Part 78 Lucky Star

Black bags, a comedian and no Chablis.

Did you know, if you put a Like at the end of this, your suitcase will never be over the weight limit at the airport. That’s the truth.

Well hello to you. Intro done!

Right then, if you read last week’s Post you’ll know that our landlord has let us pay monthly instead of every three months. So instead of paying fifteen thousand pounds at the end of September, we paid five thousand.

This was a good help, it eased the stress a little.

But we were always looking at cost cutting exercises, we needed to save money, very little was coming in.

And one of those cost cutting exercises involved rubbish.

An explanation. When you have a business, as well as paying business rates to the local council, you also have to pay extra for your rubbish to be taken away. But we couldn’t afford to pay for that.

Now, disposing of waste in central London wasn’t a case of throwing a black bag of rubbish into a hedge. People didn’t like that. And launching it into the Thames is sometimes frowned upon.

But we had the answer. And keep this to yourselves, OK?

We put our rubbish into other companies bins. Or, we popped them on another restaurants’ pile. Yes it’s not nice, but because we were considerate, we alternated the dumping. And the team joined in also. So one night Ben took a bag, the next night Tina took a bag and we did the third night. A different route and a different bin. That way, suspicions weren’t aroused. Although you wouldn’t expect an office bin to be checked at midnight anyway.

It was only ever one black sack, we weren’t busy enough to generate more rubbish than that. Plus, refuse collection was very early every morning, so nobody ever knew.

Unless you lot go and tell them.

But don’t worry, some time later we could afford rubbish collection, and as time progressed, recycling was put in place by the large waste companies. The Thames was safe.

Some black refuse sacks.

And wine by the glass, we adjusted this also.

An explanation. When a restaurant or bar offers wines by the glass they also have to attend juggling classes.

This is why. Let’s say that a restaurant has ten bottles of wine available by the glass. Jim and Jean turn up on a Monday night and order a glass of wine of the most expensive option. But everyone else who orders a glass of wine chooses the cheaper options.

And for the next four or five days, nobody else orders a glass of that expensive wine. It’s inevitable that the remaining wine will be wasted. Unless of course they’re crazy busy and selling loads. Or you drink it yourself.

So it’s too risky to have so many bottles of wine available by the glass, waste is expensive.

So reducing bottles which were available by the glass saved us a little cash.

If you think we deserve a cup of toffee for writing this guff, that’s the button.

And on the subject of wine, we have to remind you that we were still using a small wine company from outside of London, which was painful. Every week there was a problem.

“Sorry, we don’t have that Malbec at the moment.”

“Sorry, you’ll have to re-print your wine list, the Chablis has a different vintage now.”

“Sorry, you’ll have to change your wine list again, the Chablis with the previous vintage is available again.”

“Sorry, we’ve sold out of Chablis.”

However, there was a solution. Once a week an Italian chap, Luca, used to pop into the restaurant to chat. He worked for a London wine supplier and wanted us to use their wines. Donna informed him, every week, that we weren’t worth bothering with because we weren’t busy enough to buy wine in huge amounts.

“Don’t worry, we can organise something. I’ll come back next week.”

And indeed he did, sometimes twice a week. In the end Donna agreed to use their services. And we were glad we did. They could deliver every day if needed, they didn’t run out of wine, that’s helpful, they didn’t charge for delivery and they even printed our wine lists for us. That saved ink and paper. Every little helps.

But we were still very quiet, every day we just hoped that something would happen. The A board attracted a few people, and our practice of accidentally dropping leaflets on the Tube and in the cookery book section of bookshops seemed to be working, a little.

But on one particular lunchtime we had two special guests, Tricky Vicki and her Nanna Rose. They had taken a train to London just to visit us. Nice eh? For those who can’t recall, Tricky worked at our York restaurant, and Nanna Rose used to do the restaurant laundry.

They were shocked at how quiet we were, Vicki couldn’t understand why.

“But you were busy every day in York.”

And it was around this time that another interesting incident happened. Ben, Lozza and myself were in the kitchen plating up a few dishes, we had a few diners. Yea, crazy. Tina charged into the kitchen like a rabid Tasmania Devil, “Andrew, put your suit on, we need you upstairs.” Then she whizzed off.

