The Devil in the Kitchen (16 page)

THIRTEEN

The Christening

W
ITHOUT THE FOOD
at Harveys there would never have been the circus.

I wasn’t expecting an easy ride to the top. After all, I was taking over what had been an upmarket burger bar in Wandsworth, rather than an elegant dining room in Mayfair. The interior design was horrific, but there was no money to redecorate. The kitchen was tiny, and again there were no funds for improvement.

My business partners, Nigel and Richard, lurked around in the background; the former looking after the wine list, the latter dealing with the accounts. Understandably, they wanted to see a return from their investment, but my motivation was to serve the finest food in the world.

How could I deliver a high standard of cuisine with the restraint of limited resources? If Harveys was going to work, I would have to be smart and draw heavily from my not-insignificant experience of serving alongside the Michelin masters. I would need to use every trick I had learned on my nine-year journey from Harrogate to Wandsworth Common.

I had always admired the Box Tree’s clever technique of rotating stock (ingredients, not chicken stock), because it meant they could reduce waste. Reduced waste equals increased profits. Stock rotation therefore became a rule at Harveys, and this is the way it worked: One day I might do pigeon with fresh-thyme-scented roasting juices and champagne-braised cabbage. But if the customers didn’t go for it, then I would rethink the dish because I couldn’t contemplate the prospect of chucking the pigeons into the bin. The next day I might put Pigeon à la Forèstiere (with wild mushrooms) on the menu and, fingers crossed, that would do the trick.

I also had to find a way to work in such a small, cramped kitchen. I had worked in a few big kitchens by now, including the Gavroche powerhouse, where there might have been four chefs on the Meat section, three on Fish, four on Pastry, two on Hot Starters and two on the Larder. At Harveys, kitchen space was a luxury, so, just like Pierre Koffmann had done at Tante Claire, I put a massive table in the middle of the kitchen. The table became the work surface and in those early days we were like a pack of wolves; three or four of us darting around, surface to stove, stove to surface, each of us doing a bit of everything.

There wasn’t enough space for a separate garnish section, so to overcome this, I tried to incorporate vegetables as ingredients served on the plate with the main dish, rather than served on separate side plates. I’d serve young leeks, roast button onions and girolle mushrooms on the same plate as a guinea fowl, roasted on the bone, skin taken off, legs split, thigh bone taken out, drumstick cleaned up, the whole lot put together, breast carved and laid across the top with jus blonde. Likewise, Pigeon en Vessie was served on the same plate as a Tagliatelle of Leeks. And the Roast Pigeon de Bresse did not come with side plates of vegetables, but was garnished with potato rosti, young turnips, lentilles du pays and a single ravioli that contained mushrooms, garlic and thyme. Harveys dishes were filling and substantial.

The kitchen at Harveys was also too small for the traditional French-style chefs’ hierarchy. At Gavroche hierarchical ranks were important and the system was respected by every man in the kitchen, but my Harveys brigade would only ever be as large as ten—I wouldn’t have the real hierarchy until I had the Restaurant Marco Pierre White at the Hyde Park Hotel. I had two chefs on Pastry in a poky kitchen annex and the remaining eight of us were packed into the overcrowded main kitchen, not working on sections, but working together to compensate for our lack of staff. In other words, we all mucked in to do garnish, hot starters, main courses and fish. If there was a table of five, eight cooks worked on five plates, which might mean two people working together on one dish, then I’d piece it all together. Despite the unusual arrangement, consistency would have to be crucial at Harveys. At Manoir, you’ll recall, in my opinion the system fell apart when the pressure increased and the number of covers went above forty. With this in mind, I wanted to ensure that each and every Harveys dish was consistently good.

So I was the head chef and every other member of the brigade was an “assistant”—there was no sous chef. I told my assistants to call me Marco, rather than Chef. I was still in my twenties and didn’t consider myself old enough to be called Chef, although when I gave Kevin Broome, a cook from Manchester, a job at Harveys, he started to call me Boss, which stuck. Thereafter, I was either Marco or Boss until my retirement from the kitchen in 1999. Although I didn’t go for Albert’s hierarchy, I certainly adopted his high regard for discipline.

Then there was the food itself. I began questioning everything that went on the plate. Why am I doing this? Why serve this with that? Why serve that with this? Why cook this for so long? Why, why, why? I remember serving a vinaigrette with a terrine of leeks and thinking the vinegar was too harsh. It often is, isn’t it? So I just cut the vinegar by diluting it with water; you still get the strength but you’ve taken away some of the acidity and made it palatable. I called it water vinaigrette: put oil, water and garlic in a large bowl, add salt and pepper, and then stir very gently so the vinaigrette doesn’t emulsify. It looks beautiful on the plate—separate pearls of oil and water.

