I signed up for junior year abroad and left California with little money on the pretext of studying literature and art, but traveling for its own sake was paramount. Yearning to see the world and figure out how to live an interesting life, I arrived in London during Margaret Thatcher’s second year as Prime Minister, six months before Prince Charles proposed to Lady Diana Spencer in the nursery at Windsor castle. I was twenty, a year older than the future Princess of Wales.
One winter afternoon four months into my stay, I took a walk through the London borough of Richmond-upon-Thames, and on a quaint side street I noticed a hand-written sign in a restaurant window: “Waiter or Waitress Needed; Enquire Within.” I had never waited tables anywhere. Peering into the restaurant, which I will call Mornington’s, I saw paneled walls hung with bucolic paintings and a dozen or so wooden tables adorned with vases of flowers. Desperately needing the money — and shelter from a sudden, brutal downpour — I entered the restaurant, which was not yet open for dinner. Two men appeared from a backroom. They were slim, in their thirties, and they seemed mildly shocked to find a stranger with sopping hair in their dining room. I asked, “Do you still need a waiter?”
“Where are you from?” the swarthier of the two said. He had a mustache and penetrating gaze. I will call him Ian.
“California,” I said. “But I’m studying here.”
There was a long silence. I expected one of them to claim the position had already been filled.
“Look there,” the other man said. “You’re dripping all over the carpet.” Taller and lankier, he looked like someone I’d call Jack.
While Jack observed the expanding dampness, Ian asked me about my experience. At sixteen, I had an after-school job slapping pickles on beef patties that were shuttled on a conveyor belt through the broiler, which hardly seemed the pedigree desired by Mornington’s owners, who stood with their hands on their hips, giving me once-overs. I glorified my fast-food stint by saying a famous American restaurant had recruited me for duties in the kitchen and dining room, which was all true, although in the dining room — red vinyl booths where customers ate off plastic trays and siphoned buckets of soda — I was chiefly responsible for emptying the trashcans and mopping the floor.
“We’ve only had waitresses in the past,” Jack said. “Not waiters.”
“But we are short on help right now,” Ian said. “Aren’t we Jack?”
They asked several reasonable questions: could I work weekend nights until eleven, did I mind washing dishes now and then, what was I studying in England, how long would I be there? I shivered through my answers, and Ian went to the kitchen, returning minutes later with a cup of milky tea. “Sugar?” he asked, handing me a dainty saucer. “I know that Americans like sugar.” Unsweetened was my preference, I told him. As the men had not invited me to sit down, I sipped the tea while standing.
“We’ll need to discuss this and let you know,” Jack said. “We’ll be interviewing other candidates, of course.”
Ian threw him an edgy glance.
I gave them the number for the pay phone in my dreary college dormitory in Twickenham, a short train ride away from Richmond; cell phones, like any serious plans for my future, were still years away.
“If we’re interested, we’ll be in touch,” Jack said.
Warmed briefly by the tea, I left the restaurant and encountered an icy wind hurling iron-gray sheets of rain in my path. I slogged toward the train station, but halfway up the street I heard someone calling my name. I turned around and saw Ian standing outside under an immense black umbrella.
“Can you start on Saturday?” he shouted. “Five o’clock?”
As an American without a work permit, I was illegally employed and paid under the table, and I was warned, as a precautionary measure, not to speak with the police officers who dined with us. On my first night, in the hour before dinner service, Jack guided me through the menu, from the starters such as leek soup and sausage rolls to the main courses and desserts. The ingredients and flavor profiles were to be memorized, he said, so that I could discuss each dish with an informed confidence. Ian taught me how to mix cocktails such as gin and tonic, gimlets, Tom Collins — anything with gin, essentially — and I began to learn about various wines, the nuances of sherry and port, and sundry liqueurs. If a man asked for ale, beer or Guinness, he was given a pint glass, whereas a woman was brought a half-pint, an old-fashioned custom to preserve the appearance of ladylike drinking.
