Don't Try This at Home (17 page)

An Italian in Paris

GIORGIO LOCATELLI

Giorgio Locatelli, from Lombardy, is considered by many to be
the best Italian chef in the UK. Giorgio has been involved with
several groundbreaking Italian restaurants in London, most
notably Zafferano, where he earned his first Michelin star in
1999. In 2002, Giorgio and his wife, Flaxy, opened their first
independent restaurant, Locanda Locatelli, which gained a
Michelin star in its first year. Giorgio has a very successful
TV career and has co-written a cookbook with restaurateur
Tony Allan, called
Tony and Giorgio.
Giorgio is currently
working on his second book, to be published in 2006.

I
N 1989, after four years working at the Savoy in London, I thought it was about time I finally went to Paris. In those
days Paris was like a finishing school for chefs. The only reason I'd gone to London instead was because I thought it was
a lot hipper than Paris, and also because the Savoy was the place where Escoffier had cooked and developed haute cuisine.
Nowadays everyone is cooking Italian, but the big buzzword for a chef coming from Italy at that time was "international";
we had to cook all sorts of food, especially French, and the biggest stage of all was in Paris.

So, after four years, I told the Savoy's head chef, Anton Edelmann, that I was leaving. He was pissed off at first, and didn't
want me to leave. But he shared the same passion for food that I had, and he had traveled a lot by the time he was thirty,
so he eventually wished me the best, even offering to set me up with a job in Paris. When he was younger, he had worked with
the directors of Laurent, a famous old restaurant, and he sent me there. The pay wasn't going to be as good—in London I was
a senior sous-chef, earning £400 a week, while at Laurent I was going to be a
commis rotissier
making about a third of that (and half of that would go to rent)—but I took it gladly, since it was important to me that I
go to Paris.

I arrived on a Friday, with just my knives and a few chef's jackets. I had a contact there, a girl with a room for rent in
the Bastille district, very central and on a direct Metro line to the restaurant. We went out for dinner, and then the next
day, while wandering the city on my own, I timed the route from home to work. Twice.

On Monday morning, I was supposed to be at the restaurant at eight; I arrived at ten to seven. I sat in a cafe on the corner
of the Champs Elysees, ordered a cafe au lait, and looked around me, for the first time realizing where I was. I have to admit
I felt quite proud that I'd actually made it to Paris.

The first thing they said when I turned up at Laurent was, "The laundry's over there." We got four jackets and two pairs of
trousers a week, so I didn't need the few things I'd brought from London. The restaurant even had a shower.

So I started work. The job of the
commis rotissier,
among other things, is to stay all afternoon when everyone else has gone off on a break, and to cook Laurent's famous pommes
soufflees, served with chateaubriand and bearnaise sauce, a dish which has never gone off the menu.

The trick to pommes soufflees is to slice the potatoes exactly the right thickness, then dry them properly, so that when they
hit the oil in a big pan, at just the right temperature, they puff up perfectly. You can't let them hit the bottom of the
pan, or else they are ruined. Trust me—I made so many of them in the first month that the skin on my arms was bright red.

One afternoon, however, they refused to cook properly. I was supposed to have gone on my break hours before, and these fucking
potatoes just would not puff up. I was getting more and more frustrated with them, when the sous chef walked in and, seeing
me, said, "Well, what do you expect? You're a spaghetti. And, even worse, you learned to cook with
les rosbifsl"

Charming.

The irony, though, was that the same guys who called me "spaghetti" would come and ask me questions about the classic Escoffier
repertoire. At that time, a lot of French chefs had come from bourgeois restaurants outside Paris and didn't really know how
to do the fancy sauces, or which garnishes went with which dishes, whereas the Savoy taught us all of them.

I learned a lot at Laurent, though. The Savoy was a restaurant on a truly grand scale, but Laurent was a much more human size,
and it showed me that it was possible, with technique and timing, to do things I would have thought were impossible for a
smaller place. The cost control was amazing: the cheese cellar was run like a military operation, with twenty-five different
cheeses from twenty-five different farms, and the wine list was superb. Laurent was a model of a restaurant that I could imagine
running; it was a fantastic, inspiring business.

