Service: Sarah Gilmartin’s scorching, engrossing new novel

By The Reading List

24 Aug 2023

The waitress. The chef. The chef's wife. Three different stories, but which one contains the truth?

Service, the gripping new literary page-turner from Sarah Gilmartin, follows the fallout from a scandal-struck high-end restaurant, from three alternating perspectives.

When Hannah learns that famed chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she’s thrown back to the summer she spent ten years ago waitering at his Dublin restaurant – the plush splendour of the dining rooms, the wild parties after service, the sizzling tension of the kitchens. But she also remembers how the attention from Daniel soon morphed from kindness into something darker.

Set in 2017, the year the Harvey Weinstein exposé was published, Service is brilliantly observed, smart and stylish. The novel’s different voices reveal a story of power and complicity, of the lies that we tell and the courage that it takes to face the truth. Read an excerpt below.

***

HANNAH

I’ve never felt as alive as I did that summer. Alive, needed, run off my feet. Every evening we were queued out the door, we had bookings a year in advance. It was the kind of place people of a certain age called hip, while the rest of us rolled our eyes, discreetly, not wanting to jeopardize our tips.

Back then, when the country still thought it was rich, there was always some brash, impossible customer demanding a table from the hostess just as the dinner rush took hold. These arguments added to the atmosphere, the heat, the energy that ripped around the establishment and kept us going six out of seven nights a week.

The restaurant, let’s call it T, was in a large, ivy-covered building two streets over from the Dáil. We served businessmen, politicians, lobbyists, the type of men who liked a side order of banter with their steak and old world red. We learnt quickly to talk nonsense about the property market and the boom, though we didn’t really have a clue, we just knew that the wages were decent, the customers wore suits, and the tips were sometimes obscene.

We only employ college students.

Don’t be brainless.

Don’t be nosy.

Be tactful.

Be knowledgeable.

Your Châteauneuf from your Côtes du Rhône.

Your bouillon from your bouillabaisse.

Your? As if. We got the same pasta tray-bake and soggy salad every day before service. It was delicious – it was free.

I remember the heat of the kitchens, the huge flat pans with slabs of butter sizzling from midday, though I was fortunate to mostly work dinner, when the bigger tables came in. You’ll get cocktails and evenings for sure, Flynn the bartender told me with a homicidal grin, then he muttered some quip that ended in ass to his sniggering colleague. That was the Ireland of the day, asses replacing bottoms, cocktails replacing pints, quick deals and easy money, opportunities that had taken decades – centuries – to filter down.

The kitchens were so hot that summer you could feel the burn on your blouse in the throughway, the small space off the main dining room that joined front of house with back. This was the nucleus of the restaurant, where we fired orders on computers, gossiped about customers and complained about the bar staff who’d let our drink orders back up while busy working their own tips. Double doors would flap open to the kitchens as a runner passed through with four plates – the maximum number permitted – and the heat would come at us in short, magnificent bursts that were often accompanied by shouts from the chefs, which would remind us who was really in charge and send us running once more onto the floor. Yes, sir, No, sir, may I tell you, sir. It was like a show. It had the buzz of live performance.

The customers were a who’s-who of boomtime Dublin, the men in suits and open-necked shirts, the women in stiff dresses and blow-dries. With our clipped ponytails and rubber-soled pumps, we could not compare. And yet, we did not go unnoticed.

Some of the restaurant staff were famous themselves. Everyone knew the manager Christopher, his high-boned London face, and the easy charm that was just the right side of fawning. Christopher-call-me-Chris, who was lovely to work for, clear and very funny, unless you were obviously hungover or in the habit of being late.

Unless you offended a customer. It was the number one rule in the restaurant, in every good restaurant around the world: the customer is always right.

They came to T for the atmosphere, and for the cooking, certainly, though they never saw the reality behind the double doors, vaunted men in white with unnatural concentration, hot faces and drenched hairlines when they took off their caps at the end of the shift. The only women in the kitchen were the Polish dishwashers who doubled as baristas when the bar was mobbed and who refused to speak English to the waiters they disliked.

Most of the customers came for the head chef Daniel Costello, who was so good at cooking that he didn’t need stars (though shortly after I left he got his first, which nearly killed me). He had two sous chefs who hated each other but stuck it out to work with him, then the rest of the team – nine or ten men, largely in their twenties – who each had their own station along the stainless steel counters that ran the length of the kitchen. They prepped and cooked, shouted and swore. They plated dainty meals in a matter of seconds. They listened to classic hits on the radio, or played loud music on the prehistoric stereo above the sinks. They drank vats of Coke from plastic cups with ice that melted in minutes. One of us waiters would do a refill round whenever we caught a lull. We looked after them and they looked after us. That was the theory. But really we stayed out of their way, and out of the kitchen unless we were buzzed. Theirs was a different world. You could smell it the moment you went back there, through the spices and sauces and the bins full of leftovers. Talent and testosterone. You hadn’t a chance. You were a minnow in a pond – a help, a hindrance, a nothing.

The serving staff were at the end of the chain, attractive bartenders and waiters hired to make the customers feel good about themselves so they’d spend more money. Easy on the eye. That was the phrase used by the owners, a consortium of rich men who treated the restaurant like a fancy canteen where they came and went as they pleased. Easy on the eye. It was literally part of the advertising policy. Everyone in the industry knew – you didn’t apply unless you had a certain figure or face. They’d turned away a waitress in her thirties, one with years of Michelin experience. They told her she wouldn’t be able to keep pace. Not in this restaurant, this so-hot-right-now restaurant.

So I suppose it is fair to say that when I went for the job, I had an idea that I was not uneasy on the eye. But it wasn’t something I thought about all that much. And then after that summer, when I no longer worked there, which is to say when I was fired, I did not want to think about it at all. DM

Service by Sarah Gilmartin is published by Pushkin Press (R440). Visit The Reading List for South African book news, daily – including excerpts!

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