……………

“Would you like a meal?” asked the manager, as I stood there on the work surface,  tools in hand, my face streaked in cooking oil as I told him the job was completed.

Suddenly I was on the spot – in addition to being on the work surface.  What was I to do?  The year was 1979, the place was Queensway in the middle of London, and I was in a Chinese restaurant. So what was the problem?

Well, let’s go back to the beginning.  I have long felt (and said) that I  came from the worst country in the world for cooking and I moved to the second worst.  One of the advantages of living in rock bottom conditions, I suppose, is knowing that if there is any movement it can be only one way.  Mind you, there are people who think they’re already at rock bottom and then they find out they’re not, like all those voted for Brexit in the belief that “things can’t get any worse”

Now, I know some people, some Irish people at any rate, will start screeching in anger at the above statement – the one about the Irish cooking, I mean; pretty well all of them are already screeching about Brexit.  One very good friend, for instance, just gets very angry with me to the point of discussion exclusion, when I even begin to hint that there was not much of a cooking tradition in the Ireland of the past.  Similarly, two Irish friends, twin brothers with whom I shared a flat for many years, would get annoyed with me whenever I brought the subject up. 

So what was this all about?  The twins grew up with their experience of Irish cooking from their mother, just as I did with mine.  Their mother was a great cook, as indeed were they, and my mother a mere 300 metres away was a terrible one – and as one wag told me years later “you don’t cook, you heat food”.  We simply had conflicting experiences.  The crucial question was, whose mother represented the real Ireland more?  They insisted theirs fulfilled the role just  as I insisted mine did.  We had reached an impasse.   Actually, there’s something surreal about this: a south London flat of three Irish guys arguing about whose mother was the more typically Irish, the claim to authenticity  resting on their ability to cook – or lack of it.  

And so the issue lay for a while, ready to flare up sporadically like a border incident between two states who had never really accepted the ceasefire line, each forever feeling short changed.  There was only one thing for it – bring in the UN.   The UN arrived in the form of the twins’ youngest sister, en route to somewhere exotic with food to match.  All parties went before the tribunal.  The tribunal pronounced.  She said that whenever she ate in the homes of her school-friends, she always found the food to be terrible. She knew their mother was an exceptional cook in the Ireland of the time.  I had won!  The twins accepted  that it was my mother who was the most typically Irish – with rotten cooking to prove it.

Incidentally, one of the twins used to tell me that his idea of hell would be a lifetime on my diet – with my food heating abilities.  Imagine that as a prison sentence – he’d prefer the hard labour option, I’d imagine.  It is worth mentioning that once,  when once holding forth to one of my sisters about Ireland’s failure to develop its  resources, she added “and the failure to develop recipes”.  

By the way, just for the record, the quality of food and cooking in Ireland (and England) has improved beyond recognition in the last thirty years.  

The issue with the other friend, herself a very good cook, remained unresolved. She would get quite annoyed whenever I brought the subject up.  There would be no discussion, no questioning, no reflection and no exploration, just an angry insistence that I was talking “rubbish”.  Some years ago, her daughter, over on holiday from Down Under, briefly stayed with me in south London.  Gingerly, I brought up the subject , wondering if I was going to be treading on a land mine – and be blown to hell.  However, just like the twins’ sister, she told of eating meals in all her schoolfriends’ houses – and they were indeed terrible – no question!  I could never figure out why her mother would get so angry at my cooking comments: did she think I was somehow saying that she was a bad cook? 

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Weirdly, somewhere around 2015 Radio 4 ran a programme about an Irish cookery school opened by three women in Co. Cork in 1987.  According to the programme, these three founders were motivated by the dreadful state of Irish cooking.  By way of example, the programme quoted from a French magazine that visited the country in 1971.  To say that it was scathing about the cuisine  it discovered in hotels and restaurants was to put it mildly – like the review of a posh London restaurant in 2004 which said of the soup “if this were found in Iraq, it would let Tony Blair off the hook” – yeah, my mother used to make soup like that.  The French magazine summarised its findings on Ireland’s culinary capabilities with the comment “it’s not so much that the food is terrible, but that the Irish think it’s good”. 

