The Devil in the Kitchen (26 page)

This kitchen was big. The one at Harveys was so small that we had to store the vegetables in a shed in the courtyard. The size of the kitchen at Wandsworth prevented me from winning three stars because I was unable to show off different cooking techniques. You need to have the right number of staff and the right amount of space to do that, and as the kitchen was so cramped, I couldn’t fit in the staff or the techniques. At the Hyde Park, however, we had braised dishes, confit dishes, dishes en cocotte, dishes en vessie—an array of dishes that we couldn’t have done at Harveys. At Harveys there had been just a few dishes on the main course, but now, on the Fish section alone, we’d have six or seven dishes and the entire menu might contain fifteen main courses.

The food stemmed from classical French but veered toward simplicity. Pigeon with Foie Gras, wrapped in cabbage and served with pommes purée and black pepper, was a favorite. Lobster was grilled and served with a little truffle butter, pig’s trotter was served with sweetbreads and sauce périgueux, while the menu also included a French fillet of steak with horseradish, and guinea fowl with risotto of white truffle.

On the top of the menu I used a Salvador Dalí quote: “At six I wanted to be a chef, at seven Napoleon and my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” The pudding menu contained the quote from the eighteenth-century food writer Brillat-Savarin: “To know how to eat well, one must first know how to wait.” That was a message to all those customers who kicked up a fuss when their food took time to prepare.

(Later, when I had an investment in a restaurant called Sugar Reef, I put on the menu “Be blonde,” and attributed the remark to General Custer. It was made up, of course, and was really a tribute of sorts to the captain of the
Titanic
, who apparently shouted, “Be British,” as his ship was sinking. On the pudding menu at the same restaurant, we used the quote “Yes,” and attributed it to the man from Del Monte— orders for desserts have never been better.)

To start with, we struggled. The trouble was we weren’t used to doing big numbers at lunchtime. At Harveys we’d been busy every night, but because we were in the middle of nowhere, we only did fifteen or twenty covers for lunch on a good day. At the Hyde Park we were doing three times that amount, maybe fifty or sixty for lunch. Then just as we were recovering from that service, we had to do up to a hundred covers for dinner. Cooks who had been strong enough for Harveys were now not so strong. They couldn’t grow. They couldn’t move on and up their game. I suppose it’s like a football team that goes from second to first division. If they don’t up their game, then they’re not going to stay in the premiership.

Consistency remained a priority. Derek Brown, head inspector of Michelin UK, had visited the Canteen one day and I’d chatted to him. I had asked him why Gavroche had been demoted, going from three stars to two. “Well,” he had replied, “three of the four meals I had that year were not up to a three-star standard.” Mr. Brown did not like compromise. His remark underlined my belief that every dish heading from the kitchen to the table would have to be of a three-star standard. I said to him, “I have always dreamed of winning three stars and what I do is look at the only three-star restaurant in London, Tante Claire. If I can beat them on all levels, you cannot deny me three stars.”

“Very clever,” Mr. Brown replied.

I would visit Tante Claire and study the dishes as they appeared on the table in front of me. As far as I was concerned, if we put our mind to it, we could beat Pierre on amuse-gueules, hors d’oeuvres, fish, meat, cheese, pastry, puddings and petits fours. The one area where Tante Claire exceeded was with its bread. He served the best bread in the country and that’s because it was one of his true passions; and to have a passion for something means that you have to seek great understanding of its creation, which, in turn, gives you a very good chance of perfecting it. It wasn’t just the recipe or the environment or the flour—which he imported from God-knows-where—it was the passion that put him ahead of me. You have to have the right pair of hands making the stuff.

For a while I worried about how Pierre’s customers were being served better bread than my customers at the Hyde Park. Then I remembered what Nico Ladenis had always said: if you can find someone who makes it better than you, give it to them to make it. I had no desire to learn about bread, it just didn’t turn me on, so I found a bakery that could do the job for me and they worked from our bread recipe.

