Humble Pie (5 page)

In January 2001,
Royal Hospital Road
picked up its third Michelin star. On the same day, my wife handed me the keys to a blue Ferrari. Lovely as the car was, there is no doubt in my mind which one was the greater prize. I’d longed for that third star, and now all my hard work had paid off. It meant, officially, that my restaurant was the best in London because, the year before, two other chefs lost their three-star status. To this day, mine is still the only three-Michelin-starred restaurant in London.

My third star wasn’t just important in its own right: it meant that bigger, better things were around the corner.

There were changes at Claridge’s Hotel, and my father-in-law, Chris, went to a meeting. There he met a man who has amazing vision, John Ceriale. John immediately threw down a
challenge by asking if I would be happy to do breakfast if we were to take over the restaurant at Claridge’s, but there was a catch. I’d have to cook the breakfast.

Chefs hate doing breakfast, and Chris knew this, but it would be great to run the Claridge’s restaurant, and other people would be interested in this. So Chris replied yes. Later, he told me that he had wondered how to break this news to me. He even said that, had it been a problem, he would have done the breakfasts himself. God forbid!

We were both thinking the same two things. First, that we were not going to lose out on this amazing opportunity, and second, a successful breakfast business would pay the rent, leaving the income from lunch and dinner to us.

A deal was struck. I would be allowed to put my name above the door, and, what’s more, my restaurant would have its own entrance. I was thrilled. With its old-style glamour, Claridge’s is a place I’ve always loved, and its history is amazing. It’s been open in one form or another since 1812, and everyone has visited, from Queen Victoria to Margaret Thatcher, from Donatella Versace to David Beckham. The restaurant was very much a place I liked to take Tana, so I was determined to get everything completely right.

When it opened in October 2001, we had spent £2 million on furniture, decoration and all the rest. The room, in shades of my favourite aubergine, is airy and elegant. I chose all the china, glassware and cutlery myself.

I was determined to run our kitchen at
Claridge’s
and the kitchen at
Royal Hospital Road
at the same time. I was lucky because I had a great right-hand man coming with me to
Claridge’s
, Mark Sargeant. But the drive from Mayfair to Chelsea took just seven and a half minutes. If I had to, I could flit between the two.

We spent a lot of time practising our menus. We always trial new dishes over and over until they are perfect. As a result, the menu at
Claridge’s
is exquisite.

Claridge’s
was an immediate hit. In our second week of trading alone, we welcomed some 1,500 guests. We were on our way, and I had proved something: it
was
possible to run more than one restaurant to the same high standard (the restaurant at Claridge’s soon won a Michelin star).

My next project was to open a restaurant in Glasgow. That idea was very dear to me, for obvious reasons. I liked the idea of having a success there. So we opened a seventy-seater restaurant inside Glasgow’s most popular hotel at the time.

Glasgow was the first British city to have a Versace store outside London. The city is very swish, so I felt there would be a market for our kind of cooking. I appointed David Dempsey as chef, and the food was brilliant. Within a year, this new restaurant had won a Michelin star.

In 2002, at the request of our business partners, we opened a restaurant in The Connaught hotel in Mayfair. The Connaught is a very special place – but its restaurant had become as stodgy as hell. I got Nina Campbell to redecorate it, and appointed Angela Hartnett as chef. She has an Italian background, and the menu was going to have a modern Italian touch – a real change for us. I agreed that our move into The Connaught could be filmed by the BBC2 behind-the-scenes series
Trouble at the Top.
This was good publicity, both for the restaurant and for Angela, who dealt with me and the cameras really well. The restaurant, once the complaints of some rich old ladies had died down, was a huge success. Angela’s restaurant, which we called
Menu
, went on to win a Michelin star in 2004.

After setting up at The Connaught, which was not easy, I must admit that I did feel as if anything was possible. But, when the idea of us taking on
The Savoy Grill
came up, I couldn’t quite believe it. The Savoy is probably London’s
most famous hotel. On a typical weekday, you could find any number of cabinet ministers dining at
The Savoy Grill
. It was very, very traditional. It still had a dessert trolley, for God’s sake, heaving with trifles and jugs of buttercup yellow Jersey cream. Changing it was going to be like messing with the Holy Grail.

