Following the loss of confidence engendered by the end of a five-year long relationship, I delved deep into the only reasonable course of action; I watched a fuck-ton of anime. One of the many Japanese cartoons I consumed during this depressing era was the anime Food Wars.
For the uninitiated, Food Wars is an anime about cooking food that is so ridiculously amazing it causes spontaneous nudity. I'm not kidding, it's real. Look it up.
During this period I had been cooking quite a lot as I was in the midst of grad-school and, resultantly, extremely broke. My roommate and I had struck a deal, buy most of the food and I will cook for us both. It's quite amazing what the raw stress of being responsible for another person's nutrition can do to your cooking ability. Especially when the other person is an over six foot, 120 kilogram behemoth.
This all led to a pot of beef stew I made which I lovingly called "Drunken Beef Stew," both because the ingredients resembled a cocktail and because I was hammered while making it. It was awesome. In my ego trip I phoned my father, informing him that I was now an ultimate chef with ultimate skill, and could defeat his beef stew. Spurred by the anime-logic of Food Wars we arranged to make both beef stews and compete with a few judges. We set a date for the competition and left it at that. I then called my friend Ringo to gloat. He, quite unexpectedly, asked to compete with us. Somehow we cut my dad out of the equation and scheduled a competition for the next Tuesday when I was back in Amman, about a month later.
We got a few friends together to act as judges, randomly chose the theme of Spaghetti and Meatballs, and competed. I won for the first and only time.
A close friend of ours, Hike then asked to join/was roped in. Over the next 3 months or so each of us would choose a random theme out of a vase and have a mini-competition; a competition that would range from levering forks off the table, to a backgammon tournament, to guessing the next song on shuffle. The winner would choose the theme for that week from the three options, then we would compete, usually with completely new recipes that had never been tried before. Themes ranged from "local ingredients international forms," to "Only Cans," to "3 JD," to "Chicken Sandwich," to "Summer." It was great fun and I strongly recommend it. Your cooking will improve, as will your understanding of your friends.
On that note, aside from the things that I knew about Ringo and Hike already (that they were good guys, great fun, enjoyed sexually harassing each other...etc.), I got a bit more insight into their personalities. Both were true perfectionists, Hike was meticulous in his presentation and his food, Ringo was insane about technique and did not know how to work normal human hours (one time he spent two days making Creme Fraiche) (he did not sleep) (.)(.) (haha, boobies). Hike was also prone to slight bouts of extreme hysteria wherein he would either start to make what I can only describe as noises, or go totally nonverbal.This happened rarely and usually in the kitchen, which isn't mot much of an issue when it's a fun funky activity.
My father, cut out of the competition, had slowly begun seething with the type of resentment usually known only to Olympic silver medalists. It also didn't help that we were raiding his spices and fucking up his kitchen. Thus, he stretched his fingers, twiddled them like Wile-E-Coyote and created a cunning plan. He had a house that he was trying to sell out in the Jordanian gentrified countryside, and suggested to me that we turn it into a restaurant. I refused outright, having become accustomed to his Machiavellian schemes. Ringo was not quite so experienced or strong so my dad approached him next. Ringo suggested it to me, and in front of Ringo's sweet ass I will agree to anything. We both expected Hike to be the hard sell as he had an actual job, but he agreed outright, much to my dismay.
There is something to be said about the unique type of confidence enjoyed by people who've never done the thing they're about to do, sort of like a sheep trying to fly. Also like a sheep trying to fly, it usually ends messily. We had assumed it would be a simple process of putting in about 2500 JOD (including a contribution from a silent partner), finding used chairs and tables, then testing recipes for a month. Those expectations were dashed when we discovered that our water smelled of sulfur. They
were further dashed when we realized that any quantity of chairs and tables in our price range would have to be purchased from a refugee camp and refinished by hand, since we couldn't afford to get someone to do it for us. Also, any cookware and electronics we could afford were somewhere between second-hand and fifth-hand and were therefore about as reliable and sturdy as a pair of cardboard shoes. Also, our water was not hooked up to the government and came out of a well. Actually, does it count as a well if it is two collapsed plastic tanks in a hole in the ground?
Slowly, we all became accustomed to a new set of roles. Hike became a managerial mastermind, which is to say a nag and a pain in my ass, but one that is sorely necessary. Ringo became an expert in haggling and simply finding shit for cheap. Did you know you can get a pasta machine for 4 JOD? Well, you can't, but Ringo can. I became a clean-machine-supreme. I can clean like a motherfucker.
Our initial time-frame was one month. It took us three weeks to fix the chairs, fix the water, discover that the sink had been, for some reason, fixed with a plastic bottle-cap, ignore the sink, and get the space ready in a general sense. By this point, we had gone from an ambitious a-la carte menu to an equally ambitious set menu. Soup, followed by salad, followed by an appetizer, followed by a main, and lastly, dessert. With about a week of actual recipe testing under our belt, we decided to have a soft-opening for friends and family.
The interesting thing about working 12-16 hour days of demanding labour, is the way that certain things can slip your mind. For example, are you aware that beef stew requires beef stock? Also, are you aware that good beef stock takes about six hours to make? I'm sure that we were, but somehow in the days leading up to our very first service we sort of put that thought to the side. The night before our first service a certain nagging reality resurfaced, we were not prepared. And it wasn't just the beef stock, a whole set of pre-prep work was simply not done in favour of other stuff that seemed more important at the time. It was at this point, with our opening looming over us like the ready and willing tea-bag of a douche on Halo, that we discovered that at least one of us would have to sleep at the restaurant.
