Читать книгу Bruce’s Cookbook - Bruce Poole - Страница 7
ОглавлениеLife Before Chez Bruce
My parents were both teachers and as a family we all profited from long school holidays. Before Dad bravely branched out solo as a portrait painter, we relied on his salary from Wimbledon School of Art and although we were rich in time during the long summer break, there certainly was not enough cash around to send our family of five away on fancy, exotic holidays. Luckily, my parents took the view that it was better to experience longer journeys in a caravan than shorter, hotel-based trips. This meant that we were able to go away for at least a month at a time and over the years we visited France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, northern Italy, Austria and what was then Yugoslavia – my two brothers and I scrapping and arguing pretty well the whole way. Conditions weren’t always easy or comfortable (particularly for Mum and Dad – it can’t have been much of a holiday for them on occasion), but we had many memorable and enjoyable adventures.
France became our main country of choice and, interestingly, the vast majority of my own memories of these holidays are based around food. I am no longer able to separate one French campsite from another, or even, sadly, one stunning medieval town from the next, but my first experience as an eight year old of eating rabbit (braised with white wine and mustard, served with sauté potatoes) at a dusty, roadside Routiers café in Provence was etched razor-sharp in my little brain. I remember eating snails, coq au vin and frogs’ legs for the first time too and, far from providing the squeamish stuff of childhood dining nightmares, I recall them being delicious. Melons, courgettes, aubergines, figs, paté and apricots were all firsts for me on these trips and, to stock up the caravan’s galley before moving on, we would visit local food markets, practising our crude linguistic skills as we went. I remember the boulangeries and the faded, crumbling, fake mosaic fascias of the charcuterie and butcher shops, their beaded curtains rattling lazily in the hot sunshine.
My parents’ sterling efforts at instilling some culture into their squabbling kids did not go entirely wasted and the magnificent splendours of the Loire châteaux of Chambord, Cheverny, Amboise and Azay-le-Rideau all left their mark. But no more so than the fascination I experienced at the window of one of Tour’s exclusive patisseries, as I gazed mesmerised by the jewel-like chocolates and exquisite pastries on offer. I had never seen anything like this before in Blighty and the sheer quality and breadth of food available in Europe, and particularly France, made a big impression on me.
At the age of thirteen I went to boarding school and in one startling moment it dawned upon me that food at school was not going to be like the stuff Mum cooked at home. All kids complain of school food – mine are no different – but the tosh we endured was truly terrible. I recall scrambled eggs and tinned tomatoes for breakfast. This is a combo I actually enjoy today, but the egg component of this school preparation resembled a raft of cold, yellow polystyrene, so overcooked was it. In fact, I am convinced that nicely seasoned polystyrene would have tasted better. One particularly odious lunchtime main course was entitled ‘Chicken à la King’ and, without exception, the realisation that this little number featured on the day’s bill of fare at the dining hall brought howls of protest from us all. Its name made us snigger too, as it was evidently neither a dish fit for royalty nor did it contain any chicken. There were, however, huge hunks of skin floating amid the thick floury sauce and one had to trawl carefully through it to avoid them.
The conspiracy theorists amongst the boys (and there were many) dreamt up the patently untrue notion that the school’s Catering Manager was as corrupt as could be and the fact that he drove an improbably flash, new car was all the proof we needed that he was on the take. Clearly, we surmised, he used to go to the considerable trouble of buying hundreds of whole chickens, boning and skinning them under the cover of night and using the flabby detritus for us hapless, hard-working and undernourished kids. The real meat he would siphon off by means of his car’s capacious boot and sell at a tidy profit. We were on to his evil shenanigans and had the sting to catch him all planned out. Somehow we just never got around to following this through and all thoughts of revolution were soon forgotten once we were booting a football around the muddy playing fields or jumping up and down to the latest AC/DC album in our dormitories.
