The Substitute Ingredient

14:10

The call comes while Otto is breaking down a lamb.

Ferrucci's has gone into administration. Effective immediately. No deliveries. The van that was supposed to arrive at eleven this morning and did not arrive at eleven this morning is not going to arrive at all, ever, and the reason nobody rang is that there is nobody left to ring.

Ferrucci's supply, and have supplied since 2011, the smoked ricotta.

What the smoked ricotta is

It is in one dish. The dish is on the menu as tortelli, smoked ricotta, brown butter, sage and it has been on the menu since the restaurant opened.

It is the dish. Every review mentions it. Forty per cent of tables order it. There is a photograph of it on the website that a person who does not work here took in 2016 and that Otto has never been able to improve on.

The smoked ricotta comes from one family in Lazio who make about four hundred kilos a year and who sell it in Britain through exactly one importer, which is Ferrucci's, which as of 14:10 does not exist.

14:18

Otto rings the family in Lazio.

Otto's Italian is functional. The woman who answers speaks no English. The conversation lasts eleven minutes and ends with both of them understanding each other perfectly and neither of them able to do anything, because the cheese is not the problem — the cheese exists, in Lazio, right now — the problem is that it is a fresh cheese with a shelf life of nine days and there is no longer anybody who brings it to England.

She says she is sorry about four times. Otto says it is not her fault about six times. Both of them mean it.

14:31

Options, as established at the pass with Nadia and Bilal:

1. Take the dish off. Rejected in under four seconds, unanimously, with feeling.
2. Substitute a different smoked cheese. Otto has four in the walk-in. All four are wrong and Otto knows they are wrong without tasting them, which Nadia points out is unhelpful, which Otto concedes.
3. Smoke ricotta themselves.

14:40

They are going to smoke ricotta themselves.

Nobody in the kitchen has smoked a fresh cheese before. Bilal has smoked a duck. Nadia has smoked, at home, some almonds.

14:52

There is no ricotta.

There is ricotta in the sense that there are eleven kilos of ordinary ricotta in the walk-in for other purposes, and it is fine ricotta, and it is not the same cheese in any respect — different milk, different acidity, and, crucially, about forty per cent wetter.

You cannot cold-smoke a wet cheese. It goes grey and weeps and tastes of an ashtray. Bilal knows this from the duck, obliquely, and says so.

15:04

Nadia hangs eleven kilos of ricotta in muslin over four hotel pans.

15:30

Otto builds a cold smoker out of a chafing dish, a length of ducting he takes off the ice machine, and a hotel pan of wood chips, and sets it up in the yard where the extraction cannot reach it.

Three staff from the restaurant next door come out to watch. One of them takes a photograph. Otto asks him not to post it. He posts it.

16:15

First test. Forty minutes of smoke.

It is bad. It is genuinely bad — thin, harsh, tasting of the chips rather than of smoke, and Nadia says the word "bonfire" and Otto cannot argue.

16:20

Bilal says: "Less time, more air."

Nobody asks why he thinks this. He is nineteen and he has smoked one duck and he says it with the confidence of a man who has understood something, and Otto — who has forty-one minutes before the first booking — says, "Do it."

17:02

Second test. Twenty-two minutes, ducting propped open, chips damp.

Otto tastes it. Then he tastes it again. Then he takes it to the walk-in and tastes it against the last four hundred grams of the real thing, which he has been saving and which will do nine covers.

Nadia watches his face.

"Well?"

"It's not it," says Otto.

"Right."

"It's not it," he says again. "It's — " He tastes it a third time. "It's not worse."

17:11

Nadia writes the new menu card. She writes tortelli, smoked ricotta, brown butter, sage, because it is smoked ricotta, because that is precisely what it is.

19:40

Table nine, who have eaten here perhaps thirty times, order two.

Otto watches from the pass, which he never does, and which everyone notices.

The man at table nine eats about a third of it, and stops, and says something to his wife.

Then he turns round and looks at the pass.

Then he gives Otto a thumbs up, and goes back to it.

23:50

Bilal is on the smoker again in the yard, in the dark, with a notebook.

He is doing eleven minutes at a time now and writing down every one.