The Devil in the Kitchen (33 page)

I decided my life would be enriched if I saw no more of him. It’s unlikely we shall ever know each other again. When I cut, I cut.

Back in 2001, Mati was shopping in Peter Jones in Chelsea’s Sloane Square when she bumped into Gordon’s wife, Tana. The pair of them were pregnant and they talked babies. Tana was due to give birth six weeks later, and when Mati asked her if she knew what the sex was, Tana said that she had no idea. Mati then said that we were expecting a girl and that we had already come up with a name: Matilda, to be named after Mati. Tana remarked, “It’s a lovely name,” and then the pair said good-bye.

A month or so later we heard that Tana had a baby girl and she and Gordon had named their daughter Matilda. Of course, Mati decided that we would have to choose another name, which is understandable. She threw me a book of children’s names and I flicked open the pages of names beginning with “M.” I came to the name Mirabelle, a variety of plum, and said to Mati, “Why not? We own a restaurant called Mirabelle.” Mati objected at first, but shortly after our baby was born, we were watching a movie in which one of the characters, a little French girl, was called Mirabelle. Mati saw it as a good omen and that’s how Mirabelle got her name, so I suppose I owe Gordon one.

Heston Blumenthal says I am extremely sensitive about friendship, and perhaps he is right. One Sunday Mati and I went to Heston’s restaurant, the Fat Duck in Bray, for lunch with a crowd that included my protégé Philip Howard and Mati’s wonderful parents, Pedro and Lali. I wasn’t on speaking terms with Gordon, but by coincidence he happened to be in the restaurant on the same day. He arrived with Tana, said hello to Heston and asked, “Any chance of a spot of lunch?” Heston didn’t know that we weren’t talking and breezily said, “Marco’s coming today.” Gordon didn’t let on that we had fallen out but simply asked where we would be sitting. When Heston said the garden, Gordon asked if he and Tana could have a table inside. Half an hour later I arrived with my mob. I saw Gordon and said to Heston, “What’s
he
doing here?”

Heston was bemused. “Who, Gordon? He’s come for lunch.”

I said, “You’ll have to ask him to leave.” Philip Howard, a very nice man, shuffled uncomfortably and said something like, “Oh no.”

Heston called Gordon away from the table. “Gordon, Marco says he’s not going to stay if you are here. I think you should have a word with him.” Heston then scurried away into the kitchen to hide and asked his maître d’ to keep him informed of developments.

Gordon came into the garden and said, “Thank you very much, Marco, for ruining a nice day.”

I said, “Why don’t you sue me for loss of enjoyment?”

He came back with, “You fat bastard. I’ve always wanted to call you that.”

I said, “Is that the best you can do?”

Gordon left. There was silence in the garden. The customers on other tables were gripped by the scene—it was another sideshow worthy of a standing ovation.

A
FTER LEAVING THE
kitchen, I lost direction. I was hooked on the adrenaline of service and it was extremely hard to kick the habit. It was all very well hanging up my apron on December 23, 1999, and retiring as a chef, but the following morning I woke up to the startling realization that I was unemployed. Incredible though it may seem, it hadn’t occurred to me that I wouldn’t have a job. I had an income, because I owned or had an interest in a number of restaurants, including Mirabelle, the Belvedere, Drones, Quo Vadis and Criterion, but I felt miserable having deprived myself of that daylong fix of adrenaline. The structure of my life had vanished.

It was cold-turkey time. I escaped for a bit and there were similarities to the way in which I had behaved after my mother’s death, going fishing, hunting and shooting. I’d take myself off to the countryside for a day out with those good friends of mine, my thoughts. It seemed strange that I had stopped cooking in order to be happy but found it difficult to boost my spirits. I kept telling myself, I want to develop as a person, not as a chef anymore. Then I resurfaced, filled with the same energy and knowledge that got me three stars, and wanting to use that knowledge, skill and understanding to move forward. I just needed a direction.

One night in the spring of 2004, Mati and I went for dinner with my manager, Peter Burrell, who also represents the jockey Frankie Dettori. Peter wanted me to meet Frankie, so I suggested he come along with his wife, Catherine. The five of us went to my restaurant Drones, and Frankie and I got along very well. He moaned about the starter, carpaccio, and I said, “Frankie, what do you know about food?” To which he replied, “Actually, I know quite a lot about food. Being a jockey I need to watch my weight, so I’m very specific and fussy about everything I eat.” I took his point.

