“Oui, chef,” I say and toddle back to my place at the larder where I’m helping fellow apprentice Julie make crab salads. Julie is squeezing thin trails of bright orange roasted capsicum coulis around circular towers of food in such a way that the trails merge to form a perfect belt of colour. “Could you place four coriander leaves at equal spaces on the coulis?,” she asks quietly.

I pick up a coriander leaf. I think I recognise it. Earlier, I spent ninety minutes going through bunches of the stuff, selecting leaves of perfect colour, condition, shape and size for this very purpose. I lay it on the coulis. An edge breaks the creamy surface. Then I notice its base is not lying square against the salad. I push it in. More coulis creeps onto the leaf. I try to straighten it. Some crab falls out of the tower of food. I poke at the meat and my finger smears a lick of coulis up the plate. I take a step back to judge my handiwork. It looks like a weasel’s been at it. “Julie,” I whisper. “I think I’ve fucked this up.”

I glance nervously over to Brahimi, who’s standing at the top of the kitchen. At once, he’s managing to bark orders, plate dishes, check his Blackberry, sup peppermint tea from his personal pot and inspect every single plate that returns from the restaurant to ensure that guests have been finishing their dinner.

“I can’t serve that!” he shouts at a chef in his French accent, which is as pungent as a one-year-old brie noir. “You’re fucking wasting my time!”

I automatically duck at the reprimand, like a WWI soldier cowering in a trench from perilously close shell-fire.

“Is it sometimes difficult to understand him?” I ask. “Yes,” Julie whsipers. “And sometimes he changes what he says and it’s still your fault.”

Like me, Julie’s dressed in a white chef’s tunic and navy blue apron. Unlike me, she has a basic grasp of the laws of food craft. She looks at my salad and grimaces politely. In the time it’s taken me not to be able to put a leaf down, she’s arranged intricate layers of blanched cucumber, seasoned, dressed and topped with garnish seven other salads. Perfectly. Julie is a first year apprentice, just 19 years old.

I’m here to discover what it’s like to be an apprentice working under the celebrity chef Guillaume Brahimi at his famed Bennelong restaurant at Australia’s Sydney Opera House. Married with three daughters, Brahimi is, in the words of his maître d’ of twelve years Craig Hemmings, a “complex character” who “sometimes behaves terribly”. He arrived in Australia in 1990 following four years in Paris working under Joel Robuchon – Gault Milau’s chef of the century and notoriously, in Hemmings’ words, “the biggest arsehole in the business”. After launching Pond in Kings Cross, which earned two chef’s hats in the Sydney Morning Herald’s prestigious Good Food Guide, Hemmings hired Brahimi to work at Bilson’s (now Quay) at Circular Quay, where, between 1995 and 1998, he pulled-in the full compliment of three chef’s hats.

Now, displaying the fanatical demands and brutal temper of his mentor Robuchon, he’s brought the same prize to the tranquil white shells of the legendary waterside venue, where he serves contemporary Australian cuisine (with huge French influences), memorably described by the Herald as, “breathtaking… the comfort food of kings”. Indeed, he’s repeated his three chef’s hat score and has been rewarded by a room that purrs with an average of 200 guests every evening. But a speck has just appeared in the crème brule; during September’s Good Food awards, one chef’s hat was publicly removed from this most public and fanatical of chefs. 

You wouldn’t have wanted to be a fly on Brahimi’s tablecloth the moment he heard that news. In common with many chefs of his stature, he has a reputation for crushing ferocity. Alex Ensor, his ex chef de cuisine at Bennelong who now drives the kitchen at Salon Blanc in Woolloomooloo, remembers rows that went “beyond verbal,” adding, “it was like a game of rugby in there.” And his advice to this fresh apprentice is simple: “Take some headgear”.

***

Jose, one of GB’s (as all the apprentices call him), two chefs de cuisine, tells me I’m to pick the biggest leaves out of a fragrant mountain of dewy basil for Brahimi’s signature ‘Basil Infused Tuna’. And when I say ‘pick’, I mean a specific and precise clip, between the thumbnail and the pad of the forefinger, in exactly the right place between leaf and stem.

The central job of the apprentice is to work on the insane nano-details of the food you’ll toss into your mouth with barely a thought. Everything possible is done by hand. If they could find a fire-breathing boy to lie with a boiling stockpot on his face for eight hours, he’d be here. Really, you wouldn’t believe how many teenagers finger your food in the hours before you eat it.

