I’ve seen love in various forms here at Mangal II. I’ve seen elderly couples come here week after week, ordering the same dishes whilst they’d lock eyes, hold hands and share warm conversations with genuine affection and companionship. I’ve seen young couples highly-charged on stimulants, hands all over one another and having barely touched the food, on their second bottle of wine, and they disappear off to the toilet together wrongfully assuming nobody has noticed. We’ve had breakups, first dates, engagement and wedding parties, tears and tonnes of snogging. Surprisingly, zero public proposals by the way.
I remember a couple who would come in every month for a number of years. I must have been in my late teens/early twenties. The man looked like a hybrid of Austin Powers and Guy Pierce; the woman the lovechild of Dobbie from Peep Show and another face familiar to me but now feels like a fading memory. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, they’d sit across the ocakbaşı grill each time – this being “their spot”, and order copious amounts of chicken wings and chops and any other dish which didn’t require cutlery to navigate their way through. What would proceed for the next two hours would be pure hell. They’d take a bite, hands covered in meat fat and oils, and then make out. Bite, and make out. On loop, non-stop, until the biting became more carnivorous ,and the kissing and touching manic and painfully grotesque. It was as if the food was a prop, and they were really here to consume one another. I’d watch in horror, and each time it was like a car crash – you know it’s happening, and the visual effects are negatively impactful and traumatic but you’re too stunned to do anything about it. Do I intercept and pull each victim away from the collision (in this case these two freaks and their colliding of tongues and saliva and lamb juice)? Do I call the emergency services? Or do I simply stand in horror, frozen with fear, and pray someone, something, takes this harrowing sight away from my peripheral?
Luckily, I didn’t have to do anything. They eventually broke up - I know this because the woman turned up months after her final visit with Guy Powers with another guy, with a new haircut, requesting the same seat. Thankfully, her dining companion was less horny, or by the very least, more respectful, and they didn’t finger fuck the hell out of one another. It was to be her last visit.
It’s Valentine’s Day today. Every restaurant (including ours) will be full to the brim with couples. New ones, old ones, blind dates and maybe even a couple of friends supporting one another as they forge the fight through eternal singledom and loneliness. It’s a day of love and one full of grand gestures, high net spend, too much alcohol and the high probability of disappointment. It is a stupid, stupid day and one the industry revels in because it will boost their weekly take-in and drive the economy into overload for a brief moment. January, as we all know, sucks for most industries, not least hospitality. Dry January seems to have really caught wind this year, spilling over to Frigid February. The public appear to be on the brink of financial collapse and that has been reflected in our and our peers’ services as numbers drop, fewer waste money on alcohol with a high mark up, and food intake is reduced.
And now? A celebration of love and grandiose expressions of wanting an other and being wanted and monetising that in a public setting to maintain the status quo of proving your relationship is strong and everlasting. Look, we’ve all been there. I sure have. But this is such a stupid day. I can absolutely attest that the customer profile who dines at Mangal II on this day, year upon year, is not our usual one. I could not give a fuck about releasing this think piece today because the customer who walks into my establishment does not even read my newsletter, let alone care. They’re here because they saw one of our videos on YouTube or saw an image of our Tahini Tart on Instagram, or some other superficial reason and they’ve been hooked in. They’re here because they want to impress their date and check off a restaurant on their list. They’re here because they’re just like you and me and we all do the same, too. I am them.
There are restaurants I care about and restaurants I don’t care about, but I visit out of morbid curiosity and pressure by my friends and industry peers to do so. For example, I have now been to The Devonshire thrice, and I still think there’s something unremarkable about the whole experience but the next time I’m in Soho and I want a ludicrously thiccc Guinness which makes zero sense just how much ass (body) it has, how overpowering its notes of black coffee and cocoa beans are compared to the very best Guinness I’ve gulped, you know I’m headed there. Why? Because Top Jaw says so on my feed every fucking day as they interview chefs (and Rishi Sunak – lost a lot of brownie points for that one, boys) for their favourite pub, and because my mates and I talk about it and because I am an industry gimp ready to follow the trails of what’s in and what’s out.
I go to all these places and I own one of these places and that’s why I know myself and what I would rather be doing on Valentine’s Day (avoiding it – this has been the way my whole life, whether I am in a relationship or not), and I know a lot of my customers feel the same, so the ones who do come in tonight will mostly be of a different breed. There’ll be snappy and nervous and demanding and ask for a G&T without looking at the drinks list (we don’t have G&T) or a Prosecco (we don’t serve prosecco by the glass). They’ll ask about Action Bronson because they say the Munchies video, or ask if they can have chilli sauce with their mains and whether it comes with rice or salad (it doesn’t). Some won’t turn up. And you know what, the remaining 70% will be absolutely delightful guests, but the 30% will stick out and our usual ratio of ‘Wonderful to Awful’ is 99:1. So Valentine’s Day really does stick out as a crap time of year for service. The other being office Christmas party season where you get the occasional lout who has begrudgingly been invited by colleagues and does not know how to behave in restaurants but is a bit too familiar with our toilets.
I don’t mean to shit on everyone’s Valentine’s Day. I hope you all have a lovely dinner, stimulating conversation, and crucially, get laid. I just can’t stop thinking about that man with chicken marinade dripping off his forefingers with his hands up the rear of the woman’s jeans. And then I temporarily plead for early Alzheimer’s to delete this memory forever.