The Devil in the Kitchen (10 page)

It struck me at the time that while it was good of him to apologize, it was wrong of him to do so in private. If he wanted to bollock me in front of everybody, that was fine. But if he wanted to be correct about it, he should have apologized in public too. When I eventually came to run my own kitchens, I promised myself that if an apology was due, I would make it in front of the rest of the staff.

Despite instilling fear, Albert also instilled confidence. In one of those B&H moments in his office he told me that I did the work of two or three men. And he said, “I know which plates are yours on the passe, even when you don’t deliver them. I can tell they are yours just by the way you dress them. I know it’s your hands that have dressed those plates—no one does it like you. You have more natural talent than anyone else in this kitchen.” What had I done to earn such compliments? I can’t remember. But I had seen talent in other chefs—it’s just the touch, the way the food falls, the way the sauce pours, the way the garnish is put on the plate. If you watch a great chef, he moves elegantly as he cooks. Someone can tell you how to do a picture. They can give you a paintbrush and paper and then give you instructions— paint a circle, paint a square, put a brushstroke here and another there. But the paintbrush is in your hand, so it all comes down to your artistic talent. Can you paint the perfect circle? Can you paint the perfect square? Are the brushstrokes too heavy or too light? Are the colors right?

O
N DAYS OFF,
I would walk down Queenstown Road, cross the Thames at Chelsea Bridge and head up to the King’s Road. The King’s Road was a honeypot. Young people swarmed there. Punk was born here. The place was magical. This stretch of road running from Sloane Square to Parsons Green was one long, crowded parade of ultratrendy clothes shops, cafés, bars and pubs. If you were broke, it didn’t matter because you could still enjoy yourself by strolling and watching, observing the confident young rebels on show. It was the early eighties but there were still a few die-hard punks around, with pierced nostrils, swastika tattoos on their foreheads, spiky hair dyed pink, purple and lime green—and those were just the girls.

I would go to Pucci’s, which to me and other King’s Road wanderers seemed like the coolest café in the world, to sit and drink coffee and smoke. Queues of people would hover outside waiting for a table and Pucci himself (no one knew his first name) was nicely grumpy. If the queue was too long, he’d dash over to the people at the end of it, yelling, “Go away! Go away!” Customers who annoyed him got a blast of his pidgin English, “Shard up!”

I went to Pucci’s so many times that eventually I became a familiar face. I struck up conversation with other regulars, an assortment of New Romantics and youthful aristocrats. I was a lowly cook, but I was welcomed into the Chelsea set; it was a slow process because confidence was a requisite factor for membership, and I didn’t have much of that. I was fascinated by these people, their creativity and their energy. I’d sit there making a single beer last me the whole night. I had Pils because it was all part of the image, but I didn’t like the taste of beer and lager, and in the eyes of my new friends it would have looked odd to order a glass of wine. I positioned myself close to the social whirlpool, though, and slowly I was sucked in.

Just as Gavroche had a hierarchy, so did the Chelsea set. At the top was Robert Pereno, who, I think I’m right in saying, was the man behind the one-night clubs that eventually became raves. To me, Robert was the king of the King’s Road, and the role of queen played by his girlfriend, Lowri-Ann Richards, a singer and actress. Then there was James Holdsworth—Little James—who helped Robert instigate the one-night clubs. And there were others on the scene and doing clubs: Rusty Egan, who was in Visage, and Steve Strange. They might hire Crazy Larry’s for the night, and when I finished work, I’d head off there.

The Chelsea set also included some wild young aristocrats and children of upper-class parents. The kids tended to have been at Eton before bailing out of education and life as we know it. They wanted to lose themselves in the mayhem of the King’s Road. Chelsea was a magnet for junkies, be that drug takers or adrenaline-addict chefs. Nowadays, young aristos want to have good careers rather than spend their days on the King’s Road, but there was a period of a few years— a window in time, I suppose—when rich kids managed to escape responsibility and parental pressures, and the King’s Road is where they went. I’d grown up thinking aristos were snobs who looked down their noses at the working classes, but the ones I met then didn’t give a damn that I was a cook with a state-school education who earned in a year what they got in weekly handouts from their folks.

