The best meal of my life by Tim Hayward
In the third of our series featuring a different guest writer each month, food writer Tim Hayward, tells us about his most memorable meal
‘Best Meal’ is a pretty tough brief for a lifelong glutton. There have, of course, been some memorable ones, ‘on expenses’ in the obvious three star restaurants - including the last one where I finally came to the realisation that this would never be what food was about for me; there have been some emotionally important ones with lovely people, rites of passage in beautiful places and then of course, there was my Nan’s corned beef, chips and tinned peas, (wearing my polyester ‘Man From Uncle’ ‘jammies and watching Dr Who), but there’s one particular meal that really stands out because, in memory at least, it sort of set everything in motion that got me into food and kept me there.
A job in the kitchen
I was around 18, my first summer out of school living in a seaside town and getting ready to go to art college. I was already 6’ tall but as skinny and neurotic as it was possible to be in the days before diets were invented. It was the first day of my first catering job.
Forte’s was a Bournemouth institution. It had a tea and coffee hangar at ground level for the tourists, some kind of mid-level bistro-bit for those who would stretch to lunch and upstairs, for the hoteliers, developers, gangsters and other local worthies, the Grill Room with vicious, queeny old waiters in starched patrol jackets and a vast sirloin served off the gueridon.
I was a trainee KP. Within minutes of arriving in the colon of the huge Edwardian beast of a kitchen I was ankle deep in food waste, scraping smashed meals and fag ends into pig bins that smelled like the sluice room in Scutari hospital.
Perks
My teacher was a stocky Italian, called Pasquale one of the many from Forte’s home villages, that had made careers in his operation. He had barely any English beyond gesture and profanity, hands like the paws of some powerful digging animal but an easy smile that somehow made the awfulness of the job a conspiracy between us rather than the slavery it could have been.
At the end of the shift, I felt like I’d been comprehensively and professionally beaten up. Everything ached, smelled bad or seemed to be bleeding. Mario beckoned me into a passage between potwash and staff-hole, where the gueridon stood, the remains of the great side of roast meat hacked into a pile of scrackly crusts, dark drippings and congealing fat. He handed me a loaf, hot from the bakery and we fell on the tray like a couple of wolverines.
Leftover luxury
Food in Britain back then wasn’t brilliant. Roast beef was a rare extravagance in my family, a loaf that didn’t come in a packet was a luxury. Milk and orange juice, which Pasquale began feeding us in pint mugs from big chillers nearby, were treats to be occasionally administered like medicine. I didn’t know how hungry I was, not just at that moment, because of the work, but across my whole teenage life. I was existentially bloody ravenous, and I suspect Pasquale knew it.
That summer I gorged on the same impossibly sybaritic combination every day. On minimum wage, eating the dining room leftovers was an unquestioned perk of the job and, for me, very Heaven. As the grill room closed and the gueridon came down in the lift, I was waiting at the door, loaf and mug of milk in hand. I grew. Not fat, the job made sure of that, but broader and taller. Even today, when my wide shoulders carry no more burden that the weight of my own subsequent excesses, I feel the effects of those strengthening orgies that, literally, made me what I am.
We’ll meet again
A few years ago I was working with a video crew in Italy and I ran into Pasquale again by complete coincidence. He owns a farm now, back in his home town, that he and his wife built with the money he made scraping the plates of Bournemouth Rotarians. His English is still rubbish and I have no Italian at all, but after we’d eaten a superb dinner and were lashing into the inevitable grappa, we looked at each other - he the prosperous and contented farmer, I food writer and fatknacker. I can’t be sure but I reckon we were both thinking the same thing - “You’ve done alright out of Forte’s, mate”
Tim Hayward has written for various publications, publishes the brilliant food quarterly ‘Fire & Knives’ and saved the iconic Fitzbillies Café in Cambridge.
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