I do not recall being particularly into cookery at this time. I quite liked making cakes at home and my love of drop scones, chocolate rice crispy cakes and melting moments probably stems from this era or before. At school we certainly ate a lot of toast and the stocking up of one’s tuck box took on immense importance and was carried out with military precision at the end of holiday periods. I took a year off between school and university, five months of which were spent travelling around South America where I remember most of the food being stodgy, very hot and cheap. I do recall working out the exchange rate of Ecuadorian pesos to reveal that an avocado cost the equivalent of 2p. By this stage I was also drinking quite a lot of beer and I was made-up to learn that a litre bottle cost about 18p. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that I did not root out this fantastic continent’s finer dining establishments and that, as an impressionable eighteen year old, I was far more interested in Brazilian skirt and cheap lager than proper restaurants.
The subsidised beer theme continued at university. During my three years at Exeter, I not only met the lovely girl who would later become my wife (Anna), I also started to discover a real interest in cooking. The kitchen facilities in the rented accommodation I shared with my mates in the middle year were not dissimilar to the conditions encountered by the cast of The Young Ones, but I used them to knock out respectable spaghetti, risottos and roast chicken and I even had a crack at a bouillabaisse once. To attempt this scary-sounding Provençale fish soup, my friend Gary and I visited an Exeter fishmonger to obtain the ingredients, one of which was a whole John Dory. We had never seen one of these before and, judging by the rank and smelly condition of this grubby specimen, neither had the cowboy fishmonger. We binned the dory (and ended up binning the bin), but the soup turned out a treat. To conclude this memorable culinary soiree, the dessert chosen was made from a recipe I found in a throw-away supermarket cookbook. It came by the unpromising title of prune whip. I like to think that my menu-writing skills at least have improved since those halcyon beer-fuelled days and nights.
The standard of my amateur cooking remained resolutely amateurish, but gradually improved as I studied at Westminster Hotel and Catering College. Aged about twenty-one, I spent a year there on a conversion course designed to encourage graduates in unrelated disciplines (my degree was in History, hardly a fast track into the higher echelons of the hospitality industry) to apply for ‘management’ positions in hotels and the like. Although this was not a cookery course per se, I increasingly found myself reading about food and restaurants in my spare time. Any extra cash I had was spent in restaurants, usually sampling the cheap set-lunch option accompanied by tap water. Part-time work helped boost the food fund and one Christmas holiday job was at an exclusive butcher’s shop in West London, where I was appalled to learn that the ‘fresh free-range Norfolk turkeys’ sold at a considerable premium to the well-heeled local residents queuing at the door were nothing of the sort, but, in fact, frozen birds defrosted the previous night on the shop’s fake sawdust floor. It was a tawdry and eye-opening introduction to the world of commercial retail catering – a valuable lesson in how not to do things. The butcher’s shop in question is long gone, I am glad to say.
After Westminster College, I was taken on as a trainee manager by the Scottish Glasgow-based hotel group Stakis. This organisation has since been swallowed up by The Hilton Group, but at the time had a sound reputation for its management training and I received the shock of my life upon being thrown into the boiling ferment of a busy city-centre hotel. My posting was to The Stakis Grand Hotel in Stoke-on-Trent (or Hope-on-Trent, as I unkindly called it in letters home) and this three-star place relied heavily on the conference and banqueting business generated by the commerce from the neighbouring pottery towns. ‘Trainee Manager’ was a euphemism for dogsbody and this green dog was chucked behind the bars – and there were quite a few of them. I did a great deal of bar and cellar work and quickly became used to the idea that as a junior ‘manager’ one was expected to put in considerably more hours than just about anyone else in the building – anywhere between seventy and eighty hours a week was perfectly normal and more during December. The weight fell off me as I literally ran up and down the staircases of this imposing Victorian edifice going about my many duties and for this I was paid the princely sum of £5,500 per annum. Very basic live-in accommodation was part of the very basic package.