Take the broad beans. They’re shelled, boiled, peeled and then have their umbilical cords sliced out with a special knife, all with the concentration of a fine-art restorer, by a student who’s fulfilling the four years of forty hour weeks they need to qualify. The trick of it all is to be accurate, fast and exactingly consistent, and the catch is there is no trick: it comes only with painstaking practice.

As I pick, I chat to my comrades de cuisine. Next to me is a smiley redhead with ruined arms called Patrick who’s tearing the tops and tails off French beans.

“Wouldn’t it be quicker to do that with a knife?” I ask him.

“Yeah, but this is the way GB does it.”

“Why?”

He looks at me with a mad grin. “I don’t know. You don’t ask.”

On my other side is Emmanuel, an 18-year-old Filipino who finds it difficult to make eye contact and who focuses on his work with an intensity that sometimes looks like fear. He’s working at a long metal tray filled with meaty wisps of crab meat. Meticulously, with the tips of his fingers, he’s feeling every juicy fibre to check for shell fragments. 

“How do you take it when you when you got told off?” I ask.

“Sometimes, I break down,” he whispers. “But inside. You’ve got to keep it inside.”

I’m still picking as Jose looms up behind me. He tosses gently through my leaves, picks one up and examines the cut. “Beautiful,” he says, before walking off.

Brahimi, meanwhile, has just arrived back from a meeting with his accountant. He can be heard loudly telling Jose and Bo how his heroes in the French national rugby team called him to say bonjour at 2am that morning. He only stops to address the whole room to tell us there’s “260 booked this evening”, before going back into conference with his two chefs de cuisine.

The apprentices themselves have little direct contact with Brahimi. Orders initially pass through his two lieutenants, then the chef de partie, who take charge of individual sections, such as meat, fish, pastry or cold larder, where I’m stationed. The students don’t even have that much contact with each other during their short breaks: they’re either napping in the Opera House’s green room or necking simple pasta dishes in the empty Bistro. And they’re too busy to chat during service: there’s no slack at all in the Brahimi kitchen. There’s not even enough, I’m assured, to give the qualified staff the chance to play the traditional initiation stunts on them, such as separating short grain rice from the long grain or fetching buckets of steam.

As I obsess over my picking, I begin to understand why the apprentices put themselves through it. I slowly become infected by it all. The basil I’m working with is no longer a plant, it’s the greatest fragrance I’ve ever known. The leaves become precious things; prized and prime ingredients. And my job – our job – isn’t to slog repetitively for hours over a chopping board anymore. It’s to play with magic.

You can tell the chefs who’ve become bewitched. When they talk about food they do it with gesticulations so sensual it’s as if they’re miming porn. Of course, all chefs take a secret pleasure in watching people place their creations on their tongue and seeing their eyelids drop involuntarily with the pleasure of it. They’re unceasingly thrilled by the seductive power their talent affords them. And it is a power thing. But there’s also something else – a greater madness yet that can befall these conjurers of cuisine. You can see it when you talk to Guillaume Brahimi. “Perfection,” he says to me from across the table. “L’amour du travail bien fait. The love of the perfect work.”

Bramimi is explaining his ethos, as taught him by Pierre Bardini. It was a mentorship with this Parisian Bistro chef that preceded Brahimi’s stints at La Tour D’Argent and Robuchon’s three-star Michelin Jamin, but followed the happiest memories of his childhood  – with his mother in the kitchen, a place he describes as a “refuge” from the schooldays that, as a dyslexic, he found so tough.

Is it possible that the pursuit of perfection could drive a person mad? “Absolutely,” he says, with a shallow nod. “Only the mathematician can achieve true perfection.” He takes a sip of espresso, his top lip pushing under his teeth as if to strain out every whisper of flavour. “My definition of perfection is not the same as it was one year ago. We’re better than last year and last year we were better than the year before.” Which unfortunately for him, is a sentiment with which the critics at the Good Food guide could not agree.

“You know,” he says, “I’m sure there’s a lot of politics in the guide and I’m sure they need to sell the guide.”

If he’s insinuating that the guide make certain decisions purely to create publicity, he won’t acknowledge it. When challenged, he just shrugs and smiles as if to say, “well what do you think, Mr Silly?”

In this brooding, defensive mode, Brahimi is intimidating enough. In the kitchen, his ire must be petrifying. Whilst admitting he loses his temper frequently, when asked for a straight yes or no over whether his admonishments have ever turned physical, he replies “no,” before begrudgingly admitting to, “a little bit of pushing around.”

