The Devil in the Kitchen

by Marco Pierre White

  I adored Ollie. I saw him as a kindred spirit: someone who did things his own way. Whenever I knew the Reeds were coming, I’d always try to get away from the kitchen, if for only a minute or two, to greet them at the door. One night Ollie walked into the restaurant and looked around before saying grandly, “I’d like to commend you on the décor. It is the finest.” (He always spoke like a character out of a Sherlock Holmes adventure.)

  I said, “But Oliver, you’ve been here a hundred times.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but it’s the first time I’ve arrived sober.”

  His evenings at Harveys followed a pattern. He’d drink his aperitif while sitting on the floor, then after his starter he would leave the table, sprint into the kitchen and, without saying a word, rip off his tie and throw it at me before running out. He’d return to our chaotic kitchen a dozen times each night, for a chat or to do something crazy. He must have spent as much time in the kitchen as he did at the table. In the restaurant he would summon the wine waiter, and when asked what he would like to drink, Oliver would reply, “Bring us three more bottles of what we just had.” He was rarely seated when his main course arrived; instead, he’d be on the landing upstairs, arm-wrestling another customer.

  The staff loved him—he was a big tipper—and the customers loved him too. He would start chatting to groups on neighboring tables, and before long the tables would be rearranged until Oliver’s table had grown to four times its original size. He wasn’t happy unless he had met everyone in the restaurant and kissed their hands. Harveys became a party when Oliver was in the house. He’d walk in and everything would rev up a gear—the only other person I’ve seen have that effect is Frankie Dettori. One night I was in a rush, dashed past Oliver, and was halfway up the stairs when I noticed he was chasing after me. I stopped, turned around to him and said, “Oliver, why are you running?”

  “Where’s the fight?” he said.

  And among the celebrities and the politicians, supermodels, pop stars and gossip columnists . . . somewhere among that fascinating cast of customers, there must have been a Michelin inspector. The Michelin Guide is published every January, and in December 1987 I picked up the phone and called Derek Brown, the UK guide’s head inspector. I had never met him but, like Egon Ronay, he had the power to do amazing things to my career.

  I introduced myself and we had a short conversation. I said, “Mr. Brown, I am coming to the end of my first year in business and was wondering whether I will be awarded a Michelin star.”

  He replied, “We never reveal information like that prior to publication of the guide.” Oh well, I thought. It was just a cheeky call; I thought I’d chance my luck. I would have to wait another month before finding out if I had won a star. Or would I? Just as I was about to put down the phone, Mr. Brown added, “But I can tell you that you won’t be disappointed.”

  I really would like to say that it was one of the happiest days of my life. But by now you know me well enough to know that it did not bring me happiness. There was no celebration, no knees-up. Somehow it didn’t register as a great achievement because I wanted so much more. I wasn’t used to congratulating myself and I didn’t know how to reward myself. I didn’t have time to attend a party, let alone organize one.

  If I had managed a party, it probably would have ended up something like the Sturm und Drang affair I attended on New Year’s Day 1988. A crowd of us gathered at the publisher Anthony Blond’s house to toast the New Year, and Jonathan Meades was there. Previously, Jonathan—the restaurant reviewer for the Times—was the one critic who terrified me. He could destroy a place. But I didn’t need to be scared of him: in Easter of 1987 he had booked into Harveys using the alias Hogg, and he later phoned me to say, “My name is Hogg. I was in the other night and had jelly of calves’ brains. It was sensational. How did you make it?” Only when I saw the article did I realize that Hogg was Meades and vice versa. Then, in an end-of-year roundup for the Times, Jonathan had given the Newcomer Restaurant of the Year award to Harveys.

  The gathering at Anthony’s house was a few days after Jonathan had given me the Newcomer award. Apart from Jonathan, his girlfriend Frances Bentley (who worked for Tatler magazine) was there as well as three other chefs: Nico Ladenis, my former boss; Rowley Leigh of Kensington Place; and Simon Hopkinson, who had just opened Terence Conran’s Bibendum, and whose cookery book, Roast Chicken and Other Stories, has more recently been voted the most useful recipe book ever written. The evening was memorable for two reasons:

  First the food, or rather the simplicity of the food, considering there were four chefs in the house. It was ten P.M. and everyone was starving, but everywhere was closed and the host had not thought about catering for his guests. “My cupboards are bare,” said Anthony. I volunteered to cook, partly because I found it easier to cook than socialize.

