I am the Lunchman: dispatches from a London school canteen

Written by Jack Faulkner
Illustration by Darren Shaddick

I was lured into kitchens long ago. I have loved it and I have plugged along and I have hated it. I vowed to leave it and came back. I’ve seen a lot of kitchens. Big ones, small ones, outdoor ones. Kitchens with pristine green tiles. Kitchens that break most legal workplace laws. I’ve worked in prestigious restaurants. I’ve cooked in fields. I’ve cooked more panisse than any living boy from Aylesbury has. I’ve cooked for people who own art galleries, and I’ve seen lawyers, I’ve seen two former prime ministers and Harrison Ford in dining rooms. I once was kept from my break on account of Isabella Blow and her hat wanting some St Emilion au Chocolat at Blueprint Café with Jeremy Lee. I helped to open the Sessions Arts Club in London with Florence Knight. My old workplace is photographed in pages of glossy magazines. 

I’ve worked with people who have books you might buy for your favourite aunt. With the excellent catering company Sabel Food, I helped deliver banquets for people like Yotam Ottolenghi and Nuno Mendes. I was once even on Mary Berry, The Great British Bake Off icon’s other TV show, deep frying gnocco fritto in a blind panic. I was flown to Pisa and cooked for a man I now know to be a dictator. I’ve cooked at every royal palace in London. Now, this reads like Mr Big Balls throwing around some weight but frankly, if you work in a central London restaurant for long enough you’ll cook for a recognisable face or someone dripping in couture.

We chefs live in a world of perpetual glamour. Chefs do telegenic things, hold up whole turbots for the camera and look tough. I should tell you, I’ve been known to embroider the truth. Cooking is not a world of perpetual glamour. There’s much that isn’t wholly wonderful, the hours are not very social and most chefs spend their money at the osteopath. So I had to choose what to do if I was to see my wife in the evenings and weekends.

There’s some sexy cooking, which we eagerly watch on the screen and when we devour Anthony Bourdain’s books. Restaurants that have merchandise and chefs have the lifestyle that was previously the preserve of rock stars. There are a lot of reasons people want to do it.

And then there is what motivated me to change from panisse cook to the rich and famous, to cooking for the eager young minds of Barnet, North London. I love cooking but I don’t love being a chef. The glamour in itself doesn’t cover a London lifestyle. If I was rich I’d still cook but it’s a job, a way to make a living, to earn a crust. People cook for money. The hip cache doesn’t pay the bills. The lifestyle means you don’t see your partner or much in the way of actual sunshine. So I took the opportunity of working daylight hours for the first time. I am now a school chef. Although I prefer the nickname I was given by the pupils: Lunchman.

My office is a chemical store with a desk. But it has a sign on the door that reads ‘Head Chef’. It’s where I eat, write the menu, and make my orders just as chefs do in restaurants. Under my desk there’s a 25kg bag of dishwasher salt and lots of packets of hairnets. My world hasn’t changed that much. I cook for a different type of person. Mostly they’re under five feet tall. It’s a world not seen on the television programme The Bear. My clientele don’t wear Margaret Howell shirts; they don’t have strong views about negronis. They do say excellent things like “Chef Jaaaaack, I’m going to the dentist.” Or they ask sincerely excellent questions like, “Chef Jack is a person who was born in London British?” Which is how I ended up talking about constitutional matters with an eight-year-old from the Seychelles.

Schools are very different from restaurants in Clerkenwell, gastropubs in Stoke Newington, or festivals in Oxfordshire. My clientele are obliged by law to be there. If you’re going out for some lightly chilled red wine from Provence and some pâté en croute, your situation is very much unlike the people I cook for. You chose to be there, you chose the restaurant, you chose the wine, you chose the food. In my dining room. I’ve made this choice for the children and teachers. Therein lies my big problem. I have to cook food for people from simply any background. The demographic in a restaurant I’ve cooked at is always loosely very homogeneous. Mostly relatively affluent, and mostly quite knowing about food. The average diner in a restaurant has eaten onglet with Café de Paris butter or Piedmont peppers or crème brûlée. The diners of St John in Smithfield and Roots in York are not going to be very dissimilar demographic-wise. University education, a couple of holidays a year, fairly knowledgeable about grape varieties. This is neither good nor is it bad, it’s just what it is. A state primary school is not like that.

There are children from affluent backgrounds and children from much less affluent backgrounds. Half the children I cook for take home vouchers for food banks. Others went to Greece for the summer holiday. Some of the children clearly only have one jumper to wear. The reality of people whose families don’t have much money is something that I didn’t see at the event I did in the Diptyque shop in Mayfair. Primary schools don’t smell like myrrh at Christmastime.

My diners come from any community you might expect – I cook for children in north London. West African, Romanian, Chinese, Jewish, Turkish, Greek, Jamaican, Polish, Bangladeshi and everywhere in between. This means my job is to make food that is satisfying for all. I cook jollof rice because I work with Rosemary from Ghana. The children with Ghanaian heritage love it, but Oliver from Muswell Hill won’t clear his plate. He won’t eat more than a bite. So I cook plain white rice and plain drumsticks for a dozen children. If I cook meatballs and mashed potatoes, everyone will eat it, except one Sikh boy who has vegan sausages instead. One boy is of the Jain religion, so he has a little meal with no onions or garlic etc. That’s fine, That’s the job. I cook chicken sausages, not pork, everything is halal, and nothing is a rare breed. That’s fine, that’s the job. I make compromises because my job is by and large to feed children. It’s nutrition. Skills and flourishes have left the arena. I don’t drape bitter Italian leaves elegantly next to a partridge and some red grapes. I have had to pare back herbs and spices a lot. Saffron, sumac and za’atar have a place in my home kitchen, not at work. I've learnt that some eight-year-olds view dill with suspicion although I do take pride in my bubbly, well-risen focaccia which I make three times a week. I might like cardamom, but Maria from Romania doesn’t. So, I have toned things down a lot.

Every second week I make margherita pizza. In that sense I can’t hide behind heavy flavours, just mozzarella, fresh dough and tomato sauce. So it’s in keeping with good practice. When you’re ordering vitello tonnato it’s because you like it. And you may have eaten it in a trattoria in Venice. It’s not because you have lessons in the afternoon and need to be full up so you can concentrate. Nobody ordering a Basque cheesecake is doing so thinking about much more than the pleasure. If I’m making a cake for 160 children, some of the kids can’t have eggs – one of them gets vocal about how fed up they are eating grapes while others get to eat cake. So I’ve found a cheap source of vegan mayonnaise, which I can use as an egg replacement so that everyone can have cake. If you’re having a quick salt-beef bagel at lunchtime on your hour’s break, that's not the only hot food you’ll eat that day. Although I’m informed that some children will only have toast in the evening. So I have to cook something that children want to eat. Not what I’d like them to want. Getting hot food into the stomachs of children is vital. Also, I value restaurants, I think what I’m saying is jollof rice or osso bucco shouldn’t just be for rich adults. They can be universal. Good food is vital. My friend Joe is the head chef of Gordon Ramsay’s Savoy Grill. That’s obviously a very impressive job. I, however, am very content and just a little bit proud to say I am The Lunchman. 

This story first appeared in Sandwich 08 - the Chef’s Special issue. You can buy your copy here.

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