Jack showed me how to wash glassware so that it sparkled streak-free: plunge into nearly boiling-hot sudsy water and agitate for fifteen seconds, then remove and rinse for drying on a rack. Meticulous Ian lectured me on the correct setting of a table: knives on the right, teeth toward the plate, forks on the left, water and wine glasses top right, butter knife placed diagonally on the bread plate, napkins folded into impeccable pyramids aligned one inch above the dinner and salad forks. He toured the dining room with a ruler to ensure the exact and consistent spacing between all these elements. I absorbed the totality of these lessons with fascination and even relief; at my college, I’d struggled to write ponderous essays about Shakespeare and modern art, while the practical instruction at Mornington’s, grounded in an abundance of tactile realities, dissolved the academic mental clutter, clearing the way for a surprising sense of accomplishment.
Jack and Ian created a genteel and homey haven of understated elegance, one that honored the spirit of English reserve without sacrificing a flair for fun. Royalty had dined there — a princess by blood — as well as members of parliament and West End theatrical luminaries, but anyone who walked through the door, with or without a reservation, was made to feel welcomed and special. Before opening Mornington’s, Ian had excelled as a creative director for an advertising agency; he had a shrewd talent for instilling a magnetic, even tantalizing appeal in almost anything. Jack had managed a pub, where he mastered the important fundamentals of hospitality. As the style-setter, Ian wore thin snazzy ties, designed the menus — hand-crafted anew every day — selected the ever-changing table décor, and chose the background music, which always included at least one nightly playing of an album by his all-time favorite group, “Gladys Knight and the Pips.”
I believe the men had detected in me the potential for a waiter shaped in service to their creation, but their apprentice was by no means a perfect pupil. One evening during my first week, I asked some guests who had finished their main courses if they’d like to see the dessert menu. Ian heard this. At the first opportunity, he pulled me into the pantry. “It’s not dessert,” he said. “It’s pudding, as we told you. This is an English restaurant, and in England we call it pudding.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “Pudding means something different to me.”
Ian’s face tightened. “It’s not funny,” he said. “It’s pudding, so please refer to it as such.”
For me, pudding was the chocolate miracle my mother had stirred into being on the stove and delicately poured into a large glass bowl. A smooth skin formed on top as it cooled, a sign that it was ready to be devoured for dessert or breakfast or whenever I felt like it. After Ian’s scolding, I trained myself to advise our guests, at the start of their meals, to save room for our lovely puddings — I’d learned to say lovely as breezily as any Englishman, without a second thought about my masculinity — and when they finished with their mains, I reminded them that delicious puddings awaited. Pudding, pudding, pudding. It began to feel natural, as if I’d been an advocate for pudding and not dessert since my babblings in a crib. But a few weeks after my debut, despite all the conscientious drills, I suffered a lapse, and when Ian heard the forbidden word, he loudly cleared his throat. “I mean pudding, of course,” I said, without flinching. The diners at my table didn’t seem to care, or even notice, that I had uttered dessert, but it was my last gaffe in this linguistic duel.
Jack spoke more softly than Ian and seemed the product of a well-mannered English boyhood. Once a month, he drove upcountry to spend the weekend with his elderly mother. He preferred to stand inconspicuously at the back of the restaurant, watching over diners from afar. Polite, introverted, circumspect — that was Jack. Ian, the calculating and chatty perfectionist, struck a commanding managerial pose in the dining room, ready to pounce at every chance for social interaction. As business partners, the two men seemed extraordinary complements to one another, even when they quibbled fussily about the Yorkshire pudding, which was not a dessert — by which I mean it was not a sweet ending to a meal but rather a side dish made of eggs and flour, and slathered with onion gravy. Every night, after the last customers had left, Jack and Ian would sit together at a table drinking coffee or wine and assessing the day’s successes and failures, as business partners do. Early on, it didn’t occur to me that they were romantic companions too.
