The Devil in the Kitchen (14 page)

Raymond and I quickly forgot the “sacking” incident. In a way, it strengthened our relationship and we became good friends. He had given up trying to break me, if indeed he had ever really intended to. “To break you,” he once told me, “you need an iron bar across your back.” I became the only member of the brigade to socialize with him and we’d go into Oxford to chat over coffee. He was a natural wit, deep and philosophical, and he trusted me. Not all the chefs in his brigade were given the freedom to come up with specialties, so the way he treated me was like a status symbol. I felt important. And even more so when Club des Cent, a group of one hundred gourmets, held a dinner at Le Manoir and Raymond put two of my specialties—my asparagus mousse and a pig’s trotter dish—on the menu.

There was a problem with Le Manoir’s style of cooking. When we did up to thirty or forty covers, it was most probably the finest restaurant in Britain. But when we had eighty or ninety covers, the system fell apart because the food was too complex. Each dish comprised so many components and different cooking techniques that it was extremely difficult to keep up. If you were doing a table of two, it was OK. But if you were doing a table of eight, then you could be stretchered.

You can afford to be frilly and artistic with cold food because it can be prepared before service. But when you’re dealing with hot food, it’s a different story. When we were doing big numbers at Le Manoir, there wasn’t much chance of every component being cooked perfectly or presented in the way Raymond had intended; the cracks were visible. Someone might forget to put an ingredient on the plate, or customers would end up waiting a long time for their food. It goes back to my point about consistency. At forty covers the food was consistently good, but by eighty covers it had lost that consistency, and consistency is the thing that might have taken Raymond from two stars to three.

To make matters worse, Raymond would occasionally come into the kitchen to change things at the last minute. For all his elements of genius and spontaneity, he had an annoying habit of adding an ingredient, playing around with the picture on the plate, in the middle of service. “I don’t like the presentation,” he might say.

If Raymond asked if you were OK, the response had to be, “I’m fine, Chef.” I didn’t want him joining in. I kept my surfaces clean and tidy and that way Raymond thought I was all right. If there was mess all over the place, he reckoned I was in need of assistance. I was on Meat once when I sensed his presence and heard that chilling question, “Can I help you?”

“Can you do the duck please, Chef?”

“Where is it, Marco?”

“In the oven, Chef.”

Raymond bent down, removed the pan from the oven and placed it on the stove. Then he took the duck from the pan, chopped up the bird, turned around without the cloth and seized the scorching pan handle with his bare hand. His palm sizzled and Raymond crouched down in agony. He had welded himself to the blisteringly hot metal. Even the customers in the restaurant must have heard his torture-chamber screams of misery. The skin on his palm rapidly tightened and I zoomed in for an inspection of the claw. In the center of his purple palm there was a white dot, left by the hole where the handle hung from a hook. I feel for him now, but at the time it was the sort of Raymond episode that made the brigade chortle.

Raymond came into the kitchen one day, shortly before lunch service on a Sunday, and headed toward Duncan Walker, who was on Hot Starters and just about to slice the Terrine de Poireaux et St. Jacques. The terrine is straightforward enough in terms of preparation—mix it, mold it, steam it in between paper, add a bit of beurre blanc—but if it’s sliced too slowly or too quickly, the whole thing will collapse. You have to get it just right. Duncan started to slice, with Raymond watching from just a few inches away, when, predictably, the terrine started to cave in. Raymond must have been having a bad day and the sight of the sinking terrine was just too much. He wrapped his fingers around Duncan’s oxlike neck and spat out the words, “You massacred my terrine. You massacred my terrine.”

Duncan stood up to his full height of six feet and Raymond’s fingers uncurled themselves, his grip loosening. “Bollocks,” said Duncan, whipping off his apron, “and bollocks to your job.” He chucked the apron at Raymond’s chest and started to motor out of the kitchen. Raymond grabbed Duncan’s arm to stop him from leaving, but the beast was too powerful. The boss was dragged along the floor, almost as if he were waterskiing. Raymond, defeated, turned to me. “That’s not good, Chef,” I said.