Yet even before I started to tackle the cooking side, I became obsessed with what I call the illusion of grandness. The plates and silverware had to be the finest, and the tablecloths had to be beautiful. The walls of the restaurant were lined with wonderful paintings—I treated the Hyde Park as an art gallery. Not one of these things makes the food taste any better, of course, but all of them frame the food and help to make the customer feel that he or she is sitting in a magnificent restaurant. I also wanted to take the show from the kitchen into the dining room, so that there would a lot of carving in the room. I would do dishes for two, like gigot of milk-fed lamb, and roast pineapple with vanilla, which were carried into the dining room on silver trays. The impact was greater than at Tante Claire. For instance, rather than saving cash by putting five halves of scallops on a plate—as would have been customary in those days—I’d put five medium-sized scallops on a plate, so the dish had height and presence. You smelled three stars when you walked into the room. I had put Michelin in a position where they could not deny me my third star.

The pace was relentless. We worked six days a week and had little time for life outside the kitchen. I was living in Pont Street, a ten-minute walk away, and would leave home every morning at eight forty-five. In the kitchen I might do a bit of butchery, perhaps the mise en place, and then talk to the chefs de partie about dishes that were coming up. I’d talk through dish ideas with my head chef, Robert Reid. At eleven forty-five
A.M
. Mati would come in with Luciano and our new baby, Marco, and she would sit them on the passe while she had a cup of coffee. I was on one side of the passe and my family was on the other. Fifteen minutes later lunch service would start and we’d finish about two thirty
P.M
. Then I would do whatever paperwork was required, or perhaps meet with suppliers. People came to me; I would never leave the restaurant. In the late afternoon, Mati might come back and we’d have a coffee while the boys sat on the passe, then after dinner service I’d talk through the evening with my brigade before heading home. My head would hit the pillow at about one in the morning, so it was a fifteen- or sixteen-hour day Monday to Friday. Other members of the kitchen staff would start at seven thirty or eight in the morning. On Saturday I would go in at two o’clock in the afternoon and work until midnight, then on Sundays I slept.

In terms of standard, the front-of-house team matched the kitchen brigade. I had joint managers, Pierre Bordelli and Nicolas Munier, both in their early thirties, good looking and amazingly diplomatic; they knew how to handle the customers. Then I brought in the veteran Jean Cotat. He had worked for years with the Roux brothers and was known throughout London, rightly or wrongly, as the finest maître d’ who’d ever worked at Le Gavroche. Then Jean had a job at Tante Claire, which ended in strange circumstances. A lady customer had asked where the toilets were and he had walked her to the door and then, as she went into the ladies’, he’d said, “Making room for the next course, madame?” Lord knows what had encouraged him to say such a thing, but the long and short of it is that Nic Munier knew Jean’s son, Simon, who, in turn, phoned to find a job for Jean. I was delighted to have him on board and he would work the last ten years of his career with me.

The exhausting routine made me tetchy when food wasn’t up to the right standard. One evening a chef presented a bowl of soup on the passe, awaiting my inspection. I would always dip my little finger into the soup to test its temperature and on this occasion the chef had delivered a fish soup that was lukewarm rather than piping hot. I called him over. “What is this?” I said.

“Soupe de Poisson, boss.”

“Cold Soupe de Poisson,” I told him and then I pulled his bib apron away from his chest and emptied the contents of the bowl down his front. I picked up the croutons and chucked them in. Next, I put the bowl in between his apron and chef ’s whites. Then I sent him back to the stove. Everyone in the kitchen found this incident very amusing, except for the young chef who was a walking bowl of fish soup. Yet he knew that five minutes later he’d be sniggering when one of his colleagues got a bollocking.

Customers were also prone to get on my wick. They would arrive in the restaurant and, in a flashy way in front of their friends, tell the maître d’hotel, “Get Marco to cook it.” This annoyed me. One day a man came in and ordered a bowl of chips, or french fries, adding, “Get Marco to do them.” He thought he was being funny by ordering fries in a posh restaurant when such a dish was not on the menu. I thought, fine, you can have chips, it’s not a problem, but if you are asking me to cook them, then you will have to pay accordingly. So I charged him £25, which made him look like an idiot. When he got the bill, he was astounded and summoned the maître d’ to complain. I sent the waiter back to tell the customer, “Marco cut the potatoes, Marco blanched them and cooked them. Marco put them on a silver dish and then personally put the garnish of tomato ketchup on the side just as you requested. His hourly rate is higher than the other chefs.” I suppose that customer has been dining out on the story ever since, so he’s had his £25’s worth.