One fully-booked night, a crisply-dressed woman with no shortage of pearls summoned me to her table. She and her male companion had finished their roasted meats and steamed vegetables, all well-irrigated with gin and tonics and a bottle of Mouton Cadet. “I’d like to enquire about your puddings,” she said. “Do you have spotted dick this evening?” As the man dabbed a napkin to his lips, I stood silent for a moment.
“Allow me to ask for you,” I finally said, thinking this was the polite English way of masking my ignorance, for I had no idea what she was talking about.
Ian was in the kitchen arranging lettuce on a plate when I relayed the woman’s question. “No spotted dick tonight,” he said. “I’m afraid we’ve run out of spots.”
“Shall I tell her?”
“Yes, of course you should tell her.”
Back in the dining room, I told the woman, “I’m very sorry. We’ve run out of spots.”
Baffled at first, she soon realized that the earnest American waiter had fallen victim to a ruse. “Well, young man,” she said. “Since you only have the dick but no spots, we’ll take the bill.”
Spotted dick, Ian later told me, was a steamed pudding studded with dried currants or raisins and accompanied by warm custard. It was a quintessential English pudding, but Mornington’s never had it on the menu. Ian and Jack preferred to bake a rich bread pudding garnished with a luxuriant caramel sauce. Later in my year abroad, I saw cans of spotted dick in the Sainsbury market, but without room in my pence-pinching budget for frivolous experiments, I never bought any.
As a waiter I earned two pounds an hour in a year when the pound was worth around two dollars. Inflation had ravaged the British economy, leaving many people miserable and broken, and for a marginally employed student, London proved hideously expensive. A ploughman’s lunch of stale bread, cheese, a couple of pickles and, if you were lucky, a meager wedge of fatty pate, cost ten dollars — prohibitive for me. On many days before I became a waiter, I lived off fried eggs and toast from the college refectory, crackers, apples, cheese, coffee, and McVitie’s digestives. On weekends I splurged on a pint of ale. Slim to begin with, I lost weight in England.
Although two pounds an hour was not much, it was more than I had ever made, but still the situation could have been more lucrative if the English had tipped like Americans. Mornington’s best customers might leave ten percent, but even that was rare. Others rounded up their bills to the nearest pound while many left nothing at all. At the end of my shifts, I was compensated for my time in pound notes slipped from the cash register. When Ian paid me, he’d give me more than my hourly earnings, pressing the money discreetly into my palm without telling Jack. Ian had lived for a time in New York City; he knew that American waiters enjoyed gratuities wildly more generous than his compatriots would ever consider. Whenever I went to work, I was always happy to find Ian in the dining room reviewing the reservation list or re-polishing silver before guests arrived while Jack manned the kitchen; I knew that Ian would be in charge of paying me that night. When I saw Jack in the dining room, my heart sank; he never paid me more than the hourly wage.
Ample free meals partially made up for the paltry tips. It was usually Ian who put together a plate of food for me during short breaks: a slice of beef Wellington, named after the first Duke of Wellington, with honey-glazed carrots or a scoop of garden peas; plump roasted chicken and roasted potatoes, or a salad of cucumbers and tomatoes tossed with crumbles of stilton cheese. I could eat, without asking, any of the puddings lined up on a shelf outside the kitchen. I especially hankered after the trifle with layers of decadent custard, whipped cream, sponge cake and fruit — fresh strawberries or juicy tangerine segments — but I also indulged in the treacle tart, a shortbread crust filled with golden syrup, sweet butter and cream. I drank pots of strong coffee with my puddings, and soon I would be trembling as the sugar and caffeine charged through my blood, keeping me awake until two in the morning, long after my shift had ended. But I didn’t care: at least I had not gone to bed hungry.
Three months into the job, on a bustling Friday night, two smartly clad couples came in to celebrate a birthday. After they sat down, I took their drink orders. Each person asked for a flaming Sambuca, an aperitif I had watched Jack and Ian prepare but had never made myself. It seemed easy enough: pour the anise-flavored liqueur into a sherry glass, drop in three coffee beans — symbolizing health, happiness and prosperity — then carefully ignite the liquid’s surface with a match. In the small alcove bar, I made the drinks, lit each one, and placed the glasses on a round tray before presenting them to the table. The flaming Sambucas looked festive, and the birthday girl reached out to take one.
