White’s cuisine was classic at heart but made leaps nobody had seen before, such as juxtaposing grapefruit and rouget (red mullet). The beauty and integrity of his dishes was staggering. I can still recall a sea bass with precisely diced ratatouille, the feminine elegance of a shellfish nage, and the gently brûléed top of a lemon tart. As my appetite for culinary magazines and cookbooks grew, these publications became much more than just reading material; they were the closest I could come to the food of expensive London restaurants, to traveling to other countries, especially France, and to the points of view of the great chefs of Europe. But it would be years before any of them touched me the way White Heat had. It showed me the way, sharing an ideal of food and labor that gave me something to aspire to, and—although I hadn’t chosen it quite yet—it also prepared me for the rigors of my profession.
Accordingly, I stuck with my interest, and in time, I located the proper shops and specialty markets to begin my kitchen experimentation. But I still had to find my own way. Having read about a dish of pig trotters stuffed with morels and sweetbreads—a legendary Pierre Koffmann composition that had found new life in White’s kitchen—I decided to give it a go. I bought sweetbreads from a local butcher, but there was just one thing: rather than a veal sweetbread, he sold me one from an ox, a repulsive, sinewy clump that must have weighed two pounds. I botched the cooking of it and when I tasted it, it was like biting into a bloody heart (or so I imagined).
Clearly I had a lot to learn, but these failures didn’t deter me in the least. I plowed ahead with my education and as time wore on, I developed more and more aptitude and finesse, until a crossroads presented itself: when I turned sixteen and met with an army recruitment officer, he handed me a contract. I realized I’d be committing myself to six years of service and wouldn’t get out until the seemingly ancient age of twenty-one. I decided instead to go with my gut and devote myself to cooking, seeking a job as a commis chef (a prep and line cook) at a more serious restaurant where I could begin my education.
For my first job, I set my sights on L’Escargot, one of the oldest “nice” restaurants in London, first established in 1927. The restaurant had been shuttered for two years and just reopened, in 1993, under the ownership of Jimmy Lahoud, with not one but two chefs—David Cavalier and Garry Hollihead. I had followed all of these developments in the local papers. Both chefs had had their own restaurants and earned Michelin stars in the 1980s. L’Escargot was reborn as two restaurants in one: a brasserie on the ground floor that served pristine, beautiful, grand cuisine such as smoked haddock in a white wine sauce; and a fine-dining restaurant on the second level that offered a more classic French menu with au courant flourishes typical of the White era, such as a ravioli of sweetbread and morels with green asparagus velouté, corn-fed hen with an Albufera sauce (a poultry-based sauce with white truffle and cognac), and a raspberry soufflé with crème fraîche and vanilla ice cream; plus a catering space above that.
What most appealed to me, though, was that the restaurant offered living accommodations to its staff. In light of the unpleasant situation at home, this seemed like the ultimate “two birds with one stone” proposition—get started on the business of learning how to cook, and at the same time get out of the flat and off on my own. L’Escargot, located on Greek Street, was just a few blocks from what had become my father’s home on Charing Cross Road, but it would provide the independence, both spatial and financial, that I longed for.
The L’Escargot team let me “stage,” working a shift so the chefs could observe and evaluate me before officially hiring me as a commis chef. (In the United States, this is known as trailing.) They had me peel tomatoes, pick tarragon and spinach leaves from their stems, and peel garlic. These might seem like unrevealing or unchallenging tasks, but today I understand: so perceptive are the eyes of seasoned chefs that they don’t need to see much. Just as they can tell if a piece of fish is done merely by looking at it, they can size up an aspirant cook and his prospects with a quick once-over. Besides, they would be teaching me how to do everything their way; they only wanted to gauge if I was serious and could maintain focus and intensity, not to mention do whatever it took to get the job done.
