“When?” I asked, rather than why.
“Now.”
She didn’t seem quite right but I agreed to go with her. It would be an adventure, I thought, something spontaneous. We pulled into a petrol station near Selby on the A1 and she went into the shop. I opened up the glove compartment and all these drugs fell out— cocaine, speed, and God knows what the other drugs were, but they were drugs. So when she got back in I said, “What the fuck is this?” She went ballistic and told me to hand them over. I refused. She got out of the car, so I followed and put her back in it, then we drove off. There was a nationwide police manhunt going on at the time and I think someone must have seen me pushing Suzie into the car and suspected I was a kidnapper. We were half a mile from the petrol station when police cars surrounded us. I had to stuff Suzie’s haul down the front of my trousers and no arrests were made. Suzie soon disappeared from my life.
I found a new girlfriend. Lowri-Ann Richards was three or four years older than me and a card-carrying member of the Chelsea set. LA, as she was known, was also something of a starlet. As previously mentioned, I had met her a few years earlier, before I left for Le Manoir, when she was going out with Robert Pereno. When she was “resting,” as they say in the acting profession, she earned a living serving customers at Joe’s Brasserie in Battersea, and I had bumped into her at Joe’s after a session in the Lampwick’s kitchen: “Didn’t you used to go out with Robert Pereno?” That’s how it had started. LA and Robert had been in a band called Shock before setting up another group, Pleasure and the Beast—LA, in her revealing outfits, was the pleasure to Robert’s beast.
They released a single called “Dr Sex” but chances are you’ve never heard it. While they couldn’t crack the charts, LA and Robert were revered in the King’s Road as members of the hierarchy. Pleasure and the Beast were among the New Romantics who used to play at the highly trendy Blitz club, where, incidentally, a certain George O’Dowd worked as a cloakroom attendant before going on to become Boy George. Their stage performance was raunchy, bordering on outrageous, though they abandoned an Apache dance routine after Robert accidentally broke LA’s arm while trying to impress the audience by throwing her about.
LA was a confident girl. As an actress, she did stage work mostly but she had appeared (as Jane) in the 1980 movie Breaking Glass, which starred the singer Hazel O’Connor and was a cult classic, a sort of punk version of A Star Is Born. Years later LA was a Welsh Tele-tubby, I think. At the time, though, she was just what I needed. There had been a year of celibacy at Le Manoir and I was craving a bit of attention: it was a draining experience mothering poor Alan. Finances weren’t great and I needed stability in my life. LA was a caring person and, behind the façade of Chelsea vixen, she was utterly polite and the type of girl who would charm your parents. That and the mutual physical attraction held together the relationship.
LA brought fun into my life. Together we would go to parties, bars and clubs. And when she landed a part, I would be there in the audience. I went to see her in a show at the Players’ Theatre and when she did panto in Swindon I had a seat in the stalls.
LA invited me to move into her place, a three-bedroom flat in Battersea, and I hastily packed my trunk and escaped Alan’s sparsely furnished pad. We shared the flat with her sister, Morfudd, who was a maître d’ in a West End restaurant, and our home was a five-minute stroll from Lampwick’s, in the appropriately named Sisters Avenue.
It was a good time to live south of the Thames. The phrase “yuppie” had yet to be coined, but nevertheless, young upwardly mobile professionals were settling in up-and-coming areas like Clapham, Wandsworth and Battersea. They weren’t just flash City blokes in chalky pinstripe suits; they were young men and women making a bit of cash and living one big party. They worked hard and played harder, drinking and eating to excess, and then using their staff expense accounts to reclaim the cost of their exuberance. Their parents had lived the Swinging Sixties, but the kids were swinging even more than their parents. These young professionals liked Chelsea—many of them had grown up there—but the property there was too expensive, so they crossed over to the south side of the river, where they could get more for their money. They flooded in, clutching their beloved copies of The Sloane Ranger Handbook and chuffed that they were still so close to Peter Jones and the bustling King’s Road. All of a sudden SW11 was a cool place to live and its popularity sent property prices booming. I remember one friend buying a two-bed flat in Battersea for £25,000 and selling it eighteen months later for £80,000.
