The Devil in the Kitchen (15 page)

I revised my plan. OK, I convinced myself that I had revised my plan: work for nothing at Lampwick’s and do a bit of work in Nico’s kitchen; then when Alan was on the mend, I would be on that ferry to Calais. I’d give it a few weeks. Six months later I was still at Lampwick’s, and as I was refusing to take a wage from Alan, I had chewed my way through my savings from Le Manoir. I would have to wait more than a decade to see Paris.

I had come from Le Manoir’s seventeen-strong brigade, but in the kitchen at Lampwick’s there were just three chefs, which included an assistant chef called Siân and the head chef, young Martin Blunos. Highly talented, hardworking and keen to learn, Martin had worked under Alan when the latter was head chef at a restaurant in Covent Garden. Although Alan was a chef by profession, he tended not to interfere in the kitchen at Lampwick’s, remaining mostly front of house, drinking with the regulars.

Martin was cooking classical French food, and I brought in my experience and, in particular, the special Manoir touch. So I would do Terrine of Leeks and Foie Gras for starters and maybe Pigeon en Vessie (pigeon cooked in a pig’s bladder) as a main course, and for dessert I might do Terrine of Fruits. Martin was spongelike, absorbing every detail of each dish as I showed him how it was created. He has since said it was as if Roux, Koffmann and Blanc were there in his kitchen, giving him a lesson.

I taught him how to do Pigeon en Croûte de Sel, which I’d first had at Le Manoir on the day of my job interview. Done well it’s a superb dish. The pigeon is gutted, trimmed, stuffed with thyme, then sealed and left to get cold. Then you make a salt pastry—salt, flour, egg whites—let it rest, roll it half an inch thick and mold it around the bird, carefully creating a pigeon shape. The excess pastry is used to make a little head with a small beak, with cloves for the pigeon’s eyes. The whole thing is brushed with egg white, and sea salt is sprinkled on the breast part of the pastry, so that as the salt bakes, it colors the egg. It ends up with a varnished oak appearance. At Le Manoir the dish was carved at the table. The pastry head was removed and put to the side of the plate like a garnish; then the pastry body was cut so that the herby aroma steamed out to whet the appetite.

“We haven’t got the space to carve it and we haven’t got the staff,” said Martin.

“We must,” I told him. “That’s the way they do it at Le Manoir.” And we did.

It’s not surprising that Martin went on to become a two-star Michelin chef with his restaurant in Bath, Lettonie, and more recently he won a star for the Lygon Arms in Worcestershire. He was passionate about food at Lampwick’s, but he was more fascinated by his assistant, Siân. The couple went on to marry and have a family together. Martin says his memories of working with me include the times before service when we changed into our chef ’s whites. Real chefs don’t wear underpants because working in hot kitchens can leave you with a painful condition known in the profession as Chef ’s Arse, which is caused by oversweating. Anyway, Martin remembers me showing him my testicles as we got changed, and that is what first springs to his mind when the name Marco Pierre White is mentioned.

Meanwhile, Suzie—the girl I met at the Up All Night before going to Le Manoir—came back into my life. With some style, I might add. I woke up in the middle of the night and she was sitting on the end of my bed. I said, “Suzie, what are you doing here?” She had put her hand through the letterbox and opened the door. She said, “I want to go to Yorkshire with you.”

“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 Covent 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.