Why the best seat in any restaurant is out back by the bins

The sixth anniversary of Anthony Bourdain’s death recently caused me to take down my tattered copy of Kitchen Confidential from the shelf. The word “iconic” is over-bandied, but that cover image is as close as you are going to get to a timeless visual synecdoche of the hospitality industry. Most people, understandably, are affected by the big knives tucked into the belts, the hard-ass swagger and wiry languor of the boys in the picture. Me? I can smell the wall they’re leaning on.

It’s not easy to describe, if you’ve not experienced it, and it will be much worse for you once I’ve tried, but it’s a coarse blend of urine, bin juice, sweat and damp cigarette butts. That picture is taken in a place that exists in every single restaurant, termed in the demotic, “out by the bins”.

Sure, you can eat at a restaurant with a fashionably open kitchen or at the counter — always the best seat in the house. These arrangements are intended so you can experience the fire and knives of service. Liminal, involving, but sanitised.

I admire the American writer Jim Harrison beyond reason, and he expressed it better than I even wish I could: “Distance from food preparation poisons the soul with cold abstractions.” Getting close to where and how my food is prepared infinitely improves my experience of eating it. But for me that need can never be met by a merely “open” kitchen where, framed by the pass, carefully cast chefs perform delicate interventions, in the managed spotlight of the heat lamps. It’s all too perfect, too knowing. Too damn clean.

The truth is that the whole purpose of a restaurant, at a very fundamental level, is to remove you from the mechanics of how your meal is made. And if the pass is run so you can comfortably watch it, then the action is taking place elsewhere, offstage. And once you have that knowledge, the glistening performative efficiency of the open kitchen seems subtly inauthentic.

Of course, there’s something else going on here, possibly deeper and less rational. I am, if I’m completely honest, just flat-out jealous. I want to be sitting on the steps, grabbing at a couple of lungfuls of fetid bin air and nicotine-laced tobacco smoke before diving back into the basement maelstrom. I live a freelance life now. I am the very definition of my own boss and master of every moment of my working life. Yet that somehow never feels as free as a couple of milliseconds of grabbed freedom on someone else’s clock.

I’ve never smoked. A sickly, puling, asthmatic child, I could never hold smoke down long enough to acquire the addiction, no matter how badly I wanted it. But as soon as I got my first kitchen job, I understood that going “out by the bins for a smoke” was essential to belonging. That was where assignations took place, physical or verbal battles were fought, scores were settled and gossip — endless gossip — traded.

When I began my restaurant career, cooks came from a catalogue by Cesare Lombroso and wait staff were old, bitter martyrs to flat feet. Nobody was shocked when they lit up. But today front of house people are intelligent, young and socially adroit. Kitchen staff are bright, articulate and fully aware that, to function well, they need to look after themselves physically. I couldn’t understand, therefore, when I took over my first restaurant, why smoking was still pretty much endemic.

Then, out by the bins, an experienced head waitress schooled me. On a busy day, breaks will be shunted aside during rush periods and often can’t be caught up. Restaurant work isn’t unionised and the Catch-22 of the working day is that insisting on taking your full break at busy times will drop your colleagues deeper into the weeds.

“Sometimes I’ll get five minutes. That’s not enough time to get away from the building, and I’m fucked if I’m spending it in a stinking underground locker room. Out here, I can smoke a cigarette in less than three minutes,” she said, as she tapped a Marlboro out of the pack and sparked up . . . “And that’s no bastard’s time but mine.”

I timed her. She could. And, once again, I ached to smoke.

Thinking now about Bourdain, and perhaps 85 years further back to George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London, they showed how our experience in the performance space at the front of a restaurant cannot exist without the experience of others at the back of it. “Behind the pass”, yes, but ultimately “out by the bins”.

The secret spaces of the hospitality world are still often grim in ways that would shock the customers, eating perfect food, just metres away. But that difference is the point. You don’t want to see, or maybe even know, where the staff hang out . . . and that’s totally fine with them.

The sad part for me is that once you own a restaurant, you don’t get to hang out by the bins any more. I’m sure I’d be welcomed, offered a fag I can’t smoke and some polite banter might occur, but I know, in my heart, that the entire purpose of the space is that they own it, not me.

Once you’re attuned, you, too, will begin to spot the spaces. Walking through the smart parts of town, a flash of whites up an alley or in a stairwell, a waft of cigarette smoke. For you, I hope, it’ll be a little frozen vignette of hospitality truth, lit by a single bulb and smelling like a lower circle of hell. A reiteration of Bourdain and Orwell’s revelations that can never be made too many times. For me, though, the nostalgia is fond, foolishly romantic . . . and almost painful.

Follow Tim @TimHayward and email him at tim.hayward@ft.com

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