It doesn’t matter how glamorous the performance; backstage is never pretty. At a little after seven on a weekday morning the chaos of backstage at Scott’s in Mayfair has expanded on to the pavement of Mount Street outside. Yesterday’s linen, bundled up in red cloth sacks, sits alongside crates of empty glass bottles. There are bales of cardboard from boxes that once contained all the ingredients cooked here, and crammed bins. A kitchen porter oversees the industrial-scale dumb waiter that trundles it all up to street level from the basement alcove where it was stored last night. Witness: the debris of London’s finest fish suppers.
And so begins what will be an 18-hour day in the long life of one of London’s landmark restaurants, the biggest of big West End shows. What the diners see is the performance, full of grace and artful choreography. But if you can get behind the scenes, and few do, you’ll find a massive crew: of cooks (obviously) but also of kitchen porters and suppliers, of junior waiters and managers, fine-tuning the experience in real time. You don’t notice them when you’re a customer, which is as it should be. You’re not supposed to. But a trip here backstage reveals the inner working of an elegant albeit complex machine, all in the service of pleasure. There’s no point pretending. A meal at Scott’s is expensive. A bill of £100 a head is not uncommon. What you’re paying for is what you never see.
It’s customary to describe Scott’s as an institution, but that makes it sound as if it smells of over-stewed cabbage and mild incontinence. Scott’s is a long way from that. It began life as an oyster bar over on Haymarket in 1851, moving to this location in the late 1960s, and going through repeated makeovers since then. The most recent was in 2006 when it was re-opened by the Caprice group, owners of The Ivy and J Sheekey.
A central marble bar was installed with, at its heart, a curving stone altar for the display of seafood on ice, designed by cutting edge architects Future Systems. There is polished wood panelling and a glittering mosaic of a floor, though at this time of day much of it is covered in plastic matting. Lined up on those mats are four gas canisters used for the outside heaters which must be brought in each night. Right now the dining room is a place awaiting its moment. The tables are unlaid.
The action is down below, in the low-ceilinged, strip-lit kitchen, where all is concentration and furrowed brow. After negotiations with the occupant of a flat up above, it was agreed that work wouldn’t start here until 7am each day and that the extractors could not go on until 9am, when cooking may begin. Over by the pass, where each dish is plated during service, Scott’s head chef Dave McCarthy and Caprice group executive chef Tim Hughes are looking at the menu. “I’m checking the spellings,” Hughes says. “Spelling mistakes annoy me,” McCarthy laughs. They have the easy banter of two men who have worked together for over two decades. Hughes floats across the whole group, but spends a little more time here than elsewhere. “I just like seafood restaurants,” he says.
The assumption is that the busiest time in a glossy restaurant kitchen will be when the dining room is full and people need feeding, but in truth it’s right now, in the morning hours before service. The 15 cooks on the morning shift – some will leave mid-afternoon to be replaced by those working only the evening shift; others will do the so-called “double” and go through – are prepping ingredients for the entire day. Up on the cold section Polish sous chef Michael Heins – they call him “Beans”; well, of course they do – is slicing smoked salmon for the day. Hughes has finished his planning meeting with McCarthy and has moved over to the seafood prep station in the far corner to pick white crab meat from the fresh crabs leftover from yesterday’s seafood display. “We get through 30kg of pre-picked crab meat a week,” he says, “plus 6kg picked from the crabs we have.” In all, they spend anywhere from £30,000 to £45,000 a week on fresh fish, and only £5,000 on meat.
Meanwhile, sous chef Tom Fraser is outside on the pavement. Later today he will be cooking for a tasting of new dishes to go on the menu. Right now he’s checking in the fresh fish delivery from a fleet of transit vans that pull up to the kerb each morning, some travelling overnight from the coast, others coming from London’s Billingsgate Fish Market. The new stock goes back into the dumb waiter out of which the used laundry came. “If we don’t like what we see, we won’t take it,” he says, opening up a box of pre-cleaned squid. On a good day, the restaurant, which can seat just over 140 when totally full, can serve anywhere from 450 to 500 covers. At Scott’s, almost every day is a good day.
At 8.35am everything stops for a cooked breakfast eaten upstairs in the restaurant, the first in an accelerated schedule of meal times for those feeding the rest of us. Breakfast is late. Lunch is early at 11.30am. The evening meal is eaten at a child’s teatime of 5pm. McCarthy addresses the staff. “From now until Christmas it’s going to be full on. We’ve got 200 plus for lunch and 240 for dinner. Also we’ve got a tasting for dishes which will go on the menu on Friday. Please familiarise yourselves with the new dishes so, come Friday, it’s not carnage.”
