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CUISINE DU MOI
GAVIN CANARDÉAUX AS TOLD TO BEN CANAIDER
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First published in Australia and New Zealand in 2008 Copyright © Ben Canaider 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com The Cataloguing-in-Publication entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia: Cuisine du Moi ISBN 978-1-74175-607-4 Text design by saso content & design pty ltd Typeset in FCaslon 12 ITC by 1000 monkeys Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1. The Chef: The Executive Chef de Chef, Gavin Canardéaux 7
I N F U S I E R P R I NT E M P S
AU X
G AV I N 25
2. The Ingredients: The hit list of top ingredients, mostly bio-dio-orgo, and often grown by Canardéaux himself 29
C O N S O M M É A L P H A B ETI Q U E 55
3. The Menu: Seasonal, sustainable, non-carbonemitting and never containing any prices 59
W AY G U B U RY G U 81
4. The Restaurants: Cuisine du Moi, Le Auxerre de Gavoir Faux, Lad Gav, Ricky’s Sportsbar and Steakhouse Hamburger Grill and Bar 87
D E - R E - U N - C O N ST RU CT E D T- B O N E F O A M 105
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5. L’attitude : Being a chef and a celebrity and a corporate citizen 109
C A N AR D É AU X
DE
C A N AR D É AU X 131
6. The Man: A more personal view of Canardéaux, by Gavin Canardéaux 135
G L AC I E R L’ E AU M E R 155
7. The Critics & The Media: What others say about G.P. Carnardéaux. ‘It is hearts and minds, not PR ...’ 159
Conclusion 179
Acknowledgements 181
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Introduction
What does food mean to you?
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William Shakespeare once said that if you showed him what people ate, he could show you what sort of cars people deserved to drive. Then—as now—he is right. We take so much for granted in these times. We fail to grasp the lessons and learnings of earlier generations; we put aside classic recipes and wholesome food as easily as we throw another Shakespeare Nintendo game into the recycling bin. Which is why I will not let my two gorgeous little daughters—Aga and Moulinex— play any of their Shakespeare Nintendo Tennis Combat Challenge DVDs before they’ve had a proper afternoon tea of cucumber sandwiches and Pimm’s. Discipline is key to parenting, of course, as it is essential to any kitchen or restaurant. I could be everyone’s friend at any one of my restaurants around the world, just as I could be best buddy to my two gorgeous daughters, but that wouldn’t get me anywhere. Chaos would reign supreme. ‘Doing-things-my-way’ has become a bit of a mantra in my homes and at work, vis-à-vis Canardéaux restauranting and
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domesticity. But, look, don’t get me wrong. What I mean to say is that I love my restaurants and my family. I’m even pretty keen on my current French wife at the moment! (Only joking, or making the joke, Roxanne!) But you need a firm hand. The constant pursuit of excellence in my role as an icon chef in troubled times is something that I do not take lightly. Sure, I’ve got a sense of humour, but some things are more important than the making of the joke, Roxanne ... Life might well seem absurdly perfect for me and my current wife and two gorgeous daughters, and my restaurants may very well be the pinnacle of what now passes for unsurpassed restaurant excellence in an ongoing environment of hospitality awareness, but that doesn’t change the fact that I am a very down-to-earth, easygoing sort of guy. I love nothing more than getting into one of the kitchens at one of my homes and getting the girls to muck in as I throw together some photographically and effortlessly amazing chok-choy stir-fry salad with a medley of sea urchin eggs in a pasta al forno of goat’s cheese and aubergine tagine. Aubergine tagine. The girls love that. They laugh! ‘Aubergine tagine, Daddy,’ they say in perfect unison. ‘It rhymes!’ And you see what I am trying to get at. If you feed your children lovingly and honestly and with a TV crew in attendance, well, they grow up to be smarter than other kids. It’s not rocket science. Thank you for buying this book, because it will change your life—and make your children better than other children.
