The Devil in the Kitchen (8 page)

Michael was offered the job and he accepted. When he arrived, we were the two pranksters from the George reunited. One day, the French chef Pascale, who was in charge of Hors D’Ouevres, went into the walk-in fridge to fetch ingredients. Michael and I closed the door and locked him in there for half an hour. When we opened the door, Pascale was sitting on an upturned crate and rolling a cigarette. He said nothing. In fact, he said nothing for an entire week. He just sulked. The French don’t get angry; they sulk.

Michael Truelove’s arrival would ultimately lead to my departure. Once he’d settled in, he encouraged me to look for another job. “You don’t want to stay in the sticks, Marco,” he’d say. “You want to spread your wings.”

Ridiculously immature, I decided to hand in my notice without having a job to go to. I thought I’d be asked to work a six-week notice period and during that time I’d find another job. Michael Lawson turned pale when I told him I was off. “I’m not telling the bosses,” he said. The prospect of relaying bad news frightened him. “You’ll have to tell them yourself, Marco.”

I mustered up the courage and broke the news to the Boys.

“Let’s talk about this in the Chinese Room,” said Malcolm, and we went upstairs, where the three of us sat at a table. They offered to increase my salary, which then was about £30 a week.

“It’s not about the money,” I said. “I’ve made up my mind and you can’t persuade me to stay.”

It was wrong of me to assume they’d want me to work out my notice, staying on for a month or even six weeks. They were so badly hurt by my announcement that they came back with a blow that broke my heart.

“Go now,” said Malcolm.

“There’s no point in staying,” added Colin. “It’s best if you get your things together and leave now.”

I was numbed by what I saw as brutality. What’s more, they wouldn’t give me a reference. Looking back, I can understand their reaction. Today I don’t blame them. I had rejected them, so they were rejecting me. But to have happiness snatched from me in a matter of seconds seemed cruel. Malcolm and Colin had been like my adopted family.

I had never imagined that I would leave on bad terms. If only I had been able to work my notice and leave on a high . . . I was traumatized. I had arrived at the Box Tree happy and excited, but eighteen months later I left via the same door, feeling destroyed. Love affairs often end in heartache, don’t they? Yet the Box Tree would remain in my memory as the most special restaurant I have ever walked into, let alone worked in.

About twelve years later I was at the stove at Harveys, my restaurant in southwest London, by then the winner of two Michelin stars, when the kitchen phone rang. “Hello, Marco. It’s Michael . . . Michael Lawson.” It was lovely to hear his voice and I told him so. He said, “Would you mind if I came to dinner?” I told him to come whenever he wanted, at which point he revealed that he was phoning from the public phone box outside the restaurant. Poor Michael had felt nervous about walking into the restaurant. Stage fright or something like that. I ran through the restaurant and greeted my mentor at the door. I sat him at table nine and gave him a grand meal with wine. When service had slowed down, I went out to have a chat with him. “The meal you fed me tonight,” said Michael, “was better than anything we ever did at the Box Tree.” It was a compliment that went some way toward repairing what were then my tarnished memories of that wonderful little restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

SEVEN

It Was Meant to Be

I
T WAS THE
summer of 1981 and I was a nineteen-year-old in a rut, back in Leeds. After my abrupt departure from the Box Tree, I’d been drifting. I took a chef ’s job at Froggie’s, the restaurant of a Leeds casino called the Continental, where the head chef, Jacques Castell, served good old-fashioned food.

I was a lodger in Moor Allerton, in a house owned by a Spanish woman called Esperanza. This put me in the peculiar and uncomfortable position of living just around the corner from Dad and the house where I had grown up. As Dad and I hadn’t spoken for a few years, and I could not bring myself to resume relations, I found myself having to hide from him.

Sometimes I would spot him walking down the road and would have to turn away so he didn’t catch sight of me, or scurry away in the opposite direction. I don’t think he ever saw me—I don’t remember cries of “Hey, Marco, what the hell are you doing here?” He had no idea that we were living within a few hundred yards of one another. I feel very sad about it now. It was a ridiculous situation.

I had to escape Leeds. I had escaped once, albeit only the short distance to Harrogate and then Ilkley, and had gone back to Leeds because I knew it, but once I was there, I saw the city in a different light. I didn’t like it any longer. As a child I’d often felt I didn’t fit in there; now I fitted in even less. I had caught a glimpse of life outside the city.

