by Craig Taylor
That was The Square really, the beginning of The Square. ’96, ’98. Where a classic fish soup would be the sauce for a piece of roasted John Dory. That’s clever at the time. Now, of course, that fish sauce is turned into a foam and it’s frozen-dried and pre-boiled and it’s air-dried into a crumb and it’s rehydrated into some kind of … it’s just gone mad. People have gone mad. But that’s the food right there that I started to fall most in love with. That’s when I fell in love with food and that first love affair has never gone away.
After that it got all a bit weird because then people took that food and started to do really artistic and creative things with it, and things started to be crispy and standing up and lots of angles and lots of big piles in the middle of the plate and stacking things up and presentation became much more important. Some stupid fucker put presentation at the forefront of importance in restaurant food, and all of a sudden food just looked like some kind of art display and it was awful really. And that lasted for a while until some clever guy started putting food in a water bath and all that stuff, and molecular gastronomy was born and here we are in a new era where molecular gastronomy is very prominent in the upper echelons of fine-dining food. And I think, you know what, those people that have got half a brain, take where they were from, stick to what they were from, cherry-pick some of this presentation thing because it’s quite nice, cherry-pick some of the molecular, cherry-pick some of X, Y and Z, keep it real to themselves, put it on the plate and send it – and those are the restaurants right now that are stormingly busy. That’s how it works.
I had a conversation with a young chef two days ago. I took him for a drink because he was a bit off. He had worked for somebody extremely high profile for a long time and he said to me, I went with that chef to do a little television thing recently. We had to eat the food that he’d put on for this show, all of his own food – and he didn’t want to eat any of it. He said, I don’t cook for that, I just cook it. But you can’t stop eating your own food!
I couldn’t believe it. It’s not a product – it’s dinner! You’re not creating some innovative washing-up thing, it’s someone’s dinner. Thankfully I think we’re moving back into a time where it’s actually becoming a bit more honest. In France, the guests are stuck in their ways. In England, they don’t know what their ways are, so they can’t get stuck in them. The roots for the English are toad-in-the-hole and shepherd’s pie – doing anything slightly more innovative than that is the road to laughter.
DAVID SMITH
Director of Markets, City of London
There are six wholesale markets in London, of which I’m responsible for three. The big ones – Billingsgate for fish, Smithfield for meat, and Spitalfields for fruit and vegetables – tend to be unseen, because two of them are slightly tucked away. Smithfield, of course, everyone knows about because it’s right in the middle of the city and it’s got two major thoroughfares running through it. And there is also this whole raft of street markets and retail markets around the capital, 180 of them still around London.
His office is in the City of London – he refused to be stationed at any of the three markets he oversees, lest it suggest favouritism. There’s evidence of fruit in the office: two bananas browning in the corner. His is not an old market trading family; he was alerted to the job while reading the classifields in The Times.
These wholesale markets have been here for ever. Billingsgate is now down at Canary Wharf, it’s been there for the last twenty-six years, but that is just a little flash in history. It used to be in very impressive cast-iron-and-glass buildings right on the Thames, down near London Bridge, and it had been there since mid-Victorian times. But everyone knows that there has been fish sold on that site since long before that. When the market moved, the archaeologists came and started digging. They found a lot of fish debris there from the pre-Roman days – which implies there was some sort of trading in fish going on there 2,000 years ago.
We sell 150 different types of fish down in Billingsgate. During the course of the year you will see parrot fish, tilapia, different types of bream. Barramundi farmed in Australia, prawns out of Thailand, there’s a huge fishing industry in Oman and that gets flown in. In fact I can barely think of a country that has a coastline that doesn’t send product into Billingsgate. Huge lumps of tuna, whole swordfish. You know, these things which weigh 100 kilos, these are big lumps of fish. If there’s a market for it, a merchant will supply it. There’s a guy who sells live eels. He has them in racking with water going through the whole time and he opens the drawer up and these eels poke their heads out to come and talk to you. In the olden days if one escaped it was just allowed to go off into the dock and good luck to you. These days they’re so expensive they go and catch them – come back!