We worked and played hard at The Grand and I learned the ropes quickly. However, hotel life was not really for me and after eighteen months of vertiginous learning curve, and having been asked once too often to dress up in a fluffy squirrel outfit to pose as Cyril, the company mascot, I wanted to get back to London. More importantly, I wished to work specifically in restaurants. Le Café St Pierre on Clerkenwell Green, EC1 received its new Junior Assistant Manager in the spring of 1987. During my eighteen months at the restaurant I immersed myself in the London restaurant scene by eating out as much as my rota and salary would allow and extending my overdraft when it wouldn’t. For the first time, British-born chefs were earning the headlines and Rowley Leigh at Kensington Place, Simon Hopkinson at Bibendum and Alastair Little at his eponymous restaurant in Soho were all presiding over the stoves at red-hot ticket destinations. Le Gavroche had three Michelin stars, Anton Mosimann and Nico Ladenis each had two apiece and there were other young and driven British chefs like Marco Pierre White, David Cavalier, Gary Rhodes and Gary Hollihead making names for themselves and earning their first stars. I visited all these places and many more and simply could not get enough of eating out – I had become a restaurant junky and London felt like the centre of the restaurant universe to me, always on hand to deliver the fix I craved.
The place I was working at in EC1 was good enough and provided me with a decent salary, but increasingly it was the kitchen I became more interested in. I had also witnessed the comings and goings of a few head chefs and the serious headaches this had caused the owner. I knew that I would one day want to run my own restaurant and felt that it might be safer to do so from the engine room of the kitchen. Besides, I have now worked with enough highly professional dining-room staff to understand that dealing with customers directly was, perhaps, never going to be my true métier!
With this restlessness beginning to take seed, Anna and I planned a trip to Paris. I had read a captivating restaurant review by Matthew Fort (then reviewer for the Guardian) of Joël Robuchon’s restaurant Jamin, at 16 Rue de Longchamps. Having read Matthew’s beautifully written piece over and over again, I felt simply compelled to go. Robuchon’s restaurant didn’t merely live up to expectations, it just blew me away. It was easily the best meal I had eaten up to that point, and to this day I have never enjoyed a finer feast. I still recall everything about the place. The waiter was brilliant at his job too and I will always remember how he sliced the (very large, very crusty) loaf of bread to accompany cheese by touching it with nothing other than a fork, spoon and carving knife. He also showed true compétences relationelles by patiently tolerating my schoolboy French as I clumsily ordered two tasting menus. There was a little bit of clunky banter between us up until the arrival of the main course: the magnificent stuffed pigeon with the chef’s famously rich creamed potato. The waiter fired me a question and this time I was flummoxed. Totally stumped. He asked again, a little slower. Toujours rien – I had well and truly fallen. He waited just the right length of time before picking me up gently by asking in perfect English: ‘Would you like some mashed potatoes?’
And, of course, Monsieur Robuchon’s spuds were legendarily good, as was each and every dish. The desserts were superb too (the French still leave us standing when it comes to patisserie) and just after we had finished the pudding course from the seven-course tasting menu, my new English-speaking chum wheeled up a hitherto unseen and magnificent dessert trolley. I had never seen anything like it: such technique, beauty, precision and generosity. The lunch was both terribly expensive and terribly cheap at the same time. We kind of floated out of the place, feeling well and truly restored, just as one should considering the provenance of the word ‘restaurant’. And when I had properly sobered up, I was determined to learn how to cook professionally – not because I harboured any daft misconception that I would be able to cook like Robuchon himself, but because I simply wanted to be a better cook.
By now I had been promoted to Restaurant Manager, after the departure of my predecessor. Although I was flattered to be offered this senior role at a relatively young age and learned a lot from the experience, I finally decided to take the plunge and, at the ripe old age of twenty-five and a bit, I wrote letters to what I considered to be the ten best restaurants in London at the time, asking for a job as a chef. I received several encouraging replies and following an interview conducted by Simon Hopkinson at Bibendum, I was offered a job there. Naturally, I was thrilled. I had been working for three years front-of-house in both hotels and restaurants and I was certainly used to the gruelling hours and not afraid of hard work. However, I was about to meet the next severe reality check head-on. And at full velocity.
I both disliked and loved working at Bibendum in my nearly two years there. Or more accurately, I hated it at first and then learned slowly to enjoy it, but it was an arduous and painful process. Anna (now my wife) and I had discussed at length the impact this change of career would have on us both and I had promised myself that come hell or high water I would complete a year with my smart new Knightsbridge employer, assuming I wasn’t first given the bullet. I was seconded to the Larder section (where the salads and cold starters are prepared) and the first thing that struck me was the pace at which everything happened and the intense levels of concentration needed to keep up. My first few weeks were a total blur of preparing vegetables, salads, picking crabs (the cooked meat out of the bodies, that is), cleaning fridges, meat slicers and just about everything else and all under the watchful eye of Simon Hopkinson. Nothing was ever clean enough, good enough or fast enough and it was all rather demoralising.