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And if you haven’t bought it yet—like if you are only perusing it at the bookstore, killing time because you can’t afford a proper nanny to look after your kids—then fuck off to the register and pay some proper fucking money for this book. Book prices don’t make people cheap; people make people cheap. Thanks again for all your letters and emails, and thanks for making food the number one ingredient in your life! Mon amore e bon petit et mis en plais! Gav G.P. Canardéaux Manhattan, 2008
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Chapter 1
The Chef My name is Gavin Canardéaux. But you know that.
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I am the world’s leading über icon chef. My restaurants, my food, my signature dishes and my approach to food in general have all fundamentally changed how we now eat. My name is a by-word for cooking, for eating, for feeding, for family, for easy and for stunningly and aspirationally gorgeous fabulousness. My name more or less means fantastic food you can whip up at home in a hurry in under twenty minutes—and for under twenty euros. It is food to feed the people you think might be important to you, at least tonight. It is food you can also easily photograph, which is what so many home cooks are doing today. Yet I digress. Gavin Canardéaux. That’s just a name. This book is more than that. Think of it this way: I want you to call me, and to think of me, as Gav. Not so much your friend in the kitchen, but your mentor, your older brother, your lover, your uncle, your parole officer and your plastic surgeon. For no matter what you attempt to do in your kitchen, and no matter how much you ruin the ridiculous ingredients you buy, I will always be here to tell you how much you’ve fucked up. Read
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this book as if I am looking over your shoulder. Read this book and use this book under the pretence that I’m only ever just a short and speedy cab ride away. Read this book and you will understand why chefs are the most important people in the world today. Without them nothing else would function or exist. There would be no lunch, no lubrication, no misdemeanours and nothing for the paparazzi to photograph. Read this book and you will see what it is to be mesmerised by food, and by advertising, and by self-esteem issues. But have I given too much away already? No, no; not at all. This chapter is about the chef. About what it takes and makes and breaks to be a chef. But not just a chef; an über chef. A master. An icon. Someone through whose veins runs pure passion d’cuisine. And this is how it starts ...
I grew up on farms on each major continent. With my
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father, my mother, my aunty, my uncle, my half-sister, and my mother’s old friend Doris in the Transvaal. From the age of eighteen months to the age of eighteen years, the world was my oyster. And my leg of mutton, my venison haunch, my wild rabbit, my line-caught salmon, my force-fed goose, my delicate mouthful of ortolan. So it is no small wonder that when I was little I wanted to become a vet. All those animals constantly being mustered,
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caged, neutered and slaughtered. But as the years went by I realised that whenever an animal died you could not only eat it, but you could sell it too. Cute furry animals appeal to kids, but bank balances appeal to the grown-ups—and I grew up. I went to China; I went to Australia; I went to America. I even went to Wales. I went anywhere where food was the most important part of the culture. I wanted to turn my body into a sort of Noah’s Ark for the best culinary traditions and practices. A storehouse for the best food in the world. But it would also be a storehouse with a difference. But this philosophy is something that kids and even children pick up all so easily. Call it innocent naivety, if you will, but I call it genetic predisposition. And environment, of course. Get two attractive and intelligent people together in an unspoiled and very photogenic part of the world where property values are still relatively unrealised and you will soon have offspring ready to grab the baton. That’s what I did, I guess. And my parents are so terribly proud of me. I took what they gave me and I ran. I never looked back. I send them Christmas cards, of course, but that’s about it. Home life was where my CdM began. By this acronym I mean Cuisine du Moi, of course—or Cuisine du Passion, as it’s known at the Culinary Institute of America’s Metaphysical Learning Centre. I mean Center. That is CdP. But I know all of my readers know all of this already! So: early home life. Let’s get back to that. I’m lucky, I guess, because I remember the very first dinner I ever attended as a guest. I was seven hours old and my father came into the hotel room I was staying in and said to me, in his