He then wanted my advice. “Can you suggest a restaurant where I can go with Catherine and the kids? A place where I can have good food but also feel happy that the kids are eating well.” He didn’t want a fast-food joint, in other words. I thought long and hard about the question but was unable to answer it. I simply could not think of a single restaurant that would meet his requirements. When I said, “No, I’m sorry. You’ve got me there,” he replied, “Then why don’t we open one together?”

I promised to sleep on it. A day or two later I phoned him to say yes, I was in. Four months later, in September 2004, we opened Frankie’s in Yeoman’s Row, Knightsbridge. Unlike the jockey it was named after, Frankie’s is growing. The first one in Knightsbridge was followed by another in Chiswick. There’s a Frankie’s in Putney, and the Criterion, that monster of a restaurant in Piccadilly Circus, changed its name to become the flagship Frankie’s.

Having stepped away from the stove, my understanding of food is far greater. It sounds odd, but when you’ve been engrossed in cooking, you become, to a certain extent, lost in what you are doing. Seventeen or eighteen hours a day in the kitchen not only stunts your growth socially; it can also stunt your growth in cooking terms. You become blinded. You are just working, working, working. Routine. Standards, standards, standards. Now that I’m no longer under that pressure, I find I can look at a dish, mentally dissect it and see a way of improving it far better than I could then. I can sit down and work things out more easily. I reflect well and am better at simplifying, working out concepts and understanding food.

A young chef has a habit of overworking things and it takes great confidence to believe in your produce and yourself. I have discovered that I didn’t need to put that much effort in. For instance, in the old days I would have put a huge amount of effort into designing a Dover sole dish, but now that I’m out of the kitchen, I know that it should be served plain and simple, with only a little bit of lemon juice and perhaps a splash of olive oil. Delicious. I no longer want complicated food. If I decided to cook again tomorrow, I would do uncomplicated dishes. My menu would contain things I like to eat, and if that’s whelks with a bit of malt vinegar and white pepper, then that’s what I’d do. It might be fresh crab, seasoned nicely, with a bit of olive oil and some hot toast. Or red mullet with sauce vierge—olive oil, lemon-grass seeds, tomatoes and basil. Perhaps, it would be a top-quality medium-rare steak, hung properly (which is for twenty-eight to thirty days, in my opinion), pan-fried and seasoned properly, then served with a great salad. The problem with a lot of chefs today is that they don’t have a classical foundation. If food is that good, you don’t have to do that much to it.

Of course I like to indulge and eat something quite rich occasionally. I love classical food and adore a big bowl of choucroûte or daube de boeuf. In the summer of 2005, I bought a pub, the Yew Tree Inn, not far from Highclere Castle in Berkshire. Logs blaze in the inglenook fireplace, the ceilings are low, the wooden beams are four centuries old. There are even six bedrooms for customers who have let the mood take hold of them and don’t fancy the drive home. The menu is good. There might be venison (brought in by yours truly after one of my shoots), and not overhung or overcooked, but sliced thinly like roast lamb and with the same texture too. The menu changes daily, but there could be a risotto of local crayfish, or Brixham mussels, roast fillet of brill or maybe a fillet of beef. But the menu also includes one or two dishes that were served at the Connaught during those twenty-six years when the brilliant chef Michel Bourdin oversaw its kitchen until his retirement in 2001.

Michel served the Connaught’s old-money clientele a superb dish, Oeufs de Cailles Maintenon, which is on the Yew Tree’s menu for three reasons. First, it tastes magnificent—a blanquette of pastry, on top of which is a druxelles (minced mixture) of sautéed mushrooms and shallots, on top of which are five gently boiled quails’ eggs, soft and runny in the center, on top of which is hollandaise sauce. Second, it enables you to taste Michelin-standard food that was being served in the Parisian restaurants of the fifties and sixties, restaurants where Michel had trained before coming to England. Eating this dish is a bit like stepping back in time—one mouthful and you are in the golden age of gastronomy, the Escoffier style of cuisine. It’s fattening, of course, but if you want to indulge yourself, then this is comfort on a plate. Third, this dish is on the menu as a small tribute to Michel. I never worked for him, but I admired him tremendously. In my own little way, its presence on the menu says I haven’t forgotten the world that I came from, in the same way that he did not forget his roots. He didn’t forget where his passion was born.