Raymond, hair ruffled, said, “What’s not good?”

“We’ve got no one on Hot Starters and nearly a hundred are booked.” So Raymond had to do Hot Starters.

Apart from the Mouse House tenants, I made another good friend while at Le Manoir. One morning in June I was the first in the kitchen and there was this lad, shelling peas, the sort of menial chore I had done in my first job at the Hotel St. George in Harrogate. I was intrigued by him because it was a hot day but he was wearing a woolly jumper.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Heston.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m just here on work experience because I like cooking.”

“Take off your jumper, Heston,” I said. “I’ll give you an apron.” That’s how I met Heston Blumenthal. He tells the story slightly differently. In his account, he was working in the kitchen with a French chef who was trying to pick a fight with him. Apparently I said to Heston, “You don’t want to work with the French. Come and join the English.” He stopped what he was doing and came to work with me on my section.

He spent about a week working alongside me in the kitchen. On the second day he saw me fighting with a waiter. According to Heston, the waiter was clinging on to the work surface and I was trying to drag him out of the kitchen, but he wouldn’t loosen his grasp.

Heston was trying to cook a dish one morning when Raymond wandered past, looking displeased with the way the lad was going about it. “Use your head,” said Raymond. “Use your head.
Le tête
, my little baby,
le tête
.” (Raymond often called his cooks “little baby”; it was patronizing but meant affectionately.) On these instructions, Heston bent down to the ramekins that were on the counter and started nudging them with his head. “What are you doing?” asked Raymond, puzzled. Heston replied, “You told me to use my head, Chef.” You’d think he was being silly and ridiculing Raymond, wouldn’t you? But I wouldn’t be surprised if the pressure had got to Heston and all he was doing was obeying the command.

Heston seemed keen enough, but after his stint of work experience he decided cooking was not for him and went to work for his father’s business.

It would be a few years before he reassessed his ambitions and we were reunited when I gave him a job in the kitchen at the Canteen. And it would be a few more years before our memorable meeting when we talked about a restaurant he was going to buy (with the help of his dad) and wondered what it should be called. “Why not call it the Fat Duck?” I suggested. “Because then its address will be the Fat Duck, Bray-on-Thames, and everyone will think it’s got a view of the river. When they arrive and see that it hasn’t, they’ll hardly turn round and go home.” He took my advice, and has since won three Michelin stars for the Fat Duck. Oh, and he’s got an OBE.

During those summer months when the rest of the world was talking about that global jukebox Live Aid, at Le Manoir we were more excited about the cover coming off the swimming pool. If staff handed in their notice, they were carried past Raymond’s cherished vegetable garden, through the grounds, squealing and kicking, and chucked fully clothed into the pool. Inevitably, it went too far.

I can still see the look of horror on Jenny Blanc’s face as she stood at the side of the pool trying to absorb the vision before her: chefs and waiters ducking each other in the water (the English versus the French again). “What’s going on?” she yelled. “We haven’t even finished serving the customers.”

Raymond, however, enjoyed the ritual and once led the pack toward the duck pond, suggesting it was a better place for a dunking. It was a wild scrap, with Chef pinning himself to the pond’s surrounding wall so he didn’t end up in the water. The soft headmaster had succumbed. There at the duck pond, Raymond Blanc was being as childish and silly as all his wild schoolboys. It would have made a lovely picture, with the fitting caption “If you can’t beat ’em . . .”

TWELVE

Coming Home

D
ESPITE THE FUN,
a year at Le Manoir was enough. Around about Christmas 1985, when my contract was coming to an end, I took stock of my life. The best chefs in Britain had trained me but I suppose I had always been intrigued by the great chefs in France, men I had never met. When I looked at a cookery book that had been produced by one of these Paris-based Michelin-starred masters, I was like a child engrossed in a fantastic fairy tale. Colin and Malcolm, the Boys who ran the Box Tree, had also filled my head with their stories of French restaurants. Places like Maxim’s and Le Tour d’Argent seemed to me the epitome of grandness and elegance. Paris was the magical kingdom. I thought I should go there. Acquiring knowledge of cooking was far more important than staying in a job simply to rise through the ranks.

