That was how it started. We must have had a meeting, but I don’t remember it, and then we hooked up with Claudio Pulze, who’d made a few quid out of the Italian restaurants he owned in London. Claudio owned the lease to the site I’d seen that morning before speaking to Steven, so he was in, as well. This was the setup:
Michael was the man with the vision. He’d wanted to open a restaurant in the harbor because his London home was a penthouse flat overlooking the Thames in Chelsea Harbour, and he quite liked the idea of owning a restaurant that would be virtually next to his living room. He’d just been waiting for the right thing to come along and now it had. Michael had the cash and he was going to give me—yes, hand me—a stake in the business.
Claudio was the guy with the property and he knew about the catering business. He was a bellhop in Turin before coming over to England and, in 1975, opening his first restaurant, Montpeliano in Knights-bridge, which, incidentally, is still there.
I was the one passionate about food and with the reputation for being a workaholic. And Michael liked me, so there you go.
The three of us went to see the site. It was a monster. We thought, this is going to be bigger than any top restaurant London has ever seen. We were looking at a 200-seater, which meant about three thousand covers on a good week—and when it eventually opened, we reached that target. We knew the more punters we got in, the more money we would make. This place was going to revolutionize restaurants. From then on, size would matter. The phrase gastrodome had yet to be coined, but what we had in mind was a gastrodome, nevertheless.
There was a hitch, however, which prevented us from opening quickly. The trouble was, Britain was hobbling along in one of the worst recessions of the twentieth century. The restaurant industry was really suffering and there we were, talking about opening a huge restaurant and expecting it to be filled every night. People were broke, for Christ’s sake. The yuppies had done their bollocks, as my old man would have said. John Major was the prime minister but there was an overwhelming feeling that he was on his way out, and then there would be a hung Parliament or an end to Labour’s years in the wilderness. “We’ll wait,” said Michael. Come again? And he explained his strategy: we would wait for the outcome of the general election and take it from there. He didn’t want to invest until he felt comfortable that he was onto a winner. He was asking himself the crucial question: If Labour wins, will the economy sink so low that it kills all hopes of opening our Chelsea Harbour monster? It was, then, a Major hitch.
So we waited, and during the pause Michael and I underwent a bonding process. He is a gourmet who likes good food cooked well, no fuss, and he likes to talk about restaurants. Michael invited me into his confidence, his home and the world of the glitterati. He didn’t need to be so good-natured because we were, after all, simply business-partners-to-be. But as our restaurant site sat waiting for the general election outcome, Michael and I started to spend time together. The Caines would come for dinner at Harveys and I would go for lunch at their house near Wantage, in Oxfordshire.
Lunch chez Michael followed a pattern. He was the one, rather than Shakira, who would do Sunday lunch, and he was more than capable of the job. He is what I would describe as a proper cook: he did what he did—usually simple stuff, nothing too aspiring—and he did it very well. We’d sit down and have a good roast with all the trimmings. There were times, certainly at the beginning of our friendship, when I felt slightly intimidated by Michael, not only because he was a legend but also because I wasn’t used to sitting down to a meal with people thirty years my senior.
When the food was finished, he’d produce a bottle of that ghastly herbal alcoholic drink Fernet-Branca. Then we’d leave the table and go for a stroll in his beautiful garden. As we ambled through the garden, Michael would recount amusing stories about the people he had met during his fascinating life, as well as a story or two about Peter Langan, the legendary restaurateur and Michael’s former partner.
He’d smile nostalgically while reminiscing about Peter’s custom of staggering from his restaurant to collapse on the pavement outside, his legs extended over the curb so his feet were in the gutter. Michael was at the restaurant once when Peter stumbled in and said in his Irish brogue, “I don’t know why, but me feet are fookin’ killin’ me.” Michael said to me, “I looked down at his spats to see bloody tire marks on each shoe. Some bastard had driven over his bloody feet. And Peter didn’t even know it.”