The American designer Barbara Barry gave the room a new sense of glamour – but it still felt like
The Savoy Grill.
In the kitchen was Marcus Wareing. Marcus combined a modern approach with the best features of the old
Grill
– the dessert trolley, for instance, and he continued to serve dishes like omelette Arnold Bennett. The critics loved it and so, too, did its customers.

Since
The Savoy Grill
, we have gone from strength to strength. The
Boxwood Café
, my take on an American diner, has been a huge hit, proving those who said that I can’t do anything other than fine dining totally wrong. I was keen that it would have a child-friendly environment, and it is the only one of my restaurants where I’ll allow my own kids to eat. The Knickerbocker Glories are worth crossing London for.

More recently, we opened
maze
in Grosvenor Square. Jason Atherton, its chef, won a Michelin star inside a year. I would say that the
maze
bar is one of the most glamorous in London.
Abroad, we opened two restaurants in hotels in Dubai and Tokyo.

It is now over a year since I opened in the hard, brutal world of New York. We opened in Florida around the same time, but that was simple, compared to the politics, union problems and food critics in New York. Now we are preparing for a big opening in Los Angeles. This, in many ways, will be as important and challenging as New York, and it will need all my time at first, and back-up from London.

Every time I open a new restaurant, the critics fill the newspapers with the same old stuff: I am spreading myself too thin, or this new restaurant has to do with vanity and money, rather than the passion that was behind
Aubergine
.

It’s total rubbish. In the weeks building up to an opening, I am there, totally. I’m hands-on, putting the chefs through their paces, testing every dish, over and over. All my chefs have worked for me for years, and I trust them completely. People ask me who does the cooking when I’m not there, and my answer is always, ‘The same people who do it when I am there.’

What makes me really pissed off in the kitchen? What makes me explode? Lies.

A chef can overcook a scallop, he can overcook a fillet of beef, but what he can’t do is lie about it. It’s not that he’s lying to me. He’s lying to the customers, too, and I won’t have that.

The second thing I can’t stand is dirty cooks. I want clean trousers, clean hair and clean nails. If a chef is proud about how he looks, he’s proud about how he cooks. Since we brought in the idea of the Chef’s Table – a table right in the heart of the kitchen, where customers can see all the action – this has been more important than ever.

We have a Chef’s Table in all our fine dining restaurants now, and they’re usually booked for months in advance. In 2002, Tony Blair celebrated his forty-ninth birthday at the Chef’s Table in
Claridge’s.
It’s also been used by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Richard and Judy, Ronnie Wood and Kate Moss. That one table alone earns £1 million a year for our company.

The third thing I can’t stand is clock-watchers. There’s no room for clock-watchers in a kitchen. You could be working twenty hours on the trot. So what? That’s the way it goes.

But there’s one thing above all that I have grown to despise, and that is a fat chef. I should know. I was one myself once. That’s why I started running. I did my first marathon in four hours and fifty-eight minutes. My best
time so far is 3.30 and fifteen seconds, which I got in 2004. My dream is to break 3.30, and I can definitely do it.

How quickly can I tell if a new cook is going to be good enough? Within a day, is the honest answer, and inside a week you can see whether they’re going to be with you for two years or five.

The easiest way for a new chef to impress me is with their seasoning. That gives me a real idea of what a cook’s palate is like. You could be the most able cook when it comes to roasting a scallop or braising a turbot, but if you can’t season what you’re doing, you’re lost.

What about women in kitchens? I love women chefs: they’re intelligent, they’re fast learners, and they can be tough. As for the effect they have on the boys, it’s entirely good. Put a woman in a kitchen and discipline will improve. The guys hate being told off in front of the girls. It’s a playground thing – they just find it embarrassing.

So how often am I in the kitchen myself? Well, in spite of the business and all the travel, my TV work, the recipes I write for
The Times
and my books, and all the other millions of drains on my time, I am still heavily drawn to my restaurants. Three to four nights a week I am
at
Royal Hospital Road,
and for three to four lunches.

Royal Hospital Road
is the top restaurant, but it only has twelve tables. That’s forty seats. It’s closed at weekends, and it’s the same team for lunch and the same team for dinner. It’s fool-proof.

