The Devil in the Kitchen

by Marco Pierre White

  Gordon, meanwhile, never really cracked until his final night at Harveys. I don’t recall what he’d done wrong, but I yelled at him and he lost it. He crouched down on the floor in the corner of the kitchen, buried his head in his hands and started sobbing. “I don’t care what you do to me,” he said as he wept. “Hit me. I don’t care. Sack me. I don’t care.” I was hardly going to sack him; he was leaving the next day. I’d gotten him a job working for Albert Roux at Gavroche.

  I COULD SMELL the Michelin inspectors a mile off. The most important ones were the two at the top of Michelin UK: Derek Brown, the head inspector, and his number two, Derek Bulmer. They were the two Dereks. Or rather, the two Mr. Bs. I was not on first-name terms with the highly influential duo.

  Inspectors tended to book a table for two early in the evening, let’s say seven o’clock. You’d instantly smell a rat, as seven was rather early for dinner in Wandsworth. Then they would order a half bottle of wine, which, again, is suspicious, because people going for dinner to an upmarket restaurant usually order by the bottle. Then there was the fact that we knew what they looked like. After winning my first star, I had met both Mr. Bs, but when booking they would still use an alias because obviously they didn’t want me to know they were coming.

  They didn’t arrive in disguise, wearing false beards and wigs, but although I knew they were in the restaurant, they were too clever to be outwitted. There wasn’t the opportunity to make their meals more special, because they ordered dishes you couldn’t change, such as a fish soup or terrine, which had been made earlier in the day.

  I won my first star in 1988 and retained it the following year. Then, in the last few months of 1989, it crossed my mind that I might be up for promotion, because the Michelin men visited half a dozen times.

  By now I had done several things to improve Harveys since winning my first star. During the summer of 1989 I had closed the restaurant for six weeks so that it could be totally refurbished. The provincial, unexciting décor I had inherited and despised was stripped away. I had taken on the services of interior designer David Collins, who would go on to design most of my restaurants. David made Harveys far more stylish, elegant and chic, basing his design on New York’s Waldorf-Astoria—the walls were beautifully decorated with ornate plasterwork and mirrors, the lighting was soft, the wallpaper was unobtrusive.

  One day I saw Derek Brown in the restaurant and asked him what he thought I could do to win two stars. “It’s not for me to tell you how to run your restaurant,” replied the man I called Mr. Brown. “But if you start serving amuse-bouches and improve your coffee, you won’t be a million miles away.” That day I started serving amuse-bouches, or amuse-gueules—little tasters to entertain the mouth. These included grilled sea scallops with crispy calamari and a sauce made from the squid ink; an individual oyster with watercress in champagne jelly; and a brochette of langoustine with leeks and truffle. These amuse-bouches had to be grand—you can’t start with what I would call a little knickknack on the plate. It was the first thing customers were going to taste, and I had to leave them wanting more. The following week I bought the best coffee machine and ordered a brand of delicious coffee. Harveys started serving the finest coffee in London. I could see where Mr. Brown was coming from. Amuse-gueules provide the first impressions of the meal while coffee provides the final mouthful.

  I also asked my former boss Albert Roux what I could do to win another star, and he said, “Your menu is right; the balance is right. Just refine the dishes and you will win two stars.”

  * * *

  I’ve mentioned the refinement of classical dishes. There’s another name for it: nouvelle cuisine. The phrase probably sends shivers down your spine if you were a restaurantgoer in the eighties and remember the horrendous dishes involving small portions of food and crazy combinations—an assault on the palate of punters who seemed happy to pay for the stuff. What a great shame that so few chefs—and most restaurantgoers—do not understand the true meaning of nouvelle cuisine. In fact, I’d say that 99 percent of chefs haven’t got a clue what it means. Nouvelle cuisine is classical cuisine with the concept lightened. It is what Fernand Point did in France in the forties and fifties and then explained perfectly in Ma Gastronomie, the book I found while working in the kitchen of the Box Tree as a teenager.

