The Devil in the Kitchen

by Marco Pierre White

  THE SAME TWO questions always crop up about Harveys. First, was I really so nasty to my chefs? Second, did I really kick people out of the restaurant?

  Sometimes I bump into hugely successful, talented chefs who were my protégés and they say, “You were really nasty to work for but it made life easier afterwards.” And they say that without a hint of irony. I’ve also come across punters who tell me they came to Harveys and say, “You kicked me out, but I suppose I asked for it.”

  Dealing with the staff issue, first. Yes, I was a hard boss. Even without my insistence on discipline, finding staff was difficult enough. At that time the majority of young chefs aspired to work north of the Thames, rather than south. They’d rather have done Belgravia than Bellevue Road. When they accepted the job, they were in for the shock of their lives. My unmanageable desire for perfection brought out a certain tetchiness in me. I expected my chefs and waiters to match my commitment, and I let them know that. My addiction to work, my constant craving for an adrenaline fix, set the pace, both front and back of house. I was working hundred-hour weeks, but they weren’t slacking either. If joining Gavroche was the culinary equivalent of signing up for the Foreign Legion, then taking a job at Harveys was like joining the SAS. We were a small unit of hard nuts.

  In the early days, I allowed staff to sit down for a meal before service, but that didn’t last long. Egon Ronay’s glorious review a couple of months after we opened started off the nonstop bookings, which pretty much finished off the custom of staff lunches. There just wasn’t time to eat. Jean-Christophe Slowik, or JC, replaced Morfudd as maître d’, and one day he asked for a quiet word. JC was only in his twenties but had worked for Madame Point, widow of my hero Fernand Point, in France before doing a front-of-house stint with that genius Raymond Blanc. He was as young as the rest of us but had a wisp of premature gray hair. In his engaging, diplomatic and charming way, he explained that he had a problem. “What is it, JC?” I asked.

  He said that he was having to take money from the petty cash box, nip to the deli a few doors down and buy sandwiches for his ravenous waiters. He asked, “Is it not odd that we work in a restaurant but have to buy lunch from somewhere else?” JC is good when it comes to making good points. JC was skinny enough and he added, “To lose any more weight, I will have to lose a bone.” From then on I allowed staff to have a meal, a couple of times a week, before service.

  I survived on a diet of espresso and Marlboros—my nutritional intake came from the morsels, nibbles and sauces I tasted during cooking. Most members of the team found that Mars and Twix were ideal for energy bursts. Then there were the plates that were returned to the kitchen from the dining room totally clean. For ages I thought the customers were so impressed with the food that they were devouring every last speck on the plate. In fact, it was the starving waiters who were responsible for the spotless dishes. As they left the dining room and walked along the corridor to the kitchen, they would polish off the customers’ leftovers, guzzling the remains like famished vultures.

  There was a look of horror in the eyes of JC’s new waiters as they arrived for their first day at work. The sight that greeted them was one of waiters and chefs suffering chronic fatigue and hunger, all set to the soundtrack of a screaming boss. Even before service started and the first customers arrived, a new waiter would often make an excuse about getting something from his coat, only to scurry off and never return. These new waiters couldn’t work a single hour, let alone an entire shift. Eventually JC accepted that many of the recruits would evaporate as fast as their enthusiasm and he worked extra hard to compensate for this problem.

  In the kitchen, the first three weeks was the toughest period for the new boys. By the end of it they were usually fucked, having lost a stone in weight, gained a dazed expression and cried themselves dry. That was when the shaking started—and when many of them left. One day they were there, the next they were gone. If they could make it into the fourth week, they were doing well.

  We were in the kitchen one night when Richard Neat mentioned something about feeling faint and then collapsed on the floor. He was having a panic attack between the stove and where the meat was prepared: the exhaustion had taken its toll. None of us knew what to do but one thing was for sure—the cooking continued around Richard’s quivering body beneath us.

