|
|
Executive Times |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
2007 Book Reviews |
|||
|
|
The Devil
in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef by
Marco Pierre White |
|||
|
Rating: |
*** |
|||
|
|
(Recommended) |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Freedom The
sensational title of Marco Pierre White’s memoir, The Devil
in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef, belies
the underlying story: hard work produces results. There’s very little sex, a
lot of pain (mostly that which comes from hard work) and the madness of the
intensity of work to the exclusion of all else. And the title of this book
when it came out in the My days at
Gavroche came to a hasty, unexpected end in September
1982, when Albert picked up a soup ladle and began waving it in front of my
face in the middle of his three-star kitchen. I was
feeling grouchy anyway. For a week or so I’d been suffering from a stomach
problem—the beginning of my ulcer, maybe—but I still turned up at the kitchen
every day and worked late into the night. I was a sleep-deprived, mop-haired
wreck with a stabbing pain in my belly, and when head chef René rounded on me
with a thunderous verbal assault, I answered back. I can’t even remember what
started him off; I have no recollection of what I was supposed to have done
wrong. But Roux robots were not supposed to answer back—it showed a fault in
the programming—and my attempts to defend myself only increased the volume
of René’s rant. The sound
of the commotion must have penetrated the glass walls of Albert’s office and
he emerged at a galloping pace, swooping up a ladle from a kitchen surface.
He was the knight embracing his lance, and he was heading toward me. Was he
going to dispose of me with a long-handled, copper kitchen implement? Was I
about to be ladled? Adrenaline pumped through my twenty-year-old body, but
with my stomachache and exhaustion, I didn’t have the patience to stand there
and take a bollocking from the boss. Albert stopped his charge when he was a
foot in front of me and raised the upended ladle into the air, moving it in a
pecking motion in front of my face. The spoon
part of the ladle came toward the bridge of my nose, then, before it could
touch me, it was swiftly retracted. Forward, back, forward, back in pendulum
fashion, though metal and skin never connected. Albert stared at me and,
swinging his ladle, he uttered the words, “Now [peck] . . . you
[peck]. . . listen [peck] . . . to
[peck] . . . me [peck]. . . my [peck] . . . little
[peck] . . . bunny [peck].” “My little
bunny”—now that was patronizing. By all means give me a bollocking and shout
at me, I thought, but please don’t patronize me. I grabbed the spoon. “That’s
it,” I said to him, as the rest of the robots carried on mechanically with
their chores. “I don’t like being patronized. I don’t need this shit.” Then
I marched. I marched out of the kitchen, changed out of my whites and
buggered off. I don’t think Albert tried to stop me leaving, and anyway, I scarpered pronto. The magic chef’s little bunny vanished. I found
work at a small restaurant on the other side of the river, in It was in
December that I bumped into Albert, and he was extremely apologetic about
the way it had all ended at Gavroche. “Why don’t
you come back?” he asked, and I didn’t need much time to think about it. In
the interim period of a couple of months I had reflected on the soup-ladle
incident, and now I could appreciate the comedy behind my departure. My
decision to leave had been irrational, I told myself, so I accepted Albert’s
offer and pitched up to start my second stretch at Gavroche. It didn’t
last long. The magic wasn’t there anymore. In that short period of time,
from September to December, my friends Roland Lahore, Danny Crow and Stephen
Yare had gone, moved on. I saw the restaurant in a
different light. What had previously seemed grand, exquisite and stylish no
longer had the same effect upon me. I wasn’t blinded by the silver anymore.
