The customers were bad, the bosses worse: novelist Kathleen Alcott recalls her days in the food trade
My first tastes of fine food were just that – mouthfuls, just enough that I could later describe the dishes to diners, meted out by mingy restaurateurs who ran what was then one of the greatest performances of elegance in San Francisco. On an alley nestled between two streets that ran dramatically uphill, the city’s rich clientele chose from a row of restaurants of different European provenance. It was my job to lie to them, to make them believe that these were places of sophistication when what I saw was financial collapse, internecine rivalry, and lives stalled and forgotten on that lane that appeared so charming and vivacious. San Francisco was afflicted by fog the first day I wandered down that lane, an accidental college dropout, my education placed on hold by the recession, my bank account in the low triple digits. I was freezing in the dress and thin tights I had worn, and when I found the restaurant that had placed a vague Craigslist ad, the middle-aged man who greeted me hardly glanced at my résumé. It was the first in an army of red flags. He complimented my cheekbones, my platinum blonde hair, and asked if I could start the next day – it was an easy job, one he would explain in the morning.
The restaurants in the alley were owned half by a pair of French men, the other half by Italians; their contempt for each other was a daily performance, enacted in the greetings not offered as they passed, or by the way a large party’s arrival at one of the French restaurants meant the simultaneous ignition of 10 angry cigarettes by the Italians and their employees. The evil brilliance in the scheme was that each establishment was marketed as independent – offering the finest in seafood or in paella or in New American or in authentic Naples cuisine – and my job, the most shameful I’ve ever had, was to stand before one of those restaurants with a menu in my hand, to court each potential customer with a lush description of the food. I could sell the menu so well precisely because its offerings were out of my reach, very rarely sampled but watched all day arriving on immaculate platters. The pork chop with peaches, I would say, really sings atop the goat cheese mashed potatoes, with the savoury and the sweet truly harmonised. The Dungeness crab mac and cheese marries a classic comfort food with the unmistakable zest of the sea. For six hours I stood in the same place, to my right a Spanish beauty whose Castilian lisp caught many customers, and to my left a woman who had stood there for rumoured decades, an Italian with calves like rifles who would mock my posture or voice as she whistled and waved her menu in semaphore. She still shows up in nightmares, Piera, her canine teeth exposed, one translucent platform heel turned out in an obscene show of thigh.
Eccentricity was the rule: they lowered $300 bottles of champagne in a straw basket from their office to the street
Related: The meals that mark life’s milestones
I still think of The Alley, and wonder who that girl was who survived there
Continue reading...