“It’s hot!” I said, pulling the tray away. But the drinks spilled into the table’s centerpiece, which that night was a bouquet of dried flowers arranged — by Ian — in a straw basket, the whole of which burst into a magnificent bonfire, illuminating our faces with an other-worldly glow. Everyone in the dining room stopped eating and turned to witness the spectacle; one distinguished-looking man, napkin still affixed to his lap, stood up and applauded.
“This is fun!” a woman at a nearby table said. “Can I have my birthday dinner here, too?”
I ran to retrieve a fire extinguisher from the kitchen. “How many times do I have to tell you?” Ian said. “No running in the restaurant, for God’s sake!”
“But there’s a table on fire,” I said.
“Bloody hell!” He grabbed the canister and handed it to me. “Have Jack take care of it, would you?”
I walked back calmly but swiftly to the dining room. One of the men at the burning table had doused the flames with glasses of water, launching plumes of white smoke to the ceiling. After removing the charred remains of the centerpiece, Jack began making a new batch of drinks for the birthday party.
“Thanks to you, they’re having a wonderful time,” he said. “Now is there anything else you care to destroy this evening?”
One weekend when Jack was visiting his mother, Ian asked if I could help him with prep work for Saturday night’s dinner. “You can cut up the vegetables, do some washing, and make some puddings instead of eating them,” he said. “Come in at noon.” Mornington’s didn’t have lunch service, so there was plenty of time in the afternoon to get ready for dinner. Though not keen on spending the day in the kitchen, I wanted the extra cash. I had been saving part of my earnings for a spring break trip, and knowing that Ian would likely add a tip to my hourly rate, I was glad to work the additional shift.
As a waiter, I always wore my only pair of black slacks and a button-down dress shirt, but for kitchen prep I put on jeans and a t-shirt under a ratty sweater. When I arrived at noon, Ian was massaging fresh herbs and spices into slabs of beef, allowing the flavors to permeate for several hours before roasting. “I saved the potatoes, carrots and onions for you,” he said. “Let’s get you chopping.”
After laying out an array of knives, he untied hefty mesh sacks of potatoes, carrots, and onions, which were to be diced for single-serving meat pies. I picked up a knife and began attacking the potatoes, halving them first, then quartering each chunk. “Not like that,” Ian said. “I need them much smaller.” He took the knife and deftly reduced a knobby potato to tiny white cubes that all seemed precisely the same size. “There, like that,” he said. “Now you try it.”
I worked through the potatoes, heaping them into a bowl of cold water to prevent browning, then moved on to the carrots. Though I’d found an efficient, steady rhythm with the knife, the bags of root vegetables emptied ever so slowly.
As I started into the onions, Ian said, “If you breathe through your mouth, cutting them won’t make you cry.” Following this advice, I sliced through onion after onion without spilling a single tear. By this time, I had been chopping and dicing for more than an hour, all the while daydreaming about an adventure to Morocco, via trains through France and Spain before a ferry crossing over the Strait of Gibraltar, if only I could save enough money. As I went on imagining my future travels, Ian announced that he needed to fetch more meat from the walk-in refrigerator down the hall. As he walked across the kitchen, he stopped behind me. I heard him sigh, and then he pressed the length of his body into mine, his front to my back, his chest rubbing up and down my spine as his humid breath fell on my neck. My own body seemed to freeze and melt at the same time, and my grip tightened on the knife as I plunged the blade into an onion’s dense, packed flesh.
Ian peeled away from me and went to the refrigerator. When he returned, he said, “Now that wasn’t too bad, was it?”
“The onions?” I asked.
“Everything,” he said.
