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Onwards

Occasionally I wonder – and get asked – how my cooking style has changed over the years. I am also often asked what my favourite restaurant is. These are not easy questions to answer. I have never much favoured fancy, complicated food and I can’t abide food that looks as if it has been in someone’s fingers and hands a lot before arriving at my table. I don’t like teetering towers of grub or artful dribbles of sauce either. It sometimes bothers me how much time we spend at the restaurant in thinking about packaging and presenting a new dish, but this, sadly, comes with the territory. As professional cooks we have a responsibility to make food look presentable – beautiful even – but this should never assume a greater role than that played by the flavour and texture of a dish. I am, however, fairly sure that every chef has been guilty of this cooking crime at some stage in their career. I know I have.

These days I like to read a menu that has been created with thought and, importantly, understanding for a customer’s needs. I enjoy a card where there is real technique and even flair on show, but this should be tempered by the acknowledgement that sometimes a guest might like something a little simpler. I am aware that, with a lot of our clients, it is often the wife (or partner, to be politically correct) who faces the task of choosing where to dine of an evening. A businessman may have just arrived from Heathrow after a long flight and might not have the stomach for a whole load of different proteins tortured to within an inch of their lives. He may just fancy a simple plate of superb San Daniele ham sliced to order. Or perhaps an immaculate green salad. A good menu should offer such alternatives, but alongside more show-stopping dishes that enable the kitchen’s real voice to be heard. Unfortunately, I don’t see many menus displaying these qualities. I come across plenty of ‘impressive’ offerings where the chef is clearly working his (and his brigade’s) socks off to dazzle the clients. But frankly, these places are not for me.

I like to visit restaurants where the front-of-house team plays a part at least as important as that enacted by the chef and the kitchen brigade. Where the wine list is beautifully crafted and where I can seek advice from a knowledgeable, friendly and enthusiastic sommelier or server. Where I am greeted warmly at the door. Where the menu is not bigger than the table. Where the cheeses are expertly chosen and where the selection reflects the region or country in which I am dining. Where I am perhaps offered another table if one doesn’t appeal (although I have never been particularly fussy in this respect). Where I can be confident that all the kitchen’s produce is irreproachably top-notch and where every dish is lovingly and skilfully prepared. If there is a delay, I am understanding, of course, but it is nice to be kept up-to-date by an alert manager. Where I can ask for a simple bowl of vanilla ice cream, if that is what appeals at the end of a meal, without fear of putting the pastry chef’s nose out of joint. Where I don’t need to order dessert at the beginning of the meal. (This practice should be made illegal, by the way, and any establishment advocating such nonsense should be shut down.) Where the chef has elected to put a simple borlotti bean salad on in July because the quality of the beans demands it. And I don’t mean a salad with some beans in it and a dozen other things – I mean a salad that is all about the beans. I like to visit restaurants where there is a brain, or ideally many brains, ticking. And hearts beating. I don’t like fashionable restaurants either, or ones where I have to wear overly smart clothes (as this would almost certainly increase the cost of the meal significantly).

I like a plate of food to taste of what is advertised. If I order turbot, I want lots of expertly cooked turbot and not much else. And certainly not just a piddly portion simply because it is prohibitively expensive. And I will expect to pay accordingly. I dislike the tendency of certain places to offer a putative surfeit of luxury ingredients but none of them with generosity. A plate of food can be generous without being clumsily oversized and I like a place where the chef understands this. I like the bread to be excellent and I couldn’t care less how many varieties are offered – one is fine by me. I don’t mind if the waiter leans across me when serving my wife as long as his hospitality and professionalism are deemed more important than knowing which side to serve from, or that the punt of a Champagne bottle is evidently designed for the thumb of the pourer. If one thumb is so employed, I can usually guess where the other one is!

In short, I like going to places where the chef has something to say. And where the restaurant manager does too. When Anna and I are out and about socially, the two job-related questions I am most often asked are: Who cooks at home? And what is your signature dish? Well, I often cook at home, but it is very simple stuff and I absolutely love it when someone else does it. And I do not have a signature dish, I am glad to say, although enquirers often look disappointed by this response. I hope my food has become simpler over the years, but I suspect I am only partly along the path towards Simplicity. I certainly spend more time these days thinking about which ingredients can be taken off a plate rather than added and I guess that this is at least a step in the right direction.

