The Devil in the Kitchen

by Marco Pierre White

  What was I going to do with my life? I was too embarrassed to tell him that come the following morning I would be a chef. I didn’t think he would approve. So I replied, “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want some advice from an older man?”

  “Please tell me, Mr. Bradley.”

  He stopped walking and turned to look at me soberly. “You’re not a bad-looking lad,” said Mr. Bradley. “Go to Miami, Marco, and be a gigolo.”

  FIVE

  The George

  YOU LITTLE CUNT,” yelled Stephan Wilkinson, the head chef of the Hotel St. George. Welcome to the world of gastronomy. I had been on the job for a week and I had cocked up something or other. Burned some toast, maybe. Or had I overscrambled the eggs?

  There was a ferocious glare from this dwarf of a man, in his tall white hat and apron that touched his shoes, and then another boom came out of his vulgar mouth. It was a drill sergeant scream that rose above the bubbling of sauces, the sizzle of frying meat, the clatter of copper pans against iron stove, the sharpening of knives: “What are you, White? What—are—you!”

  This tornado of furious abuse engulfed me. “A little cunt, Chef,” I replied. “I’m a little cunt.” Forgive the language, please, but in the kitchens I’ve worked in, the most popular four-letter words have got to be “cunt” and “salt.” To the outside world, “cunt” is considered highly offensive; but in the heat of professional kitchens, cooks frequently call one another “cunt.” You just need to work out whether it is being said in a nasty way—“Do that again, cunt, and you won’t have a job tomorrow”—or a friendly way—“See you tomorrow, cunt.” Sometimes it’s an adjective: “Who nicked my cunting knife?” Sometimes it’s an adverb: “Stop cunting talking and get on with the job.” When Stephan called me a “little cunt,” it was the word “little” that seemed odd, since I was the one looking down on him.

  And so I took my first step along the long, bully-laden, work- obsessed, sleep-deprived, nicotine- and caffeine-fueled, passionate, hot and winding road that would end with three Michelin stars.

  It’s a bit shabby today, but in the spring of 1978 the Hotel St. George was still an imposing Edwardian building on Ripon Road in the heart of the delightful Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate. Today the St. George is a different entity; it is the Swallow St. George Hotel, part of the Swallow chain. Swallow St. George doesn’t have the same ring, does it? But in the late seventies it had yet to be bought out and was still a grand and exceptionally busy hotel, privately owned by a man called Mr. John Bernard Kent Abel, and the food reflected its stature.

  My life may well have been very different if I had started out two or three years later, but as it was, I stepped into the dying days of the golden age of gastronomy. At the George, I saw standards and style that, like so many other hotel kitchens, had been inspired by Escoffier, whose philosophy was “Good food is the basis of true happiness.”

  I don’t think the St. George was where I discovered a passion for food, but the romance of that golden age did not pass me by. For instance, boiled ham at the George wasn’t just boiled ham. The meat was cooked and then coated in a chaud-froid sauce—a béchamel or velouté sauce made with clarified butter and flour, turned into a roux and then moistened with milk, cream or onion stock, with gelatine (originally calf’s foot jelly) added to it. The sauce was layered onto the ham, with the first layer allowed to set before another layer was added, and then another layer, and so on, until the ham was totally white. The ham was then meticulously studded with chopped truffles to form a design, then that was covered in an aspic jelly and the finished product was placed on a huge silver platter and carved in the dining room. It was a magnificent sight and one that we are unlikely to see again now that the restaurant business is governed by percentages and portion control.

  There were probably fourteen staff in the kitchen, serving the hotel’s two restaurants, the French Room and the more informal Lamplighter, and we were busy but I didn’t mind. My father’s programming was paying off. Hard work was a necessity of life and it did not cross my mind to pack it in and find another career. I was the son of a chef and the grandson of a chef, my brothers were chefs. Cheffing was in my blood.

