The Right Place by Sophia Money-Coutts

Author:Sophia Money-Coutts [Money-Coutts, Sophia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

London, 2015

SHE CALLED IT THE Little Fig, partly because Phil lent her the money to open it, partly because Maggie wanted her own restaurant to turn out the same kind of food: simple, unfussy, using the very best ingredients she could source: tomatoes that tasted of tomatoes; fat, juicy prawns the size of a baby’s fist; butter with salt crystals that crunched on the tongue; the softest of sourdoughs, which would make diners want to trample their own mother for another piece. All of this was harder to find in London than in Provence, but thanks to five years in restaurants after La Pêche, including an Italian in Islington, a Japanese in Soho, a trendy American diner that briefly existed in Ladbroke Grove, and a Persian place in South Kensington, Maggie had developed a network of devoted suppliers who loved her for her calm, because she didn’t shout and swear at them like the male chefs did.

The site was on the Hackney Road; a former greasy spoon run by a vast woman called Kelly who’d recently died. This meant it had a kitchen, a serving area and a restaurant floor but, since Kelly had run the café for forty years and never changed the Formica tables or lino floor, the space needed to be gutted. Maggie kept the big glass windows almost the same, with linen café curtains than ran halfway up them, but changed everything else. Jamie sourced second-hand kitchen equipment from restaurants that were closing elsewhere, and she found mismatched wooden farmhouse tables, benches and cushions, and crossback chairs at car-boot sales. She wanted people to be comfortable, above all, to while away hours in The Little Fig, eating cheeseboards and drinking wine, as if there was nowhere else they’d rather be, just as at Le Figuier.

She met Mungo on opening night. It was chaos, as launch nights always are. Jamie was doing the PR and had organized a guest list of magazine editors, food writers, TV chefs, models, It-girls and It-boys. Maggie also insisted that the locals who used to eat at Kelly’s be invited (she put up a photo of Kelly behind the bar to reassure them). And since Jamie had also already managed to get The Little Fig mentioned in various newspaper diaries, food columns and online, everyone who was asked came, keen to see the hot new place in Hackney. The resulting crowd was a hilariously eccentric combination; socialites with bouncy blow-dries pushed past elderly locals in tattered trench coats and flat caps, gazing around the space in wonder.

Maggie hid in the kitchen at first, churning out platters of bruschetta, wooden boards of salami and cornichons, cheese gougères, sun-dried tomato tartlets, chicken liver pâté spread thickly on small rounds of baguette, blackened garlic prawns and cubes of lamb skewered on rosemary. Unpretentious, but a lot of it. She didn’t want any guest going hungry. She didn’t want crowds to cluster around her waiters either, desperately reaching for food as if they’d never eaten.

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