No Penne

The restaurant is open, mind you, and diners are ushered quickly past our marble kitchen pass on the way to their tables. Their path takes them right past the stack of mismatched bowls piled high with our staff dinner, that they look at with confused expressions on their faces.

‘Is that on the menu? I didn’t see that on the menu online.’

Today, we’re having prawn curry laksa, with fried tofu puffs and blanched water spinach, and I understand their confusion. We don’t have noodles on the menu, and noodles are a rare treat for staff meal too. I whipped this version up pretty quickly, and usually save noodles for special days when we have the time to sit down and eat together. They’re difficult to eat quickly or gracefully when standing, so rice, grains or short pasta are our usual go-tos. We had ‘Shannen special’ on Wednesday, a thrilling pasta dish from one of our chefs, Shannen. He has the uncanny ability to combine dozens of different ingredients and somehow create the same dish, every time. There’s always some form of pork - cured, dried or fresh - a suggestion of tomato, mysterious vegetables, the oil from anchovy tins, sporadic olives, and a few curious additions from our extensive Asian dry store. It’s definitely very delicious and insulting to many cultures, but I always look forward to a Shannen special.

There’s only one rule though – no penne.

Rigatoni is fine, fusilli is fine, paccheri is fine, and there is nothing wrong with the actual shape of penne. The idea of serving penne to my colleagues that I respect and admire is unconscionable. To me, serving them penne would be showing them the greatest disrespect, like actively telling them that I don’t like them or care very much about them. This is probably a trauma response, though. Let me explain why.

For six excruciating months during my apprenticeship, I worked at what was once one of the most esteemed restaurants in the country. A restaurant that was in the early 00’s known for breaking boundaries, for spearheading a new wave of Australian fine dining. These boundary-pushing chefs, with their brave new ways of thinking and cooking, forced me to eat plain penne pasta every single day, leaning against the bench in the pastry section. If I was lucky, I got to eat my penne on a crate in the alleyway next to the bins. I don’t eat beef for religious reasons, and they still made Bolognese five times a week. On my day off, they would make chicken katsu. I think they thought it was funny.

I worked from 8am to 2am, Tuesday to Saturday. On Mondays, I went to cooking school, where I’d think about that limp, sad penne, and wonder if I was making the right choice to become a chef. Then, I’d go home and cry weakly because I was so tired and malnourished. I thought I missed the staff dinners from the Chinese restaurant from my earlier days, but I think I missed being treated like a human being.

That Chinese restaurant had a tough kitchen that was founded on respect. We were fed well -  the staff meal menu had to be pre-approved by the head chef the night before – and in return we were expected to perform to the highest standard. There was no expense spared to feed us, and we were expected to cook for each other with as much care as we would for the guests, if not more. The head chef used to use this line as a measure of quality, ‘you only serve this to us if it’s good enough to serve to your own mother. If not, f*** off.’

We mostly ate Chinese home-style, with rice, meat and vegetable dishes, and soup. They knew I didn’t eat beef, so they only served it on my days off. Our sous chef was in charge of the ‘master soup’, adding bones, fresh water and vegetable scraps to the stock pot every day, creating a tastier and tastier broth as more ingredients were added, simmered and strained. He kept it going for a month until he added fatty lamb bones to it and ruined it. I learned from him to always under-season broths meant for drinking.

‘You need to drink a whole bloody bowl of it, and you can’t if its too salty, donkey.’

Us junior chefs were dedicated to the staff meal cause, too. One chef, Jack, spent thirty minutes a day over two months perfecting croissant dough, just to eventually make us pitch perfect foie gras and blackberry croissants for tea. I organised my week to make 300 wontons and roast char siew for wonton noodles. Another chef made his favourite dishes of chả trứng hấp and nem nướng for his last staff meal, dishes that I’ll probably never have again because I can’t pronounce them. We’d also have snack time, where tiny ikura don or little portions of hot oil-seared noodles might make an appearance alongside a cup of thick, strong Indonesian kopi. By 8pm we’d be having a torrent of abuse hurled at us by the head chef, but at we knew it wasn’t personal. That same person basically force-fed us with warm generosity only four hours earlier.

The restaurant I spent most of my time at was a Michelin-starred, internationally-renowned establishment. Here, staff meals here were weaponised. We ate our daily meal at the staff canteen (read: sprinted across the complex to wolf down food in under 3 minutes and sprint back to the kitchen, sometimes bringing kitchen timers with us to the dining table) and did a staff supper on Sundays. Every week, one poor soul was forced to find time in an already impossible 16 hour day to have supper ready for 40 chefs as soon as service concluded. The chefs were frustrated, exhausted and ready to hate on anything that wasn’t an ice-cold beer after a merciless service. A memorable chef once made 40 textbook perfect, luscious, custardy French omelettes which really impressed the grumpy chefs with the technical skill required to pull that off. Another made some very divisive but perfect crispy lamb brains with sauce Gribiche, served in a hollowed out cabbage bowl. Because brains are infuriatingly fiddly to prep, and the cabbage bowl plating was really quite cool, the grumpy chefs were impressed on this occasion, too. Other times, you’d just get mocked for trying too hard, undercatering or failing. It was impossible to win with that crowd. They just wanted beers and they hated each other. I missed the Chinese restaurant.

Staff meal culture is as legendary as restaurants themselves, and nothing expresses a culture more plainly than observing the way they share a meal. You can hide behind polished chefs, cutlery and gleaming smiles, but if you serve little more than contempt to the staff for their only meal a day, you’re not fooling anyone. There’s nothing hospitable about what you do. A weird decision then, to work in hospitality.

We don’t always have the time to eat together at Etta either, but when we do, when we find a moment to take our aprons off, shrug ourselves into chairs, pour each other sparkling water and tuck into our Shannen special, something magic happens. Time stops, for a moment. We forget that we have guests arriving in 17 minutes, we forget the little arguments we’ve had during the day about ordering too much citrus, we forget that we have 7 more hours of service to go. We’re just people – friends, even – sharing the same space, getting through the same day, having something to eat together. These are rare and beautiful moments in hospitality, where the true nature of your workplace really shines through. The staff at Etta are worth a damn sight more to me than a bowl of boiled penne on a crate next to the bin.