The Devil in the Kitchen

by Marco Pierre White

  As it was, there was more than enough scrapping going on at Harveys. We had to contend with the Wandsworth yobs who thought it hilarious to wander up to the restaurant window, drop their trousers and do moonies at my customers. I’d send out chefs to deal with the barearsed idiots and chase them off. The Wandsworth louts might have thought they were tough, but the Harveys brigade was the toughest of the tough. One day a trio of young hooligans pushed open the front door, produced a can of Coke, shook it up, opened the lid and threw the exploding can into the restaurant. According to witnesses, it was like a gas bomb. Customers dived for cover, hoping not to be soaked by the foam as it fountained out of the missile. The yobs then legged it, stupidly unaware that their escape route was taking them right past the kitchen door at the back of the restaurant. “Get them, Gordon,” I screamed.

  Just as the yobs were running past the door, Gordon and a couple of other chefs greeted them in the courtyard. From my place at the stove, I could hear the biff, bang, wallop sounds of a good old scuffle. Then Gordon reappeared clutching his hand. During the fight he’d punched one of the yobs in the mouth and had somehow managed to end up with a tooth wedged in his knuckle. He extracted the gnasher, but was clearly in some pain, moaning and groaning; there was some speculation as to how long it would be before septicemia set in and killed him. “For Christ’s sake,” I said. “Am I the only bastard cooking?” At this point JC dashed into the kitchen, his eyes wide with terror. “They’ve got a hand grenade!” he screamed.

  Hand grenade? Who? My maître d’ spluttered something about the yobs’ dads appearing on the scene for a bit of score settling and bringing with them a hand grenade. We were so exhausted and run-down that none of us thought to question JC’s suggestion that our little restaurant by Wandsworth Common was about to be blown up by a hand grenade. I gave the command, “Bolt the fucking doors and get down.” My SAS unit searched for cover, sheltering under pieces of furniture and in kitchen cupboards. When it was all quiet on the western front, everyone reemerged and continued with the job at hand, be it shelling peas, making pastry or trimming cheese for the evening service.

  It was in the early days of Harveys that I renewed relations with my Italian relations. For some reason or other, I phoned my uncle Gianfranco, who mentioned that my younger brother, Simon—by now a man in his early twenties—was in a rut. “Send him over here,” I told my uncle. “He can come and work for me.” I went to Gatwick Airport and waited at the barrier to greet the brother I had not seen for almost two decades. It was a Sunday afternoon and very quiet in Arrivals. The first person to come through was a giant, a monster of a man, and I just thought, Christ, he’s a big bloke. He was followed by the other passengers who had been on the flight, and when the place emptied, the giant was still standing there. He must have been six foot eight, some five inches taller than me. He had to have been the tallest man in Italy.

  We were brothers but hadn’t recognized each other. We shook hands—perhaps we hugged each other, I can’t recall—but apart from that, we couldn’t really communicate. I didn’t speak Italian and his English wasn’t fantastic. After he’d said hello, he looked down at me and asked, “Do you know a shop called High and Mighty?” Nearly twenty years and that was it. Take me to High and Mighty. We swaggered out of the airport like a walking freak show: Italy’s tallest man accompanied by his lanky, gaunt, hollow-cheeked older brother. At Harveys I put him on the Pastry section but it didn’t work out, and after a week or so he returned home. Just like my earlier visit to Italy, his trip to Britain was cut short. At the time Simon aspired to be not a cook but a policeman and that’s what he went on to become. He told one of my Italian-speaking chefs that once he was a cop, he would return to Harveys and arrest me for the way I treated my staff.

  IT WAS NEVER going to last with Alex, and a couple of years after marrying, we were divorced. Two people need to have the same dream. Mine was winning three Michelin stars, and that ambition came before everything else in my life. Alex’s dream . . . well, I don’t quite know what her dream was. Even on paper we weren’t a good match. I came from a hard, working-class world that, since my mother’s death, had been dominated by men. All of a sudden there I was, married to a nice middle-class girl. I couldn’t take it in. I didn’t want things to be perfect. I didn’t want pleasure. I was driven by my insecurities and a fear of failing, and to some extent a fear of dying before achieving my ultimate goal. The kitchen was the only place where I felt comfortable.