  First, however, I would have to pass an initiation ceremony, which all the new chefs underwent at the George. On my first day I arrived at seven thirty in the morning, changed into my brand-new chef ’s whites, and was given my first job. “Here’s a big pot of stock,” said Stephan, and he pointed toward a vat of jellied beef stock. “And here’s a sieve.” He told me to transfer the stock, via the sieve, from the pot into another big pot. I spooned dollop after dollop into the sieve and then pushed it through the tiny holes with a little ladle. The stock splashed all over my whites and then, once the job was done and my arm muscles were aching badly, the stockpot was taken from me and put onto the gas, where it quickly turned into liquid. I stood and watched, thinking, why didn’t they just bring it to the boil and then pass it through the sieve in the first place? I didn’t quite realize that they were taking the piss out me.

  My next job on that day was to blanch, peel and de-seed five boxes of tomatoes. Halfway through the laborious process, my arms—already tired out by the stock-sieving chore—could take no more and they seized up. I was standing there with my arms bent and locked; I looked like a crab. I had worked seven hours straight, without a break and without a meal, and that’s when I lost it. I freaked and burst into tears.

  Stephan took pity. He got me a ham sandwich and I sat in his office, “the glass room,” munching away and feeling that I had failed. That evening I was told to clean the walk-in fridge, but by now it was nine thirty, and as I’d only had a ham sandwich all day, I was starving. There was a massive bowl of something that looked chocolatey and sweet. I dipped my finger in and tasted the mixture. Quite nice, I thought. So nice, in fact, that I ate the whole bowl of mixture. When the pastry chef asked if anyone had seen his bavarois, I looked at him blankly and shook my head. It was only a year or so later that I learned what a chocolate bavarois was and it dawned on me that I had eaten what he had been searching for.

  In time, and with experience, I became a bit more cocky. When Chef gave me thirteen sacks of peas to shell, I asked, “Chef, what does thirteen sacks of peas look like when they’ve been shelled?” He replied, “I don’t know.” So I threw away six sacks and shelled the remaining seven. When I was asked to prepare ten boxes of spinach, I chucked away four boxes and prepared the remaining six. Unaware that I was ditching a lot of the produce, Stephan couldn’t believe how fast I was at sorting out the veg. On top of that, I endeared myself to other cooks who were challenging each other to drink a pint of malt vinegar: I stepped forward and downed the pint in one gulp. I felt thoroughly wretched afterward but I won the game, and after that they started to treat me like one of the fellows.

  I’d do breakfasts twice a week, and when Sacha Distel, the French crooner, stayed at the hotel, he became the first famous person I cooked for. I made him bacon and eggs. It was carried up to his room and then I sneaked away from the kitchen and up to his door, bent down and peered through the keyhole. There he was, Monsieur Distel, eating my English breakfast.

  In the mornings I’d work in the larder, doing the Lamplighter buffet, and one of my duties was to make the salads—Waldorf, bagatelle (with mushrooms), à la grecque, niçoise and coleslaw. I found that I could be a little bit creative with the salads and no one would make a fuss, and eventually I found that I could experiment with artistic presentation on whatever I liked. So if I was given a sirloin of beef, I might slice it very thinly and then arrange it around the joint in a fan shape. I wasn’t doing anything new—I had watched the other chefs make these dishes—but now I could create my own pictures. We might do a honey-glazed ham, which I’d decorate with cloves, studding them so they made the shape of a harlequin. Or I would do a chaud-froid of ham, using the studs of truffle to create a vase of flowers, perhaps.

  The back door would open and wo
nderful ingredients would be carried into the kitchen. Each season brought different ingredients and the menu would change accordingly—strawberries, asparagus, game . . . I stood in awe, watching as enormous wild salmon—there was no such thing as farmed salmon then—arrived to be poached, left to cool and then covered in scales of thinly sliced cucumber. In those times, meat did not arrive precut into equal-sized portions, ready for the pan. Whole lambs would be brought in and chopped up in the kitchen. The beef was brought in as sirloin and rump attached in one enormous joint. The leg of veal came as a rump, the whole loin attached to it. Milk would arrive in giant churns, rather than in plastic bottles or cartons. This was yesterday’s world, when fish-and-chip shops served food wrapped up in newspaper—a popular custom that was banned because of concerns that the newsprint contained toxins.