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customarily reserved and soi-distant tone, ‘Gavin, avec moi voulex le tableau per le chance-ay le dine avec l’mother et moi?’ I played it all a little cool. I was new in town, and I wasn’t going to throw myself at the first dinner invitation that came my way. You know, I see a lot of young kids in the hospitality business do this, and I always think to myself, thank God I played it cool that night with Dad at l’Hotel Front Canal. But I measured it all up and then I thought to myself, well, how many opportunities will I have in life to enjoy a simple dinner with my parents? So I graciously accepted the invitation and my father and I smoked a pre-dinner Monte Cristo #47 and a half as I fixed a couple of dry Martinis. But enough of my past. Dinner that night in the rightly famous Le Souillé Pantalon was a revelation. I guess you could say that it really opened my eyes to what food could do for people, and to people, and despite people. My mother had a green salad that she did not touch; she mostly spent her time smoking a packet of Davidoff cigarettes. (I believe the maitre’d temporarily left his post to buy the packet for Madame across the road at the tabac.) My father ordered the charcuterie plate, sans pâté, galantine, sausage, terrine, cornichons, rillettes, crépinettes or ham—he just wanted the pickled cherries. Having only hours before been born, I was that hungry I could’ve eaten road kill—which is organic, of course, so it is fine for babies. The amuse-bouche was creamed cauliflower atop a fine wafer below a slice of smoked scallop. Manners dictate that an amusebouche must be eaten in two bites, but I let manners hang. Gulp! It went straight down. Dinner then seemed to progress quickly, as if in some sort of dream state. Or maybe it was the wine—
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a Moulin-à-Vent followed by the Beaucastel en magnum? My entrée was a dozen snails in a garlic sauce; the main was entrecôte with petit pois and gratin dauphinois, which I thought was a cheeky side dish to order, given I was a baby, or the dauphin ... It was just a pity there was no dolphin on the menu, I guess. I’m sure that would have got a wry smile out of my taciturn father. But I am mentally now wandering. The effect of the dinner? I felt humbled by the experience. I felt enlivened. I felt full. But I also felt enraged. I was enraged because whilst I was being feted and charmed and photographed at this amazingly simple yet perfect restaurant, there were people my own age in other parts of the world—like West Korea, East Samoa and sub-tropical Argentina—who weren’t getting the same sort of restaurant-quality food and beverages as I was. That’s the moment, I guess; that’s the moment when I knew. That’s the moment when I told Mum to stop fucking well mollycoddling me and let me do the thing I had to do. To go into the world and get restaurants sorted. She smiled at me and she swore at my father in Hindi, and then she gave me a credit card. ‘Go, Gavin! Go!’ she said. And I went. Straight to my aunty’s. Whilst I was born in Paris, near the Dordogne, my aunty lived a little further out of town, in North Carolina. This was God’s own country, where any redneck could grow tobacco and drink a bottle of bourbon a night whilst still managing to realise that it was poor form to have intercourse with your immediate cousins. Plenty of them slept together, but there was no hanky-panky, praise the Lord. It was a sophisticated and socially advanced community, that was Rapid Falls, and
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it’s where I learned so much about being hospitable. Because it is not enough to be in the hospitality business, treating it like a job; you have to occasionally pretend in a very real way to be genuinely hospitable. As if you actually like people you’ve never met before and very possibly will never see again. As if you want to serve these people food, and drink, and take away their messy plates, and thank them for gracing your house—or, for that matter, your restaurant. And that’s how I learned the trade. From the age of one month until the age of six years I served my extended family in North Carolina their TV dinners every night. Well, I exaggerate. It wasn’t really night-time. It was usually about 5 pm. That’s when they liked to deal with their food. But that was fine by me; after all, they were the customers. I’d get home from my day job at the tannery at about 4 pm and I’d have a good 45 minutes to do all the mise en place and pre-heat the microwave and get the tray-tables ready for Grandma Rawlings and Grandpa Root. I guess on my busiest nights I’d do maybe fourteen or fifteen covers, what with extra folk coming around for religious and other high-cultural events, like Thanksgiving or Super Flush Sunday. It was hard work and I was rarely thanked; just hit, mostly. But it grounded me. I learned at a young age some very important lessons. Always pop the plastic corner of a microwavable TV dinner before putting it in said microwave at 560 watts for eight minutes. Always tear the plastic cover off the microwavable TV dinner from left to right, and away from your body. (Steam burns are real.) Always get the fucking service of the microwavable TV dinners right. And get them right the first time. Don’t insult your customers, don’t insult your recipes
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and your ingredients by presenting the wrong microwavable TV dinner to the wrong relative. You might as well spit in their face whilst stomping on the TV remote control. Show some love, some passion, some Cuisine du Moi. And do you want to know something? This sort of hard work pays off. After four years as Executive Chef at 1147 Lafayette Boulevard, Rapid Falls, North Carolina, my Grandpa Root said this to me: ‘Boy? You there, boy. You sure know how to make that micro Jap oven work ... Fuckin’ Japs ...’ That’s my point though. I didn’t grow up on a daisy farm. I grew up on a variety of killing fields in every part of both hemispheres. North and South. And Asia, too. It was ‘kill or be killed’. So I killed. I’m still killing them today. And I’ll keep killing until the day I’m called to a higher place.
