The Devil in the Kitchen (9 page)

I only did a short stint with Nico, but we became good friends and both won three Michelin stars on the same day, in January 1995. The last time I met him for lunch, Nico said, “What shall we talk about?” I replied, “What do you want to talk about?” And he responded, “Let’s talk about all the cunts in the industry.”

Meanwhile, thinking back to my early days with Albert Roux, I remember walking down Queenstown Road toward Chelsea Bridge and heading for work in a Roux kitchen when a Mini Metro pulled up beside me and a voice shouted, “Jump in.” It was Albert.

All talk in the Roux empire was about whether Albert would collect three stars in the
Michelin Guide
, which was due to be published in the following January of 1982, and as I was in the company of the man himself, I thought I would raise the subject. “Albert,” I said, “do you think you will get your three stars?”

Eyes firmly on the road and deadly serious, he said, “If I don’t get them, I will throw myself in the Thames.”

I went silent, pondering the words of a determined man. I had never heard a chef threaten to take his life if he didn’t achieve such status in a guide. Do actors say the same thing in the run-up to the Oscars? Do athletes feel the same way about Olympic medals? How apt, I thought, that he should mention throwing himself into the Thames when the river was just beneath us. When January came, Albert was spared a watery grave. The
Michelin Guide
awarded Le Gavroche three stars—Albert had reached the top.

I compared the setup of the finest restaurants to something akin to the Mafia. On this basis, I decided that Albert was definitely the Godfather, the boss of bosses. He would be played by Marlon Brando . . . in an apron. He was a father figure with a very dominant presence and could philosophize in that Godfather style. While you worked for him, you felt you had his protection. You knew you were with the don.

That left four others in this mafia of Michelin winners: Pierre “the Bear” Koffmann, head of the Koffmann family; Nico “Nic the Greek” Ladenis, head of the Ladenis family; Michel Bourdin, head of the Bourdin family; and Raymond Blanc, who, with all his craziness, could only be Al Mascarpone.

EIGHT

The Boss of Bosses

S
TRANGE THOUGH IT
may seem, there are many chefs who suffer a fear of the stove. You will find them in the world’s finest kitchens. They might be great cooks, with heads crammed full of culinary knowledge, but the minute they are thrown into a busy kitchen, they wobble, lose it and need bailing out. Until they conquer that fear, they are destined never to rise through the ranks and find a place in the kitchen hierarchy.

You need confidence to shrug off your insecurities, push your way past the other chefs and take control of the stove. Step into a powerhouse kitchen like Gavroche’s and you won’t hear “excuse me” or “would you mind.” Each man has his own dishes to create, his own job to do, and he has to have the required strength of character to barge his way past the others in order to cook.

When I finally made it into the three-Michelin-starred kitchen at Gavroche, Albert Roux was keen to let me know that I should never be frightened to push in with my pot or pan. One night at Gavroche, shortly after I had joined the brigade as an assistant on the Meat section, Albert called me into his office there—something akin to a large glass bowl—for a chat. He gave me a Benson & Hedges, which was his way of saying “at ease.” “Don’t be scared of the stove,” he said to me, and then waved a hand toward the kitchen. “You can cook as well as any of those people. You have nothing to worry about.” He had got me wrong: I wasn’t scared of the stove; what I didn’t want to do was get in the way of my superiors. But effectively his words were a confidence booster: he was saying I was showing the other chefs too much respect and in doing so I was suppressing my abilities.

Yet I understood precisely what Albert meant about fear of the stove. I had seen it before, just a couple of months earlier when I’d worked at Gavvers. There had been a chef there who was about my age and I remember him being extraordinarily precise in what he did, but in my view he was also a bit slow. He had been trained in one of those big kitchens in France, where there’s such a massive infrastructure that chefs have the luxury of being able to take their time.

When this young lad arrived at Gavvers, he was put on Meat and I was an assistant on Fish, which is a tough section because it doesn’t allow for error. We were doing more than a hundred covers a night, and to feed that number of people, you have to be really quick at the stove, but he found it hard to deal with. It doesn’t matter how much knowledge you have as a cook, you can’t run a section if you appear slow. So he moved from Gavvers and went to work at Le Gamin, where I think he helped Dennis Lobrey on the passe, shouting out the orders.

