Nasty Moments: 3

I was giving a speech one afternoon to a conference of chefs (yes, chefs do have them too), as it happened on the process of opening a restaurant. This was not long after I started in Marylebone. I thought I would find out how lunch service had gone so I rang at 2.30 p.m. Everything had been fine, apart from a couple of things. Apparently no fish had been delivered, as the delivery van had broken down in Lewisham. Fish dishes were therefore reduced to one, which ran out at 1.15. The kitchen ventilator fan had come loose from its mounting and had vibrated so hard that the screw-in bulbs lighting the customers’ loos had all fallen out, plunging the basement into darkness. A customer on table twenty, who had perhaps been marooned in the gents, or was simply horrified by his lunch, had some kind of seizure and collapsed on the floor. As if that wasn’t enough, two of my hand-picked female staff had had a falling out and had started hitting each other as the first customers arrived.