I did not answer him. I did not know how to answer him. Nothing like that had ever happened to me; it was foreign and I was a foreigner, a kid who had fled the cloisters of his youth for an uncharted odyssey that commenced without trepidation, but now, during the Saturday shift, a feeling of dread seared through me, dividing my existence as surely as the knife could split a carrot. Breathing through my mouth, still not shedding a tear, I quietly finished the onions while Ian assembled the vegetables and meat in ceramic dishes, topping them with pastry dough. I spoke only to ask about the next task. The tables needed to be set, napkins folded, glassware inspected, carpet vacuumed. As I worked, I tried not to think about Ian up against me in the kitchen.
But how could I not think about it? Ian’s maneuver amounted to both a violation and an invitation, clashing forces that instantly disarmed me. Squeezed between a manipulative boss and the need to earn some money, I felt immobilized and unable to think clearly or act decisively. In the moment of contact, I did not know what I wanted or what I should do. Leaving the restaurant hadn’t occurred to me; neither did speaking up, pushing Ian away, or leaning into him. From my first night at Mornington’s, I had only wanted to do a good job and walk away with a few pounds in my wallet. As the heady aroma of herbs and simmering custard wafted over me, I performed the requisites for dinner service. Although Ian’s behavior had rattled me to the core, I was also hungry, and I hoped that he’d fix a nice lunch plate for me but he didn’t, and I worked without eating.
After prepping, I took the train back to my college. In my room, where I lived alone, I snacked on some savory biscuits with cheddar cheese and took a nap before changing clothes and returning to Mornington’s for the week’s busiest, longest shift. Guests would order aperitifs, request more bread, speak in subdued voices, and partake of luscious puddings. Some might puzzle at my accent and ask where I was from and whether as a Yankee I could recommend, with authority, the steak and kidney pie. At night’s end, after the last diners waddled out the door, my belly would be stuffed with trifle, my veins pulsing with coffee, my wallet newly thick with cash. With Jack away, Ian would fatten my pay with an American-sized tip.
I was never again asked to help with kitchen prep. At spring break, I took a week off for traveling to Morocco, and afterward I continued working at Mornington’s until late June, when my mother, father and sister joined me in England for a low-budget tour of Europe, after which we would return together to California. I hadn’t told Ian and Jack that I would not be coming back to the restaurant. After all they had taught me, after all the free meals, after the illicit pay and the furtive tips, I was nervous about letting them down. Inclined toward deference and driven to succeed, I was the student who loathes to disappoint his teachers. I never formally resigned from Mornington’s. Instead, I quit by disappearing.
Many years later, after wandering the world, I found myself at Waterloo station. Gone were the grit and the gloom, the poor lighting and decaying grandeur. The dingy aura of a diminished empire had been replaced by gleaming shops and trendy cafes all along the concourse. In a disoriented state of recognizing nothing, I could not find the train for Richmond listed on the schedule board, so I asked for assistance in the sleek ticket office.
Finally at my destination, I ambled up the same street where I was once caught in a raging storm. Why did I want to see the restaurant again, after all this time? For some of the same reasons that we return to childhood homes and old haunts marked by complicated histories: to clarify hazy images of the past, and to understand the nature of events and whether some could have happened differently. I also wished to dispel a specific power that had been exerted over me, one that had lodged like a pebble deep within my being, and to see my youth, so potent with questions, from the freeing perspective of distance, as one who had learned to accept and extend invitations on his own terms.
Through the restaurant window, I recognized the tables and the chairs, the somber wood paneling and the aging carpet I’d soaked with rainwater. Squinting at my reflection, I saw my younger self appearing out of nowhere, the American who started a fire that smoldered beyond the dining room confines. But inside, there was no sign of Ian and Jack. Their beloved establishment had gone out of business, and in its shell a Bulgarian restaurant had opened. I had never eaten Bulgarian food and knew nothing about it. A menu posted on the door included a dish called kozunak, described as sweet egg bread cooked with sugar, butter and rum-soaked raisins, which sounded uncannily similar to the pudding we never served at Mornington’s. I debated going in for a meal and saving room for dessert, but with a clear sky overhead I decided to continue walking.
Image by Los Muertos Crew on pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- The Saturday Shift - October 11, 2024