This little chef is found by a path on the North Davis Greenbelt, next to a very well-kept garden with lots of interesting features (that I am always a bit too nervous to sketch; it is a bit ‘as seen on TV’ and I am scared of the person who creates it coming out and chasing me away) but I could not help to sketch this little chef. He is very little, and maybe a bit more plump than I have drawn him (which I did with the Lamy Safari fountain pen with carbon platinum ink). I never knew any chefs that look like this, though I did know a fairly rotund cook once (I think called Ron? It was a long time ago when I was a very young waiter), lovely chap. I was a waiter when I was a teenager, going on many catering jobs with my mum in places all over north and west London, usually synagogues, often people’s houses, the odd conference centre, one time I even did a catering job at the Houses of Parliament, serving tea and sandwiches to some people at a Jewish Single’s party hosted by an MP. One time I even served tea and wine at the Israeli Embassy. Wow, this was a long time ago, the mid-90s. The little chef does remind me of the 90s though, specifically the ‘Little Chef’, the restaurant chain much loved by motorists around the country. I maybe ate in one once? We didn’t stop in them very often, the occasional service station on the way up north maybe, but I do remember going to the ‘Happy Eater’ when I was a kid, and throwing up violently right after eating some of their alleged food. If you are from Britain and remember the Happy Eater, it was another restaurant you’d find off the motorway but its logo was of someone putting their fingers down their throat, I kid you not. The clue was there all along. It reminds me of a similar chain restaurant in France, ‘Flunch’, named for the sound you make when vomiting into a bucket. However the Little Chef was a notch above these places, from what I understand. Actually everything I know about the Little Chef comes pretty much exclusively from my correspondence with a friend of mine (Jacki) who worked at one in the mid-90s somewhere in the Cambridge area, we would write to each other a lot back then, proper letters on paper like in the old days (before emailing, decades before social media), and she would tell me all about everyone who worked there, the people that would come in, everything. Except about the food, come to think of it, I presumed it was good because she wouldn’t tell me about anyone being violently sick, as I had been in the Happy Eater that time. I think it was a good place to work. I enjoyed reading all those letters, and would write back with my own stories about working in the Asda Coffee Shop, or serving triangle sandwiches to Ronnie Corbett at a gallery (which I did once, and he was utterly fantastic). So when I see this little chef as I’m on my walks or runs on the Greenbelt, I do think of those tales about the Little Chef back then.