The Devil in the Kitchen (28 page)

Things didn’t improve when we finally arrived at our destination. I realized that we were cooking in a tiny, cramped kitchen above a betting shop. What they hadn’t told me was that this was a kitchen that didn’t have an oven. There was a massive, gas-burning hot plate, which I transformed into an oven by removing all its shelves except for the lowest one, which was just above the heat. The main course was sea bass with a crust of thyme leaves and it took about forty-five minutes to cook it. Luckily, the starter (terrine of foie gras with Sauternes gelée) and pudding ( jelly of red fruits) were served cold, otherwise we’d never have done it. There were no complaints. Quite the contrary. JC said that guests had told him the meal was “spectacular.”

We headed home exhausted. At Calais the customs officers asked to see my passport. “I don’t have one.” How did you get out of England in the first place? “We drove.” The irritated officer waved us through with, “
Allez! Allez!
”

At Dover we were stopped and asked to show our passports. I explained that I didn’t have one and the customs officer asked if I had any form of ID. I fumbled around in the glove box and confidently produced my fishing license. The Pierre part of my name must have made him suspicious. “How did you get out of Britain in the first place?” he asked. “We drove,” I said for a second time. Eventually we were waved through the barrier with the officer shouting, “And get a bloody passport.”

T
HE KITCHENS WERE
my escape zone but I was intrigued by the business side of restaurants. The likes of Michael Caine and Rocco Forte had encouraged me to be entrepreneurial and they had made me more confident. I set about building a restaurant empire. One night in the summer of 1996 I was driving around London when I found myself heading down Curzon Street and past the door of the Mirabelle. I felt an urge to nip inside, just to have a look at the place, so I asked my driver to stop.

I had been to the Mirabelle only once before, though not for a meal. It was back in the summer of 1981, when I first came to London and was working for Albert Roux. I was nineteen years old, and on my first day off I took a bus across the river and up to Hyde Park Corner, then crossed Park Lane, walked through the little streets of Mayfair and into Curzon Street. I had gazed at the Mirabelle for a few minutes. There she was, the grand old dame, once the equivalent in London society of Maxim’s in Paris. I walked through the doorway and down the stairs and politely said to someone at reception, “I collect menus. Do you have an old menu I could keep?”

At home that night I studied the menu, which contained classical French dishes like Omelette Arnold Bennett, Quenelles of Pike, and Cutlets of Lamb Prince William, which is made with truffles. The menu would have been the same for years, influenced by Escoffier and that invaluable cookbook that can be found in every professional kitchen,
Le Répertoire de La Cuisine
. Mirabelle, which opened in 1936, represented romance. Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Onassis (she always sat at table one) and Maria Callas all loved the place and Princess Margaret and Grace Kelly would dine there, as would Liz Taylor. Maurice Chevalier had been a regular. Lord Lucan held his engagement party in a private room at the Mirabelle. Just think of the people who had walked through those doors, the things that had been said, the deals that had been done at those tables.

On that Saturday night in 1996 I walked in just to have a look at the restaurant that had once been so full of romance, mystique and life. It was dead. The menu was—get your head around this—a mixture of French and Japanese food, and the lack of customers told me it was only a question of time before the Mirabelle would be up for sale. I introduced myself to the restaurant manager Takanori Ishii and we had a two-hour chat. The Mirabelle was owned by a Japanese company, and Mr. Ishii was good enough to confirm my suspicions that business was not great. Still, they weren’t interested in selling. Mr. Ishii was a charming, polite, soft-spoken man, and from then on I stalked him. I would find the time to pop into Mirabelle once or twice a week to let him know that if it ever came on the market, I would be interested in buying it. I felt it was only a matter of time before they’d want to sell.

In the meantime a restaurant in the same street caught my eye. Les Saveurs was owned by another Japanese company, although it served only French food and hadn’t been so bold as to throw a few Japanese dishes onto the menu. There was no movement on the Mirabelle front and I was determined to have a presence in Mayfair, so when I heard a rumor that Les Sav might be up for sale, I pounced.