  Looking back, I realize that it was my love of nature which gave me the understanding of natural ingredients. Mother Nature is the true artist, and the chef is merely the technician. Every single day I was turned on by nature. But what would keep me going, the thing that would keep me in this career, was the desire to be recognized. The better I was at the job, the better I felt I could cope with my insecurities. I would become first and foremost addicted to the adrenaline of cooking, rather than the passion for great food.

  Standards at the George were high. If you made sandwiches, you had to trim the edges of the bread to perfection and serve them on a silver platter. Customers dined on dishes like beef Stroganoff and steak Diane. Nothing went to waste. If boiled ham was served hot, the remaining meat would be used later for sandwiches. Roast lamb might be served with petit pois à la Française and pommes dauphinoise, and the leftover lamb would be served cold in the following day’s buffet. Once in a while we’d serve a spectacular baron of beef, which is the two sirloins and the ribs—the better part of an entire cow. The baron was too big for the ordinary kitchen ovens, so it would be hung in the bakers’ oven and roasted pink. Once it was cooked, it was put on a sort of stretcher and two chefs would carry it into the dining room for carving.

  I did a bit of everything: I spent time with the kitchen’s butcher, worked hours on the larder section and sometimes would help the pastry chef by making lemon syllabubs or piping cream onto the trifles. I admired everything I saw. Some weeks I would work fifteen or sixteen hours a day, bumping up my basic wage of £15 a week to £60 with all the overtime I did. As an apprentice I received a salary raise of a pound a week on my birthday.

  When I turned seventeen on December 11, 1978, I had a day off, but I still went into work. Was I already hooked on the security of the kitchen? I had seen on the menu that they were doing Châteaubriand sauce béarnaise for a private party and I wanted to learn how to make béarnaise, a derivative of hollandaise, so I asked if I could come in to watch it being made.

  At the George we might have a party for 350 people and I’d have to do pommes de terre château, where the potato is “turned” so that it is perfectly olive-shaped. With 5 little potatoes for each plate, that’s 1,750 pieces of potato. Compare that with working in a restaurant, where you might do six portions of pommes de terre château a night, and in one evening at a hotel I had acquired experience it would have taken me nearly sixty nights to get in a restaurant. So I picked up the disciplines of cooking speedily, organization and one other thing: how to discipline my hands, almost program them, so I became really fast with a knife.

  It didn’t matter how fast or hard I worked, bollockings were still part of the job. Bollockings from Chef. Bollockings from the older chefs, who included a bloke from Lancashire whose accent was so deep that I could not understand a single word that came out of his mouth. I would just respond with a simple “yes” to every remark he made. Then one day he muttered something unintelligible and when I said, “Yes,” he screamed, “What the fuck do you mean, ‘yes,’ boy? Didn’t you hear what I fucking said?” That was the only time I understood him.

  I was indeed the apprentice, the whipping boy, but I could take the bollockings because I had been toughened up by my childhood. It was as easy as stepping from one male-dominated, bullying world into another. Being bollocked was no big deal. Most of the time I found it rather entertaining, even enjoyable. I savored Stephan’s rage.

  There was something else that would make my life a little easier at the George. Stephan, like my dad, enjoyed a bet, and something happened that helped to mellow him a little. A few weeks after I joined the brigade, Stephan let off one of his drill sergeant yells: “Marco! Your dad’s on the office phone.”

  I went into the office and took the call. The excitement in Dad’s voice said it all. “Marco,” he started, “I’ve just had Johnny Seagrove on the phone and he says there’s a horse racing in the three ten at Ripon. It’s a good one. Do a pound each way.” He told me the horse’s name, I repeated it and then said good-bye. Stephan, who had been within earshot, was curious. “What was that all about?” he asked.

  “That was my dad. He’s mates with lots of trainers and jockeys and he’s had a tip.” Stephan’s eyes widened with delight. He was more than a little impressed; he was agog. Now he saw me in a different light. This teenage lad standing in front of him, young Marco White, had connections.

  Dad’s tip proved to be a winner, and after that news of my connections rapidly spread through the hotel. Within days my popularity had soared. Chefs and waiters, barmen and chambermaids would track me down to say sweetly, “Hello, Marco. Spoken to your dad?” If I nodded, they’d put a pound or two in my hand and ask me to back the horse for them. “Off you go,” Stephan would say, pointing toward the door, and I would sprint to the bookie’s in my chef’s whites to place the bets. I wonder now whether I spent more time in the bookie’s than in the kitchen.

