The Devil in the Kitchen (6 page)

Dad’s tip proved to be a winner, and after that news of my connections rapidly spread through the hotel. Within days my popularity had soared. Chefs and waiters, barmen and chambermaids would track me down to say sweetly, “Hello, Marco. Spoken to your dad?” If I nodded, they’d put a pound or two in my hand and ask me to back the horse for them. “Off you go,” Stephan would say, pointing toward the door, and I would sprint to the bookie’s in my chef’s whites to place the bets. I wonder now whether I spent more time in the bookie’s than in the kitchen.

Through this I devised an ingenious way of getting the brigade back for bullying me. I used to announce to them, “My dad’s calling with a tip tomorrow,” and they would rush toward me, handing over their cash. Then I’d go to the betting shop and put all their money on a horse of my choice. If it won, I took the profit and then gave them their money back, saying, “There was no tip from Dad.” If the horse lost, I’d give them their betting slips to show I’d put the money on. It meant that on a good week I was earning more than Stephan. I felt like an entrepreneur.

The George also taught me that chefs and waiters hate each other. There’s a variety of reasons but usually it boils down to nationality. At the George, the chefs were British while most waiters were French or Italian. The George’s restaurants must have had a charming ambience, but in the kitchen there were battles between the front-of-house regiment and the back-of-house brigade. Usually it was just bickering, but I remember a scuffle between drill sergeant Stephan and Giovanni, the restaurant manager.

Giovanni was in the kitchen when Stephan taunted him and it could have gotten quite nasty, but Giovanni was carrying two buckets of ice, which he dropped on the floor. As the two men attempted to hit one another, the ice beneath them formed a mini ice rink and in the end they fell to the ground, arms wrapped around each other Laurel and Hardy–style.

Despite all this I liked Giovanni, and because of our Italian roots, we bonded. He was the staff playboy and drove a 1000cc Harley-Davidson. He was the coolest man in the hotel. In fact, he was the coolest man in Harrogate, and must have been the only one with a Harley. He had the best room in the hotel and would spend his days off lying in bed with his girlfriend, Joanna. Sometimes I’d chat with Giovanni and he would go all Marlon Brando on me, saying, “One day I will leave the hotel, Marco, and when I do, I will leave you two things: my room and my girlfriend.”

Eventually that day came. Giovanni climbed onto his Harley, like Gary Cooper mounting his horse, and rode off into the Yorkshire sunset. I did indeed end up with his luxurious room, which meant I could move out of home. However, Joanna was heartbroken at losing her lover and I didn’t have the courage to tell her Giovanni had promised her to me.

I was not good with the opposite sex. There was a posh university undergraduate whose name I forget and who had taken a holiday job as a chambermaid at the George. She seemed quite interested in me and I mustered up the courage to invite her to dinner in Harrogate. It was my first date and I took her to Vanni’s, an Italian restaurant in Parliament Drive, but the evening did not go well. As I was trying to make her laugh with a funny story, I waved an arm and accidentally knocked a glass of red wine onto her white blouse. A waiter sprang into action, trying to wipe away the wine with a napkin, and I sat there dying. She said, “Don’t worry,” and I paid the bill and we went back to my hotel room, the room where Giovanni had been so lucky in love. She removed her sodden blouse and I gazed at her black bra before she put on one of my white shirts. Then she removed her trousers, revealing black knickers, and lay on the bed.

Uncomfortably, I lay next to her and stroked her bristly thighs. Christ, her legs are hairier than mine, I thought. Who’s the man on this bed?

I wanted to explore, to experiment, but she said, “You’re too nice, Marco. You’re too young. I can’t do this to you.”

The kitchen porter—he had to wash up and keep the place clean— disliked me intensely. He was a big slob of a man, six foot four, with horrible greasy hair. When he walked past me in the kitchen, a reflex action compelled him to give me a sharp poke in the kidneys with his thumb. Probably I deserved the pokes but I had to get him back. I devised a plan.

“Chef, can I clean the walk-in fridge?” I asked.

Chef looked over at me. “Of course you can.”