A lot has happened, of course, since Chez Bruce opened its doors in February 1995. Most importantly, our second and third daughters, Isabel and Francesca, arrived to bolster the Poole brigade. On the business front, my business partners Nigel Platts-Martin and Richard Carr and I have opened two other restaurants together: The Glasshouse in Kew Gardens and La Trompette in Chiswick, both in West London. Running three busy restaurants has its moments, but it is on the whole a highly demanding yet equally rewarding business. I am pleased I am not alone in facing this task and it is always good to have partners who excel in areas where I am weak and this is certainly the case with our partnership. It is a genuine team effort and I am grateful to play my part within it. I could not hope for more astute, supportive, understanding and generally outstanding partners.

For at least ten years I ran Chez Bruce from behind the stoves. This was hugely enjoyable, but increasingly it became more difficult. All any decent Head Chef wants to do is develop his or her team and improve the food. Hopefully this comes hand in hand with a profit line that assumes a pleasing gradient. However, with two other restaurants to worry about, I became frustrated at being pulled in directions that took me away from the Chez Bruce menu and there came a time when I felt the restaurant deserved an individual dedicated to the kitchen alone. Matt Christmas took over the responsibility of the day-to-day running of the kitchen a few years ago now and he has done an outstanding job. Matt is his own man, of course, and is more than capable of writing his own excellent menus. I like to add my tuppence-worth along the way and I feel that the Chez Bruce menu is a genuine and happy collaboration between the two of us – I hope it is more than the sum of its parts. I am grateful for the support Matt and Senior Sous-Chef Samuele Pacini have given me over the years and I look forward to further improving what we do together at the restaurant. There is always so much more to achieve and the food can always be better. I greatly value working with people who understand this.

I am also lucky to work with many outstanding front-of-house individuals and, not forgetting that my earlier catering career started not in the kitchen but in the dining room (or behind a bar and in a beer cellar more accurately), I have always had an obsessive interest in the mechanics of dining-room management. How we look after our guests is absolutely central to our business. The Chez Bruce management and wine teams have done a brilliant job over the years and not always in the easiest of conditions. At least chefs can scream, shout and generally behave badly behind the scenes when things go pear-shaped – no such excess steam valve for dining-room staff. I take my hat off to the whole team. I couldn’t do what they do and I have huge respect for front-of-house staff everywhere. And, of course, thank you to the two magnificent teams at La Trompette and The Glasshouse.

At the time of writing (August 2010), Chez Bruce is shut and undergoing a major refurbishment, the main purpose of which is to install a brand new kitchen, as well as to improve customer facilities. Having the business closed is an odd feeling, but my partners and I are confident that it will make the restaurant even better. I am also enthused at the prospect of working with my staff and feeding our guests in an altogether improved environment. The future is never clear in the restaurant industry, but for this writer at least it holds interest and excitement by the bucketful.

There has to be an easier way of making a living than running a restaurant. I have had to deal with unspeakably unpleasant, rude and, on occasion, violent customers. I have twice been hauled up in front of an Industrial Employment Tribunal. I have endured Inland Revenue Inspections (routine ones, I might add, but stressful all the same) and, like many other chefs, faced the prospect of the Environmental Health Officer marching into the kitchen unannounced to carry out a full inspection in the carnage of a busy service. Many times. I have cooked by candlelight in power cuts, with erupting drains around my feet, in 150-degree heat when the extraction has packed up, and often in serious discomfort due to burns and cuts. I cooked throughout one December whilst suffering from shingles and one summer with a broken collarbone. I have helped police ‘with their enquiries’ on several occasions due to break-ins, and attended the premises in the middle of the night with the alarms going off. I have had the sad honour of speaking at the funeral service of a long-serving employee. Negative and inaccurate restaurant reviews occasionally come with the territory. Staff walk out in the middle of service and so do customers and we have had to call an ambulance to the restaurant on several occasions. And so on and so forth.

But I have dined at Château Latour, drinking only 1959 First Growths (thank you, Steve and Frédéric) and have drunk world-class wines in the chilly cellars of brilliant and modest wine makers. I have worked with incredibly interesting and talented people of all nationalities and from all walks of life. I have seen employees become employers. I have been taught how to carve a pata negra ham by one of the world’s greatest ham producers and gorged on the stuff at his farmhouse in the arid acorn forests of southern Spain. My job has taken me to great restaurants around the globe and I have generally put on weight in my happy pursuit of the perfect meal. I have had the pleasure of serving families from one generation to the next and enjoyed talking Premiership football with one gentleman who visits us weekly. I have experienced motorcycle sprints to Strasbourg for three-star dinners and judged (and learned from) inspirational young chefs in cookery competitions. My spectacles once fell apart when I was cooking on the sauce section and I welded them temporarily with hot caramel. I have even had to down tools due to complete incapacity caused by laughter. Oh, and one customer once complained of there being a naked man in the toilet.

In short, it is not a bad life.