Complete ignorance of food ran parallel with lack of cuisine.  In the Summer of 1967 at the age of 16, I was sent to stay with a French family, whose eldest boy had pen-friended one of my sisters.  On my first day he announced, in English, that for the evening meal we would be having ….he didn’t know the word in English  … “artichaut”.  And I sure as hell didn’t know what it meant either.  So we looked it up in the dictionary and found that  “artichaut” in English is “artichoke”.  I still hadn’t heard of it.

So, did this culinary deprivation of my early years imbue me with a desire for the exotic, a taste for taste, a desire to sample the cuisine of the world, to put a little flavour into my life?  Nope.  I must have assumed, somehow, that if the food, or at least the cooking was bad in Ireland, it was probably worse everywhere else. At least it was familiar.   One of my dominant memories of childhood is what my mother used to do to cabbage; she turned, what I later discovered to be a crisp, crunchy vegetable into a limp, boiled-to-death sodden, dark green rag flecked with little bits of aluminium – from her witch’s cauldron.  Soup wasn’t her only WMD.  Years later I was shocked to discover that I actually liked the vegetable.  We used to grow rhubarb in the back garden and my mother, amazingly, actually made quite nice rhubarb tarts – or at least my taste buds of the 1950s and 60s thought so.  And then one day I tucked into one, only to recoil seconds later at the disgusting taste.  My mother, possibly striving for the exotic, had added cloves, a good handful of complete buds sprinkled around the tart.  And that was the last rhubarb tart I ate for half a century.  And then some of my sisters, trying to  engage in the jet set age, the age of trendy sophistication, at least to Irish eyes, didn’t go west, they went Vesta! Vesta ready meals of the mid 60s were meant to represent an exotic, trendy lifestyle from exciting far away places.  They tasted as awful as they looked, which sort of proved what I’d always felt about foreign food.  “East, West, home’s best.”  I would touch nothing from east of Dover, just like God intended.  

I was safe and secure in my tastes and I knew what I liked – and what I didn’t.  I knew what foreign food tasted like (Cloves and Vesta) and it was not good.  Pasta or pizza of any sort, was simply not on the menu and were all safely quarantined beyond Dover – the gastric equivalent of the Iron Curtain or the Maginot Line.  I was resolute in holding my section of the front.   And there, with Europe divided in two, things might have stayed.  Alas, events, a veritable Panzer thrust, overtook me on a very exact date. On Monday, January 1^st, 1973, Ireland joined the Common Market or EEC.  My main defensive position, my Maginot Line of  protection against foreign food,  had been breached.  I realised I had to change.  

Of course I still had standards to maintain and positions to hold.  I might have lost the western  front, but that still left one heck of a lot of places and tastes against which I could hold out.  The eastern front was still holding.  I wasn’t going to have to eat anything with too high a foreign factor.  But still, I knew I had to start eating at the EEC, a process assisted by my move to London in the same year.  So long as it stayed like that, a group of nine states, I could manage – and maintain standards.  I feared further European expansion.  I had a particular dread of India and China joining the gang of nine.  I’m the guy who actually went into an Indian restaurant in London  and asked for (cringe, cringer, cringiest) “egg and chips”. 

And there things stayed.  Europe stayed at nine and I actually went to Italy in 1978, staying with  the family of a friend I had made in London. The food was fantastic.  I loved the way the wine was served without pomp or ceremony in any old bottles that happened to be available, drawn  from a large vat in the basement and it tasted bloody good too – and I’m not even a wine drinker.  I told my host that it was only Ireland’s entry into the EEC that allowed me eat his country’s cuisine.  He  remarked that it was the first time he had ever heard of “anyone with a political stomach”.  That period remains one of the best fed periods of my life – and they didn’t do Vesta!  So it was thus far and no further. 

Back in London, I then started working for a weird guy, a doctor of wood, a veritable ocean-going lunatic who operated all sorts of peculiar businesses, one of which was a restaurant cleaning company.  The main part of this job involved driving a battered Morris Marina pickup around to various restaurants, replacing filters and then returning to base to dump the dirty filters into a degreasing vat.

