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Premature disengagement

Hold that thought if you were planning to come and eat in the restaurant in Uzès because I cook there: I no longer cook there. Artistic differences and what have you lead to a separation of our paths. Email me for the real reasons.

Topics: Restauranting, Stuff | 2 Comments »

Ensconced…

My kitchen - bar on the left, kitchen at the back, hole in the floor on the right down to the cellar where my cold room hides - closed during service so make sure you've got everything to hand!. Yes, it really is as small as it looks

…as Chef de Cuisine (OK, I only have a commis and half a plongeur but hey, what’s in a name?) at À Côté in the Place aux Herbes in Uzes. It’s called À Côté because it’s next door to l’Oustal, the first restaurant owned by À Côté’s proprietaires.
We do three salad/starter plates (soon to be four), Côté Sud, Fraîcheur and Mer (coquette coming soon! with chicken!) which feature Provençal-type stuff (grilled peppers, Jean-Remy’s famous Trilogies, meatballs, rice, that sort of thing; tzatziki, pea velouté, herb-stuffed chicken; mussels, rouget, brandade, prawns, respectively; ribs of beef and veal served on tableside charcoal grills; pierrades, hot stones on which you cook your own beef/veal/duck breast/seafood/marinated chicken; and a couple of fish dishes including, Real Soon Now, rougets au Pastis.
It’s hard work and a real challenge to keep on top of recipes, stocks, ordering, service and cooking, but we’re getting some very nice comments back from those who eat in the restaurant, which is fantastic.

We have room for a couple of tables and a few barstools inside, at the very most, so our customers sit under the arches or out in the town square

Everything is home-made, including the tomato sauce in the ratatouille – vegetable of the day right now. Days have been variable with between 4 and 50 customers per service, but we’re a new restaurant right next door to one of the best-known and longest-established eateries in town so it’s going to take a while to get things going properly.

Come and eat; it’s all good, not expensive and you’ll get a bilingual welcome.

