Certain careers in Britain seem to personify different eras – in the Sixties, every Bright Young Thing wanted to be a television presenter or an investigative journalist while until recently, banking seemed to be the pursuit of choice for high achieving types. Now, improbably, the restaurant trade has begun to attract the same aura of glamour for the restlessly ambitious, despite rock bottom wages and a work schedule that makes virtually any other job seem benign. American chef Anthony Bourdain has seared the less seemly side of New York restaurant life into our imaginations with Kitchen Confidential – now Simon Wroe has done something similar for London, only this time it is fictional.
The narrator of Chop Chop is a provincial graduate who arrives in London in need of work and ends up as a commis in the dysfunctional kitchen of a Camden gastropub called the Swan. Even allowing for a certain amount of hyperbole, this kitchen is not somewhere that sensitive souls would care to linger. Chef Bob randomly punishes his brigade by locking miscreants into the walk-in freezer while others who mess up an order have scalding oil poured onto their arms. Racist Dave and Ramilov provide the backbone of the kitchen, while curiosities like Camp Dave or public school boy Dibden survive by being true to type.
The author keeps up our interest in the fate of these disparate characters with a plausible portrait of what life is really like in a modern kitchen with some pretensions for artistry. The badinage tends to be more obscene than witty and the tension between the various sections is portrayed in a convincing manner.
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| The author - now pursuing a career in the equally precarious world of letters |
The novel is written as a first person memoir with verisimilitude enhanced by interjections and observations made by the leading characters on how they are described.
However, what keeps the reader turning the page is the insertion of a mephitic criminal called the Fat Man, who terrorises the staff and demands they also cook increasingly questionable dishes for him at home with his gang. These trials of endurance start with the drowning of ortolans in brandy but then proceed to more shocking demands, as a metaphor on the morality of the pursuit of pleasure through the plate.
Other dimensions enter the story – the tricky relationship between the narrator’s father, who ends up coming to live with him in London and his unrequited love at the Swan for an attractive woman who works opposite him but for most of the time, refuses to acknowledge his existence. The denouement is cleverly executed and a surprise to even to the most alert reader. After completing this book, one has a far more nuanced understanding of the compulsion many people have to remain in the tortuous bubble of a restaurant kitchen, where the rest of the world seems an irrelevant blur. Equally understandable is the news that the author, having spent some time in such challenging kitchens, has decided to give up his culinary career and pursue a literary path.
