I Kept the Knives and Let Go of Everything Else

The fan

The last thing you switch off in a restaurant kitchen is the extractor fan. Everything else has its own small ceremony. The gas gets closed at the wall. The fridges get propped open with a wooden spoon so they don't go sour. The pass gets wiped down with the same blue cloth you've been wringing out since 2015. But the fan runs the whole time, so loud you stop hearing it, a sound that lives in the bones of your skull for nine years and then one night is simply not there.

I flicked the isolator down at twenty past midnight on a Sunday in October. The noise stopped and the silence came in like water. I remember standing there with my hand still on the switch, listening to a car go past on Fourth Avenue, listening to somebody's dog, listening to the tick of the metal cooling. I had never once heard the sound of my own kitchen empty. Forty one years old and I was crying in a room that smelled like burnt butter and Handy Andy.

Neels came through from the front with two glasses and the last of a bottle a regular had left us. He didn't say anything clever. He put the glass down on the pass and said, "It was a good room, Ang." That was it. Nine years of partnership, of shouting at each other about the wine markup, of him doing the books at the corner table on a Tuesday with his reading glasses pushed up into his hair, and that was our whole eulogy. It was a good room. It was.

What it actually cost

People want the closing to be a story. They want a villain. They want to hear that the landlord was greedy or that the area died or that the food went off. None of that is true and all of it is a bit true. Our rent went up. Our covers went down. Load shedding took out three Fridays in a row in the winter and a generator that could carry a full kitchen was going to cost us more than we made in a good month, so we did what everyone did, we ran the gas and cooked in the half dark and told people it was atmospheric, and some of them believed us, and some of them just stopped booking.

The thing nobody tells you is how long it takes to die. It is not a heart attack. It is a slow subtraction. You stop replacing the sous chef. You take the lamb off because the yield is wrong. You start doing the deliveries yourself in your own car because the courier bill is eleven hundred a month. Then one day Neels sits you down and shows you the spreadsheet and you realise you have been personally funding your customers' dinners for about fourteen months.

I was known for one thing, really. A smoked snoek and potato terrine, pressed overnight, cut into a slab and seared so the outside went to glass. Sounds fussy. It wasn't. It was a fish my ouma used to buy off the back of a bakkie in Melkbosstrand and I put it on a plate in Parkhurst and charged a hundred and forty five Rand for it. People drove from Bryanston for that terrine. And it turns out you cannot pay a rates bill with a terrine.

The Fourways house

Here is the part I am still a bit ashamed of. I was renting a house in Fourways. Four bedrooms. A pool I swam in maybe twice a year. A garden I paid a man to mow because I was never home in daylight. I had that house because a chef with a restaurant is supposed to have a house, and because when I was twenty six and working doubles in Illovo for eight thousand a month I had promised myself something.

It was twenty six thousand a month. I have to write that number down because for a long time I refused to say it out loud. Twenty six thousand Rand a month for a building I used as a place to lie down. I gave notice in the January and my mother, who is not sentimental, said, "Ag, you were never in it anyway." She was right and I hated her for a week.

The strange thing about giving up a big house is that people assume something moral has happened to you. Somebody at the Spar in Broadacres said, with her head at an angle, "So you're downsizing," and I understood that she meant she had heard about the restaurant.

The maths

By March I was cooking private dinners. Somebody's fiftieth in Hyde Park. A dinner for eight in Sandhurst where the host wanted to talk about the wine for forty minutes while I was trying to get a sauce to sit. My knives went into the canvas roll, the same one I bought in 2011 at a place off Louis Botha, and the roll went into the boot of the Corolla next to a crate of chafing dishes, and the Corolla went wherever the work was.

That was when where I lived stopped being about me.

I sat down with a piece of paper, because Neels had trained me to sit down with a piece of paper, and I did the sums like a courier company. Fourways to Hyde Park at four in the afternoon on a Thursday. Forty five minutes if the M1 is behaving, and the M1 does not behave. Fourways to Sandhurst, same. I was doing eighty kilometres a day and burning about four thousand Rand a month in petrol and, worse, arriving at people's houses already flattened, already having lost the argument with the traffic before I picked up a knife.

And I needed a second fridge. That is not a joke. Everything I do lives in a fridge for a day or two before it goes on a plate, and I could not put a second fridge in a garage that lost power four hours a day on stage four.

So the calculation was not about lifestyle. It was: how close can I be to Hyde Park and Sandhurst, and can the building keep the lights on. That was the whole brief. I started looking at apartments for sale in Sandton the way you'd read a delivery schedule, not the way you'd dream. Two bedrooms, one of them for stock. Backup power that actually worked. Somewhere I could park a car full of chafing dishes without walking three hundred metres in the rain.

A better kitchen than mine ever was

In April I cooked in a house in Sandhurst and I want to be honest about what happened to me in that room.

It was a kitchen the client barely used. Induction, two ovens, a blast chiller. A slab of stone in the middle you could have laid a body on. The knife drawer had a set that had never been sharpened because it had never been used. Everything worked. Everything was quiet. There was no burr on the edge of the counter that catches your hip, no fridge door you have to lift and shove, no gas ring with the dodgy igniter you light with a lighter you keep in your apron pocket for nine years.

I stood in there with my canvas roll open on that beautiful stone and thought: this is a better kitchen than any kitchen I have ever owned. And I have owned a restaurant.

I waited for the bitterness. It didn't come. What came instead was something flatter and cleaner. I thought, they have the room, I have the hands. And nobody in that house that night knew or cared that I had once switched off an extractor fan and stood in the dark. They just ate the terrine and one woman closed her eyes at the table, which is the only review that has ever meant anything to me.

Small on purpose

I bought in the end. Not big. Two bedrooms in a building close enough that I can be in Hyde Park in twelve minutes and Sandhurst in nine, and the second bedroom has the fridge in it and a shelf of vac bags and my mother thinks this is tragic. I looked at Hyde Park apartments for a while and did the sums and the sums said no, so I moved my line a little and stopped pretending the postcode was the point.

The thing I did not expect was the dignity of it. Choosing to be small is not the same as being made small. When the restaurant closed I was shrunk by other people, by numbers, by a landlord's letter. When I signed for a flat I could actually afford, I did the shrinking myself, on purpose, with a calculator, and that is a completely different feeling in the chest.

Neels helped me move. He carried the fridge up with a guy from the building and then sat on my kitchen floor drinking a beer with his back against the cupboard and said the place was nice, and I could tell he meant it and also that he was measuring it against what we used to have. So was I. We are allowed to.

I am not going to tell you this is a comeback. I don't have a restaurant. I probably won't have one again, and there are Sunday nights, especially in summer when the highveld storm comes in around five and the light goes green over the buildings, when I miss the noise of a full room so badly I have to go and stand on the balcony. I cook for strangers in their houses. I drive home at eleven with my knives in the boot. Some months are thin.

But I am nine minutes from work now instead of forty five. My food is better than it was in the last two years of the restaurant, because I am not exhausted and I am not afraid. And when I looked at all those Sandton apartments with their little floor plans, what I was really looking for was not a home in the way I used to mean that word. I was looking for a place to keep my knives, close to the people who want to eat.

Turns out that was enough. Turns out it was more than enough, actually, which is the part I am still getting used to.