Perhaps I might never have seen that young man again were it not for the fact that he was Albert’s son, Michel Roux Jr. Michel would go on to run Le Gavroche, taking over from his father in the nineties, and he runs it very well.

Albert may not have wanted any of his team to suffer from a fear of the stove but the Gavroche brigade was driven by fear nonetheless. We were driven by a fear of failing, a fear of fucking up, a fear of upsetting the boss.

It was easy to gauge the terror—when chefs arrived at the restaurant, they raced to change into their whites. There was no time to stop and have a cup of coffee in a café while you contemplated the day ahead. Every morning I found myself hurrying into work, petrified by the thought of arriving late. Once when I committed the sin of turning up five minutes late, I dashed in to be greeted by Albert, scowling. Would I be marched to the wall and shot?

“There’s always an excuse for being an hour late,” he said. “But there’s no excuse for being five minutes late.” After that I would virtually run off the bus to work. Even though I was in early and worked through my breaks, conscientious soul that I was, that sort of diligence was never acknowledged in Gavroche.

The hierarchy there kept everyone in their place. Gavroche had a traditional kitchen hierarchy like that found in the finest restaurants in Paris. At the top was Albert, the chef patron, or chef proprietor. Beneath him was the head chef, René, who stood at the passe shouting out the orders and making sure the dishes were perfect before being sent to the table. The head chef is the composer. Under René was the sous chef, the head chef ’s right-hand man, or deputy. Then there were the chefs de partie, the ones heading up the different sections. Those sections were Meat—sometimes referred to as Sauce—Fish, Pastry (which included all desserts, rather than just ones with pastry) and Larder. Some kitchens have a section for Cold Starters and another for Hot Starters. Within each section the hierarchy continues: each chef de partie has a premier commis chef, or assistant, which is where I started at Gavroche. And the premier commis is in charge of a couple of commis chefs, also called assistants. Then there’s the kitchen porter, who does the washing up.

During service Albert was head chef, barking the orders from the passe and making sure everything came together. He was the sergeant major, seeing out the food, shouting, bollocking anyone in his path, and no one dared disobey him. When he was at the passe, nothing bad got past him. He saw everything that went out, and if he didn’t touch the dishes with his hands—rearranging the ingredients on the plate to perfect the picture—then he touched the dishes with his eyes, and that is really important.

Out of service, Albert was the chef patron—the general—who would sit in his office composing menus and dealing with paperwork and suppliers. Occasionally he would come into the kitchen to carry out inspections. He would open a fridge and peer inside, and if something wasn’t right—an overripe piece of fruit, perhaps, or a sauce that had spilled and not been cleaned up to his satisfaction—he would scream for the head chef, René, and the bollocking would kick off. “This is fucking filthy. What is going on?” René would always get it first from Albert, and the bollocking would then be passed down the hierarchy. René would bollock the chef de partie. The chef de partie would bollock the premier commis. The premier commis would bollock the commis. During these inspections it was rare for Albert to bollock the commis in the first place: hierarchy had to be respected.

Young chefs would do a year at Gavroche, just to have it on their CV, and then move on. From day one they would be mentally preparing their letter of resignation, but because of Albert’s awesome presence, staff were always scared to hand in their notice.

René initially took a dislike to me and gave me one bollocking after another. I think he dreamed of having a kitchen full of French and Italian cooks. He had the French and the Italians—his favorites—but I was just another Englishman who annoyed him. René would amuse himself by telling me to go and get something from the main fridges, which were at the front of the restaurant. I would sprint from the kitchen, run round the side of the building to the fridges at the front, collect the ingredient and then dash back. I’d have a second or two to gather my breath and then René would shout, “Cream from the fridge,” and whoosh, off I’d go again. Run forward, run back, run forward, run back. That was my existence in the early days at Gavroche. René, or maybe Albert, gave me the nickname “Horse,” because even before service I had run the equivalent of Aintree.

