Chop Chop Read Online Free Page B

suspicious of it as an establishment. Why would anyone want to hire me? I had no bar experience, no kitchen experience, no waitering experience, no silver service training. I could not pull a pint. I could not serve a roast potato. I had a dissertation about modernist discourses between the individual and the city that a tutor had said was a good attempt. I had an A-level in medieval history and a hole in my trousers I couldn’t afford to get patched. Any business that needed me had it pretty rough. In truth, I was already a little disappointed in The Swan before I got the job.
    â€”
    The Swan is on a street immediately parallel with Camden High Street that gets none of its big sister’s traffic. Unless you have business on that street, or you take a wrong turn, you would never visit it. The market in Camden attracts the crowds of Italian tourists with Day-Glo backpacks, the teenage drug dealers and indie stragglers; the high street draws in the local shoppers and the area’s more discerning bums. The Swan’s street attracts a different type of pedestrian. The people you find on this street are guests at the boardinghouses at its far end, semirespectable places with names like The Star of Alexandria or Regency Court. You might see the odd door-to-door salesman in blazer and brown shoes still pounding the pavement, a foot-sore dinosaur in a digital age. Or you might spot a vagrant looking for a quiet place to shit or shoot up. With a favorable wind, this last kind might stumble upon an alleyway between a car park and a shabby terraced house halfway up to Mornington Crescent. When it is not being used as a toilet, this is the trade entrance to The Swan.
    Here I arrived one morning in October, my hiking boots swinging by my side in a plastic bag, unsure what the hell I was doing. On the phone the man had told me to bring sensible footwear and knives if I had them. I didn’t. My landlady did not permit me to use her kitchen because I was a
pentelho
good for nahting
, but I wouldn’t have even if I could. I was quite busy enough with all my street watching and novel reading and blackhead squeezing without worrying myself with cooking. Furthermore, some of Camden’s kebab shops are very well regarded.
    There was no answer to my knocking at the back gate in the alley. I found it was open, and wandering through into the yard I saw trays of stew and sauce and carcasses of mysterious meatcovering every inch of a wooden picnic table. Deliveries of vegetables were stacked as tall as a man on the ground. Huge stockpots steamed like restive volcanoes. In front of me, sounds of music and conversation carried from an open doorway covered by a chain screen. I stuck my hand through this portal and stepped inside.
    It was a small room packed to the gunwales with food and equipment and containers and cutlery of every imaginable kind and shape. Alien species of sieve and colander hung from the hooks in the ceiling next to gigantic ladles and slotted spoons and what looked like instruments of medieval torture. There were strange metal trays wrapped so many times in plastic wrap that the contents were opaque. On a long buckled shelf that ran the length of the left-hand wall, cookbooks and recipe cards sat beside a hi-fi of such age and decrepitude it seemed unkind to use it. A sign next to a large, glowing switch said, IF THIS IS OFF THEN WE ARE ALL FUCKED. A pair of stainless steel work surfaces stretched away from me, with stainless steel fridges beneath them, and where they ended another began, running across the top of them to form a giant
π
symbol. Behind that, at the far end of the room, a line of metal stoves pumped out a wall of heat I could feel from where I stood.
    Two men were standing side by side in front of these stoves, prodding at pans on the burners and then turning to their work sections to chop and weigh and mix.
    â€œI went to that Gourmet Burger the other day,” one man was telling the