I had enjoyed the Manager’s considerable perk of a night taxi home after work at Le Café St Pierre – no such luxury here, of course. My two brothers were both experienced motorcyclists and I was not, but it was clear that I needed some form of two-wheeled motorised transport, as I lived too far away from work to contemplate cycling and was permanently too knackered to pedal anyway. I asked my brother Eddie for help and he duly obliged, but not before drawing upon the combination of his profound motorcycling knowledge and considerable sense of humour. The second-hand moped he chose for me was none other than a Honda Vision and for those not au fait with motorbikes, this was just about the smallest, slowest, girliest 50cc bike on the market at the time. It was designed for petite, sixteen-year-old hairdressing apprentices, not a six-foot-two lump like me. And Eddie knew it. And, my word, did he laugh as he wheeled it out from the back of his van. I used and abused this thing for a year and clearly remember it almost coming to a standstill every time I summited the lofty peak of Twickenham Bridge over the Thames. But it did the trick and it enabled me to hold down my first chef’s job.
I very nearly didn’t last the course at Bibendum and seriously thought about jacking it all in on several occasions. The work was hard, there were frequent bollockings and I simply was not good enough to feel like a worthwhile member of the team – and working in a high-class kitchen is all about teamwork. I was the twenty-six-year-old novice and there were a few in the talented, young brigade who were quick to remind me of the fact. I couldn’t believe how relentless it all was – there was just so much work to do. All the time. And the boxes of shellfish, salad leaves, herbs, poultry, fish, dry goods and the rest just kept on coming and coming in an endless wave of exhausting graft.
To make matters even harder (or more interesting, depending on your viewpoint), Simon liked to change the lunchtime menu every day and I was often preparing dishes I had never seen before. On one occasion I was told to put a poached egg salad on the menu. As I had been off the previous day, some of the mise en place for this special, including the poached and refreshed eggs, was already in my fridge – great; one less job to do. I got the rest of the gear together for the salad and served at least a dozen lovingly dressed and plated salads during the frantic lunch service. Simon was as usual cooking the main courses and after lunch he came over to me and asked me how I had got on with the new warm salad. Warm? Shit. Where had I been reheating the poached eggs, he asked? I had thought the idea of stone-cold poached eggs was a little odd to be honest, but no-one had told me any differently and, judging by the dearth of complaints, the poor customers were none the wiser either. Mr Hopkinson was not amused and I received a full-throttle hairdryer rollocking. But by this stage, I was used to them, as we all were, and they were simply part and parcel of kitchen life.
After six weeks working alongside the cold-starter chef as his commis, I was left to run the section on my own. This was quite a scoop for me, but at the same time the pressure was ramped up several notches. I just about survived and began to slowly find my feet and after a while I was moved to the pastry section and, from there, around the other sections of the kitchen before ending up on the most prestigious of all – the main course or sauce department. After that, it was time to move on. Simon was and continues to be a highly intelligent, articulate and brilliant cook. I have huge professional respect for him and have always been grateful for the opportunity he afforded me. I am glad to say that Bibendum is still a great restaurant and marches on true to its roots in the capable hands of Matthew Harris. It also benefits from arguably London’s most beautiful dining room and I cannot think of a more enjoyable venue for lunch. In fact, just writing this makes me want to book a table there right now.
To this day I am still friendly with some of the lads there with whom I grafted. One such chum is Phil Howard and when Phil went off to forge his own glittering career at The Square in St James’s, I asked if he might have any vacancies in the kitchen. Life at The Square was even harder than at Bibendum – it was a madhouse. We did nothing but work and I had to ask Anna for even more patience as we hardly saw each other and on my days off I rarely emerged from an utterly spent vegetative state. The days simply whirred past in a frantic and pressurised smear of time. It is fair to say that Phil ran the kitchen with less discipline than I was used to, but the sheer demands his menu imposed made life severe for the brigade. But we knocked out some seriously cracking food and by this stage my confidence as a cook had grown somewhat because I now knew that I could hold down just about any section in a highly demanding kitchen.
