It was the night before Christmas 2006. I lay on a sofa in Plumstead, watching ‘The Football Years’ on Sky Three. Only a small portion of my attention focussed on the flickering screen, however, as most of it was taken up with wondering what the fuck to do with myself now.
A combination of wandering up blind alleys, dubious choices and plain bad luck had led me to a place which possessed a little style, still, but absolutely no substance.
My time seemed to be split between washing up, cleaning deep-fat fryers, flipping burgers and lugging bags full of meat down Tooting High Street. Thirteen years in kitchens and I end up effectively as a KP. Trouble being, that I was the Chef and the Commis too.
I’d known for at least a year that I’d had enough of kitchens. I’d had my little triumphs, but the last was three years ago. Since then it had been a blend of dead-end jobs, and trying to run away from them. Sorties to Australia and Greece had their moments, but moments were all they had. Neither was the future I’d been looking for.
In London I’d tried Chelsea, Wandsworth, Twickenham, Enfield and now Tooting since getting back from Australia in Summer 2005. All more of the same. I was at the point where the idea just of dropping out, taking my computer somewhere quiet and watching downloaded 80s TV all day seemed a fine idea.
But I was only 42, not really even middle aged in the good old 21st century. I had no easy income, no rich relatives off whom to ponce. Surely I’d have to do something.
But what?
Cooking had been paying the bills, as I say, for 13 years. Even that started accidentally. Back in Summer 92 my then girlfriend and I had taken a holiday on a Greek island. We liked it so much, the next Summer we went to live there. We had both been working for London Transport’s travel information service, so obviously there were no similar careers to move into. I had been thinking of taking up a bar job when someone asked, ‘Can you cook?’
Well, yeah, but it had never occurred to me to do it professionally. I was admittedly a marvel at minestrone, a supremo at spaghetti Bolognese, a purveyor of canny curry, but only amongst friends.
Still, no better ideas were presenting themselves at the time, so I did it. Over the course of a Summer I discovered I was pretty good at it actually, although even then it was obvious my organisational skills were second to pretty much everyone. Due to this, I learned the first rule of working a good kitchen – pray you are lucky enough to have a really good assistant or KP beside you. This is seldom a matter you have choice in - I can remember actually employing only one KP in 13 years. The rest of them were already there. For the most part, I was luck personified. They all seemed to like me, and most of them enough to go that extra yard which was often necessary.
Anyway, by the end of my second Summer in Greece I could do a service of 70 covers without too much trouble. I was beginning to be able to put my own menus together. I decided that this chef business was ok.
In September 1996 I flew back into Gatwick, a chef with three years experience at the hard end, making sure Bob from Bolton had his full English or his Sunday roast in the 40 degree heat, serving up tuna jackets at 2am, handcutting 20kg of chips to keep happy the tourists of Eilat. Oh, the glamour.
Due to the fact that the ex-girlfriend was based there, my next stop was Wigan. Upwards, ever upwards. Perusing the sits vac ads in the local paper, I discovered that chefs in England were supposed to have things called City and Guilds 702, or at the least an NVQ, before they could run kitchens, or in many cases even work in them. As I had arrived in the profession by accident rather than design, I had neither.
Thus I learned the successful chef’s second invaluable skill, that of CV Revisionism. Bearing in mind that people believed what they read, as a rule, I simply told everyone I was a qualified chef. This skill, incidentally, was the main reason I got several jobs. Later on it helped to have a couple of soft references to give out, but even that wasn’t so important. According to my current CV, I have had something like a dozen chef’s jobs, and been sacked from none of them. In actuality, I have had something like twice that amount, and been sacked from several. Throats are cut and backs stabbed in the catering industry with terrifying abandon. Think about how many knives there are in the average kitchen.
But I digress. I landed the chef in charge gig at a pub in the centre of Wigan, and began an intensive ‘learn as you go’ course in how to work English kitchens.
Which, if we fast forward to the present day, means I have done a decade. That seems as good a place as any to stop. During that time I managed to land two really good jobs. One of them lasted five years, on and off, and was the glory that was the Landseer, London. The other lasted a fortnight, and was the wasted World Cup call-up that was Maceo, Paris.
But God knows I landed some dogs as well. Mentioning no names, step forward Frankie & Benny’s, Preston. Take a bow, Loustros, Rhodes.
