The Man Who Ate the World (31 page)

“They build you up and they bring you down,” Pat says as she lays down her cutlery, much of the dish uneaten. The service is distracted, disinterested. Nobody asks why food has been left behind, as if it might be intruding into private grief, and when we complain about unequal measures of highly priced wines by the glass, the sommelier suggests that we are making a fuss about nothing.

At dessert, things only get worse. I am served a slice of cheesecake with a rhubarb sorbet. I take a tiny spoonful of the sorbet and, startled, insist that Pat tastes it. She is so cross now that it does not surprise me when she doesn’t bother with cutlery, choosing instead to scoop some up carelessly with her fingers. She recoils, with a look of disgust on her face. “It’s moldy.”

I nod sadly. “Well, technically it’s not the sorbet that’s moldy, it’s the rhubarb from which the sorbet was made, but . . .”

She shakes her head at me. Before her is a plate of chocolate fondant that she has barely touched.

“Why did you make me have dessert? I didn’t want dessert. I could have been back at the hotel having another cocktail.”

We ask for the bill, pay it as quickly as we can, and leave without saying anything to the chef, Phil Howard, a nice man I have interviewed on a couple of occasions and who normally I would have wanted to meet. We just want to leave. He calls me a few days later.

He says, “You couldn’t wait to get out of there, could you.” To his credit, he wants to know what went wrong, wants to know about everything: the upselling by the sommelier, the bored waiters, the moldy sorbet, and I tell him. He asks me to come back again, as his guest. I thank him for the offer.

It makes little difference. The meal had cost £222 ($455). True, I had spent more on some meals during my travels and on occasion eaten just as badly, if not worse. I had simply shrugged them off and put them down to experience, perhaps even reveled in the opportunity I had to
take my revenge in print. This was different. With those poor dinners abroad, I had excuses. I was a stranger in a strange town, and in those circumstances, a good restaurant can never be guaranteed.

London was my town. I was on home turf and I had no excuse for eating badly. My job was to know these restaurants inside out and if even I couldn’t make sure that I had a good time, what hope was there for anyone else? I was furious about the expense of that £222 for such a truly dismal, disappointing, depressing experience. For days afterward I wandered about, angry and irritable. I was brooding. I was meant to have eaten a great meal. Instead, I was allowing the bill for that meal to eat away at me.

Curiously, my wife didn’t seem at all troubled by this turn of events. Pat was in a very jolly mood indeed.

I
knew who to blame for my bad night out. It was the same people who were responsible for every bad meal I had ever eaten in London—though, to be fair, they were also responsible for many of the good ones, too. It was those titans of British gastronomy, Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch.

This requires the long view, so let’s step back a few decades to the Second World War, when, in an act of national survival, Churchill’s government industrialized food production in Britain and introduced rationing in a bid to guarantee that the population remained fed. Any link between the land and its inhabitants that had survived the Industrial Revolution was now firmly broken. That, combined with an essentially Protestant culture that tended toward stoicism and self-denial, led to a completely moribund and drab food offering. It would eventually make Britain the laughingstock of Europe, and certainly the last place you would think of popping into for lunch.

In the latter decades of the twentieth century the derision came not only from beyond the country’s shores but from within them, too, as Britain’s well-traveled middle classes happily bored their friends with the
revelation that French food culture had an uncommon depth and lusciousness compared to that found at home. While undoubtedly true, it always seemed to me that these critics were failing to recognize the basic reason for this gulf: Food culture had endured in France because, when the Germans invaded, the entire French nation suddenly remembered they had something in the oven that needed looking at, and quickly surrendered so they could go back to tilling the land and cooking up all those delicious daubes and coq au vins. The British, meanwhile, fought on alone and saw food as merely another part of the war effort.

The thrust of the foodie’s complaint, however—that eating out in Britain was a dismal experience, akin to root canal surgery only without the anesthetic—was undoubtedly true: overcooked meat, over-boiled vegetables, sauces like wallpaper paste with none of the flavor profile. Both the war and, even more importantly, the nine grueling years of rationing that followed, had left the country with a collective sense that to spend proper money on sustenance was somehow indecent and that the flamboyance and display associated with the “Continental” restaurant—all that setting fire to things! All that stuffing of one bird into another!—was a gross self-indulgence and certainly not the done thing in Britain.

