I reeled away from this dramatic and pungent book never wanting to eat in a restaurant again, such are Alasdair Gill’s fruity descriptions of chefs scrubbing spillages off the floor, hosing down oily dishes, and everyone stinking of bleach, ‘surrounded by feathers and fag ash’, their fingers ‘slick with fat and sauce’.
A busy kitchen is made to sound like a cross between an unregulated slaughterhouse and a lunatic asylum in the days of screams and electric shocks. Chefs all seem damaged people, ‘highly emotional, rageful and toxic’. They are ‘nomadic, semi-feral runts stitched together with nicotine’.
Throughout Knives And Spoons, Gill
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