Free Chop Chop by Simon Wroe Page B

how things change. It’s the tragedy of those little parts that stay the same. How what we took for emblems now look tawdry, now spell shame.

6. BOB AND BEYOND
    F
ucking soufflé!
”
    But these family troubles are ancient history, all behind me. Or a hundred miles away, at least. (At my back now, Racist Dave is telling me to press on. If it is not Ramilov raising editorial quibbles, it is Dave.) On a heaving Saturday evening at the beginning of December—three days after Ramilov, in search of a loving touch, ended up fridge-bound in the company of lobsters—the ogre is demanding a soufflé. Dibden’s section is once more sprayed with bits of fruit and crumb and peel. Spilled sauces and dark reductions are clotting like blood. The mint leaves tremble in his hands. His mouth is slack and open, his movements awry. His head folds one way, then the other. There is no use left in him. He is a punch-drunk boxer, a spavined horse, a former umbrella. We watch in silence.
    â€œ
I want it now, spastic! Get it on the plate!
”
    Originally this account of Dibden’s collapse was going to give him the benefit of the doubt: wrong-footed by one horrific service, an unfortunate soul who flew too close to the sun. He has suffered enough, I feel, without having to be tarred and feathered again in these pages. My editors think otherwise, however, and they have offered various unflattering insights, counterclaims, to the effect that our companion’s demise was inevitable. Ramilov, in a frenzied missive, suggests Dibden is “less use than a velvet prick.” Dave claims that Dibden was the longest-serving commis The Swan had ever had. It was a year, he says, before Bob let him reheat soup. And only when I arrived, when there was absolutely no excuse, did Dibdenfinally receive promotion to the larder section. By then, Dibden had been at The Swan for almost two years, and still inspired such little confidence that the day Ramilov started he was essentially demoted again, exiled to pastry.
    â€œ
A raspberry soufflé, you dopey fuck!”
    The truth is that the pastry section is seen as an easy gig. A kingdom of one, where scorned but aloof chefs twiddle their thumbs while sauce and larder get shafted. Desserts are an afterthought in most restaurants. As Dave likes to observe, everyone needs a main—only fat bastards
need
a pudding. It is an extravagance. Some nights The Swan did not sell one dessert. So it seemed reasonable, in one sense, for a man of Dibden’s capabilities to fill the post. Nor did he require any practice acting scorned but aloof.
    â€œ
Soufflé, cunt?
”
    Bob would like a raspberry soufflé that has been on for half an hour. He leans on his palms at the pass, poking his jowly, sweating head beneath the hot lamps to shout at Dibden. Big Bob, in all his petty, weaselly majesty. Cocktail sausage fingers, huffing like a spoiled child. The tyrant. The buffoon. The prick. Where are you now, Bob? Who are you terrorizing? I ask, but I do not want to know.
    â€œ
Soufflé!”
    â€”
    People say we never should have taken all this from Bob, that we should have walked out the minute he raised his voice to us or treated us in an unprofessional manner. But those people don’t understand. In the kitchen, shouting and bullying
is
the professional manner. I know most places don’t take it as far as Bob did, but I’ve also heard tales of worse from Ramilov and Racist Dave, of chefs they have heard about, or other places they have worked. Chefs arevery partial to this game, I have found. It gives them a warm and cozy feeling about their job while it confirms the horror of it.
    Did you hear about so-and-so?
    I heard . . .
    Total fucking psycho . . .
    Apparently at _____ he doesn’t let them use the loo during service. Blocks the door with a chair. If they piss themselves they just got to carry on. Two stars, plating foie gras and truffles with