The two head chefs let me spend some time in the kitchens of both restaurants during lunch service. David Cavalier was very creative and—after the Marco Pierre White fashion—a very boisterous kitchen presence, while Garry Hollihead was a more traditional, archetypal chef’s chef, with a mastery of technique and a strong, silent temperament. I didn’t help in either kitchen during service; no way they’d let a wet-nosed child get in the way of execution. Instead, they had me stand to one side of the pass and watch the team. The brasserie featured an enormous kitchen and produced about one hundred covers (people served) per meal period. The food was outstanding, such as a beautiful smoked haddock with a poached egg and white wine velouté, and a slow-roasted loin of Welsh lamb with Provençal garnish. But volume wasn’t especially appealing to me. I was much more drawn to the intricate food being turned out upstairs, where just three cooks served about twenty-five covers, lunch and dinner, five days a week.
The difference between an everyday eatery like New York, New York and L’Escargot was stark, especially upstairs. There was a hush over the line during service, a reverence for the work at hand and a sense that something important was being undertaken. Amusingly, despite the venerable setting and attitude, the cooks didn’t wear the classic uniform of checkered pants and white jackets. So ubiquitous was the influence of Marco Pierre White that every kitchen in London was populated by Marco wannabes dressed in sweatpants, T-shirts, and blue aprons with white stripes—a sartorial statement that extended to the chefs themselves. By the same token, White’s use of a Villeroy & Boch charger plate with a basket weave–patterned rim made it de rigueur in most fine-dining restaurants of the time, including L’Escargot.
After service, Cavalier asked me if I wanted a job as a prep and line cook. I didn’t mess about, responding with an emphatic yes. I was keen to get into that kitchen and begin cooking, even though I had no idea where all of this might lead me.
He hired me on the spot, and we agreed on a weekly wage of 100 pounds, roughly equivalent to US$150—a pittance even in those days, but that’s normal. Restaurants of a certain caliber are forever engaged in a glorified barter with young cooks: the cooks provide labor for nothing or next to nothing, and the restaurants dispense knowledge and experience that can only be earned on the job. This might sound like a racket, but it’s a long and proud tradition and also, in many cases, the only thing that keeps the price of a fine-dining meal from skyrocketing into the stratosphere. In any event, I didn’t care about the money or lack thereof; I was eager to get in a real kitchen and cook, so that was all that mattered.
It wasn’t until after the handshake that I got to see the living accommodations that had drawn me to L’Escargot. I was unabasedly excited as one of the cooks led me there for the first time. It was something to have just turned sixteen and be living on my own, but I was about to learn that “on my own” was a relative term. The first thing that hit me was the stench: when my guide flung open the door, the sour smell of sweat hit me so powerfully that I instinctively drew my head back and my eyes started to tear up, the same way they did when I was chopping an onion. Just a year or two older than I, the cook chuckled the chuckle of a world-weary veteran, and I felt the chasm between his experience and mine expand even wider. My stomach sunk. I hadn’t known what to expect, but I certainly didn’t expect this: a dimly lit two-room flat with mattresses arranged around the floor, about six per room. (In time, I would discover that behind the bedroom was a back bedroom where the pastry chef, Bernard, lived. He had declared it his own and padlocked the door, and that was that.) At the foot of each mattress was a suitcase or duffel bag, secured with a padlock, and, taken together, the two items constituted the personal living space and possessions of each tenant.
If I had any illusions about what it took to
become a cook, they were dispelled right then and there. I also quickly realized that I had merely forgone one type of military existence for another: the whole experience had a You’re in the Army Now feel about it, from the discipline of the kitchen brigade to this barracks-like setup. Things only became more militant from there. I asked to be assigned to the upstairs restaurant, and the chefs granted my wish, dispatching me to the hot appetizer and vegetables station. It was everything I wanted, but it was also sink-or-swim and was something of a nightmare. In a kitchen like that, there were no prep cooks—you readied your own food, from peeling vegetables to butchering fish and meats, prepared the dishes in advance, then finished and fired them at the lunch or dinner hour. It was a lot to take in, and the environment intensified it. There was no extraction (ventilation) in the kitchen, so it would get up to a hundred degrees during service, prompting me to periodically step back from my station and pour an entire bottle of water over my head.