It was an exciting time in my life and my food was being noticed. Fay Maschler, the Evening Standard’s restaurant critic, came to Lampwick’s for dinner one night and gave me my first review in the London newspaper. She was quite polite about the food but I have no recollection of what I must have done for her to describe me as “the volatile but rather beautiful Marco, his intensity can glaze a crème brûlée from ten yards.”
Meanwhile, that black cloud finally showed signs of shifting from its seemingly fixed position above Alan’s head. Two of Lampwick’s regulars, a pair of property entrepreneurs, had asked Alan to go into business with them. Nigel Platts-Martin and Richard Carr had bought a wine bar called Harvey’s, which served nothing more ambitious than well-cooked burgers to a hungover crowd that craved comfort food. Harvey’s was in a good location, amid a pretty parade of Victorian shops on Bellevue Road, a couple of miles from Lampwick’s, and it overlooked Wandsworth Common. Nigel and Richard intended to split the business three ways, the idea being that Alan would be the head chef, or that they’d hire Martin to run the kitchen. Grasping for a chance to improve his wretched existence, Alan agreed to the deal. He closed Lampwick’s in the summer of 1986, which of course meant that I had lost a job, though I was pleased for my friend. The new venture was going to bring him the fresh start he so badly needed.
I got a job at Leoni’s Quo Vadis, an Italian restaurant in Soho, which paid me the extraordinarily high salary of £350 a week. Years later it would pay me considerably more than that.
The head chef at Quo Vadis was an old boy known only as Signor Zucchoni. He had been cooking the same sort of Italian trattoria-style dishes for forty years and cooking them very well. He was a traditionalist in a tall white hat, and at the beginning he viewed me as some sort of peculiar beast. There were moments when I used to catch him studying me with a look of horror in his eyes. He was thinking, “Big man with long hair, not right.”
I endeared myself to Signor Zucchoni by working very hard. Then when he asked about my background—“How come you godda name like Marco”—I explained that I was half Italian and he smiled warmly, the same sort of smile that had crossed Danny Crow’s face at Gavroche when I had mentioned my Italian roots. There was another way in which I won admiration from the boss and his assistant, Pepe. They both enjoyed a drink, so each day I would ask the restaurant manager for two bottles of wine, explaining that I needed to use them for the specialty dishes. Back in the kitchen, I handed the vino to my two superiors. They used it to pick up their spirits, rather than perk up my dishes.
When Jimmy Lahoud, the owner of Quo Vadis, opened Café St. Pierre on Clerkenwell Green, he asked me to be head chef and I took the job, but it didn’t last long. My life was about to change dramatically and it all started with a phone call from Nigel Platts-Martin.
“Would you be interested in doing Harvey’s with us?” said Nigel. I was confused. Surely Alan Bennett was going to be the chef. Not anymore, said Nigel. He and Richard didn’t think Alan was up to it. Nevertheless, I felt there was something going on behind Alan’s back; was I being approached without his knowledge?
“I can’t step on Alan’s toes,” I told Nigel. “Sort out your problem with Alan. If he says he doesn’t want to get involved in Harvey’s, then sure, come back to me.”
He did come back to me, about a week later. Nigel said Alan was most certainly out of the picture. Martin Blunos had lost faith in Alan and had gone off to work in Cov
ent Garden. Then Nigel reiterated that he and Richard Carr had also lost faith. “But whatever we think of him as a person is irrelevant,” added Nigel. “He hasn’t been able to come up with the cash to buy his share in the business, so he can’t be a partner. Simple as that. Do you want to be head chef?” asked Nigel.
“My problem,” I replied, “is that I can’t actually afford it, Nigel. I don’t know where I’d get the money to invest . . .”
It was only later that I realized Nigel and Richard were not, in fact, asking me to be a shareholder. The thought had never crossed their minds. I had wrongly assumed they wanted me to fill the position left vacant by Alan. But by now they were only after a head chef. When I told Nigel that I didn’t know where I would find the cash to invest, I had inadvertently put him and Richard in a vulnerable position. I had misinterpreted what they were offering, but now they were thinking, “Christ, we’re opening a restaurant in six weeks’ time. We haven’t got a head chef and we don’t know any chefs. To keep him happy we’ll have to make him a shareholder.”