The walk-in fridge was enormous. I removed hundreds of bowls and containers, one by one, and put the food into clean containers. It was a laborious job for me, but it meant that the porter was left with a mountain of bowls and containers to wash up and in those days everything was washed by hand. I turned this into a regular fridge-clearing exercise, which drove him mad. “It’s your turn for a beating,” he’d say, his hands like prunes, and then we’d go in circles around the stove as he tried to get me.

I made friends with another chef, Michael Truelove, and together we would think up ways to annoy the porter. I would phone the kitchen pretending to be Mr. Abel, the hotel’s owner, and Michael would answer the phone. He’d then tell the lackey, “Mr. Abel’s on the phone. He wants to speak to you.” When the porter came on the line, I would do my impression of the owner and say to him, “There are some boxes in my office for the chef. Can you come and get them, please?” Big and scruffy, the porter would waddle into Mr. Abel’s office saying, “I’ve come for the boxes,” and an irritated Mr. Abel would ask, “What on earth do you mean? What are you talking about, man?” Then the penny would drop and he’d return to the kitchen raging. “You’re in for a beating,” he’d say.

Michael and I were the kitchen’s practical jokers. One night he helped me climb into the chest freezer, and when Mary, a waitress, came into the kitchen and asked Michael where to put the unused table butter, he said, “In the freezer, love.” She opened the door, saw a chilled body inside, threw the butter into the air and bolted out of the kitchen. A few minutes later the hotel manager, Barry Sterling, came into the kitchen. “There’s a body in your freezer,” he told Stephan. Chef went through the freezer, chucking out the frozen vegetables while shaking his head and saying, “There’s no body in here.”

In the afternoons I used to go and see Bill and Ken, the hotel’s porters. I’d have a cup of tea with them and help polish the guests’ shoes. One day I walked into their room and, in order to sit on my favorite chair, had to remove a book that was on the seat. I glanced at it as I picked it up. It was the
Egon Ronay 1976 Guide to Restaurants and
Hotels
. I sat down and flicked through the pages and realized for the first time in my life that there were restaurants out there that were awarded stars.

I stopped on a page that mentioned a restaurant called the Box Tree. The guide said it was the best restaurant in Britain. I was fascinated by the photograph of the Box Tree, which looked like one of those three-hundred-year-old inns and had nice cars parked outside. Later I asked around in the kitchen to see if anyone had heard of it. They had, but said it was impossible to get a job there; Box Tree staff were apparently blissfully content and rarely left, so there was hardly any chance of vacancies arising.

At some point in 1979 I picked up the phone and called the Box Tree to see if there were any jobs going. Luck was on my side. Someone had just handed in their notice and I was invited for an interview with Malcolm Reid and Colin Long, highly regarded as a success story in the industry and who were also known for their campness. Their sexuality provided an opportunity for ridicule in the macho world of cooking, and when I told people I had been invited for an interview, they joked that I would be going for “a Long Reid in bed.”

I went shopping for an interview outfit and bought myself a smart jacket, a shirt and tie. The only shoes I could find to match the clothes were half a size too small but I got them anyway. I took the bus to Ilkley, arrived early and sat on a park bench at the top of Church Street. My feet were killing me, so I took off my new shoes to let the blood flow. When I tried to put the shoes back on, though, my feet had swollen. I managed to squeeze myself into them but only with extreme discomfort. I minced across the road to the Box Tree, walking like a man in women’s stilettos. I’m sure I got the job the minute they saw my mincing walk.

Messrs. Reid and Long kept me there for two and a half hours and showed me the food. The pain in my feet subsided as I gazed at a magnificent duck terrine. I was looking at perfection. When they offered me the job, I accepted immediately and hobbled back to the George to hand in my notice. I was about to discover my passion for cooking. My world was turning from black and white into color.

I
T WOULD HAVE
been the most natural thing in the world to call my father and tell him of my good luck, but by then, he wasn’t a part of my life. It was my silly fault, really. I had lost touch. During my first couple of months at the George I had lived at home. And after moving into the hotel, I had made weekly trips back to 22 Lingfield Mount to join him for Sunday lunch.

Then one day, shortly after I had moved into the George, he got married. Dad had met a woman called Hazel—he might have known her years, for all I know—and very quietly they tied the knot at a register office. I have to be honest, I couldn’t deal with it. Of course he was right to remarry—after all, my mother had died ten years earlier—and Hazel wasn’t a bad woman; she stayed with him until the end. And Christ, who am I to judge?

