Hospitality – by Nicole Melanson
ISLAND | ISSUE 162
‘Your dad didn’t eat again today,’ the nurse told me over the phone. ‘Is there anything you’d like to say to him?’
Please don’t die seemed pointless. My father had COVID-19, and after a brief but promising upswing at home, he was back in hospital – 15,670 kilometres away. I knew a second discharge wasn’t on the cards.
I wanted to wish him ‘a good death’, but that, too, seemed pointless. My dad was running out of oxygen, in isolation, alone. Even the best spin doctor would have struggled to twist that around. Besides, I wasn’t sure my father was even aware that he was dying. He never mentioned it, so neither did I.
Instead, I told him stories, details of his life that had etched themselves into my brain, all the memories that would survive him, presuming I survived.
*
Along with 30% of Australians, I was born overseas. ‘The lucky country’, as it’s known, has been a good host to me, and I have tried to be a good guest in return. Twenty years and five children later, I consider myself as Australian as I do American … until tragedy strikes from afar. Then I feel like an immigrant again.
My father’s death took fifteen days, during which time I left a breadcrumb trail of tears from one end of my house to the other. Brush my teeth, weep. Skim an email, weep. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Flightless, cocooned with my husband and children in lockdown, I had no sharp edges to grate myself against. I needed the kind of cathartic cry that comes from overstimulation, a total sensory meltdown. In the absence of sufficient triggers, I lived vicariously through Gordon Ramsay’s temper.
“I needed the kind of cathartic cry that comes from overstimulation, a total sensory meltdown. In the absence of sufficient triggers, I lived vicariously through Gordon Ramsay’s temper.”
Before my father died, I’d watched Ramsay less than half a dozen times. I wasn’t offended by his personal brand of belligerence so much as I was disinterested. If Ramsay was the chef equivalent of death metal, my tastes ran more to folk. It was only once I needed to see someone metaphorically smashing guitars that I finally understood his appeal.
*
I once dated a guy I met in a record store, back when browsing for music in person was a thing. The guy was two metres tall with Eddie Vedder hair, but as soon as I saw him angry, I knew it was over between us. I don’t remember what set him off, only that he placed one fist on the table, screwed up his face and yelled, ‘Poppycock!’
People like to say that swearing is a sign of ignorance, an inability to express oneself more eloquently. It’s a reasonable theory, disproved by all the poets and writers I know. Upon realising that the grungy Goliath I was dating avoided half the dictionary, I did what any other self-respecting wordsmith would do, and dumped his sorry ass.
There were other reasons, yes – his moth-like fingers being one; the fact that he incessantly quoted Jewel at me another. But really, it was his gosh golly darnedness that did it.
Around the same time, Gordon Ramsay erupted on television with Boiling Point. I might have developed a crush on him then in all his rugged, profane glory, but I never saw the show. I was too busy tending bar.
*
Like millions of writers before me, I became a bartender because I couldn’t pay the bills with words alone, and also because writing was killing me. I couldn’t keep weight on. I couldn’t fall or stay asleep. I centred myself in everything. What I was thinking, what I was feeling, what other people were thinking and feeling about what I was thinking and feeling … I consoled myself with Nietzsche: ‘One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.’ But I was burnt out.
There was a broken engagement, followed by emptycaloried love affairs. A well-located apartment overlooking a park with a resident flasher. A bank account I could barely keep afloat thanks to a complete inability to budget and a weakness for impulse-purchasing ‘investment’ pieces. Desperate, I applied to a restaurant looking for a waitress, but one look at the way I carried a cocktail tray and the manager put me behind the bar instead.
When I started pouring drinks, I was clumsy, slow and distractible. By the time I’d worked my way up to nightclubs, my pulse kept time to techno and I had the laser focus of a shark.
“When I started pouring drinks, I was clumsy, slow and distractible. By the time I’d worked my way up to nightclubs, my pulse kept time to techno and I had the laser focus of a shark.”
*
Working in hospitality is the perfect antidote to a young writer’s tendency to sit and ruminate. Adrenaline, exhilaration, exhaustion. It is, in short, everything that ‘poppycock’ is not.
Restaurants run on a childlike sense of time. Every day is a new day. Every individual meal is that meal alone and nothing more. Customers don’t care about your stellar reputation if their food is late or cold, or their order gets mixed up. So what if someone smashed your heart into a million tiny pieces? South end of the bar needs a vodka tonic and a frozen margarita stat. While my father was dying, the entire world was busy baking bread. Ovens everywhere, full of carby comfort. Challah knots. Cinnamon scrolls. Enough fucking sourdough to sink a thousand ships.
I wanted none of it. At night, I put my kids to bed and sat on the sofa and drank, waiting for my father’s time zone to catch up with mine so I could call to find out if he’d survived another night. I didn’t have the heart for comedy or the attention span for drama, and I’d already watched all the thrillers. Scrolling through on-demand viewing, I stumbled across an old episode of Kitchen Nightmares and decided to give it a try.
