While Chiltern Firehouse might be harder to get into than a Berlin techno club — the current waiting list for non-celebrities is six months and counting — one purported insider isn’t entirely thrilled by how the place is run.
Celebrities from Lindsay Lohan to David Cameron have been crowding through the door to sample executive chef Nuno Mendes’s famed cuisine — but according to a posting on Stage Chef, a blog run by kitchen workers, all is not well among the stoves.
“I am not happy,” writes an anonymous chef who claims to have worked there for the past five months. “Neither is anybody else, it seems.” He says the muddled layout of the kitchen sections makes “cohesion and communication bloody difficult”; that some of the night chefs “or night pirates as they are known (or gypsies, cowboys, renegades, dreamers)” can’t be relied on to julienne a plate of shallots and that “service is a mess”. “It’s not,” he mildly concludes, “an efficient kitchen.”
He also claims it’s “always a struggle” to find proper storage for the mountains of food constantly arriving. “After finding containers, it is more of a struggle to find space in the fridges for it all. More so if you give a shit about trying to keep fish below meat and cooked meat above raw meat and all of this away from veg” — a basic kitchen food safety requirement.
The blogger says he left the Marylebone restaurant recently. A spokesperson for Westminster council tells us its food safety staff are yet to inspect the kitchens at the Firehouse but will be doing so soon. Chiltern Firehouse has politely declined to comment.