The rest of them were a combination of good, fair and indifferent. And where I was now was more indifferent than most. It is a worrying trend at the bottom of the kitchen food chain that one man is expected to do three jobs. This is due mainly to a lack of trade, fair enough, but not always, and it doesn’t make it any easier for the person concerned. You’ve done your time to get to the position where you don’t have to wash dishes, clean friers and bash spuds any more. And then you have to do it all over again. On top of this, you’re alone, so you lose the whole essential dynamic of a good kitchen. And on top of this, you spend hours on end without so much as a bowl of chips to fry.
As an example, I list in full the orders that came through the kitchen in the first week of January.
Monday - 3 beefburger, 1 chicken burger, 2 veggieburger
Tuesday – 3 beefburgers, 1 fishfinger burger, 1 veggieburger
Wednesday – 1 fishfinger burger
Thursday – 1 mezze, 1 samosa, 2 garlic bread, 2 beefburger, 1 fishfinger burger, 2 burritos
Friday – 1 lasagne, 1 burritos, 1 beefburger, 1 beef stew, 1 veg lasagne, 2 wedges, 2 chips
Saturday – 2 cheese pie, 1 chicken pie, 1 chicken burger, 2 beefburger, 1 veggieburger, 2 burritos, 1BLT, 1 Chicken baguette
Sunday – 5 Roast beef, 1 veggieburger, 4 Sausage and mash, 2 lasagne, 1 fishcake, 1 blt, 2 chicken baguette
That’s all, folks.
For someone with a boredom threshold as low as mine, this is as good as tucking me into the pilot’s seat of a Japanese kamikaze plane. It is certain that, eventually, I will crash and burn.
By the time I found myself on that Plumstead sofa, there had been almost six months of hours on end. Of being arm-deep in greasy water. My only New Year’s resolution was that, when this job ended, I would never work in a professional kitchen again. A few days into the New Year, I found my job advertised on the internet. QED.
So, what to do?
While I think about it, I may as well tell a few stories.
First, let’s discuss how the meal maketh the man.
Although becoming a chef was completely unplanned, I suppose it wasn’t a total shock. I’d always had a soft spot for food, and have always been able to recall places and people through the memory of taste and smell. Memories of good times in life usually have a meal or two involved.
I was born in Zambia but left while a mere infant, thus I have no memories at all of the place. I’m told that everyone lived on mealymeal or gin, depending on which side of the economic divide you found yourself, so maybe it’s just as well.
Probably my earliest food memory is watching, absolutely fascinated, as a family friend called Harry McEwan constructed a chip butty. I would have been five or six. Discussing this later with my mother, I was banned ever from making one. Common, apparently, but standard practice for Glaswegians like Harry.
Every Saturday when I was about 7 I would go to my Nana’s. There’d be either Shepherd’s Pie or Lancashire Hotpot for lunch, and fish and chips from the Starbeck Chippy for tea, eaten out of the bag with loose batter and vinegar. For breakfast the next day, either Dunelm Sausage and beans, or the world’s greatest bacon butties, in a Stotty cake with black pudding and tinned tomatoes. I could eat one right now… All she ever ate were lettuce sandwiches, made with Stork Blue Ribbon Margarine and Nimble bread.
From my Grandma, the Great SuperMac Liver Con. It was the day of the 1974 Cup Final, which featured my beloved Toon. We won’t talk about how Kevin Keegan tonked us virtually alone. It was nothing to the tonking my Cub Group team had suffered only that morning, something like 8-1. When I got to my Grandma’s, where we would watch the cup final, she cheered me up by saying there was steak for lunch. It was yummy. Only later did she tell me the steak was liver, cunningly coated in flour and pan-fried to what a 10-year old considered medium. For weeks afterwards, I refused to believe I’d eaten liver. For weeks afterwards, I refused to believe Supermac had played so rubbish.
Another couple of Grandma memories – there was always a mousse in the hoose, and I clearly remember scoffing one as we watched the black smoke rise from the Vatican the evening the pope before the Polish one died.
She had an old pantry in the backroom which always contained a tin of ratafia biscuits, sort of Italian macaroons flavoured with almond. If I smell those today I’m instantly back in that house.
