'Fine dining'

Tweet

As well as my regular work I sometimes work at events. Often these are things like concerts that I get to enjoy free – well actually I get paid to be there – but recently I’ve done a few ‘fine dining’ events. The first was at a very fancy hotel. It made me laugh because although the ‘front of house’ is incredibly posh, with beautiful furniture, sparkling glassware, chandeliers everywhere… even the ceiling is upholstered for goodness’ sake! But behind the scenes it’s pretty chaotic and the situation in the kitchen is really just the same as when I used to work at a ‘Little Chef’ (chain of roadside diners) back in my schooldays. Then last night I was at another posh dinner in a beautiful historic building. This was a very exclusive event and hopefully the clients had a wonderful time. Thankfully they didn’t know what went on in the back room. Basically the building, which is over 500 years old, is just a bare stone building with a couple of wooden benches, and was never designed for any food-based activities. Yes it has lovely big mullioned windows and a fan-vaulted ceiling, but virtually no facilities. Electricity has been installed but there is no running water, and for any kind of event absolutely everything has to be brought in (at extra expense of course, on top of the eye-watering cost of hiring the actual building itself). We started by carting in the tables and chairs. Also the warming ovens and tables to set out the food (that almost went wrong when the big metal ovens wouldn’t quite fit through the stone gateway!) Then tablecloths, napkins, plates and glasses and cutlery. We laid all the tables, filled the salt and pepper grinders, folded the napkins, put out place markers and bottles of water and red wine. Prepared the trays of milk jugs and sugar bowls for later. Meanwhile sound and lighting people were installing extra lights and a PA system for the speeches. Then we went to the toilets and got ourselves ready to serve the food. This was the only chance we got to wash our hands! All the food had been prepared in advance and was just kept warm until it was time to assemble the meals on the plates. Then the plated meals were set out on long tables for the servers to grab two or three and take them out to the diners. At first this was OK and just a couple of flies came in through the open porch. But as the evening went on, more and more flies came in. Then as the servers cleared the tables, of course sometimes as they cleared the plates they would get a bit of gravy or something on their hands. People got sticker and stickier and there was nowhere to wash. I resorted to dipping my fingers in the ice-buckets and then wiping them on paper napkins! During the speeches there was a 20-minute interval and we were told that was our time to eat. There was plenty of food available, and we found a few plates; the snag was there was no clean cutlery. The staff had to resort to taking forks from the bucket of used cutlery and swishing them about in some hot water from the big electric urn that had been brought in to make tea and coffee. Then it turned out the clean plates were actually needed for the last of the desserts! I don’t dare think about what the chefs did about that. And of course we had to wave the flies away from the food constantly by this time, while the crates of dirty plates were absolutely crawling with flies. Luckily the guests knew nothing about any of this and appeared to have a very enjoyable evening. They left in good spirits with many expressions of gratitude. After that it was a bit of a crazy rush to get everything disassembled and carried back to the vans, but in 45 minutes it was all done and you would never know anything had happened there. I got six hours’ pay, a free dinner and two almost-full bottles of wine to take home. But I certainly wouldn’t be rushing to host a fancy dining event at that venue! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2025.