I applied for two jobs. The job I really wanted was at Le Gavroche, the two-star Michelin restaurant in the heart of London. Box Tree staff had talked romantically about this fine establishment in the capital. Albert Roux, Gavroche’s chef patron, was hailed as an excellent cook. The press, the critics and customers loved his classical French food. It is fair to say that Albert Roux and his brother Michel—who ran the Michelin-starred Waterside Inn—were the most talked about chefs at the time. Or they were in Yorkshire, at least.

So I set my sights on Gavroche and phoned to ask for an application form. Around about the same time, however, I heard of a pastry chef vacancy at Chewton Glen, a country house hotel that sits on the edge of the New Forest in New Milton, Hampshire (today it is considered one of England’s finest small hotels).

When a letter arrived from Le Gavroche, I opened it excitedly, knowing it would be the application form. But when I pulled out the form, my heart sank. Every single question was written in French and I imagined that the responses were expected to be in the same language. I thought it was the Roux way of saying that they would take chefs of any nationality, as long as they were French. I didn’t speak a word of French, so I concluded, alas, that I would have to rule out Le Gavroche. I chucked the application form into the bin. I pinned my hopes on Chewton Glen and was delighted when the head chef, Christian Delteuil, invited me to the South Coast for a job interview.

On Thursday, June 18, 1981, I took the coach from Leeds to Victoria coach station in London, traveled across the capital to Waterloo station and from there caught the train to New Milton. There was nothing particularly memorable about the interview. I liked the head pastry chef, a nice old boy, but I don’t recall having a great deal of respect for Delteuil and, having worked for Michael Lawson at the Box Tree, I knew respect for the boss was a necessity. Delteuil’s parting words were, “Give me a call next week and I’ll let you know if you’ve got the job.”

I would have called him, of course, but the extraordinary events of the next twenty-four hours ensured I never needed to pick up the phone. It therefore remains a mystery to me whether or not I landed the pastry chef job.

Beginning my journey home from Chewton Glen to Leeds, I arrived at New Milton station and discovered, annoyingly, that I had missed my train. When I finally got to Waterloo, I asked a man who I thought was a British Rail ticket collector how I could get to Victoria. “I’m not from British Rail. I’m with Royal Mail,” he replied, but he happened to be going to Victoria, so he offered me a lift in the back of his van, and I made the journey perched on sacks of post.

At Victoria coach station I was told, “You’ve missed it, mate . . . The next coach back to Leeds isn’t until the morning.” A bed-and-breakfast was not a consideration: first, I was a nineteen-year-old lad and nineteen-year-old lads don’t do B&B when they’ve missed the coach; second, I was broke. So I took a stroll. This was my first time in the capital and I was going to make the most of it.

I didn’t know where I was heading, but I ended up wandering along a brightly lit street and then I stopped dead in my tracks.

There I was, quite by chance, standing outside Le Gavroche in Lower Sloane Street. I stood on the pavement, mesmerized. The lights were still on in this exquisite restaurant, a two-star heaven, and I pressed my nose up against the window. Inside there were a few customers, happy and well fed, finishing off their meals with midnight cups of coffee. It seemed elegant, stylish and grand, with the warm golden glow of dim lights and candlelight.

I couldn’t stand there all night, though, I’d have been arrested, so I headed back to the coach station, where I met a German lad who was about my age and equally forlorn, and together we embarked on a sightseeing tour, walking to Buckingham Palace and Parliament Square. We went to Trafalgar Square to look at Nelson’s Column, before my companion, who had more cash than me, bought me a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich.

When morning came and the Leeds-bound coach pulled out of Victoria, I was not on board.

Instead I returned to Le Gavroche, knocked on the back door and asked to see the head chef. A pastry chef called Baloo (as in the
Jungle
Book
) told me the restaurant was closed for lunch and that no one else was around. I was about to walk away, perhaps back to Victoria, when he added, “You could always go to Roux brothers’ head office. It’s not far.” I walked down Lower Sloane Street, crossed the Thames at Chelsea Bridge, went straight up the Queenstown Road and took a left onto Wandsworth Road, and there, a few hundred yards along, was Roux HQ.

