* * *
After I’d worked on Meats and Fish, Michael put me in charge of Pastry and I was given a week to learn the craft. A lot of the best chefs have done Pastry, Michel Roux of the Waterside Inn among them. Why is Pastry so important? Because it is all about science, and the knowledge of culinary science is vital. A precise measurement of that ingredient mixed with a certain amount of that ingredient produces this result. It’s chemistry.
I beavered away, practicing dishes like Sorbet Poire Genet, a delicious ball of pear sorbet decorated with a little slice of fanned poached pear, a mint leaf and a drizzle of pear liqueur. It was served in a pearshaped glass bowl, the top of which was removed by the customer to reveal the sorbet inside. The pink grapefruit sorbet was another beauty. If you make pink grapefruit sorbet, it will turn white, so we added a touch of grenadine to give it that pink tinge. The Box Tree menu would change every day and I would build the pudding menu out of about thirty dishes.
If I wanted to introduce something, it would have to be tasted by the Boys when they had their dinner at six thirty in the snug. Now that I had my own section, I really began to excel. I could express myself and create dishes. I took a tuile biscuit and added rose ice cream and glazed strawberries in their own coulis, put a sugar cage over the top of it and decorated it with crystallized primroses—very camp, very Box Tree. “Excellent,” said Messrs. Reid and Long. “We’ll call it Timbale de Fraises Pompadour.” It became a specialty of the Box Tree, and years after my departure it was still on the menu.
I now knew that the kitchen was the best place in the world. At the George I had discovered that cooking enabled me to express myself, and at Box Tree I was acknowledged. There was “well done” and “that’s good.” For the first time in my life I was being recognized. One night Ken Lamb, the head waiter, confided in me that he had heard the Boys discussing me. Mr. Reid had said to Mr. Long, “Marco’s the best pastry chef Box Tree’s ever had.” That sort of comment was a welcome confidence booster for an eighteen-year-old chef.
MICHAEL LAWSON, A lanky man with a kind face, took me under his wing. Like me, he was another damaged soul. As a young man he had arrived at the Box Tree and worked his way up to become head chef. Somewhere in the distant past he’d met a girl and asked her to marry him. She accepted his proposal and the wedding was organized, but shortly before the big day she was killed in a car accident, so the rumor went, when she was on her way to collect her wedding dress. Michael, poor man, had never recovered from the loss or found another woman. He had never wanted to. Instead, all his love and emotion had gone into the Box Tree. On our days off he would take me for a drink at the pub and I would sit there listening to him talk about food, the menus he had devised and Box Tree kitchen stories. Michael was understated; if you’d have walked into the kitchen, you wouldn’t have known that he was the head chef because he didn’t have a great presence, but boy was he a great chef.
It was while at the Box Tree that my romantic life, up until now barren and bleak, perked up. On Sundays I would work at a nearby pub, the Cow and Calf, where I met a part-time waitress called Fiona. She was a year or two younger than me and I was thrilled when she accepted my invitation to take her out for dinner. I took us by taxi from Ilkley to Harrogate, where we had dinner at a very posh restaurant, Olivers, before getting another cab back. I lost my virginity to Fiona in bed at Mr. and Mrs. Fox’s house, where I lodged during my time at the Box Tree. I was eighteen years old. For a few months, maybe six, we existed on a relationship called sex.
Sadly, Fiona left me for the restaurant manager at the Cow and Calf and they went on to have children together. Being ditched did nothing for my confidence, but I convinced myself that Fiona was simply turned on by power. Why else would she have deserted me for him?
In reality, relationships were a distraction and I would come to realize that much of the time I could only manage brief flings. My girlfriends, meanwhile, would be fitted in around my days and nights in the kitchen. This may seem terribly disrespectful, but I got more turned on by food. If I met a girl, I’d go round to her house when her parents weren’t in, we’d have a quick shag and that was it. Bonds were broken long before the word “love” could be mentioned.
