The standard of my amateur cooking remained resolutely amateurish, but gradually improved as I studied at Westminster Hotel and Catering College. Aged about twenty-one, I spent a year there on a conversion course designed to encourage graduates in unrelated disciplines (my degree was in History, hardly a fast track into the higher echelons of the hospitality industry) to apply for ‘management’ positions in hotels and the like. Although this was not a cookery course per se, I increasingly found myself reading about food and restaurants in my spare time. Any extra cash I had was spent in restaurants, usually sampling the cheap set-lunch option accompanied by tap water. Part-time work helped boost the food fund and one Christmas holiday job was at an exclusive butcher’s shop in West London, where I was appalled to learn that the ‘fresh free-range Norfolk turkeys’ sold at a considerable premium to the well-heeled local residents queuing at the door were nothing of the sort, but, in fact, frozen birds defrosted the previous night on the shop’s fake sawdust floor. It was a tawdry and eye-opening introduction to the world of commercial retail catering – a valuable lesson in how not to do things. The butcher’s shop in question is long gone, I am glad to say.
After Westminster College, I was taken on as a trainee manager by the Scottish Glasgow-based hotel group Stakis. This organisation has since been swallowed up by The Hilton Group, but at the time had a sound reputation for its management training and I received the shock of my life upon being thrown into the boiling ferment of a busy city-centre hotel. My posting was to The Stakis Grand Hotel in Stoke-on-Trent (or Hope-on-Trent, as I unkindly called it in letters home) and this three-star place relied heavily on the conference and banqueting business generated by the commerce from the neighbouring pottery towns. ‘Trainee Manager’ was a euphemism for dogsbody and this green dog was chucked behind the bars – and there were quite a few of them. I did a great deal of bar and cellar work and quickly became used to the idea that as a junior ‘manager’ one was expected to put in considerably more hours than just about anyone else in the building – anywhere between seventy and eighty hours a week was perfectly normal and more during December. The weight fell off me as I literally ran up and down the staircases of this imposing Victorian edifice going about my many duties and for this I was paid the princely sum of £5,500 per annum. Very basic live-in accommodation was part of the very basic package.
We worked and played hard at The Grand and I learned the ropes quickly. However, hotel life was not really for me and after eighteen months of vertiginous learning curve, and having been asked once too often to dress up in a fluffy squirrel outfit to pose as Cyril, the company mascot, I wanted to get back to London. More importantly, I wished to work specifically in restaurants. Le Café St Pierre on Clerkenwell Green, EC1 received its new Junior Assistant Manager in the spring of 1987. During my eighteen months at the restaurant I immersed myself in the London restaurant scene by eating out as much as my rota and salary would allow and extending my overdraft when it wouldn’t. For the first time, British-born chefs were earning the headlines and Rowley Leigh at Kensington Place, Simon Hopkinson at Bibendum and Alastair Little at his eponymous restaurant in Soho were all presiding over the stoves at red-hot ticket destinations. Le Gavroche had three Michelin stars, Anton Mosimann and Nico Ladenis each had two apiece and there were other young and driven British chefs like Marco Pierre White, David Cavalier, Gary Rhodes and Gary Hollihead making names for themselves and earning their first stars. I visited all these places and many more and simply could not get enough of eating out – I had become a restaurant junky and London felt like the centre of the restaurant universe to me, always on hand to deliver the fix I craved.
The place I was working at in EC1 was good enough and provided me with a decent salary, but increasingly it was the kitchen I became more interested in. I had also witnessed the comings and goings of a few head chefs and the serious headaches this had caused the owner. I knew that I would one day want to run my own restaurant and felt that it might be safer to do so from the engine room of the kitchen. Besides, I have now worked with enough highly professional dining-room staff to understand that dealing with customers directly was, perhaps, never going to be my true métier!
With this restlessness beginning to take seed, Anna and I planned a trip to Paris. I had read a captivating restaurant review by Matthew Fort (then reviewer for the Guardian) of Joël Robuchon’s restaurant Jamin, at 16 Rue de Longchamps. Having read Matthew’s beautifully written piece over and over again, I felt simply compelled to go. Robuchon’s restaurant didn’t merely live up to expectations, it just blew me away. It was easily the best meal I had eaten up to that point, and to this day I have never enjoyed a finer feast. I still recall everything about the place. The waiter was brilliant at his job too and I will always remember how he sliced the (very large, very crusty) loaf of bread to accompany cheese by touching it with nothing other than a fork, spoon and carving knife. He also showed true compétences relationelles by patiently tolerating my schoolboy French as I clumsily ordered two tasting menus. There was a little bit of clunky banter between us up until the arrival of the main course: the magnificent stuffed pigeon with the chef’s famously rich creamed potato. The waiter fired me a question and this time I was flummoxed. Totally stumped. He asked again, a little slower. Toujours rien – I had well and truly fallen. He waited just the right length of time before picking me up gently by asking in perfect English: ‘Would you like some mashed potatoes?’
And, of course, Monsieur Robuchon’s spuds were legendarily good, as was each and every dish. The desserts were superb too (the French still leave us standing when it comes to patisserie) and just after we had finished the pudding course from the seven-course tasting menu, my new English-speaking chum wheeled up a hitherto unseen and magnificent dessert trolley. I had never seen anything like it: such technique, beauty, precision and generosity. The lunch was both terribly expensive and terribly cheap at the same time. We kind of floated out of the place, feeling well and truly restored, just as one should considering the provenance of the word ‘restaurant’. And when I had properly sobered up, I was determined to learn how to cook professionally – not because I harboured any daft misconception that I would be able to cook like Robuchon himself, but because I simply wanted to be a better cook.
By now I had been promoted to Restaurant Manager, after the departure of my predecessor. Although I was flattered to be offered this senior role at a relatively young age and learned a lot from the experience, I finally decided to take the plunge and, at the ripe old age of twenty-five and a bit, I wrote letters to what I considered to be the ten best restaurants in London at the time, asking for a job as a chef. I received several encouraging replies and following an interview conducted by Simon Hopkinson at Bibendum, I was offered a job there. Naturally, I was thrilled. I had been working for three years front-of-house in both hotels and restaurants and I was certainly used to the gruelling hours and not afraid of hard work. However, I was about to meet the next severe reality check head-on. And at full velocity.
I both disliked and loved working at Bibendum in my nearly two years there. Or more accurately, I hated it at first and then learned slowly to enjoy it, but it was an arduous and painful process. Anna (now my wife) and I had discussed at length the impact this change of career would have on us both and I had promised myself that come hell or high water I would complete a year with my smart new Knightsbridge employer, assuming I wasn’t first given the bullet. I was seconded to the Larder section (where the salads and cold starters are prepared) and the first thing that struck me was the pace at