While we were still waiting to see what would happen in the general election, Michael invited John Major for lunch at the penthouse. “Will you cook for us?” Michael asked me, and of course I said yes. I was something of a hired gun at that time. Celebrities and anyone who was wealthy enough to have outside caterers at their home would call me in and I’d pitch up with a few of the Harveys boys. I arrived at Michael’s penthouse with my mini team of cooks and got to work on the meal. I don’t remember what I cooked, apart from the main course. Remember, Michael is a straightforward eater who doesn’t like fuss, so there were no surprises when he asked for a roast chicken with all the trimmings.
* * *
In at least a million homes every day a chicken is put into an oven, left to sit there for a couple of hours and removed when it’s brown.
That’s not how to roast a chicken. This is what I would do at Harveys and in the restaurants I had afterward, and this is what I did for Michael:
I’d get the best chicken, a poulet de Bresse, and then I would sous-vide it—cook it under pressure. Sous-viding is a process by which the bird is sealed in a bag, almost vacuum-packed, and poached for ten minutes at 175 degrees Fahrenheit so that the heat gently penetrates from each side. Then it’s lifted out of the water and allowed to rest. After that you cook the skin by browning the bird on each side in a pan of clarified butter, sitting it on its back and putting it in the oven for thirty minutes or so, depending on how big it is. Done— you have a golden brown chicken, cooked to perfection.
If you just put a chicken in the oven, it’s cooked before it’s brown. In my restaurants I had sous-viding machines, but you can do the same thing at home by wrapping the bird in plastic wrap until it’s perfectly sealed and then poaching it for twenty minutes. The beautiful juices will collect in the plastic wrap and can be poured over the cooked meat before you finish the cooking process in the oven.
The sous-viding process means you don’t need to stuff the bird. Stuffing is an important part of roasting fowl, and when I was a boy, it was traditional to stuff ducks and geese and then sew up the arse before roasting. Why were they stuffed? To slow down the cooking so the bird cooked from the outside in. If you don’t stuff it, the heat gets into the cavity and the bird cooks from the inside out, so the skin isn’t cooked and the bird is very fatty.
* * *
Michael greeted his guests at the door and John and Norma Major came in. Then Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall. And finally, Bryan Forbes and his wife, the actress Nanette Newman. I was in the kitchen with the boys and we were cooking and chatting—it must have been one of those rare occasions when I allowed conversation—about The Italian Job. We were talking about that classic scene in the movie when Michael’s team blow up a mini and he delivers the classic line, “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.” As we were chatting, we found ourselves in our own drama. Smoke erupted from the cooker and the air-conditioning wasn’t working. So before we knew it, we were all coughing and spluttering, engulfed in a fog of smoke, and then the fire alarm went off. One of the choking boys opened the kitchen doors to get a bit of oxygen, and a thick, dark cloud of smoke poured out of the kitchen and into the living room, where Michael was standing with the PM and a cluster of stars, no doubt telling them how they were about to be fed by a Michelin-starred chef. Through the smoke I could see Michael with a look of shock on his face—he knew the fire brigade didn’t have hoses long enough to reach his penthouse— and then he became the action hero we all know and love. Michael dashed in with the window ke
y, yelling, “You’re supposed to open the windows, not the bloody doors.”
John Major survived that lunch date and went on to beat Neil Kinnock and win the election in April 1992, stretching the Conservatives’ winning streak to four general elections in a row. The pollsters and pundits were alarmed by the victory but Michael, Claudio and I were delighted. Major might not have halted the recession, but we opened the restaurant anyway, perhaps because Michael felt we had escaped the worst-case scenario, which was a Labour win.
The Canteen opened in November 1992, just as Bill Clinton was about to beat George Bush Sr. in the U.S. presidential elections. It was heaving, just as we’d hoped, and was bright, spacious and busy, clocking up a few thousand meals each week. Another gastrodome was opened shortly after we appeared on the scene, Terence Conran’s Quaglino’s. The nation was still in recession but that couldn’t stop us. We were a destination restaurant, by which I mean punters traveled to Chelsea Harbour just for a meal at the Canteen, for superb ingredients cooked to perfection.