  At Michel Roux’s Waterside Inn, they used to do a veal cutlet with caramelized bananas and raspberry vinegar sauce. No, not very clever. At Albert Roux’s Gavroche, they did tournedos of beef with mangoes, oranges and lemons with a rum sauce and served with a timbale of rice with a fried banana on top of it. Again, it doesn’t sound particularly palatable. You’d probably describe both of these dishes as nouvelle cuisine and you wouldn’t be blamed for doing so. But neither of them are true nouvelle cuisine because neither can be described as a classic dish that has had the concept lightened.

  At Harveys, it was all about lightening. So I’d take flour out of sauces and use natural juices. A mousselline of scallops—a classic—is traditionally made with eggs and cream. But if you use eggs, then you have to use the cream to lighten the flavor, and before you know it, you’ve diluted the taste of the scallops, which is what you really wanted to eat in the first place. You don’t need eggs because scallops have their own natural protein. Simply get rid of the eggs and there you have it—nouvelle cuisine. Classical cuisine made new.

  * * *

  The Michelin men would always host a press lunch to coincide with the annual publication of the guide, and usually the meal would take place in a restaurant that was up for promotion. Of course, Michelin needed to book a large table, and surreptitiously, so no one sussed them.

  Every January chefs would phone one another to see if anyone had received an unusual booking for the day of the guide’s publication lunch. In January 1990 I didn’t need to phone around. A booking had been made for a table of twelve and the organizer was very cagey about who was hosting the lunch. I felt confident it was a Michelin lunch, which, more than likely, meant I had won my second star.

  I was in the kitchen at about twelve thirty, preparing for lunch service and awaiting the mysterious guests, whose table was booked for one P.M., when JC came in and said, “Mr. Brown from Michelin is here to see you.” And there was Mr. Brown, standing right by the kitchen door. I went to shake his hand and he held up the freshly printed Michelin Guide. He flicked through the pages and then stopped on the entry that read, “Harveys: two stars . . .”

  It was an achievement. I was twenty-eight years old, the youngest chef ever to win two stars from Michelin. It had been six years since a British restaurant had been upgraded from one star to two. I now joined a clique of two-star chefs, all of whom had been my bosses: Raymond Blanc, Nico Ladenis and Pierre Koffmann. The only three-star restaurants in England at the time were Gavroche, run by another mentor, Albert Roux, and the Waterside Inn, overseen by Albert’s brother, Michel.

  On top of that, Harveys was doing well, considering the slumping economy and high interest rates, which had been imposed to stop the boom. Maggie Thatcher’s popularity was in decline and she wasn’t doing herself any favors by introducing the poll tax. She had won her third term in office in 1987, the same year I opened Harveys, and the way business was going, my restaurant would still be open for business long after Maggie left No. 10 Downing Street.

  Tears filled my eyes. I said, thank you. Yet Mr. Brown’s good news did not encourage me to leave Harveys and go off and celebrate. Instead I retreated back into the kitchen and the comfort of hard work and discipline, and later that day Bob Carlos Clarke took that so-called classic shot of me smoking a cigarette and looking whacked.

  Mr. Brown’s guests from the press swanned into Harveys, took their seats, filled their glasses and cheerfully awaited the meal. I served them Tagliatelle of Oysters with Caviar as amuse-gueules; leeks and langoustines in jelly; pig’s trotter; and then the Crackling Pyramide, a nougatine that was liquidized (the powder is then sprinkled onto a baking tray and put in the ov
en so that it melts, and when it is hot enough, you remove it, let it cool and then cut it into a pyramid shape and assemble it around a biscuit glace). They finished their banquet, Mr. Brown would have noted, with the most pleasant coffee money can buy.

  When you win one star, the spotlight is on you. When you win two, however, the spotlight gets bigger. Approaches came in from the media but I turned down TV and said no to lots of media opportunities that would have brought me a good deal of money. As far as I was concerned, I had a duty to my paying customers. In the days when Derek Brown ran Michelin, he awarded the stars to the chef and he expected the chef to be behind his stove. These days it seems that the stars are given to the restaurant that enables the chef to spend little (or even no) time in his kitchen. I had zero obligation to the media.

