At Scott’s in Mayfair, the VIP diners arrive with bodyguards and the kitchen spends £45,000 on fresh fish every week. Jay Rayner goes behind the scenes
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It doesn’t matter how glamorous the performance; backstage is never pretty. At a little after seven on a weekday morning the chaos of backstage at Scott’s in Mayfair has expanded on to the pavement of Mount Street outside. Yesterday’s linen, bundled up in red cloth sacks, sits alongside crates of empty glass bottles. There are bales of cardboard from boxes that once contained all the ingredients cooked here, and crammed bins. A kitchen porter oversees the industrial-scale dumb waiter that trundles it all up to street level from the basement alcove where it was stored last night. Witness: the debris of London’s finest fish suppers.
And so begins what will be an 18-hour day in the long life of one of London’s landmark restaurants, the biggest of big West End shows. What the diners see is the performance, full of grace and artful choreography. But if you can get behind the scenes, and few do, you’ll find a massive crew: of cooks (obviously) but also of kitchen porters and suppliers, of junior waiters and managers, fine-tuning the experience in real time. You don’t notice them when you’re a customer, which is as it should be. You’re not supposed to. But a trip here backstage reveals the inner working of an elegant albeit complex machine, all in the service of pleasure. There’s no point pretending. A meal at Scott’s is expensive. A bill of £100 a head is not uncommon. What you’re paying for is what you never see.
Related: A day in the life of Scott's restaurant - in pictures
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