We cooked dishes like Roast Wood Pigeon with a Perfume of Ceps and White Truffle Oil and Roast Saddle of Lamb with Juniper Jus. There was poached salmon and there was sautéed salmon, served with savoy cabbage leaves that had been cooked, liquidized to a purée and then blended with chicken stock and cream and infused with white truffle oil. The Canteen won a Michelin star and I can’t think of another restaurant that size that has achieved that.
I didn’t step away from Harveys. I was still there during lunch and evening service, but the rest of the day was spent at the Canteen, where I had installed former Harveys chefs Stephen Terry and Tim Hughes. It wasn’t until the following year, in late 1993, that I bailed out of Harveys. I sold my stake and Mark Williams, who had been my Harveys assistant from day one, became the restaurant’s head chef. Eventually, my little gem on Wandsworth Common was no more. Harveys had played such an influential role in the career of so many talented chefs, and then it was gone. Today it is still a restaurant and a good one at that. It’s Chez Bruce, a Michelin-star winner where Bruce Poole is the chef. I have never been back to eat at that restaurant, though. You move on, don’t you? I didn’t feel sad to leave. I felt it was time to move on, time to progress.
EIGHTEEN
The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me
GIVE ME ME a rule and I’ll probably break it. As a boss I had one sacred rule, which was never to go out with a staff member. I managed to keep to it from the day I opened Harveys in January 1987 right up to the final days of 1992. Business was business, and I reckoned a fling with a waitress or manageress would be an unnecessary distraction. You can appreciate the dangers, can’t you? Think of all those horror stories about the office boss who has a romance with his secretary. This is one of the reasons I haven’t had too many female cooks working with me. Women chefs are very good, probably better than men at cooking because they don’t take shortcuts. But from my experience, when I have employed women, they tend to end up going out with one of my boys and that can lead to a major breakdown in the discipline of the kitchen.
I resisted the urge to date attractive women on my payroll for five years, a full half decade, but when I broke the rule, I did it stylishly.
The story begins not in 1992 at the Canteen, but a year or so earlier. Antony Worrall Thompson was a mate of mine and would often phone up, asking me to go along to the Char Bar in Chelsea. “There’s a beautiful Spanish bird who works there,” he used to say, as if that was enough to make me charge over the river. Antony’s intention was not to set me up with “the Spanish bird,” but he didn’t want to turn up at the bar on his own, otherwise he risked looking like a lonely bloke. Despite Antony’s pleading phone calls, I don’t think I ever went with him, so at the time I never met the woman in question, and I’m sure he was never so precise as to mention that her name was Mati.
Then one night I finished service at Harveys and went for a drink at Antony’s trendy restaurant 190 Queensgate. At the time, 190 was like a chefs’ club. We all gathered there after service just to wind down. In fact, to digress slightly, one night I was seriously wound up and there was a punch-up. I didn’t drive but had taken on a driver called Trevor who had gypsy origins, which meant that he was deemed unsuitable by some of the posh clientele who drank at 190. Another customer started taking the mickey out of Trevor, and when I asked him to stop with the nasty comments, he refused to do so and then he started squaring up to me. My father’s old line, “Don’t argue, just hit ’em,” came back to me. I broke the guy’s nose and no one blamed me—he was a snob who needed bringing down to size.
Anyway, moving on. Antony’s charm offensive had reaped dividends with Mati. She was no longer serving him drinks at the Char Bar, but sitting at his table having enjoyed a long dinner.
Mati wanted a packet of cigarettes but the cigarette machine was broken, so Antony said, “Don’t worry. I’ll ask my friend Marco.” They came over and she remembers that I was a huge guy slumped forward on the table, wearing a white T-shirt and white chef ’s jacket, with one arm draped around a girl and the other arm draped around another girl. On the table, there was an overflowing ashtray as well as scattered packs of different brands of cigarettes. Antony said, “Marco, this is my friend Mati. Can I have a cigarette for her, please?” I said to her, “What do you smoke? Marlboros are for hard-core people, Bensons are disgusting, Silk Cuts are for wimps.”