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Turning six was a breakthrough birthday for me,
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both personally and professionally. In this year I was, in absentia, awarded a retrospective degree in American Cultural Studies by the University of North Carolina—the Greensboro campus, of course. I wasn’t the youngest alumni at Greensboro; a five-yearold South Korean kid had done a double major in corporate governance and jurisprudence. So, not the youngest, but I was probably the proudest. Besides, the South Korean kid had actually taken all the classes. But I don’t have any ill feelings about missing out on campus life. I’d been doing what I love—
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cooking. But now it was time to venture forth once more into the world to play Noah, and to further become that culinary Ark I mentioned earlier. So I went to the heart of the veritable culinary Garden of Eden; to a place that would almost suffocate me in the heady airs of the world’s greatest culinary tradition and training—and the best the French had to offer. Hong Kong. This is where I came not just to learn, but to master my trade, my art, my calling, my passion. And I got off to a flying start. What with my university degree at the top of my already impressive CV, I was lucky enough to be bought by one of Hong Kong’s greatest French chef de chefs: Winston Pong. Executive Chef de Chef at the Hong Kong Hilton, Pong had a formidable reputation and personality, a massive recipe catalogue, and an enormous sexual appetite. My first interview with him was as intimidating as it was invigorating. Having only just arrived in Honkers by shipping container, I’d barely had time to unpack my knives and my yoga mat when I was called into the cold larder of the basement kitchen, just below the rightly famous Harry’s Piano Bar and Grill. The maitre d’hotel—a charming expat Dutchman nicknamed ‘Fisting Fritz’—opened the door of my cage and said: ‘XO wants to see you, you little fag.’ (The charm was in the tone, let me tell you.) I hurried to the kitchen and found it empty. Listening for any noise I wandered about its stoves and fire extinguishers. Listening, listening ... then I thought I heard something coming
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from inside the walk-in refrigerator. So I walked in. And I walked in on Chef de Chef Pong—or XO, as he called himself—giving some sauce to one of the hotel’s guests, an elderly American divorcée with her shoes still on. (Having come straight from North Carolina this was not unusual to me.) ‘You the little duck?’ grunted XO, in between other grunts. ‘Oui, chef de chef, oui!’ I shouted. ‘Make me ... an omelette ... you little ... shit!’ he yelled, grunting some more. ‘Oui chef de chef, oui!’ I dashed out into the kitchen, selecting a few choice ingredients from the cold larder as I went. Onto the stove top I put an 8-inch skillet. I whisked three Birds of Paradise eggs in a copper Bird of Paradise egg-whisking bowl, using a bamboo whisk made from the bamboo trees in which Birds of Paradise often nest. Once whisked I discarded one-third of the whisked mixture and added 5 millilitres of an emulsion made from a knife point of freshly grated mace, one saffron stem, and a boiled-down shark fin. Into the hot skillet I threw a good knob of solidified panda fat. I let it sizzle (they say that when you hear the panda fat sizzle like a panda being slowly stabbed, well, that’s when the fat is at the right temperature for frying). I added the egg mixture, gently manoeuvring the quickly forming omelette around the edge of the skillet until it had taken the shape of a Bird of Paradise in full flight. I plated, I garnished with a bamboo leaf fashioned— origami style—into the shape of the beak of a Bird of Paradise. Then I served my chef, who was still entertaining the in-house guest.