Then, a tragically short two months after I bought Les Sav, the Mirabelle came on the market. But there was a problem: there were others who wanted to buy it, and they were richer than me. There were four contenders. There was Anton Mosimann, the renowned chef who was regarded as an establishment figure in British gastronomy. Then there was Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, owners of Le Caprice and the Ivy, who were financially backed by the awesomely successful City figure “Black Jack” Dellal. There was the Chez Gerard group. And there was me—the small fish in a big pond. So if I wanted Mirabelle, I would have to use my wits.

I had courted Mr. Ishii, spending long nights talking food and restaurants, so that could do me no harm. And I had also done the Les Sav deal, which had taught me a bit about the way the Japanese like to do business.

I started my strategy with my knowledge of serving Japanese customers. They are discreet people, not loud and raucous in restaurants. They come for the meal, and when they order coffee, you get the bill ready because you know they’re not going to spend any more. Once they order a coffee, that’s it—they rarely have two.

From this I deduced that they liked quiet deals, didn’t like things being on the open market, and if something fell through, they wouldn’t like it to be publicized. The way I saw it, two Japanese companies had opened restaurants in Curzon Street and neither restaurant was doing well, but the companies were too embarrassed to sell. Only when the first one made a move and sold Les Sav to me did the other company feel confident enough to sell Mirabelle. Up until now, pride had prevented them from selling.

Mr. Ishii, by now my dear friend, told me to make an offer of half a million pounds less than the highest bid, which had come from Black Jack and the Caprice and Ivy boys. I took his advice, but my offer included something I felt sure would appeal to Mr. Ishii and his bosses. I told him that if the restaurant was sold to me, I would continue to employ its staff and added, “If I step in and buy the Mirabelle, Mr. Ishii, you will have a job for life.”

It is an important aspect of Japanese culture that the boss looks after his employees—or rather, does all he can for the people who have worked for him. Essentially, my offer was something Black Jack’s money simply couldn’t buy. My intention of retaining Mirabelle’s Japanese employees suggested I was a man who was not only in touch with the owners’ code of conduct but also wholeheartedly supported it.

Mr. Ishii rang me and said, “I’m on your side.” Then he spoke to his bosses in Japan, telling them, “I think Marco should own it because he will look after everyone who has worked here. We will still have jobs.” And with that I was given the Japanese equivalent of the thumbs-up. I went to bed happily scheming up plans for my new restaurant in Mayfair.

The next morning I woke up horrified: I now owned two restaurants on the
same street
, competing with one another. I thought, fucking hell, this wasn’t supposed to happen, what am I going to do? I had put myself in a ludicrous position, but luckily for me, Rocco Forte also wanted to own a restaurant in Mayfair and he phoned and asked, “Can I buy Les Saveurs?” Certainly, sir.

I wanted to take Mirabelle back to what it originally had been. I wanted to reinstate the romance.

I knocked out walls and turned the Tapestry Room, cashier’s office and wine cellar into one room, which is now the Chinese Room. A space that had once seated ten people now sat forty. A cloakroom was put in, but when I saw it, I was alarmed because it took up part of the bar area, so the cloakroom was knocked down and the bar became massive. Pillars were put into the bar but they weren’t right—they didn’t fit in with the character of the restaurant—so they came down and were replaced. A wooden floor was laid, but a few days later I noticed it was buckling because it had been put down too tightly. The restaurant was about to open to the public, so it was too late to rip up the whole floor; instead, the builders had to come in after evening service, between two
A.M
. and eight
A.M
., and replace the wooden floorboards with tiles. It was a time-consuming, painstaking process, night after night, and took about three months to finish. In addition to all this I wanted the color of the ceiling to match the blue in a painting I’d hung on the wall. When the ceiling was painted, it didn’t match, so it was painted again. It still wasn’t right, so it was painted a third time— we finally got there.

The food was restored to its classical French foundations, but with a modern twist of refinement. The Parsley Truffled Soup contained bacon and chicken stock; there was Cappuccino of Mushrooms, Tarte of Endive with Sea Scallops, and Spring Lamb Provençale. The chefs included Charlie Rushton, Spencer Patrick, Lee Bunting and Curtis Stone, who today is something of a TV personality. I wanted it to win a Michelin star and it did.

