I had enjoyed the Manager’s considerable perk of a night taxi home after work at Le Café St Pierre – no such luxury here, of course. My two brothers were both experienced motorcyclists and I was not, but it was clear that I needed some form of two-wheeled motorised transport, as I lived too far away from work to contemplate cycling and was permanently too knackered to pedal anyway. I asked my brother Eddie for help and he duly obliged, but not before drawing upon the combination of his profound motorcycling knowledge and considerable sense of humour. The second-hand moped he chose for me was none other than a Honda Vision and for those not au fait with motorbikes, this was just about the smallest, slowest, girliest 50cc bike on the market at the time. It was designed for petite, sixteen-year-old hairdressing apprentices, not a six-foot-two lump like me. And Eddie knew it. And, my word, did he laugh as he wheeled it out from the back of his van. I used and abused this thing for a year and clearly remember it almost coming to a standstill every time I summited the lofty peak of Twickenham Bridge over the Thames. But it did the trick and it enabled me to hold down my first chef’s job.
I very nearly didn’t last the course at Bibendum and seriously thought about jacking it all in on several occasions. The work was hard, there were frequent bollockings and I simply was not good enough to feel like a worthwhile member of the team – and working in a high-class kitchen is all about teamwork. I was the twenty-six-year-old novice and there were a few in the talented, young brigade who were quick to remind me of the fact. I couldn’t believe how relentless it all was – there was just so much work to do. All the time. And the boxes of shellfish, salad leaves, herbs, poultry, fish, dry goods and the rest just kept on coming and coming in an endless wave of exhausting graft.
To make matters even harder (or more interesting, depending on your viewpoint), Simon liked to change the lunchtime menu every day and I was often preparing dishes I had never seen before. On one occasion I was told to put a poached egg salad on the menu. As I had been off the previous day, some of the mise en place for this special, including the poached and refreshed eggs, was already in my fridge – great; one less job to do. I got the rest of the gear together for the salad and served at least a dozen lovingly dressed and plated salads during the frantic lunch service. Simon was as usual cooking the main courses and after lunch he came over to me and asked me how I had got on with the new warm salad. Warm? Shit. Where had I been reheating the poached eggs, he asked? I had thought the idea of stone-cold poached eggs was a little odd to be honest, but no-one had told me any differently and, judging by the dearth of complaints, the poor customers were none the wiser either. Mr Hopkinson was not amused and I received a full-throttle hairdryer rollocking. But by this stage, I was used to them, as we all were, and they were simply part and parcel of kitchen life.
After six weeks working alongside the cold-starter chef as his commis, I was left to run the section on my own. This was quite a scoop for me, but at the same time the pressure was ramped up several notches. I just about survived and began to slowly find my feet and after a while I was moved to the pastry section and, from there, around the other sections of the kitchen before ending up on the most prestigious of all – the main course or sauce department. After that, it was time to move on. Simon was and continues to be a highly intelligent, articulate and brilliant cook. I have huge professional respect for him and have always been grateful for the opportunity he afforded me. I am glad to say that Bibendum is still a great restaurant and marches on true to its roots in the capable hands of Matthew Harris. It also benefits from arguably London’s most beautiful dining room and I cannot think of a more enjoyable venue for lunch. In fact, just writing this makes me want to book a table there right now.
To this day I am still friendly with some of the lads there with whom I grafted. One such chum is Phil Howard and when Phil went off to forge his own glittering career at The Square in St James’s, I asked if he might have any vacancies in the kitchen. Life at The Square was even harder than at Bibendum – it was a madhouse. We did nothing but work and I had to ask Anna for even more patience as we hardly saw each other and on my days off I rarely emerged from an utterly spent vegetative state. The days simply whirred past in a frantic and pressurised smear of time. It is fair to say that Phil ran the kitchen with less discipline than I was used to, but the sheer demands his menu imposed made life severe for the brigade. But we knocked out some seriously cracking food and by this stage my confidence as a cook had grown somewhat because I now knew that I could hold down just about any section in a highly demanding kitchen.
I passed my motorcycle test and, armed with a full licence, once again asked Eddie the Oracle for advice on an upgrade. A Honda CB 450 became the commuting steed of choice for my time at The Square and although it was by no means what one would call a cool bike, with its extra grunt it was a welcome relief from the series of mopeds, step-throughs and 125s I had become embarrassingly inured to. One afternoon between lunch and dinner services, I rushed home on the bike to attend a much-needed dentist’s appointment and came a cropper on an oil-slicked bend opposite the Budweiser brewery in Mortlake. As I slithered across the road and then righted myself and bent machine, it soon became obvious I had bust my hand. All I could think about, however, was getting in touch with Phil to give him time to arrange cover for the evening service. All you ever think about as a chef is the food – the menu, the menu, the bloody menu – it is a pervading and ineluctable presence. I telephoned the kitchen from the brewery’s reception office to tell the lads the bad news. With my arm in plaster in the ensuing days and weeks, I was of little use at work, but I still reported for duty all the same and recall becoming particularly nifty at peeling calf’s brains, as this job required little dextrous use of the fingers in one hand.
I was now about thirty and it was time to move on once more. Anna and I were still living in Twickenham and there was a locally well-known little French bistro in Hampton Wick called Le Petit Max, run by two eccentric twins, Marc and Max Renzland. We loved going there and it had become our favourite restaurant. The place was run as a greasy spoon by day (by two equally eccentric ladies) and as a serious, but informal place at night. It had no liquor licence and we would take along lots of wine and eat lots of really delicious bourgeois French food and we got to know the twins reasonably well – occasionally talking shop late into the night behind the steamed-up windows. Marc cooked and Max looked after the customers and when they realised that I was thinking of leaving The Square, they offered me a job at a new restaurant they were setting up near the Fulham Road. The timing of this offer worked well and after a short period of deliberation I decided to go with it.
I left The Square in January 1994 and, before my next job, Anna and I took a week off and rented a little cottage in the Lake District. We did some walking, but mainly chilled out in front of the fire since the weather was particularly foul. One wet, bleak morning I togged up and walked the half mile into Hawkshead, the nearest village, to buy a newspaper and, once back at the house, came across an article on the new Michelin guide, which had just been published. Phil had earned his first Michelin star and I was beside myself with excitement. I had to congratulate him and ran back through the pissing rain to the public phone box in the town square (no mobiles in those days) and we enjoyed the moment together – him in his hot, sweaty subterranean dungeon I knew so well and me in a rain-battered call box in a remote Cumbrian village. It is one of those happy memories one never forgets and was made all the sweeter by the knowledge that the hard work from all concerned had been rightly rewarded.
Chez Max in Ifield Road was my first experience of a brand new restaurant opening. Marc had recruited a fairly small kitchen team and, as there appeared to be little in the way of structure or hierarchy within the fledgling brigade, I was sort of shoved unwittingly into the position of sous-chef, alongside Marc, who wrote the opening menu. As the twins continued to operate the bistro in Hampton Wick, they would shuttle between the two sites and when a staff shortage demanded that Marc return to Le