Dialogue: And it got up the nose of old Forty-Sav Frank

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Got a letter from a friend, Arnie, who discusses a contemporary issue more eloquently than I could.

Dear Gordo:

I'm moved to write to you, me old freezing-works mate, by an incident here in Wellington the other day that you may have read about.

That cook joker at Two Rooms Restaurant reminded me of Forty-Sav Frank, chef at the Ngauranga freezing works caff four decades ago. I think you'd left to work on a newspaper when he arrived.

Now Frank was a culinary artist. He could cook a huge pot of savs without splitting a skin. They would all emerge hot, really tasty and each in its own little unbroken red jacket. I've never known anyone since who could do that even with a couple of savs.

Sausages, too. He could fry a pan full of snarlers and spitters so they emerged evenly brown and with their jackets intact. And, you know, I never saw that guy break a yolk in six months of working alongside him while he cracked literally hundreds of eggs one-handed into a pan.

This bloke with Two Rooms in Wellington, if he's the hot-shot they say he is, may well have trained at the same cooks college as Frank - although I once asked him whether he had any qualifications and he tapped his tummy and said, "Only this 58-inch waist and a couple of years in the galley on a cargo ship."

But what I'm sure Frank and the Wellington joker had in common is style. Frank wore one of those striped canvas butcher's aprons and, honest to God, he had a clean one on every day.

He was a stickler for approaching a good sav - and a pie too - with a clean palate and encouraging his customers (or "yous jokers", as customers were called then) encouraging them, as I was saying, not to approach his savs with the taint of the last fag on the tongue. No one was allowed to smoke in the caff until after he had finished his meal.

And what brought him to mind the other day when those ladies were heaved out of Two Rooms for being a bit strong on the pong was the time when a bloke on the killing chain broke wind while standing in the queue for lunch in the caff.

Frank did his nana. He made a loud speech about how he'd had the plaster walls painted that beautiful butter-yellow colour, had insisted the fly-papers were changed every afternoon and that every employee was entitled to have his tea served in a cup with a handle and no cracks.

"And you," he said, shaking his ladle at the culprit, "you come in here after a night on beer and steak and onions and create this olfactory assault, this haute stink, in my caff. Get out!"

Now you'll remember, Gordo, that your average killing-chain butcher was built like a Dunedin warehouse. Matt was his name and his general demeanour would have made Mike Tyson look like a choirboy. He beetled his brow, bared his yellow teeth and flexed his shoulders. His mates gathered around him and it looked as though it was all on.

But then he blew off again. His mates melted away - almost literally.

Frank, handkerchief over his nose, yelled abuse and dozens of his yous-jokers, engulfed by the mephitic miasma emanating from Matt, fired a salvo of savs and spuds. Mat was forced to retreat. He was barred from the caff after that and became a lonely figure, sitting on his own at lunchtime tucking into sandwiches or fish and chips from down the road and was never again known to you-know-what at work.

Don't know what became of Frank. Maybe the cook down at Two Rooms is one of his grandkids. I doubt that, though, because if there's one thing Frank couldn't stand it was pretension, or people taking themselves too seriously.

He was all for style, but I remember one day when a coolstore hand complained about the "bouquet" of his English Breakfast cuppa, Frank leaned into him and said in that steely tone he reserved for whingers: "You want 'bouquet', you bleeder, you go to a florist. And get yourself a nosegay while you're at it and shove it up your left nostril."

Anyway, old mate, I hope you're well and keeping busy. I'm reading a lot and I grow a mean carnation. Tried roses for a few years but they're too rich and velvety for me. I like the pert prettiness of carnations, and I grow sweet peas and daffodils. I guess I like things to be understated.

Have you noticed that the world has become obsessed with food and booze? I've got a nephew who wouldn't know a canto from a clavichord, a sonnet from a screech of brakes, but he tells me he's a cultured chap because he knows a cab sav from a pinot noir and can make his own pasta.

I'd say that guy in Two Rooms might think the world spins around his appreciation of himself.

His palate may be as fine-tuned as a Stradivarius but the sounds that come out of your mouth are more important than the stuff you shove into it. I'd like to shout him a holiday in Kabul to sharpen his sense of other people.

Be good to yourself, Gordo.