by Jay Rayner
Margaret Thatcher’s personal contribution to food culture in Britain is hardly glorious: As a young research chemist, before she entered politics, she was part of the team that devised the method for pumping huge amounts of air into sweetened milk solids to produce Mr Whippy super-soft ice cream. However, her political philosophies had a major impact on the restaurant business. Put most simply, Thatcherism made it okay both to have money and to spend it on stuff. A series of tax-cutting budgets and economic measures that favored the moneyed over those on low incomes encouraged a consumer boom that eventually washed into the catering trade.
After all, once the fat-walleted city boys had bought their houses and their cars and their box-shouldered suits, what the hell else were they supposed to spend their money on? Restaurants presented the opportunity for some all-too-literal conspicuous consumption. It is no coincidence that, when commentators look for the first shoots of Britain’s so-called restaurant revolution, they point to once-famed London restaurants like Hilaire, Alistair Little’s, and Sally Clarke’s, all three of which opened in either 1983 or 1984, the early years of Thatcher’s second boom-time government.
The key year, though, was 1987, which saw the arrival of Bibendum, the River Café, and Kensington Place. Most importantly, in January of that year, Harvey’s opened in London’s Wandsworth, just south of the Thames. In the kitchen at Harvey’s was a young, beautiful, gifted, and scrappy chef called Marco Pierre White, who liked to shout at his cooks and his customers in between cooking what was reputed to be some of the best food ever seen in the British capital: tagliatelle of oysters with caviar, roast Bresse pigeon with a fumet of truffles, savarin of raspberries.
Marco Pierre White, a motherless working-class boy from Yorkshire with a serious mouth on him, became Britain’s first rock star chef, with all the bad behavior that title suggests. There are many chefs working today who cite Marco as an inspiration, and it has been argued that the credit for all this fame and adoration should go to a former rock band manager and restaurant inspector called Alan Crompton-Batt, who became his PR man.
It is true that Crompton-Batt built up the young chef as some mysterious, mercurial figure of the stove, and in doing so, invented the profession of restaurant PR. Before Crompton-Batt, new restaurants merely opened their doors and hoped that customers would find them. Crompton-Batt, a gregarious, entertaining, but troubled alcoholic who would die young as a result, changed all that by targeting journalists and shaping his clients to fit the stories the newspaper wanted to write. He was a vital part of Marco’s success.
That said, he was only able to do his job because the British media was itself suddenly interested, and the media was only suddenly interested because of technical innovations introduced by newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch.
For decades the newspaper industry in Britain had been held to ransom by the print unions, who could—and would—take a title off the streets if they had a dispute with the management. The result was an industry sentenced to decades of chronic unprofitably. Murdoch, inspired by advances in technology, was determined to tackle the problem. After all, as owner of The Sun, The News of The World, The Times, and The Sunday Times, he had much to gain, not least by a massive reduction in the number of staff needed to print his papers. One night in 1986, after negotiations had collapsed, Murdoch secretly moved his entire newspaper production to a new site across London in the docklands, and sacked all 6,000 of the printers. It resulted in months of violent picketing outside Murdoch’s Wapping headquarters. Eventually the protests collapsed, and soon almost all of Britain’s national newspapers were making plans to introduce the new technology themselves.
This short lesson in British newspaper history is important because of the impact the new technology had on the structure of the newspapers themselves. Before Wapping, a British newspaper was just one section with perhaps a color magazine for the high-end Sundays. Suddenly it was possible to print endless supplements and new sections at greatly reduced cost. The problem was: what to fill them with? Taking their cue from successful early eighties-lifestyle magazines like The Face and Blitz, newspaper editors across the capital decided the future lay in leisure time.
