LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 5

      It’s thanks to my lucky stars that June hired me. Otherwise I’d have had to leave our little home town to find work after the bistro closed down.

      The bistro was my first job out of catering college. It wasn’t overly fancy, at least not when I first started working there. It teetered somewhere between a builder’s caff and someplace that served food au jus. Set in the old town fishmonger’s shop, its walls were tiled white with a pretty Victorian green border running around the whole room. We only had seating for twenty-eight, with the open kitchen behind the old fish counter. Jen, my boss, kept as many of the original features as she could. Pale green ironwork surrounded the huge plate-glass front windows and door, which rattled awfully in winter, so we had a heavy velvet curtain in front to keep the customers from blowing away whenever someone came in.

      There were fishy touches all over the restaurant: some of the original adverts for jellied eels and pilchards in old money, weighing scales with their enamelled dish on the battered sideboard. Fishhooks hung from the ceiling and the old barrel by the door held customers’ wet umbrellas. We even used the display counter – once upon a time piled with ice and seafood – for our desserts.

      Jen had upmarket ideas when she hired me. Best of all, she believed in me. But, being fresh from catering college, I had yet to believe in myself.

      I don’t mean that I didn’t have the skills. I knew my pâté from my parfait. I just didn’t have the confidence. Yet there I was, the new cook in a newly reopened bistro – Jen had the word ‘café’ prised off the front of the building, and ‘bistro’ just fit, though it always looked squashed together. I got to have complete say over the food we served. Once I got over the shock and stopped panicking, I started to love the job. Every week Jen and I sat down together so I could tell her what I was planning. I didn’t have to ask permission for my menu. My catering school friends were gobsmacked when I told them that. Most of them were prep cooks, waking at 5 a.m. to chop mountains of onions, and there I was, designing my own menus.

      Jen was thrilled and so was I. Finally, finally, I was an actual cook, just like I’d always planned. I don’t want to paint it as the perfect job, because the hours were punishing and it was sweaty and nerve-racking. Still, it felt like my dream had come to life.

      Within a few months we were gaining a good reputation around the town, and people had to book for dinner on weekends. And sometimes even for lunch. But no matter how packed the bistro got, my parents still weren’t convinced. ‘What do you want to do next?’ Mum asked every single time I visited, like I was working behind a McDonald’s counter instead of running my own restaurant.

      ‘This is what I want to do,’ I always answered. ‘Why else would I have gone to catering college?’

      ‘I still have no idea,’ she’d say, ‘when you could have gone to university. Though I suppose this could be a leg up the ladder, if you leverage it. But darling, you’ve got the brains to be on your way to the boardroom, not doing dishes in a kitchen.’

      Maybe I shouldn’t be bringing this up now that Mum’s gone. After all, it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead. But it was harsh, so there’s no use pretending that she was a saint. You may as well know what she could be like.

      Mum always followed up with her main objection to my career plans: I should be challenging myself to do more than even my parents had. They were entrepreneurs with a successful building firm, but Mum always saw corporate jobs as better than what they had. That’s where you could really get a leg up the ladder. She and Dad did what they could without any education or family money. She wanted more for me.

      The problem was that every time they told me I could be more, all I heard was that I was less. That’s hard to accept at any age. I was still a teen. Meanwhile, my brother did everything they wanted. Maybe his aspirations really did align with theirs, or maybe he was brown-nosing. Whatever the case, he made them happy while, as long as I worked in a kitchen, I wasn’t going to measure up to Mum and Dad’s dreams for me. No matter what I was doing there, no matter how perfectly it matched what I wanted to do. Even after I’d been head chef for six years and built the bistro into a restaurant with a waiting list for reservations, and won awards for my cooking, they weren’t as convinced about my success as I was.

      The more they harped on about all the ways I could be doing better, the more I tried to ignore them. After all, I was happy with my progress. I was doing exactly what I’d set out to do. Their criticism couldn’t hurt me. At least, that’s what I thought.

      Now

Скачать книгу