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He stopped grunting. He stopped entertaining the in-house guest. He looked at my omelette. He took a very small bite of my omelette. He threw the omelette at me, still on the plate. He spoke. ‘Are you taking the piss, little duck?’ I spent the rest of the day peeling carrots. I then washed the peelings before reattaching them to the carrots using food starch as glue. I’d then present each finished carrot to my chef, and if he could tell that it had been peeled and re-unpeeled I had to eat the carrot. It was the start of my professionalism and my professional respect for food and for chefs and for the passion that is at the heart of my cuisine. And it was the start of very good vision. I’m way beyond 20/20, let me tell you. After four years of preparing vegetables and other exotica— such things as turnips, celery, sweet potato, parsnip—Chef de Chef Pong agreed to let me start my apprenticeship at the HK Hilton, and it was the start of an apprenticeship that would last another four years. But at least now I was earning a wage and earning the respect of the other hospitality industry professionals who brought life and love to the HKH. Quickly progressing from vegetables I moved on to herbs. Then to salad greens, and then rice. And it was around this time that I started to call myself ‘Gav’. Other people did too, and I soon felt I was becoming a very important part of a team of battle-hardened food warriors. There were Mexicans, there were Puerto Ricans, there were El Salvadorians, there were people from Bermuda. And lots of English sous chefs who basically spent all their time getting bad tattoos and watching football. And there were waitresses, of
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course, because English sous chefs can’t go anywhere without a young lady fresh from a tanning lamp. If only they paid as much attention to their grilled dishes as they did to their women, English cuisine might be in a better state than it is today. After these four years I emerged from my cage. I was now a free-wheeling chef, and a chef that no restaurant owner anywhere in the world could fail to employ. I’d made my mark; I’d made my own passport to success. I’d become Gavin, and I would never look back. Next stop, obviously enough, was Wales.
The Welsh live and breathe food like perhaps no
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other people in the world. No. Not ‘perhaps’. Definitely. Food is to these alien people so simple yet so surreal. More stolid than solid; more dodgy than stodgy. But it’s fun! The Welsh are naturally hysterically funny people, let’s face it. And when they cook they’re funnier than usual. Yet Welsh food is more than just fun and more than just having a good time, or a da amsera, as these strange people would say. If I had but one word to sum up Welsh cooking it would be this: Welsh food is a warming cuisine rooted in simplicity—a yn cynhesu cuisine ’n reddfol i mewn symledd. And being very simply rooted was something that I understood. Humility and quiet reserve have always been qualities close to me. I went to Wales to bring my personal spiritual journey into harmony with simple yet satisfying food. I went
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straight to the Gower Peninsula. Straight to Swansea. And straight to seaweed. Because that’s where we are all from in the first place, let’s face it—no, not Welsh seaweed; I mean the sea. Millions of years ago, maybe even many millions of years ago—and, in some people’s cases, only a few generations ago— we, all of us, dragged ourselves out of the collective swamp and stood up on the shore. With the taste of seaweed still on our tongues we marched into the forest and started eating stuff like chicken and curry and fried potatoes. Which is part of the reason our diets are so out of whack nowadays. Fuck. Without the seafood that once so happily sustained our yet-evolved beings, well, I reckon there is really something missing in our lives. But let’s not waste our time on this David Attenborough thing anymore. Let’s get back to me. My first job—or, rather, my first consultancy position—was in a little town called Oxwich Bay, where the seaweed literally wandered in from the high-tide mark every day, straight into the cold larder. The restaurant built around this cold larder was called Casa Bara Lawr, and it was run by an ebullient man called David Evans and his wife David Jones. They had an affectionate and happy relationship and were always gay. The old building which housed their hospitality commanded beach views and a working lavatory. Having honeymooned in Italy many years before, they chose to call their very traditional Welsh cuisine ‘Italian’, in memory of their time in that wog peninsula. Hence part of the restaurant’s name, Casa. They were fuckwits, clearly—but nice fuckwits. Harmless fuckwits. Bara Lawr is a Welsh term, as my readers will know, and it means laverbread. And that’s what I was here to make, to speak