It’s a perfect space – like eating inside a fucking Chanel handbag. It turns over £3 million a year, and makes between £500,000 and £750,000 a year in profit – all from this tiny little restaurant. To say that there’s a waiting list for a table is less than half the story. Once the list is thirty to forty tables long, we have to stop taking names: it’s just too embarrassing. They’re never going to get in.

What makes a three-starred Michelin restaurant? Consistency. Every night must be to the same very high standard.

People tend to say, ‘God, Christmas must be a nightmare for you.’

No, that’s wrong. January is the same as December. May is the same as March. The menu is seasonal, and it changes between every ninth and twelfth week. We’ll change half the dishes one week, the rest the next. Nothing must be left to chance because this is the jewel in our crown.

Of course, there have been failures. The Glasgow restaurant was brilliant, but Scotland is the home of the deep-fried Mars Bar and the deep-fried Nutella-fucking-sandwich.

The restaurant was always fully booked at weekends, but during the week this was not the case. It was a place Glaswegians went to only as a huge treat. As a result, in three years of trading, we lost £480,000. No chef, however brilliant, can keep a restaurant open on just two good nights a week. It affects quality as well as profit, because good cooks thrive on being busy – and so, in January 2004, the restaurant closed.

Since then, whenever we’ve been planning a restaurant in a new city, we’ve always been extra careful to do our research, to find out what people really want. In the future, I’d love to open another restaurant in Glasgow. I love the place, and I’m extremely proud of my Scottish roots. But next time, I think we’ll go for something a little more informal. It’s a case of horses for courses.

And so to the TV series
Hell’s Kitchen,
one of the worst experiences of my life. The idea of the show was that I taught a group of celebrities to cook for real-life celebrity diners, with all the pressures of a busy restaurant. One of the celebrity chefs was voted off by the public every night.

I honestly had no idea of how big the show was going to be – the scale of the kitchen that they’d built or the size of the restaurant. ITV were offering me £40,000 an hour, so I would basically earn half a million pounds for two weeks’ work.

As was obvious to anyone who saw even five minutes of the show, I wasn’t too impressed when I met the contestants. To be honest, I didn’t know who half of them were.

How was this lot going to cook food to a high enough standard to be served in a restaurant?
More to the point, how were they going to do it quickly enough?

I was furious with the production people for the amount they were allowing the contestants to drink late at night. This might have made some of the footage they got better, but I had a fucking restaurant to run. The battle lines were drawn. They were all supposed to be cooks, so I treated them like cooks.

The real problem was that the producers were only worried about making a ‘reality’ TV programme, and the contestants were only worried about how they looked on that programme, while I was attempting to run a proper fine dining restaurant. As for Angus Deayton, who was presenting the show, I soon found out that he was taking the piss out of me. They wanted me to chat to Angus on camera – you know, a bit of friendly stuff – but the show was live, so they couldn’t make me. He was fucked then.

‘Fuck off, Angus,’ I could say. ‘I’m not interested. I’m too busy.’

I went to ITV and I said, ‘You’re going to have to make big changes. You’re going to have to get some proper chefs in to do some of the preparation.’

Then came my big bust-up with Amanda Barrie, the
Coronation Street
actress.

She physically tried to punch me. At that point, I walked.

I said to ITV, ‘She’s going to have to be removed. What are you waiting for? For someone to be stabbed?’

My walking out never came out in the press, but let me tell you now, all hell was let loose.

That night, I walked all the way home to Wandsworth, still in my chef’s clothes. It was really weird. I felt completely spaced out.

I thought, ‘If they’re not going to listen to me, I’m not going to do this any more.’

The next day, on the Sunday, I just didn’t show up, at which point ITV finally agreed to get some proper chefs in. And so I agreed to go back.

Jennifer Ellison, who won the show, worked well, no doubt about it. So did Al Murray. There was a level of respect there, and quite a lot of talent. To this day, he puts on amazing dinner parties. He’s a fucking good cook. He takes it seriously.

The one who really got on my tits was Edwina Currie. There were members of the public (and even quite a few of my mates) voting to keep her in the show just because they loved watching her wind me up. She was just so fucking lazy and totally irritating.