  When I did give a rare interview, the journalist would have to come to Harveys and stand by the stove, firing questions while I fiddled with the gas, chopped and cooked. About a year earlier we had been in the middle of lunch at Harveys when a film crew turned up to film me. Halfway through filming, I got angry for some reason or other and told them to get lost. As they headed out of the restaurant to load their equipment into their van, Keith Floyd, a brilliant chef and close friend who had been having lunch in the restaurant, left his table to come into the kitchen. “You may not like these people,” he said to me. “They are, after all, television people, but it’s terribly important that you are nice to them because they can help your business.” I went outside and had a chat with the crew and within a few minutes they were back in Harveys, cameras rolling.

  Keith says that while he still loves me, I am like a petulant child at times. But remember, I was just a young man in my twenties. I was trying to be a great chef, not a celebrity. Keith had made a conscious decision to become a television star, and at that time he reigned as king of the celebrity chefs.

  If I was away from the kitchen, doing an interview or making a program, who would be in the kitchen cooking? I was chasing a Michelin dream, which had more than enough pressures attached to it. Now I was being followed by photographers and journalists who relayed my every movement and supposedly private conversation to the British public. I didn’t have a team of managers like the celebrity chefs of today. Alan Crompton-Batt worked as my publicist, but unlike that of the modern-day celebrity chef, my life was not one long day of meetings with potential sponsors, TV producers, book publishers and agents. I didn’t zoom from one television studio to another to sit on a sofa or stand in a mocked-up kitchen doing a Baked Alaska demonstration for the viewers at home. If you are a chef today and want to become a TV personality, then you’ll have some idea of what to expect because others have gone before you. But I wasn’t in a position to look around me and think, There’s another young cook who’s in the limelight; I’ll ask him how he copes with being a celebrity. There were no other young celebrity chefs. What’s more, I was a working-class lad, and the big name at the time was Keith, who was posh, highly articulate, witty, and distinctly middle class.

  Away from the kitchen, it was a struggle to keep my private moments my own, and I was constantly trying to outwit the Fleet Street pack that lurked so close behind me. They were never closer than when I started going out with Nicky Barthorpe. A posh Chelsea girl and minor aristocrat, Nicky had worked with my wife Alex for Edina Ronay, the fashion designer and daughter of restaurant critic Egon Ronay. Nicky had started out as my wife’s friend, and when my marriage ended, she became my girlfriend. The Daily Mail gossip columnist Nigel Dempster sniffed out the story that we were seeing each other and dispatched one of his reporters, Kate Sissons, to the flat in Tite Street, Chelsea, where Nicky and I had set up home. Kate rang the buzzer wanting an interview. Would Nicky and I pose for a picture? I ignored the requests. Half an hour later I looked out the window down onto the street a couple of stories below and could see Kate sitting in an open-top sports car with a photographer, another woman, at the wheel. They knew I would have to come out sooner or later and they would sit and wait all day if necessary. I was imprisoned—the only way out was through the front door and into the Mail’s clutches—but somehow I had to escape.

  I phoned the kitchen at Harveys and asked to speak to Lee, by far the most loyal of my henchmen and the one who truly appreciated my sense of mischief. I said, “Lee, listen closely. There are two people outside my flat waiting to get a picture of me. They’re from the Daily Mail and they’re in an open-top sports car. I want you to get a couple of the lads and give them a bucket each. Fill the buckets with flour—be generous with the flour—then add some water and mix it to a good paste. Once you’ve done that, get over to Tite Street and chuck the contents of your buckets over the two people outside my flat. Got it?”

  “Yes, Marco.”

