In my neighbourhood, there’s a “dark kitchen” – a warehouse run by a major takeaway platform, housing cooks for eight or nine restaurants. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it, were it not for the dog. He has the tenacity and skills of a truffle hunting pig – but for chicken. He could sniff out a wing buried under a rock encased in nuclear waste. Nine different cuisines, involving new and exciting ways to fancy up poultry, is like a siren going off in his head – complete sensory overload.
The delivery guys, waiting outside in a snaking line with their electric bikes, like a scene from John Steinbeck with extra garlic, all say hello to him, and he enters a battle between his primal appetite and, to give him his due, his friendly manners. The appetite always wins. “Must get in the building,” say his straining neck muscles and the eyeballs nearly popping clean out of his head. “No time to lose!”
Yesterday, as I was going through this daily wrestle, a man came up and asked what I thought of my dog lead. “Well,” I embarked. “I only bought it because he snapped through the last one, which was made of chain metal, trying to kill a duck. So, sure, this is parachute material, every strand designed to withstand 500kg or whatever. But also he is essentially a Minotaur dressed in a fleece, so who knows how long it can last?”
“I only ask,” he replied, “because I make the lead.”
“I wish you’d said that to begin with: I would have just said something nice instead of giving you my life story.”
“I like to get an honest opinion,” he replied.
“Dark kitchens” are also known as “shadow kitchens”, “ghost kitchens” and “cloud kitchens”. Every one of those terms, apart from “cloud”, sounds nefarious – a black-ops scenario where maybe they’re making a chicken wrap, or maybe people are yelling expletives at each other and not allowed to go to the toilet. They weren’t invented for the pandemic, but have predictably boomed, particularly in London, though major platforms have also doubled their sites in Manchester and Leeds. And I’m desperate to know what goes on in them.
Kitchens everywhere are famously brutal places. Chefs are generally bad tempered, a fact that, coupled with macho norms and multiple sharp or hot objects, can come off as an imminent threat to everyone else’s safety. Hours are unbelievably long. The command structure is modelled on the French military, so if you seriously displease your superior, he’s allowed to shoot you; or at least, that’s the atmosphere. And everyone behaves as though perfection is a matter of life or death, since to behave any other way – maybe this is just food, and they can live with the odd hair in it? – would lead to chaos.
All that, by the way, is just a regular, “light” kitchen, a kitchen with diners sitting five feet away. I’ve been in restaurants with open kitchens and have still seen the chef scream at the underlings and waiters start crying. If you keep all that pressure and discipline but remove the civilising influence of the neutral observer, what would that look like? Is it like an arena scene in Gladiator: fierce solidarity in the teeth of awesome peril? Or the final episode of Breaking Bad: expert cooks in chains, shuffling lifelessly from one hob to another? Or perhaps everyone is much more relaxed, freed from the glare of annoying punters, and it’s more of a carnival? I’m never going to know unless I can get in there, and how can I get in there, when even the delivery guys have to wait outside?
Obviously, if the dog got in there, I’d have to bust in to retrieve him. So what I need now is for his lead to break. I need a faulty parachute.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