I remember meeting one young girl at a club and taking her home. As we stood by her gate, I was just moving in to kiss her when we were lit up by the headlights of an oncoming car. It was the Boys in their black Cadillac. The car stopped and Colin jumped out. “In, Marco,” he ordered me. As I sat in the backseat being driven home by my bosses, Colin explained, “We had to get you away from that girl. You don’t know what you might have caught.”
From time to time, I would bump into Mr. Butler, my former teacher at Allerton High, who happened to live in Ilkley. We’d stop and chat and he’d ask how things were going and he always seemed pleased that I had found a job that made me passionate. Many of my contemporaries from school had drifted from one job to another, or were “on the dole”—living off state handouts.
My Box Tree days drew to a close not long after Steve, Michael Lawson’s sous chef, handed in his notice and Malcolm and Colin asked if I knew of anyone who could replace him. I was too inexperienced for the job, they had quite rightly thought. The only person I could suggest was Michael Truelove, the chef who first taught me how to use a knife when I worked in the kitchen at the Hotel St. George. He had been good to me, at times protecting me from the bullying of head chef Stephan, and I liked him. “Michael is a very good cook,” I told Malcolm and Colin. “About five years older than me and a hard worker.”
Michael was offered the job and he accepted. When he arrived, we were the two pranksters from the George reunited. One day, the French chef Pascale, who was in charge of Hors D’Ouevres, went into the walk-in fridge to fetch ingredients. Michael and I closed the door and locked him in there for half an hour. When we opened the door, Pascale was sitting on an upturned crate and rolling a cigarette. He said nothing. In fact, he said nothing for an entire week. He just sulked. The French don’t get angry; they sulk.
Michael Truelove’s arrival would ultimately lead to my departure. Once he’d settled in, he encouraged me to look for another job. “You don’t want to stay in the sticks, Marco,” he’d say. “You want to spread your wings.”
Ridiculously immature, I decided to hand in my notice without having a job to go to. I thought I’d be asked to work a six-week notice period and during that time I’d find another job. Michael Lawson turned pale when I told him I was off. “I’m not telling the bosses,” he said. The prospect of relaying bad news frightened him. “You’ll have to tell them yourself, Marco.”
I mustered up the courage and broke the news to the Boys.
“Let’s talk about this in the Chinese Room,” said Malcolm, and we went upstairs, where the three of us sat at a table. They offered to increase my salary, which then was about £30 a week.
“It’s not about the money,” I said. “I’ve made up my mind and you can’t persuade me to stay.”
It was wrong of me to assume they’d want me to work out my notice, staying on for a month or even six weeks. They were so badly hurt by my announcement that they came back with a blow that broke my heart.
“Go now,” said Malcolm.
“There’s no point in staying,” added Colin. “It’s best if you get your things together and leave now.”
I was numbed by what I saw as brutality. What’s more, they wouldn’t give me a reference. Looking back, I can understand their reaction. Today I don’t blame them. I had rejected them, so they were rejecting me. But to have happiness snatched from me in a matter of seconds seemed cruel. Malcolm and Colin had been like my adopted family.
I had never imagined that I would leave on bad terms. If only I had been able to work my notice and leave on a high . . . I was traumatized. I had arrived at the Box Tree happy and excited, but eighteen months later I left via the same door, feeling destroyed. Love affairs often end in heartache, don’t they? Yet the Box Tr
ee would remain in my memory as the most special restaurant I have ever walked into, let alone worked in.
About twelve years later I was at the stove at Harveys, my restaurant in southwest London, by then the winner of two Michelin stars, when the kitchen phone rang. “Hello, Marco. It’s Michael . . . Michael Lawson.” It was lovely to hear his voice and I told him so. He said, “Would you mind if I came to dinner?” I told him to come whenever he wanted, at which point he revealed that he was phoning from the public phone box outside the restaurant. Poor Michael had felt nervous about walking into the restaurant. Stage fright or something like that. I ran through the restaurant and greeted my mentor at the door. I sat him at table nine and gave him a grand meal with wine. When service had slowed down, I went out to have a chat with him. “The meal you fed me tonight,” said Michael, “was better than anything we ever did at the Box Tree.” It was a compliment that went some way toward repairing what were then my tarnished memories of that wonderful little restaurant in the middle of nowhere.
