i miss the kitchen - 24.11.2024
back in 2018, fresh out of a postgrad in experimental music and struggling to make rent, i got a job working in paradise slice, a pizza shop located on brick lane, east londons tourist hub and food street (note, far from my favourite, just the most popular). paradise slice was part dysfunctional family, part slice shop/resturant and part makeshift cookery school. while you’d start at the counter, taking orders, pouring drinks and prepping, after about a week or two, you’ll get your time at the make station.
the family circa 2019
pulling pizza has an rhythm to it. you can take your time, gently stretching the dough out evenly, gently pocketing and lavishly flouring the board, but the timer will always catch up to you. topping is fairly routine but you’re always against the clock, too slow and the pizza sticks to the board and good luck getting any type of circle from it, no matter how many touch ups you do in the oven (a risky experience that more often then not, leaves you with small contact burns, best to be avoided). after a while though, that time sinks into your movements, becomes so natural to your body its like a rehearsed dance around your station.
at the time, i was working four days weeks cut into early and late shifts, often finishing my early shifts at 5/6pm, grabbing my 3 large bags of equipment and setting off to the other side of london for rehearsals of whatever dance piece i was working on at the time. getting home at 1 or 2am, after a straight 4 hours of rehearsal, i was always moving, constantly a flurry of motion, rarely sitting still apart from those rare mornings on the weekend reading on the sofa. likely my relation between dancing and cooking was forged in the synchronicity and lack of processing time going from cooking to dancing, with barely time to breathe.
the balance was physically and mentally exhaustive, leaving me achy, underslept, underpaid and hungover. even so, i miss the tempo of it a lot. the way your body just moves around performing complex actions without so much as a thought sent in its direction.
dough prep
paradise slice was heavily inspired by the new york lower east side tradition of italian slice shops, so much so specialist ingredients were brought in to make it taste athentic to the ny tradition. the slight difference being the freedom we were allowed in kitchen. after a certain point you were free to try out any combination you wanted (pending the approval of your shift crew and the limitations of whatever we needed to use by the end of the day). the crew themselves were a jumbled bunch of artists, musicians, skaters and students, non of whom had learnt to make pizza before, but left being able to pull a 20inch pizza base with their eyes shut.
my own time to leave came in 2019. looking for something with more stable hours, better pay and tangentally related to art, i took a job as a videographer at a local gallery. i returned once to work an event and catch up with my old colleagues but was sadly too late to return as a customer before paradise shut in 2020, a victim of raising rent prices and the damage COVID19 and a lack of proper governmental protections did to the service industry.
i’ll always remember those times, though the synchronicity with which i moved through kitchen and the rehearsal space, and in my facination in how we move through comfortable and uncomfortable space.