Smithfield, there’s been a market there since the early part of the Middle Ages. They had a live cattle market there until the middle of the Victorian age, by which time it moved a mile or so up the road, to Islington Fields, and that’s when they built those magnificent buildings, still operational. They are breathtakingly beautiful buildings of their type. And they make a very fine meat market. We spent £70 million on it a decade or so ago, upgrading it so that it now meets all the EU standards of hygiene. Those who were used to the market fifty years ago say, of course, it’s no fun and it hasn’t got any character; that may be true, but it’s clean and it’s sanitized. I can remember when they had wooden floors covered with sawdust and everything was open and you had these porters carrying half carcasses over their shoulder and a cigarette hanging out of their mouth. There was no refrigeration as we know it today, but nobody got food poisoning or anything like that. It may not have been as clean and as sanitized as things are today, but it was still healthy.
Smithfield today is a bit old-fashioned in its ways of doing business, but it has a buzz about it. It sells first-rate quality meat, so long as you want to buy a decent quantity of it. You wouldn’t get away with buying less than a box of chickens late in the day and they wouldn’t want to sell you one leg of lamb or something like that. On the other hand, you can go down on a Friday about seven o’clock in the morning and they would be more than happy to deal with you for a bit of cash. It helps their cashflow and they would be able to get rid of some of the stock before the weekend. These guys who work there all work in white coats and overalls and white wellies and hard hats. When they start, they are absolutely immaculate, that’s an absolute rule. But if you’re a meat cutter you’re going to get blood on your clothes, and even the proprietors of the businesses have got pretty bloody outfits by the time it tails off about eight in the morning.
Spitalfields has been operating under Royal Charter since 1682. It moved from just outside the City of London to new buildings in East London in 1991. We’ve got 115 stands in the main hall at Spitalfields, of which more than half are foreigners of one sort. The tenants are under no obligation to tell us how much they’re selling, but based on the number of forty-ton trucks that come into the market every day, we reckon we sell not far short of 700,000 tons of fruit and vegetables out of Spitalfields every year. That’s a hell of a lot of fruit and vegetables. (By comparison, we sell 120,000 tons of meat in Smithfield, and in Billingsgate about 22,000 tons of fish.)
The majority of people who come to Spitalfields are either running restaurants or cafes or catering companies, and there is an enormous colour spectrum that you wouldn’t have had in London a hundred years ago. But the spirit, the humour, the doggedness of the traders – that hasn’t changed. The knowledge that they are merely here for a small period of time but the market has been here for hundreds of years, that you are a custodian of a tradition. That remains.
You must really get down to one of the markets.
PETER THOMAS ET AL.
New Spitalfields Market traders
New Spitalfields Market sits on a 31-acre site in Leyton, East London. Inside its great shed are those 115 units for wholesaler traders to sell vegetables, fruits and flowers,
the largest such market in the United Kingdom. In the early morning hours it’s full of stock and alive with the sound of beeping forklifts. Here in the far east of the city, the rest of London is a distant wash of orange in the sky. There is no pedestrian traffic, no late-night wanderers cut through this part of town. If you are out on this patch of concrete, at these unsociable hours, it’s to buy fruit and veg in bulk.
The first couple of times I visited the market, I was a danger to myself. Stand for too long in a delivery lane and you’ll feel the strong arm of someone guiding you out of the path of a forklift. They move quickly, buzzing past the stacks of cucumbers, squashing errant tomatoes, the drivers peering over their shoulder, sometimes gumming bits of pineapple. On one occasion I left with a box of lychees; another time I came back with a box of spring onions, because the white bulbs of the Spitalfields onion looked like they were made from ivory. Sometimes I’d get fixated on one particular vegetable and the whole mad din of the covered market – the reversing forklifts, the shouted exchanges between buyer and seller, the twittering birds and occasionally the wash of rain outside and the loud, tinny radios playing Heart FM – faded out. Usually I stayed for just an hour or two.