Other times I might pick a main ingredient—sea scallops, lamb, whatever—and then create a long list of other ingredients that I thought would go well with it. I would sit there, studying the list, allowing my imagination to go and then . . . and then I would start to see it visually. At night, when I wasn’t in the kitchen, I would sit down with pen and paper and draw pictures of dishes that came out of my imagination and were intended for the following day’s menu. Sometimes, in search of inspiration, I would resort to my trunk, which contained French cookery books and menus I had collected over the years from other restaurants. Then I might deface my books by drawing my own sketches of dishes straight onto the books’ illustrations. Years later, at the Hyde Park, I still did my late-night sketches, then handed them in the morning to my head chef, Robert Reid, saying, “Copy these.” With so many of the dishes I would start at the end, if you like, and work my way backward; the process always began with drawing that picture on the plate.

I needed a system for making sure the brigade brought my vision to life, plate after plate. At Manoir, it had sometimes been a problem that not every chef could copy Raymond’s artistic style. Quite simply, they didn’t have his flair. Somehow, I had to find an easy-to-follow way of enabling my chefs to imitate my desired presentation of dishes. I devised a simple method: the plate became a clock. The top of the plate was twelve o’clock and the bottom of the plate was six o’clock; three o’clock was to the right and, of course, nine to the left. So if a chef was dressing pigeon with a petit pain of foie gras, I could shout across the kitchen, “Foie gras at twelve, confit of garlic at four . . .” You can never go wrong, as long as your cooks can tell the time.

*    *    *

T
O ACCOMPLISH ALL
this—to turn a neighborhood joint into a temple of gastronomy, perfect from the moment you opened the door to the minute you got in the cab—I was racing constantly, like one of my father’s beloved greyhounds. Imagine you are running a marathon . . . at sprint speed. Now imagine what you might look like halfway through the distance and it will help you get a picture in your head of what I looked like during Harveys: gaunt, debauched and knackered.

I suppose I was trying to kill myself. But then, sacrificing your health for your career was all the rage. Harveys opened against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s greed culture. People talked about City types being “burnt out” by the age of thirty. Young men and women didn’t stop to question the damage that can be caused by chronic obsession; we didn’t pause to consider the consequences of the pace.
Wall Street
was the big movie of the year, and that was a film about greed and self-indulgence, about hunger for success. Its underlying message was that greed is destructive but the subtext was totally missed by most cinemagoers of my age. Instead everyone was reciting Michael Douglas’s line—“Breakfast is for wimps”—as if it was the mantra for anyone who wanted to get to the top. (My own breakfast, by the way, has always consisted of the same three courses: a cough, a coffee and a cigarette.)

In Harveys I had found my Adrenaline Heaven. This was Pain Paradise. Customers may well have gone there to fill their stomachs but I went to feed my addiction to work, my addiction to adrenaline and to pain, and at Harveys something was always happening.

Actually, it is wrong to say that something was
always
happening. During those first couple of months after opening there was zilch happening. Things were bad and certainly not helped by the winter weather, which was particularly brutal that year. We could handle forty-four covers but most nights the restaurant was virtually empty. One evening it was completely empty, so I came out of the kitchen with Mark and Simple Simon and we stood with Morfudd and her front-of-house team of two looking out of the window at the action outside: a blizzard was raging across Wandsworth Common.

Through the snow, two scarfed-up, sludge-covered people suddenly appeared, trudging bravely in their boots and anoraks and approaching Bellevue Road as if it were the peak of Everest. It turned out to be the head jailer of Wandsworth Prison. He was bringing out his windswept wife for “a treat.” When they had finished their meal, I joined them for coffee and a chat.

I was so overwhelmed by their Hannibal-esque trek to Harveys, impressed by the effort they had put into it, that I found myself telling them, “Don’t worry about the bill.” They wrapped themselves up again, in that cheerful sort of way that the British do before throwing themselves into a snowstorm. Stiff upper lip. Then they stepped out of the restaurant and into the blizzard and vanished.

That was the worst night. Two covers, zero takings—and I don’t think Mr. and Mrs. Jailer ever came back. Life at Harveys remained quiet for the next couple of months—there wasn’t a noticeable growth in popularity—but rather than worrying about the lack of cash coming in, I concentrated on getting the menu right, and the few punters who came in ate well.

Then one day in early spring, the kitchen phone rang. I got a flashback to Manoir Aux Quat’Saisons. Two years earlier, Raymond’s kitchen phone had rung and I’d picked it up, as was my habit at that time, pretending to be an answering machine. “Please leave a message and we shall come back to you,” I had said, before delivering an earsplitting “Bleeeeeep!” After the “tone” came a soft voice, announcing that it was Egon Ronay, the renowned critic and best-selling author of restaurant guides, and saying, “I would be most grateful if Raymond could call me when he picks up this message.”

And so I was there in the kitchen at Harveys, listening to the same soft voice, totally unaware that Egon Ronay had visited my restaurant, eaten my food and was about to write a review for his column in the
Sunday Times
, and paralyzed with fear that he might recognize my voice. Instead, Egon explained that he had been in to eat at Harveys and had enjoyed his meal tremendously. He intended to write a piece for the
Sunday Times
but beforehand wanted to know a bit more about me. “I can tell from your accent that you are not Italian,” he said to me. “So how did you get a name like Marco?”