See you on the other side

“Pecorino,” he says. The word is sharp and zestful, in a layered way I can’t quite decipher. I look to his features to find the explanation behind this cheese-related intensity, and I imagine that they are flashing with dissonant realities: pride, lustiness, exhaustion, and the kind of solace one can only find in the mundane. He is an expert in base pleasure and he cooks it en masse, ad infinitum. I don’t imagine it is an emotionally simple task. Behind him, heat is steaming from the jumbo-size pots and the Uber Ipad is dinging, dinging, dinging. The noise has trained us all, Pavlov-style, to disassociate back to periods of frantic business, sweat, and grime, but we aren’t returned to that state just yet. Now, like soldiers, we are prepping at the precipice of a new battle.

“Broccoli,” he goes on, pushing the dish a little further towards us so that it sits just underneath the bright light of the overhead heaters. I can see flecks of cheese melting as he talks. “Raisins. Pappardelle; unless gluten free, then it’s the fettuccine, yes. Tell them it’s high-quality Australian butter,” he adds, before going on to list the dairy manufacturer that floats in one ear and out the other. “Fresh chilli, with lamb ragu, and we add shaved truffles if they like, that’s an additional seven dollars. Yes? Taste.”

The steps leading up to opening usually go like (albeit occasionally faulty) clockwork, so I savour the moment of spooning up the dripping pasta and giving the chef my nod of satisfaction. He knows that it’s good; he needs to confirm that I know, because then, of course, I will be better able to relay this universal truth to the customers. There is a lot of this job that is machine-line, drastically repetitive, but this sensation — this carby, stringy substance that is so decadent and so simultaneously, boldly prosaic — must leak out, and infuse all that procedural hum. Beneath the ‘spiel’, the menu walk-throughs, the stammered apologies, the setting, re-setting, bringing out of the dessert napkins and spoons, the phrase, “How was everything?”, which will be uttered on a night of seventy or eighty bookings a minimum of seventy to eighty times (it must especially infuse this phrase, or else one might come to dangerously loath it) — beneath all of this, this moment of mozzarella melting on my tongue must be the wind beneath my wings.

There is another layer to the significance of this moment. We have been told that tonight at 8:00pm, all in Melbourne must be thrust back into yet another lockdown (this one, lockdown 6.0, coming over a grand total of 200 days spent in hard lockdown since the beginning of 2020); and so tonight, when I give the chef this nod of appreciation, I try to make sure he knows I mean it from my soul. I don’t know when I will be back in this setting again.

There is rarely a moment on a weekend when I have the opportunity to stand and survey the scene. To work this job, you must swap the integrity of stillness to imitate your very best impression of a cog. It must be: event, process, completion, repeat; any infusion of human error or observation within that leads to unbearable spikes in cortisol for everyone behind the kitchen doors. For this reason, I am thankful that one of the main events that needs ticking in this list of essentials is an act of service. You hang yourself up with your coat, and between the hours of five and midnight, you exist for the purpose of those stringy, carb-heavy gifts to the public. However, this evening, at 7:05pm, I do take a minute to don myself back on, and I look out at the scene.

The hum and chatting isn’t as omnipresent as a typical weekend. People are more muted. The forkfuls are more savoured, conversation slower, more intentional. In the background, we are playing our typical mixture of upbeat funk and corny Stevie Wonder hits. Embraced by the twangs of Higher Ground, the customers are gathered in their groups of two, three, five. Pasta takes the centrestage, and around it, for one moment, standing on the edge of a long time apart, we hold the space for their connection again. As I clear their plates, and listen to their appraisal, and serve them final glasses of whiskey, no ice, I decide that the products of this hard slog are more precious than base pleasure and hedonism. Near the door, I hear a group break into uproarious giggles.

That sound still echoes in my ears when, at 7:59pm, we swing the sign around from ‘open’ to ‘closed’.

“See you on the other side,” says the chef. Again, I see dissonance in his eyes and in his face, around the confines of his mask. He does not know when the other side will be. Still, I know he will not give this up. Time and again, when we start back up, and people are ready to filter inside, although they will never see him, and he will leave exhausted all the same, he will be ready. Once again, all I feel I can do is to nod in understanding.