The Devil in the Kitchen (21 page)

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 halfway 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.

Gordon, meanwhile, never really cracked until his final night at Harveys. I don’t recall what he’d done wrong, but I yelled at him and he lost it. He crouched down on the floor in the corner of the kitchen, buried his head in his hands and started sobbing. “I don’t care what you do to me,” he said as he wept. “Hit me. I don’t care. Sack me. I don’t care.” I was hardly going to sack him; he was leaving the next day. I’d gotten him a job working for Albert Roux at Gavroche.

I
COULD SMELL
the Michelin inspectors a mile off. The most important ones were the two at the top of Michelin UK: Derek Brown, the head inspector, and his number two, Derek Bulmer. They were the two Dereks. Or rather, the two Mr. Bs. I was not on first-name terms with the highly influential duo.

Inspectors tended to book a table for two early in the evening, let’s say seven o’clock. You’d instantly smell a rat, as seven was rather early for dinner in Wandsworth. Then they would order a half bottle of wine, which, again, is suspicious, because people going for dinner to an upmarket restaurant usually order by the bottle. Then there was the fact that we knew what they looked like. After winning my first star, I had met both Mr. Bs, but when booking they would still use an alias because obviously they didn’t want me to know they were coming.

They didn’t arrive in disguise, wearing false beards and wigs, but although I knew they were in the restaurant, they were too clever to be outwitted. There wasn’t the opportunity to make their meals more special, because they ordered dishes you couldn’t change, such as a fish soup or terrine, which had been made earlier in the day.

I won my first star in 1988 and retained it the following year. Then, in the last few months of 1989, it crossed my mind that I might be up for promotion, because the Michelin men visited half a dozen times.

By now I had done several things to improve Harveys since winning my first star. During the summer of 1989 I had closed the restaurant for six weeks so that it could be totally refurbished. The provincial, unexciting décor I had inherited and despised was stripped away. I had taken on the services of interior designer David Collins, who would go on to design most of my restaurants. David made Harveys far more stylish, elegant and chic, basing his design on New York’s Waldorf-Astoria—the walls were beautifully decorated with ornate plasterwork and mirrors, the lighting was soft, the wallpaper was unobtrusive.

One day I saw Derek Brown in the restaurant and asked him what he thought I could do to win two stars. “It’s not for me to tell you how to run your restaurant,” replied the man I called Mr. Brown. “But if you start serving amuse-bouches and improve your coffee, you won’t be a million miles away.” That day I started serving amuse-bouches, or amuse-gueules—little tasters to entertain the mouth. These included grilled sea scallops with crispy calamari and a sauce made from the squid ink; an individual oyster with watercress in champagne jelly; and a brochette of langoustine with leeks and truffle. These amuse-bouches had to be grand—you can’t start with what I would call a little knickknack on the plate. It was the first thing customers were going to taste, and I had to leave them wanting more. The following week I bought the best coffee machine and ordered a brand of delicious coffee. Harveys started serving the finest coffee in London. I could see where Mr. Brown was coming from. Amuse-gueules provide the first impressions of the meal while coffee provides the final mouthful.

I also asked my former boss Albert Roux what I could do to win another star, and he said, “Your menu is right; the balance is right. Just refine the dishes and you will win two stars.”