  Then JC came into the kitchen carrying a tray and screamed, “Oh my God, look at Richard.” JC phoned for an ambulance, which arrived within minutes, but JC was keen not to disturb the customers by letting them see the paramedics stomping through the dining room, so he directed them round to the back door. As the diners enjoyed their food, the ambulancemen tended to Richard. They had to strap him to the stretcher because he was having spasms. The next day, he was back in the trenches with the rest of us.

  I MAKE NO apologies for my strict leadership methods and I have no one to blame but myself. However, I was, of course, the product of disciplinarians who included my father, Albert Roux, Pierre Koffmann and good old Stephan Wilkinson, my first chef at the George and the man who called me cunt as if it were my Christian name.

  Normally only one person was allowed to speak during service, and that was me. Kitchen visitors said it was a bit like watching a surgeon in an operating theater.

  Step now into my theater of cruelty:

  ME: Knife. [Knife is passed to me.]

  ME: Butter. [Butter is passed to me]

  ME [through gritted teeth]: Not that fucking butter. Clarified fucking butter, you fucker.

  Poor timing always upset me. If we were doing a table of six, for instance, and only four of the main courses were ready, then I was prone to flip. That’s when I might send a chef to stand in the corner. “Corner,” I’d say, jabbing a finger toward the corner of the room. “In [ finger jab] the [ jab] fucking [ jab] corner.” The chef would stand not with his face to the wall but facing me; that way he could pick up some knowledge while enduring his punishment. I remember one night, when I was in an intensely irritable mood, four chefs pissed me off, so each of them was sent to stand in a corner. When a fifth chef did something to annoy me, I shouted, “Corner. In the fucking corner.”

  “Which one, Marco?” he asked. I had run out of corners.

  I went berserk if brioche wasn’t toasted correctly. If it’s toasted too quickly, you can’t spread the foie gras on it; if it’s toasted too slowly, it dries. It has to be toasted at the right distance below the grill, so it’s crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. You don’t scorch it and you don’t dry it. Insignificant to you, maybe, but the difference between life and death to one of my cooks. If the brioche wasn’t right, or if the vegetables had been chopped incorrectly, then someone was in for a nasty bollocking. “Do you really want to be the best?” I’d tell them. “If you do, that’s fantastic; if you don’t, then don’t waste your time.”

  In order to achieve my dream I reckoned I needed a brigade with army-standard discipline and, as I had learned at Gavroche, discipline is borne out of fear. When you fear, you question. If you don’t fear something, you don’t question it in the same way. And if you have fear in the kitchen, you’ll never take a shortcut. If you don’t fear the boss, you’ll take shortcuts, you’ll turn up late. My brigade had to feel pain, push themselves to the limits, and only then would they know what they were capable of achieving. I was forcing them to make decisions. The ones who left, well, fine, at least they had decided a Michelin-starred kitchen was not for them.

  Take a look at the ones who stayed, the ones who could take it and even appreciated it. Today, they are considered to be among Britain’s finest chefs and they all came from that cramped kitchen at Harveys. There’s Gordon Ramsay, of course. Gordon arrived in January 1988 after phoning up and asking if there was a job going. At the time he was working at a restaurant in Soho and, during a break, had read an interview with me. He thought I looked wild and crazy and a bit like Jesus, and he felt compelled to pick up the phone. I hired him, and when he came, I treated him as I w
ould anyone else. He would eventually leave my kitchen in tears, but would go on to win three Michelin stars of his own. There are other winners too: Philip Howard has two; Eric Chavot has two; and Stephen Terry has one. Meanwhile, Tim Hughes is now executive chef of the Ivy, Le Caprice and J. Sheekey. All of the chefs who went through Harveys will say they have never worked in a more pressurized environment, but I doubt any of them will say they regret the experience. Chefs love mania.

  Gordon, Stephen and Tim shared a flat in Clapham, a couple of miles from Harveys, and I used to scream at them, “Did you bunch of cunts go home last night and conspire against me? ‘What stupid things can we do to wind up Marco?’ Is that what you all said to each other? Did you sit down together like a bunch of plotting cunts and say, ‘What can we do tomorrow that will really piss him off? What can we do to really irritate him?’ Did you, Gordon? Is that what you did, Stephen? Did you conspire against me, Tim?’ Because you are all being so fucking stupid today.”