God knows what I looked like when I walked through the door. Actually, I know what I looked like: I looked like shit. It was about ten in the morning and I hadn’t slept for more than twenty-four hours. Albert, a dapper little Frenchman in his midforties, was sitting there and I instantly recognized him from newspaper pictures. He was kind enough to make no comment about my shabby appearance.

“Mr. Roux. I’m hoping to get a job in one of your restaurants.”

He said, “Where have you worked?”

I showed him my references and mentioned that I had worked at the Box Tree. “You were at the Box Tree, were you? How long were you there?”

“About eighteen months, Mr. Roux.”

The magic name Box Tree worked well. “Go back to Leeds,” he said, before adding, “get your belongings and then come back down on Monday. Report here on Tuesday.” And that was that.

I
OBEYED ALBERT’S
orders, and the following Monday, when I returned to London, the company found me a little bedsit in Clapham, just around the corner from Roux HQ. On Tuesday, June 23, 1981, I became a “Roux robot”—what rivals in the industry called the mechanical chefs who worked for brothers Albert and Michel.

I did not start off in the kitchen at Le Gavroche but at Le Gamin, the Roux-owned City restaurant beside the Old Bailey. I did a couple of weeks there, under head chef Dennis Lobrey, who cooked good, proper food. What I saw for the first time in my life was a high standard of food served in a couple of hours to 130 people. The only desserts made on-site were ice creams and sorbets; the other pastries—things like Charlotte aux Poires and Truffes au Chocolat—came from the Roux head office. It was a smoothly run operation.

Shortly after I joined there was a bit of upheaval in the expanding Roux empire. Gavroche moved to Upper Brook Street, where it remains to this day, and its Lower Sloane Street site became Gavvers, which served watered-down versions of Gavroche’s classical dishes. At Gavvers we’d make things like Sablé à Pêche, which was a Gavroche specialty, but rather than having two layers, you’d have one layer because it was cheaper.

Dennis’s second chef, Alban, was my head chef at Gavvers, and in the autumn of 1981 I ended up at Gavroche. I made friends with Mark Bougère, who, as the chef tourner of the company, would go from one Roux restaurant to another, standing in for chefs who were ill. He was, in effect, Albert’s right-hand man and would come to Gavvers to check on things. Mark was a very fine chef, an elegant cook with a great touch, and he took a real liking to me and taught me a lot.

He taught me, for instance, how to make great sorbets with a concentrated flavor and wonderful sauces. He also encouraged me to question what I was cooking. He was one of the most knowledgeable chefs I’ve ever come across and I still have an image of him making a mousseline of fish beautifully. It was clear to me why he was the most trusted of Albert’s staff.

I am indebted to Baloo, the Gavroche pastry chef, and not just because he was the man who directed me to Roux HQ, but also because he offered me a place to stay in his flat in Queenstown Road, enabling me to move out of the bedsit. One night I was walking home when I spotted Baloo talking to someone outside our flat. It was Nico Ladenis, the Michelin-starred chef who owned Chez Nico in Queenstown Road.

Nico asked if I would like to do a bit of work for him. At this stage Gavroche did not open for lunch, so I had that part of the day available. I took the job. I would work in the mornings from Tuesday to Saturday for Nico in his tiny kitchen, picking up £50 a week on top of the £67 I was paid by Albert.

At Nico’s I’d prepare the meat and fish while the sous chef did the starters and puddings like Prune Armagnac Parfait, Caramel Parfait and sorbets. The sous chef was camp, very precious and had a good sense of humor. He would take a bollocking from Nico and then duck down under the counter so his boss couldn’t see and pretend to suck him off.

Nico, meanwhile, had established a reputation for being a perfectionist. He did not like customers to ask for well-done meat and he wouldn’t allow salt and pepper on the table. He thought his palate was perfect, which I don’t think is right—you have to accept that everyone’s palate is different. Nico’s may well have been perfect, but someone else might like a little more salt, it’s as simple as that.

One morning I was in the kitchen and an electrician walked into the restaurant asking to speak to Chas. We all stood there, scratching our heads. “Chas? There’s no one here called Chas.” The electrician was insistent. “Chas Nico,” he said.