The Devil in the Kitchen (20 page)

One evening the whole sweaty bunch got together to grumble about the heat. “Right, that’s it,” I said. I was annoyed and couldn’t stand their moaning. I marched over to the air-conditioning machine and turned it off. “We’ll all roast together,” I said. From that night on they kept their complaints to themselves. If the boys couldn’t stand the heat, well, that was tough because they couldn’t get out of the kitchen.

When I was feeling charitable, I’d give the instruction to remove the kitchen’s skylights, thus allowing some of the heat to escape. Gordon was in the kitchen one morning when the skylights were off, and he was rolling out pasta. He felt water on his head and assumed it was rain. He was wrong. A dog had wandered onto the roof terrace, cocked a leg and promptly urinated through the roof and onto Gordon and his ravioli. Gordon was enraged, if not a little embarrassed in front of his cackling colleagues. He ran outside with a knife. I don’t think he was going to stab the dog; he just wanted to
look
like he was going to stab the dog. As it turned out, the beast was too fast for him.

When Gordon wasn’t chasing dogs, he was usually rowing with Ronnie, his younger brother, who has spent years fighting another on-off battle, an addiction to heroin.

When I gave Ronnie a job as kitchen porter, I hadn’t reckoned on the bickering it would entail. The two brothers loved each other dearly but had ferocious squabbles. I once asked where Gordon had gone, only to be told to look out the window. I glanced across the road and there was Gordon on the common, sprinting away from an angry Ronnie, who was trying to catch him and waving clenched fists.

They were hugely competitive. One day I saw Ronnie at the sink and, after examining his sparkling plates and cutlery, I told him he had the most talented hands I’d ever seen. I was winding him up, but for weeks after he boasted to Gordon that I had praised his hands, as if he was the more gifted of the Ramsay brothers.

There was another kitchen porter, Marius, and when I think of him, it makes me realize how unskilled I was at handling certain situations with my staff. Marius turned up for work one morning saying he had sore throat. I didn’t send him home to bed like a sympathetic, experienced employer might have done. Instead someone or other mentioned that the best cure for Marius was Armagnac and port, so we filled a brandy glass with the concoction and told him to drink it. Half an hour later, when Marius collapsed unconscious on the kitchen floor, we carried him outside to the freezing cold, dumped him in the courtyard and forgot about him. A snowstorm came and went before someone said in a shocked way, “Marius.” We rushed out to recover his trembling body. Two hours after complaining of a sore throat, Marius was suffering from alcohol poisoning and the onset of hypothermia.

Marius took some time off (to recover from the world’s worst hangover) and the stand-in kitchen porter pitched up. On his first day I gave him a few hundred quid and told him to go to the bookie’s and put the money on a horse that was racing that afternoon. He left with the readies, muttering the horse’s name to himself so as not to forget it. We never saw him again.

Anyway, you now have a clearer picture of me as the boss. I was nasty, vicious, aggressive and blunt. I put my hands up to all of that. But, hey, don’t get me wrong—along the way I had earned the respect and loyalty of the brigade. And away from the kitchen, I like to think I had my moments of compassion too. I helped out those with financial problems, and when Gordon went to work in France, I lent him the money for the trip. I was also there with the rest of them when they played football on Wandsworth Common. In fact, I was often the one who dragged them out to play when they said they were too tired to exercise.

The boys would do anything for me, and that included beating up my rivals. In the summer of 1990 I was asked to cook at a polo event and Antony Worrall Thompson, by then an established name in the restaurant world and the head chef at 190 Queensgate, kindly said he’d come along to help out.

I arrived at the Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club with my brigade and everything was going well until my boys decided Antony deserved a pummeling. Aristocrats and rich polo lovers were happily enjoying their food in the outdoor tent, but behind the scenes in the attached kitchen, Antony was being pelted with lemon tarts. He was quickly coated in sweet yellow goo. He tried to make a run for it but thought better of charging through into the tent because he looked ridiculous and it would cause too much of a scene. So Antony sprinted out of the makeshift kitchen and into a field, and that’s where he was tackled by one of my boys, the wildebeest brought down by a leopard. He was then subjected to the humiliation of having a dozen eggs cracked on his head by the Harveys brigade. Antony, whom I’ve always liked, didn’t take it very well.

