What do advocates do for fun? It’s not a trick question, more an invitation to list activities that require testosterone, adrenaline and disposable income in equal parts. Skiing? Rally driving? Horology?
If you are Matt Jackson, try peeling shallots. Jackson is one of a growing number of people, fully formed adults with proper jobs, whose idea of a good time is to work in a restaurant. Not for them the regular experience of arriving in a taxi, perusing the wine list and debating ox cheek versus John Dory. They want to put on whites, sharpen their knives, and experience the heat and pressure of a working kitchen.
The French call them stagiaires, kitchen interns who come to watch and learn. But the last thing Jackson wanted was a job in a restaurant. He just wanted a break from the bar, doing something equally demanding but completely different.
“I had been a lawyer for a very long time — 20 years non-stop,” he recalls. “It was getting a bit dry, losing its interest for me.” He took six months off from the bar and signed up for a course at the Edinburgh School of Food & Wine. This was good, but not quite enough.
“I had a drive to do something a bit more hard-core, more demanding of me.” So he sent Tom Kitchin, Edinburgh’s trailblazing Michelin-starred chef, an email.
“I wrote, ‘I’m a 42-year-old married bloke. This may sound a bit midlife crisis, but can I just come in and peel tatties or whatever it might be?’ And that was it.”
The deep end awaited.
“I came along, shook Tom’s hand, said hello, got my whites on, worked till midnight.” Later on, he did two full weeks of split shifts, 7am to 11pm, getting home around midnight. His jobs were the most menial going, including, on one occasion, preparing a huge pile of snails. “By Saturday night, I was having hallucinations, it was so crazy.”
The nearest analogy he can find is with competitive sport. “It is exactly the same as before a rugby match. Prep before service is like the warm-up: you crack a few jokes, you’re nervous, but at least everyone is talking. During service, it’s absolutely focused, there is no chat at all, no music, everyone’s absolutely focused on what they’re doing. Afterwards, if it’s good service, you may have a beer together, a chat about what went wrong and what went right. And if it’s a bad service, you know all about it.”
He is far from alone in considering this to be a really great weekend. Yannick Grospellier reports a steady stream of requests to learn the basics of rib-sticking alpine cookery in his kitchen at Yann’s in Crieff. A smaller, less rarefied set-up than Kitchin’s hothouse, his stagiaires can be trusted to do more than peel the carrots.
“They do whatever needs to be done,” he says in his delicious Chamonix accent. “They tell me they want to make a lemon tart or a boeuf bourguignon and we will put it on as the plat du jour, and I will make it with them.”
Grospellier’s most regular stagiaire is a waitress at Andrew Fairlie’s two-star Michelin restaurant, just up the road at Gleneagles. Fairlie himself has a regular supply of volunteers from within the catering industry, but very few civilians in his kitchen.
“We get people from the hotel wanting to look around and see how we make bread, but that’s about it.” For the professionals, however, it can be the best week they ever spend. Four of Fairlie’s present brigade started out as stagiaires. One kept in touch for two years before he finally found a job.
It was seeing chefs of Fairlie’s calibre at work that prompted Sunday Times photographer Stuart Wallace to sign up as a stagiaire. “I find cooking very therapeutic. It’s something I’m passionate about. I potter about in my kitchen and make up my own recipes, but it’s very difficult to learn new skills. I want someone to teach me quickly how to do something.”
Taking a course, however prestigious, does not have the same appeal. “I don’t want to stand around with Keith from Uddingston asking lots of questions. I want to go and feel the buzz of a real kitchen.”
A new venture in Glasgow’s southside has the stagiaire concept built in. Domenico del Priore, owner of Cookie, a deli-restaurant-cookery club on Nithsdale Road, wants the kitchen facilities — the ovens, the ice-cream machine — to be open to everyone who wants to take their cooking to a higher level. Even as the renovations were under way, the breadmaking fanatics of Strathbungo came sniffing around.
“The bread fad seems to be huge around here,” he says. “Everyone wants to bake their own. There is a guy across the road who claims to have perfected his sourdough mix.”
Cookie’s chef, Ian Wilson, will work in an open-plan kitchen and is happy to talk as he chops. “I want to show people what it’s like in the kitchen,” he says. “I want them to come and ask questions. The whole point of Cookie is for people to come in and ask.”
For Jackson, his stint at The Kitchin was a life-changing experience, though it is a while since he has worked there — his day job does not allow him to fit in too many splits.
“When you’re doing what I’m doing at the bar, you have to be doing it or not doing it. You can’t mess around. If I’m defending someone who’s charged with rape, he doesn’t want to think I’m more excited about working in a restaurant. I can’t be thinking, ‘Can we get out of here because I’ve got a shift starting in five minutes?’”
Inspired by Kitchin’s demand for fresh, seasonal produce, Jackson constructed a vegetable patch in his back garden. “I used bricks and built the foundations,” he says proudly. “I grow a lot of stuff outside there. To have a meal of pheasant or lamb that your friend has raised, with fennel and tatties from your own garden ... I get slightly worryingly excited about that.”
The rest of the Jackson family — he is married with two children — have much to thank Kitchin for. On holiday in France last year, Jackson spotted a fine rabbit in the market. He took it home and filleted it in the chef’s approved manner. On Monday night, considering what to make for dinner, he decided to knock some leftover mash into croquettes, poach salmon fillets and serve them with pea and spinach puree. “It was,” he says with a grin, “really pretty.”
Yet working in a professional kitchen, one of the most stressful environments outside of an active volcano, has taught him to relax. “I had got to the stage when, if I was having a dinner party, I didn’t want to be eating it with the guests. I just wanted to be serving them. If I was eating, I would be perpetually worrying about what stage the next course was at. I’m shot of that now.”
Jackson went back to the bar feeling better for his whole experience. “I was astonished how rejuvenated I felt. To this day, I’m enjoying it more than before.”
Grospellier would like to see more enthusiasts taking shifts in a professional kitchen. “They should go to their local restaurant and ask,” he says. “I’m sure they would be more than happy to indulge. Anybody with a skill has a duty to pass it on.”
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