The Mirabelle’s romance doesn’t rub on everybody, however. My manager came to see me one night, complaining that Marianne, the receptionist, was in floods of tears. A customer had walked into the restaurant, where he was meeting his wife and friends, and Marianne had asked him to wait for a minute before taking him through to the table. He didn’t have time to wait. “Fuck off,” he said to Marianne and stormed through to the table, his shocking treatment leaving her in tears.

I went up to the table where the man was sitting and they looked quite flattered that the boss was paying them a visit. I politely said, “Sir, do you have a problem?”

He looked up quizzically and replied, “No.”

“I find that very strange.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I have a receptionist in my office in tears because of the way you treated her.”

“What did I say?”

“You told her to fuck off, sir. You humiliated and upset her and she feels terribly insulted. Either pluck up the courage to go and apologize to her or leave. I’ll give you five minutes to make your decision.”

I was in the bar when the rude man came up to me. He was furious and said, “You just made me look like a cunt in front of my wife and friends.”

I said, “That’s because you are a cunt.”

He said, “We’re leaving.”

But before he could get his coat, I said, “You must be a cunt, because anyone with any decency would go and apologize. So fuck off.”

Those last two words were important. I had treated him exactly the same way he had treated Marianne. All he had to do was say, “You’re absolutely right, I’ll go and say sorry.” If a man comes into one of my restaurants and swears at the receptionist, he is clearly in the wrong restaurant.

What of Mr. Ishii? He left Mirabelle, but returned to work for me a couple of years later. He is my chauffeur and assistant. Sometimes his driving is as good as Jean-Christophe Novelli’s. Once he fell asleep at the wheel; another time, after we’d nearly killed a pedestrian, I asked in astonishment, “Mr. Ishii how close were we to killing that woman?” and he replied, “About six inches.”

He knows I like to wind him up. I’ve used his mobile phone to photograph my genitals before and applied the picture as the phone’s “wallpaper.” One day we were driving out of a hotel car park and there was this big trailer with two big blokes in boiler suits. I spotted an opportunity to amuse myself. I said, “Stop the car, Mr. Ishii.” He stopped and I said to him, “Can you ask those two blokes if they’re wearing suspenders?”

He wound down the window and said, “Excuse me, are you wearing suspender?”

One of the bruisers looked perplexed. “Sorry, mate?”

Mr. Ishii asked again. “Are you wearing suspender?”

“No, we’re not.”

“Thank you very much.” Window up and off we drove.

I have a laugh at his expense, but Mr. Ishii is very dear to me. We work really well together because while I am spontaneous and cavalier, he is straightforward, extremely polite and well-balanced. When my life is veering all over the place, Mr. Ishii, with his self-control, is there to offer stability. He is the yin to my yang. Throughout our ten-year friendship we have never had a single row, and I have given him plenty of cause to pick a fight with me. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I heard him raise his voice. Mr. Ishii is the perfect gentleman.

Sometimes after we’ve had a particularly long day, I’ll apologize and he’ll always reply, “Not at all, Marco. It’s been a pleasure.”

He is the best ambassador that I have because his unswerving loyalty suggests I must have a few good things going for me.

If there was another one out there like him, I’d hire him tomorrow. But there is only one Mr. Ishii.

People ask, why do you still call him Mr. Ishii rather than Takanori? I respect him very much, that’s why.

There’s another thing. I have to pay him credit for helping to launch my career as a restaurateur. Without his support I would never have got the Mirabelle, and since then I have opened a further thirty restaurants.

G
ORDON RAMSAY, MY
protégé from Harveys, was ready to become a chef patron and in the nineties I helped him launch Aubergine, in Chelsea. I even came up with the restaurant’s name. In the restaurant’s first few months, his kitchen wasn’t right, so my chefs at the Canteen cooked a lot of the food for Aubergine and his boys came over to collect it.

I visited Gordon one day at Aubergine to show him a copy of the
Egon Ronay Guide
, which had awarded him one star. We were standing on the pavement outside—Gordon, his then-girlfriend Ros, Mati and me—when I saw a meaty, nasty-looking skinhead walking in our direction. “Look at that,” I said to Gordon.