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Smoke Without Fire

Smoked Haddock Tartare

* Le Poulbot was a Roux

brothers outpost in the city

where I first cut my teeth as

a head chef.

**Alan was the doyen of PR

in the restaurant world.

He was a man of great

intelligence and charm,

coupled with an engaging

but dissolute lifestyle.

I was the chef of Le Poulbot* in the mid-1980s, a time when

being a chef was becoming a vaguely trendy, socially

acceptable occupation. Several chefs, including Simon

Hopkinson, Alastair Little, Nico Ladenis and Pierre

Koffmann, were invited to have lunch cooked for them by

the critics. Our hosts were the Blonds, the irreplaceable,

charming publisher Anthony and his equally eccentric

wife Laura, who inhabited an enormous flat in a converted

warehouse somewhere near the river in Bermondsey.

Restaurant critics were then something of a novelty, so

the relatively small brigade was augmented by food writers

and sundry others. Fay Maschler, aided and abetted by

her sister Beth, cooked some delicious lentils. Jonathan

Meades, assisted by Alan Crompton Batt,** cooked a huge

pot of ‘la Sauce’, an Elizabeth David recipe calling for

rabbits, pig’s trotters, chunks of beef and several bottles of

Medoc. Henrietta Green, then about to publish the first

of a series of directories of British food producers, brought

smoked haddock.

I liked the haddock dish so much that I copied it and

put it on the menu. It was a simple but brilliant idea. The

finnan haddock was not cooked, but sliced thinly like

smoked salmon and marinated in lemon juice, olive oil and

herbs. Henrietta had her fishmonger do the slicing and

simply applied the marinade at the appropriate moment.

Despite it being a rather clean, light and healthy dish to

put before such a rackety crowd, Henrietta stole the show.

It was a long lunch, characterised by the lavish

generosity of our hosts coupled with a certain louche and

reckless abandon on the part of both guests and hosts

alike. One critic fell asleep under a sofa, two chefs very

nearly came to blows, Anthony nearly got off with a

certain restaurateur, and I think the party was pretty much

wrapped up by midnight. When I was in Sri Lanka later

that year, people still spoke of the Blonds – who had lived

in Galle, on and off, in the 1980s – with a degree of awe that

was unsullied by the passage of time. Others have revived

the idea of critics cooking for chefs, often proving the old

adage that ‘those who do, do and those who can’t, teach’

but none of those occasions quite matched the brio of that

inaugural event.

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