I passed my motorcycle test and, armed with a full licence, once again asked Eddie the Oracle for advice on an upgrade. A Honda CB 450 became the commuting steed of choice for my time at The Square and although it was by no means what one would call a cool bike, with its extra grunt it was a welcome relief from the series of mopeds, step-throughs and 125s I had become embarrassingly inured to. One afternoon between lunch and dinner services, I rushed home on the bike to attend a much-needed dentist’s appointment and came a cropper on an oil-slicked bend opposite the Budweiser brewery in Mortlake. As I slithered across the road and then righted myself and bent machine, it soon became obvious I had bust my hand. All I could think about, however, was getting in touch with Phil to give him time to arrange cover for the evening service. All you ever think about as a chef is the food – the menu, the menu, the bloody menu – it is a pervading and ineluctable presence. I telephoned the kitchen from the brewery’s reception office to tell the lads the bad news. With my arm in plaster in the ensuing days and weeks, I was of little use at work, but I still reported for duty all the same and recall becoming particularly nifty at peeling calf’s brains, as this job required little dextrous use of the fingers in one hand.
I was now about thirty and it was time to move on once more. Anna and I were still living in Twickenham and there was a locally well-known little French bistro in Hampton Wick called Le Petit Max, run by two eccentric twins, Marc and Max Renzland. We loved going there and it had become our favourite restaurant. The place was run as a greasy spoon by day (by two equally eccentric ladies) and as a serious, but informal place at night. It had no liquor licence and we would take along lots of wine and eat lots of really delicious bourgeois French food and we got to know the twins reasonably well – occasionally talking shop late into the night behind the steamed-up windows. Marc cooked and Max looked after the customers and when they realised that I was thinking of leaving The Square, they offered me a job at a new restaurant they were setting up near the Fulham Road. The timing of this offer worked well and after a short period of deliberation I decided to go with it.
I left The Square in January 1994 and, before my next job, Anna and I took a week off and rented a little cottage in the Lake District. We did some walking, but mainly chilled out in front of the fire since the weather was particularly foul. One wet, bleak morning I togged up and walked the half mile into Hawkshead, the nearest village, to buy a newspaper and, once back at the house, came across an article on the new Michelin guide, which had just been published. Phil had earned his first Michelin star and I was beside myself with excitement. I had to congratulate him and ran back through the pissing rain to the public phone box in the town square (no mobiles in those days) and we enjoyed the moment together – him in his hot, sweaty subterranean dungeon I knew so well and me in a rain-battered call box in a remote Cumbrian village. It is one of those happy memories one never forgets and was made all the sweeter by the knowledge that the hard work from all concerned had been rightly rewarded.
Chez Max in Ifield Road was my first experience of a brand new restaurant opening. Marc had recruited a fairly small kitchen team and, as there appeared to be little in the way of structure or hierarchy within the fledgling brigade, I was sort of shoved unwittingly into the position of sous-chef, alongside Marc, who wrote the opening menu. As the twins continued to operate the bistro in Hampton Wick, they would shuttle between the two sites and when a staff shortage demanded that Marc return to Le Petit Max to cook, I soon found myself in charge at Chez Max. Within less than two weeks of the opening night, I was, in effect, the Head Chef and was writing the menu with my new sous-chef (and now good friend) Rob Jones. The twins were well connected and the restaurant received rave reviews. We were subsequently bombed every night and cranking out large numbers with a small crew was demanding. Anna and I had just had our first daughter, Charlotte, but the job just consumed me totally and once again I found myself putting in fierce hours – sometimes sleeping on the restaurant banquettes at night in an attempt to get more of the shut-eye I longed for. It was tough for both Anna and me, but at last I felt able to start expressing myself as a cook and was soon coming up with new dishes, which to my surprise, customers seemed to enjoy.