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Lessons learned

2008 was a real roller coaster of a year. It started going downhill after a hoped-for cool job in Ireland with A Famous Celebrity fell through when he and especially his wife turned out to be complete and utter lying tossers. Lesson learned.
The year went back uphill with the proposition of working back in Ireland for a member of the country’s richest family – and downhill six weeks into the job when it turned out that he didn’t intend to actually pay me any wages.
We were still going uphill with the birth of Scarlett on May 1 and were literally three days from moving house to Ireland, all three of us, when the wages bombshell dropped. Scarlett was a month old and we were in the throes of packing up the house in France to go spend a month in Ireland and then move over lock, stock and barrel when I learned – accidentally – that my erstwhile employer had no intention of paying me any wages while he was away from home. And since he spends six months a year abroad for tax purposes, my salary started looking very paltry.
Coupled with the fact that Ireland had really disappointed me as a country, this was a real downer. We were prepared to accept the country’s third-world health care – it costs €70 to visit a doctor, non-reimbursable, and you pay for children as for adults – and being out in the wilds of nowhere because, firstly, I actually loved the job; cooking for the old man was a joy, he was a real pleasure to work for personally. Unfortunately those with whom he chose to surround himself were wankers of the first order, bent on destroying me quite possibly because they saw me as ‘competition’ for his favours. And secondly, the offered salary would have allowed us to save up enough money to return to France in a few years and establish our own business. Well, wages are easy to promise but harder to pay, so that one stopped dead there.
It dragged on, of course. I had to return to Ireland to collect my belongings, fortunately when there was no one in the house. I had 75 kilos of luggage, all my cooking equipment and books; when traveling over my employer had paid the excess baggage charge but there was no way I could afford that myself, so I had to get a ferry from Dublin to Hollyhead and then a train across Wales and England to London and then up to my parents’ house near Bedford. There I left most of my belongings and brought the rest home on Easyjet – 20 kilos in the hold and who knows how much stuffed into my carry-on rucksack. A real nightmare 48 hours which all but did me in, both emotionally and physically. We had really invested in the idea of moving to Ireland, even being prepared to take our one-month-old daughter there to live, only to have the idea destroyed by a lying tart. Still, lesson learned – never, ever, ever go anywhere to work without a signed contract specifying everything you want. Old men make promises their staff have no intentions of keeping.
I quickly found a job in a restaurant in Avignon which was fine, a post as Chef de Partie in a gastronomic restaurant 10 minutes by pushbike from the flat. The salary was Enough and the work interesting, although some of the characters working there were jaw-droppingly weird. The Second who managed to get fired after serving rotting fish to one of the place’s favourite clients and sending off a sample to the analysis laboratory that was, literally, full of his own shit (permitted level of the bacteria you leave on food after not washing your hands following a bathroom break: 500; actual level of shitty bacteria in sample: 30,000); the cook who was a ‘mythoman’, as the French call them, a Walter Mitty character who had, variously, a dead daughter or a daughter who was studying to be a doctor; a daughter so poorly she was helicoptered to a brain specialist in Marseilles or who was doing well at school; a collection of vintage Ferraris and Bugattis or who drove a broken-down old Alfa Romeo. Then there were the control freak managers who wanted one, not two, slices of toast served with the foie gras and the portions of salad accompanying starters to be weighed, and who refused to replace the flood-damaged and filthy kitchen floor six years after it was ruined; waiters who spent, literally, hours chatting up female customers and shagging them instead of serving food. A chef who gave me a final, written warning (with, naturally, no preceding warnings at all) when he found one spot of tomato juice on a wall in a part of the building I’d never worked in. It goes on. All restaurants are special, but this one was Special. That place was a roller coaster ride all on its own, a funfair of excitement and disappointment on the Montagne Russe, as the French call them, that was our 2008. Lesson learned: everyone who works in, and especially who runs, restaurants is Mad with a capital Flibble.
On the up again. We got married in August, a truly splendid weekend of fun and partying with many of our favourite people traveling from all over France and the UK to have a good time with us. It makes you want to get married more often just so you can see them, really one of the favourite weekends of my whole life. And especially getting to work with the marvellous Steve and Caroline preparing Sunday lunch: thank you chaps, without you none of that would have been possible, I love you dearly. Lesson learned: Friends are great, cherish them.
