The Devil in the Kitchen (7 page)

Aside from serving classical French cuisine, the Box Tree also had the feel of a good restaurant that you might stumble across in a village in France. It was warm and cozy and kitted out with beautiful antiques and great paintings. The windows were stained glass and there was stained glass throughout the restaurant, so that everyone became a shimmering silhouette, a shape behind colored glass. Along with an extensive list of French wines, the restaurant had those classic qualities then associated with the French: style, finesse and attention to detail. The menu was written in French with English thrown in, or, if you like, English with French thrown in. So there was Roast Partridge, Pommes Garnished. When I later went on to own restaurants, I’d write my menus in the same English-French way.

By 1976 the Box Tree had won its first Michelin star. In 1977, a couple of years before I arrived, it was awarded its second. The only two-star restaurants in England at the time were the Connaught in London, Albert Roux’s Le Gavroche in London, his brother Michel Roux’s Waterside Inn in Bray—all with powerhouse kitchens—and little old Box Tree in the middle of nowhere with just eight kitchen staff.

I began on hors d’oeuvres, though my other duties included watering the flowers at the front of the restaurant, polishing the brass and washing the Boys’ black Cadillac. Every morning when I arrived for work, my first job was to make the traditional Box Tree kick-starter for the kitchen staff: I’d put four pints of milk into a stainless steel pan, scald it and then whisk in a few tablespoons of Nescafé and a few tablespoons of sugar. In the microwave I’d heat up all the bread buns from the night before, which we’d eat with the coffee. Michael Lawson would ladle the coffee into a mug and then add another kick by throwing in a dash of calvados. He wouldn’t touch another drop of alcohol all day until the end of service, at about midnight, when he’d allow himself a large whiskey on the rocks.

One of my chores was to take the vegetables round to an old Polish man who lived nearby and was paid a few quid to shell the peas and peel the sprouts. Another of my jobs was to clean the copper pans and dishes using a solution of egg white, flour, salt and malt vinegar; a cut lemon was used like a scouring pad to apply the paste, and once it had dried, it was washed off and the pan was buffed up to make it gleaming. Everyone at the Box Tree had to be multitasked. You didn’t just go in and do your job; you did whatever you had to do.

Ken Lamb, for instance, was the baker during the day. He’d make the bread, puff pastry and the petits fours. Come evening, Ken would put on his dickie bow tie and—presto!—he was now the head waiter.

From the outset I was enchanted by the extraordinary system that operated within the restaurant. It had only fifty covers (or seats), but there were two sittings, one at seven thirty
P.M
. and one at nine thirty
P.M
., so we did a hundred covers but only needed a staff large enough to serve fifty. One coffee waitress could look after all of them.

Then there was the price of the meal. A three-course dinner might have been twenty quid, making it possibly England’s most expensive restaurant in the late seventies. It was packed, too. Crammed with rich Yorkshire mill owners, the guys who had made money out of textiles in the fifties and sixties. In the evenings I would hear the cars pulling up outside, the car doors slamming. And not just any old cars— Bentleys lined the streets outside. As I beavered away, I would always try to keep an eye on the swing doors that led from the kitchen to the restaurant. When they swung open, I’d get a glimpse of the happy customers, impeccably dressed and looking rich, glamorous and sophisticated. The sounds of the kitchen would be momentarily muffled by laughter from the dining room, the sound of people really enjoying themselves. From the brightly lit kitchen I could see the candlelight in the restaurant.

Michael had his sous chef, Steve, and there were two Frenchmen, Michel on Meat and Pascale on Hors D’Oeuvres. There were bollockings, sure, but not with the ferocity of those I’d received at the George. In fact, one of my memories is of Steve getting a monstering after he burned me with an egg slice, something the size of a toast grill. He had put the implement onto the gas, and then when it was very hot, he put it onto my arm. I screamed in agony and Steve looked astonished—I don’t think he realized how hot it would be and I am sure it was never his intention to burn me. He was just mucking around but he got a severe bollocking.

