The Devil in the Kitchen (12 page)

After service Pierre would sometimes offer to give me a lift somewhere and I’d ask him to drop me in the King’s Road. I might go to the Up All Night, where you could, surprisingly, sit up all night drinking coffee. I met girls and they seemed to find me amusing, but relationships rarely progressed further. My success rate at pulling wasn’t great because I didn’t have a huge amount of courage when it came to making the first move. I was in the Up All Night with Eddie Davenport, the young clubbing entrepreneur, when he introduced me to a posh girl whom I shall call Suzie. She was a beautiful girl, but for weeks nothing happened between us. Sometimes I would stay at Suzie’s flat in Chelsea, sleeping on the floor while she was in her bed. Then one night she just came and cuddled up with me and after that we started going out with each other.

I was in the kitchen one lunchtime when Pierre the Bear said, “Your old boss Albert is here.” I glanced around, expecting to see my former mentor clutching a soup ladle. “No, he’s in the restaurant,” said Pierre. “He’s come for a meal. You can make it for him.” Albert ordered the Gelée de Lapin aux Champignons Sauvages, which, I must say, I went to a lot of trouble to make. I took care to ensure it was pretty and arty, then I placed the dish on the passe for Pierre’s approval, but he didn’t compliment me on the presentation. Instead, he raised a hand above the plate and brought it crashing down onto the food. Then, as if he were playing a piano concerto with one hand tied behind his back, he used his chunky fingers to mess up the dish. Rabbit terrine and mushrooms that had once looked glorious became a pile of roughed-up rubbish. Without saying a single word, Pierre had told me precisely what he thought of Albert Roux.

TEN

Raymond Blanc: The Oxford Don

A
LBERT ROUX AND
Pierre Koffmann may have had little time for one another, but they would have both agreed on one thing: discipline was the way to run a kitchen. The prospect of receiving a loud bollocking from either chef forced me to discipline myself: arrive on time, keep surfaces tidy, absorb the pressure and cook well. But there is a major flaw in severe discipline. It suppresses flair, imagination and talent. At Gavroche, remember, Albert was the one who came up with the menus and his brigade of Roux robots didn’t dare alter the recipes.

“Do this” was the command.

“Yes, Chef ” was the response.

I had never really paused to question the screaming and shouting. It seemed natural to me and I had come to accept it. “Must be prepared to take bollockings” was part of the job description. But when I was twenty-three years old, after I had done time with Roux and Koffmann, I found myself working for a chef who was soft and inquisitive. He was a man who actually asked for my opinions and who wanted to know about my passion for food. In fact, Raymond Blanc was so enthusiastic and encouraging that I discovered a sense of freedom, and that is when my confidence started to grow. It seemed as if I had done painting by numbers and now I was being given a blank (or perhaps Blanc) canvas.

It was Nico Ladenis who, in the winter of 1984, told me about a job going at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Raymond’s country house hotel in Great Milton, some eight miles from Oxford. Nico had called to say that one of Raymond’s chefs, Nigel Marriage, had handed in his notice, thereby creating a vacancy. Although Le Manoir had been open only for about six months, it was doing very well and was destined to win awards and become a huge success. In fact, the hotel’s restaurant already had two Michelin stars to its name, as Raymond had been allowed to transfer them from his restaurant Les Quat’Saisons in Oxford.

“You’ve got to ring Raymond,” insisted Nico. I was working for Pierre but I made the call and arranged an interview date.

My former employer Alan Bennett, by now a good friend, offered to drive me to the interview. We arrived at Le Manoir, originally Great Milton’s manor house, and my first impression of Raymond was, “Christ, he’s small.” The look on his face said he was thinking, “Wow, he’s big.” I did not get the job there and then. Raymond asked me to fix a date when I could do a two-day trial period in his kitchen.

Although the interview is a blur, I have a vivid, treasured memory of the meal that followed our chat. My chauffeur Alan had been kicking his heels for about an hour while I was being grilled, so to speak, and he had developed an appetite. When I said I was ready to leave, Alan declared that he had absolutely no intention of driving home until he had lunched in the restaurant. He invited me to be his guest and I accepted. It was probably the finest meal I had ever eaten and certainly the most expensive. The bill for the pair of us came to £134 (and I wasn’t even a drinker in those days). I can see each dish now as if it were on the table in front of me. I started with Terrine of Foie Gras with Leeks, Truffle and Wild Mushrooms
;
then I had Salad of Offal, which was made up of calf’s sweetbreads and calf’s brains; as a main course I had Pigeon en Croûte de Sel with a Sauce Périgueux (a Madeira-based sauce with veal jus and chopped truffles); and I ended the feast with a fantastic Soufflé de Pommes.

It wasn’t necessarily the ingredients that made the meal so magnificent. As I moved from one course to another, I studied each plate, and then it eventually dawned on me that these were the sort of dishes the best chefs in France were serving. Raymond was clearly more in touch with the development of cuisine in Paris than either Albert or Pierre. He was doing something new and exciting.

Magazines and books had kept me up to date with how the great chefs in Paris were refining the classical dishes, so while Albert was giving his customers classical cuisine—often masculine, hearty dishes like Daube de Boeuf (braised cheeks of beef in a robust sauce)— Raymond’s food was more feminine. The foundations of his food were classically French, but the concept was lighter. There were no full-bodied sauces. Raymond knew that Mother Nature was the real artist.

“What did you think?” asked Alan as we headed down the M40.

“It was visual,” I said. “There was freshness and lightness but it was so visual.” What I was really saying was, “I like his style. I want that job.”