  Other times the bollockings included physical abuse. I might severely tug a chef ’s apron, or grab a chef by the scruff of the neck and administer a ten-second throttle, just to focus him. One night I lifted Lee Bunting and hung him by his apron on some hooks on the wall. The cooks never knew what to expect from me—and neither did I. A film crew arrived for the series Take Six Cooks and happened to walk into the kitchen as I was throwing bottles of sauce and oil at an underling. The producer had to duck down to avoid being hit by flying glass. “I don’t know if we can film in there,” he told JC. “War zones are less dangerous.”

  Chefs who weren’t sent to stand in the corner, throttled, or forced to duck to avoid flying sauces might even be chucked in the bin. We had a great big dustbin in the kitchen, which was filled with the usual waste produced in professional kitchens. The boys who were too slow, or simply too annoying at any particular moment, were dumped inside it. Arnold Sastry, the brother-in-law of comic actor Rowan Atkinson, was known as Onion Bhaji and he was regularly binned.

  “Onion Bhaji in the bin,” I might say, and the rest of the brigade would obey orders.

  Why, you ask, did these poor young men continue to work for that bullying brute, Marco? Good question. And many of them not only continued to work with me, but stayed with me for years, right up until the day I retired in 1999. The thing is, a bollocking isn’t personal. It’s a short—sometimes not-so-short—sharp shock. It’s an extremely loud wake-up call. It’s smell-the-bloody-espresso time. In the heat of service, I didn’t have time to say, “Arnold, would you mind speeding up a little, please?” I couldn’t stop cheffing, couldn’t take my mind off the game in order to say politely, “Gordon, when do you think you might finish the guinea fowl, old boy?” I had to be hard to deliver the message and the message was “Do it now and do it right.” They all knew this and they all understood it. That is why, when a chef is receiving a bollocking, none of his colleagues jump in to defend him. The rest of the brigade look down and carry on with the job. Each one of them knows that sooner or later he will be the one getting a bollocking. I created fear but I don’t remember anyone ever saying, “Marco, enough is enough. Pack it in.” I’m convinced that a mile-wide streak of sadomasochism ran through the Harveys brigade. They were all pain junkies—they had to be. They couldn’t get enough of the bollockings.

  Interestingly, a number of members of the Harveys kitchen brigade were, like me, the product of a tough upbringing. They might have lost a mother or a father. They would have grown up on council estates. They were working class; from the wrong side of the tracks. Cheffing was still predominately a working-class profession then, and there was one cook who for a long time pretended he was working class just to fit in. It was a while before we discovered he was the son of rich parents and a private school boy to boot.

  During the summer the tiny kitchen, with its glass-panel skylights, became blisteringly hot, and we all wore sweatbands on our foreheads and wrists. One day a chef moaned that he was too hot, so I did something that, on reflection, was rather hazardous. Carving knife in one hand, I held his jacket with the other and slashed it. Then I slashed his trousers. Both garments were still on his body at the time. “That should provide a bit of ventilation,” I told him, and when he asked if he could change out of his chopped-up clothes, I said, “Yes, at the end of the service.”

  One evening the whole sweaty bunch got together to grumble about the heat. “Right, that’s it,” I said. I was annoyed and couldn’t stand their moaning. I marched over to the air-conditioning machine and turned it off. “We’ll all roast together,” I said. From that night on they kept their complaints to themselves. If the boys couldn’t stand the heat, well, that was tough because they couldn’t get out of the kitchen.

  When I was feeling charitable, I’d give the instruction to remove the kitchen’s skylights, thus allowing some of the heat to escape. Gordon was in the kitchen one morning when the skylights were off, and he was rolling out pasta. He felt water on his head and assumed it was rain. He was wrong. A dog had wandered onto the roof terrace, cocked a leg and promptly urinated through the roof and onto Gordon and his ravioli. Gordon was enraged, if not a little embarrassed in front of his cackling colleagues. He ran outside with a knife. I don’t think he was going to stab the dog; he just wanted to look like he was going to stab the dog. As it turned out, the beast was too fast for him.

