Category: Memoir

This season has been long. We served 38,000 covers, burned 14 pots, gained 2 apprentices and lost 1 whisk. I have forgiven the cucumber, though I will never forget.

When I am gone, I would like to be remembered as a chef who cared. Not a chef who won, though a third star would have been nice. A chef who held the door, set the table and made sure no cat left hungry. Tonight, as the last guest departs and the lights fall, I will sit alone with a saucer of butter, a yellow sun in a blue dish, and be nine weeks old again.

In 2005, I burned a 200 litre pot of veal stock. The smell crept through the building, down the stairs, out the door and into the street, where a delivery man was heard to say ‘what a lovely, terrible thing.’

I wept for hours. My mentor, Madame Gaspard, then 14 years retired, arrived at dusk with a bottle of brandy and a ladle. We sat in the kitchen, saw the black ruin, and she said, ‘Chef, the stock does not care.’ I have thought about this sentence every day since. The stock does not care. The stock does not remember. The stock is merely water that has seen too much, and so, I confess, am I.

Before I was a chef, I was a busboy, and the waiters taught me everything. A grizzled Siamese named Vittorio showed me how to carry five plates up one arm. A shy tabby named Pearl taught me the art of the invisible refill. And a gruff old cat, whose name I never learned, taught me never to turn my back on a table of eight.

They are the soul of a restaurant, the ones who see the secrets, the spilt wine and the proposals gone wrong. My own waiters earn 14 percent more than the industry average and are given Thursdays off, and I have never regretted a single treat.

In 2012, a critic from the Hollow Oak Gazette arrived at my restaurant unannounced, wearing a hat and a false moustache. He ate one entire turbot, three sides, two desserts and my staff lunch. I did not notice, for I was in the freezer.

His review ran under the headline ‘I Have Never Been So Full.’ It was neither praise nor insult. Business tripled. I have never found out what he thought of the turbot. I only know that the next day, the kitchen was full of flowers, and my sous chef had resigned in a state of religious awe. I have been trying to cook for that man ever since.

I rise at 4 a.m. to visit the Harbour Fish Market, a cavern of silver, salt and shouting. A man named Morty, who has sold me mackerel since 1996, nods once as I enter. This is our entire friendship. It is perfect.

I touch every fish. I press, I sniff, I look into its eye. The eye should be clear, like a good conscience. I reject 60 percent of what I see. By 6 a.m. I have chosen four crates of sea bass, two of sardines and one very large turbot, who looked at me with such dignity that I paid his price without argument. He will be the star of tonight’s menu.

Every chef has a freezer. Mine is a 4 metre by 3 metre cube, set to minus 18, with a single stool and a shelf for contemplation. I have wept there for the loss of a perfect hollandaise, a lost mentor and a dropped crème brûlée.

The cold is a comfort. The silence is a gift. The only disturbance is the faint, humming conversation of 80 kilos of frozen mackerel. Sometimes, if I listen closely, I swear they are saying ‘there, there.’ I have a rule that no chef shall be disturbed in the freezer for less than ten minutes. It has saved three marriages and one very fine fricassée.

Dear young chef, you will burn your paws. You will drop the stock. You will be shouted at by someone with larger whiskers and fewer manners. All of this is good. All of this is the school.

But let me give you three things I wish I had known. One: salt early, salt late, salt never in the middle. Two: a clean station is a quiet mind, and a quiet mind makes a better sauce. Three: when you are finally given your own restaurant, do not call it something clever. Call it your name, and then give it away. I wish someone had told me this before I opened the one that was shaped like a teapot.

My whiskers have been in the kitchen since before the pilot light. The left one, longer and more sensitive, detects tuna from 11 metres. The right one, shorter and more suspicious, detects lies. Together they have made me what I am.

In 2009, the left whisker was singed by a flambé gone rogue. I cried for a week. In 2011, the right whisker was clipped by a rival chef at a charity bake off. I did not cry; I filed a complaint. They have both grown back, a little stronger and a little more dramatic, and I now insure them for 40,000 treats through a specialist underwriter on Harbour Street.

It was 1998, and I was a young sous chef at the Café Moustache. The soufflé, a magnificent golden dome, rose to an impossible 14 centimetres. The head chef, a terrifying Burmese named Madame Gaspard, carried it herself to table six.

At the threshold of the dining room, it sighed. Then it fell. The room went silent. Madame Gaspard stood motionless with a collapsed pudding in her paws, and I knew my career was either over or beginning. I fled to the walk in freezer, where I wept into a block of cold cream. When I emerged, she said only, ‘Again.’ I have said the same word to every apprentice since.

I was nine weeks old when I first understood butter. It sat on a saucer on my grandmother’s windowsill, a yellow sun in a blue dish, and I climbed the curtain to reach it. I fell. I tasted it. I was changed.

Everything I have cooked since, from the 14 course tasting menu at Le Saumon to the dainty tuna tartare at Trattoria Whisker, has been an attempt to return to that saucer. I am Chef Beauregard ‘Beau’ Pawsworth, and this is the story of a life spent at the stove, hungry, haunted and eventually star adjacent.