Of course there were always those with an interest in eating well. Elizabeth David’s elegant food writing, in books like
French Country Cooking and An Omelette and a Glass of Wine
, let people know there was another way. There were also stalwart restaurants, George Perry-Smith’s Hole in the Wall, in Bath, for example, or Sharrow Bay, at Ullswater, in the Lake District, which fed people well. But the pickings were still meager and, in most parts of the country, you were more likely to starve than get a good dinner. Even in London food of ambition was generally to be found only at prohibitive prices in the dining rooms of grand hotels, like the Connaught, and there was very little of that.

Margaret Thatcher’s personal contribution to food culture in Britain is hardly glorious: As a young research chemist, before she entered politics, she was part of the team that devised the method for pumping huge amounts of air into sweetened milk solids to produce Mr Whippy
super-soft ice cream. However, her political philosophies had a major impact on the restaurant business. Put most simply, Thatcherism made it okay both to have money and to spend it on stuff. A series of tax-cutting budgets and economic measures that favored the moneyed over those on low incomes encouraged a consumer boom that eventually washed into the catering trade.

After all, once the fat-walleted city boys had bought their houses and their cars and their box-shouldered suits, what the hell else were they supposed to spend their money on? Restaurants presented the opportunity for some all-too-literal conspicuous consumption. It is no coincidence that, when commentators look for the first shoots of Britain’s so-called restaurant revolution, they point to once-famed London restaurants like Hilaire, Alistair Little’s, and Sally Clarke’s, all three of which opened in either 1983 or 1984, the early years of Thatcher’s second boom-time government.

The key year, though, was 1987, which saw the arrival of Bibendum, the River Café, and Kensington Place. Most importantly, in January of that year, Harvey’s opened in London’s Wandsworth, just south of the Thames. In the kitchen at Harvey’s was a young, beautiful, gifted, and scrappy chef called Marco Pierre White, who liked to shout at his cooks and his customers in between cooking what was reputed to be some of the best food ever seen in the British capital: tagliatelle of oysters with caviar, roast Bresse pigeon with a fumet of truffles, savarin of raspberries.

Marco Pierre White, a motherless working-class boy from Yorkshire with a serious mouth on him, became Britain’s first rock star chef, with all the bad behavior that title suggests. There are many chefs working today who cite Marco as an inspiration, and it has been argued that the credit for all this fame and adoration should go to a former rock band manager and restaurant inspector called Alan Crompton-Batt, who became his PR man.

It is true that Crompton-Batt built up the young chef as some mysterious, mercurial figure of the stove, and in doing so, invented the
profession of restaurant PR. Before Crompton-Batt, new restaurants merely opened their doors and hoped that customers would find them. Crompton-Batt, a gregarious, entertaining, but troubled alcoholic who would die young as a result, changed all that by targeting journalists and shaping his clients to fit the stories the newspaper wanted to write. He was a vital part of Marco’s success.

That said, he was only able to do his job because the British media was itself suddenly interested, and the media was only suddenly interested because of technical innovations introduced by newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch.

For decades the newspaper industry in Britain had been held to ransom by the print unions, who could—and would—take a title off the streets if they had a dispute with the management. The result was an industry sentenced to decades of chronic unprofitably. Murdoch, inspired by advances in technology, was determined to tackle the problem. After all, as owner of
The Sun, The News of The World, The Times,
and
The Sunday Times,
he had much to gain, not least by a massive reduction in the number of staff needed to print his papers. One night in 1986, after negotiations had collapsed, Murdoch secretly moved his entire newspaper production to a new site across London in the docklands, and sacked all 6,000 of the printers. It resulted in months of violent picketing outside Murdoch’s Wapping headquarters. Eventually the protests collapsed, and soon almost all of Britain’s national newspapers were making plans to introduce the new technology themselves.