SEVEN
It Was Meant to Be
IT WAS THE summer of 1981 and I was a nineteen-year-old in a rut, back in Leeds. After my abrupt departure from the Box Tree, I’d been drifting. I took a chef ’s job at Froggie’s, the restaurant of a Leeds casino called the Continental, where the head chef, Jacques Castell, served good old-fashioned food.
I was a lodger in Moor Allerton, in a house owned by a Spanish woman called Esperanza. This put me in the peculiar and uncomfortable position of living just around the corner from Dad and the house where I had grown up. As Dad and I hadn’t spoken for a few years, and I could not bring myself to resume relations, I found myself having to hide from him.
Sometimes I would spot him walking down the road and would have to turn away so he didn’t catch sight of me, or scurry away in the opposite direction. I don’t think he ever saw me—I don’t remember cries of “Hey, Marco, what the hell are you doing here?” He had no idea that we were living within a few hundred yards of one another. I feel very sad about it now. It was a ridiculous situation.
I had to escape Leeds. I had escaped once, albeit only the short distance to Harrogate and then Ilkley, and had gone back to Leeds because I knew it, but once I was there, I saw the city in a different light. I didn’t like it any longer. As a child I’d often felt I didn’t fit in there; now I fitted in even less. I had caught a glimpse of life outside the city.
I applied for two jobs. The job I really wanted was at Le Gavroche, the two-star Michelin restaurant in the heart of London. Box Tree staff had talked romantically about this fine establishment in the capital. Albert Roux, Gavroche’s chef patron, was hailed as an excellent cook. The press, the critics and customers loved his classical French food. It is fair to say that Albert Roux and his brother Michel—who ran the Michelin-starred Waterside Inn—were the most talked about chefs at the time. Or they were in Yorkshire, at least.
So I set my sights on Gavroche and phoned to ask for an application form. Around about the same time, however, I heard of a pastry chef vacancy at Chewton Glen, a country house hotel that sits on the edge of the New Forest in New Milton, Hampshire (today it is considered one of England’s finest small hotels).
When a letter arrived from Le Gavroche, I opened it excitedly, knowing it would be the application form. But when I pulled out the form, my heart sank. Every single question was written in French and I imagined that the responses were expected to be in the same language. I thought it was the Roux way of saying that they would take chefs of any nationality, as long as they were French. I didn’t speak a word of French, so I concluded, alas, that I would have to rule out Le Gavroche. I chucked the application form into the bin. I pinned my hopes on Chewton Glen and was delighted when the head chef, Christian Delteuil, invited me to the South Coast for a job interview.
On Thursday, June 18, 1981, I took the coach from Leeds to Victoria coach station in London, traveled across the capital to Waterloo station and from there caught the train to New Milton. There was nothing particularly memorable about the interview. I liked the head pastry chef, a nice old boy, but I don’t recall having a great deal of respect for Delteuil and, having worked for Michael Lawson at the Box Tree, I knew respect for the boss was a necessity. Delteuil’s parting words were, “Give me a call next week and I’ll let you know if you’ve got the job.”
I would have called him, of course, but the extraordinary events of the next twenty-four hours ensured I never needed to pick up the phone. It therefore remains a mystery to me whether or not I landed the pastry chef job.
Beginning my journey home from Chewton Glen to Leeds, I arrived at New Milton station and discovered, annoyingly, that I had missed my train. When I finally got to Waterloo, I asked a man who I thought was a British Rail ticket collector how I could get to Victoria. “I’m not from British Rail. I’m with Royal Mail,” he replied, but he happened to be going to Victoria, so he offered me a lift in the back of his van, and I made the journey perched on sacks of post.
At Victoria coach station I was told, “You’ve missed it, mate . . . The next coach back to Leeds isn’t until the morning.” A bed-and-breakfast was not a consideration: first, I was a nineteen-year-old lad and nineteen-year-old lads don’t do B&B when they’ve missed the coach; second, I was broke. So I took a stroll. This was my first time in the capital and I was going to make the most of it.