In the end they arranged the finance for me. Richard acted as a guarantor for a bank loan of £60,000 and all I would have to do was establish an amazing restaurant that brought in enough money to pay off the loan, leaving me with some cash for rent. At the age of twenty-four, I was a chef patron, a chef proprietor.
The dining room was horrible and nasty. It looked like an English tearoom—pinks, greens and creams were everywhere you looked. It would have to change, eventually. But first I needed to find the staff. In October 1986, I phoned Michael Truelove at the Box Tree to see if he knew of anyone and he sent down a young chef called Simon Simpson, who I called (with affection) Simple Simon. I gave a job to Mark Williams, who had cheffed for Christian Delteuil at L’Arlequin. That made three of us in the kitchen. The search for a maître d’ was not exhaustive. LA’s sister Morfudd Richards, with whom I shared my home, agreed to do it. She was happy working in the West End and today she reckons that had the job offer come from anyone else, she would not have accepted it because she did not really want to work south of the Thames. But she had come into Lampwick’s with LA one night and seen me cook: Morfudd had faith in me.
The restaurant opened in January 1987. It had a friendly name, we all reckoned, but I didn’t like the apostrophe—it was ugly—so it had to go. Harvey’s became Harveys. Its days of selling fried beef patties in baps were finished.
THIRTEEN
The Christening
WITHOUT THE FOOD at Harveys there would never have been the circus.
I wasn’t expecting an easy ride to the top. After all, I was taking over what had been an upmarket burger bar in Wandsworth, rather than an elegant dining room in Mayfair. The interior design was horrific, but there was no money to redecorate. The kitchen was tiny, and again there were no funds for improvement.
My business partners, Nigel and Richard, lurked around in the background; the former looking after the wine list, the latter dealing with the accounts. Understandably, they wanted to see a return from their investment, but my motivation was to serve the finest food in the world.
How could I deliver a high standard of cuisine with the restraint of limited resources? If Harveys was going to work, I would have to be smart and draw heavily from my not-insignificant experience of serving alongside the Michelin masters. I would need to use every trick I had learned on my nine-year journey from Harrogate to Wandsworth Common.
I had always admired the Box Tree’s clever technique of rotating stock (ingredients, not chicken stock), because it meant they could reduce waste. Reduced waste equals increased profits. Stock rotation therefore became a rule at Harveys, and this is the way it worked: One day I might do pigeon with fresh-thyme-scented roasting juices and champagne-braised cabbage. But if the customers didn’t go for it, then I would rethink the dish because I couldn’t contemplate the prospect of chucking the pigeons into the bin. The next day I might put Pigeon à la Forèstiere (with wild mushrooms) on the menu and, fingers crossed, that would do the trick.
I also had to find a way to work in such a small, cramped kitchen. I had worked in a few big kitchens by now, including the Gavroche powerhouse, where there might have been four chefs on the Meat section, three on Fish, four on Pastry, two on Hot Starters and two on the Larder. At Harveys, kitchen space was a luxury, so, just like Pierre Koffmann had done at Tante Claire, I put a massive table in the middle of the kitchen. The table became the work surface and in those early days we were like a pack of wolves; three or four of us darting around, surface to stove, stove to surface, each of us doing a bit of everything.
There wasn’t enough space for a separate garnish section, so to overcome this, I tried to incorporate vegetables as ingredients served on the plate with the main dish, rather than served on separate side plates. I’d serve young leeks, roast button onions and girolle mushrooms on the same plate as a guinea fowl, roasted on the bone, skin taken off, legs split, thigh bone taken out, drumstick cleaned up, the whole lot put together, breast carved and laid across the top with jus blonde. Likewise, Pigeon en Vessie was served on the same plate as a Tagliatelle of Leeks. And the Roast Pigeon de Bresse did not come with side plates of vegetables, but was garnished with potato rosti, young turnips, lentilles du pays and a single ravioli that contained mushrooms, garlic and thyme. Harveys dishes were filling and substantial.