A few years later as we ate a rather spiffing rabbit stew, I discovered my Great Uncle would under no circumstances eat round food. No peas, no oranges. Possibly the most unique food aversion I’ve come across. Was he serious? We shall never know.
A childhood holiday in Normandy and Brittany introduced me to croissants, real coffee, moules et frites, those strangely pink candy prawns and scallops you can get on the seafront at Deauville, paprika flavour crisps, baguettes the size of tube trains.
On the downside, I ended up at a boarding school and some of the food there was horrific. Some teatimes they would give us Spam Fritters with Tinned Tomatoes. Other days this strangely glutinous Egg Curry with even more glutinous rice would appear. You could have made bricks with the scrambled eggs. Bad things happened at mealtimes, like the announcement of those errant pupils who would miss the Saturday night disco.
But when I went home for a weekend there would be Spaghetti Bolognese which I could smell from halfway down the street, or my mother’s Jamaican boyfriend would have knocked up sausage, beans and mash. He never once made Goat Curry with rice and peas, but then he was quite posh. And down to Nana’s, obviously, for one of those fantastic bacon sandwiches.
When I was 14 my Dad and Stepmother moved to Singapore. We’d had curry at home, loads, and very nice it was too. And I’d been to the Moti Mahal a time or two. But until you’ve had a banana leaf job down the Serangoon Road, or a Mutton Korma from Ujagar Singh’s (the first time I’d seen people eating with their hands), you don’t know what the real stuff’s like.
Equally a Chilli Crab on the seashore or a Kweichow in Newton Circus were worlds away from the Runwell Chinese. But here a strange coincidence. The world’s best fish and chip shop, up until about 15 years ago, was on Starbeck Avenue in Sandyford, Newcastle. The second best turned out to be in Singapore, near Changi army base. You could get bananas, dunked in batter and deep fried, with freezing ice cream on top. Washed down with a grape fanta, this was lovely. Hey, I was only a kid.
A year later Dad moved on to Hongkong and things got even better. I remember a junk trip to an outlying island where the seafood was still swimming about half an hour before we ate it, and the New Year Buffet at the Repulse Bay Hotel, where you’d go through a pan-Asian plateful an hour, over four hours. It took a week to digest it all.
Back in the Northeast, my mother ran a pub for a while in Bedlington, a rough pit village north of Newcastle. Pub grub in those days ran to toasties (bizarrely, the most popular flavour was chicken curry) and pasties, but what pasties! Filled with a molten mixture of corned beef, potato and onion, pastry that melted in the mouth, perfect. They were made by a rough diamond name of Davy Pattison, who had other talents. There was this lad who was barred from the pub, and decided to get his revenge by chinning me in the Chinese takeaway. Davy was in there at the time, and the yob got no further than words as Davy said to him, ‘Touch him and you’re dead.’ Davy got free pints for a fortnight after that one. As for the yob, he tried it again a few nights later but I set the dog on him. The dog didn’t actually hurt him, but kept him backed up against a wall for a good ten minutes. Very funny.
I was to return to Hongkong sooner than I planned, for reasons which we need not go into here, and this time instead of staying for a fortnight, I was there for three years. Man, the food memories are positively multitudinous. Where do I start?
The Sichuan Lau (RIP), which was the world’s greatest Chinese restaurant. My 18th birthday, a sublime evening framed by Ma Po’s Beancurd, Hot and Sour Soup, Garlic Pork, Yunnan Ham and Smoked Chicken in white sauce, and the sublime beauty of Sephi Wetherby.
The SMI (RIP), where you could get an astounding range of curries from all over Asia. The best samosas, with wicked minty stuff to dip them in. Peshwari Red Mutton will long live in the memory, as will a cute girl called Veronica Rosario.
Macau; pigeons at the Fat Siu Lau, feijoada at the Estrela do Mar, African Chicken (better known here as piripiri) at Maxim’s, Quails and prawns and Portuguese rice at Pinnochios on Coloane.
The Curry Buffet in ‘the Canteen’ at the Excelsior Hotel.