  When Gordon wasn’t chasing dogs, he was usually rowing with Ronnie, his younger brother, who has spent years fighting another on-off battle, an addiction to heroin.

  When I gave Ronnie a job as kitchen porter, I hadn’t reckoned on the bickering it would entail. The two brothers loved each other dearly but had ferocious squabbles. I once asked where Gordon had gone, only to be told to look out the window. I glanced across the road and there was Gordon on the common, sprinting away from an angry Ronnie, who was trying to catch him and waving clenched fists.

  They were hugely competitive. One day I saw Ronnie at the sink and, after examining his sparkling plates and cutlery, I told him he had the most talented hands I’d ever seen. I was winding him up, but for weeks after he boasted to Gordon that I had praised his hands, as if he was the more gifted of the Ramsay brothers.

  There was another kitchen porter, Marius, and when I think of him, it makes me realize how unskilled I was at handling certain situations with my staff. Marius turned up for work one morning saying he had sore throat. I didn’t send him home to bed like a sympathetic, experienced employer might have done. Instead someone or other mentioned that the best cure for Marius was Armagnac and port, so we filled a brandy glass with the concoction and told him to drink it. Half an hour later, when Marius collapsed unconscious on the kitchen floor, we carried him outside to the freezing cold, dumped him in the courtyard and forgot about him. A snowstorm came and went before someone said in a shocked way, “Marius.” We rushed out to recover his trembling body. Two hours after complaining of a sore throat, Marius was suffering from alcohol poisoning and the onset of hypothermia.

  Marius took some time off (to recover from the world’s worst hangover) and the stand-in kitchen porter pitched up. On his first day I gave him a few hundred quid and told him to go to the bookie’s and put the money on a horse that was racing that afternoon. He left with the readies, muttering the horse’s name to himself so as not to forget it. We never saw him again.

  Anyway, you now have a clearer picture of me as the boss. I was nasty, vicious, aggressive and blunt. I put my hands up to all of that. But, hey, don’t get me wrong—along the way I had earned the respect and loyalty of the brigade. And away from the kitchen, I like to think I had my moments of compassion too. I helped out those with financial problems, and when Gordon went to work in France, I lent him the money for the trip. I was also there with the rest of them when they played football on Wandsworth Common. In fact, I was often the one who dragged them out to play when they said they were too tired to exercise.

  The boys would do anything for me, and that included be
ating up my rivals. In the summer of 1990 I was asked to cook at a polo event and Antony Worrall Thompson, by then an established name in the restaurant world and the head chef at 190 Queensgate, kindly said he’d come along to help out.

  I arrived at the Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club with my brigade and everything was going well until my boys decided Antony deserved a pummeling. Aristocrats and rich polo lovers were happily enjoying their food in the outdoor tent, but behind the scenes in the attached kitchen, Antony was being pelted with lemon tarts. He was quickly coated in sweet yellow goo. He tried to make a run for it but thought better of charging through into the tent because he looked ridiculous and it would cause too much of a scene. So Antony sprinted out of the makeshift kitchen and into a field, and that’s where he was tackled by one of my boys, the wildebeest brought down by a leopard. He was then subjected to the humiliation of having a dozen eggs cracked on his head by the Harveys brigade. Antony, whom I’ve always liked, didn’t take it very well.

  Another incident that illustrates the vicious rivalry at the time, involved my boys and the ones who worked for the Roux brothers. It was during the restaurant world’s annual trade fair at the Business Design Centre, in Islington, North London. The boys from Harveys were taunting the Roux brigade by calling them Roux robots and boil-in-the-bags, a reference to the line of precooked food that was produced by the Roux brothers. There was an air of tension and then, as I was onstage in the middle of demonstrating how to cook fish, a scuffle broke out in the audience between the two brigades. A couple of the lads had to be escorted from the building—which would have been fine if they had been drunk at a nightclub, but they were haute cuisine chefs at a trade fair, for heaven’s sake. Newspapers got hold of the story and had a lot of fun writing about “Michelin Star Wars.”