Another incident that illustrates the vicious rivalry at the time, involved my boys and the ones who worked for the Roux brothers. It was during the restaurant world’s annual trade fair at the Business Design Centre, in Islington, North London. The boys from Harveys were taunting the Roux brigade by calling them Roux robots and boil-in-the-bags, a reference to the line of precooked food that was produced by the Roux brothers. There was an air of tension and then, as I was onstage in the middle of demonstrating how to cook fish, a scuffle broke out in the audience between the two brigades. A couple of the lads had to be escorted from the building—which would have been fine if they had been drunk at a nightclub, but they were haute cuisine chefs at a trade fair, for heaven’s sake. Newspapers got hold of the story and had a lot of fun writing about “Michelin Star Wars.”

As it was, there was more than enough scrapping going on at Harveys. We had to contend with the Wandsworth yobs who thought it hilarious to wander up to the restaurant window, drop their trousers and do moonies at my customers. I’d send out chefs to deal with the barearsed idiots and chase them off. The Wandsworth louts might have thought they were tough, but the Harveys brigade was the toughest of the tough. One day a trio of young hooligans pushed open the front door, produced a can of Coke, shook it up, opened the lid and threw the exploding can into the restaurant. According to witnesses, it was like a gas bomb. Customers dived for cover, hoping not to be soaked by the foam as it fountained out of the missile. The yobs then legged it, stupidly unaware that their escape route was taking them right past the kitchen door at the back of the restaurant. “Get them, Gordon,” I screamed.

Just as the yobs were running past the door, Gordon and a couple of other chefs greeted them in the courtyard. From my place at the stove, I could hear the biff, bang, wallop sounds of a good old scuffle. Then Gordon reappeared clutching his hand. During the fight he’d punched one of the yobs in the mouth and had somehow managed to end up with a tooth wedged in his knuckle. He extracted the gnasher, but was clearly in some pain, moaning and groaning; there was some speculation as to how long it would be before septicemia set in and killed him. “For Christ’s sake,” I said. “Am I the only bastard cooking?” At this point JC dashed into the kitchen, his eyes wide with terror. “They’ve got a hand grenade!” he screamed.

Hand grenade? Who? My maître d’ spluttered something about the yobs’ dads appearing on the scene for a bit of score settling and bringing with them a hand grenade. We were so exhausted and run-down that none of us thought to question JC’s suggestion that our little restaurant by Wandsworth Common was about to be blown up by a hand grenade. I gave the command, “Bolt the fucking doors and get down.” My SAS unit searched for cover, sheltering under pieces of furniture and in kitchen cupboards. When it was all quiet on the western front, everyone reemerged and continued with the job at hand, be it shelling peas, making pastry or trimming cheese for the evening service.

It was in the early days of Harveys that I renewed relations with my Italian relations. For some reason or other, I phoned my uncle Gianfranco, who mentioned that my younger brother, Simon—by now a man in his early twenties—was in a rut. “Send him over here,” I told my uncle. “He can come and work for me.” I went to Gatwick Airport and waited at the barrier to greet the brother I had not seen for almost two decades. It was a Sunday afternoon and very quiet in Arrivals. The first person to come through was a giant, a monster of a man, and I just thought, Christ, he’s a big bloke. He was followed by the other passengers who had been on the flight, and when the place emptied, the giant was still standing there. He must have been six foot eight, some five inches taller than me. He had to have been the tallest man in Italy.

We were brothers but hadn’t recognized each other. We shook hands—perhaps we hugged each other, I can’t recall—but apart from that, we couldn’t really communicate. I didn’t speak Italian and his English wasn’t fantastic. After he’d said hello, he looked down at me and asked, “Do you know a shop called High and Mighty?” Nearly twenty years and that was it. Take me to High and Mighty. We swaggered out of the airport like a walking freak show: Italy’s tallest man accompanied by his lanky, gaunt, hollow-cheeked older brother. At Harveys I put him on the Pastry section but it didn’t work out, and after a week or so he returned home. Just like my earlier visit to Italy, his trip to Britain was cut short. At the time Simon aspired to be not a cook but a policeman and that’s what he went on to become. He told one of my Italian-speaking chefs that once he was a cop, he would return to Harveys and arrest me for the way I treated my staff.