That series was like a portal, taking me back to a time before coronavirus. I marinated in nostalgia, remembering what it was like to catch up with friends over tapas or a communal charcuterie board. The otherworldliness of it all was bittersweet.
*
The irony of watching a show about an industry destined to be kneecapped by the pandemic did not escape me. I felt uncomfortably omniscient, watching restaurant owners fret over how to rejig floorplans to improve traffic flow, or source local ingredients to reduce the cost of importing from exotic locales. I watched them spruik for customers on footpaths packed with pedestrians, knowing that in the not-too-distant future those same footpaths would become deserted.
As soon as the virus hit, hospitality was the first thing to go. The outside world disappeared overnight. On community Facebook pages, pubs and cafes begged for business, offering pre-packaged meals in accordance with local guidelines. Instead, their former patrons snuck around Prohibition-style, sprung by the press having secret rooftop drinks, backyard barbecues and clandestine dinner parties. It seemed breaking bread with friends and family was something no one was prepared to give up.
*
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs asserts that before we’re in a position to worry about airy-fairy things like love and ‘self-actualisation’, we must fulfil our most basic physiological needs, which is to say, what the animal in us requires to survive. Water. Food. Warmth. Rest. Also known as the bare necessities.
Is it any coincidence that these are the very things that drive us to restaurants? People dine out first and foremost to be fed, second to be hosted. Of course, it’s this hosting that distinguishes a successful restaurant from a supermarket, but the basics come first. A cold drink. Hot food. Then, a cosy room and a comfortable chair, followed by companionship.
So, too, in grief. When my father died, time warped between the past and present. His death reduced me to my elements – a bundle of organs and nerves, bound in infantile helplessness. My husband brought me toast and coffee. My children cuddled me in my nest. But it was Ramsay who got me out of bed, because after sadness came fury.
“My husband brought me toast and coffee. My children cuddled me in my nest. But it was Ramsay who got me out of bed, because after sadness came fury.”
*
In hospitality, every shift walks a knife edge between efficiency and chaos. When you’re running in sync with the machinery, spinning all your plates in time to the beat, it’s impossible not to resent anyone whose incompetence or carelessness threatens to pull the pin from the entire operation. Ramsay gets a lot of mileage out of these inevitable grudges, calling out individual failure in front of the whole crew, providing a cautionary tale with a side of schadenfreude.
Sitting on my sofa, knowing I would never see my father again, knowing all the COVID-closed businesses in my community were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy through no fault of their own, I was ready to see Ramsay berate some entitled slackers, and he did, screaming at one restaurant manager for letting his dog shit on the dining terrace, another for microwaving frozen burgers. Here, at last, was logic and order. Nothing anywhere else made sense, but Gordon Ramsay as judge and jury was a system I could get behind.
*
It’s easy to look at other people’s lives and point out all the mistakes they’ve made. It’s much harder to turn the camera back to ourselves and question where we took a wrong turn, dropped a stitch, missed a step. The apology we never offered. The too-infrequent phone calls. The silence we let fester until it rotted everything beneath. It’s harder still to account for confusion and impotence, to admit that we knew something needed to be done – we just didn’t know what to do, so we did nothing.
The beauty of a show like Kitchen Nightmares is that it makes complex problems seem like they have simple solutions. Still parenting your adult children as if they were toddlers and letting them run your business aground? Then hire a competent floor manager. Bought the venue where you married your ex in a failed attempt to recreate the magic of your past? Just modernise your decor and update the menu.
“The beauty of a show like Kitchen Nightmares is that it makes complex problems seem like they have simple solutions. Still parenting your adult children as if they were toddlers and letting them run your business aground? Then hire a competent floor manager. Bought the venue where you married your ex in a failed attempt to recreate the magic of your past? Just modernise your decor and update the menu.”
At first, I wondered why Ramsay shied away from the real crux of each restaurant owner’s problem: the broken heart, the dubious ethical decisions. Then I realised that what he was providing was the same thing customers routinely seek from bartenders instead of therapists: a tangible resolution to an abstract thirst. So, what to do in a kitchen instead of discussing unhappy childhoods, divorces and debts? Attack those filthy floors with a mop. Focus on the incompetent cook. Shout, swear, smash some plates – whatever it takes to exhaust that existential rage.
*
What I used to see as ritual humiliation for the sake of theatrics, I began to recognise as proven methodology. Before anyone can go up, they need to hit rock bottom. It’s a familiar pattern in rehabilitation, but it holds in hospitality, too. Cue the cranky customers, the scathing reviews, the empty bank account. Picture the restaurant closing. Imagine the house repossessed, the partner and children sitting in the dark, crying for food.
This winning combination of fear and shame plays out in everything from reality TV weight-loss shows with marquee-sized scales, to fraternity hazing, where drunk and blindfolded pledges are left in the wilderness to find their own way back. It’s the same tactic used in the military, depriving cadets of food and warmth and sleep in order to break, then remould, them. It even factors into how we mourn.
At its most elementary level, grief is a problem. You loved a person, neatly packaged in a body with a name and voice and habits, many of which you found endearing. Now that person is gone, leaving you to deal with the great, messy, overwhelmingness of losing them.
