Читать книгу Frankie Dettori’s Italian Family Cookbook - Frankie Dettori - Страница 6

Frankie

“Sometimes in life we find ourselves in the right place at the right time doing stuff we didn’t imagine we would ever get involved in. The first time I ever met Marco was when I popped into Drones, one of his restaurants in London, for a quick bite before heading home. He was also there having dinner and came over to join us for a glass of wine. The conversation soon turned to food and restaurants.

London is positively teeming with restaurants, there is no doubt about that. Every possible permutation and nationality of cuisine known to mankind is widely available, yet I’d always found it hard to find good family-friendly restaurants which are ‘happy meal’ or kiddie menu-free zones. I suddenly found myself in a heated conversation with Marco. Why aren’t there more restaurants that cater for families? Why don’t the ones that exist serve real food that all the family will love? I don’t serve my kids frozen chicken nuggets at home, so why would I go to a restaurant to pay for the privilege of doing so? And why can’t family restaurants be stylish enough to keep the grown-ups happy but also informal enough so we can relax there with all the kids? What I wanted was a bit of family glamour! Who would have thought that my passionate outcry would be instrumental in bringing a touch of Italian family values and lifestyle to a series of restaurants?

As a jockey I have to be extremely disciplined about what I eat. They say that men think about sex once every seven minutes. Well, not this man! It’s food I can’t stop thinking about. And as I can’t eat what I want when I’m racing, my next favourite thing is to talk food. Doing just that with a charismatic, incredibly knowledgeable, three-starred Michelin chef was, for me, pure paradise. Marco and I spent the next couple of hours coming up with a wish list of what our perfect family restaurant would offer, from the décor and the general feel of the place to which of our favourite family recipes we’d make sure were on the menu. It was a fantastic evening.

I left Marco at Drones around 11pm, having enjoyed some of the best carpaccio I had ever eaten along with a glass of my favourite Italian red wine, Sassicaia. (It was just the one glass, but it meant I had to run an extra fifteen minutes in a ski suit the next morning to burn it off. I kid you not!)

Marco called me the next day. He had, literally overnight, come up with a blueprint for a family restaurant called Frankie’s (how flattering is that?) and asked me to go into business with him. The concept that he had come up with was pure genius and I didn’t hesitate to say ‘I do’. Thus the unlikely marriage of Frankie Dettori, little Italian jockey and (whenever possible) bon viveur, and Marco Pierre White, Michelin-starred chef and infamous raconteur, came to be.

The incredible thing about Marco is that once he has the bones of a great idea he is capable of turning it into a reality in double-quick time. And so it was that Frankie’s was born three months later in Knightsbridge, London, with everything I had been looking for in a family restaurant – and so much more I didn’t even know I’d wanted until I got it.

The décor was entirely down to Marco, as it is with all of his restaurants, for, despite employing an army of designers and experts, ultimately most of the ideas come from him. He has a remarkable eye for detail and seems to know instinctively what works and what doesn’t. For Frankie’s he wanted a classical look that would exude fun with that all-important shot of glamour. He lined every inch of wall space with floor-to-ceiling mirrors then hung six huge glitter balls from the ceiling. The finished product was awesome, a perfect blend of tradition and fun that just oozes glamour.

Everyone fell in love with the four-foot wide glitter balls, me and the kids included. In fact, we liked them so much I nicked one and it’s now hanging in the TV room at home, all four feet of it. My wife Catherine was less than convinced it belongs there, but she was outvoted four to one. Democracy is a wonderful thing, especially when the kids are on your side!

Frankie’s opening night was a star-studded event. Madonna and Guy Ritchie (now regular customers), Claudia Schiffer and Matthew Vaughn, Philip Green and Larry David were there, to name but a few, and from that very first night Frankie’s created a buzz that has increased in volume to a now deafening roar. In the space of two short years we have opened three more Frankie’s restaurants in London: in Selfridges, Chiswick and Putney. We have just opened up in Dubai and Shanghai as well, with plans for Las Vegas in the pipeline. Amazing.

I was in Frankie’s with my brood just a few days ago and when I looked around the restaurant it warmed the cockles of my little Italian heart to see tables of families of all age groups, from grandparents to toddlers, laughing, eating, drinking and having a great time. ‘We’ve done it,’ I thought, ‘now there really is a great restaurant for families.’”

Marco

“The night Frankie popped into Drones for a quick supper was the catalyst for an idea which had been brewing in me for some time: to open a family restaurant that would serve good food with a lot of fun and a little bit of glamour thrown in for good measure. When Frankie and I got talking, I knew I’d found the perfect partner for my venture. His vision of what a good family restaurant should offer and his absolute faith that ‘la famiglia’ is the central component of life mirrored my own. We also had the perfect research group available to us. Between us we had two wives, three grandmothers, two grandfathers and, most important of all, eight kids aged between one and seventeen who all had very clear ideas of their own about what they wanted from a restaurant.

When it came to the menu Frankie and I followed my mother’s philosophy of buying the best and allowing the ingredients to speak for themselves. As well as classical Italian dishes, such as pizza, pasta and the traditional meat and fish, I was also keen to have a good quality burger on the menu along with a few unusual additions, like roast belly of pork and the much underrated calf’s tongue.

Of course, the restaurant business is not just about food: it’s also about entertainment. I wanted to make sure that everyone who ate at Frankie’s would be a little happier when they left than when they came in. With the help of Jean Cristoph, my operations director, and Calum Watson, my executive chef, we turned Frankie’s from an idea into a reality. Two years on, given the amount of families we have coming through the doors every week, it would seem we have achieved our goal.”