by Ken Hom
Before you could say ‘Cheers!’ to their success, the hotel was full. It was still the same hotel it had always been. Its structure had not altered; its location had not shifted. But now people were flocking in for the great food and the fantastic wine. And where they were drinking beer in every other place, people went to The Boathouse to enjoy the delights of its beautiful cellar.
They were doing wine classes, but they were classes with heaps of fun – eight different bottles, each in a brown paper bag, four of them being Australian Shiraz, four being Côtes du Rhône, let everybody taste them. ‘OK, which ones are from the Rhône, which ones are from Oz? Now rate them, which ones do you like the best?’ It was like a beauty contest … for wine.
One night, two women came along to the wine beauty contest. At the end of it, they approached Ron and said, ‘We’re looking for someone to run a wine company in Thailand. Would you be interested?’ Remember, he’d quit the wine business and promised never to return.
He said, ‘Yes, I would be interested.’ The company was called Seagram, the world’s largest distillery, and it was separating its wine sector from its spirits division. He was given the job. When friends asked him why he had taken the job when he had promised never to return, he said, ‘Wine just followed me. I had no other way.’
He spent eight years at Seagram, took a year off and then took a job with another company. Now, this new company was really small. Along with his colleagues, Ron built it from scratch, from virtually nothing. Early on, they had a staff of three, with one truck delivering bottles of about ten different wines.
Today, the company, Bangkok Beer and Beverages, imports wines, spirits, coffee, mineral waters and other drinks. It supplies more than 600 labels of wine and has 300 people on the payroll. It is, I understand, the biggest company of its kind in Thailand.
There were a few setbacks, including the global economic crisis and a government campaign which tried to deter Thais from buying foreign goods. But, by 2000, the Thais returned to wine. Ron and the company supply hotels and therefore tourists, but the majority of their customer base is Thai.
Long before all this happened, when Ron was still living in California, he had visited Thailand. That first visit was in 1988, and during the trip Ron strolled out of his hotel one day. The life-changing turning point happened right there and then as he stood on the street. Ron said to himself, ‘I want to live here.’ He still can’t quite figure out why. Could have been the heat, the smell, the feel, or that he was living in a moment of not knowing what to do, where to go.
But everything that he saw was exciting and interesting to him. He wanted to be there, in Thailand. Between that trip and 1992, when he went to run the school, he travelled there twenty-five times, sometimes just for a week or so. These days, Ron doesn’t have an enormous credit card bill from flying. He lives there.
WELL, now you have heard Ron’s story. My own turning point took place when I was in my fifties. I’ll tell you what happened. My feelings had been formed in Thailand, where the zen-like attitude is marvellously contagious. I started to turn more to Buddhism, which I had known since childhood, but now it became a larger part of me.
Then, when I was in Catus, I felt that, finally, I had achieved the kind of thing you dream about. In this little French village I had a massive house, an incredible wine cellar, a kitchen to die for and with a monster hob – I’m talking about that Maestro Bonnet range, which can reach a heat high enough to make the crispiest-based pizza. I had reached a stage of thinking, Hold on here, this is too much.
I mean, I had a whole floor filled with nothing but my clothes. As a child, I did not have any fancy clothes, so when I had money I bought them, often Versace. I had a vast and glittering collection of watches, some of them rare Rolexes. They were all black, as I figured I should specialise in something, so it was expensive black watches. But is that really what life is all about: acquiring a maximum of material possessions? Shopping therapy was a bad therapy. You think, I’ll buy something and then I’ll be happy. Once you’ve bought it, you think, What am I going to do with this now?
This does not mean that I decided to abandon all of my possessions and wander around like a Buddha without clothes. I don’t believe in that approach, either. But I thought that for my soul it would be good to downsize. I am sixty-seven years old and, if I’m lucky, I have ten or twenty years to live. I would like to spend that time unencumbered by stuff.
I gave all my clothes to friends. They were all in impeccable condition – the clothes rather than the friends. I suppose I could have had a charity sale, but I reckon that clothes are personal and I had a lot of good friends who were my size. My friends were delighted. Most of the clothes were practically new; ridiculously, I had worn many of the garments only once or twice. The watches were given away or sold.
