A recipe for disaster

Author Monica Ali. Photo / Supplied

Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef of the Imperial Hotel in London, is having a bad day when Monica Ali's darkly witty new novel In the Kitchen opens.

Yuri, the Ukrainian night porter, has been found dead (and naked) in the basement where, it appears, he has been living.

The restaurant manager, Gleeson, whom Gabe despises, insists on putting artificial flowers on the dining room tables. Damian, a trainee chef whom Gabe has just realised is the only other English person in the kitchen, scratches his pimples.

And his executive sous-chef Oona is irritating Gabe on every front: her cooking ("her idea of fine dining was stew and dumplings with a sprig of parsley on top"), her voice, her dry, scratchy feet - and her menu preparations for tomorrow night's Sirovsky launch at the hotel.

Gabe is under a lot of pressure. He's literally all over the place. As his mind switches, briefly, to today's lunch service, Oona tells him there's been a bit of a problem with the custard - lumps. "You do every last little ting right, but sometimes it don' turn out like you plan."

"Oona," said Gabe, "it's custard. If you do everything right, it turns out right."

He goes on to instruct her, in unnecessarily minute detail, on why the protein in egg yolks expands and links up to form custard, but only if the temperature is between 70 and 80C. Above that, you get lumps. Then Gabe goes off to make yet another to-do list while scratching the back of his head, which always itches these days.

You start to realise that Gabe, the man supposedly in charge of his kitchen empire, is on the verge of a huge breakdown.

"I have an organising principle for this material, which was about custard," chuckles Ali on the phone from London, a few days before flying here for the Writers and Readers Festival. "Gabe gives Oona a little lecture about how it's the protein in the egg yolk, the molecules - when they heat up they vibrate faster and faster and their internal bonds break down and they begin to unravel and this is what happens to Gabe as well.

"He starts off as ambitious and successful and in control - or so he thinks - and a number of pressures in his work and family and personal life heat him up and he begins to unravel, too. The book is about one man's emotional journey through life, his lack of faith in anything in terms of long-term commitment, values and so on. So it is about faith, hope, love - and custard."
The amusing thing about Gabe in the earlier stages of the book is that his thoughts are so malign. General manager Mr Maddox "was a first-class bully". His sister Jenny wears velour tracksuits and "had her hair done at Curl Up and Dye". Ernie, the goods-in porter at the hotel, never looks directly at Gabe, which makes "him look mentally deficient, which Gabe sometimes suspected he was". When Gleeson, who is pulling some sort of scam in a guest room upstairs, stands next to Gabe, he stands a little too close "as usual".

Maddox and Gleeson were both delicious characters to play with, says Ali. "Gleeson was rather slimy and officious. That is just a great delight to me to get your teeth into as a writer. The relationship he has with Gabe is, I found, interesting because Gleeson sees that Gabriel is having a breakdown and he says that to him as an insult. But because they are both such enemies, it makes Gabe determined not to see what's happening to himself."

As for Oona, she, too, was "great fun" to write. "Particularly some of the interchanges between Gabe and Oona because they are at cross-purposes. He is not catching her drift and he is quite dismissive towards her at the beginning but she is somebody he does come to appreciate that he's got quite a lot to learn from.

"He is a quite a hard man in some ways. He thinks of himself as essentially decent but he is essentially adrift. Although he thinks he is comfortable in this atomised society, he doesn't really have long-term values and loyalties ... for instance, he proposes to his girlfriend and then he cheats on her."

The novel is not just about Gabe. Ali also looks at issues which have become problematic in today's Britain, including human trafficking, illegal immigration and what almost amounts to slave labour. The hotel itself is a character in the book.

Built in 1878, the Imperial has had a chequered history, like so many large old London hotels, and its architecture as well as its layers of neglect and renovation are integrated into the narrative. Its hierarchy - from the management upstairs to the lowliest cleaners and porters - are also part of the story.

Ali spent a year researching the book, including hanging out in hotel kitchens, observing the interaction between the "United Nations Assembly" of immigrant staff, the accidents, the frayed tempers during service.

"They are amazing places," she says. "I got drawn in - they are such high-pressure environments. They are a great setting for confrontation, quick-spark dialogue and all that stuff so they provide very interesting material. That's part of our fascination now watching all those programmes on television about professional chefs and the tensions in the kitchen."

Ali spent time in the kitchens of five large London hotels, on condition she wouldn't identify any of them. "I am quite good at being invisible in some ways or getting people to talk to me. But it was different from going in to see a manager and writing things down on a notepad. That is very different from talking to somebody like a porter whose immigration status may not be regular or may have a difficult story in their background. There's no way I would sit down with a pen and pad with somebody like that. So it was a question of hanging out and talking with whoever was comfortable around you."

Ali says that as she writes, she paces the room going through a scene, trying to slip into the role of a character. For this book, she says with a laugh, there was "quite a lot pacing actually. I think it might be a sign of insanity, the number of voices I hear, ha ha. Seeing from somebody else's perspective is, for me, a key business of writing. Some writers see with a painterly eye, like John Banville and Richard Ford. For me, it starts with acting, putting yourself in someone else's shoes, to empathise, attempting to find their voice.

"Mind you, hearing the voice in your head is one thing. Getting it to come out of your mouth is another."

Monica Ali

Born: 1967 in Dhaka, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to an English mother and Bangladeshi father. Due to the war for independence, the family moved to Bolton, northern England, when she was 3.
Family: Married to management consultant Simon Torrance with two children. They live in southeast London.
Career: Studied at Wadham College, Oxford. Worked in publishing and branding agencies in London. Voted one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists on the basis of a few manuscript chapters of first novel, Brick Lane (published 2003), for which she won a 300,000 ($765,000) publishing deal. Brick Lane was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; winner 2004 British Book Awards: Newcomer of the Year. She has also published Alentejo Blue (2006) and In the Kitchen (2009).
Of note: The filming of Brick Lane, about a Bangladeshi family in east London's Brick Lane, created a controversy among the Bangladeshi community, inflamed by a letter-writing spat between Germaine Greer and Salman Rushdie.

At The Auckland Writers &Amp; Readers Festival

What: An Hour with Monica Ali
Where and when: Aotea Centre, tomorrow 10am