CharNgor Faan (Barbecue roast pork and goose, with boiled rice) from the little shack at the top of Marsh Road
Fast Eddie Chiu arranging for takeaways from the Saam Lok Gau (3 6 9), a fantastic Shainghainese place on Lockhart Road. Dumplings, Wui whor yuk (a double-cooked pork dish which I’ve never been able to recreate), Choi faan, noodles in a rich soup heaving with sweet vinegar, garlic and chilli. And chicken’s blood, and meat of extremely dubious origin, but it was so tasty.
Friday nights on the piss in Wanchai, finished off with preferably Pie, Chips and Beans in the House of Doom, or sometimes with an eggburger from the stand on Luard Road, or sometimes wonton noodle soup from the all-night stalls.
The little stall, more of a corrugated iron shack, around the back of Centre Point where they did the most awesome dosi fortoi danji (ham and egg toasties). And anyone who travelled on an HYF ferry in the early 80’s will remember the delightful menu – egg sandwich, spam and egg sandwich, instant noodles with fried egg, instant noodles with spam and egg. I kept expecting Michael Palin to jump out of the engine room and begin singing.
The Portuguese banquet my Dad knocked up the night I took Christina Sedelmaier round for dinner. Both the piripiri and Miss Sedelmaier were exceedingly hot. She was from Bremen, and to this day I look out for the Werder score in the Monday paper.
Eating Thai for the first time round John Lenehan’s house, his wife had cooked Tom yam soup which I remember being the hottest thing I’d ever come across. The wife was pretty hot too, the textbook Thai bride.
The Sweet & Sour Pork at the little restaurant in Pui O on Lantau Island, served on a bed of crispy noodles, washed down with a ho dong-ah Carlsberg.
Back to Newcastle for a two week holiday in early ’83, and my mother introduced me to this late night venue her friend Derek owned. You could only stay late if you ate something, but luckily there was always excellent soup, brewed up by the delicious Therese Lewis, who I took to see Roy Harper play live. I ate a lot of soup that fortnight.
Even the McDonald’s were nice in HK, especially when you were meeting the aforementioned Miss Sedelmaier in the one on Queens Road Central, or buying her a cheeseburger in the one down Repulse Bay Beach.
More curry, this time at one of the little places in Chungking Mansions. Samosas and really nice Chicken Madras with chapattis and dahl, in the company of a gorgeous Canadian called Mel.
And it was there in Chungking Mansions, I suppose, that I first cooked for the great unwashed masses. I was living in a hostel at the time, a crazy-cool place containing people from all over the place. One day I cooked a Bolognese for about eight people, and to my surprise all of them remarked on how good it was. The ego had landed. Christmas came along, and it turned out there’d be about a dozen of us with empty invitation books.
No problem. We spent Christmas Eve in the Three Brothers sinking Carlsbergs, then on Christmas morning dragged our hangovers roumd the Dairy Farm on Nathan Road. We managed to find chickens if not turkeys, plus most of the trimmings. By teatime we were sitting about the hostel with silly hats on, tucking into dinner. We followed the Xmas Pud with top quality Nepalese Temple Balls, then went back down the Three Brothers.
That was the first time I realised that being able to cook was something that could bring people together. That day around the imaginary table were a German, two Swedes, two Frenchmen, an Italian, two Australians, three Americans and half a dozen Brits.
It was also the day I realised that I could do something which could genuinely touch people.
The realisation that I was blessed with a true gift would come much later, after much trial and error, but even then I – understood instinctively what was happening to the ingredients I was using. I soon stopped measuring, for instance, and except for those examples where it is absolutely necessary, such as bakery, I never measure now. I just know, like the great DJs know when to drop a tune and you or I don’t, even though we understand the music.
I think the point here is that though anyone can learn the method, the science, the gift of true understanding, or maybe empathy is a better word, is something you’ve either got or you ain’t.
It occurs to me that I did actually work in a couple of restaurants during those HK years. For a short time during 1981 I worked for a Canadian guy called Danny, who owned a Lebanese called The Sheikh and an American place called – do you know, I really don’t remember. It’ll come to me. Oh, yeah, Alice’s. I think. I was only the bar boy, though, and the closest I got to the kitchen was when the chef slipped me doctored falafel, filled with incendiary chilli sauce. Ha ha. Nice ribs in the American place, though, and nice waitresses too.
I returned to the UK in ’84 to find the Northeast having the shit kicked out of it by Thatcher, although this was offset by the Keegan promotion team hammering more or less everyone. Not long after getting back, a group of friends and I met in one of their back gardens. One of them arrived munching on something I’d never seen before. While I’d been away, the Elephant’s Leg had arrived.
