Trouble at the Imperial

It was probably a mistake for Monica Ali to call the hero of her third novel Gabriel Lightfoot. The reader thinks of Hardy’s bucolic swains and the reddle-man’s cart disappearing over Egdon Heath, whereas instead there lumbers into view a 42-year-old hotel chef with an incipient bald spot and inadequate leisure. On the other hand, Hardy would doubtless have cocked a knowing eye at the complexities of Gabe’s personal-cum-professional life, the fading nightclub singer avid to marry him and bear his children, and the pair of business associates keen to bankroll a swish Pimlico restaurant with his name above the door.

The first sign that all might not be well below stairs at the Piccadilly Imperial, built in 1878 by a Victorian industrialist and once visited by Charlie Chaplin, comes when Yuri, the Ukrainian night-porter, is found dead in the basement store-room. While the coroner diagnoses a drunken fall — much to everybody’s relief — there are other discoveries to set aside the contused and naked body and the two black binliners containing his worldly goods. Chief among them is ex-waitress Lena, a prostituted waif from Moldova, whom Gabe ends up installing in his flat and, somewhat to his surprise — she is utterly charmless — falling in love with. A close second is the slimy restaurant manager’s people-trafficking scam. Meanwhile, from the northern fastness of Blantwistle, comes news of Lightfoot senior’s mortal illness. Love life a mess, professional future uncertain, family skeletons capering through his dreams, Gabe starts to fall apart.

Like Ali’s best-selling debut, Brick Lane — there is no geographical resemblance — In the Kitchen is a novel about modern urban tribes, diaspora and mono-cultural smash. In a work environment where ‘every corner of the earth was represented’, Gabe and fuddled teenage trainee Damian are the kitchen’s only home-grown staff.