A Cook's Tour (30 page)

     Fergus is an exception to my general observations of chef behavior – as he’s an exception to nearly all the rules. Standing by my table, he lovingly, even serenely, describes the lovely little pig’s tail I’m about to eat and how much he’s sure I’ll like it.

     ‘This was a very noble pig,’ he says, looking like a thoroughly charming mad scientist in his white jacket and apron, his movements stiff, formal. He speaks quietly; shy, wry, sounding way too educated to be a chef, he’s the last guy in the world you’d picture as the proprietor of an establishment that celebrates nothing less than guts and glory.

     These are dire times to be a chef who specializes in pork and offal. The EU has its eye on unpasteurized cheese, artisanal everything, shellfish, meat, anything that carries the slightest, most infinitesimal possibility of risk – or the slightest potential for pleasure. There is talk of banning unaged cheese, stock bones, soft-boiled or raw eggs. In the States, legislation has been suggested, mandating a written warning when a customer requests eggs over easy or a Caesar salad. (‘Warning! Fork – if placed into eye – may cause injury!’) A woman in the States won a lawsuit, claiming her coffee was too hot, scalding her as she stomped on the accelerator exiting the McDonald’s parking lot. (‘Warning! Deep-fried Mars bar – if stuffed down pants – may cause genital scarring!’) The result of this unrestrained fear mongering, this mad rush to legislate new extremes of shrink-wrapped germ-free safety? Much like it was after Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
scared the hell out of early-twentieth-century meat eaters – the absorption of small independents into giant factory farms and slaughter domes. Try and eat an American chicken and you will see what looms: bloodless, flavorless, colorless, and riddled with salmonella – a by-product of letting the little guys go under and the big conglomerates run things their way.

     You have only to visit an English pub in, say, Bristol or Birmingham – once-proud strongholds of British culinary tradition at its simplest and most unvarnished – to see that the enemy has reached the gates and is pounding on the door. A vegetarian menu! Right there – next to the steak and kidney pie and the bangers and mash! Worse – far worse – is when you look over at the bar and see Brits, brewers of some of the finest alcoholic beverages in the world, gorgeous beers, ales, and bitters, once served in that most noble of drinking vessels – the pint glass – sucking Budweisers from long-necked bottles.

     It’s war. On one side, a growing army of hugely talented young British, Scottish, Irish, and Australian chefs, rediscovering their own enviable indigenous resources and marrying them with either new and brash concepts or old and neglected classics. On the other? A soul-destroying tsunami of bad, fake reproductions of what was already bad, fake New York ‘Mexican’ food. Gluey, horrible nachos, microwaved never-fried ‘refried’ beans, fabric softener margaritas. Limp, soggy, watery, and thoroughly dickless ‘enchiladas’ and catsupy salsas. Clueless ‘Pan-Asian’ watering holes where every callow youth with a can of coconut milk and some curry powder thinks he’s Ho Chi Minh. (Forget it. Ho could cook.) Sushi is almost nowhere to be found – in spite of the fact that the seafood in the UK is magnificent. You get more heart, soul, and flavor at an East End pie shop than at any of the rotten, fake, dumbed-down ‘Italian,’ ‘Japanese fusion,’ or theme purgatories. Even the cod – the basic ingredient of fish and chips – is disappearing. (I raised that subject with a Portuguese cod importer. ‘The damned seals eat them,’ was his answer. ‘Kill more seals,’ he suggested.)

     Fortunately, Fergus and other like-minded souls are on the front lines, and they’re unlikely to abandon their positions. Sitting at St. John, I ordered what I think is the best thing I have ever put in my mouth: Fergus’s roasted bone marrow with parsley and caper salad, croutons, and sea salt.

     Oh God, is it good. How something so simple can be so . . . so . . . absolutely luxurious. A few Flintstone-sized lengths of veal shank, a lightly dressed salad . . . Lord . . . to tunnel into those bones, smear that soft gray-pink-and-white marrow onto a slab of toasted bread, sprinkle with some
sel gris
. . . take a bite . . . Angels sing, celestial trumpets . . . six generations of one’s ancestors smile down from heaven. It’s butter from God.