GONE were the watches and clothes. This left me with the wine cellar. Ron Batori had sparked my interest in wine, back in the Berkeley days when I started as a teacher at the Academy. I took Ron’s wine class and loved it. I will never forget that taste of 1947 Cheval Blanc, one of the finest wines that has ever passed my lips.
From then, I started to accumulate wine, and with a specific keenness in Bordeaux. I had quite a cellar, with wines dating back to the 1900s. Nine out of ten bottles were clarets.
Wine excited me, particularly when I came across something that I did not expect and which therefore surprised me. For instance, I bought a jeroboam of Mouton Rothschild from 1993. Well, that’s an off-year, and others would have told me not to buy it because it was not a good vintage. I bought it because it was cheap, and when I opened the bottle, its contents were superb. (Perhaps, said my friend Jancis Robinson, because it was in a large format, which could have improved the wine’s maturing process.)
Jancis, as I have mentioned, had inadvertently inspired me to sell the wine. This was partly because she advised me to drink local wines, which ruled out Bordeaux. But also there were times when she would go into my cellar, with me at her side, and say, ‘You need to drink this, you know, Ken.’ I thought, My God, I won’t have time to drink all that. Then there were times when I opened a bottle, hoping for ecstasy, only to be disappointed.
In 1997, I saw for sale a methuselah – holding the equivalent of eight bottles – of Cristal champagne. It was from the 1990 vintage and had been produced specially to be drunk in 2000, so that it could be popped to celebrate the dawn of a new millennium. A friend advised me to buy it, saying, ‘You will never see it at this price again.’ Its price was $2,000. I paid the money and thought, New Year’s Eve on the eve of the new millennium is going to be one helluva party.
Well, when the year 2000 rode around, the party was not to be at my house but at someone else’s, and with a lot of people I did not know. So I figured I would save it for another occasion. It was 2006, and that bottle was sitting in the cellar, when I read an article about a wine sale in which that very same vintage of Cristal and same sized bottle had sold for $11,000. That’s a neat return on the money.
I sought Jancis’s advice, telling her that I wanted to share my wine with others in the world. She gave me two options: there were wine agents who would come to see my cellar and give an evaluation, or I could go to Christie’s, the established auction house in London. I preferred the latter option, as I had met a man from Christie’s when I helped with a charity fundraiser for Action Against Hunger. I figured, If I am going to sell it, at least I get something out of it.
The auction was held at Christie’s in December 2006, and amounted to 170 lots of hundreds of wines. They included bottles from the châteaux of Pétrus (1966, ’78, ’82, ’86, ’88), Mouton Rothschild (’66, ’71, ’78, ’79, ’83), and d’Yquem (’71, ’88, ’91). There was Latour, which included ’66 and ’70 as well as the complete and faultless 1955. Lafite and Cheval Blanc featured, too. From that great vintage of 1945, there was Haut-Bailly and Branaire-Ducru. But that’s enough numbers and châteaux – you get the picture.
T
he lots included champagnes, including my methuselah of Louis Roederer Cristal Brut. That big bottle raised six times the sum I had paid for it. The auction did not bring me a fortune considering what I had paid for the wine, but my rationale was this: the money paid for my friends and I to drink exceptional wine for about twenty years – at hardly any cost. I had got my money back.
My tastes in wine have changed. There was a time when I had an intellectual approach to wine. Take a bottle of Pétrus ’66. You open it, you worship it, you are in awe of it. The brand name is impressive. Today, my tastes have simplified. Now I like young, robust wines. Maybe I like younger because I am older.
And I seem to recall that I was drinking a sparkling champagne on that very cold night in Catus when I discovered Rio. The wind and rainy snow were hammering on my windows and I yearned for somewhere to warm up those early months at the turn of the century, the beginning of the new millennium.
Cashing in air miles could get me to a sunny place. I imagined the globe, hovered over South America, and then zoomed in on Brazil and Rio de Janeiro, which had long intrigued me. For years I had wanted to take myself to that city beside the Atlantic, birthplace of the samba, with its beaches and enchantingly named Sugarloaf Mountain on Guanabara Bay, and home to a seemingly endless and ludicrously hedonistic carnival. Was the bossa nova the soundtrack to my thoughts on that chilly night? Probably, yes.