The cooks return to the kitchen. Stephen Hutchings, who took over as general manager in July after two decades with the company, arrives around 9am. “What I want to see when I arrive is my staff here doing their job. I want to see Lukasz sat there checking everyone in,” he says, waving towards a head waiter at a corner table, not yet suited and booted. There’s a while before lunch; he doesn’t need to be in costume yet. There will be a team of around 40 working front of house today, including a dozen waiters of various ranks, and two maître d’s. One of the latter, Emily Brooks, is hunched over the computers on the reception desk just inside the door, assigning tables for lunch, and contacting all those who have booked to confirm. “If the booking was made yesterday or it’s a regular who we know doesn’t like getting a confirmation call, we don’t,” she says.
Do they hold tables back for regulars? “We used to,” Hutchings says. “But not any more. We juggle. That’s part of the magic of restaurants. We’ve always got people who come late or others who arrive early or some who will take one of the seats on the terrace.” And what if they get a call from someone claiming to be booking in a celebrity? “We call them back to check who they are, though we are somewhat in the hands of the people calling. If we have royalty or perhaps American senators then we tend to know ahead because bodyguards come to check the place out. And it’s usually the same bodyguards so we know who’s coming.”
At 11am, ice is brought up in trays from the kitchen to stack the seafood display. Australian chef de partie Azraa Hayat, who’s been working here for five months, oversees fellow Australian Dimitri Cottos, who has been here just two days. Raw razor clams and unopened oysters are pushed into the ice to create scaffolding on which to place a whole hake, silvery under the downlights, and both lobsters and crabs. “Sometimes people sitting at the bar just stare at it,” Hayat says.
In the wood-panelled wall behind the reception desk are doors leading in and out of the upstairs service area, where drinks are dispensed and cleaned crockery and glassware stored. Perched in one corner, two waiters, Dario Cammarasana and Antonio Ferrara, both Italian, both in jeans and T-shirts, are wrapping lemon halves in muslin and tying them off with ribbons. All the voices back here are accented. The staff at Scott’s are from more than a dozen countries including Poland and Italy, Venezuela and Latvia, Argentina and Ghana. Ask if anybody here who had the vote chose Brexit, and they roll their eyes. Lemons wrapped, Cammarasana and Ferrara slip off to put on their dark blue suits. It’s showtime.
It’s 11.45am and time for the morning staff briefing which, because the restaurant’s not yet open, can take place in the dining room. Head waiter Lukasz Trzoch is in charge. “It’s a busy lunch today,” he says. “Pretty much intense until 1.30 and then more evenly spread.” He reads out the waiter station allocations, then moves on to the notable bookings. Some are classic VIPs – big-name actors or TV stars – but many are moneyed hedgefunders who have offices nearby. As Trzoch calls out their names, his team call back details of who they are and where they work.
Another senior waiter takes over and grills individual staff members on the menu. “Tell me all the ways we serve lobster here at Scott’s” or “Recommend a starter and a main course”. The punters expect the staff both to know who they are and exactly what it is they’re serving.
At 12.06pm, the ticket machine downstairs on the pass bursts into life with the first order of the day: “No starter, goujons, buttered spinach, peas and broad beans.” McCarthy glances at it. “Solo diner, regular, at the bar. He’ll be gone in half an hour.” He barks the order to the team of four over by the grill. The first serious ticket comes through at 12.14pm: smoked salmon, Dover sole, the works. They sell dozens of Dover sole every day, seared on the grill then finished in the oven for a few minutes, before being trimmed in the dining room upstairs.
To McCarthy’s side is a board of hooks hung with numbered enamelled tags, representing table numbers. “One to 39 is the restaurant. No table 13. The best are tables 10, 11 and 12. Sixty to 66 is the terrace.” As an order lands on the tray, McCarthy throws the correct enamelled tag on alongside it so it gets to the right place.
Service down here will now follow an ordered rhythm: there will be the whirr of the ticket machine. Orders will be shouted and confirmed. There will be the call of “service!” as each tray is ready to be hoiked upstairs. Lunchtime at Scott’s is what Hughes calls “a bit blokey”. Up at the bar, eating alone, is an American university professor called Donald Johanson, white haired and bifocalled. He discovered the skeleton of the early human in East Africa nicknamed Lucy; in the world of human origins he is a rock star. Here, he is just a chap at the bar. “Whenever I come to London I eat here,” he says. “We have nothing like this in the US. I always have the Dover sole. They just do it so perfectly.”
By 3pm most of the tables are cleared, though some will carry on into the late afternoon as the dusk falls. “We have a Middle Eastern clientele who like to eat late,” Hutchings says. “They prefer the terrace so they can smoke cigars.” Table 27 in the back carpeted area – another demand of the noise averse neighbours – is now laid for McCarthy, Hughes, Phil Usher, the group pastry chef, and Wade van Tonder, head pastry chef at Scott’s. Oysters and sole, crab and lobster are always available here but around a third of the menu changes every two weeks. They start by sampling the new supply of caviar, eaten off the back of their hands. They like the glossy, grey beluga. “Take the leftovers straight back to the kitchen,” Hughes tells a member of staff. “I don’t want the waiters off the floor for 25 minutes scoffing it.”