Occasionally an extra job would come up.  This one concerned a Chinese restaurant in Queensway, not far from London’s Hyde Park, where the  management wanted access traps in the kitchen extraction system. I arrived, via pickup, at the the appointed place to find a fairly large establishment, and was greeted by the manager, a jolly Chinese gentleman who spoke pretty good, but not perfect, English – but then my Cantonese isn’t so hot.  I was taken to the kitchen, a huge basement  room full of nooks, crannies and alcoves where the situation was explained to the large staff, maybe fifteen in all, in Cantonese.  It transpired that none of the kitchen staff could speak any English, one or two of the younger ones perhaps able to utter the odd word but not enough to form a sentence, let alone any meaning.  All communication therefore, was down to the manager with his pretty good but not perfect English.  It transpired that he had been born in London and had lived there all his life.

I set to work.  The traps had to be cut into the slab sided ducts that hung from the ceiling.  How do you begin?  Well, the first thing you do is to drill a hole.  This I did but  with the withdrawal of the drill came the flow of the oil.  Oil just poured from that single hole, oil from 10,000 meals, reeking of Confucius, no doubt, with appropriate wisdom sauce.  I hastily grabbed a bin to catch that oil, wondering how much there’d be.  Quite a lot, as it turned out.  I reckon four or five litres of the stuff flowed before it finally stopped.  I was then able to get on with the job, bits of residual oil splashing on to me as the large kitchen staff  busied itself with feeding the restaurant’s prosperous clients, the manager oscillating between the relaxed affluence above and the busy industry below.

Eventually the job was finished to everyone’s satisfaction.  As I stood on the work-surface, demonstrating the functioning of the new access traps, the manager made his offer of the meal.  Me, eat Chinese?  Food from a land way beyond even the furtherst reaches of the EEC?  Food from the eastern front – the ultimate east?  Foreign isn’t in it!  The man’s having a laugh!  The only way I’d ever eat this stuff would be if China joined the EEC – yeah, “till Birnam wood doth come to Dunsinane”.  But I liked the guy and thought I’d try out a bit of polite etiquette stuff for once.  Rather than say I had standards and I’d rather eat worms than Chinese, I thought I’d let him down gently.  “Thanks”, I said, “but I don’t like rice”.   This was instantly translated. The entire kitchen staff stopped what they were doing, some emerging from nooks and crannies that I didn’t even know were there – like Georgia George’s fans “They stopped working on the railroad, they downed tools at the mill” –  and gathered around to stare up at this strange creature who didn’t like rice.  I might as well have come from another planet.  I was simply beyond their range of comprehension.   Their faces said it all.  Never in their entire lives had they even heard of anyone, not even in the remotest, far away places, who didn’t like rice.  I was quite simply the weirdest thing they had ever seen in their lives. (OK, no wisecracks at the back)

The manager then responded.  “Well”, he said ”do you like noodles?”  Do I like noodles?  What the heck are noodles?  Are they like artichokes or something?   Are they something ultra foreign that even ultra foreigners wouldn’t eat for being “too foreign”.  I was lost.  A mad lunacy overtook me.  “Yes”, I said, wondering what I was letting myself in for.  What would my gravestone say?  “He went too foreign for his own good”.   After a few minutes a large plate of food for which I had no vocabulary was placed in front of me  – and I’ve enjoyed Chinese food ever since.  It was delicious.  Birnam Wood did indeed come to Dunsinane, as Macbeth was to discover.

As I loaded my tools and metal sheets into the pickup, my face still streaked with oil, a keen looking chap in late middle age, attired in a suit came marching along the pavement.  As he caught sight of me his march came to an abrupt halt. – a-ten-shun!!  “Crikey O’Reilly” he ejaculated “you’ve copped a packet”.  “Ah, that’s ok”, I replied ““I’ve just been cleaning up a Chinese restaurant”. “Mopping up operations” he answered enthusiastically “that’s what I like”.  He marched on – probably off to his own section of the front. 

My First Chinese.r2 @ Stephen Kearney September 2020

Postscript:  In researching Vesta – the exotic foreign food brand – I discovered it was actually founded by the very British firm of Batchelors in 1961. The only thing foreign in Vesta was the name!