The kitchen at Harveys was also too small for the traditional French-style chefs’ hierarchy. At Gavroche hierarchical ranks were important and the system was respected by every man in the kitchen, but my Harveys brigade would only ever be as large as ten—I wouldn’t have the real hierarchy until I had the Restaurant Marco Pierre White at the Hyde Park Hotel. I had two chefs on Pastry in a poky kitchen annex and the remaining eight of us were packed into the overcrowded main kitchen, not working on sections, but working together to compensate for our lack of staff. In other words, we all mucked in to do garnish, hot starters, main courses and fish. If there was a table of five, eight cooks worked on five plates, which might mean two people working together on one dish, then I’d piece it all together. Despite the unusual arrangement, consistency would have to be crucial at Harveys. At Manoir, you’ll recall, in my opinion the system fell apart when the pressure increased and the number of covers went above forty. With this in mind, I wanted to ensure that each and every Harveys dish was consistently good.
So I was the head chef and every other member of the brigade was an “assistant”—there was no sous chef. I told my assistants to call me Marco, rather than Chef. I was still in my twenties and didn’t consider myself old enough to be called Chef, although when I gave Kevin Broome, a cook from Manchester, a job at Harveys, he started to call me Boss, which stuck. Thereafter, I was either Marco or Boss until my retirement from the kitchen in 1999. Although I didn’t go for Albert’s hierarchy, I certainly adopted his high regard for discipline.
Then there was the food itself. I began questioning everything that went on the plate. Why am I doing this? Why serve this with that? Why serve that with this? Why cook this for so long? Why, why, why? I remember serving a vinaigrette with a terrine of leeks and thinking the vinegar was too harsh. It often is, isn’t it? So I just cut the vinegar by diluting it with water; you still get the strength but you’ve taken away some of the acidity and made it palatable. I called it water vinaigrette: put oil, water and garlic in a large bowl, add salt and pepper, and then stir very gently so the vinaigrette doesn’t emulsify. It looks beautiful on the plate—separate pearls of oil and water.
Other times I might pick a main ingredient—sea scallops, lamb, whatever—and then create a long list of other ingredients that I thought would go well with it. I would sit there, studying the list, allowing my imagination to go and then . . . and then I would start to see it visually. At night, when I wasn’t in the kitchen, I would sit down with pen and paper and draw pictures of dishes that came out of my imagination and were intended for the following day’s menu. Sometimes, in search of i
nspiration, I would resort to my trunk, which contained French cookery books and menus I had collected over the years from other restaurants. Then I might deface my books by drawing my own sketches of dishes straight onto the books’ illustrations. Years later, at the Hyde Park, I still did my late-night sketches, then handed them in the morning to my head chef, Robert Reid, saying, “Copy these.” With so many of the dishes I would start at the end, if you like, and work my way backward; the process always began with drawing that picture on the plate.
* * *
Cook’s brain. It’s that ability to visualize the food on the plate, as a picture in the mind, and then work backward. There’s no reason why domestic cooks can’t do the same thing. Cooking is easy: you’ve just got to think about what you are doing and why you are doing it. Too many professional chefs never think about what they are doing.
For instance, let’s just think for a moment about a fried egg. It’s not the most inspired dish, but then again, if you can’t cook an egg, what can you cook? And actually, a perfectly cooked fried egg is quite beautiful.
Apply the cook’s brain and visualize that fried egg on the plate. Do you want it to be burned around the edges? Do you want to see craters on the egg white? Should the yolk look as if you’d need a hammer to break into it? The answer to all three questions should be no. Yet the majority of people still crack an egg and drop it into searingly hot oil or fat and continue to cook it on high heat. You need to insert earplugs to reduce the horrific volume of the sizzle. And the result, once served up in a pool of oil, is an inedible destruction of that great ingredient—the egg. Maybe that’s how you like it, in which case carry on serving your disgusting food.
Meanwhile, the rest of us can think about what we really want to see on the plate. We want that egg to look beautiful and appetizing, because then when we eat it, we shall all be happy. We want the white to be crater-free and unblackened around its edges. The yolk should be glistening, just a thin film that can be easily pierced by a fork to let the yellowness run out. That’s the picture.
The Devil in the Kitchen Page 12