Often they spent their money on drugs, heroin being the drug du jour. There was dear Charlie Tennant, the son of Lord Glenconner, who was polite and gentle natured but also heavily into smack. His parents tried to help him by booking him into the Lister Hospital, just off the King’s Road. They could have picked a different location. Charlie would break out of the Lister and only had to walk a few hundred yards to get a fix. Chronically afflicted by the effects of the drug, he used to bounce up and down. The last time I saw him was in Fulham Broadway, where he had a house. He invited me in for a coffee and did one of those obsessive-compulsive shuffles a hundred times before putting his key in the front door. Sadly, Charlie has since died, and inevitably there were one or two others who had drug-related deaths, though I’m pleased to say there were many members of the set who managed to avoid the temptation of drugs.

Among the girls there was Victoria Lockwood, who went on to marry Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, and Sophie Ward, daughter of the actor Simon Ward, who became a well-known actress and then left her husband for a lesbian lover. Then there was Willy Harcourt-Cooze, a Pucci’s regular. He’d sit at one of end of the bar while I sat at the other, and for months we didn’t introduce ourselves, but when we finally got chatting, Willy told me how his father had died when he was a child and I told him about my mother’s death. A bond was formed, and years later when I opened Harveys, Willy became a regular customer and remains to this day one of my closest friends. One of Willy’s girlfriends, by the way, and another Pucci’s regular, was a young Rachel Weisz, who went on to become a great actress and win an Oscar for her role in
The Constant Gardener
.

I talked to my new friends about food with such passion that they all thought I’d lost the plot. They were amused by my obsession. In terms of their usual topics of conversation, eating came after drinking, clubbing, hair and clothes. A day in the life of the Chelsea set member would go like this: Coffee outside Dino’s, then off to Oriel at Sloane Square to sit outside and bird—by which I mean women—watch, back up to Pucci’s for a drink in the evening and then on to Crazy Larry’s. In between, there were clothes to be bought. Dressing up was a big thing. In their colorful waistcoats and frilly pirate shirts, people looked like something out of Adam and the Ants. One of my favorite garments was a black T-shirt with the words “Bobo Kaminsky” stamped on it. I bought it from Jones and paid a fortune for it. Don’t ask me who Bobo was. At times it seemed as if I was the only one with a job. When they were getting up, I was already into my sixth hour in the kitchen.

My Yorkshire accent disappeared and I started to sound a little posh. If you’re in your late teens or early twenties and go off to the States or Oz, there’s a good chance you’ll end up sounding like an American or Australian. My journey from Leeds to London was not that far, but I can understand why, as a young, impressionable lad, I ditched the accent in an attempt to fit in. I thought, I’m just a boy from a Leeds council estate, but I’ve been accepted by all these toffs. Three years earlier I’d used my spare time to fish or poach, and now I was in this melting pot of rock ’n’ roll people. The contrast seemed extreme. They did what they wanted, when they wanted, and that attitude was infectious.

In the kitchen I absorbed the knowledge that made me a chef, while on the King’s Road I absorbed a confident attitude, passion for life, wildness and pace. If a rock star was born, then it must have been on the King’s Road.

It was also on the King’s Road that I met the man who would become my publicist, the rock star’s PR, if you like. Alan Crompton-Batt was the manager of a brasserie called Kennedy’s, and when I was in there one day, sitting at the bar having a coffee, he got chatting. He had been an
Egon Ronay Guide
inspector, he said. “You must know the Box Tree,” I said. And he did. He had eaten in its dining room when I had worked in its kitchen.

You may never have heard of Alan but there is every chance you’ve heard of Jamie Oliver, Gary Rhodes, Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal. Would you have heard of the chefs, I wonder, if it weren’t for Alan? He was the creator of the modern-day phenomenon that is the celebrity chef. He was the Dr. Frankenstein who saw the public relations potential of the monsters skulking in the kitchen. His clients did not include Jamie, Gary, Gordon and Heston, but Alan was the man who set the ball rolling back in the eighties, after he’d left Kennedy’s. He and his wonderful wife, Elizabeth, had their own PR business that specialized in promoting the cooks as well as the food. Before then, chefs weren’t really discussed in editorial conference.

Alan knew the restaurant business well and had a great palate. He was the master of the long lunch. I have never known anyone go into battle like Alan. You could have a conversation with him in an empty restaurant at two o’clock in the morning when he was virtually comatose but he’d still manage to come up with ideas as his eyelids flickered. And the next morning he would be at his desk at nine, putting those ideas into action. He was on the ball.

