Sofia had been thrilled to get the job at Nakachwa. On her first day she turned up thirty minutes early because she had convinced herself that the buses would get stuck in traffic. Of course they didn’t and she had stood outside in the cold January morning for fifteen minutes that felt much longer until Joy arrived. Even in a dream state she could still feel the electricity, the buzz of anticipation as she waited. Joy was everything she wanted to be one day: a restaurant owner, a great chef, a mother, a visionary.
Joy and Peter had opened Nakachwa before anyone in the culinary world had really considered that ‘African’ food was anything worth thinking about, years before the craze for Ethiopian food swept across gentrifying swathes of London. The restaurant had been open for fifteen years and had had a Michelin star for five of those by the time Sofia stepped through the door. They were a couple, and their baby also had the name Nakachwa. Joy was in charge of the kitchen and Peter was in charge of everything else, including service.
‘You’re here early,’ said Joy, with an endearing inflection of a worn-down Ugandan accent. ‘I like early – too many of these youngsters who think that blackness absolves them from timekeeping. Not in my house.’ She stood back and motioned for Sofia to pass.
The L-shaped dining room was set up for around one hundred covers. All the tables were circular, highly polished, ethically sourced teak. From where she was standing in the doorway, it looked like a forest of trees, each felled to dining height. The walls were painted in various shades of warm earth tones: terracotta, ochre and mahogany. The length of the back wall, where the kitchen could be spied over the top of the serving counter, was a dreamy mauve, like the colour of the horizon as the sun dips out of view. Overhead large wicker lamp shades pooled each table with light. The pictures she’d seen online, and glimpses she’d spied behind Joy’s head during her rushed and furtive Zoom interview, hadn’t done it justice.
’It’s beautiful,’ said Sofia. She wasn’t being hyperbolic; she thought it might be the most enchanting space she had ever seen.
‘Thank you,’ said Joy. ‘It reminds me of home. That’s all I have ever tried to do really – bring a slice of home to this grey city.’ She chuckled. ‘Peter never believes me when I say I’m a proud Ugandan, but this is my homage.’ They stood in silence for a moment, and then Joy collected herself from her daydream. ‘Anyway, I’m sure what you really want to see is the kitchen.’
‘Yes please.’ She could hardly contain her excitement.
Joy led the way. The kitchen was just as breath-taking. For Sofia – who had been a lowly commis on the bottom rung, and cornered into the windowless depths of one of Lochland’s kitchens – it was a revelation. It was 8a.m., an hour before the first prep shift started, and the sun was just rising. Along half of the back wall of the kitchen, which was gilded with large windows, the first rays of light flooded in.
That first day passed in a daze. At 9a.m. the other cooks started arriving. She spent most of the day mesmerised watching Joy work. She was calm but authoritative, and came over to Sofia’s station on a couple of occasions to compliment her work, as she did with the others in the kitchen. It was a revolutionary approach. No shouting, no swearing, no threats.
Over the next couple of months Sofia settled into her new life. A few friends from back home in Portsmouth had been in London for a while and soon enough she had infiltrated a couple of groups. She knew just the right number of people to keep things interesting without feeling like she had to frequently bail on plans because of her unsociable hours.
At work too, she found herself a little group that had begun to solidify into friendship. Tony, Erica and Simon – the four of them would go for an ill-advised round or two or three after work in a nearby pub. There was a lot of drinking. Sofia often found herself commuting through a fog of dehydration, the proximity of other bodies bumping against her on a tube carriage prompting hair-raising waves of nausea.
Tony was a chef de partie like Sofia. Her full name was Antonia, although she hated it for ‘outing her as the Sloane Ranger’ she tried so hard to conceal with her cropped blue-black mullet and pierced eyebrow. Erica and Simon were front of house. Among the rest of the restaurant staff there was a divide between the two ‘camps’ but their little gang enjoyed bridging that gap. Erica was a little shy, but breathtakingly efficient, and a stickler for details. She had a lilting French accent that endeared her to customers – that and her infectious smile.
