Miles Collins

The German Kitchen Brigade…..

It’s fifteen years ago and I am a demi chef de partie in an eighty bedroom hotel in the heart of Baden Wurtemberg in Southern Germany. I have just finished a four year apprentiship in a fifty two bedroom hotel in Grimsby on the east coast of England. Chef Barker’s kitchen was massive with a high ceiling, this kitchen is a third of the size with a ceiling I can touch. This isn’t good, low ceilings means sweaty chefs, even in Iceland. My first day is in the middle of a heatwave, within an hour any calories I have stored from my bowl of spatzle the day before have mutated into sweat marks on my oversized jacket.

There’s been a problem with my uniform, they haven’t arrived. Herr N. the hotel owner and executive chef gives me one of his. Promotion already! At that time I was six foot tall and weighing in at about eleven stone, Herr N. was five foot six and nineteen stone. I looked like the central pole in a Bedouin tent, his name was embroidered on the jacket which was three feet to the left of my chest. The trousers weren’t much better either, I suggested we fit another chef in them at the same time to cut down on the washing. Chef told me I should stand in a field to scare the pigeons off, if my appearance didn’t do it then my German surely would.

The Head Chef was a Bavarian called Herr Schweiger, his hobbies included drinking, smoking, football and poking fun at me in no particular order other than poking fun at me first. He managed the kitchen in a different style to what I was used to under Chef Barker, I rarely saw him lose his temper with anyone and you never had that feeling that he would either though he didn’t have the same level of responsibility of other chefs I have worked for.

The chefs were a mixed bunch, some I liked some I didn’t. I started working with a lad called Max who told me he was leaving in six weeks so I would take his position as chef de partie entremetier. This was a challenge, I wanted to prove that I could manage a section in a foreign language and train junior chefs before returning to England. My first challenge was called Roland, a particularly unattractive specimen with spiky hair and glasses that wouldn’t stay on his nose. He made a bloody awful job of anything he turned his hand to, even smoking. When I had exasperated my catalogue of German swear words and insults I would launch into English ones which made him feel worse and me a lot better.

The work load on that section was considerable, probably the most I’ve ever had before becoming a head chef. Everyday we made thirty portions of whatever soup for the day menu, an a la carte soup and two types of consomme with six different garnishes. We cooked the hot starters, the vegetarian starters and main courses and up to eight different vegetables with corresponding garnishes at any one time. We made the spatzle and the other regional speciality; ‘maultaschen’.

Maultaschen is a filled pasta similar to a meat based ravioli, they can be eaten as a main course or smaller ones are served as a garnish for consomme (clarified meat broth) The nightmare was getting these made (think a hundred plus every time) and eighty to a hundred portions of spatzle plus the soups, veg etc before 11.30 in the morning. Imagine making that lot with Roland in two hours, my stress levels used to go through the roof. It would be nothing to cook 120 covers in two hours on a lunch time with Roland stood motionless, mouth open looking like he had just landed on Mars.

There were two lads on the larder section, a moody local who moaned like hell every time he had to make a green salad and a czech called Josef who worked every hour God sent just to send his money back home. He was the proud owner of the worst car I have ever had the misery to sit in, a fifteen year old Lada that broke down in the middle of Stuttgart one saturday afternoon with yours truly having to push it off the road to the hilarity of a bunch of very attractive female exchange students from Spain. I never forgave him for that.

On the sauce section was a young and very talented local called Claus who did amazing things with pulled sugar during his afternoons off, he was always very respectful towards me and years later I saw his photograph in Restaurant magazine for finishing third in the world renowned Bocuse d’Or culinary competition, an incredible achievement. The other was an Austrain with the body of a starving stick insect and the face of a water rat. He was annoyance personified, he used to wind me up every day until I really lost it during a lunch break towards the end of my time there. He went white and ran out of the kitchen and never bothered me again, this display of aggression would later serve me well against drug-fuelled Mancunians and drunken Scots .

From day one I knew this was going to be hard and I would have to stand up and prove myself all over again….