An aromatic delicacy consisting of the bits left of animals after everything else (including turkey hamwiches) had been dragged off them, moulded into a fetching oast-house shape, glued together with fat and God only knows what else, then cooked by plonking it on a stick and letting it revolve, ominously, dripping, some bits greyer than others, until it reaches the texture of sodden cardboard.
But slice it up, stick it in a pitta bread, douse it with incendiary chilli sauce, hide the grey stuff with salad and maybe just a dab of garlic sauce, and something makes it taste okay. If you’re pissed enough.
I had seen my first doner kebab. It would be 15 long years until I discovered the Crystal Charcoal Grill on the Holloway Road (more of which later) and found out what they were meant to taste like. During the intervening years I must have scoffed hundreds of the damn things, but now I wouldn’t touch an Elephant’s Leg with yours.
I was a student at this time, and my staple diet was spaghetti hoops on toast, with a bit of dahl of a weekend. But I was picking up recipes which I still use today, most of them from my mother.
One of these was Lentil Soup, which admittedly is just dahl under a different flag, dahl with bacon in it. But this stuff has kept me alive tens of times. Cheap, tasty and filling. It’s snowing outside as I write this, and a bowl of that soup would go down a treat.
Or as Nigel Slater might say,
‘This morning I woke to puffs of snowflakes spinning gently past my frosty windows, and immediately ran to the kitchen to start chopping onions, waiting in frantic anticipation for the aroma of sweating celery and carrots, the sharp sizzle as the bacon is introduced to the pan, the impatience as I wait for the fabric of the lentils to diminish into a soft, slushy reddish-orange gloop studded with crisp slivers of bacon and dressed with a handful of rouglhly chopped parsley.’
What some people will do to fill a page…
The cassoulet I made to impress Liz Elsden, an ex-nurse from Dundee. What a shame she was happily married. (Or was she? Should maybe have pressed that one harder.) Pulling it out of the oven, steaming, full of chorizo, topped with crispy slices of belly pork. Red, not white, and I don’t care what they say in Castelnaudary. Although they’re dead right when they say the best thing to wash it down is a good Cahors. There’s one of those in my oven right now.
Spaghetti with tuna fish, possibly the simplest recipe I know as all it is is spaghetti, tuna fish, onions, garlic, lemon juice, tomato puree and seasonings. You can even leave out the garlic and onions if you don’t have any.
On a visit to London to see my Dad, who had just arrived back from HK, I discovered the Canton, which to me is still the closest thing to eating in Hongkong outside the place itself. An insanely busy little Chinese place on Newport Place just opposite the NCP multi-storey, this place does basic Cantonese grub to die for, Singapore Noodles of sublimity, all served by waiters with Masters Degrees in surliness. Perfect. The Canton used to be open 24 hours but no longer is. However if you’re passing, you can get the best char siu in London for only £5.50 a throw, takeaway. I wonder whatever happened to Elaine Holmes, who accompanied me on that first visit? She used to talk sometimes about taking the cloth, becoming a Nun. Oooerrr.
That same weekend, I helped my Uncle Paddy cook his famous Moghlai Chicken, one of those things which generically gets classed as a curry, but isn’t one. I remember wandering into little shops on Blackstock Road looking for things you’d never have got in Newcastle in those days, such as black cardamoms, asafoetida.
After college in Newcastle we used to go to the Afghan Kebab Place just by where Marlborough Crescent bus station used to stand. They did this curry, Peshwari Chicken, really mild with peppers and stuff, perfect for soaking up too many pints down the Broken Doll. I remember a freezing Sunday night, Lisa Dawson and I had just hitched back from the countryside and tucked into an Afghan to warm us up before finding other, more inventive methods. And their Elephant’s Legs, I remember, weren’t bad. Their cool trick was to make the garlic sauce really spicy. Ha!
I sold advertising space for a while, and Friday nights with that crew were not pretty places to be. We used to end up in La Stalla, a really dodgy Italian place with a dancefloor and terrible food. I remember waking up one morning to find I’d left my dinner in the bath before retiring. Not before eating it, unfortunately.
