Multiple-choice reading

The first thing I learnt in a professional kitchen was that nobody says “please”. On my first night at Ferro, a busy Italian restaurant near the station, the head chef, Declan, shouted “Behind!” as he passed me with a tray of hot pans, and I nearly dropped a whole box of lemons. I thought he was angry. Later I realised it was the kitchen’s way of being polite. In a space that narrow, with that many knives and that much heat, a single word does the job of a long sentence.

I was nineteen, and I had cooked for my family for years. My lasagne was famous, at least on our street. I imagined I would be making something similar within a week or two. Instead, for the first month, I peeled. Carrots, onions, potatoes, a mountain of garlic every afternoon. I went home smelling of it, and my younger sister refused to sit next to me on the sofa. At the time, I was secretly hurt. I’d been hired as a cook, I told myself, not a machine for removing skins.

What I didn’t understand was that Declan was watching. He noticed who kept their station clean, who arrived ten minutes early and who checked the fridge temperatures without being asked. One afternoon he picked up one of my onions, looked at how evenly it had been chopped, and walked away without a word. The next day I was moved to the starters section. It was the best compliment I’d ever received, and he hadn’t said anything at all.

The starters section was a different world. During service, orders come in on small paper tickets, sometimes twenty at once, and each one has to be ready at exactly the moment the main courses are. My first Saturday there was a disaster. I forgot two salads, burnt a tray of bread and, at the worst possible moment, ran out of clean plates. A waiter called Rosa, who had worked there for eleven years, quietly started washing plates for me. When I thanked her afterwards, she shrugged and said, “Everybody has a first Saturday.” I still went home certain I would be sent back to peeling.

Slowly, I got faster. I began to understand the rhythm of an evening: the calm at six, the sudden rush at half past seven, the long, exhausting hour after that when everyone is too busy to talk. I learnt to keep three orders in my head at once, because there’s no time to write anything down. My feet hurt in a way they had never hurt before, and I stopped seeing my friends at weekends, because weekends were when we worked hardest. My mother said I had disappeared, and she wasn’t entirely joking.

Some people have asked me whether it’s worth it, given the pay and the hours. Honestly, there have been nights when I’ve wondered the same thing. But there is a moment, usually around ten o’clock, when the last tickets have gone and the kitchen goes quiet, and someone puts the radio on while we clean. Everyone is tired and nobody says much, but it feels as if we’ve done something difficult together. I haven’t found that feeling anywhere else.

Last week Declan asked me to prepare the staff meal, the food the team eats together before service. I made lasagne. Nobody said it was famous, but the tray came back empty, and that was enough.