The food upstairs at L’Escargot wasn’t inherently complicated. A main course might be as simple as a nicely cooked piece of corn-fed chicken, accompanied by potatoes or mushrooms, and orbited by bits of celery. The menu was small—five appetizers and five main courses—so there wasn’t really that much to master on any given day; readying ten prepared portions of each dish would put you in good stead for the next service. But it was all new to me, the standards were high, and the precision alone was daunting, as everything required deft knife work. For example, one of the first things I did was a brunoise (very fine dice) of ratatouille. It might not sound like much, but for me it was a crash course in knife skills, as I cut half a case of red pepper, eggplant, zucchini, onion, and garlic down to infinitesimal, uniform dice. Because they cooked at different rates, during service, I had to sauté each one to order, then bring them together in a tomato reduction.
My first few weeks at L’Escargot served as a seminar. Among the other things I made then was pommes dauphine (a Parisian-style gnocchi) made by mixing pâte à choux with riced potatoes, grated orange zest, and nutmeg—which I would shape, to order, into quenelles (three per order) in the palm of my hand, then deep-fry them, whereupon they would balloon up into perfect golden arrowheads. I learned how to braise a pork neck, which was the first time I ever cooked anything sous vide, or under pressure. (It’s a sign of how much this technique has matured over the past two decades that I now realize we did it all wrong back then: we braised it old-school in a pan, then reheated it in bags, whereas today we cook it in the bag from the get-go.) There was a classic veal jus, which we’d simmer for three days in a huge cauldron, never letting it boil, then add an entire bag of shredded torpedo shallots and cook them down until they infused the liquid with a honeyed sweetness. The flavor of that jus—its perfect complexity and primal intensity—was revelatory to me, though I never got to taste more than the small spoonful required to okay it for general use.
Add up all the little lessons, and I was privy to a first-rate culinary education. I did not attend a cooking school nor did most of the young men and women I came up with in the kitchens of London. Most American cooks consider matriculating at an institution a rite of passage, but where I come from, you learned by doing on the job. The system works, if you become a careful curator of your own education, staying in jobs that continue to develop and expand your knowledge, and choosing well when the time comes to move on to the next one. The strength of the European system is apparent by the repertoire of potato preparations I learned at L’Escargot: in that one restaurant, in just one year, with one vegetable, I learned to make pommes puree (in the Joël Robuchon style, with butter), pommes fondant, pommes dauphine, pommes Anna, pommes soufflé, Turban de pommes, pommes dauphinoise, pommes frites, and pomme rosti, to name just a few. It’s as complete an education in the craft of potato cookery as you could ever hope to attain, even at the best modern cooking schools.
Never a terribly social person, I found that I rather enjoyed communing with my ingredients, considering them, contemplating them, even coming to understand them the way I felt I understood myself. This may sound a bit eccentric, but it’s something that, over the years, I’ve found I share with other chefs. For example, I’d be turning potatoes, slicing them, blanching them, and frying them, and pondering everything about them. For such a humble ingredient, it has an enormous place in Western cuisine and in Western history. It has nourished man for centuries and been at the forefront of important milestones: Ireland’s potato famine, for example, or the way it nourished immigrants to America when they first arrived on its shores. It’s built civilizations up and torn them down.
It’s also one of the more versatile ingredients available to chefs, part of why each chef has his own take on the potato. Under the learned leadership of Cavalier and Hollihead, I became expert in the potato’s many nuances and how to get the most out of it. Most cooks don’t think of potatoes as seasonal, but they most certainly are. Different potatoes are at their prime at different times of year, mostly due to how dry matter solids (which give the tuber its defining flavor) behave. For example, Yukon gold potatoes are perfect for pommes fondant in December and furthest from it in June. This kind of information is crucial to properly respecting your raw ingredients and just one of the countless lessons I gleaned in those early days at L’Escargot.