  I sat by the window waiting for the show to start and waved at Kate, who waved back. Then I saw Lee and his little gang appear, their car screeching up beside the photographer’s sports car. Lee and the others jumped out and—whoosh—three buckets of paste were thrown over Kate, her snapper and the leather interior of the car. Goo was all over them. They stood there, white statues on the black tarmac. On the other side of the road was an old people’s home and the elderly residents gathered and gasped. The next thing that happened was not meant to have happened. From nowhere a red car zoomed into the picture and four large men with guns leapt from it. “Police!” they yelled. Lee and the other cooks were pushed up against a wall while Special Branch put away their guns and produced batons and handcuffs. A couple of squad cars arrived and my chefs were put into it and whisked away.

  It all could have gone badly wrong had I not phoned Kate and asked her not to press charges. “Come for dinner as my guest at Harveys,” I said. She saw the funny side of it, but the photographer wasn’t happy. Nigel, meanwhile, ended up with a good story and eventually Kate got her interview. A couple of nights later I was there at the stove, with Lee and the other miscreants by my side, cooking a Michelin-starred dinner for the journalist we had pasted. Paying penance has never seemed more peculiar.

  SIXTEEN

  Banged Up and Butchered

  I WOKE FROM my sleep with a start. There was a nasty stabbing pain in my chest, which intensified, making me gasp for breath. It was as if I couldn’t get any oxygen. What was happening? What the hell was going on? It was a rainy morning in the winter of 1989, and the last thing I could remember was returning home from Harveys the night before and crashing onto the bed, fully clothed, clutching my house keys. Now I looked down to my hands and couldn’t see the keys. The pain in my chest wasn’t easing. Had I swallowed them? Was it possible that I had swallowed my house keys? My sleep-deprived, adrenaline-fueled, thousand-meal-an-hour, workaholic existence was certainly manifesting itself in strange forms. I couldn’t die now, not before I’d won my third Michelin star.

  I staggered from the bed, out of the house and into the street, grabbing a spare set of keys on the way. I grabbed a spare set because it occurred to me that the keys in my gullet might remain lodged there forever, like the cowboy sheriff with the rusty bullet in his body, and I’d be unable to get back into the house.

  I clutched my chest with one hand while using the other to hail a cab. “Chelsea and Westminster, please.” What a wretched sight I must have looked to the medical team at the ER: a big, pallid, panting creature with wild hair. “What’s the problem?” asked the doctor.

  “Swallowed my house keys.”

  You hear those apocryphal stories of people limping into hospital because strange objects have been stuck into their orifices during kinky sex games. I could see it: the story about the wild-haired man who turned up with keys in his chest was destined to become another classic yarn in the staff canteen at the Chelsea and Westminster.

  I was taken to a room and x-rayed and then the doctor stood and studied the picture in front of me. “As you can see,” he said, running his finger down the X-ray, “there are no keys inside you.” Reassuring news. He reckoned I’d suffered a panic
attack in my sleep—there would be more of those to come. My blood pressure was an extremely dangerous 210 over 180. If I’d been an older man, I would have suffered a heart attack. I didn’t ask for a second opinion and I’m glad that I didn’t—I later found my house keys on my bedside table.

  My God, what had I done to my poor body? I didn’t really accept it at the time, but I was undoubtedly messed up, physically, mentally and emotionally. The frightening thing was, I didn’t feel tired or exhausted because my craving for the next fix of adrenaline kept me going. I had this ability to drive myself beyond myself, if you get my drift. My mind was stronger than my body. My body was saying, “Give me a break,” but my mind was saying, “Let’s go faster.” Most mornings, I would leap out of bed and dash around the house, putting on my shoes while simultaneously brushing my teeth, making coffee and reaching for a Marlboro red.

  That pace continued throughout the day. I was in the restaurant from nine in the morning until two the following morning, and then back home for three or four hours sleep. It was absolutely relentless. Rumors circulated that I was a coke fiend—understandable, I suppose, when you consider the whirlwind that engulfed me. However, I couldn’t have done the job or worked those hours if I’d have been on drugs. Sitting in Harveys once, aware of the gossip, I amused myself by lining my forearm with salt and sniffing it up my nostrils. Onlookers would have thought I was snorting cocaine, but I won’t try that joke again. At the time I wasn’t much of a drinker either; I wouldn’t really take up drinking until I was thirty-eight.