Coastalblog

It is the end of a particularly punishing Saturday service, and my body is reminding me, once again, that I am pretty old for a line cook. Okay, that's a slight bit of faux modesty, done for the effect of the sentence. I'm a head chef, not a commis or a prep drone, but I do still work the line. I don't have to, I have other chefs, all of whom are perfectly competent (the maladroit get found out pretty quickly in our line of work, and so do the wankers, it's one of the reasons I enjoy it, there's no test of character quite like a busy Saturday service, and no test of consistency under pressure like Christmas) but for some reason that I have yet to fully fathom, I'm still there. I haven't even moved to expo, the traditional head's spot, standing at the pass plating and telling everyone what to do, I still work saute and grill, the grunt work, the actual hands-on stuff. I make sauces in the pan a la minute, fillet and portion to order, I don't prep garn...

I have never been a slender man. No one has ever looked at me and thought "oh, he needs feeding up". It's a good job for me that I was already in a relationship by the early noughties as I was never going to carry off the wasted rock star in skinny jeans look. No one has ever mistaken me for Noel Fielding. This is not to say that I'm entirely a corpulent mess. I have, at various times in my life, been in pretty good shape, but it takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of vigilance, particularly in my line of work, where temptation is never far away. Also, I reason, I have only one life to live, so have the cheese, ffs. I have often wondered what it would be like to be effortlessly in good nick, to not have to stop and think how much I really want that pie (quite a lot, obviously, pie is great), but I've long since come to terms with the fact that my default form is "lived-in". I do try to keep things under control, but I also put weight on at the mere menti...