  I went into the kitchen and searched around. He had a couple of onions, some pasta, a tin of tomato purée, a few rashers of bacon and a clove of garlic. I did a spaghetti sauce the way I’d been told my mother used to cook it: Sweat off the onions with the garlic without coloring them, then put in the diced bacon and sweat that off, then add generous amounts of tomato purée and sweat that all off in more olive oil. Then take the cooked pasta and put it straight into the sauce. It was very simple but Jonathan said it was one of the greatest pasta dishes he’d ever eaten. And I was too shy to say, “Well, it’s not me; it’s just the way my mother used to cook it when I was a boy.”

  The evening was also memorable for the squabble between Nico and Simon, who had a silly argument about food. If I remember rightly, the spat started when Nico criticized the “dreadful” brioche that Simon was serving at Bibendum. Nico said that when he opened his first restaurant in Dulwich, South London, he used to buy in fish soup because it was better than the fish soup he could make himself. He told Simon, “Find someone who makes brioche better than you, buy it in and serve it.” I suppose Nico was saying that Simon had a duty to give his customers only the best food, but Simon was quite proud of his brioche.

  “You do know,” added Nico, who was angry but still eloquent, “that I’m a self-taught chef.” To be self-taught is a big put-down in the premier league of chefs. In the outside world it is a bit like calling someone a cunt. And then Simon started crying. I don’t know if it was the words “self-taught chef” that produced the tears; perhaps it was the strength of the criticism. I felt sorry for him being savaged and slaughtered by the great Nico, whose Chez Nico, incidentally, had won Restaurant of the Year in Jonathan’s awards. I stepped in, telling Nico to forget about it. Mind you, the proof was in the pudding (and the starters and main courses): Nico went on to win three Michelin stars. Simon, meanwhile, retired from the kitchen in the mid-nineties before he had the chance to win a star. The pressure was too much for him. During service one day he had what he now calls a “mini-breakdown,” and to save his sanity he stepped away from the stove of the professional kitchen.

  EARLIER ON I mentioned that I hated the interior design of Harveys, and then I said that Ollie Reed loved the décor. In between me hating it and Ollie loving it, the restaurant was redecorated. But during that period when I still hated it, something else happened. There was an episode, if you like.

  Morfudd came into the kitchen during service one day and told me about a certain customer in the restaurant. He said he had played a role in designing Harveys in its days as a burger bar, before I took over. This man had told Morfudd that because of his contribution to the restaurant he and his five guests should be entitled to a meal or drinks on the house.

  What he had done to the restaurant was ghastly. It was chintzy, mediocre, charmless and lacking in imagination. It really bothered me. Morning, noon and night I would look at Harveys’ décor and silently pray for the day when we had enough money to have the place done up properly. So you’ll understand my reaction when I learned that this bloke was not only sitting in my restaurant but had the audacity to ask for a free meal or drinks.

/>   “No, Morfudd,” I said. “No, no, no. And please go and tell him that I am not prepared to cook for him because I dislike the way he furnished the restaurant.” She was reluctant at first—I can see why now—but I was adamant, and so she went back into the dining room to have a quiet word with the designer. “What?” he screamed as she relayed the news to him. He was outraged, furious and probably very embarrassed in front of his friends. He stormed toward the kitchen. From the stove, I could hear him shouting, ranting and raging. I stopped whatever I was doing and went into the corridor that led down to the restaurant. He was at one end while I stood at the other.

  He made a mistake. The punch-up that followed was a release, in a way. For months I’d been staring at the chintz, thinking, I’d like to meet this bastard. And now he was charging toward the end of my clenched fist. Every swipe I delivered—and I delivered a few—was a blow for good taste. The kitchen brigade had to pull me off him. Ask Morfudd if you don’t believe me. He staggered out of Harveys, minus a tooth or two and nursing a perforated eardrum. I had partially stripped him, as well. During the scuffle, I ripped an entire sleeve from his suit jacket, and it was left lying on the corridor floor, a casualty of battle. As his friends helped him out of the restaurant, he stepped onto Bellevue Road, looked down at his arm and wailed, “This is Gucci, for Christ’s sake.”