     A few years ago, the neighborhood around St. John was about as fashionable as a fistula. Now, there are faces and bodies one usually associates with tofu snacks and soy milk smoothies, skinny, well-dressed women, mussing their lipstick as they enthusiastically gnaw bones, ooh and aah over the glories of pork belly, pig’s trotter, tripe – all that lovingly cooked offal. It’s where the people who truly love food, who know what’s good about wiping grease off their chins, can congregate without fear, safe from the dark clouds of processed food gathering over Europe. A meal at St. John is only one of the great dining experiences one can have in England. I’m not going to bother to give you an overview – reciting the names of all the sharp, ambitious, well-trained chefs who have, in recent years, completely reversed the widely held perception that English food was crap. Suffice it to say that most of these guys could kick their French counterparts’ asses around the block. An Englishman in the kitchen – be it in New York, Melbourne, or anywhere else – is a promise of good things to come. A meal at St. John is not just one of the great eating experiences on the planet – it’s a call to the barricades.

     Because it will not end with the marrow (which already has to be imported from Holland). The enemy wants your cheese. They want you never again to risk the possibility of pleasure with a reeking, unpasteurized Stilton, an artisanal wine, an oyster on the half shell. They have designs on stock.
Stock!
(Bones, you know – can’t have that.) The backbone of
everything
good! They want your sausage. And your balls, too. In short, they want you to feel that same level of discomfort approaching a plate of food that so many used to feel about sex.

     Do I overstate the case? Go to Wisconsin. Spend an hour in an airport or a food court in the Midwest; watch the pale, doughy masses of pasty-faced, Pringle-fattened, morbidly obese teenagers. Then tell me I’m worried about nothing. These are the end products of the Masterminds of Safety and Ethics, bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that isn’t really oil, overcooked gray disks of what might once upon a time have been meat, a steady diet of Ho-Hos and muffins, butterless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless light beer. A docile, uncomprehending herd, led slowly to a dumb, lingering, and joyless slaughter.

I’ve never eaten Marco Pierre White’s food, though I’ve lingered longingly over his cookbooks. He, I believe, no longer cooks personally at his restaurants – and is no longer the haunted-looking bad boy of the British culinary scene. Nowadays, he looks more like a well-fed Venetian merchant prince. But back in the old days, he was a hugely important figure in the UK culinary firmament and a crucial trunk in the genealogy of next-generation chefs. He remains a hero to me for two reasons. First, his food was important – defiantly retro (with his pig trotters, for instance), unapologetically French (he took them on at their own game – and won). His food was (and is) creative, beautiful to look at, and, I am reliably informed, delicious in every way. Second, he threw customers he didn’t like out of his dining rooms – a move that caused shudders of pleasure among chefs around the world. And third – and most important to me – his was the first cookbook where the chef looked like the chefs I knew – gaunt, driven, unkempt. That groundbreaking photograph of Marco smoking a cigarette in
White Heat
made so many of us everywhere say, ‘I am not alone! There are others like me!’ (I’m not saying, by the way, that I can cook anywhere near as well as Marco Pierre White. Just that I smoke in my kitchen, too.)

Finally, there’s England’s greatest chef, or England’s biggest bully, depending on which paper you’re reading at the time – the fearsome and prodigiously talented Gordon Ramsay. I’d been hearing about this guy for years. Ex-footballer. Formerly with Robuchon, Ducasse, Guy Savoy, Marco Pierre White. A legendary wordsmith in the kitchen – famed for excoriating his crew, ejecting food critics, speaking his mind bluntly and undiplomatically. A while back, I was told about the cinéma vérité
Boiling Point
series, in which the beleaguered Ramsay was said to behave monstrously to his staff. Intrigued, I managed to track down a copy of the videotape series. To my mind, Ramsay was sympathetic from beginning to end. I rooted for him as he sweated out the beginning of a service period for a massive banquet at Versailles, ill-equipped, with only a rent-a-staff of indolent bucket heads to help him. I cheered when he summarily dismissed a waiter for guzzling water in full view of the dining room.
Pour décourager les autres
, I’m guessing. I suffered as he suffered the interminable wait for his much-hoped-for third Michelin star and was heartbroken when he didn’t get it. (He since has.) Those who can’t understand why a chef operating at Ramsay’s level gets a little cranky, or who appears to be operating at a higher and more self-important pitch than their boss, simply don’t understand what it’s like to work in a professional kitchen. They certainly don’t understand what it takes to be the best in that world. It is not only how well you can cook that makes a great chef, but your ability to cook brilliantly, day in and day out – in an environment where a thousand things can go wrong, with a crew that oftentimes would just as happily be sticking up convenience stores, in a fickle, cost-conscious, capricious world where everybody is hoping that you fail.