She said, “I’m afraid I’m a Silk Cut person.” I didn’t have that brand, so she took a Marlboro Light and that was it. No eye contact. These days she’ll tell you, “He must have left some sort of impression because I remembered the encounter, but it wasn’t a particularly good impression.”
MATI KNEW THE Canteen’s restaurant manager Torquil, and he called her to say this great new place was about to open—mentioned the fact that Michael Caine was behind it—and offered her a job as a waitress. She didn’t want to do waitressing and turned down the job. Two weeks later Torquil phoned to say the bar manager had dropped out so would she prefer that position? She said yes. Amid the buzz of getting the Canteen up and running, I didn’t really notice her. But in those first few weeks after opening the Canteen, I became entranced. There were scores of good-looking female punters coming in each night, dressed to the nines and being friendly to me, but I was more interested in the woman serving the drinks than the ladies drinking them.
Mati Conejero was olive-skinned and beautiful. She was born in Majorca, the daughter of Spanish parents, but she grew up here, so her accent is London rather than Palma. My initial seduction technique with Mati—my own little way of telling her I was interested— did not involve conversation. At the end of evening service I would sit at the bar, flicking matches and rolled-up pieces of paper in her direction as she took care of the customers. Feeling the gentle stab of a match in her neck really annoyed her, but I figured that at the end of the night, when she came to sweep the floor, she would be forced to think about me.
Within a month or so I must have moved on from match-flicking to conversation and we became friends. If I saw Mati going for a break, I would follow her out of the restaurant and jump out behind her. “Fancy a coffee?” She’d agree and we’d take a cab from Chelsea Harbour to Pucci’s café on the King’s Road.
At first, neither of us remembered that we had already met at 190 Queensgate. Then one night Antony Worrall Thompson came into the Canteen, headed up to the bar and asked Mati if she would like to join him for a glass of champagne. She said she couldn’t because she was working, so he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll ask my mate Marco if it’s OK.” That’s when Mati realized that I was the “huge guy” with the cigarettes at 190. And when Antony came up to me to see if I would allow Mati to have a drink, that’s when it dawned on me that Mati must have been that “Spanish bird” he was always going on about.
One of the things I liked about Mati was that she came from the same humble beginnings as me. Her mother, Lali, was a seamstress (and, as I would later learn, a magni
ficent cook); her father, Pedro, was a waiter. I’d been out with posh girls—hell, I’d even married a couple of them—but I reckon you can only really love your own. In my opinion, if you’re from the poorer side of society, you can’t marry into upper-class circles because you’ll never be understood.
There were two obstacles that threatened to stop us turning from friends into lovers. The first was that Mati had a boyfriend.
She had been seeing this bloke, on and off, for about two years. She told me, more recently, that her boyfriend had asked her one night, “Are you in love with Marco?” She had said that no, of course she wasn’t in love with me, and told him off for asking such a ridiculous question. But I suppose it got her thinking. Shortly afterward she split from her boyfriend, moved out of his house and into her parents’ home in Holland Park. She then had a row with her father about her lurcher’s nonstop farting, so she and her dog moved out of her parents’ house and into a friend’s flat in Tower Hill.
When she told me about this, I gave her the keys to my flat in Pavilion Road, Knightsbridge, and said, “Go and stay there if you need to.”
She said, “I’ve got a lurcher that farts.”
“That’s fine,” I said, but she declined the offer and handed back the keys a few weeks later.
Some nights Mati would give me a lift home to my flat, and one evening I kissed her before leaping out of the car and hurrying into my flat. She didn’t see me for two days afterward, and even then I didn’t mention our snog—is that evidence that I was shy with girls?
So Mati was now young, free and single . . . The second obstacle was that Lisa Butcher, my estranged wife, wanted to get back together with me. Between the spring and fall of 1992 I had managed to charm Lisa, get engaged to her, marry her in Brompton Oratory and then separate. People make wedding speeches that last longer. Occasionally Lisa would pop into the Canteen for a chat, and then at some point in December, she said, “Why don’t we have another go? Let’s give it a try.”
The Devil in the Kitchen Page 19