A plate of smoked haddock with colcannon, a replacement for a summery dish of hake with capers and octopus, is checked rather than tasted. It’s an old favourite that always comes back on at this time of year. “It is what it is,” Hughes says. “A satisfying plateful for under £20.” There’s a caramelised shallot and parsnip soup, and a thick veal chop with ceps. Another old friend, a treacle sponge pudding to be shared, is devoured. Only a chocolate orange mousse doesn’t make the cut.
In the dining room, the late afternoon customers with nowhere to be and the money to support their leisure cross the 5pm threshold unaware they have moved from the lunch to the dinner service. Back behind the doors, staff are grabbing dinner and preparing for the evening briefing, which will take place out of sight on the back stairs. They huddle, like an army preparing to go over the top. Tonight’s it’s in the hands of duty manager Yuri Horpinchenko from Ukraine. “A very busy start,” he says. “Massive seating at 6.30 then again at 8.45.” Tonight they have a financier who likes a negroni the moment he sits down. There’s a PR queen who, he says, likes a glass of champagne on arrival. “She likes a bottle,” two waiters shout back in unison. Another regular likes an ale to start. “Pour the second one for him the moment you serve him the first.”
Downstairs, the ticket machine begins whirring again. By 6pm the lights are low in the dining room, and the mood has changed. Compared to lunch this is a mixed crowd: women in their night-time heels, men in their half velvet collars. In the private dining room there’s an investment bank hosting a speaker, over double-cooked soufflés and hake. At lunch they sold none of the costly fruit de mer. Now they’re stacking them up. “It snowballs,” Hughes says. “Once they see one being made you get many more orders.” And with that he’s off back to his family home on the south coast, by way of the kitchen at nearby Sexy Fish. McCarthy leaves around the same time too. They have a strong team in place who will get the job done without them.
Over on the reception booth by the door, reception manager Andrew Dunford is bathed in the glow of computer screens. He is air traffic control, the man who must somehow land all the diners on all the tables within a reasonable amount of time. At 8.35pm they hit a pinch point. “All the 6.30s didn’t really want to come then so turned up at 7 and aren’t finished. All the 8.45s really wanted to come at 8pm so they turn up early.” He plays diner Tetris, firing off instructions as to who should go where. It is the one point in the day when the controlled chaos of the operation risks revealing itself to the customers. But they are old hands at this. “We’re used to it,” Dunford says. “It’s what we do.” One couple gets left waiting at the bar longer than he would like. “Comp their pre-dinner drinks,” he whispers to a colleague, nodding in their direction.
On his screen, the bookings bounce up, in different colours: for those who have arrived and are at the bar, for those who are at their tables, and those who are late. On another screen they can see exactly how long each party has been at its table and how far their order has progressed. The winners at the moment are a table of six who have racked up a £1,100 bill. “I know it’s going well when the grey strip comes up at the bottom of the screen,” Dunford says, pointing it out. “That means the ends of the bookings.”
At 10.26pm the last order clatters into the kitchen, four minutes ahead of the official cut off. It’s for octopus and tempura langoustine, and for Dover sole off the bone. The diners are unaware, but the process of closing the restaurant has begun, albeit subtly. At 10.30pm the terrace must be cleared, the remaining diners there seated inside. Quietly, waiters start refilling the cruet sets for the next day, topping up the bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. In the kitchen, the clean down has started. Sous chef Tom Fraser is in the tiny basement office ordering stock for the next day. He has been here for more than 15 hours.
The general manager’s last job before he leaves at 11pm is to lock away the cash tips, which will later be divided up among the staff. Bills are paid, plates cleared. Glasses are emptied. Boozy conversations turn from late night roars to tired, contented sighs. The doorman outside hails a few more taxis. And at 12.30am the last customer is gone. Now the restaurant belongs to the “closing head waiter” who tonight is Martyna Guz. “I like the responsibility,” she says. “We used to re-lay the tables at night. Now we do that the next morning by daylight. It’s better, I think.”
Immediately, the rubber mats go back on the floors and the gas canisters from the terrace heaters come in to take up their overnight position. The awning is rolled back to the wall. The tables are stripped and washed down with hot water. The remaining shellfish is pulled off the display and taken to the kitchen, along with the ice, which must be washed away. The alcove by the staff entrance which this morning was emptied of dirty linen and emptied bottles, is finally full again. The floors are swept. Shortly after 1.30am, Guz turns her key in the lock. At this time, Mount Street is all but silent, save for the occasional late-night cab, cutting through from Park Lane to Piccadilly. Another day in the life of Scott’s is done. It’s curtain down. Tomorrow, they will do it all again.
20 Mount St, W1K 2HE; scotts-restaurant.com
This article was taken from Observer Food Monthly on 15 January 2017. Click here to get the Observer for half price.