The very next morning, I made arrangements, booking into the Copacabana Palace – today Belmond Copacabana Palace – without question one of the finest hotels in the world. Since it opened in 1923, the rich and the famous, Hollywood stars and European royalty have luxuriated in its splendour. Barry Manilow stayed here in the 1970s and, over drinks with lyricist Bruce Sussman, wondered why no one had written a song called ‘Copacabana’. So they did (along with fellow lyricist Jack Feldman). ‘At the Copa’ might grate at times but it can start – as well as end – a good party, and has brought fortunes to Barry and his song-writing duo.
And the song is playing in my mind as I sit here now, beside the pool and under an umbrella, shading myself from the thirty-degree heat of January. Should I wish to swim in the sea, the golden-sanded beach is just across the road. Should I crave a visit to the spa, it is just a few steps away, and it has the most wonderful swimming pool – semi-Olympic-sized – as well.
During my first visit, I was fortunate enough to have Claude Troisgros as my guide. Claude is the son of Pierre Troisgros, one of the founders of nouvelle cuisine. Claude left France for Rio, married a Brazilian, opened a restaurant and set up home here. Then he went to New York for a few years and launched another restaurant, which is where I met him in the mid-1980s. Then he returned to Brazil, where he is to this day, and is now a massively successful restaurateur.
Claude’s cuisine is French-based, but he has been able to take ingredients from the Amazon and make them into Brazilian cuisine. He’s a fun guy, a big TV star, and he loves the country. ‘I cried’, he told me one day, ‘when Brazil lost the World Cup.’ ‘I’ll take you to all the best restaurants,’ he said, ‘and I’ll show you the real Rio.’ By the end of the trip I had fallen in love with the city and its people, and returned as often as possible.
For me, a visit always features a big bowl of feijoada, the Brazilian stew of pig – and I mean all of the pig. I like the snout, the ears and the feet, and the crackling. It is an interesting cuisine, which is Portuguese-inspired but eaten, of course, in a tropical climate. The Brazilians are addicted to sweets and pastry, which I am not. However, there are many savoury Brazilian dishes that I love, such as Bolinho de bacalhau (codfish croquettes), Bolinho de aipim com carne seca (fried manioc – or cassava, as it is often known in the Caribbean – with salt-cured beef croquettes) and traditional Picadinho de copa (Brazilian beef casserole served with white rice, sautéed vegetables, toasted manioc, fried egg and fried breaded banana).
In January 2013, there was a fire in a nightclub disco in southern Brazil. It was a great tragedy and a lot of people were trapped in the club because, it was said, there were no emergency exits. The death toll was devastating. About 240 people lost their lives; hundreds more were badly injured in the blaze.
Shortly afterwards, the Copacabana Palace decided to review its own disco and concluded that it would close it down. What would it replace it with? What would fill the space? ‘We’re thinking of having a tapas bar,’ Andréa Natal, the beautiful, elegant general manager told me.
I had an idea, and said, ‘Why don’t I put together a concept for you?’ My proposal was for a pan-Asian restaurant, similar to Yellow River, a very successful British restaurant group for which I had been a figurehead and consultant. The plan took almost a year to be approved, but then it was full steam ahead. A brigade of the hotel’s chefs came to Bangkok for ten days, and that is where I trained them, at Maison Chin, a restaurant I was winding down. I devised the menus and continued to work with the team when they were back in Rio.
We called it MEE. That means ‘beauty’ in Korean. The restaurant has ninety-two covers as well as a sushi bar, and, in January 2014, I was an extremely happy man when we opened its doors and the first guests came to eat. The sushi bar offers slices of tuna, prawn, squid and salmon, as well as horse mackerel, surf clam and geso. We have dishes of truffled quail egg and cucumber with Japanese plum. There is crispy Hong Kong chicken, and stir-fried prawns with crunchy, sweet walnuts. Tonkatsu onsen tamago is a Japanese dish of pork belly, steamed and deep-fried and served with bok choy and slow-cooked egg. For dessert, perhaps mango ravioli filled with yuzu cream and served with a citrus sorbet.