Nicolas Munier, one of the restaurant managers, came into the kitchen one day to tell me there was a problem in the restaurant. A fight was about to erupt in my beloved dining room, he said. Two very camp men had been sitting in the restaurant when a trio had arrived and been seated at the table beside them. The trio consisted of a wide boy—a sort of flashy geezer, a rough ’n’ ready type—and two blonde women. They were too crude and ostentatious for the camp couple, who started to loudly make rude comments about the women. The wide boy didn’t like it and by the time I walked into the dining room he was holding the two men by their ties as they knelt on the floor in front of him. “If you don’t apologize to the ladies, I’m going to do the pair of you,” he was saying. He was pulling their ties so hard that they were being throttled and were incapable of speech, so there’s no way they could have said sorry even they’d wanted to. “Please, sir, let me deal with this,” I said to him, and when he let go, I helped the two men to their feet and took them outside.

“I’m terribly sorry,” I told them. “The problem is, when someone books a table, we never quite know what sort of person they are. His behavior was atrocious and I cannot apologize enough, but the table may have been booked by his p.a. or someone else. What I can tell you is I certainly won’t allow him into this restaurant again.” I waived their bill and they departed into the night, shaken by the experience of being roughed up and strangled, but placated nevertheless.

Then I returned to the dining room and went to the table where the geezer was sitting with his birds. “I am terribly sorry, sir,” I said to him. “The problem is, when someone books a table, we never quite know who’s going to come, and on this particular occasion it was those two dreadful men, wasn’t it? What I can tell you is I certainly won’t allow them into this restaurant again and your meal is on the house.”

I was not so charming when a French couple arrived for dinner. They were in their early fifties and well-dressed and they told my manager, the impeccably mannered young Pierre Bordelli, that over the years they had dined in the finest French restaurants—Joel Robuchon, Guy Savoie—and that they were at the Hyde Park because they had heard of my reputation and were keen to taste my food. They asked Pierre to choose for them from the menu, which he agreed to do. For starters we gave them crab, which was served with tomatoes, and a mosaic of chicken, leeks and foie gras. When Pierre asked if they had enjoyed it, they said that they were “disappointed.” For their main course, they had pigeon wrapped in cabbage and served with foie gras, and cod cooked with a green herb crust. Again, Pierre asked them what they thought of the food, and they said it was equally unimpressive. He relayed their remarks to me. “Ask them to leave,” I said. Pierre approached their table and said, “I am sorry, but Mr. White does not want you in the restaurant. In fact, he would like you to leave now and please don’t worry about the bill. Your meal is on the house.” He pulled the table toward him slightly, a gesture designed to tell them that their time was up. The couple sat there, astonished. “For the past thirty years I have been dining in the finest restaurants in the world and I have never been asked to leave,” the man said.

Pierre tugged the table a little closer to him and said with utter charm, “There is always a first time for everything, sir.”

I tried to be as calm as possible when I ventured front of house. Although at about seven one evening I was strolling through the dining room, on my way to look at the reservations book, when I walked past a table of six Americans who were having an early dinner. They were chatting away happily, and as I got closer to them, I heard one man say, “The chef here is crazy. I mean, he is kerrrr-razy.” I carried on walking, but as I looked at the book, his words came back to me. I thought, hang on a second, he was talking about
me.
When I walked back through the dining room, I stopped at the table and said to the customer, “I might be many things but I am not crazy, do you understand?” He sat there petrified, not knowing what to say. I had to fill the silence. “So now you can do one of two things,” I continued. “Stay here and have a nice dinner, or leave now.” He shuffled uncomfortably and then asked meekly, “Would you mind if we stayed and had our dinner?” The following day I got a graceful letter from him, apologizing for his comments and saying that he had enjoyed the best meal of his life.