  FIFTEEN

  No Bill, No Mink

  MY MANAGERESS CAME into the kitchen and she was nervous. The man on table two was complaining about the cheese, she said. I don’t know what was making her nervous: his complaint about the cheese or my potential reaction to his complaint. I was curious. “What’s wrong with the cheese?”

  “He says he always chooses his own cheese,” she replied.

  “Well, tell him that’s not the way we do it here,” I said. “Just tell him that we do a plate that contains a selection of seven cheeses—they are all perfectly ripe—and that’s how we do it. Go and tell him that.” She scurried off, but returned a minute later, saying the customer was still insisting he wanted to choose his cheese rather than have the seven-cheese selection. “Can you deal with it?” she pleaded.

  I walked from the kitchen to the restaurant and up to the customer. You’ll have to take my word for it when I say that I was extremely polite, even though he was a particularly ugly, short-arsed redhead. I told him that we serve a selection of seven cheeses, “And that’s the way we do it here, sir.”

  “But I don’t like two of those cheeses,” he said.

  “Well, that means there are still five of them that you do like, sir. And each cheese is served as a substantial, generous portion.”

  He was having none of it. “I always choose my own cheese.”

  “That’s not how we do it here,” I repeated, not quite knowing where we were going with this one.

  Slowly, with a hint of menace in his voice and a pause between each word, he said, “I always choose my own cheese.” I don’t know what happened in my head. I just decided that I wasn’t going to tolerate it. The job’s hard enough, I thought, why do I want someone like that in my restaurant? Even if there is an issue and we’re wrong, there’s no need to be an arsehole. And don’t patronize me—and that’s what he had done. He was patronizing me.

  Of course I wanted to kick him out, but when you work your way up through the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants, they forget to teach you how to deal with rude and difficult customers. Albert was a strict boss and Pierre was notoriously hard on his staff, but I had never seen either of them give the punters what for. Raymond, of course, was charm personified, so he probably would have conceded and let the bloke choose his own bloody cheese. And what about Nico? It would infuriate him when customers booked a table and then didn’t show up. So Nico would make his wife phone them to ask what had happened and then, with his hands on his hips, he would stand close by her—close enough for the person at the other end of the line to hear—and bark loudly, “Tell them to fuck off . . . We don’t need their fucking money . . . Fuck them . . . Put the phone down on them.”

  Staring at this dwarfish, patronizing man who was slowing down the smooth-running operation of the restaurant for my valued customers, I found myself saying, “Why don’t you just fuck off?” Pause. The smug smile didn’t leave his face. “Forget the bill,” I said. “Just fuck off.” He stood up and walked out of Harveys.

  THE CHOOSE-MY-OWN-CHEESE STORY is one of those anecdotes that would be used to illustrate the claims that I was an angry young man. After all, what kind of a chef kicks out a customer whose only offense is to ask if he could choose his own cheese? Yet what is fascinating about the above story is that I have since heard the customer intended to be kicked out. It was all premeditated. He came to the restaurant with the sole intention of getting a free meal by being obstinate. I can’t think of many men who would put themselves thr
ough the humiliation of being told to eff off just so they could have a free lunch. But then, I suppose I should take it as a compliment.

  Harveys had earned a terrific reputation for its food but, as I mentioned, punters also came for the show. One element of the show was provided by the celebrity clientele: star-struck customers could sit just a few feet away from them and ogle. I mean, if Ollie Reed had asked you to join his table, you’d remember it for the rest of your life, wouldn’t you? Food is food, but a great restaurant is an experience. And the tension was heightened by the thought of the volatile, moody chef who was supposedly skulking in the kitchen. Customers had this image of me: the long-haired wolf lying in wait, ready to pounce on his prey, be it the customer who dared ask for salt or the one who returned his plate because the meat was undercooked.

