I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…
Restaurateur
I used to have trouble remembering the correct spelling of the word Restaurant – knowing where to put the au vovels, middle or last until I started to think of how it sounded Restore-ant a place to rest and be restored which solved that problem – the au is in the middle. But recently, a poet, older even than I, who also attends the Keighley Library Poetry Group, monthly, – gently pointed out that on the short bio on the back of my self-published chapbook, I have misspelt Restauranteur – it should be Reastaurateur and upon checking, I found that indeed it should! By my sounding system the owner of a Restaurant is therefore a Restore-ateur – one who restores you in body and hopefully in mind…
There is of course, nothing restful about running a restaurant, especially if you are one of the chefs! There is perhaps, something that restores the spirit on a daily basis else why would so many people do it – it is truly a lifestyle choice that consumes every waking hour with menu-planning, shopping, food-prep, cooking, supervising staff, talking to customers, clearing up and cleaning and somewhere in there, paying bills, staff and doing accounts… Well it is all of those things if you are a small restaurant! During the first two weeks of opening, between all the running around and working in the heat and pressure of the kitchen, I lost a pound (0.4Kg) each day…
When my mother died, I was between jobs which was lucky in terms of spending time with my sisters, sorting out her flat, and when, afterward, I returned to Yorkshire with a little immediate cash from my mother’s estate, I spotted a Restaurant premises up for rent in the next village of Addingham. Following a building collapse (nobody was hurt) and the rebuilding of the front of house area, the previous owners, who had moved into a different area of catering, decided to let it out, fully equipped and ready to go. I paid too much for it, didn’t know that a large gastro-pub was also about to reopen, and the year proved dire in terms of weather – it rained all Summer, non-stop. I operated a Café menu during the day, so daily baking of scones and gateaux, whilst in the evening, there was a Bistro menu – so a double challenge there! The weather meant that the walkers, tourists, cyclists and villagers either didn’t materialise or went to the gastro-pub which also had the advantage of it’s own car park and so I never got out from under the shadow of their honeymoon phase. I did, of course, have customers – just not enough, and so after eight months, with debts rising to meet the rest of my inheritance, I had to admit defeat and close. Losing your inheritance is no small thing and yet, part of me can say that I had no regrets, or rather, that I enjoyed (almost) all of it! I had one of my grandsons who lived in Addingham, working as a waiter in the evening, I assembled a great bunch of staff, some of them on an apprenticeship scheme and I cooked a lot of good food, and those customers who came, were I think, happy and a few became regulars!
People often want to know what kind of food I cooked and I have to say it was homely, eclectic and a little fusion. My signature dish was Venison marinated in Strawberries and Stilton, and Brioch Bread-and-Butter was always on the menu. I had a curry night every few weeks. What I don’t have is menus – they were hand drawn – no digital ghosts, and no pictures – I was too busy to be taking photos – but I have a lot of happy memories…
You can read a bit more about dishes I sometimes served at Frewins here:-
If you want to know what it is like to work as a chef, you could do worse than read “Kitchen Confidential” by the bad boy chef, Anthony Bourdain who ended up with a TV series on food around the world. I reviewed the book as part of a “Six Degrees of Separation” post – a fun challenge in itself, if you haven’t encountered it – you can read my post below.
Such as easy word to mispronounce. Easy to forget that there is no N in the middle.
Forget? I never knew lol