Laurent's owner was Sir James Goldsmith. When one of his daughters was getting married, naturally the reception was held in
the restaurant. We had a huge, elegant, multitiered wedding cake delivered. It looked like a traditional British wedding cake,
but it was actually much more fragile, with layers of cream, fruit, meringue and liqueur-soaked sponge. Of course somebody
managed to drop it when we took it out of the van.

This was a disaster. You can't have the boss's daughter getting married with a bashed-up cake, so we sent for an emergency
patissier
who turned up with his spatula in hand, looking a bit like Donatello. I don't know whether he repaired the cake with anything
edible—in fact I know there was a chunk of polystyrene in it by the time he'd finished—but it looked pretty good. In any case,
we hid the broken side against an enormous vase of flowers, so we just about got away with it, although I wouldn't have liked
to get the slice with the polystyrene.

Though I was eventually promoted to
chef de partie
in the fish section, money was still tight. Sometimes I got to supplement my wages with a bit of outside work, like cooking
at Vincennes race course, for the Prix d'Amerique. Cash in hand was a real bonus, and it meant I could afford to go back home
to Italy a couple of times a year. After one such trip, I drove my little Fiat Panda all the way back from Italy to Paris,
and it was fantastic having a car in Paris. One weekend, I drove to Alain Chappel's restaurant; because he was a consultant
chef for Laurent, I got to meet him. He was amazing. I even got to go to the market with him: he would visit every stall and
pick up just one bunch of carrots, say, from each of them.

Anyway, I'd had a pretty good year and a half living and working in Paris—although it felt a bit provincial after London,
where it was already quite rock-and-roll to be a chef; in Paris I was just a fucking cook—when I decided that I'd broaden
my experience and take a job at Tour d'Argent. Also, I was eager to get a big fuck-off name on my CV.

They offered me a job as a
chef de partie
in the
garde-manger
', which caused instant resentment among the French
commis
chefs, who refused to understand how a spaghetti could be a
chef de partie.
I don't think I got called by my real name once in the whole time I worked in Paris. "Rital" was the favorite insult, but
I was also called "wop," "spic," "spaghetti," "macaroni," "chink" . . . anything but my name.

The only time I even
saw
my real name was back at Laurent, at Christmas, when we had a vote to see who would do the much-disliked job of playing Father
Christmas for the kids' party in the restaurant. I checked the trash afterward, and every piece of paper had my name on it.
It was a conspiracy, organized by the sous-chef, who has since become a friend but back then was a bit of a bastard. The only
problem, apart from the early start—Father Christmas had to come in early on Saturday—was that I didn't speak much French,
so the kids probably got the wrong presents.

At Tour d'Argent, the work was much harder and more pressurized than it had been at Laurent. There were twenty-five of us
in the kitchen, and another four or five in the pastry section downstairs. I thought I had made some progress while in Paris,
but now I realized that, to the chefs at Tour d'Argent, I was just as much of an outsider as ever.

The head chef—I didn't like him at all—used to ask me questions about Italian cooking. At Laurent, now and again I cooked
some Italian food—we had a dish of risotto with scallops and champagne sauce, served with Dover sole, and we used to do a
bit of tagliolini, and lasagne for staff dinner—so I said I'd cook him some polenta, which I bought from a little Italian
shop in the Jewish Quarter.

I brought it back to the restaurant and showed Chef and the sous-chef all the different ways you can prepare polenta—soft,
hard, in diamonds, grilled—but they were unbelievable bastards. They just didn't believe Italians could cook. No matter what
I did to the polenta, Chef just crossed his arms and, with a sniff, shook his head. But I refused to give up, and in the following
days insisted on making it again, varying the method. The only direction I got from Chef was that he wanted it lighter. So
I reduced the amount of grain that I used. "Lighter," he insisted. Then I made it with milk, not water. "Lighter." Then half
cream and half milk, with lots of butter whisked in at the end . . . until eventually, one day, he said, "Qz,
c'est un vrai
puree de mais!"
But it never,
ever
went on the menu.