  INTO ALL THIS madness stepped the intrepid Bob Carlos Clarke. I had met Bob in 1986. My girlfriend Lowri-Ann Richards was friends with him and one day she introduced us. A couple of years later, when I was offered a deal to write a cookery book, White Heat, I approached Bob to see if he would be interested in taking the pictures. By then he was a well-known fashion photographer. He invited me round for tea and I arrived with a pile of linen tablecloths. Bob thought I was dropping off the laundry but I explained to him how I like to draw on tablecloths and on these particular ones I had drawn pictures of the dishes that would appear in the book, as well as sketches depicting cooking in which I had tried to show the heat of the kitchen—steam pouring from pots and that kind of thing.

  Bob spent about a year on and off in the restaurant, snatching snaps of the diners and of me and my brigade in the kitchen, but there was never a moment when I felt that he was intrusive. In fact I reckoned it was important, for the sake of chefs everywhere, that he showed the public what went on on our side of the passe. Bob was a good fly on the wall. There was a time when White Heat was considered Britain’s most influential cookery book because it inspired so many young people to become chefs. It was innovative because it contained not only shots of food but also those moody black-and-white, reportage-style photos of kitchen life at Harveys. When it was published in 1990, White Heat became a cult classic, sending out the uplifting message that if I—the long-haired young cook from Leeds—had crossed the North-South divide to find fame in London, you too could do it. A glance at Bob’s pictures gave the reader a fascinating glimpse of the haggard, exhausted cooks who produced Michelin-starred dishes and of how exhaustion equaled passion.

  Alongside the photos of the brigade cooking dishes, smoking and fighting, there are quotes illustrating my outlook on life at the time. Flicking through the pages today, I’m struck by a massive quote of mine that reads, “I can’t work in a domestic kitchen; it’s just too confined. There’s no freedom and there’s no buzz. At home I’m not hit with forty covers in half an hour, so there’s no real excitement.” In a strange way, it may have explained why I was rarely in the kitchen at home, let alone at home.

  FOURTEEN

  Beautiful Doll

  I MET MY first wife at the fishmonger’s in the summer of 1987, some six months after the opening of Harveys. My relationship with Lowri-Ann, the onetime queen of the King’s Road, hadn’t worked out. I can’t remember how it ended—these things fizzle out—but I had removed myself and my trunk from her place in Battersea and resettled in a flat close to Wandsworth Common. The location of my new home meant that when I wasn’t sleeping in Harveys, I was at least bedding down a few hundred yards from the restaurant and my cherished kitchen.

  I was living with a bloke whom I shall call Derek, who was another member of the King’s Road set. Derek had been a heroin addict and I only moved into his place after he promised me he’d managed to kick the habit. He hadn’t. Most nights I would return from Harveys, shattered, burned and cut, and walk into the flat to find Derek and his friends drugged up, lolling and slumping. I may as well have been living in an opium den. In the mornings I’d be awoken by a shaky hand knocking on my door. “Yes,” I’d say. Then one of Derek’s junkie mates would stumble into the room and ask to borrow a mirror—not to apply makeup, you understand, but to snort a line of cocaine. I got back one night to find a girl, off her face and wilting on the sofa. She asked if I could roll her a joint. “I’m sorry,” I said politely. “I can’t.” As in, I don’t know how.

  “Christ,” she replied, her eyeballs swiveling. “Are you that stoned?”

  Derek was unperturbed by my reluctance to take drugs. As far as he was concerned, I was a dependent just like him. “You’re an addict, Marco,” he once told me, with a junkie’s beam of confidence. “You’re an addict to the warmth,” by which he meant the stove, the cooking, the kitchen, the work.