I was recruiting staff, processing the orders, writing the rotas, organising the kitchen porters and changing the menu regularly, alongside cooking on the meat and fish section, and we certainly had no extra hands at that time to run the pass or oversee proceedings. There were some hairy nights and one in particular comes to mind when one of the managers, who was known to enjoy a drink, failed to show for work after he got boozed up in a nearby pub during his afternoon break. There was no other senior member of staff trained to take orders, we were fully booked and the night went predictably and horribly pear-shaped. Hungry and thirsty customers were coming into the kitchen to complain of long waits and I had to bite my lip as irate punters offloaded on me with gusto – all I was trying to do was to cook decent food! On the same night I lost it with one especially unhelpful member of staff and as I downed tools to vociferously berate the hapless guy at full volume and with suitably robust language, I suddenly had the uncomfortable feeling that I was being watched. Sure enough, as I turned around there was a poor guest who had come to the kitchen simply looking for service and, instead of receiving any, he was met with a decidedly ugly and unprofessional scene. It was all part of the learning curve I suppose – character-building, one might say.
Alongside the painful management-learning tangent, I was at last able to start discovering my own cooking style. Simon Hopkinson’s simple but exactingly accurate approach had made a big impression on me and I tried to pursue a similar path. There were plenty of French classics on the Chez Max menus, but a few of my own numbers appeared too. I have always loved charcuterie and it was exciting to shamelessly push these preparations centre stage. We boned out whole rabbits (a fiddly process), brined them and made ballotines. I enjoyed serving them as a starter with old-fashioned, mustardy celeriac rémoulade and toasted buttery brioche. We made loads of other terrines too and foie gras mousses, cured our own duck breasts and boiled up pigs’ heads and trotters for fromage de tête and croquettes. I then combined the whole lot on a huge plate and christened it rather pompously ‘Grande Assiette de Charcuterie Chez Max’. (This inevitably turned into an even bigger plate at Chez Bruce where the same theme developed…) I kept the desserts simple but immaculate. More classic beauties were filched from the French pastry kitchen: tartes Tatin, tartes fine, custards, bavarois, brûlées, mousses, truffe au chocolat, fresh fruit sablés, pure ice creams and lots of pastry. Always lots of buttery pastry – I loved the stuff and still do. The critics used words like ‘gutsy’, ‘trencherman’ and ‘bourgeois’ and we received positive reviews, but I felt these adjectives slightly missed the point. It was pure food I aimed for, not messed about with, but with great attention to detail. ‘Refined Rustic’ I liked to call it quietly.
But exploratory culinary frolicking in the workplace can only exist sustainably within a stable business. As the restaurant’s investors turned on each other and suppliers stopped turning up due to ‘cashflow problems’, I could see the writing on the wall and wanted out. Nigel Platts-Martin owned The Square restaurant where I had worked previously and he dined at Chez Max occasionally. He liked the food evidently (ordering the deep-fried calf’s brains with sauce gribiche on one occasion I seem to recall) and was looking to recruit a chef to head up his other restaurant, Harveys on Bellevue Road, Wandsworth Common. Marco Pierre White had made Harveys a London – in fact, European – destination restaurant with his scintillating and brilliantly executed modern food, but he had moved on a couple of years previously and by the time Nigel approached me with the possibility of taking on the mantle there, I must confess I was not especially excited by the prospect. The place’s reputation had, understandably, taken a bit of a knocking and I had no wish to add my name to the growing list of those who had presided over the stoves since Marco’s departure.
I went to meet Nigel and we talked about the restaurant’s prospects. Initially I was not terribly keen on the site myself. At the time, Nigel had his hands full with the burgeoning success of The Square, so when he suggested that I take on a broader role and effectively run the place from the kitchen, I became more taken with the project. He was also convinced that the good people of SW17 were crying out for a more informal but high-quality concept, the kind of model I naturally favour and had seen work at Ifield Road, and so the idea began to take shape. The name Chez Bruce was his idea and it seemed a fitting watershed to herald the passing of the old and the dawning of the new. I was slightly uncomfortable with the name, to be honest, but it struck me as a promising, albeit slightly risky way of furthering my career. After a fair bit of thought, we shook hands on a deal and I was on board. Harveys’ final day of trading was New Year’s Eve 1994. The restaurant then shut for a six-week period during which the dining room was thoroughly refurbished to create a fresh and more relaxed feel. Smaller tables and chairs were installed, they were covered with paper tablecloths and Chez Bruce opened for business in February 1995.