René’s sous chef, Danny Crow, was half Italian, and when he discovered that I also had Italian blood, he became my friend and helped René see me in a different light.

There were fifteen or sixteen of us in the Gavroche kitchen and there was no chitchat. If anyone spoke, it was only to talk about the menu or the food. Overall, there were hours of silence, punctuated by orders from René and barks of “Yes, Chef.” We all beavered away, sticking to each recipe—be it Poulet de Bresse en Vessie or Canette de Peche or Omelette Rothschild—and being precise and methodical. I could certainly see why the troops commanded by Albert and Michel were known, outside the organization, as the Roux robots. Later on, when I went on to run my own kitchens, I too would insist on silence. At Gavroche I discovered that there is something beautiful about the sounds—chopping, clattering, sizzling—of a working kitchen.

The chef de partie on the Meat section was a Belgian called Claude. He was the Roux robot prototype: organized, consistent and perfect for Gavroche, Claude did not play around with the recipes that came from Albert’s office; he stuck to the original and never veered. Another lad, Stephen Yare, was about my age and, like me, was an assistant, and a few years later we would work together under Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. There were also a couple of Japanese guys who were also good, mechanical Roux robots.

We were doing big numbers—eighty covers—in a fast and hard, aggressive service, so it was essential that we all had three attributes: knowledge, touch and organization. I thrived on the pressure and stress of the workload. If I wasn’t already an adrenaline addict, I was fast turning into one. I found gears within myself that enabled me to step up a level as the kitchen pressure increased. You cannot let the pressure get to you, though very few chefs can do big volumes and maintain a consistently high standard.

There was one guy who really stood out, and not only because of his distinctive white clogs. Roland Lahore had knowledge, speed and a sensational flair. Roland moved quickly, worked quickly and cooked elegantly. I can still see him now, doing a scallop of salmon, cooking the fish beautifully and adding a handful of sorrel to the sauce. Roland would make terrines that, when sliced, were like glorious mosaics on the plate: he had visualized the finished terrine before assembling the ingredients. I watched him finish off a sauce by throwing in a segment of pink grapefruit and breaking it up with a whisk so the fruit infused the sauce with a perfect balance of acidity (always finish a fish sauce with citrus or vinegar).

But Roland was a soloist, a Maradona. He was playing his own game and his wild streak must have rubbed off on me. If you’re working in a big kitchen team, you have to be synchronized. Imagine you have two chefs, one is on Meat and the other is on Fish, and they are each cooking two dishes for the same table. If the chefs are good, they will work together, so the four dishes make it to the passe at the same time. One of the chefs will shout out, “Ready in three minutes,” and the other chef will work to that.

But Roland lived in his own world, and inevitably that meant he wasn’t synchronized. He was in charge of the Fish section but he might be behind or ahead of the man on Meat. So if a table of six ordered three meat and three fish dishes—the fish would be on the passe but the meat wouldn’t be ready, or vice versa. Roland tended to forget about the rest of the kitchen. He worked only with his unit of two assistants, who were whipped along and kept in line by him.

He had done his time at Troisgros in France and then worked for Michel Bourdin at the Connaught in London. He left the latter because they couldn’t control him, and at the Waterside Inn, Roland was deemed equally unmanageable. But though others may have found him difficult, I had the utmost respect for him, and Roland liked me too. Maybe he related to me on a mental level—perhaps he could spot the similarities. Who knows? I was not yet a soloist but it wouldn’t take long. Like me, Roland worked through his breaks—if he didn’t, he knew he’d be in trouble during service—and he never once sent a bad plate to the passe.

T
HOUGH I WOULD
go on to become good friends with Albert, our relationship at Gavroche was strictly business. If you finished your job, he would find you another. If it was six thirty in the evening and the first customer wasn’t due in until seven, giving you half an hour to kill, Albert would fill the gap by finding you something else to do. He was that disciplined. One night Albert gave me a severe bollocking because my timing was disjointed during service: there was a delay between two dishes. An hour or so afterward he called me into his office and produced a Benson & Hedges, signifying I should be at ease. I was convinced that I was about to get the sack but I was wrong. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I overreacted.”