Food and drink fitted the bill perfectly, not least because it was innovative. It’s true that some of Britain’s glossy monthly magazines had previously run restaurant columns. The model for the British restaurant review, which talked as much about the room and the ghastly people in it as the food, was pioneered by a journeyman writer called Quentin Crewe in the society magazine Queen in the 1960s. Crewe, who had muscular dystrophy, had been consigned to a wheelchair since his twenties, and the column, with impressive bad taste, was called “Meals on Wheels.” In the early eighties the novelist Julian Barnes was employed by Tina Brown to write a similar restaurant column for Tatler magazine, under a pseudonym, and the London Evening Standard ran a column, written first by Quentin Crewe, and then, from 1972, by Fay Maschler (who continues to this day).
Regular restaurant columns were not a feature of Britain’s national press until the mideighties when Paul Levy—one of those credited with coining the term “foodie”—started reviewing a couple a month in The Observer. Then, in 1986, The Times appointed Jonathan Meades, and the weekly restaurant review was born. Very soon all the (then) broadsheet papers had their own columnists, whose writing fed back to encourage the restaurant sector, which in turn only encouraged the food writers further. The writers were now competing against one another to write the sharpest, most vibrant copy, fully aware that if the reader found their restaurant writing dull, there was always another guy working down the street.
It is this furious competition that distinguishes British restaurant writing from that in America. In the U.S., few cities have more than one or two newspapers and not all of those employ critics. The restaurant critic, therefore, has the place to themselves and, in an often extravagantly profitable business, will have the luxury to visit a restaurant three, four, or five times before handing down judgment, usually in measured tones. Their British counterparts—and there are around a dozen of them—will go once, and then, eager to find a readership, tell it as they find it. No U.S. critic ever alludes in their restaurant reviews to, say, bodily fluids, sadomasochism, or the merciless Mongol hordes sweeping across Asia; a British restaurant critic will feel they have failed if they haven’t mentioned at least one of those, if not all three. It led the New York Times to announce, in 2003, that the profession in London was pursued by a bunch of “sometimes hilarious, astonishingly brutal restaurant critics who in the last few years have turned English food writing into a blood sport.” I had never been so proud.
And all of this thanks to Murdoch and Thatcher, without whom I would not be able to make a living as a food writer—simply because such a living would not exist, much like many of the restaurants I visit. Still, that doesn’t mean it isn’t also worth acknowledging the deforming influence their involvement has had on the business. A restaurant sector like that in London, which was encouraged, for the most part, by the availability of the money to pay for the experiences it was selling rather than out of some profound interest in food, is bound to give birth to some god-awful monsters. Likewise, the feverish interest of lifestyle journalists, with an insatiable hunger for the next big thing, cannot help but tempt restaurateurs to pursue ever more contrived Unique Selling Points. Over the years in London I have eaten in a restaurant that championed the unique fusion of Italian and Japanese food (risotto eaten with chopsticks, anyone?), another that offered tiny, overwrought French dishes, to be plucked from a sushi conveyor belt, where they had all inevitably cooled to an arctic chill, and a third that made a feature of the hole in the wall beneath the shared sink between the toilets that enabled the women to watch the men pee. Assuming they wanted to.
The most corrosive impact of the forces that shaped London’s restaurant sector, particularly at the top end, was a by-the-numbers approach, which insisted that certain things be done not because they mi
ght be, say, fun or even merely pleasant, but because it was a “fine dining” restaurant, and that’s what a joint with that title demanded. With little embedded restaurant tradition to pull upon, there was no real culture of professionalism and precious few skills base in the UK. All the new breed of restaurateur could do was ape what they had seen in France or the U.S.—and all too often they were about as convincing as a six-year-old girl in mummy’s shoes.
I discovered all of this for myself in the early nineties when I was robbed at a Central London hotel. What I had thought I was doing was having dinner at Marco Pierre White’s relocated restaurant at the Hyde Park Hotel, where he had finally won his third Michelin star. Instead, it felt like the sort of incident that really ought to have been settled in the courts, or at least by a fight.
