When I first made the move to London to be an actor, I found myself broke and lonely very quickly. I was living in a single room attic in a lady called Cathy’s house in Kilburn Park alongside her elderly father and a french man called Fred that I never saw once in six months.
I got the first hospitality job I could which, in my opinion, was a slam dunk. A place called ‘Bubba Gump Shrimp Company’, an American fish and seafood restaurant that is based on and centers around the Oscar winning 1994 film Forrest Gump. It was right in the heart of Piccadilly Circus located in the gargantuan Trocadero building and was an exciting and scary new opportunity and at the tender age of 21, with an unhealthy expectation of what this London move would bring me, I jumped into the frying pan feet first and hands in the air.
Before I go any further, despite what it may seem like I’m leading up to, I am not in any way denying that I met some incredible people there, some of which I still am friends with to this day. Some people that will probably read this still work for the company and hey – all power to you. It is a family in a lot of ways and there were many reasons I ended up staying there for nearly 2 years. But what you need to know about Bubba Gumps, as an entity, an idea, a lifestyle, is that it is
Fucking
Mental.
In not an entirely bad way.
My first experience of the franchise was a few years earlier, on a sixth form trip to New York. We were hoarded into this movie memorabilia laden shrimp shack that seemed like it belonged in the depths of Alabama. Forrest Gump productions shots littered the walls, the film was on a continuous loop on various plasma screen’s nestled in the decor, and the staff were bright eyed and bushy tailed, laden with bright red baseball caps covered in dozens of badges and wrap around aprons.
They charmed us with their American twang and quizzed us on the movie – What three US presidents did Forrest meet? What was Forrest’s number in the college football team? It was a lot of fun and the shrimp was so fresh and delicious; you couldn’t get through all of it without feeling like you were going to explode. It just kept coming. The whole experience was awesome.
So when I saw an ad that they were opening up their first restaurant in Europe I was excited. I could do that! I’m good with people, I could wear a baseball cap, why not?! I was stunned when I first walked into the site – it was HUGE. It just kept going and going and going, groups of brightly coloured red and blue booths grouped underneath corrugated iron huts. The whole restaurant fit 420 people. I had no idea what I was in for.
The first 2 weeks were training with the team from the US. Ambassadors from Florida, New York, California etc to teach us how to be the best Gumpers possible. Trivia, food knowledge, drinks knowledge, the marketplace (a gift shop that was also a waiting area. See what they did there?) you name it, we needed to know it. We had regular exams to see if we were up to scratch. We all had 10 Gumper commandments to live by and were spot checked often to see if we had memorised them.
‘Number 5. Do the right thing when no-one is watching and be proud of your efforts.’
Some didn’t make it past the first day, some the first week. Only the strongest Gumpers survived.
The head honchos from the US along with the London management team had slowly started to pick out their favourites. Who would sell the brand the best? Who would entertain and dazzle with the movie knowledge? Who would be able to sing a birthday song in front of 200 people and not choke? We were whittled down to what seemed to be a mixture of the biggest personalities and the hardest workers. People who were deemed ‘natural leaders’ were given the must anticipated reward of a Red Hat. Those who were bestowed with such an accolade had the responsibility of their team on their shoulders. It became increasingly clear that this job is not for the fainthearted, mentally or physically.
One of the first cultural differences that came to light was our uniform. The sparkly All American Prophet that was Director of Training called Shawna. A middle aged, incredibly well dressed woman who was a boss bitch by all accounts. She had the brightest smile – almost too bright – that hypnotised you into doing anything she wanted. She had a very specific idea about the London launch and was on a one woman mission to make it come to life under an enormous amount of pressure.
Her eye was caught very quickly by my friend Josie. She was Swedish, incredibly charming and pretty with blonde dreads piled on top of her head. She was full of life and a very hard worker, but something about her rubbed Sparkly Shawna up the wrong way.
‘Hey sweetie?‘
‘Yes?’
‘Do you think you could pop to Primark and see if you can find some other jeans? I can’t stop staring at your tush and as lovely as it is, it’s a tiny bit too sexy for work.’
We both stared at her in wonderment. She stared back.
‘In the employee handbook it states that regulation trousers are flared jeans or brown cargo shorts. Skinny jeans are not permitted, this is a family restaurant after all!’
We looked down at our red aprons and name badges. Sexy was not the first word that popped into our heads. And bear in mind, this was 2013; you couldn’t find flared jeans in the UK for love nor money. I understand that fashion changes, I have a pair of flares now that I love, but BROWN CARGO SHORTS?! My legs are so short they border on stumps. This was a crisis.