So, as I often did, I put on my suit and took myself upstairs to give Tina Terminator and Donna a hand. And I was very surprised.

There were people everywhere, it was heaving. I felt as if I had joined a rock concert.

“Donna, what’s happened?”

“I have no idea, people just kept walking in. Take these glasses of wine to table four.”

I took the wine and returned to be given my next duty. And as I walked past the reception area, a little stocky fella was stood looking at me. And I recognised him.

My mind rifled through its filing system and retrieved the answer, it was Alexei Sayle, the comedian and actor. He was wearing a black suit, and the trousers were oddly very short. He held a black briefcase and wore a black Bowler hat. I wanted him to say something funny, but he didn’t. Probably his day off.

“Donna, Alexei Sayle is stood at the door.”

“Yes I know, offer to take his briefcase, I’m going to take the order from table 7.”

Why wasn’t Donna excited about this?

Well, there was lot’s of noise coming from the volume of diners, more people were walking through the door and Tina was held up at table 3 because they wanted a description of every dish on the menu.

This is why Donna wasn’t bothered about Alexei. But I was a little starstruck.

Anyway, Alexei told us that he was meeting someone but he was a little early. So he sat at table 11 and waited. And around five minutes later anther two people arrived to join him, nothing wrong with that.

Donna took menus to their table and came back with more information, “Alexei Sayle is with Tracey MacLeod.”

Tina and I were lost, “I don’t know her Donna.”

“She’s the restaurant critic for The Independent.”

Oh here we go again, someone else is about to put our name in print and have a little snigger. Someone else to start bashing their gums with remarks such as, “Who are they kidding, how could a vegetarian restaurant possibly be passed of as fine dining?”

Stop! We never said it was a fine dining restaurant.

Well, none of us had time to dwell on this, we had a lot of diners to deal with, and we just weren’t used to it.

I ran back down the stairs and into the kitchen to become a chef again, Lozza and Ben needed my help now.

That’s what happens you see. When a restaurant suddenly becomes busy, the kitchen feels nothing. It’s the front of house which is strained. Greeting diners, taking orders, preparing and delivering drinks, all stations go.

Then afterwards, the orders start to flow into the kitchen, then it’s their turn to get hammered.

I told Lozza and Ben about Alexei Sayle and Tracey MacLeod being in the restaurant. Lozza wasn’t bothered, she was spinning around the stove like a windmill. But Ben was impressed.

“Errr, yea yea, pretty cool, she’s a good writer.”

Ben was well educated, he read newspapers and stuff.

When that lunch shift finished, the one in which we had catered for more diners in three hours than we had done in three days, we panicked about the upcoming review. Naturally.

Tracey MacLeod was going to write nasty things about us. Then more bloggers would visit us, because they only knew about restaurants which had been reviewed by restaurant critics. And then they were going to scurry off home and also write nasty things about us, “Who are they kidding, how could a vegetarian restaurant possibly be passed of as fine dining?”

Stop with the fine dining thing.

A couple of days later, Donna came to the kitchen with the restaurant phone in her hand, “It’s Tracey MacLeod, she wants to talk to you.”

What could she want, did she want to shout at me because she’d found a caterpillar in her salad? Was she going to tell me off for staring at Alexei Sayle?

But you know what? Tracey was very nice. She didn’t shout, she didn’t have the voice of the Dark Lord Sauron and she actually quite liked what we did. And, she mentioned the new dessert, that riff on fig roll and a cup of tea.

See, what were you all worried about?

And when the review came out in print, we were very pleased. At last, we weren’t getting another black and white kicking.

But, did it make us any busier, after all, a review from a major critic can make or break you can’t it?

And as we have mentioned many times before, no it doesn’t.

We were busy for a week, and we picked up a few more regulars, but we never replicated that busy lunch for a long time.

But we pushed on, because we had a theory. If one person liked what we did, then two people must. And if two people liked what we did, then ten people would. And so on.

Thanks for reading this Part. Get back to us next week for Part 79 when we write about something else.

Andrew and Donna

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/reviews/vanilla-black-1718-took-s-court-london-ec4-969481.html