Instantly, it was a huge success. Indeed, so instant was its success that in March the following year I was in Bangkok, and one of the chefs emailed me to say, ‘There’s a rumour flying around that we are about to win a Michelin star.’
I emailed back, ‘You are joking.’ He was not, and a star was won, the first ever by the hotel group, which had changed its name to Belmond. I was shocked by the award because MEE had been open less than a year. It was a morale booster for the kitchen, the restaurant and the hotel.
One night, I wandered into the restaurant and spotted a familiar face.
As the maître d’, Carlos Eduardo Costa de Silva, whom all know as Cadu, came over to me, I said, ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that Kate Moss with her son?’
‘It’s Kate Moss,’ he said, before whizzing away, ‘but with her boyfriend, not her son.’
When I met the supermodel and her young companion, I said, ‘No selfies, please, Kate.’ Whenever I come across the world-famous elite, I like to say to them, ‘No selfies, please.’ It appeals to my sense of humour. Clearly it appealed to Kate’s too, because she laughed. We talked (since you ask) about our mutual friend Sir David Tang, founder of the Shanghai Tang fashion chain and creator of one of my favourite restaurants, China Tang, at the Dorchester in London. Inevitably, we also discussed delicious food and cookery books.
IN an interview with the Sunday Times in 2006, I happened to mention my collection of food and cookery books. There were 3,000 of them, many of them ancient and from all parts of the world, covering numerous types of cuisine and also wine, and written in a wide range of languages. These books lined the shelves of my library in my house in Catus. They had been collected over decades and, wherever I happened to be in the world, I would buy food or cookery books, thus satisfying my compulsion to have.
The books included, by the way, the works of that great food writer Elizabeth David, whom I once had the pleasure of meeting. We were introduced by Jenny Lo, who, in between homes, lived briefly with Ms David. One day Jenny said to me, ‘Elizabeth would like to meet you.’ Well, I was utterly flattered. Her books were some of the first I had bought in Berkeley, and I was inspired by her words and style. She had been the inspiration for Chez Panisse and its philosophy of cooking.
So I went to see Elizabeth, who, though we didn’t know it then, was in the last year or so of her life. I was ushered into h
er bedroom. She was lying in her bed, beside which she had an ice bucket. In it, there was a bottle of Chablis. ‘Will you open it?’ she said. I obliged. We drank the wine and chatted away – she liked a gossip, too – and then Jenny knocked on the door, trying to point out to me that we were due to go for dinner. The bottle was finished, and I said to Elizabeth, ‘You must be very tired.’
‘Nonsense!’ she said. ‘We’re having a grand time.’ At that point, her hand swept down to the side of the bed out of my sight and when she brought it back up, it was clutching another bottle of Chablis by the neck. She nodded towards the corkscrew, my cue to do the honours. I emerged from her bedroom euphoric. What a star she was.
Anyway, during the interview with the Sunday Times I said that I wanted to do something for Britain. The country has been so generous and loving to me. My intention therefore was to give the books to the British public. I just didn’t know how to go about it.
Let’s cut now to Oxfordshire, and the home of one Donald Sloan, who is pottering around as he prepares the roast and makes the Yorkshire pudding. His phone rings. It is a friend, Paul, who says, ‘Have you seen the Sunday Times?’ He hadn’t, as he was too busy in the kitchen to find time for reading. After lunch he reads my interview, and sees that I am looking to offload my collection of books to a worthy home. He is excited. Donald, you see, heads up the food and hospitality department of Oxford Brookes University. It is a world-renowned centre of food studies, highly respected by the hotel and restaurant professions.
Donald was well connected and did not have trouble obtaining my email address. He pinged me an email, saying he would like to discuss my collection of books. I never responded. Actually, I did respond but it was three months later, when I was in London and at the Dorchester. I wrote, ‘Dear Don, I am in London. Do you fancy lunch tomorrow?’ Don dropped everything and the very next day we met in the grand lobby of the Dorchester, and then we ambled around the corner for lunch at Nobu. Indeed, the ever globe-trotting Nobu was in the restaurant – doing a photo shoot rather than eating – and he came over to say hello and have a drink with us. I have known him for years and he’s fun company.