Over the two weeks of boot camp training and a 10 million dollar refurbishment later, we were ready to open. The day before the US team trainers left (who we had grown incredibly attached to, partly because they were amazing human beings but also in a please don’t leave us, we are not ready for this, kind of way) they took a group of us to one side and told us, in no uncertain terms, that we were screwed. The legend goes that Sparkly Shawna flew back to the US a few days early in tears.
We were on our own.
‘It’s a cavernous, laminated, wipe-down, deep-fried, hokey simulacrum of a restaurant, sucking up shoals of tourists in the catering equivalent of industrial fishing.‘
The Independant
The reviews were in and they were not good. There were three immediate problems. One was that the American charm of a fictional seafood shack set in the deep south just didn’t seem to translate to a colder, more uptight British audience as the rain lashed again the windows. Nobody wanted to be bothered with a quiz whilst they were eating their food. Nobody was buying into the Forrest Gump fantasy.
The second was the fact that it was situated in between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, one of the busiest areas of London. Tourists with limited English who would often wander in out of curiosity were often completely overwhelmed, and didn’t take kindly to the US style service that had – in this setting – all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
The third was the fact that, bar New York, every single Bubba Gumps is situated near a body of water. A vast lake in Louisiana, the twinkling ocean on the Floridian coast, the Santa Monica Pier. Not in between TGI Friday’s and M&M world. The shrimp that were flown in from Vietnam were vastly subpar quality wise and the portions were measly to say the least. The bountiful cones of shrimp in the US that went all the way to the bottom were now nestled on a bed of cabbage to cut costs. Those who had the same experience as I did in the US were often left disappointed and were not afraid to let us, as servers, know it.
In the first few months, we were often almost empty. We would wander the halls like ghosts at the feast, trying half heartedly to coerce our tables into agreeing to do a quiz or asking the manager on shift for the 10th time that night to take the service charge off.
Another thing that we started to notice that the Trocadero building is a fucking death trap. You would go out the back door to take the bins out and find that the floor just stops. You would be clutching the bin bags whilst teetering over a 2 story drop next to a broken down escalator in an empty shell of what once was another unit lost in space and time.
We would often have no gas, no water, no lighting. We would all go next door to Chiquitos for lunch and hope we would have an evening shift to go back to. In the back of our minds we started to panic – no customers meant no shifts and no service charge. A few jumped ship to TGI’s but most of us stayed because of each other. They were my first group of friends and I relied on them immensely.
But at the weekend… it was a whole other story. The place EXPLODED with life and very quickly all 420 seats were filled. Kids birthday parties, stags and hens, exhausted tourists, people pre-drinking before hitting clubs like DSTRKT or Piccadilly Institute. As servers, we went from looking after 3 tables of 3 or 4 people to trying to control 8 tables of 10, 15, 30 people even. It was CHAOS. Birthday songs with the complimentary ice cream became almost impossible to do and your popularity started to truly be measured by how many friends you could find to sing along with you.
Fights would break out, groups would rack up huge bills at the bar and refuse to pay. Some put glass in their babies food and demand a refund. One fateful Halloween my friend Katy had to take a police statement whilst dressed as half Jekyll-half Hyde.
Children would run around screaming and try to rip the fire extinguishers off the walls. We ended up having to chain all the condiments and menus to the tables.
We would often have to stay late to tidy up the trashed dinner hall. We would clean every ketchup bottle top, polish every glass. A particular low point – that will stick in my mind forever – was being on my hands and knees cleaning a dishwasher filter with a toothbrush at 2am. I cried the whole bus journey home.
But the Bubba Gump empire waited for nobody. If you didn’t like the heat then, quite literally, get out of the kitchen. Due to the size of the restaurant and the speed in which you had to keep up, If you were on a Saturday double you would end up walking around 19-20km a day. I quickly learned how to carry 4 plates at once (a skill I still have) because if you couldn’t you were just not keeping up. The physical strain on your body really started to take it’s toll and despite me SHEDDING weight during this time I was always tired. I would sleep until 3pm, get up for work and start all over again. At least the tips were better now.
But still, the daytimes were quiet and the mental weekends weren’t nearly enough for the company to pay the HUGE overheads. Management were at breaking point to pay the 6 figure rent each month and pulled out all the stops to get bums on seats, whatever the cost. They needed a marketing ploy, a gimmick, something that would stand out of the streets of Piccadilly and be able to lure unassuming tourists in for an overpriced seafood lunch.
Enter, Louie the Shrimp.
Yes, that is me.
Now full disclosure, I was not the only person who braved the Louie the Shrimp costume. The 6ft pink polyester monstrosity was quickly identified as an escape plan for a few hours and therefore a few others decided to brave the claustrophobic sweaty shell to get outside (kind of) for a bit and away from waiting tables.