Simon was Peter’s second in command, and not immediately likeable. Sofia’s first impressions of him had been that he was quite reductive: a posh, white, public-school boy who’d never had a knack for academia but had enough connections to land a job in a Michelin-starred restaurant straight out of school. He was the kind of man who was always simultaneously gagging to let you know that he knows better, and absolutely mortified that he can’t help himself from telling you that. Something about private schools in this country bred that kind of bizarre combination of arrogance and self-loathing. She found that as time wore on, she began to find it strangely endearing, the rawness with which he understood the contradiction.
On this particular evening they were at Erica’s, crammed around a small table in the kitchen of her shared flat. Erica was the worst cook, but, predictably, the best hostess. Your glass was never empty at Erica’s house. It was a wonder she could even afford her rent alongside her drink-induced generosity. ‘I’ll go get another few bottles,’ she said. They had finished the lasagne, which Sofia reckoned was shop-bought and transferred to a baking tray just before their arrival. The four bottles of red wine on the table were already empty.
‘I’ll come with,’ offered Tony. The pair of them swayed around the room in search of a tote bag and then stumbled out the front door.
‘So how would you rate your time at Naka so far?’ Simon had a habit of trying to catch her gaze when he started a sentence and then breaking eye contact about halfway through. It was all part of his self-deprecation schtick and Sofia had gotten used to it, although it took some time to shake off first the irritation and then the pity it had inspired in her. Recently she had begun to find it sort of charming.
By now she was firmly in the category of drunk, the tipsy giggles making way for earnestness. ‘I honestly love it, and it’s not just that the kitchen is amazing, it’s the team. We all just work so well together. It’s a unit, and everyone is, like, friends.’ This wasn’t quite true, but having come from a kitchen where everyone seemed to be trying to get ahead by any means possible, it felt something akin to homely.
Simon nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, it’s a good vibe,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got to watch out for number one. Do you think you’re going to go for the sous position?’
The sous chef, Mark, was leaving at the end of the month to set up his own pop-up in one of those shipping containers turned overpriced watering holes in East London. That meant the position was up for grabs.
‘I’ve only been here six months, Simon, and I’ve only been a chef de partie for a year total. I’ve got to pay my dues.’
‘But you’re the best.’ This time he didn’t look away, and Sofia blushed at the sincerity of it. She’d never really thought about the fact that he was sort of good-looking. Not her usual type, but then again she wasn’t really sure she even had a usual type.
Her dating history was limited to a two-week boyfriend in secondary school, a couple of flings at culinary college, and one more serious year-and-a-half stint with a perfectly nice, but perfectly boring guy named Ethan in Oxford. A sweet boy, but after he had revealed that he thought the Black Panthers were an American football team, she’d known that they were just treading water until she left the city. She had to admit, rather shamefully, that she hadn’t thought about him at all since she’d arrived in London.
Simon was darkly funny, a cynic and a pessimist, but she often found his company refreshing. He was honest, she thought, about himself and about other things too, so she knew he wouldn’t be giving her a compliment like that for the sake of it.
‘Well I mean, has Peter mentioned anything to you?’ Sofia asked.
He smiled slyly. ‘Oh so you want some insider knowledge?’
Sofia was embarrassed but also enjoying the playful tension that was blooming between them. ‘No, no forget I asked. That’s not fair on you and I don’t want to go behind Joy’s back.’
He laughed. ‘You’re such a goody two-shoes. Between you and me, he said that Joy has her eye on you, and that’s a direct quote.’
Just then Tony and Erica giggled their way back into the room, and Sofia, realising that she had leant forward over the table towards Simon, quickly sat back in her chair. She didn’t know why she felt like they were doing something illicit, but when Simon smiled at her, she felt a thrill of conspiracy.
For the next couple of weeks, Sofia and Simon found moments throughout the day to laugh at each other’s jokes, moan about their hangovers, and evaluate how the restaurant was running that day. Among the four of them Sofia began to feel self-conscious about how often she said things that were only meant for him to hear. Not flirty things particularly, but pick-ups from their other conversations or variations on an in-joke they shared.
She also started to notice Erica, and the way that she interacted with Simon. When she caught sight of them over the top of the chef’s counter, giggling together, she was troubled by the wave of envy that surged through her. She didn’t like to admit it to herself but she had thought she was one of the only people who could really make Simon laugh. Watching them made her feel angry because it exposed that delusion.
