It’s a crisp, brisk Friday morning in late autumn and the weather is cooling. Finding a way out of the construction site labyrinth that is Old Street station — arduous at the best of times, near impossible before coffee — I head in search of my next kitchen shift, and something resembling a latte.
It’s a Friday because Chris Leach, founder of Manteca, tells me that’s the day whole animals arrive at the restaurant for butchery. It’s also one of the busiest services of the week and knowing that, with a kind of masochistic thrust, I wanted to get stuck in. I meet Jake, the head chef. He’s smiling, with a few tattoos, some well-kept stubble and long, tied-back brown hair. He is the east London kitchen archetype.
The team at Manteca are young and many. There are 30 cooks in the brigade, a dozen working the morning shift from about 8am until 4pm, with a further crop of 10 or so relieving them for dinner service, the remaining handful resting on their days off. Only Jake and the brilliant Yags (full name Yagmur, nickname “Chelsea”) and I are on from dawn till well beyond dusk. It’s a 17-hour slog for us.
The morning is bright and filled with bounty. The promised animal deliveries has in fact arrived a day earlier, and fills the walk-in fridge with half a cow, a pair of muntjac and a brood of partridge. Upstairs is lined wall-to-wall with vegetables, fruits, brassicas, and herbs. There are four distinct varieties of basil, seven types of kale and multiple variations of tomatoes, cabbages, peppers and potatoes. This was some culinary Christmas morning with suppliers Shrub and Flourish acting as Santa. They delivery the produce at around 3am, having been harvested the day before. The team hurry about the day’s business, which first thing simply involves finding any spare square inch to put these provisions. This great haul will only last the weekend, Jake explains. It seems impossible.
We get to work. The thrum and motion of the morning starts quickly and is unyielding. These cooks share an innate sense of task: to sort, clean, tidy, sequester and prep for the day ahead. They are busy. Eight or so cram into hot prep kitchen and potwash downstairs, swapping gastro trays filled with produce, and four-litre boxes, and pens and labels, and stories and jokes. There is always time for kitchen banter — the first this morning was around one chef’s recently rubbish dates, as another questions their virginity. The room cackles.
The commonality of different kitchens tends to be the characters attracted to them. It's similar to the collegiate nature of some schools; tell a fellow cook you’re a graduate of Le Gavroche, Kiln, Le Manoir or Manteca and they’ll understand you. It’s a kind of global currency, an understanding on which I still rely. Manteca isn't a particularly stern kitchen, though it is boisterous, and each chef can clearly handle themselves. Its graduates understand this, and therefore each other.
I’m introduced to Panos, a man of wonderful calm and charm, and we head upstairs to prep one of the Manteca snacks, a fried olive. In this instance much of the work is done, there’s weighed and measured sausage meat in the fridge next to the weighed and measured green olive paste. I’m to combine and portion, an easy enough task were it not for the plunging temperature of the thing, having sat in the fridge overnight.
With my hands turning blue, I shape the mix to 50g balls carefully, giving me a chance to watch the crew at work. Panos is making ricotta. He takes litres of rich, fresh, whole milk, warming it to 92 degrees (not 91, not 93), then splits it with lemon juice. The curds cool and we later strain with cheese baskets. What looks like 5kg of fresh ricotta dries, and we season with both salt and by reintroducing much of the whey. There is a sense of process here.
Nearby, the window-side pasta extruder is playing up, but that doesn’t stop six glistening trays of the stuff from being finished, fazzoletti and campanelle shapes filling the room. Trays upon trays of mise en place come and go, ferried up and down the narrow, unnervingly slippery staircase, to and from the already-full walk-in fridge. It’s today I realise my old New Balance trainers need replacing with some non-slip chef shoes.
The little walk-in is bursting with experiments, the separate dry-aging room fit-to-burst with hanging charcuterie and hams. These chefs do everything themselves and so the days are busy. It’s not organised chaos — chaos is too harsh a word — but it’s organised to capacity. Like a pint filled to brim; one tremor and the thing would spill.
Back to our basil. Each variation needs picking, en masse. The best leaves, naturally, are saved for guests, the slightly brown or broken ones for staff food and the worst leaves and stalks for stocks. Cinnamon basil, holy basil, Genovese basil and Chinese sweet leaf basil all under my picking, greening hands. Kilos of the stuff. It takes an age and I’m (just) finished in time for 11.30am, when the final clean down before lunch begins.
Lunch is fast, the service completed in the blink of an eye. 123 guests came and went in mere hours. I learn to plate the fresh seabass crudo with jalepeno slivers and lemon dressing, and the ricotta with courgette, and the tomato salad with fresh-shaved bottarga and the lightly dressed farm salad. I meet some of the front-of-house team. Each a bounding, ebullient, and each with a beloved nickname; the most paper-friendly of which is “scarpetta fiend” but this quickly escalates to “filthy Kiren” and swiftly beyond, into the unprintable.
There’s a post-service clean down and mid-afternoon break. The staff food is hearty and rustic. The team laughingly call it “mystery meat stew”. It’s rich, the kind of thing that in the right setting would send you to sleep, but here is a caloric fuel for the forthcoming dinner service.
I catch up with Jake. Beside him Sydney, a barista from Sydney, lies down on the leather banquette and takes a short, restorative nap. Jake says business is good: we have 304 on the books for dinner, strong for a Friday, and that will probably increase before the night is over. He’s leading 30 chefs, but contests he could hire five or six more. We talk of rising salaries and welfare and of the lack of enthusiastic talent among commis. It’s increasingly rare to encounter a 20-year-old who doesn’t mind being told what to do, even with the eye-wateringly large, new-industry-standard of a £30,000 salary.
Upstairs, and by 5.30pm, Yags has taken over Panos’ duty of care to watch over both the larder section and me. She’s spent the day downstairs in butchery: a tiny, hot, windowless basement room in which loud music thumps and all of that inbound cow, muntjac, pork and hogget are broken into component pieces. Her impatience at the lack of orders is obvious. Chefs like being busy. They like plating up, they like the rush. Tickets come in and her smile returns. That energy of sending out plates, of having this immediate purpose, it’s everything.
I’m shown how to plate the other salads. I taste the balance needed to nail the beetroot, which comes with a few little pickled strawberries, walnuts and a generous heap of shaved Ticklemore cheese. I learn the simple slicing of the salami, and I plate ever more crudo, ever more ricotta and countless herb and fennel numbers.
The room rocks, diners are happy, plates are everywhere and the playlist spans The Smiths to Solange. Dinner, as the day, is long. Nearing the end my legs tire. But such is the generous spirit in this team that Connor, the sous chef working the evening shift — possibly seeing me flagging — slides some hogget pasta my way. It’s a marvel of heady meatiness, fabulous richness and beautifully slippery pasta, the sauce clinging onto the campanelle with fragrant pine nuts and artichokes. It’s the middle of service, but they’ve time to feed me, the spy, the imposter, the non-chef. It’s a wonder.
That night, we serve nearly all of the morning’s ricotta. I’m reminded that the day’s huge haul will only last the weekend. I walk to the tube feeling a certain thinness in the heel of my shoes. Seventeen hours are telling. But as I begin to approach my own, it strikes me what a home Manteca has become for those working there.
The day in numbers:
Chefs in the brigade: 30
Diners: 442
Hours worked: 17
Cost of the ricotta with courgette dish: £8.50
Starters plated (by me): +/- 100?
Number of unspeakable nicknames: Countless