During one visit, I noticed a buyer who moved up and down the aisles with particular speed, wandering, looking, negotiating and ticking off his checklist. He walked up and down for hours. He never came to rest. I sought him out and tried to ask him a question; he waved me off. I persisted and he told me he’d been in this industry since he was 16. ‘You have to be the greatest actor in the world,’ he said. ‘You have to say exactly the right thing. And you have to say it at exactly the right time.’ He told me his name was Peter Thomas and when I asked if I could accompany him through the market sometime, he said, ‘Sure. If you can keep up.’
1.00 a.m.
JOHN: What, you’ve got a bouncer now, Pete?
PETER: Yeah, a bouncer, yeah. But I look after him.
We are standing on the cold storage floor, where the sorting and food prep takes place. His operation takes up two floors and sits across the parking lot from the market.
PETER: What happens all night long, Craig, we put them orders together in these boxes. They load each lorry up and they all go out to different areas.
CT: How many lorries are there?
PETER: Fifty-five.
CT: So every different area in the city has a different …?
PETER: It’s bigger than the city. It’s really the entire M25. Tonight, most are used. On a Tuesday and a Thursday, not all the trucks are used. Come in here, come on.
*
He wears brown cords, a brown jumper over a dress shirt, thick glasses, black dress shoes. He has no belt this morning so he keeps pulling up his trousers, tucking in his shirt. He walks across the cold storage floor towards the milk floats he uses to move back and forth from the market to his office.
This is what we do in the early hours of the morning. Upstairs, we get what we call a song sheet out the computer. It’s a long sheet of paper, which tells us every single item that’s been sold. We then take our stock sheet out. Our stock sheet is a physical stock that my boys take at nine o’clock of the morning. Okay? Ian, who comes in at midnight, sits down with the stock sheet and the song sheet and compares what’s been sold against what the stock is. Now, we’re only human beings and we haven’t got a crystal ball, so sometimes we run out of certain items, which is the way I want to run the business anyway because it keeps it nice and fresh and turned over. Another employee, Tommy, makes up what you call the shortfall. So for instance we might have a hundred boxes of broccoli on stock and we might have sold 120, which means we’re going to be short of twenty boxes of broccoli. That’s what Tommy does. So that’s where we’re going now, to meet Tommy. [He tucks in his shirt as we jump onto the float.] We’ve got another one of these floats. Mind your head on that … That’s it. [He drives the milk float drives across the parking lot. The early morning air stings. Up ahead I can see noise and hustle of the market and the constant mechanical ballet of the forklifts.]
CT: So where will these trucks be heading to?
PETER: Hospitals, schools, colleges, restaurants, clubs, care homes. All within the M25.
1.20 a.m.
[Out of the milk float, he walks past the stalls. He is endlessly moving, calling out to the different guvnors, most of whom stand consulting their accounts behind podiums that sit on pallets.]
PETER: All right, Mark. You owe me a turn as it happens.
MARK: What?
PETER: Yeah, you fucking do and all …
MARK: 10p.
PETER: All right. [He takes my arm, leads me away.] See, I said, you owe me a turn. He didn’t know whether he did or not. Anyway, he thought about it, but even at this time of the morning you can’t let them have an inch. Okay, now we’ll just wait here for Tommy.
CT: Do you have a route that you stick to every night?
PETER: What I do, I go down every aisle. [He points to the lanes.] I look at every firm. People don’t know it, but I’m using my eyes all the time to see if someone’s got a lot of something. If they’ve got a lot of something I know how to bet, do you see what I mean? Hello, Tommy. This is Craig, he’s going to spend the day with us and see what happens. [Tommy nods.]
TOMMY: Mixed peppers come in from Montgomery. Strawberries, jamming strawberries, they’re in.
PETER: Yeah, I want another 20p though.
TOMMY: They’re 70. I’ve got all this top stuff, real cream gear. And I want to put 10 French beans.
PETER: Go on.