Aside from that though, the Box Tree generally had a friendly environment and Michael Lawson was a gifted mentor. I watched as he prepared, for instance, his game pie. He got a big breast of new-season grouse, a piece of fillet steak, put them into a pie dish, topped it with short-crust pastry and cooked it so the meat was pink. This was not the stuff of
Répertoire
.

Along the way there were also philosophies to be picked up. Words of wisdom that would stay with me forever. I remember Malcolm striking up a conversation by saying, “You know what I think?”

“No, Mr. Reid,” I replied. “What do you think?”

“It doesn’t matter what you spend as long as you get the desired effect.”

That’s inspiring. It’s the sort of thing that made me realize the Box Tree bunch were passionate. Money—what the hell? If we’re going to do this, let’s do it properly. And he wasn’t just referring to the dishes when he talked about the desired effect. Malcolm and Colin would spend, spend, spend in their quest to create the desired effect in the dining room. Malcolm might nip out to buy a newspaper and return with a £500 painting. As a lad from Lingfield Mount, I had never seen such extravagance, but this sort of spending taught me that creating a good restaurant requires thinking just as much about what goes on the wall as about what goes on the plate.

They never took inventory and they never did percentages, which would really alarm today’s chefs, who have a knife in one hand and a calculator in the other. Malcolm and Colin would just say, “Three courses with English turbot. That’ll be twenty quid.” Costs were never taken into consideration.

I worked on Hors D’Oeuvres and then was put onto Veg for about three months. Then Michael got me to help doing meat and fish main courses, so that Michael and his number two, Steve, were the front line and I was the backup. I already had the speed, thanks to my spell at the George.

It was while I was at the Box Tree that I discovered a truly inspirational book,
Ma Gastronomie
, written by the great French chef Fernand Point. It was not so much the recipes but the stories about the man and his philosophy that “perfection is lots of little things done well.” His words did more than simply stick in my mind; they became my philosophy.

Perfection was an important rule of the Box Tree kitchen. At the George food had been mass-produced, a bit rushed, but here I learned that you had to take your time to get everything just right. I realized that I had to stay focused on precisely what I was doing at that moment. Whatever we did, we had to do beautifully. When we made coq au vin, the chicken was marinated the day before cooking; red burgundy, the traditional wine for this dish, was replaced with claret, which is more full-bodied and therefore adds more depth to the final taste; button mushrooms, again a traditional garnish for coq au vin, were swapped for the flavorsome girolles. If an armagnac was used for the lobster sauce, or white wine used for a fish sauce, it was the best armagnac or the best white wine.

If I was cooking green beans, I’d do them in small amounts in separate pans.

After I’d worked on Meats and Fish, Michael put me in charge of Pastry and I was given a week to learn the craft. A lot of the best chefs have done Pastry, Michel Roux of the Waterside Inn among them. Why is Pastry so important? Because it is all about science, and the knowledge of culinary science is vital. A precise measurement of that ingredient mixed with a certain amount of that ingredient produces this result. It’s chemistry.

I beavered away, practicing dishes like Sorbet Poire Genet, a delicious ball of pear sorbet decorated with a little slice of fanned poached pear, a mint leaf and a drizzle of pear liqueur. It was served in a pearshaped glass bowl, the top of which was removed by the customer to reveal the sorbet inside. The pink grapefruit sorbet was another beauty. If you make pink grapefruit sorbet, it will turn white, so we added a touch of grenadine to give it that pink tinge. The Box Tree menu would change every day and I would build the pudding menu out of about thirty dishes.

If I wanted to introduce something, it would have to be tasted by the Boys when they had their dinner at six thirty in the snug. Now that I had my own section, I really began to excel. I could express myself and create dishes. I took a tuile biscuit and added rose ice cream and glazed strawberries in their own coulis, put a sugar cage over the top of it and decorated it with crystallized primroses—very camp, very Box Tree. “Excellent,” said Messrs. Reid and Long. “We’ll call it Timbale de Fraises Pompadour.” It became a specialty of the Box Tree, and years after my departure it was still on the menu.