A few years ago I had an extremely long lunch with Anthony Ellis, chief executive of Carlton Food Network. Anthony and I had enjoyed four bottles of Tiagnello, a powerful Tuscan red, when Alan arrived at the restaurant and bounded up to our table, full of energy. “That’s not fair,” he said after asking how much we’d had to drink. “You two are well ahead of me.” He was determined to catch up and catch up quickly, so he ordered two bottles of Tiagnello and a burgundy glass, which holds an entire bottle. He poured a whole bottle into the glass and downed it in one. Then he got the next bottle, filled up the burgundy glass and demolished that as well. It was an amazing sight. Alan looked at his astonished companions and said, “I am now on your level.” Though having drunk the wine so quickly he only managed to utter those six words, then he was totally fucked, off the walls.

One day I got a phone call from the Lanesborough Hotel, in Hyde Park Corner. Alan had spent a long afternoon there and staff had had to help him out of the building. On the hotel steps he had clasped on to the railings and wouldn’t loosen his grip. Something inside him was saying the evening was not yet over. Staff tugged at him but he hung on like a man dangling from the cliff top, the sea lashing the rocks below.

He was a tortured soul, but he was also immensely clever; in his youth he had been accepted at Oxford but turned down the place. He could be drunk but still profound and would come out with highly intelligent comments and witty remarks. His memory was faultless and he could recite meals he had eaten decades earlier.

Looking back to those early days when I was a regular at Kennedy’s, Alan was always kind enough to give me free drinks, and we would talk food and restaurants, and one day he said to me, “You’re going to be the first British chef to win three Michelin stars.”

NINE

Dining with the Bear

M
Y DAYS AT
Gavroche came to a hasty, unexpected end in September 1982, when Albert picked up a soup ladle and began waving it in front of my face in the middle of his three-star kitchen.

I was feeling grouchy anyway. For a week or so I’d been suffering from a stomach problem—the beginning of my ulcer, maybe—but I still turned up at the kitchen every day and worked late into the night. I was a sleep-deprived, mop-haired wreck with a stabbing pain in my belly, and when head chef René rounded on me with a thunderous verbal assault, I answered back. I can’t even remember what started him off; I have no recollection of what I was supposed to have done wrong. But Roux robots were not supposed to answer back—it showed a fault in the programming—and my attempts to defend myself only increased the volume of René’s rant.

The sound of the commotion must have penetrated the glass walls of Albert’s office and he emerged at a galloping pace, swooping up a ladle from a kitchen surface. He was the knight embracing his lance, and he was heading toward me. Was he going to dispose of me with a long-handled, copper kitchen implement? Was I about to be ladled? Adrenaline pumped through my twenty-year-old body, but with my stomachache and exhaustion, I didn’t have the patience to stand there and take a bollocking from the boss. Albert stopped his charge when he was a foot in front of me and raised the upended ladle into the air, moving it in a pecking motion in front of my face.

The spoon part of the ladle came toward the bridge of my nose, then, before it could touch me, it was swiftly retracted. Forward, back, forward, back in pendulum fashion, though metal and skin never connected. Albert stared at me and, swinging his ladle, he uttered the words, “Now [peck] . . . you [peck] . . . listen [peck] . . . to [peck] . . . me [peck] . . . my [peck] . . . little [peck] . . . bunny [peck].”

“My little bunny”—now that was patronizing. By all means give me a bollocking and shout at me, I thought, but please don’t patronize me. I grabbed the spoon. “That’s it,” I said to him, as the rest of the robots carried on mechanically with their chores. “I don’t like being patronized. I don’t need this shit.” Then I marched. I marched out of the kitchen, changed out of my whites and buggered off. I don’t think Albert tried to stop me leaving, and anyway, I scarpered pronto. The magic chef ’s little bunny vanished.

I found work at a small restaurant on the other side of the river, in Battersea Park Road. We only did about thirty covers a night, but boy did those customers eat well, because I was cooking them Gavroche-style food at a fraction of the price. The kitchen was run by a man called Alan Bennett—no, not the playwright. We got on well and I would later work for him at the restaurant he owned, Lampwick’s, in nearby Queenstown Road. When I look back on it now, I can see that Alan was a very gentle man, soft and kind, and perhaps I needed reminding that the world was full of such people. In the kitchens where I had worked, there wasn’t much gentleness, no softness or kindness, and my social life was nonexistent: I didn’t have a girlfriend to give me affection.