  It was all of those things that took me one morning to Johnny the Fish, who happened to introduce me to his secretary. Her name was Alex McArthur and she was like a beautiful doll, blond, blue-eyed and very pretty. She was, I later found out, a surgeon’s daughter and was as middle class as I was working class. We chatted and established a connection, the Oxford connection. She had studied there at the same time as my friend Piers Adam, and they had known each other briefly, and I had worked at Le Manoir. We said farewell and off I went with my lobster and sea bass. But when I got back to Harveys, Alex was still on my mind. Despite all my misadventures at the restaurant, I was far from self-assured and still not good with girls, but I found the courage to call Alex and ask if she fancied dinner.

  “When?” she said.

  “What about tonight?”

  “What time?”

  “Eleven,” I said, explaining, “I have to finish service first.”

  That night she arrived in her little Fiat Panda and I squeezed my six-foot-three-inch frame into the passenger seat. We went to Chinatown, in London’s West End, for late-night noodles, and after dinner we went back to her flat in Kensington. I did not leave. Our relationship had been cemented, as they say, in less than twenty hours. One morning I had met Alex and by bedtime I was living with her.

  She tolerated my addiction to work. I think—I thought—she was happy to go along with it. In fact, she would come and collect me when I was done for the night at Harveys. We were young and infatuated. I was twenty-five years old and Alex was twenty-one, and we managed to keep the relationship going for a year, long enough for me to propose. One day in June 1988 we were married in Chelsea Register Office, the place where rock stars tie the knot. We did it discreetly. My best man was Bob Carlos Clarke, the photographer. Bob’s wife, Lindsay, was the other witness. That was it—just the four of us. We emerged from the register office onto the King’s Road and felt a celebration was in order, so we trotted down to Dino’s and the four of us sat there eating poached eggs on toast. I had a Michelin star by then but hadn’t considered cooking a sumptuous feast for the occasion. When the meal was finished, I had my own speech to deliver, which went, quite simply, “I’ve got to get back to work.” I have no recollection of the bride being bothered about her groom vanishing, but that is precisely what I did. Buggered off, back to my kitchen. A honeymoon? What do you think?

  At some point during our brief marriage we did have a holiday in Yorkshire, where we stayed with Tom and Eugene McCoy, the cheffing brothers who ran the superb McCoys restaurant in Staddlebridge. Alex slipped on the landing in Tom’s house, and when I got to her, she said she couldn’t move her leg. At the hospital the doctors said she had a fracture and she was promptly trolleyed off to a hospital bed
. Every day I would go in to visit my injured wife, taking platters of food that I had cooked in McCoy’s kitchen. I used to turn up with huge lobster salads and that sort of thing, and when I heard the elderly woman in the bed opposite Alex whining about the hospital food, I got the hint. On future visits I’d take in two portions of everything—one for Alex, the other for the old lady. It transpired that the elderly woman was the grandmother of Mel Smith, the comedian-turned-businessman who cofounded the extremely successful Talkback television production company. Small world that it is, I met Mel Smith a few years ago when he asked me to do his fiftieth birthday party at my restaurant in Holland Park, the Belvedere. We had a good chat about his grandmother, a wonderful character, who by then had passed away.

  When Alex gave birth on September 20, 1989, I finished my lunch service before heading off to see our new baby at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. We named our daughter Leticia Rosa (Rosa being my mother’s middle name), which was shortened, of course, to Lettie. I was delighted at becoming a father, but emotionally I was all over the place, and mentally I wasn’t prepared for fatherhood. I was so involved in my work, and Harveys had become a form of escapism.

  Truth be known, I was lost within myself. How could I take on the responsibilities of fatherhood if I could barely manage to deal with myself? I couldn’t really settle into the potentially blissful environment so many new parents enjoy. It was easier for me to be in the kitchen at Harveys, grafting away, sweating and toiling, and dishing out the bollockings.

  Lettie’s birth prompted me to get in touch with my dad. I hadn’t spoken to the old man for a decade—there had been no contact with him since the late seventies, when he had remarried after I left home. On the day Lettie was born, I felt compelled to phone him. It was a brief conversation, and I cannot recall it verbatim. I said something about how he had become a grandfather for the first time; how I wanted to be the one to break the news to him and didn’t want him to learn about it from the papers. And that was it. Another two years or so would pass before we came face-to-face.