I
T WAS NEVER
going to last with Alex, and a couple of years after marrying, we were divorced. Two people need to have the same dream. Mine was winning three Michelin stars, and that ambition came before everything else in my life. Alex’s dream . . . well, I don’t quite know what her dream was. Even on paper we weren’t a good match. I came from a hard, working-class world that, since my mother’s death, had been dominated by men. All of a sudden there I was, married to a nice middle-class girl. I couldn’t take it in. I didn’t want things to be perfect. I didn’t want pleasure. I was driven by my insecurities and a fear of failing, and to some extent a fear of dying before achieving my ultimate goal. The kitchen was the only place where I felt comfortable.

FIFTEEN

No Bill, No Mink

M
Y MANAGERESS CAME
into the kitchen and she was nervous. The man on table two was complaining about the cheese, she said. I don’t know what was making her nervous: his complaint about the cheese or my potential reaction to his complaint. I was curious. “What’s wrong with the cheese?”

“He says he always chooses his own cheese,” she replied.

“Well, tell him that’s not the way we do it here,” I said. “Just tell him that we do a plate that contains a selection of seven cheeses—they are all perfectly ripe—and that’s how we do it. Go and tell him that.” She scurried off, but returned a minute later, saying the customer was still insisting he wanted to choose his cheese rather than have the seven-cheese selection. “Can you deal with it?” she pleaded.

I walked from the kitchen to the restaurant and up to the customer. You’ll have to take my word for it when I say that I was extremely polite, even though he was a particularly ugly, short-arsed redhead. I told him that we serve a selection of seven cheeses, “And that’s the way we do it here, sir.”

“But I don’t like two of those cheeses,” he said.

“Well, that means there are still five of them that you do like, sir. And each cheese is served as a substantial, generous portion.”

He was having none of it. “I always choose my own cheese.”

“That’s not how we do it here,” I repeated, not quite knowing where we were going with this one.

Slowly, with a hint of menace in his voice and a pause between each word, he said, “I always choose my own cheese.” I don’t know what happened in my head. I just decided that I wasn’t going to tolerate it. The job’s hard enough, I thought, why do I want someone like that in my restaurant? Even if there is an issue and we’re wrong, there’s no need to be an arsehole. And don’t patronize me—and that’s what he had done. He was patronizing me.

Of course I wanted to kick him out, but when you work your way up through the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants, they forget to teach you how to deal with rude and difficult customers. Albert was a strict boss and Pierre was notoriously hard on his staff, but I had never seen either of them give the punters what for. Raymond, of course, was charm personified, so he probably would have conceded and let the bloke choose his own bloody cheese. And what about Nico? It would infuriate him when customers booked a table and then didn’t show up. So Nico would make his wife phone them to ask what had happened and then, with his hands on his hips, he would stand close by her—close enough for the person at the other end of the line to hear—and bark loudly, “Tell them to fuck off . . . We don’t need their fucking money . . . Fuck them . . . Put the phone down on them.”

Staring at this dwarfish, patronizing man who was slowing down the smooth-running operation of the restaurant for my valued customers, I found myself saying, “Why don’t you just fuck off?” Pause. The smug smile didn’t leave his face. “Forget the bill,” I said. “Just fuck off.” He stood up and walked out of Harveys.

T
HE CHOOSE-MY-OWN-CHEESE STORY
is one of those anecdotes that would be used to illustrate the claims that I was an angry young man. After all, what kind of a chef kicks out a customer whose only offense is to ask if he could choose his own cheese? Yet what is fascinating about the above story is that I have since heard the customer
intended
to be kicked out. It was all premeditated. He came to the restaurant with the sole intention of getting a free meal by being obstinate. I can’t think of many men who would put themselves through the humiliation of being told to eff off just so they could have a free lunch. But then, I suppose I should take it as a compliment.

Harveys had earned a terrific reputation for its food but, as I mentioned, punters also came for the show. One element of the show was provided by the celebrity clientele: star-struck customers could sit just a few feet away from them and ogle. I mean, if Ollie Reed had asked you to join his table, you’d remember it for the rest of your life, wouldn’t you? Food is food, but a great restaurant is an experience. And the tension was heightened by the thought of the volatile, moody chef who was supposedly skulking in the kitchen. Customers had this image of me: the long-haired wolf lying in wait, ready to pounce on his prey, be it the customer who dared ask for salt or the one who returned his plate because the meat was undercooked.