So I devised a plan that, on reflection, was not particularly well thought-out. The plan in twelve words:
Go to Paris, knock on kitchen
doors and ask for a job.
My knocking knuckles had got me into this profession and my knocking knuckles had got me into Gavroche and into Tante Claire.

I phoned my Battersea-based friend Alan Bennett, who now lived above his restaurant, Lampwick’s. Would he mind if I stayed at his place for a week before heading down to Dover for the cross-Channel ferry? My journey, however, contained a surprise destination. What happened next has echoes of the way in which I got my job at Gavroche after missing the coach back to Leeds. If I had not stopped off to stay with Alan, then I would never have ended up with Harveys, the restaurant that launched my career, changed my life and transformed me into the so-called rock star chef.

Stephen Yare was also moving on, but before we left Manoir, Stephen and I cooked up a diabolical farewell gift for our old commander. Raymond kept a camera by the passe that he would use to photograph new dishes: the brigade would then copy the presentation from the pictures. Quite clever, really. Before leaving Le Manoir, Stephen and I thought we would use the camera to take some snaps of each other, little mementoes by which Raymond could remember us. When it was my turn to pose, I got a pig’s trotter, sat on the butcher’s block, unzipped my fly and positioned the trotter so it was protruding from my crotch and resting on my thigh. In terms of maturity, Stephen and I had a long way to go.

We had reckoned on Raymond getting the film developed once we had left Le Manoir, but we realized our timing had been wrong when he stormed into the kitchen clutching a set of photographs. “You two, my office,” he yelled, jabbing a finger toward us. I don’t think I had ever seen him so angry. The three of us crammed into his miniature office and Stephen and I studied the floor while Raymond started, “Fucking hell, boys. I took the film to the chemist’s. The lady there is very sweet and we had a nice chat. And then I go to pick up the pictures and she’s laughing at me.”

At this point he lobbed the envelope of photographs that he’d been clutching, and as it landed on our side of the desk, the snaps spilled out. I glanced down at them. The trotter’s resemblance to a gigantic human penis was astonishing. “Sorry, Chef,” I said, and Stephen feigned regret as well.

“And you, Marco,” said Raymond, his voice a little softer, more caring. “Now I know why you can’t get a girlfriend with something that size.”

I left Manoir and have never been back. It’s a bit like one of those love affairs that, when it ends, you think, I don’t want to see her ever again. Although I’ve not returned, I continue to be friends with Raymond, however. Though weirdly enough, I have just had a call—out of the blue—from Raymond. “Come for lunch at Manoir,” he said, and I’ve accepted the invitation.

I
ARRIVED IN
Battersea on a chilly January day in 1986 and, following Alan’s instructions, I collected the keys from the blacksmith’s beside Lampwick’s. Once inside the flat I realized something was wrong: all the furniture had been removed except for a TV, a three-piece suite and a desk. When Alan returned home, he made the tea, sat me down and told me the story. His marriage had collapsed, he said, and his wife had left him. She had taken the kids, along with most of the furniture. Emotionally, the man was on his knees.

Business wasn’t good. Lampwick’s was in Queenstown Road, about a mile from Chelsea Bridge, and in the same road there were two Michelin-starred restaurants: Nico Ladenis’s Chez Nico, and L’Arlequin where the chef was Christian Delteuil, the same chef who had interviewed me for a job at Chewton Glen back in 1981. On weekends Lampwick’s snatched the punters who couldn’t get a table at either of Alan’s impressive neighbors, but on weeknights it was quiet.

In addition, Alan was drinking heavily—restaurateurs with sorrows to drown don’t have to travel far for their next drink. I felt desperately sorry for him and when he started to say, “I’m in the shit. If you fancy staying on—” I could see what was coming and jumped in with, “Well, let’s see. I mean, I can work for a bit to help out.”