It’s just after two and we’re about to start cooking for the Italian wine dinner tonight. As always, we’ve limited the number of guests so we can make sure we get everything out on time and all the dishes are perfect. The number of guests has increased and we realised yesterday that we don’t have enough raspberries for the dessert, so I’m hoping that the supplier will deliver within the next hour, as promised. We’re doing raspberry panna cotta and it needs to set, so I’m a bit on edge. Before a dinner like this, I try to have a relaxing morning and come into the kitchen with a clear head. If this sounds like an athlete before a race, it’s because that is basically what it is.
We’re talking about forty guests who will be eating a five course dinner in about an hour and a half. The whole service will probably last from eight to ten, so that’s 200 plates in total, or about two plates every three minutes. Bet you never thought of it like that. When you look at a kitchen in full swing, it’s like a well choreographed ballet, every movement is executed without waste, you can almost feel the minds crackling from the concentration. Any glitch and it all is in danger of coming apart.

Now the funny thing is, everyone actually works better under stress. I’m sure you’ve experienced this in a Chinese restaurant, when it’s full the food is fantastic. The you come back, it’s empty and the food’s just so so. Reason? No time to make mistakes. The trick is to train the guys so they always keep that concentration, even when it’s not busy. Well, there’s no danger of that tonight! Got to dash.

A couple of days ago I was invited to dinner at a friend’s place and that is a fairly rare occurrence, because, you see, the trouble with being a chef is that no one wants to cook for you. The general consensus is that you must be some tremendously fussy guy who will judge every morsel that passes his lips. The actual fact is that most of us are just happy to be fed and not to have to do all the cooking ourselves. I’ve actually checked this with some of the best chef’s in town (you know who you are!) and everyone agrees: We’re just greedy (insert animal name of your choice) who will eat pretty much anything halfway decent that’s put in front of us. Roast overcooked? Just pass us the sauce. Gravy lumpy and oily? We’ll have some more wine, thanks. The red horridly corked? Well… you got to draw the line somewhere.

It’s a bit of a lazy Sunday afternoon, so I’ve been browsing through all the pictures I’ve got on my computer and I found a file I’d completely forgotten about. It’s called Canapes and it has pictures of literally dozens of different canapes that we have made over the past six years. Some pictures I look at and and can’t for the life of me remember what that sauce is that accompanies the beef roll. Was it tonnato? No idea! So my rather belated new year’s resolution is to catalogue and rework ALL the canapes we’ve ever made. The website has a list of all the current ones, but none of the ones in my pictures are in there!
Here’s one of them: Cherry Tomatoe with Basil and Gorgonzola. Must do that one again!

But then, it’s one of those things that are difficult to do, because we cannot be sure to get the correct size of cherry tomatoes. When I look at Martha Steward’s Canape book and see all the hollowed out, identically sized cucumbers, I can only imagine how many odd sized and funny shaped ones ended in the bin. Well, maybe she made chilled cucumber soup with them.

It’s the morning after and I think, about 50 cocktails ago that we attacked the task of completely re-creating the Frangi cocktail menu. It’s only day three now and I already need to take a break. I’m not saying this isn’t fun, but it’s hard to keep track when you reach cocktail number twenty. After six years of doing this, we’ve worked out a system that seems to keep our natural exuberance in check.

Here’s the problem: You start pretty sober and work your way through the first ten cocktails pretty quick, and even though you don’t actually DRINK any of them (well, most of the time, anyway), you still take a fair number of sips, so when you reach number twenty, everything suddenly starts to taste real good. When that happens, you have to stop and take stock of what you’ve tasted.

And here’s the trick: The next day, you don’t start with new creations, but you retry all the ones you thought were good the day before. Hopefully that’s less than five. You can be sure that today you’ll be eliminating a few more. There basically is a ten percent rule, so create twenty and you end up with two that are worth putting on the menu. It’s a tough job, but we keep bellinis on hand for when we get fed up with the mundane.

Barman Amin says: “Most of our customers like our lychee martini. They go to a lot of other places and they come back and tell me, it’s not the same! The difference is, we’re better than them. We can sell 50 to 60 a night. People just like the finishing, the measure is always right, not too sweet, nice and strong. We put two lychees, but some customers ask for four, or more! We got a lot of sweet things coming here.”

The Frangipani Lychee Martini

40ml vodka
15ml lychee liqueur
60ml lychee syrup
2 lychees
1 cocktail pick

Pour your cocktail glass full of ice and set it in front of you. This ices the glass and makes you look very professional. Put ice into your shaker, add the vodka, lychee liqueur and lychee syrup and gently stir with a cocktail spoon. Doing this very deliberately is actually more impressive than shaking the cocktail. Pour the ice out of your cocktail glass, shake out the water, but don’t wipe the glass (it just makes you look like an old fusspot), put the strainer on your shaker and pour out your perfect Frangipani lychee martini, then stick two lychees on a cocktail pick and drop them into the glass.