     Is he really such a complete bastard? Let’s put it this way: On a recent visit to his restaurant in Chelsea, I recognized large numbers of staff – both front and back of the house – from
Boiling Point
. Years later and they’re still there. When Ramsay walked out of Aubergine, the entire staff, service staff included – an incredible forty-five people – chose to go with him. That’s really the most telling statistic. Does he still enjoy the loyalty of his crew? He does. No cook shows up every day in Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen, works those kind of hours, offers themselves up daily to the rigors of a three-star service period, toiling in a small, hot space where at any moment they could get a painful and humiliating ass reaming because Gordon Ramsay is the biggest bastard or the biggest bully in England. They show up every day and work like Trojans because he’s the best. Because when they finally walk out that door to seek their own fortunes, they won’t even have to write up a résumé. Say you worked for three years with Gordon Ramsay, and that’s all any chef or owner should need to know.

     There’s another factor overlooked in the rush to brand Ramsay as rude, crude, brutish, and cruel. In the professional kitchen, if you look someone in the eye and call them a ‘fat, worthless, syphilitic puddle of badger crap’ it doesn’t mean you don’t like them. It can be – and often is – a term of endearment.

     Bottom line is, his food’s good. After all, it is about the food, isn’t it?

     I had two meals at his restaurant in Chelsea, and both were absolutely world-class. A great chef at the top of his game. There’s yet another overlooked dimension to Ramsay that doesn’t fit with the depiction of an uppity, lower-class lout overlyjacked on testosterone. Ramsay was trained as a pâtissier. This is significant – like discovering that a right-wing politician was a Bolshevik in his youth. Few chefs can really and truly bake. Most chefs, like me, harbor deep suspicions of their precise, overly fussy, somehow feminine, presentation-obsessed counterparts in the pastry section. All that sweet, sticky, messy, goopy, delicate stuff. Pastry, where everything must be carefully measured in exact increments – and made the same way every single time – is diametrically opposed to what most chefs live and breathe, the freedom to improvise, to throw a little of this and a little of that any damn place they want. Ramsay’s food resonates with his training in pastry. It is precise, colorful, artfully sculpted or teased into shape (though not too teased). It is the product of that end point in a chef’s development – the perfect balance of masculine and feminine, the yin and the yang, if you will.

     What do I mean? Look at Roberto, my grill man. He’s got a metal rod rammed through his eyebrow, a tattoo of a burning skull on his chest, muscles on his muscles. Rob Zombie and Metallica are his idea of easy listening. He’s done jail time for assault. Not a guy you’d invite to an evening at the opera. But watch Roberto cook. He leans over that plate and delicately, carefully drizzles sauce from a favorite spoon, gently applies an outer ring of sauce, then sensuously drags a toothpick through it. He tastes everything. Looks at his plates with a decorator’s eye for color and texture. Treats a filet of fish as tenderly and as lovingly as a woman’s erect nipple. Piles cute, girly-little garnishes into high, cloudlike piles of gossamer-thin crunchiness. He’s doing what everyone told him growing up that only women should do. (Ramsay’s own father told him cooking was basically for poofs and that chefs were all ponces.) We work in aprons, for fuck’s sake! You better have balls the size of jackfruits if you want to cook at a high level, where an acute sense for flavor and design, as much as brutality and vigilance, is a virtue. And be fully prepared to bulldoze any miserable cocksucker who gets in your way.

     Both times I visited his restaurant, Ramsay was in the kitchen, supervising every dish that came out, riding his crew like rented mules. He wasn’t gliding through the dining room, sucking up to his public. He’s a cook in twenty-first-century England; that means he’s an obsessive, paranoid, conspiratorial control freak. A hustler, media-manipulator, artist, craftsman, bully, and glory hound – in short, a chef’s chef. That I found him polite, charming, witty, and gracious and am saying so here will probably be an embarrassment to him. For that, I apologize. His detractors should be so lucky as to taste the absolutely stunning braised beef and foie gras I ate at his restaurant – a dish so sumptuous that I am forced to use that word. A ham hock terrine of really extraordinary subtlety and flavor, a lobster ravioli with fresh green pea puree that revealed – as all food reveals its creator’s true nature – a level of perception and sensitivity that can be a liability in the mosh-pit subculture of professional kitchens. Here’s a guy who risked everything in his career, many times over. He walked away from a career in football when it was made clear he’d never play in the bigs. He endured a procession of stages in some very tough French kitchens. He bolted from his first restaurant, entangling himself in potentially enormous liabilities just when he was in sight of the mountaintop. He loudly announced he was going for three Michelin stars and then stayed on course until he got them. Rather than kiss the asses of all those people who might – under ordinary circumstances – be expected to be helpful to him, he has consistently kicked them in the teeth or even viciously sucker punched them. It’s very hard for me not to like a guy like that. And every day those stars are sitting on him like six-ton flagstones, defying any who might choose to try knocking them off.