Loss, at its core, is an aberration. It’s a state of disorder, the cogs ceasing to turn the way they’re supposed to.
Losing my father was hard enough without also losing the entire context for our relationship. Flying became impossible. Hospitals shut up like Alcatraz. Funerals and memorial services were banned before they were even planned.
Nothing I knew about death and mourning existed anymore. Society had fallen apart, and there was no timeline for its repair.
I wasn’t just grieving my father. I was grieving the whole world.
*
The definition of depression is persistent sadness and loss of interest or pleasure in previously enjoyable activities. Psychologists make allowances for grief, but where it gets complicated is when you’re mourning not just a person, but a way of life.
When I was a child, my mother used to carefully slit the tape on presents and flatten out the wrapping paper to reuse another year. This is how it feels to bunker down during a global crisis, as if we are folding up joy and setting it aside for later. Is it any wonder if we feel depressed thinking ‘later’ may never arrive?
In my cocktail-slinging days, each shift had a peak at which all the noise and commotion abruptly became unbearable. It usually happened five minutes before last call, when a devilmay- care desperation upended the crowd. The DJ, sensing it as well, would give me a wink and play ‘Not Over Yet’ by the aptly named Grace, the song both lament and encouragement, its fever pitch reassuring me the lights were about to come on.
Halfway through every episode of Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay undresses in front of the camera and slips into chef whites. It’s performative, but I appreciate the symbolism. Working in a restaurant is a performance of sorts, one that relies on the 4 Cs of choreography, chronology, coordination, and above all else, commitment. The show must go on regardless of what’s happening backstage – or inside you.
But service is more than just an act. It’s also a privilege. Somewhere in the midst of mourning, I realised it was time to resume wearing my own chef whites. In restaurant terms, this is known as digging yourself out of ‘the weeds’. I wasn’t about to Instagram bread, but I did start making sandwiches again. It’s what humans are designed to do. Stoke the fire. Cook the kill.
“I wasn’t about to Instagram bread, but I did start making sandwiches again. It’s what humans are designed to do. Stoke the fire. Cook the kill.”
A lot of lifestyle television fetishises food, but it’s not the food itself that fills us, otherwise we’d all be just as happy picking up gourmet meals in a box. It’s the act of service that matters. Not the coffee my husband brought me, but the bringing. Not the sandwiches I gave my kids, but the giving. In nurturing others, we nurture ourselves.
*
We are biologically programmed to feed our own families, and culturally primed to feed our friends. It takes training to offer the same standard of care to strangers. When you work in hospitality, you pick up little tricks to increase your connection to customers. Introducing yourself by name is one. Smiling warmly is another.
Studies have shown that servers can increase their tips just by touching customers lightly on the arm, and even more so if they manage to brush the back of a customer’s hand. Want to achieve the same results while respecting personal boundaries (and social distancing)? Simply add ‘for you’ to the end of every sentence:
‘Can I get some more bread for you?’
‘Can I bring another drink for you?’
Not ‘Would you like …’ or ‘What will it be?’ but ‘What can I do for you?’
*
The heart of hospitality is etiquette, which is just a fancy way of saying that one identifies another person’s need and rises to meet it. It’s not about fuss or gimmicks. It’s about basic attention and care. And what could be more attentive or caring than feeding someone who’s hungry?
It took my father dying in a pandemic for me to see how ‘hospital’ fits inside ‘hospitality’. The two words stem from hospes, Latin for ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’ or, when offered shelter, a ‘guest’. A hospital is literally a guesthouse.
Like a traveller wandering in from the cold, my father was anonymous to the medical staff who looked after him until he died. Those faceless and nameless caregivers looked after me too, comforting my dad when I wanted to do so myself, but couldn’t.
As I watched Ramsay slice tomatoes and ladle soup and fold sheets of pasta into soft little pillows stuffed with fresh herbs and cheese, I thought of the nurse lifting a straw to my father’s lips. There was a connection between all of us then – myself, my father, Ramsay, the nurse. We were all in service to each other.
“As I watched Ramsay slice tomatoes and ladle soup and fold sheets of pasta into soft little pillows stuffed with fresh herbs and cheese, I thought of the nurse lifting a straw to my father’s lips. There was a connection between all of us then – myself, my father, Ramsay, the nurse. We were all in service to each other.”
*
‘Is there anything you’d like to say to him?’
‘Could you … maybe hold his hand for me?’
‘I’m already holding it. He just squeezed when he heard your voice.’
The phone crackled between us. I listened for my father breathing on the other side of the world – shallow, uneven. Too slow. Each silence lasted years.
‘You still there?’ the nurse asked me.
‘Mm-hm. Thank you.’
‘Of course.’
The silence continued another decade. I stopped hearing my father’s breath, started hearing my own. My heartbeat filled my ears. I felt the nurse smiling gently into the void, heard her wet her lips before she spoke to me again:
‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’ ▼
Image: Henry Perks
This essay appeared in Island 162 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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