My contract finished at the restaurant in October and things were fine for a while. The Irish Problem had been dragging on all through the summer, with them refusing point blank to pay me the wages they owed me. It was only a couple of thousand euros, but they would have none of it. So I was forced to take them to the Prud’Hommes, the Industrial Tribunal, the Commissioners as they’re called over there. The money would have been nice but the real problem, it turned out, was that they hadn’t given me an end-of-contract bit of paper I needed to be able to claim unemployment benefit in France. Well, they hadn’t ever given me a contract either, but the e-o-c one stopped me getting any unemployment benefit money at all from the start of November until it finally arrived in February, which made for a very, very difficult three and a half months for us. The Irish turd who had fucked everything up, the old man’s secretary, had apparently had my contract on her desk all the time – well, that’s what Sources Close To… told me, sources who had no reason to lie. Why she simply didn’t give it to me I can only guess, not know. Lesson learned: trust no one.
So I had to travel back to Ireland – four flights and a car hire, thank you – to attend the Commissioner’s Hearing in a town just down the road from the old man’s castle. The Commissioner, a retired judge, listened to my story and then started on their version. They had the Lying Secretary, The Lawyer and The Barrister in attendance; the Barrister had prepared a two-inch-thick brief which the Commissioner didn’t open. Their version of what happened was incredible, a real work of fantasy, but still. I listened patiently until The Commissioner stopped them, half an hour in, and asked them to leave the room. “This will go on all day today and probably tomorrow, if the size of this brief is anything to go by,” she said. “And they’re going to lose. How about I propose to them that they give you €2,500, they can beat it down to the €2,000 you want and we can all get home for lunch?” Fine by me, but it took another half an hour to persuade Them.
So they got off with a small fine for not having given me a contract in the first place and the €2,000 I wanted all along. Plus, and I’m guessing here, probably €10,000 in lawyer and barrister costs. I liked the old man and he deserves better advisors than this, and I’m sorry he ended up losing a chef he liked. No one won this one, although I lost less than the others. Lesson learned: get it in writing no matter how sincere the promises.
The Commissioner hearing was in late November and we spent two weeks over Christmas in England with my parents, a marvellous time for them and Scarlett who adored all the attention they gave her. It’s a real joy seeing the pleasure they give to each other, this was a real Up after the Downer that Ireland had been for me, but our money worries were mounting and becoming a real problem.
When I’d taken the P45 the Irish finally sent me into the French Unemployment office, they waved it away: P45? Here we want an E301, Monsieur. Now, an E301 is a P45 with the ‘P45′ name scratched out and ‘E301′ written over the top, but that doesn’t matter. The Former Employer should have furnished me with the E301 but, obviously, that wasn’t going to happen now, so a lot of research turned up another form to fill in and send to Ireland to turn a P45 into an E301. And that didn’t arrive until mid-February.
I gave the form to the French unemployment wonks and they promptly decided to pay me half the benefit they should have done, so another 10 days passed while they fixed that one, and we finally got some money – but only after incurring I Really Don’t Want To Know How Much in bank overdraft charges and interest. Essentially all the Irish settlement money. Lesson learned: Don’t work for the Irish, don’t trust anyone, check the bits of paper you need in advance, be nice to the French bureaucrats, have an understanding bank manager.
And of course, all this time I’ve been applying for jobs. At the end of last season no one was hiring as the economic crisis started. Then, as detailed in my last post, I applied for a couple of hundred jobs between January and now and had a really bad time of all that. I was offered and accepted a job just down the road from Delphine’s parents’ home in the Gard, but an innocent e-mail from me to the employer turned out to be a threat to drag her off to the Prud’Hommes/Industrial tribunal and she refused to hire me. Lesson learned: sort out everything before you’re hired. I thought I was just confirming something already promised, but in fact I uncovered a thin tissue of lies about wages and conditions and am glad I did – I’d have finished working 6 days a week for 3 days’ worth of wages.
It has been an extremely difficult 18 months, starting back in October 2007 when we first thought we’d be moving to Ireland to work for The Famous Irish Celebrity. People, it turns out, are simply not as nice as me. They lie. They cheat. And they smile while doing it. We’ve had some terrible moments and some fantastic moments and are now hoping, sincerely, that the next 18 months will be a lot smoother and easier. We’ll see, and hope for the best. I’m lucky that Delphine has been so understanding and supportive through all of this, I really couldn’t have coped without her or with a lesser woman, so thank you very much Chérie, mon amour, sans toi je serai rien. Lesson learned: marry a good woman.
Now I’m off to Uzes to work in a new restaurant. There’s a trial period of 14 days and, if it works out, we’ll be moving over there. But it’s all in writing now, we’re not buying plane tickets or house hunting until it’s certain, and there are back-up options waiting in the wings Just In Case.
Lessons learned.