White was the first British-born chef and the youngest anywhere in the world to win that precious third star. Legend had it that, every morning, he was roasting thirty-six chickens not for the meat, but just to make the best jus possible. Once squeezed, the chickens were thrown away. This, of course, was a disgrace and an obscenity and beneath contempt. Naturally I found it intriguing.
In those days I was consuming restaurant reviews rather than writing them, and had read breathless accounts of his food, describing meals that were, according to these writers, the best they had ever eaten.
I wanted to know what the best tasted like.
I wanted to know what three stars meant.
I needed to know.
Sure, it would cost. White was charging £75 ($150) per head (during a recession, mind you) for three courses, a price tag it would take Gordon Ramsay another ten years to reach, even at his flagship restaurant in Chelsea. But I was an optimist. I assumed it would be worth it.
You can see where this is going. The room was gloomy and shrouded in a morbid silence that was broken only by the halfhearted scrape of silver on porcelain. The food—pretty little scribbles of this and that across the plate—was, as far as I can recall, dull and soulless. It speaks volumes that while it was, at the time, the most expensive meal I had ever paid for, I can only access my emotional responses. Of what we ate, I remember almost nothing. All Pat could talk about afterward was the young waitress with the cold, expressionless face whose one job appeared to be showing women to the toilet and back again, and who can blame her for being a little on the dour side with that gig? There had been no attempt to help us toward having a good time, either in the service or on the plate, and it had left me in a depression for a week, at the end of which I swore I would never allow a bad restaurant experience to upset me like that ever again.
Obviously it was a promise to myself that I had failed to keep. That was what made me so cross about our dinner at The Square. It had been more than a dozen years since that meal at Marco Pierre White’s restaurant—or the scene of the crime, as I now like to call it—and yet visiting The Square had made me feel exactly the same way. I had begun to suspect that I really should get out less.
The attention of London restaurant critics can make chefs behave in strange ways. In 2003, a chef called Marcus Wareing suddenly began behaving very strangely indeed. That year, Wareing, who is a protégé of Gordon Ramsay, moved his one-Michelin-star restaurant Petrus from a site in St. James’s to a space in Kensington’s Berkeley Hotel. I had very much liked Petrus when it was in St. James’s and, like many others, had been surprised when it had not been awarded its second Michelin star. Wareing was a gifted and unashamedly bourgeois chef who was not scared of big flavors. I still held intense memories of his dishes there: of seared scallops in a lobster bisque, or his sweet, glazed round of pork belly. There were many who believed he was laying down a serious challenge to his mentor.
The move to the Berkeley was supposed to provide him with the platform from which to achieve that second star and there was no doubting the money that had been spent. The old Petrus had been a coffin-like chamber of silt-colored walls and gloomy spotlights. It always felt as if there were a table of constipated bishops eating somewhere in its depths. In tribute to the grand wine from which it took its name, the new Petrus had fabric-covered walls the rich color of claret, uplifted by twiddly chrome and silver bits. There were highly polished trolleys that glided about the room dispensing champagne, cheese, and sweeties, and a wine list heavy not merely with some of the greatest bottles known to man, but some serious bargains as well, to attract the big-ticket restaurant virgins.
But mostly there was the new menu that was—and this is a highly refined and very technical restaurant reviewing term—completely tonto. It is, for example, a curious fish dish that encourages a maître d’, on hearing you order it, to announce, “I am Belgian and in Belgium, this is not how we cook turbot.”
Good grief, I thought to myself at the time, this is not how they cook turbot anywhere.
The menu description said: “Braised turbot with Welsh rarebit glaze, smoked cod roe with aubergine caviar, and sautéed baby gem lettuce, lemon grass velouté.” The maître d’ described the dish to me, just as it was written. He said something like, “I wanted you to know how complex it is,” and wandered away. Pat was eating with me. She watched him go and said, “That sounded like he was trying to dissuade you from ordering it.”
Perhaps so. Certainly I wasn’t ordering it because I wanted to eat it. I was ordering it because it read like a car crash, and I can rubberneck with the best of them. It tasted as it read—a grossly over-seasoned cacophony of flavors. It was certainly a terrible thing to do to an innocent piece of fish. In my review, I said so.