  Through this I devised an ingenious way of getting the brigade back for bullying me. I used to announce to them, “My dad’s calling with a tip tomorrow,” and they would rush toward me, handing over their cash. Then I’d go to the betting shop and put all their money on a horse of my choice. If it won, I took the profit and then gave them their money back, saying, “There was no tip from Dad.” If the horse lost, I’d give them their betting slips to show I’d put the money on. It meant that on a good week I was earning more than Stephan. I felt like an entrepreneur.

  The George also taught me that chefs and waiters hate each other. There’s a variety of reasons but usually it boils down to nationality. At the George, the chefs were British while most waiters were French or Italian. The George’s restaurants must have had a charming ambience, but in the kitchen there were battles between the front-of-house regiment and the back-of-house brigade. Usually it was just bickering, but I remember a scuffle between drill sergeant Stephan and Giovanni, the restaurant manager.

  Giovanni was in the kitchen when Stephan taunted him and it could have gotten quite nasty, but Giovanni was carrying two buckets of ice, which he dropped on the floor. As the two men attempted to hit one another, the ice beneath them formed a mini ice rink and in the end they fell to the ground, arms wrapped around each other Laurel and Hardy–style.

  Despite all this I liked Giovanni, and because of our Italian roots, we bonded. He was the staff playboy and drove a 1000cc Harley-Davidson. He was the coolest man in the hotel. In fact, he was the coolest man in Harrogate, and must have been the only one with a Harley. He had the best room in the hotel and would spend his days off lying in bed with his girlfriend, Joanna. Sometimes I’d chat with Giovanni and he would go all Marlon Brando on me, saying, “One day I will leave the hotel, Marco, and when I do, I will leave you two things: my room and my girlfriend.”

  Eventually that day came. Giovanni climbed onto his Harley, like Gary Cooper mounting his horse, and rode off into the Yorkshire sunset. I did indeed end up with his luxurious room, which meant I could move out of home. However, Joanna was heartbroken at losing her lover and I didn’t have the courage to tell her Giovanni had promised her to me.

  I was not good with the opposite sex. Ther
e was a posh university undergraduate whose name I forget and who had taken a holiday job as a chambermaid at the George. She seemed quite interested in me and I mustered up the courage to invite her to dinner in Harrogate. It was my first date and I took her to Vanni’s, an Italian restaurant in Parliament Drive, but the evening did not go well. As I was trying to make her laugh with a funny story, I waved an arm and accidentally knocked a glass of red wine onto her white blouse. A waiter sprang into action, trying to wipe away the wine with a napkin, and I sat there dying. She said, “Don’t worry,” and I paid the bill and we went back to my hotel room, the room where Giovanni had been so lucky in love. She removed her sodden blouse and I gazed at her black bra before she put on one of my white shirts. Then she removed her trousers, revealing black knickers, and lay on the bed.

  Uncomfortably, I lay next to her and stroked her bristly thighs. Christ, her legs are hairier than mine, I thought. Who’s the man on this bed?

  I wanted to explore, to experiment, but she said, “You’re too nice, Marco. You’re too young. I can’t do this to you.”

  The kitchen porter—he had to wash up and keep the place clean— disliked me intensely. He was a big slob of a man, six foot four, with horrible greasy hair. When he walked past me in the kitchen, a reflex action compelled him to give me a sharp poke in the kidneys with his thumb. Probably I deserved the pokes but I had to get him back. I devised a plan.

  “Chef, can I clean the walk-in fridge?” I asked.

  Chef looked over at me. “Of course you can.”

  The walk-in fridge was enormous. I removed hundreds of bowls and containers, one by one, and put the food into clean containers. It was a laborious job for me, but it meant that the porter was left with a mountain of bowls and containers to wash up and in those days everything was washed by hand. I turned this into a regular fridge-clearing exercise, which drove him mad. “It’s your turn for a beating,” he’d say, his hands like prunes, and then we’d go in circles around the stove as he tried to get me.