  The truth is that if customers wanted salt, they could have it. If they wanted their meat well done, let them have it that way. That’s their choice. Everyone has a different palate. What bothered me was when customers started swearing and being loud, causing a scene in the restaurant and abusing the waiters, spoiling the enjoyment of neighboring tables—that’s when they were asked to leave. I say asked to leave, though the five-step eviction process was perfected to such a degree that often not one single word was necessary. This is how it would work:

  1. JC tells me about the irritating customers and I emerge to check them out before giving JC the OK.

  2. JC rounds up his waiters and nods toward the table where the offending customers are seated.

  3. On JC’s command, the squad of waiters zooms in and clears everything—plates, glasses, cutlery, wine bottles, you name it—from the table in about fifteen seconds, so only the tablecloth remains. The customers are left sitting there, thinking the table is being cleared for the next course and marveling at the fantastic service.

  4. JC swoops in, eaglelike, and snatches up the tablecloth. He disappears with it without a word, just whoosh. A few minutes earlier the customers were sitting there, drunk and imperious; now they’re embarrassed. There is nothing but a wooden table in front of them.

  5. The customers get the message—they have been humiliated—and they grab their coats and hurry out onto Bellevue Road. And no, they did not have to pay a bill.

  It was a spectacular sight. However, one night the victims—a barrister, his mate and a woman—sat there for fifteen minutes, stunned by JC’s performance but puzzled as to what would happen next. Nothing happened, absolutely nothing—actions speak louder than words. The message could not be ignored: Table number nine, your time is up. That’s the end. Please leave.

  I was at the stove in Harveys one night when JC came into the kitchen and said a customer was refusing to pay his bill. Why? Because he waited twenty minutes for his soufflé. Well, what can you do about people like that? A soufflé has to be cooked to order because it starts to deflate as soon as it comes out of the oven. You can’t say, “Here’s one I made earlier.” The customer was trying to take advantage, hoping for a free meal, but he had upset me in the middle of service. I asked JC if the customer’s wife had a coat in the cloakroom and he disappeared and returned saying, “She has a mink, Marco.”

  “Bring it to me,” I said, “and tell the customer to come and see me.” When the man appeared in my sweatshop with his wife alongside, he was looking cocksure, as if he’d told his wife to observe how he would handle the situation. He said, “Who is the chef?”

  “I am.”

  “You wanted to see me.”

  “Please stand there,” I said in my best headmaster’s voice, telling them to position themselves by a wall. “Wait until I have finished preparing this dish.” He and his wife stood silently for a minute or two, watching me while I finished sealing or searing, then I turned to them and inquired, “What’s the problem?”

  The man puffed himself up. “We waited twenty minutes for our soufflé and we’re not going to pay our bill now.” I said, “That’s fine. No bill, no mink.” I pointed toward an underling in the corner who was holding the coat. The customers looked over. I had kidnapped their coat. I repeated the terms of the ransom. “No bill, no mink. Make your choice.”

  I had hardly finished the sentence when his wife perked up, “Pay the bill, darling.”

  I wasn’t chippy, I don’t think. It wasn’t a case of a working-class lad having an issue with his upper-class customers. I didn’t have a problem with the world I came from and I’ve never tried to hide from it. I was brought up on the belief that no man can choose what he’s born into, but every man can choose to better himself. I tried to show customers the same amount of respect they showed my staff, although obviously there were exceptions.

  JC told me the man on table twelve was being obnoxious.

  I said, “What’s his problem?”

  “He’s just obnoxious. He’s not very nice.”

  So I stopped cheffing, went out to table twelve and said to the man sitting there, “Good evening. The maître d’ tells me you’ve got a little problem.”

  The customer said, “I haven’t got a problem.”

  “Strange,” I said, “because the maître d’ tells me you’re being obnoxious.” At that point the man sitting on the neighboring table interrupted, “I can vouch for him. He wasn’t obnoxious.”

  I thought, What’s it got to do with him? Why can’t he just eat his meal and keep his nose out of it? So I said, “And you can fuck off too.” Two birds with one stone.