Around the time of my 22nd birthday I decided to go on a diet, enlisting the moral support of a young lady named Debbie Kyle. Pasta with tomato sauce and white wine spritzers for lunch every day, munching on raw carrots in between times. It worked, but as soon as I stopped dieting and had a curry I piled it all back on. Bah.
There was a spell where I didn’t really eat for a week or so, I got very French over a girl called Debbie Selwood and took it into my head that deprivation would bring redemption. It didn’t of course, and I ended up not eating when I was fucking ravenous. It all culminated when we went to see David Bowie at Joker Park in Sunderland, when I could barely hear the man’s tunes over the rumbling of my belly. The curry house got a battering that night.
Another day around that time one of the girls at the office had invited us all round for a Sunday dinner, this was still while I was chasing Miss Selwood. The roast beef was lovely, but it all got very, very messy later, and I got nowhere near the lady. Not the right one, anyway.
And there were regular visits to any one of Newcastle’s many curry houses. The famous Rupali, for instance, run by Lord Latif of Harpole (you may have come across him if you’ve ever read Viz comic), where I watched my mate Graham eat a Chicken Tikka Masala the colour of a sunburnt flamingo.
Throughout this time I’d be down my Mam’s every Sunday for a feed. Liver and onion casserole, cassoulet, lamb korma with all the trimmings, my first couscous. I started watching and learning from someone who has the same natural touch as myself.
Come 1988, I was back in London, full time. My little brother and sister were six and four respectively. Often I’d pick them up from school, and get them their teas. I used to do really nice bbq spare ribs, giving conception to the recipe which would come together in glory ten years later in York. My brother amazed me with his liking for neat white rice.
Which didn’t stop my sister eating nothing but Satanic Bernard Matthew MiniKievs. It’s no wonder she’s vegetarian now.
My Dad used to cook every Saturday, sometimes it would be a Coq au Vin or Boeuf Bourguignon, other times a Malaysian feast, other times Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic, perfect for the ladies if I was going out later, you could pretend with ease to be French and thus sexy.
I now had the best job I’d ever had, and the best paid, so I could explore further and better. I got a Malaysian recipe book and did a Rendang, finding even the galangal in SMBS Foods, East Dulwich. This was still only 1988 remember. It worked like a dream. I would buy mysterious curry pastes and other assorted stuff, just to see what happened with them. I began blending my own spices, before quickly realising that Patak’s did it perfectly well, thankyou.
I learned what to do with things such as blachan, ghee, methi, tamarind concentrate, jaggery.
I tried to cook lakhsa, failing miserably.
The Curry Cabin, again in East Dulwich, was where I tended to end up of a Saturday night if I was out. Spanking Seekh Kebab, equally yummy lamb tikka biriani.It’s still there, although the last time I went was on my first date with a certain JP in ’91. The Eastern Eye was another really good curry house on Lordship Lane, while the Surma had food which wasn’t so hot, but nurses which were.
The Desaru (RIP), Old Compton St, the best Malaysian restaurant I ever found in London. Rendang, lakhsa, sayur lodeh, kari kambing, you name it. My Dad’s 50th birthday party was held there, and I returned home to find my housemate had torched the house, while cooking chips, while stoned as a monkey. I took Elaine Parker there (the Desaru, not the torched house), bought her a red rose, and she fell asleep on my shoulder on the Northern Line. Lovely. And a great night out with my Uncle Paddy, skinning up an appetiser in the bogs of the boozer nearby, then Clam Curry which apparently repeated on Paddy a little early.
I couldn’t get Elaine Parker round to mine for a curry, so I took the mountain (in the shape of a newly created recipe, Angry Rabbit) to Mohammed. Can’t remember what it tasted like, but I clearly remember waiting at Colliers Wood for the last train to Mill Hill East. Damn.
I cooked a lot of curries in those days, got a bit of a reputation for myself, and it wasn’t uncommon for people to borrow me to do a bit of cooking for them.
I think it was my cousin Bill’s 10th birthday, we went to the New World in Chinatown for many varieties of dim sum. This was probably the last time I ate chicken’s feet, a nasty habit I picked up in HK. 10 years later my cousin would introduce me to the wonders of Deep House, absolutely the best music to cook to.