At some point early in 1983 I left Gavroche once
again, this time on the most amicable terms. I left the restaurant but I
didn’t leave the company. I took a job at the Roux brothers’ spectacularly upmarket butcher shop, Boucher La Martin, in Based on
the Parisian shop of the same name, Boucher La Martin was run by Mark Bougère, the highly gifted chef who had been Albert’s
right-hand man when I had joined the company nearly two years earlier. We not
only supplied Albert’s restaurants; we also provided fine meat and poultry
to the well-heeled shoppers of Chelsea and Knightsbridge. Being a butcher—or
rather, a Roux butcher—has to be one of the toughest jobs I have ever done. The
working day started at five thirty in the morning. My first duty was to
prepare the ducks. Entering the bird’s back cavity, let me tell you, requires
the utmost skill. A lot of people are too heavy-handed, and when they’re
finished, you could drive a bus up the back cavity. At Le Boucher I had to
master the skill of opening up the cavity so that it was just large enough to
get my fingers in and carefully scoop out the insides without staining the
bird with its blood. The liver and heart were brought out whole, as were as
the lungs, which had to be removed because if cooked, they add a bitterness to the final flavors. Each morning I would
prepare about twenty ducks, their sharp bones stabbing my fingers. To ease
the soreness I would have to wash with cold water and a bit of bleach. The duck
process took me about four hours and then I would tend to the customers in
the shop. This was not the sort of butcher’s where you’d walk in and simply
buy a chicken. Everything was prepared to order. If a customer wanted a poulet de Bresse for a
fricassee, then I would chop it up accordingly; if it was a chicken for
roasting, then the bird would be beautifully tied and trussed. I had to be
disciplined with my knife and hands and I had to work quickly. In the end it
shut down, but Boucher La Martin has to have been one of Although
money had never played an important role in my life, in the fall of 1983 I
spotted an opportunity to earn a fortune and that is what seduced me away
from the butcher shop and the Roux brothers’ empire. There was a pub called
the Six Bells serving the punters who shopped in the hustle and bustle of the
King’s Road and I learned that the landlord was looking for a head chef. When
I turned up to see him, he seemed quite impressed by my experience and
offered me the job. However, he was adamant about the money. “I’ll give you a
staff budget of five hundred pounds a week,” he said. “That’s your budget.
Spend it how you like.” Maybe he thought I’d have to take on a staff of five
and a washer-up, but I had devised a way of earning a staggering amount of
money. I paid myself £400 per week, which was a fortune for a chef then, and even by today’s standards would be good money
for a pub chef. That left me with £100 from the budget, so I hired a sous chef who was about my age, an American lad called
Mario Batali. There was no cash left for a
washer-up, so Mario and I agreed to share the chore. I was quite proud of the
deal—signs of my business brain were evident even back then. We did a menu of
good lamb and sweetbreads and crayfish, that kind of thing. Sturdy
Mario, with his mass of red hair, was an interesting and special guy, but
not half as interesting as he would later become. After getting a degree in He
responded to bollockings. Even though he may have
faked it, he responded to them. If he cocked up a dish, then it would go in
the bin and he’d apologize and pretend to understand. I would push him
along—”Move it, Rusty Bollocks, faster, faster”—and after service we’d head
off clubbing in the West End, though it was almost impossible to pull birds
with him. One day I
sent him out to get some tropical fruits and he returned with a bag of
avocados. To this day, I do not know if he was taking the mickey. From the
tiny kitchen of that pub I would eventually go on to win three Michelin stars
while Mario returned to the States, where he’s today hailed as the king of
New York’s restaurants and his places include Babbo
and Lupa. He’s won a heap of awards and plaudits
including “Man of the Year” from GQ magazine. Although we only worked together
for a matter of months, he regards me as a mentor, which
is nice, and in interviews he often mentions me in entirely affectionate
terms. For instance, in July 2004, he
said, “[Marco] was a genius, and an evil one at that. Last time we spoke he
had launched a hot pan of risotto at my chest in service.” A few
years after we’d worked together, Mario’s parents came for dinner at my
restaurant, I finally
jacked in the job at the Six Bells in spring 1984 because I missed working in
fine kitchens. The pub wage, while amazing, was outweighed by an overwhelming
desire to cook in the best restaurants. There was also an incident with the
barman at the Six Bells. We were having an argument one day when he said to
me, “At least I’ve got a mother.” He saw a look of anger cross my face. Then
he picked up a knife, as if to warn me off, and I tried to grab it. The blade
sliced the palm of my hand and the scar is still there today. Once I had the
knife, I chinned him. Motherless readers will sympathize. White was the youngest chef at age 28
to win two Michelin stars, and was the first British chef to win three stars.
The
Devil in the Kitchen exploits how his perfectionism in the kitchen made
him a boss who would not tolerate mistakes, and treated those who made them
with fury. What can we learn from this memoir? Perhaps once you’ve achieved
your goals, the best next step is to quit and do something else. Such success
leads to freedom. Steve Hopkins,
July 25, 2007 |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
||||
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2007
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Devil in the Kitchen.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