Composition Pommes de Terre
This dish is my tribute to the potato and to my time at L’Escargot, combining three preparations I learned there in one composition. The base is a pommes fondant, which I prefer to make with Yukon gold potatoes at their peak. The center of this butter-cooked preparation is punched out and filled with pommes aligot, a preparation similar to pommes puree that I give an airiness by applying an espuma technique, piping it from a N2O (nitrous oxide) canister.
This composition is an ideal accompaniment to any fish, poultry, or meat, and is also delicious on its own. The recipes for these preparations can be found on this page.
Ironically, cooking for service—when all of your prep work coalesced in à la minute fashion—came pretty quickly to me. But prep was my challenge and, in my early days, my downfall. I was a quick study with certain jobs, like those ratatouille vegetables, but other ingredients were just too foreign to me, and I was doomed to fail. We made langoustine tempura, and I’d never seen either langoustine or tempura before. The shellfish came in alive and snapping, which in itself was a revelation, and I tore my hands up taking them apart out of their hard shells. Perhaps my worst offense was the first time I deveined foie gras, one of the most luxurious and costly of ingredients. I’d never tasted or even heard of it, and nobody told me to keep the lobes together as I deveined it, to keep it from falling into pieces. I botched it terribly, butchering it in the very worst sense of the word: when I was done removing the veins, it looked as though a fox had attacked it.
These moments, in turn, provided my introduction to yet another military aspect of kitchen life: the drill sergeant–worthy onslaught by the chefs who lorded over us. Whenever I made a mistake, it seemed, the chef who ran the upstairs kitchen for Cavalier and Hollihead was right there to witness it and would unleash a deafening attack: “What did you do? You fucked it up!” To a boy of sixteen, this was intimidating and terrifying, both verbally and physically, as the chef would impose himself, standing so close, screaming so loudly, that I would have to lean away just to absorb the blow. Once the punishment had been administered, he would stalk away, grousing about “the fucking guys they give me up here.”
“I’m sorry I don’t know everything,” I’d plead, following after him like a stray animal. “Teach me.” But he was clearly too frustrated to invest the time, and I’d give up asking, pick myself up, and return to my work.
(I was also once scolded by my kitchen hero. Marco Pierre White was friends with the owner of L’Escargot and would sometimes eat there. When he was scheduled to come in, word would spread among the cooks instantaneously and anticipation would permeate the afternoon, a pulsating awareness that “Marco
’s coming.” One day, he sauntered through the kitchen and caught me out of the corner of his eye. He turned and looked right at me: “Cut your hair,” he admonished me. I did, the very next morning.)
WHITE ASPARAGUS Another ingredient that I first discovered at L’Escargot is beautiful white asparagus, from the South of France, presented here as I sometimes prepare it today, with a ramp croquant and a paste of onion and hazelnut praline, a song to spring. The recipe for the asparagus can be found on this page.
More supportive was a seasoned cook in the upstairs kitchen, Simon Davis, who had just come back from Guy Savoy in Paris. Simon had also worked with Michel Guérard and with Marco Pierre White at Harvey’s; there’s a photo of him in White Heat, which impressed me endlessly. He was the very picture of the rock-star chef. In his late twenties, Simon possessed chiseled good looks, a leather jacket, an easy confidence around the stoves, and a ridiculously gorgeous French girlfriend, who’d be waiting for him after work like a dutiful wife at the prison gates. More to the point, he had a mastery of seemingly anything that might be asked of him in the kitchen. Mercifully, after witnessing my early floundering, he chose to share his hard-won knowledge with me; once the chefs had conveyed the menu each morning, he’d make a few minutes to school me in my tasks, setting me up for success. (Simon would occasionally tell me that the technique he was showing me was the one they used at Savoy or in White’s kitchen, which gave it the stamp of approval for me.) He was also the guy who told me to begin keeping a notebook in which I could record kitchen notes and recipes as I went from kitchen to kitchen and in time would use as a sketchpad for my own ideas. That seemed light-years away to me, and it was, but the vote of confidence was empowering.
To the Bone Page 3