A brief interlude in Leeds happened around this time, and I discovered Naafi’s by the University, where the curries cost two quid and came with free chappatis. And the mighty Shaan in Bradford, packed to the rafters at one in the morning. These curries all overshadowed by the towering nimbo-cumulus of semi-requited love that was (and remains) Gabrielle Finn.
The second Walden Valley folk festival, a weekend in t’country with songs, where I cooked up a lovely bit of dahl, and some other stuff, and did a free blues tune based around the link between Mrs Thatcher and BSE called, wait for it, ‘Mad Cow Blues’.
Fish and chips in Bingley near Gabi’s office, watching the first phases of Italia 90 while sitting alone and fizzing inside with emotion I couldn’t release to the extent that I probably gave up eating again, I don’t remember.
I remember the last time Gabi and I went to Naafi’s, the night David Platt netted against Belgium in the last minute to set up the Cameroon quarter final, a warm, clear and star studded night. The streets were noisy with celebrating football fans as we ate and I looked at her and I felt like the world was ending, and to this day I believe that for a month or so around that time, it did. But the world, and Gabi, would be back.
And returning to London, finding takeaways had started delivering, Curry in a Hurry with Uncle Paddy while watching England v Cameroon in the World Cup Quarter Final.
The Germany Semi, Gazza cried because we wouldn’t give him one of the lovely fat hot dogs we were scoffing as he got booked.
And the third/fourth place game v Italy, Dad cooked up some lovely Spanish style chicken, loads of paprika and red peppers.
I used to pop up to Nottingham a lot to see my mate Tim, and we used to get stoned then cook onion bhajia, channa masala and rice. Rice was something I still had trouble with. I tried all the ways in all the books for years; absorbtion and all that, none of them worked. In the end, I realised simply putting it in plenty of water and boiling it works just fine, as long as you don’t overcook it. I still fuck it up sometimes.
When JP and I got together in late ‘91, I started learning about Northwestern things, things like Pooles Pies, Sausage Pie, Pie with Suet Crust, Pie Barm Cakes. This was the girl from Wigan, incidentally. Yes, it’s all true, though there is a variation. Meat Pudding, Chips and Gravy. Which is really just a pie with a soggy crust. In the area they call the puddings Baby’s Heads. I’d come across them on a visit to Preston a few years back, now I think about it.
The first time she came round mine for dinner, I did garlic prawns, magic bread and spag bol. Those prawns worked miracles, and whenever I wanted to cheer JP up I’d cook them.
I was on Night shifts for a while when we first started seeing each other. She’d meet me out of work at 7am, and we’d ride the tube to Upton Park. Near my house on Walton Rd was a bus drivers café where they did those old school Cockney fryups. Sausage, bacon, beans, egg, mushroom, black pud, bubble, fried slice. Then home to get stoned as monkeys and shag the rest of the morning away.
I used to take in food for the people on the night shift, there were four of us and I’d cook up something then charge for it. A curry, maybe, or once I remember a really good cassoulet.
On days off we used to go off on adventures. Southend, one time, then back to Forest Hill and Sausage Pie. Lord Sam’s on a cold and rainy evening in Hastings. Escargots, a fat Steak Diane and homemade Onion Rings, followed by a highly interesting train journey back to London. Is that called the 63mph club, if you’re on a Southern Region chugger?
One evening, skint, we walked down Upper Street reading all the menus, and imagining what we’d have if we could afford it. The menu reading thing has always been a hobby, and it’s even more fun when you put them together yourself. Only today I noticed the pub up the road advertising Tai Chicken Curry, and there doesn’t seem to be a chef on the planet who can spell Caesar, as in the salad. My rule is, at least in the UK, if the chef can’t spell it, don’t order it.
We found the Big Easy on the Kings Roads, awesome American stuff – snow crabs, truly great ribs, fried clams.
We visited Newcastle, and I took her on a guided tour of its culinary highlights; the Starbeck Chippy, obviously, Mamma Mia’s down Pudding Chare, I think we even went to the Rupali for heaven’s sake.
We found the Caravan Serai, an Afghan place just off Marylebone High St. Truly different food, little Chinese-style dumplings, but with an Indian flavour. They had these carrots they pickled in sweet chilli vinegar which were lovely, a perfect example of the balance which is the secret of all good cooking.