A few weeks later I was back at Le Manoir for my trial period. On the first day I worked with Nigel Marriage, whom, fingers crossed, I would replace. I was also reunited with Stephen Yare, my old friend from Gavroche, who now worked in Raymond’s kitchen. The kitchen, incidentally, was tiny then. It was almost as if Raymond had set out to create an excellent hotel and restaurant in this old Cromwellian manor house but had given no thought to the kitchen from which to feed his guests. Its size, however, would work to my advantage. It is far better to work in a small kitchen than a large one because that way you learn more: you are always close to the action—if you’re on the garnish, you can still see what’s going on with the fish, or meat or hors d’oeuvres.

On day two Raymond came into the kitchen and said to me, “I would like you to cook me a meat dish for lunch.” I sensed it was make-or-break time. What would I give him? Or rather, what would I
need
to give him to get the job?

A few weeks earlier I had seen a cookery book that contained dishes by a Michelin-starred French chef called Jacques Maximum. One of the dishes was a tienne of lamb that was sliced and presented on the plate in a circular fan shape. What he had done looked as interesting as pink meat on a plate can look, yet it was clearly enough to inspire me. I thought I would cook the lamb for Raymond’s lunch, but I would try to improve on Maximum’s idea.

I pan fried the fillet of lamb and cut it into rondelles, just as Maximum had done, arranging it so that in the center of the plate there was a single circular piece of lamb, with the other pieces fanning out around it. On the outside of the fan I created another circle: a tiny turned potato sat next to a stuffed courgette, which was next to an aubergine, then another potato, and so on, until the circle was complete. I put tomato fondant on the aubergine and maybe on the courgette.

Then I added a couple of black olives to the dish. The plate was now the round border of a symmetrical picture of Provençal-style ingredients. I suppose it was circles within circles. Over the lamb I poured the roasting juices, juices that had been enhanced with rosemary at the end of the cooking to retain the freshness, and then I split the juices with a dash of olive oil.

The plate went out to the restaurant, where Raymond was sitting. It came back clean, closely followed by the man who had eaten from it. “Delicious,” said Raymond, who looked slightly shocked; I think because he had expected me to do a Gavroche-style dish. I was pleased, obviously, that he didn’t mention Jacques Maximum and assumed that he thought the whole thing had come out of my head.

But I had tapped into Raymond. When you think about it, the ingredients I had given him were always going to work because we all know that lamb, rosemary and Provençal vegetables go well together. What was significant was what I had done with the ingredients. I had given him a dish that was fresh, light, and above all, visual. It had everything that he responded to in food. Surely Raymond realized then that I was on the same wavelength as him.

However, he set me another challenge, asking me to cook him a fish dish for his dinner. I could only work with the ingredients that were in the fridges and ended up doing Panaché of Red Mullet and Sea Scallops with a Bouillabaisse Sauce. I can’t recall how I cooked it or how I presented it, but I don’t remember a complaint from Raymond.

I completed the trial, left on a Saturday, and on Sunday I got a call from Stephen Yare. He told me that Raymond had served his customers my tienne of lamb as a specialty. I was flattered and then came the offer of the job.

It was January 1985 and my days of virtual solitude were about to change. Five of us, including Stephen and his brother, Desmond— who worked on Pastry—decided to move in together, and we went to inspect the Bridge Inn in nearby Wheatley. Set beside the river, it seemed nice enough. We did a deal with the owner, took the rooms for a year, and I nabbed the only one that had an ensuite bathroom. “We have a nightclub here on Fridays and Saturdays,” said the owner as he was handing us the keys, “and there’s an admission charge. But as you’re living here, you won’t need to pay. You can get in for nothing.” We beamed with glee. It was as if we had just been awarded lifetime membership to an exclusive club in Mayfair.

After our first night we compared notes and all agreed that the place was overrun with mice. The Bridge Inn was infested. From then on we referred to our new home as either the Mouse House or, inspired by our place of work, Maison Mouse.

After our first Friday at work we returned late at night, pretty shattered. Deafening music blared from Maison Mouse. It was Fingles, the nightclub to which we got free entry. The club was directly beneath my bedroom and the earsplitting amplifiers rattled everything in the room, including me. I talked to the other lads and together we decided to take advantage of the free admission.

Fingles was the roughest nightclub in history. The blokes were rough, the girls were rough and the doormen were rough. They were all out to get pissed, get shagged and have a fight. Fingles was a rathole in the Mouse House. It took ten minutes to get from a table to the bar, not because there was a sea of people to push through but because the floor was littered with so much chewing gum you had to stop every three paces to peel the goo from your heels, otherwise you’d be glued to the carpet. Young, drunk lunatics pogoed along to Duran Duran’s “Wild Boys,” and there were cheers as the DJ played tracks by an up-and-coming singer called Madonna. Every now and again a punch-up would erupt and the “dancers” would form a ring around the brawlers.

To think that just days earlier we had gratefully clutched the hand of the owner as he awarded us VIP status. Now we wanted to throttle him. On Friday and Saturday nights, I would sit in Fingles with my Coca-Cola, observing the show. The thud of the music meant that Stephen and I became expert lip-readers. And I never scored. I was still far too inept at chatting up birds, and anyway, none of the Fingles girls ever walked over to my table; perhaps the chewing-gummed floor prevented them making the journey. In Chelsea I’d seen a bit of posh, but the Fingles mob reminded me of the Leeds I’d been happy to leave behind. It seemed strange that I had done time in the King’s Road, the buzziest place in Britain, and was now enduring a rather dull social life of which the highlight was a darts match in the local pub. There was one positive. During my days in Oxford I met Piers Adam one night in Brown’s, a burgers-and-steaks restaurant that’s still in business. Piers was standing at the bar, surrounded by beautiful girls, and introduced himself. He went on to become a highly successful nightclub impresario and we are still friends to this day and have been business partners.