I didn’t know where I was heading, but I ended up wandering along a brightly lit street and then I stopped dead in my tracks.
There I was, quite by chance, standing outside Le Gavroche in Lower Sloane Street. I stood on the pavement, mesmerized. The lights were still on in this exquisite restaurant, a two-star heaven, and I pressed my nose up against the window. Inside there were a few customers, happy and well fed, finishing off their meals with midnight cups of coffee. It seemed elegant, stylish and grand, with the warm golden glow of dim lights and candlelight.
I couldn’t stand there all night, though, I’d have been arrested, so I headed back to the coach station, where I met a German lad who was about my age and equally forlorn, and together we embarked on a sightseeing tour, walking to Buckingham Palace and Parliament Square. We went to Trafalgar Square to look at Nelson’s Column, before my companion, who had more cash than me, bought me a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich.
When morning came and the Leeds-bound coach pulled out of Victoria, I was not on board.
Instead I returned to Le Gavroche, knocked on the back door and asked to see the head chef. A pastry chef called Baloo (as in the Jungle Book) told me the restaurant was closed for lunch and that no one else was around. I was about to walk away, perhaps back to Victoria, when he added, “You could always go to Roux brothers’ head office. It’s not far.” I walked down Lower Sloane Street, crossed the Thames at Chelsea Bridge, went straight up the Queenstown Road and took a left onto Wandsworth Road, and there, a few hundred yards along, was Roux HQ.
God knows what I looked like when I walked through the door. Actually, I know what I looked like: I looked like shit. It was about ten in the morning and I hadn’t slept for more than twenty-four hours. Albert, a dapper little Frenchman in his midforties, was sitting there and I instantly recognized him from newspaper pictures. He was kind enough to make no comment about my shabby appearance.
“Mr. Roux. I’m hoping to get a job in one of your restaurants.”
He said, “Where have you worked?”
I showed him my references and mentioned that I had worked at the Box Tree. “You were at the Box Tree, were you? How long were you there?”
“About eighteen months, Mr. Roux.”
The magic name Box Tree worked well. “Go back to Leeds,” he said, before adding, “get your belongings and then come back down on Monday. Report here on Tuesday.” And that was that.
I OBEYED ALBERT’S orders, and the following Monday, when I returned to London, the company found me a little bedsit in Clapham, just around the corner from Roux HQ. On Tuesday, June 2
3, 1981, I became a “Roux robot”—what rivals in the industry called the mechanical chefs who worked for brothers Albert and Michel.
I did not start off in the kitchen at Le Gavroche but at Le Gamin, the Roux-owned City restaurant beside the Old Bailey. I did a couple of weeks there, under head chef Dennis Lobrey, who cooked good, proper food. What I saw for the first time in my life was a high standard of food served in a couple of hours to 130 people. The only desserts made on-site were ice creams and sorbets; the other pastries—things like Charlotte aux Poires and Truffes au Chocolat—came from the Roux head office. It was a smoothly run operation.
Shortly after I joined there was a bit of upheaval in the expanding Roux empire. Gavroche moved to Upper Brook Street, where it remains to this day, and its Lower Sloane Street site became Gavvers, which served watered-down versions of Gavroche’s classical dishes. At Gavvers we’d make things like Sablé à Pêche, which was a Gavroche specialty, but rather than having two layers, you’d have one layer because it was cheaper.
Dennis’s second chef, Alban, was my head chef at Gavvers, and in the autumn of 1981 I ended up at Gavroche. I made friends with Mark Bougère, who, as the chef tourner of the company, would go from one Roux restaurant to another, standing in for chefs who were ill. He was, in effect, Albert’s right-hand man and would come to Gavvers to check on things. Mark was a very fine chef, an elegant cook with a great touch, and he took a real liking to me and taught me a lot.
He taught me, for instance, how to make great sorbets with a concentrated flavor and wonderful sauces. He also encouraged me to question what I was cooking. He was one of the most knowledgeable chefs I’ve ever come across and I still have an image of him making a mousseline of fish beautifully. It was clear to me why he was the most trusted of Albert’s staff.
The Devil in the Kitchen Page 6