But back then, as a teenager, I was too immature to appreciate that the show must go on, the world keeps moving, and life continues. I don’t recall talking to Dad about the marriage, but one Sunday I didn’t go home for lunch with the old man and his new wife. The following Sunday I missed lunch again. Then perhaps after missing five or six lunches, that was it. A week turned into two weeks, which turned into eight weeks, which turned into years. Thirteen years would pass before I picked up the phone, called him and reestablished a relationship with the man who had raised me. I never dealt with it because I didn’t have the courage. I bottled it every time.

The bond was broken. He would write to me but I wouldn’t write back, and eventually, he didn’t know where I was, which kitchen I was working in, or where I was living. For years I had lived by his rules— he controlled me—but now I had discovered freedom.

SIX

Black and White into Color

S
TEPPING INTO THE
Box Tree was like stepping into a massive jewelry box. All the emotions that come with romance were fired up within me. I was seventeen years old and for the first time I felt acknowledged, an important part of a great team.

It was more than that, though. Messed-up teenager that I was, the staff and owners virtually adopted me. They became my new family, and for the next eighteen months of my life I was given responsibility, and with that came confidence—kitchen confidence. This is where I discovered my obsession with food and this is where I formed my food philosophies.

The Box Tree was the creation of the two men who had interviewed me, Malcolm Reid and Colin Long. We called them “the Boys,” though they were both in their forties. Malcolm—with his handsome, sharp, distinguished features and always well-groomed in a smart suit—was the serious one, seemingly pushing the business forward. Colin—blond, blue-eyed and usually wrapped up in a big woolly jumper—was the joker. Colin would see me whisking a hollandaise sauce and say something camp like, “Oh, that’s lovely wrist action you’ve got there. Fancy coming into the larder with me and earning yourself five woodbines?”

At some point in the fifties, the Boys had bought Box Tree House— originally an eighteenth-century farmhouse that had box trees in its front garden—and opened it as an antiques shop and tearoom. Tourists heading to and from the Yorkshire Dales would stop off for scones and jam. Trade was good, so Malcolm and Colin expanded the business by serving lunches. That worked, too, so they opened up for dinner. They were doing so well they decided to rethink the whole setup. In 1962 they did away with cream teas and with lunch and simply opened for dinner—and what a dinner it was.

The Boys were exceptionally clever. In fact, they were the greatest restaurateurs I have ever met. Every now and again they would head off to Paris on a Saturday night and return on the following Tuesday morning, having dined out every day from midday to midnight in the French capital. Their mission in France was to eat the finest food, cooked by the greatest chefs, and then replicate it for their customers back in little old Ilkley. Malcolm and Colin would return to the Box Tree, sit down with their head chef, Michael Lawson, and recount the dishes they had eaten.

With meticulous detail, they would go through each dish, describing the presentation, the flavors, the tastes: a particular coconut ice cream; a fricassée of lobster with finely diced vegetables and a Noilly Prat sauce. Michael would listen intently, nodding along as he absorbed the information. He’d re-create the dish in his mind. “And that evening we went to Bon Auberge, where Malcolm had this, and on Friday we had dinner at La Sel, where Colin had that . . .”

Then it was Michael’s job to copy each mouthwatering dish for the Box Tree menu. Sometimes he’d be able to reproduce it within a day or two. Other times it might take him a couple of weeks and many attempts to perfect the recipe. Malcolm and Colin would come into the kitchen to taste and see if he was close to success. Finally it would be, “That’s it, Michael. You’ve got it.” And onto the menu it went, alongside Michael’s own clever dishes.

No one in Yorkshire had ever seen food like this. They didn’t know such food existed. The most sophisticated food they ate at home would be a roast lunch or maybe toad in the hole, that hearty dish of pork sausages cooked in Yorkshire pudding and covered in onion gravy. If they went out for dinner, they might get lobster thermidor, beef Wellington, duck à l’orange, and peach Melba. Chefs didn’t feel they could stray or experiment. What’s more, there weren’t the beautifully illustrated cookery books we have today, or the food magazines and cookery programs on telly. The world back then was a much smaller place.