When I was inside Louie, I came alive. I was feeding my Disneyland fantasy and took great pleasure in dancing around for tourists and their camera phones, twerking for the masses whilst my mates upstairs were being yelled at by angry customers. It was a dream! I made that Shrimp a somebody. The hosts downstairs would become my backing dancers. I took selfies, signed autographs. I had transformed into what I came to London to be… a superstar. A huge, pink, fleshy superstar with a top hat and bowtie. I was truly living the dream.
Louie the Shrimp had became so successful, that I was called into the managers office at the start of one of my evening shifts.
‘We are taking Louie one step further.’
My heart leapt. A sparkly waistcoat? A pimp stick? A Youtube Channel? Where could he go? The possiblities were endless.
‘It’s really busy outside tonight. We think you should entertain the queue! We will have you a few handlers to guide you.’ (Louie had little to no peripheral vision) ‘We really love how much fun you bring people with this, it’s helping our social media presence in a big way.’
I went out the back into the vast cavernous wasteland of the Trocadero and hauled Louie’s huge head out of a bin bag on the floor. I dusted off his top hat and looked into his bright blue, dead looking, bulbous eyes.
It’s showtime Louie. Don’t let me down.
As I walked through the restaurant downstairs to the entrance, I felt my celebrity status surround me once again. Little kids grabbing their parents arms – ‘Look Daddy! It’s a big prawn!’ Yes. Yes it was. I am a huge prawn. I ignored the occasional ‘What the fuck is that?’ and continued my royal wave as I weaved through the tables, often knocking side plates onto the floor with my large tail, flanked by my two obedient handlers. I was the Hugh Hefner of seafood and NO-ONE was going to bring me down.
But I had forgotten one vital piece of information. Piccadilly Circus was very different at night.
My human eyes were where Louie’s mouth was, so through the black mesh I could just about see hundreds of people milling in and out of Leicester Square. I was jostled about as my faithful handlers found a good spot for me to perform. My heart was beating a little faster. The noise was deafening and the little AC fan inside Louie’s head wasn’t making things easier.
Suddenly, I was launched backwards. My handlers screamed ‘LOUIE!’ and I quickly realised a group of drunken guys had grabbed my tail and were attempting to swing me round in circles. A truly terrifying experience if you can only see a tiny box of light in front of you. At least if I fell I would bounce back.
My handlers, having told the guys to let go and fuck off, hauled me up again and yelled into my eyes ‘ARE YOU OKAY?’. I allowed Louie’s head to give huge nod and held my fish hands over my mouth-eyes, shaking my knees with fake laughter. My face told a different story.
Next thing I knew, a little girl who had just had dinner had come out of the restaurant was tapping my arm. I twisted to try and see her (and if she was a potential threat) and saw her sweet, smiling face beaming up at me.
My huge pink shrimpy head loomed down over her as I attempted to say hello, but before I knew it, she had drawn her fist back, and with all her might punched me square in the face.
All hell broke loose. The child was pulled away by her mortified parents and I roared like a wounded animal. I screamed at the handlers to get me the FUCK back inside, all falling on deaf ears as they fumbled to navigate a 6ft top Shrimp with a top hat back inside a packed out London restaurant.
That night, I took off Louie’s head for the last time. I had come to the conclusion that I valued my life more than any excuse to get out of waiting tables, and to tell you truth? The magic had gone. I watched other servers do the walk of fame, waving at Louie’s adoring fans and I clapped them as they went, but that wasn’t who I was anymore. I had changed. Louie had changed.
6 years on, I look back at my time as a Gumper with a mixture of fondness and pure terror. Despite rising to as far as I could probably go as a waiter there, I left in a fiery ball of flames as I screamed at one of managers (who was later fired for sexual misconduct) to leave me the fuck alone and then refused to apologise. My temper had taken over, my blood pressure was way too high and the bright lights of my next job, the Beefy haven that was Flat Iron, were waiting. I was ready to fling my Red Hat into the air and graduate Shrimp school.
Those people I met there were ace. We would work a double and then go to the Casino next door until 4am and get absolutely trashed. We all sat on a rooftop in Leicester Square and watched the Chinese New Year parade together. We would get dressed up to go out on the town then fall down the stairs in Leicester Square KFC (mainly just me to be fair) arse over tit. Those were the freshers experiences that I missed out on having not gone to University and I wouldn’t swap them for the world.
They say everyone should work at least a year in either retail or hospitality and they are right. You will never look a service worker in the same way again. I learned the definition of hard work, and that no job is ever below me. I will defend this to the ends of the earth and will encourage my kids to do the same thing. Everyone, at some point in their life, should have to clean a restaurant dishwasher at 2am with a toothbrush.
So yeah, that’s it really. One of my favourites stories and one that I had in mind when I made this blog in the first place. I hope it made you giggle and distracted you for a few minutes.
Stay safe.
Stay shrimpy.
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