Without sleep Hike is under the threat of spontaneously turning into a pack of irate hyenas, I needed to be at least slightly fresh since I was to be the Front of House, which left Ringo (who also happened to volunteer). I arrived home at 2:00 AM and was not really capable of sleep. I got back to the restaurant at 8:30 to find Ringo asleep on the couch we had put into our indoor smokerey.
Quickly about our indoor smokerey, also referred to as "the chill room." My caveat for opening the restaurant is that we had to have at least one room inside which could be smoked in. This led to the chill-room; a 3x4 white walled room with doodles on the wall, an ashtray, two beach chairs, and the chairs that were too ugly or nonfunctional to be put into the restaurant. It also has a big, comfy, leather couch that is weirdly good at retaining smells. Basically, it's a jail-cell for shitty chairs that has a subtle, yet powerful, odor of cigarettes.
When I chanced upon Ringo there was an additional smell in the chill-room; pure and complete human exhaustion. The smell of a person in the airport who's on the wrong end of a 36 hour journey. Not sweat, mind you, but the of acrid smell of genuine misery. On, and in, the funky leather couch. I let him be.
When Ringo awoke, I told him to go and take a shower, then continued working and waited for Hike to arrive. Once all three of us were there we, with a total of seven hours of sleep between us, we started doing more pre-prep work for the service that was about 5 hours away. I also, quite insanely, decided that this would be a good time to draw a giant fox with human hands on the wall, as well as attempt to write the menu on A4 paper as calligraphy. As soon as I finished being artsy, still not wearing my fancy waiter attire, our guests began arriving.
We had 13 chairs, and there were 13 people coming in, for our very first service. The kitchen was not clean. Some of the food was not cooked. The salad was still deconstructed. Dishes were everywhere, as were utensils. It was at this point that my grandfather, who had not been in a restaurant in over five years, walked in. I wanted to die.
I began to stall for time, I had luckily just acquired my Master's diploma and am a bullshitter without equal, which is to say I managed to buy us 15 minutes and succeeded in diverting them from the jankier parts of my humble establishment; including, but not limited to, an "office room" which had nothing in it but sheet metal and a mattress, the aforementioned smokerey, and our almost certainly unhygienic water source. All good things, however, must come to an end. It is simply not possible to stall beyond a certain amount of time without being obvious. Stuff had to start coming out. It was at this point that Hike, usually clean, handsome, precise, and in-control of himself burned himself by full-handing a sheet pan of puff pastry straight out of the oven. In a true Tom-and- Jerry moment he jumped some 2 meters into the air, stuck his fingers in his mouth, and spontaneously transformed into a pack of irate hyenas. Now completely impossible to talk to, responding to all verbal stimuli with growls and nips, Hike announced, "I'm quitting after this service."
Food started coming out and it was well received, to the pleasant shock of all assembled. My aunt walked into the kitchen (separated from the dining room by gypsum board in true ghetto fashion) and witnessed a verbal fight between Ringo and Hike which commenced without any sound whatsoever, like a TV on mute. As food was eaten, utensils were returned, and as utensils were returned, I required more utensils. This was an issue because the kitchen was currently exposed to the type of tension and mess usually reserved for the homes of people about to go into the witness protection program.
To make matters rather worse, the kitchen sink which had been rigged into some form of functionality using a bottle cap began to overflow from the bottom, filling the kitchen with soapy, beefy-smelling water. Also, the water ran out. We managed to stall for a moment and used a black plastic pipe we found in a field to refill the well from a nearby water tank which we had for emergencies. I told you it was kind of unhygienic.
Just as the main courses were about to go out, with all of our tables and chairs occupied, with knives and forks as easily located as the Holy Grail, without any time to breathe or, more importantly, smoke a cigarette, the rest of our guests arrived. It occurred to me then that maybe I had died and gone to hell.
There was nowhere to put the guests in the dining room, there were simply no chairs and no tables. There remained one room in the general area which had chairs; the smokerey. In the time from seeing the headlights of the arriving cars to the guests' entrance into the restaurant, the room had been cleaned, including a weirdly large amount of soil. Don't ask me how I did it, I can clean like a motherfucker.
We apologized profusely and sat them in our presently least disgusting space, and continued serving the party of 13 that was my mother's side of the family. Eventually, they had eaten, chilled and began to ask questions, at which point I told my mother, "I would take it as a huge personal favour if you could collect the family and leave."
The second party was far less eventful. Two of them, Ringo's cousins, agreed to come back later leaving about seven people. Those, we fed quite easily as we had streamlined the menu during our silent-movie-arguments. Ringo, while frying an appetizer, had a complete arthritis attack and collapsed on the ground like a hefty, carelessly discarded, jizz sock. I have Hike a pep talk and he reverted to human form. It was at this point that I asked Hike to take over Front of House duties for moment while I went outside for a smoke. It was then that we discovered that while the party of seven had brought wine with them, one of their party was a devout Muslim who had just eaten our main, which had been stewed in red wine for 24 hours. Fortunately, I was outside smoking and could afford to leave the damage control to Hike. The woman was very understanding and so it went smoothly, by the end we were joking with each other.
After the end of service, Hike, Ringo, and I drank the rest of the cooking wine, smoked a few cigarettes, and discovered that our main was really, really delicious.
At no point had the chefs believed that the food was actually good, despite my informing them. This suggested something truly horrifying, that we were pretty good at this and needed to keep going. Which we did for a few months until my dad sold the house and kicked us out with a week's notice.
C'est la vie, or as the French put it: shit happens.