And the next Summer JP and I took the holiday in Greece which would lead to us deciding to move there. Lots of people don’t rate the food in Greece, and it’s true that much of it is truly awful, but we found loads of good stuff on Zakynthos.
Calamari followed by rabbit stew at the Rainbow in Kalamaki, the stew packed with garlic, the rabbit itself tasting of mountain herbs, the olive oil so tasty you could have drunk it neat.
The nameless place on the harbourside at Keri, where they took us into the kitchen, opened the fridge and said, ‘There’s the menu.’ I chose a swordfish steak the size of a tray, and they merely grilled it, shook some lemon juice over it and sprinkled it with oregano.
Lunch at Stani No 1 on Kalamaki beach, the Stani Salad a mad riot of tuna, ham, egg, green beans, salady bits, and a lamb souvlaki to satisfy the carnivore, ice cold Green ‘Uns, rabbits running beneath the table as you ate.
Michaelo’s, Kalamaki’s poshest restaurant, very nice moussaka, even better giant beans, but always heaving with rubbish tourists.
We ate Kleftiko in Athens, in the shadow of the Acropolis, rubbish bouzouki players all over the place, very aggressive cats, tripping over the sheer volume of Gypsy beggars. Strange place.
A picnic we took up the mountain to eat al fresco, no one around, slow love in the tall grass as the sun beat down on us, one of the best days of my life. If she’d got pregnant that day, and it honestly was the plan, who knows what might have happened?
My mother came for Christmas, a disastrous festive break on a personal level for everyone, but I cooked up an awesome Roast Beef for Christmas dinner. I mashed up the carrots with cream, garlic and port. I dauphinoised the spuds. I roasted the parsnips in Spanish honey. The beef was a lot more tender than the atmosphere, which I duly cut with a knife by getting even more pissed than the other two were.
And on New Year’s Eve we went to a Vietnamese place in Peckham where they did those awesome carvings out of salt and carrots, swans and stuff like that. The food was great too, but watching JP try not to pass out in her noodle soup wasn’t so much fun. I thought I could do drunk until I met that girl, but she was a master, a veteran, a grog guru, and she left me standing in the stalls like the rank amateur pisshead I luckily was. There but for the Grace of God, and all that.
But we had plenty of good times. Quiz nights at the Crystal Palace Tavern, always coming second to the smartarses (and there were six of them to our two), draught Burton and the best pasties I’d come across since Davy Pattison back in ’79.
Watching the Toon tonk Charlton 3-0 at Upton Park in February ’93, and I swear to this day
Pavel Srnicek blew a kiss at JP, followed by a fatboy’s curry in the Rajah.
By then we’d more or less made the decision to blow out, head for the sun, and on April 2nd 1993 that’s exactly what we did. We boarded the train at Victoria, the start of an overland journey of which the culinary highlights were Spag Bol in a little backstreet cafe and the world’s greatest pizza, in Roberto’s, both in Brindisi. And the espresso off Bari station at 6am after a night on an Italian chugger was life-restoring.
The chapter you have just read is really just the roadmap of meals and eating experiences that brought me to being a chef, but even as we got off the ferry on Zakynthos harbour I didn’t know it. In something like a fortnight, I’d be working the six-deck mixer.
If you’d asked me then what I thought being a chef would be like, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. But I certainly didn’t think it would end up washing dishes and flipping burgers in SW17 thirteen years down the line.
For being a chef is about many things, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with cooking and absolutely everything to do with profit margins, incompetent colleagues and useless bosses. It’s cooking by numbers, it’s sticking things in a microwave, it’s serving up meals that you wouldn’t give the dog, it’s the smell of deep-fat fryers, it’s the process of having your soul systematically destroyed by stupid rules, stupid bosses and rubbish food.
For 99% of we chefs, there’s no Ramsay, no Oliver, no Blumenthal. They live on TV, on the bookshelves, in their pristine whites and their shiny, airbrushed kitchens which look like no one has so much as knocked over a container of breadcrumbs on the floor, ever.
For them, it’s the ‘cutting edge’, the gleam of the TV studio and six-figure book contracts. For us, it’s being elbow-deep in kitchen grease in dank pub kitchens and £7.50 an hour.
For us, it’s all about life on the dark side of the spoon…..
Sphere: Related Content
Loading ...