M
ATI SHARED MY
dream of reaching the top. I risked my marriage to pursue that dream, and once I had achieved it, I realized how wonderfully supportive Mati had been. I sometimes think about where my life could have gone seriously wrong. It was back in the days of Harveys, during the recession of the late eighties. The restaurant business was struggling, but my rivals reacted to the dire economic situation in a completely different way to me: they put their prices down. They reckoned that to reduce the price of a meal would bring in the punters, and when that tactic failed, they reduced their prices even further. They were searching desperately for the right price to appeal to customers. In contrast, I put my prices up. My rationale was simple: like it or not, fewer people were eating out, but the ones who were going to restaurants were the ones who could afford to pay more. My rivals sank. Their ever-reducing prices took their losses higher and higher. They went bust and chefs disappeared to do God knows what. Meanwhile, I stayed in business and saw out the recession. I went on to achieve that dream and open thirty more restaurants.

However, there must be more to success than seeing out a recession. For instance, without Mati at my side, I don’t know how I would have fared. I have always said that winning three stars was a monument to my mother, but now I wonder if I could have done it all without my father? Surely, he is responsible for my success. He is the one who made me the person I am, a driven man who keeps on pushing. Gambler that he was, the old man managed to turn me into his own thoroughbred.

There were two other men who played a significant role in my life: Alan Crompton-Batt, my publicist, who died a couple of months before I started this book, and Bob Carlos Clarke, the photographer who took those great shots for my first cookery book,
White Heat
, and who died as the final pages of this book were being written. Alan and Bob were like my props, supporting me through the rough times.

Bob was one of those friends who pop in and out of your life, rather than being a constant presence. Six months might pass before we saw each other, but when we spoke, we could pick up where we had left off. A lot of people in the fashion business found him difficult to deal with, but I never had a problem with him. Shortly before his death we had seen quite a bit of each other and enjoyed a good lunch at Luciano. Then I got a call to say that he had died. Desperately depressed, he had thrown himself in front of an oncoming train.

Although Bob was a big part of my life, I can’t recall him ever meeting Alan Crompton-Batt, that other influential figure who helped my career. I think I kept them apart and I don’t know if they would have mixed well.

In the autumn of 2004 Alan went to stay with a friend in South Africa and that is where he died of pneumonia. I have never cried so much for one person since my mother’s death.

Then this book came along.

A year and half of introspection is not a bad thing for a man who had previously found it hard to focus for more than a few minutes. Of course, I have been forced to go back to the difficult periods of my childhood, as well as two failed marriages. Recounting my days with Roux, Koffmann and Blanc—what they gave me, what they instilled in me—has been mostly blissful and made me smile. Today I can say confidently that I am happier than I have ever been. I think back to my teenage days at the Box Tree, when I would be in the kitchen, slaving away, and waiting for those swing doors to fly open so that I could catch a glimpse of the glamorous customers in the soft light of the dining room, laughing and clinking glasses, enjoying the wine. Loving the food. Now I am with them. And if you’ll excuse me, I must go. I have a slow lunch to enjoy.

Acknowledgments

First off, I owe a sincere debt of gratitude to the thousands of people who helped my kitchen dream come true. The kitchen brigades, the front-of-house teams, the cloakroom attendants. And special thanks to the kitchen porters, who spend their lives washing up but never see gratitude. Without you, the staff, I would not have achieved success in gastronomy, and it follows that this autobiography would not exist. My wife, Mati, was my constant companion and without her I’d have nothing.

Other special people are due credit: Malcolm Reid, Colin Long, Michael Lawson, Nico Ladenis, Albert Roux, Raymond Blanc and Pierre Koffmann. I also want to acknowledge Robert Reid, my right-hand man for many years, as well as Lee Bunting, Thierry Busset, Tim Payne and Roger Pizey.

There were memory joggers who took me back in time and helped me recall anecdotes for this autobiography. They included Piers Adam, Heston Blumenthal, Pierre Bordelli, Martin Blunos, Peter Burrell, Eric Chavot, Keith Floyd, Mr. Ishii, Nicky and Juanita Kerman, Bernard Lawson, Nick Munier, Jean-Christophe Novelli, Andrew Regan, Morfudd Richards, Egon Ronay and Jean-Christophe Slowik (my maître d’ who taught the staff, “Rule number one—zee boss is always right. Rule number two—if zee boss is wrong, go back to rule number one”). I owe a lunch to Charlie Day-Williams.