[Peter wanders over towards some asparagus. Tommy rattles his printout at me.]
TOMMY: This is a short sheet, yeah? This is what I do. The drivers might be waiting for a box of this or a box of that, so I run around to make sure we’ve got it all so the lorries can get out. The first lorry’s going out at two o’clock, so you need to be on your toes. After the lorries go you get a main buying list and then you start again.
PETER: Come on then. Here you are, Craig. [He deposits a box in my hands and points towards the milk float.] Just put that asparagus on there. Nice and dry underneath. Smells okay. Got that crispness. Hear that? That squeak. This is Peruvian. This time of year it all comes from South America. English has just finished. You have your seasons, you see. [He turns to the guvnor, perched behind a podium.] Ain’t bad, John, is it. What’s the ecrip?
JOHN: Tom Mix?
PETER: Okay, come and talk to you in a minute.
JOHN: All right.
[The guvnor, John, wanders away. Peter looks over some courgette flowers and says quietly, mischievously:]
PETER: Now then, what I want to do, Craig … we might have some fresh coming in in a minute, see? But he’s only got three here now. So that I’ll get this, I’ve got to hide the courgette flowers somewhere.
CT: You’re going to hide the courgette flowers?
PETER: Now at least I’ve got that, you know what I mean? Now when the fresh comes in, I’ll change it over.
[He hides the veg out of sight, straightens up, tucks in his shirt, and starts to walk.]
PETER: Keep up. Now over there I spoke to them in rhyming slang. I said, ‘What’s the ecrip?’
CT: The what?
PETER: The ecrip. Did you hear me say, how’s the ecrip? That’s ‘price’ backwards, so that you didn’t know what I was talking about. And he said to me, Tom Mix, which is rhyming slang. What’s Tom Mix?
CT: Six.
PETER: Yeah. This was why the language was designed, so that I could talk to him and no one knew what we was talking about. ‘Carpet’ means three. That one goes back to years and years ago, when people was given a prison sentence, and if what they got it was either three months or three years, they got a carpet in the cell and that’s what they used to say. How d’you get on? Oh, I got a carpet. Oh, fuck me, did ya? And that’s what it was. It was either three months or three years, but I know a carpet is three. ‘Ben neves’ is ‘seven’ backwards.
‘Thgiet’ is ‘eight’ backwards. ‘Flo’s line’ is nine, ‘cockle’ is ten. ‘Bottle of blue’ is two and then I’ll sling one at an Aristotle. An Aristotle is a bottle. Double rhyming slang. All veg has got different ones. Celery is ‘horn root’, because years ago they thought that celery was an aphrodisiac. And they said it give you the horn. So they called it horn root. ‘Self starters’ is tomatoes. ‘Navigators’ is taters. ‘Boy scouts’ are sprouts. ‘Tom and Jerry’ is cherries.
CT: Do you have different banter with people who aren’t English? Like the Turks?
PETER: Yes, it’s no good talking rhyming slang to them, is it? They just about understand proper English. One of the young Pakistani fellows learned the rhyming slang just so he’d know what was going on. [He gestures around the market.] Now these people are all salesmen and they’re all here to earn as much money as they possibly can. They will try to get as much money out of me and I will try to get as much money out of them. There’s no friends in business. We’ll be talking about football and all of a sudden the business side comes to it, and that’s it. All the time we’re talking, we know that any minute now, any second, it’s going to be, ‘How much is that?’ Then we go back to talking like friends again. You can’t drop your card.
Now then, because we’re short of produce we have to take it in the middle of the night. We can’t buy as we normally would buy. We’re at their mercy, slightly. Take for instance we’ve had to buy strawberries first thing. We’re short on strawberries. We’ve had to take them before the market has got going. Danny, who sells them, said they’re 15.50. Normally I would wait and go back there later on and say, Danny, what you going to do about them strawberries? But we’re short, so I’ve got to buy them now. He’s got me by the old thingybobs. But I can assure you I’ll get it all back later on, one way or another.