I now knew that the kitchen was the best place in the world. At the George I had discovered that cooking enabled me to express myself, and at Box Tree I was acknowledged. There was “well done” and “that’s good.” For the first time in my life I was being recognized. One night Ken Lamb, the head waiter, confided in me that he had heard the Boys discussing me. Mr. Reid had said to Mr. Long, “Marco’s the best pastry chef Box Tree’s ever had.” That sort of comment was a welcome confidence booster for an eighteen-year-old chef.

M
ICHAEL LAWSON, A
lanky man with a kind face, took me under his wing. Like me, he was another damaged soul. As a young man he had arrived at the Box Tree and worked his way up to become head chef. Somewhere in the distant past he’d met a girl and asked her to marry him. She accepted his proposal and the wedding was organized, but shortly before the big day she was killed in a car accident, so the rumor went, when she was on her way to collect her wedding dress. Michael, poor man, had never recovered from the loss or found another woman. He had never wanted to. Instead, all his love and emotion had gone into the Box Tree. On our days off he would take me for a drink at the pub and I would sit there listening to him talk about food, the menus he had devised and Box Tree kitchen stories. Michael was understated; if you’d have walked into the kitchen, you wouldn’t have known that he was the head chef because he didn’t have a great presence, but boy was he a great chef.

It was while at the Box Tree that my romantic life, up until now barren and bleak, perked up. On Sundays I would work at a nearby pub, the Cow and Calf, where I met a part-time waitress called Fiona. She was a year or two younger than me and I was thrilled when she accepted my invitation to take her out for dinner. I took us by taxi from Ilkley to Harrogate, where we had dinner at a very posh restaurant, Olivers, before getting another cab back. I lost my virginity to Fiona in bed at Mr. and Mrs. Fox’s house, where I lodged during my time at the Box Tree. I was eighteen years old. For a few months, maybe six, we existed on a relationship called sex.

Sadly, Fiona left me for the restaurant manager at the Cow and Calf and they went on to have children together. Being ditched did nothing for my confidence, but I convinced myself that Fiona was simply turned on by power. Why else would she have deserted me for him?

In reality, relationships were a distraction and I would come to realize that much of the time I could only manage brief flings. My girlfriends, meanwhile, would be fitted in around my days and nights in the kitchen. This may seem terribly disrespectful, but I got more turned on by food. If I met a girl, I’d go round to her house when her parents weren’t in, we’d have a quick shag and that was it. Bonds were broken long before the word “love” could be mentioned.

I remember meeting one young girl at a club and taking her home. As we stood by her gate, I was just moving in to kiss her when we were lit up by the headlights of an oncoming car. It was the Boys in their black Cadillac. The car stopped and Colin jumped out. “In, Marco,” he ordered me. As I sat in the backseat being driven home by my bosses, Colin explained, “We had to get you away from that girl. You don’t know what you might have caught.”

From time to time, I would bump into Mr. Butler, my former teacher at Allerton High, who happened to live in Ilkley. We’d stop and chat and he’d ask how things were going and he always seemed pleased that I had found a job that made me passionate. Many of my contemporaries from school had drifted from one job to another, or were “on the dole”—living off state handouts.

My Box Tree days drew to a close not long after Steve, Michael Lawson’s sous chef, handed in his notice and Malcolm and Colin asked if I knew of anyone who could replace him. I was too inexperienced for the job, they had quite rightly thought. The only person I could suggest was Michael Truelove, the chef who first taught me how to use a knife when I worked in the kitchen at the Hotel St. George. He had been good to me, at times protecting me from the bullying of head chef Stephan, and I liked him. “Michael is a very good cook,” I told Malcolm and Colin. “About five years older than me and a hard worker.”