This short lesson in British newspaper history is important because of the impact the new technology had on the structure of the newspapers themselves. Before Wapping, a British newspaper was just one section with perhaps a color magazine for the high-end Sundays. Suddenly it was possible to print endless supplements and new sections at greatly reduced cost. The problem was: what to fill them with? Taking their cue from successful early eighties-lifestyle magazines like
The Face
and
Blitz,
newspaper editors across the capital decided the future lay in leisure time.

Food and drink fitted the bill perfectly, not least because it was innovative. It’s true that some of Britain’s glossy monthly magazines had previously run restaurant columns. The model for the British restaurant review, which talked as much about the room and the ghastly people in it as the food, was pioneered by a journeyman writer called Quentin Crewe in the society magazine
Queen
in the 1960s. Crewe, who had muscular dystrophy, had been consigned to a wheelchair since his twenties, and the column, with impressive bad taste, was called “Meals on Wheels.” In the early eighties the novelist Julian Barnes was employed by Tina Brown to write a similar restaurant column for
Tatler
magazine, under a pseudonym, and the
London Evening Standard
ran a column, written first by Quentin Crewe, and then, from 1972, by Fay Maschler (who continues to this day).

Regular restaurant columns were not a feature of Britain’s national press until the mideighties when Paul Levy—one of those credited with coining the term “foodie”—started reviewing a couple a month in
The Observer.
Then, in 1986,
The Times
appointed Jonathan Meades, and the weekly restaurant review was born. Very soon all the (then) broadsheet papers had their own columnists, whose writing fed back to encourage the restaurant sector, which in turn only encouraged the food writers further. The writers were now competing against one another to write the sharpest, most vibrant copy, fully aware that if the reader found their restaurant writing dull, there was always another guy working down the street.

It is this furious competition that distinguishes British restaurant writing from that in America. In the U.S., few cities have more than one or two newspapers and not all of those employ critics. The restaurant critic, therefore, has the place to themselves and, in an often extravagantly profitable business, will have the luxury to visit a restaurant three, four, or five times before handing down judgment, usually in measured tones. Their British counterparts—and there are around a dozen of them—will go once, and then, eager to find a readership, tell it as they find it. No U.S. critic ever alludes in their restaurant reviews to, say, bod
ily fluids, sadomasochism, or the merciless Mongol hordes sweeping across Asia; a British restaurant critic will feel they have failed if they haven’t mentioned at least one of those, if not all three. It led the
New York Times
to announce, in 2003, that the profession in London was pursued by a bunch of “sometimes hilarious, astonishingly brutal restaurant critics who in the last few years have turned English food writing into a blood sport.” I had never been so proud.

And all of this thanks to Murdoch and Thatcher, without whom I would not be able to make a living as a food writer—simply because such a living would not exist, much like many of the restaurants I visit. Still, that doesn’t mean it isn’t also worth acknowledging the deforming influence their involvement has had on the business. A restaurant sector like that in London, which was encouraged, for the most part, by the availability of the money to pay for the experiences it was selling rather than out of some profound interest in food, is bound to give birth to some god-awful monsters. Likewise, the feverish interest of lifestyle journalists, with an insatiable hunger for the next big thing, cannot help but tempt restaurateurs to pursue ever more contrived Unique Selling Points. Over the years in London I have eaten in a restaurant that championed the unique fusion of Italian and Japanese food (risotto eaten with chopsticks, anyone?), another that offered tiny, overwrought French dishes, to be plucked from a sushi conveyor belt, where they had all inevitably cooled to an arctic chill, and a third that made a feature of the hole in the wall beneath the shared sink between the toilets that enabled the women to watch the men pee. Assuming they wanted to.

The most corrosive impact of the forces that shaped London’s restaurant sector, particularly at the top end, was a by-the-numbers approach, which insisted that certain things be done not because they might be, say, fun or even merely pleasant, but because it was a “fine dining” restaurant, and that’s what a joint with that title demanded. With little embedded restaurant tradition to pull upon, there was no real culture of professionalism and precious few skills base in the UK. All the new breed of restaurateur could do was ape what they had seen in France or
the U.S.—and all too often they were about as convincing as a six-year-old girl in mummy’s shoes.