The occasion for the big bust-up came when she didn’t prepare her special.

It was about ten minutes past six when I said to Edwina, ‘Where’s your special? What are you doing today?’

‘I haven’t done it,’ she said.

‘Say that again.’

‘It’s not really my dish, and I don’t like it, so I haven’t done it.’

The production people were going mad.

I looked at her and I said, ‘You’re a fucking joke, aren’t you?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘One minute you are shagging the Prime Minister, and now you are trying to shag me from behind.’

It just came out. I hadn’t planned it at all. I knew how everyone was running around kissing her arse, totally scared of her. Well, I was not scared of Edwina Currie – a bully who shagged the Prime Minister. It was music to my ears when she finally got kicked out. The silly cow.

I was hugely relieved when the whole thing was over. Three days later, I was off to South Africa to run a double marathon. I pulled out after six
hours. My legs were fucked. That was the first time I’d failed to finish a race, and it was all because of Edwina Currie. I was just exhausted. I had nothing left.

Soon afterwards, we had an email from Channel 4 saying that they wanted to do a second series of
Kitchen Nightmares
, the other TV series that I had been doing. The money they were going to pay me leapt from £50,000 to £100,000. I was amazed. Then ITV asked if I would do a second series of
Hell’s Kitchen.
We heard that an American company was interested in the idea of doing the show, so I was off to Los Angeles to meet them. Two days after that, Channel 4 came in with a million-pound offer to keep me there. In the end, I did do the show in America, but I passed on the offer from ITV in the UK. Why? Lots of reasons.
Hell’s Kitchen
didn’t make much sense to me. I worried about the way it made people think about me, about the kind of attention it brought.

The show attracted lots of knobs, like the coughing major from
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
He started giving me shit. On ITV2, there was a programme of extra material from the show, which Jordan was presenting. Hilarious. There she was, walking up and down this red carpet, reading from a card held right up in front of her fucking nose.

‘Hello, and welcome to
Extra Portions from Hell’s Kitchen.’

Laughable, really.

So why did I agree to do the same show in America? Simple. They wanted to do it without using so-called celebrities. The contestants were members of the public who seriously wanted to cook, and the prize for the winner, at least for the second series, was the chance to have their own restaurant in Las Vegas. In other words, it was a real, tough competition. I was in charge of the talent, and I could make all the decisions about cooking and food.

I’ve now signed for five seasons in America. I don’t think there’s a chef in the world who would have turned down the kind of money they’ve put into the show, and it has paid off. The ratings are amazing. It’s a fantastic success. More importantly, it’s given me a profile in the US that I could only dream of before.

Of course, after my television shows, I’m part of that strange celebrity world. So much of it is a pile of crap, though. We’ve had everyone in the restaurants, from Pierce Brosnan to Beckham, but we don’t have special arrangements for celebrities. There’s no secret telephone number for them.

Tana and I have become quite close to the Beckhams, and I do get frustrated when people
are so wrong about them. When you get to know them, you realise how normal they are – and how normal they want to be. Compared to them, though, I’ve had an easy time from the press. The press have been nice to me. I try to work with them as much as I can. You have to look on it as a relationship, but it’s a dangerous one.

Because of everything I’ve done, there are some amazing moments. I get lots of requests – will you come and cook at my house? One request was to cook for Blair and Russia’s President Putin at Downing Street – which was a great thrill. There was a split second when I was standing between Blair and Putin – one of those moments when I couldn’t help but think how far I’d come.

And there are my cookbooks. I see them very much as working with my TV shows. People see how to do the recipe on screen, and then, hopefully, they are interested and want to know more. So they go out and buy the book to try things at home.

I do use cookbooks myself. It’s a myth that chefs don’t. I own about 3,500. I pick them up everywhere I go. Can I learn anything new from all these books? Of course I can. You can use a book for ideas, but you can’t learn to cook from
books. That’s impossible. There has to be some natural flair.

Whom would I recommend to the home cook? Nigel Slater, without a doubt. He’s not a chef. He’s a cook. He’s never come into fashion and he’ll never go out of fashion. He has a timeless quality, and he’s good beyond belief.

But it’s the restaurants that really do it for me.