A few weeks after it was published, while on a family holiday abroad, I received a message on my mobile from a senior member of the egullet.com team, an auditor for a British telecoms company with ambitions to become a professional food writer. He believed he had a scoop, told me on my voice mail that he was preparing to publish his story but that he wanted my response first. It turned out that I was not the first critic to have ordered the turbot dish. Almost every one of us had done so. Wareing, who had spotted me in the dining room, had become so enraged, so frustrated when I had done so, that he decided to completely change the dish on service. Out went the Welsh rarebit crust to be replaced with a herb crust. Out went the lemon grass velouté to be replaced by a cepe sauce.
The gastronomic scoop of the century was that, apparently, I hadn’t noticed, and Wareing was telling anyone who would listen.
I was intrigued. Looking back at my review I saw that, while I had been clear that the dish was a mess of flavors and too salty, I genuinely hadn’t identified what those flavors were. Perhaps there was something interesting to be said about the connection between what we are told we are eating and what we therefore taste. It struck me that it couldn’t have been much of a cepe sauce, or I would have jumped up and shouted, “Who put all the mushrooms in the lemon grass velouté?”
What intrigued me most was the lengths to which a British chef might be prepared to go, when confronted by a British restaurant critic. There had been a deliberate attempt at deception, which would have been bizarre in any restaurant, let alone one at this level. Then again, it seemed Wareing was going through a curious period of his life. Asked in a newspaper questionnaire around that time how he wanted to be remembered, he said, without a hint of irony, “As a gastronomic legend,” as if the little voice inside his head that was getting him through the long and brutal working days had somehow escaped his mouth.
Many of the reviews of the new Petrus were negative and it did not achieve its second Michelin star, not that year nor for the two that followed. Finally, however, in 2007, Michelin decided the restaurant was right. In January it was awarded its second star. I had not eaten there since the turbot incident, though I had bumped into Wareing on the tight, intimate London restaurant circuit and he had told me that much of his menu had changed. He said he had returned to many of the virtues of the old Petrus.
Certainly if I was looking for a great meal, for an experience that would right the wrongs
of The Square and place my world back on its rightful axis, it had to be one of the restaurants I should visit. I told Pat she had to come, too. She sighed deeply and dragged the shiny heels back out of the wardrobe again.
The sleek Belgian maître d’, Jean-Philippe Susilovic, was still in place, though he was a little more recognizable now. He had played the role of maître d’ for Gordon Ramsay on both the British and the U.S. versions of the television reality cooking show Hell’s Kitchen, which essentially meant being abused by Ramsay for a month at a time. After each shoot, Jean-Philippe said, returning to the challenges of his restaurant, where the occasional customer might get cross but nobody told him to cut off his own testicles and eat them, as Ramsay once did, was a pleasure. He handed us the menus and, as we opened them, said, “Are you looking for the turbot with Welsh rarebit? It’s not there.”
“You remember?”
“This, we don’t forget. You don’t mess with turbot. I told him this, but you have to learn from your mistakes.”
The turbot really wasn’t there, but lots of other good things were. There was a simple and clean-tasting salad of lobster with pickled vegetables and powerful black pepper jelly that reminded me of the best of Jean-Georges in New York. We ate a dish of the freshest crab and langoustine with tiny brown shrimps from Wareing’s hometown of Southport, in Lancashire. There was a faultless fillet of Angus beef with truffles, and a plate of sweet suckling pig—loin, cutlets, crackling—whose infancy at slaughter didn’t bear thinking about. We were served extras of scallops with an orange foam and foie gras with precisely acidulated rhubarb, and at the end a parfait of peanuts with an intense chocolate mousse, salt caramel jelly, and a raspberry crème. It was a dessert of the sort created by someone who understands the imperative of sweetness, and not simply because he knows there has to be something sugared to end with.