One night, I was told to cook dinner for Claude Terrail, the big boss. I cooked him some brill in olive oil and grilled slices
of eggplant with roasted tomatoes and marjoram. When he'd finished his meal, he came into the kitchen—the first time I'd ever
seen him in there—and demanded, "Who cooked my dinner?"

I was squirming. I thought he was going to explode.

To my surprise, however, he shouted at all the other chefs, saying that they were feeding him cream and butter every night,
that they were trying to kill him, and that from now on I would be cooking his dinner every night. I was rather pleased with
myself, but I didn't know then that it would lead indirectly to the greatest humiliation of my life. If Terrail hadn't liked
his dinner, Chef wouldn't have done the terrine, and I wouldn't have been in the fridge . . . but I'm jumping ahead of myself.

After the episode with Terrail and his dinner, Chef said that we should do something with these vegetables that the boss had
liked so much, so we added to the menu a terrine of thin slices of eggplant, zucchini, and peppers, layered with langoustines
and set in a little jelly. A serving consisted of two slices of terrine, with three langoustines in each slice. We kept the
terrines in the walk-in pastry fridge downstairs, to keep them really cold and make them easier to slice.

One day, I ran downstairs to get the next terrine, went into the fridge, and saw a chef who seemed to be bending down to look
at something on the bottom shelf. I guessed it was one of the junior chefs, and I was just about to kick his ass when he stood
up and turned around.

It was Chef, his mustache twitching. He had picked up a couple of button onions that he had found on the floor of the fridge,
and he handed them to me.
"Tiens, tiens, petit Italien!
Regards-ga, rital!"
So I put the onions in my trouser pocket, without thinking, and I rushed upstairs with the terrine. He was obviously trying
to make a point about wastage in the kitchen, but I wasn't really in the mood.

I carried on with the service—we were packed that night, and it went on so late that we were still sending out starters at
11:45 p.m.—and at some point I put my hand in my pocket and felt something wet and horrible. It was the two onions. I whispered
"Old bastard!" to myself, and threw them in my trash bin, thinking he would have forgotten about them.

At one o'clock in the morning we had finally finished for the night. We were all changing, somebody was having a shower, when
the
plongeur
came down and told us that our presence was required upstairs. I could feel that something was wrong.

We all raced up the stairs, and when we got into the kitchen, everybody was given a plastic garbage bag to cut open and spread
out on the floor at his station. By this time I realized what was happening.

I don't know whether Chef had set me up deliberately or not—maybe he thought I was getting a bit too big for my boots—but
I knew that I was wrong: it might not seem like a big deal, just a couple of onions, but as a chef, if you are really dedicated,
you can't throw food away. It's the same philosophy that my mother and grandmother had, and the same idea that I try to instill
in the chefs who work with me now. It had crossed my mind to throw them in somebody else's bin, but I didn't, and anyway,
Chef knew who he'd given the onions to.

Anyway, at this point, I was just hoping that the onions had miraculously gotten trapped in an empty can or something.

No such luck. As I turned my bin over onto the plastic sheet, the two onions rolled out onto the floor, and I felt like a
very naughty schoolboy. Chef, who was a huge motherfucker, suddenly seemed even huger than normal. He made me feel about two
feet tall. He had a big stick in his hand, like a schoolmaster or a sergeant major, so he could search through the stuff you
had thrown away, and he stabbed angrily at the two onions.

I didn't say a word. I just stood there while he shouted at me. It seemed like he shouted for hours, getting ever louder and
redder in the face.

It was the biggest humiliation I have ever felt in my entire life. Chef clearly got a big kick out of screaming at people:
I'm sure that was his motivation, nothing to do with wastage or a philosophy of cooking, but still, I knew that I shouldn't
have done it. After this, they told me every fucking day that I wasn't good enough to be a chef, and at that point I almost
believed them.

I think it was at exactly that moment that I realized I didn't belong in that world. I left Tour d'Argent a couple of weeks
later; I didn't even ask for a certificate. Since that day I have never again applied for a job. I didn't need the fuck-off
name on my CV, either. Which, given all the shit I went through in Paris, is a little bit ironic.