Coastalblog

I don't know if you've watched The Bear. If you haven't, I can recommend it. The story of a chef used to working at the pinnacle of three-star perfection taking over his dead brother's sandwich shop, it's really compelling TV. Really good dialogue, characters you get emotionally invested in, a shifting timeline, interesting, clearly well thought out set piece episodes. There's clearly a lot of thought and effort gone into it, it's very good. What it isn't, however, is in any way representative of what working in a professional kitchen is actually like. Okay, I can't speak for the three-stars, but I've worked with a few that can, and they, too, smile at the lack of realism. It falls into the same trap that nearly all kitchen-set films and TV programmes do, of imagining that a kitchen is a place of constant stress and yelling, where there are at least three disasters a shift each of which, in real life, would see me stopping service and phoning for...

Christ. I suppose that I should have seen this coming, the warning signs were all there. I've had staff off ill regularly this year, and the frequency was increasing. Even the ones who don't get ill, or, at least, don't tend to phone in sick. Likewise the amount of late cancellations, someone phoning up apologetically to say someone was ill, had risen sharply over the last couple of months. But I am by nature an optimist, and also, as a general rule, rarely ill.  I am also a bloke, and therefore possessed of a pig-headed inability to stare the bleeding obvious in the face. But it got us in the end. It could have been anyone, we'd spent a weekend in Manchester generally living it up, a friend's wedding an excuse for a couple of days bacchanalia, could have been there, could have been the restaurant, might have been the very chatty Irish woman with zero concept of personal space, though on reflection the likeliest culprit is Mrs Coastalblog's journey back (I'd...