Topics: Cooking, Restauranting, Scarlett, Stuff | 2 Comments »

New job at last!

Offered and accepted. Chef de Cuisine in a small restaurant in the Place aux Herbes, right in the middle of the medieval town of Uzes.

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Getting there has been quite a journey, I have to say. I’ve been to something in the order of a couple of dozen interviews and have applied for getting on for 200 jobs since finishing at l’Auberge de la Treille last November. I turned down two jobs and still have two outstanding offers held in reserve Just In Case.

Frankly, many of the chefs and restaurant owners I met could do with taking a course or two in people management and interview techniques. One called me for interview at 8 in the morning – when I arrived two other candidates were already there and five more arrived before 8.30. He saw us in alphabetical order, not the order of arrival, so saw me at 1130, three and a half hours after I’d arrived. What a shit. Another did the same, albeit only summoning four of us for 1530. At least this one saw us in order of arrival, but WTF? Do these people really care so little about their future employees that they’re prepared to treat them like this?

Part of the problem, of course, is that in the current economic climate there are a LOT of unemployed cooks chasing fewer jobs than before, so Chefs and owners are getting cocky. I’m sure many don’t even give a second thought to the poor schmucks who are turning up like this on their doorsteps and simply treat us like dirt because, well, that works. I would refuse point blank to work for anyone who did this to me.

Equally I’d also refuse to work for any of those who called me for interview but who hadn’t actually read my CV before I turned up. So when they say things like, “Oh, you’re 48?” I understand that that means “I want a young commis I can boss around not a grown up who’ll answer back, ask ‘Why’ and have ideas that are better than mine and show me up”. Or who say, after speaking with me for 10 minutes, “Are you Belgian/German/Dutch?” Duh. Up there, top-right hand corner of my CV, the one in your hand, the one I e-mailed/posted to you last week, it says ‘Nationalité anglaise’.

And when they say, “Ah but I’m looking for someone who’s got experience of expediting 400 steak, chips and deep-fried frozen muck a day, not someone whose experience is doing 100 gastronomic meals a day,” what am I supposed to say? Your ad said ‘Seeking Second de cuisine for traditional restaurant’, how am I supposed to guess what you might want from that? Didn’t your preliminary scan through my CV clue you in a little? No? Ah, not had the time to read it? Fine, thanks for getting me to drive 150 kms for a five minute Conversation With An Idiot.

And don’t get me started about salaries. OK too late. There’s a new law in France which says that if you employ someone off the dole, you don’t have to pay their social charges for the first three months of employement saving employers about €100 a month. Fine. But only if you pay them minimum wage, €8.71 an hour. And in restaurants you get paid for 39 hours a week and the other hours you work are either ignored, or you get to take days off in lieu, or they’re paid (officially or unofficially). Just about everyone I met wants to pay minimum wage and then ‘We’ll make sure you’re OK with some cash out of the till, a few hundred euros a month/week in a good season’. Right. You wanna put that in writing? Thought not. But even if I could believe them, and frankly no one lies like a restaurant owner promising jam tomorrow, and they did give me a few hundred euros in cash every month, the problem comes at the end of the season when I have to sign back on the dole – then you only get something in the order of 70% of your previously declared salary. So 70% of minimum wage, i.e. about €800 a month. Good luck living on that with a wife and children.Because, Oh yes, no one is offering permanent contracts just six-month temporary ones “But we may be able to offer a permanent contract later on if we have a good season”. Well, I can certainly pay my rent with an offer like that, then!

Do Chefs and owners care about this? “Next please!” they cry as their eyes glaze over, you already forgotten.

I do have a lot of sympathy with owners at the moment, the French restaurant industry is deep in a hole and still digging for China. Many had pinned their hopes on a long-promised reduction in TVA (VAT in the UK, essentially sales tax) which currently adds itself at the rate of 19.6% to every restaurant bill. Former President Chirac promised to reduce it to 5.5% seven years ago, a promise taken up by President Nicholas ‘I get to shag Carla Bruni, nyah-nyah-nyah-nyahhhh-nyah’ Sarkozy during his election campaign. The reduction has finally been agreed by the EU (thank you Germany you bastards, You Must Be Stopped!) and the industry breathed a huge sigh of relief – Just in time for the summer season, hurrah! We are saved!

Er, not quite. Naturally, this being France, we can’t just say ‘TVA is reduced to 5.5% on restaurant meals’. Oh no. First we must set up a commission. And a panel. And conferences. All to decide how to implement it: should it be compulsory to reduce prices or increase wages or take on new staff? Who knows? Who gives a flying fuck? Well, the bureaucrats whose jobs depend on having enough to do that they look busy and important until it’s time for their two-month summer holidays – eating in cheap restaurants in the South of France moaning about how they’re not cheap enough. Wankers – that’s who.

So that’s the long way round to saying I’m really, really glad to have landed a decent job in an interesting restaurant with decent employers who pay overtime and seem to want to treat their staff like human beings, not scum. Result.

Menus and stuff to follow.

Topics: Cooking, Restauranting, Stuff | 1 Comment »

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