Nevertheless, Brahimi insists he treats his charges fairly. Unlike with many restaurateurs, he pays his apprentices by the hour (they earn between A$282 and A$492 per week depending upon experience), with double-rates for overtime. And tonight they’ll be earning it, with 260 diners having made reservations and expecting the finest food on the continent, seamlessly served.

***

“I need eight degu steak, four blue-eye, six amuse bouche and two degu tuna,” he shouts in a strange squeaky voice. “Oui!” shout the crew, as one.

“And we need two mixed leaves. You know how to do that?”

“Oui chef!” they reply in bedraggled union. “Well fucking do it!”

All you can hear above the clank and rattle of the cooking is Brahimi barking strings of numbers, the word “fuck” and the truncated names of delicacies. 

“What I say about the duck?” Brahimi squawks at some poor bastard. “What I say about the fucking duck?” And then, to a waiter, “If you’re coming in the kitchen you better fucking wake up!”

All we apprentices can see of him is the top third of his head as it sticks over the top shelf of the pass. Already this evening, one of our number – a veteran of two weeks who I’d seen whisking egg whites and wearing an expression that was an unforgettable combination of boredom and terror – has resigned. My job, meanwhile, is spooning blood-orange granita into frosted glasses. Even this – the simplest job in the kitchen – is proving beyond me. I keep dropping crystals of scarlet ice onto the side of the glass and smudging the frosting with my stupid fingers. Automatically, I look to Julie for help.

These youngsters display two types of confidence. Inner and outer. Outer, I’ve realised, is bad. Julie’s got the right stuff; quiet, steady and subservient, she gives the impression of being one-hundred percent fluster-proof. Brent, meanwhile, has the other stuff. There he is, contrary to the direct orders of his boss Darren, putting the Prime Minister’s leftover pain au chocolates in a Tupperware box for later. 

“I said no,” says Darren. Brent grins. “What?” shouts Darren, aghast at the cheek.

“For my breakfast tomorrow.”

“What do you mean?” Brent fronts up to the pastry boss and says, “Don’t I deserve breakfast?” Then, slowly and deliberately, he writes his name on the box. All day, Brent’s been in trouble, yet he honestly looks as though he thinks its hilarious. Later, I ask him if he minds the aggro. “No it’s fine,” he says. “Compared to my last kitchen. My old boss used to hate me,” he says, with a wounded look. “Why?” Genuinely mystified, he replies, “I’ve no idea. Once he told me, ‘I wish you were dead’.”

At the top of the kitchen, GB turns to two runners who’ve been standing still for four seconds and shouts, “If we’re doing fuck all, can we clean up, huh?” And then louder, “Fucking hell, if we’re doing fuck all, can we clean up?”

Brahimi’s massive wrath instils a strange and powerful loyalty in his troops. Many of them tell essentially the same story: an epic early balls-up and an apocalyptic bollocking, followed by a pat on the back and an encouraging word the next morning. In that redemptive moment – a welcome back into the clan when all seemed utterly lost – their devotion is forged. As Patrick says, “You’ll do anything for that feeling again”.

To the chefs, it’s all about pleasing GB. The floor may be full of paying individuals but for us apprentices they don’t exist. Instead, customers take the form of an invisible pressure that starts in the thin hours of morning and, with the deepening of the night, swells and swells until it’s almost overwhelming. It’s at this point, when things are at their most frenetic, that the atmosphere in the kitchen takes on an almost metaphysical quality. It’s as if the sheer force of effort forces a collective consciousness – a sort of hive mind – into being. It’s not surprising the bond between these talented and impressive people becomes so strong and their fates so devoted to the crew, the kitchen and their leader.

By midnight, after sinking five soufflés and reacting – to the voluble rage of poor Darren – with a chuckle, Brent’s taken off pastry duty to be “retuned”. The rest of the chefs, meanwhile, have finally vanquished the seemingly immortal pressure. The relief is such that everyone becomes a bit emotional. Not least Brahimi…

“We’re on a journey,” he tells me, leaning, all louche and sweaty, against a doorway. “We’re on a journey of life. We’re on a journey of what we do. The day the journey stops is the day it’s over. I consider my work a journey. And I’m getting better and better. And that’s the journey of work, that’s the journey of life.”

I decide this might be a good time to ask how I did.

“The boys told me you’re a perfectionist,” he says. “You did well.”

“What about the apprentice who quit?” He pulls on his coat and gives a final Gallic shrug. “I can’t even remember her name.”

As he moves to leave the kitchen, Brahimi’s last words to his brigade at the end of this brutal and entirely typical night’s work are “OK guys, not bad”. His guys, as one, respond, “Oui chef!”

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Words & photos copyright 2005-2010 Will Storr