers, revealing black knickers, and lay on the bed.
    Uncomfortably, I lay next to her and stroked her bristly thighs. Christ, her legs are hairier than mine, I thought. Who’s the man on this bed?
    I wanted to explore, to experiment, but she said, “You’re too nice, Marco. You’re too young. I can’t do this to you.”
    The kitchen porter—he had to wash up and keep the place clean— disliked me intensely. He was a big slob of a man, six foot four, with horrible greasy hair. When he walked past me in the kitchen, a reflex action compelled him to give me a sharp poke in the kidneys with his thumb. Probably I deserved the pokes but I had to get him back. I devised a plan.
    “Chef, can I clean the walk-in fridge?” I asked.
    Chef looked over at me. “Of course you can.”
    The walk-in fridge was enormous. I removed hundreds of bowls and containers, one by one, and put the food into clean containers. It was a laborious job for me, but it meant that the porter was left with a mountain of bowls and containers to wash up and in those days everything was washed by hand. I turned this into a regular fridge-clearing exercise, which drove him mad. “It’s your turn for a beating,” he’d say, his hands like prunes, and then we’d go in circles around the stove as he tried to get me.
    I made friends with another chef, Michael Truelove, and together we would think up ways to annoy the porter. I would phone the