Free The Devil in the Kitchen by Marco Pierre White Page A

come whenever he wanted, at which point he revealed that he was phoning from the public phone box outside the restaurant. Poor Michael had felt nervous about walking into the restaurant. Stage fright or something like that. I ran through the restaurant and greeted my mentor at the door. I sat him at table nine and gave him a grand meal with wine. When service had slowed down, I went out to have a chat with him. “The meal you fed me tonight,” said Michael, “was better than anything we ever did at the Box Tree.” It was a compliment that went some way toward repairing what were then my tarnished memories of that wonderful little restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

SEVEN
    It Was Meant to Be
    I T WAS THE summer of 1981 and I was a nineteen-year-old in a rut, back in Leeds. After my abrupt departure from the Box Tree, I’d been drifting. I took a chef ’s job at Froggie’s, the restaurant of a Leeds casino called the Continental, where the head chef, Jacques Castell, served good old-fashioned food.
    I was a lodger in Moor Allerton, in a house owned by a Spanish woman called Esperanza. This put me in the peculiar and uncomfortable position of living just around the corner from Dad and the house where I had grown up. As Dad and I hadn’t spoken for a few years, and I could not bring myself to resume relations, I found myself having to hide from him.
    Sometimes I would spot him walking down the road and would have to turn away so he didn’t catch sight of me, or scurry away in the opposite direction. I don’t think he ever saw me—I don’t remember cries of “Hey, Marco, what the hell are you doing here?” He had no idea that we were living within a few hundred yards of one another. I feel very sad about it now. It was a ridiculous situation.
    I had to escape Leeds. I had escaped once, albeit only the short distance to Harrogate and then Ilkley, and had gone back to Leeds because I knew it, but once I was there, I saw the city in a different light. I didn’t like it any longer. As a child I’d often felt I didn’t fit in there; now I fitted in even less. I had caught a glimpse of life outside the city.
    I applied for two jobs. The job I really wanted was at Le Gavroche, the two-star Michelin restaurant in the heart of London. Box Tree staff had talked romantically about this fine establishment in the capital. Albert Roux, Gavroche’s chef patron, was hailed as an excellent cook. The press, the critics and customers loved his classical French food. It is fair to say that Albert Roux and his brother Michel—who ran the Michelin-starred Waterside Inn—were the most talked about chefs at the time. Or they were in Yorkshire, at least.
    So I set my sights on Gavroche and phoned to ask for an application form. Around about the same time, however, I heard of a pastry chef vacancy at Chewton Glen, a country house hotel that sits on the edge of the New Forest in New Milton, Hampshire (today it is considered one of England’s finest small hotels).
    When a letter arrived from Le Gavroche, I opened it excitedly, knowing it would be the application form. But when I pulled out the form, my heart sank. Every single question was written in French and I imagined that the responses were expected to be in the same language. I thought it was the Roux way of saying that they would take chefs of any nationality, as long as they were French. I didn’t speak a word of French, so I concluded, alas, that I would have to rule out Le Gavroche. I chucked the application form into the bin. I pinned my hopes on Chewton Glen and was delighted when the head chef, Christian Delteuil, invited me to the South Coast for a job interview.
    On Thursday, June 18, 1981, I took the coach from Leeds to Victoria coach station in London, traveled across the capital to Waterloo station and from there caught the train to New Milton. There was nothing particularly memorable about the interview. I liked the head pastry chef, a nice old boy, but I don’t