  Other customers must have found this sort of behavior extremely exciting, because a lot of the observers on neighboring tables tended to come back. So much so, in fact, that certain people actually thought I was hamming it up for effect. They reckoned my irritable nature was part of an act, designed to get more PR for Harveys. The fact is, I didn’t like it when people interrupted my intensity. I was so passionate about the food and the restaurant that any criticism was destined to wind me up. A customer questioning the cheese dish was criticism. A customer saying he wouldn’t pay his bill was criticism. And then there were the moments when I just happened to be in the wrong time at the wrong place.

  I was at reception one evening, going through the following day’s bookings, when I heard a voice and said, nose still in book, “I’ll be with you in a minute, sir. Can you hang on?”

  Then I heard the same voice say to me, “Are you going to insult me?”

  I looked up and there, in front of me, was a mountain of a man. He was about six foot seven and broad as well. He had been in for dinner with a mate and had clearly drunk too much.

  “Sir,” I said, “if you’re looking for insults, then you’ve knocked on the wrong door.”

  “Is that the best you can do?” he asked. He was itching for a fight.

  “Look, if I decide to insult you, I’ll choose my time and place to do it,” I said. “And now is not the time or the place, so please enjoy your dinner, sir.”

  He went back to his table, and an hour or so later the big bruiser and his mate left Harveys, took a right and were walking up St. James’s Drive. It was about midnight and I decided that now was the time. I told one of my chefs, Lee Bunting, and another one of the boys to fill two buckets of water. Then I sent them off to soak Man Mountain. They hurried off and returned, mission accomplished. I was having an espresso a while later when Man Mountain reappeared, perfectly dry but clutching two carrier bags full of soaked clothes. He must have gone home, changed, and then returned to the restaurant to show me the sodden garments.

  “You threw a bucket of water over me,” he said.

  “I didn’t,” I replied. “I know nothing about this. Did you try chasing the people who did it?”

  And his response was, “Have you ever tried running in a wet suit?”

  Great line, that.

  Stories of my customer relations spread, but none of them deterred the restaurant guides. One day I even evicted the head inspector for the Egon Ronay Guide, which at that stage had awarded me two stars. He had been in for lunch and halfw
ay through his meal came into the kitchen and, in front of all my chefs, said, “One of those oysters I had was a bit dodgy.” He was only joking but I couldn’t see it at the time and I flipped. “Why don’t you just get out of my restaurant then?” I shouted. “As for the Egon Ronay Guide,” I added, “why don’t you just stick it up your arse?” Several months later when the guide came out, I was slightly surprised to see that I had been upgraded to three stars.

  When my former boss Nico Ladenis came to Harveys, he too came into the kitchen and said, “The meal was superb.” I thanked him before he added, “The veal with parsley purée was a little oversalted.” I turned to Gordon Ramsay and said, “Gordon, tell him to fuck off.”

  Gordon obeyed. “Nico, fuck off.” It was Gordon’s first taste of abusing a customer.

  Gordon and I were sitting in the restaurant late one night, just having a chat, when we heard a smash outside. We dashed out to the pavement and saw a man standing there. He had lobbed a brick through the window of our neighbors, an estate agency. When he ran away, Gordon chased him, and when I caught up, I saw that my underling had the brick thrower over a fence and was knocking the living daylights out of him.

  Clearly, I realized, Gordon liked a scrap, and I needed him once when a fracas erupted in the restaurant. There were six customers— three men and three women on the same table—having lunch in Harveys and it was so late they were the only ones in the restaurant. I was at reception on the phone when one of the customers came up to me and said, “Can I use your phone?” I carried on having a chat when he came round and pushed me in the chest, so hard that I fell back into a chair. I still had the phone in my hand and told the person on the other end of the line that I would call them back. “I take great offense to you pushing me in the chest,” I said. When he pushed me again, I hit him with all my might and he fell to the floor. JC witnessed the drama and screamed out for reinforcements, “Gordon! Gordon!” The next customer came running up to me and held a clenched fist above his head, ready to punch me. I chinned him as well, and he hit the floor. The third man who had been at the table came bounding up and he, too, went down. As the three customers scrabbled around on the floor, Gordon emerged from the kitchen, looking confused as he saw the bodies, and said, “What’s up?” The customers left but, bizarrely enough, they returned a couple of hours later to shake hands and make friends.