Miles Collins

When I left old blighty for pastures new

Having long harboured a desire to work abroad and with two ’stagiers’ in Switzerland under my belt I decided to leave my Chef and mentor, Trevor Barker to wreak culinary havoc elsewhere. It wasn’t an easy decision, I had spent four great years learning my trade under a great chef but I had outgrown my home town and going to Germany made sense.

As a child I travelled to Germany with my family every year to visit my mother’s side of the family, I loved the country, the food and had developed a decent grip of the language so it couldn’t be easier!!

Leaving home proper was a wrench, it was at a time when the moral fibre of my family had taken a severe battering and as quick as I had left I wanted to return but the English upper lip thing saw me through, well to the arrivals gate at Stuttgart airport and my first encounter with Herr Ric.

Herr Ric, I would later find out was the restaurant manager. A Paris exile with a penchant for loud floral shirts who spoke his own unique dialect made up of crude German with French to fill in the considerable gaps. Couple that with a lisp and a speech ratio of five hundred words a minute you start to get the idea. I sat in the passenger seat dumbfounded and horrified, I swear I didn’t understand a thing he said for forty kilometers. I sat sweating profusely, my gung-ho spirit slowly evaporating into my shirt as I wondered if everyone spoke like this.

We got to the hotel at midnight, everywhere was shut. I was knackered, physically and emotionally drained, my head banged from the verbal torture Herr Ric inflicted upon me. Never, in all of my life have I wanted a beer as bad as I did that night. Had it been a choice between a cold beer and a naked Cindy Crawford I’d have passed Cindy a duffel coat, no contest. Herr Ric offered me a beer, that I understood, I refrained from kissing him and wondered how quickly I could drink it without him thinking I was Oliver Reed.

It didn’t last long, we sat in the pitch black restaurant and I necked that beer like armageddon was upon us. What I didn’t realise was the amount of gas I had swallowed in a couple of nano seconds, if you lifted my arm up and squeezed my stomach you could have played the bagpipe version of Bonnie Prince Charlie. If I’d belched the residents would have thought armageddon was upon them too, it wasn’t funny. I sat there unable to speak, Herr Ric stared at me practising his Roger Moore eyebrow raise sipping on his very gay campari with more umbrellas in it than the beer garden.

“Noch einemal?” he said, pointing at my empty glass “Gerne” I belched in a German accent and all of a sudden I began to understand him better, amazing thing, beer.

At one o’ clock in the morning I carried my suitcases up the three flights of stairs hitting the pictures and scraping the walls along the way, Herr Ric forgot to mention the lift or if he did I didn’t understand him.

It would prove to be the first of many misunderstandings…..