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to, to meditate with, to interview, to pray with and to photograph. Because that’s what you fucking well do when you have some respect and passion for an ingredient: photograph it. Laverbread is a simple enough recipe, and anyone anywhere around the world can make it, given they have their own bit of coastal or seaside property, which most chefs I know do. Welsh seaweed is best, of course, but if you can’t source that then just use the organic seaweed that’s sold in the fresh vegetable section of your local supermarket. Or you could try visiting a Middle Eastern food store, which is something I always find so exciting to do. Right, first things first. (Ideally you’ll do all of this outside, next to your wood-fired oven.) Bring the seaweed home with a big happy smile on your face, wearing wellies (not on your face, but, like, on your feet ...) and with your kids. Or hire some kids from a casting agency if you don’t have any yet. Make the kids carry the seaweed, too, but really happily. Don’t film anything involving them crying. If they cry send them back to the fucking casting agency. Chop up the seaweed roughly using a knife. Keep the children well out of the way. Maybe even out of shot. Get the producer to throw to jump-edits of the kids playing with said seaweed in between the main shot of you chopping it up. Chop really rapidly and quickly. In close-up. Boil the seaweed for hours; simulate the hours going by with a medley of shots of you and your children being fabulous at the seaside. Use some backing music from a recently sold-out mainstream band to help with the general cooking quality. As I’ve said so many times now that it is no longer funny: if you
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cook food with a fucked backing track, well, you might as well fuck your career up the backside badly. Once the seaweed is boiled make sure the rest of the recipe is all about you. Lose the kids. Altogether. Now drizzle olive oil everywhere and put the chopped-up seaweed stuff into an eighteenth-century ceramic dish purchased from Sotheby’s. Mix some oatmeal into the seaweed. Let it stand for an hour and then fry the mixture in plenty of beef lard for as long as it takes the cameraman to get the shot right. Then serve lovingly to yourself. As soon as you’ve taken the first bite roll your eyes a bit, go ‘YYYYYUUUUMMMM’, and then tell the audience how incredibly amazing the laverbread is, and wonder aloud why, given it is so easy to make, more kids at school luncheons, given we are an island nation, don’t get fresh laverbread at luncheon. Wait for a full five seconds after the camera stops rolling, get the limo to come around, and then fuck off to have a proper lunch somewhere decent. Take your PA with you, as she might be up for one. But let’s move on. Sex. It is something of a taboo in the world of chefs and of celebrity cuisine. We’re all pretty much nature’s own gentlemen, and the girls that cook pastries and wait on tables are a loving lot who’d never kiss and tell, God love ’em! But sex is what took me to my next food discovery destination. I fell in love. And I followed the cow to Australia. To Sydney. And to the most amazingly fantastic and vibrant city I’d come across—since the last one and the one that was coming up next, of course. But right then, in love, and in Sydney, it was amazing.
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I got off the plane at Sydney at about the same
time as the girl I’d fallen in love with left me. She told me she’d become a lesbian and no longer wanted my agenda. She cut her ponytail off and threw it at me—as a statement of sexual free will, I guess. Fucking cow. But as I stood in the airport and looked down at that ponytail on the floor I thought, hang on, this is a message. Attaching the ponytail to my own head I went straight into town and took a lease out on a fucked-up old Chinese takeaway and got the sign writer in. ‘Nylon Thai’ I called the place, and I created a menu that was basically wok-tossed fresh veg with some fish chucked in it with too much hoisin sauce, too much palm sugar and too much lime. It fucking well walked out the door. Even the Sydney stick-chick food vomitoriums ate it up. I put in a side bar serving stupid long mixed drinks and ‘totally hot’ cocktails and business doubled. I got photographed and I started wearing the ponytail out to media events. I made packet-loads of dosh. I was on the cover of food magazines. I did telly ads endorsing a cheap supermarket chain. I even did a shampoo ad. If not for a sense of pride and self-esteem, I guess I could have gone on doing this shit forever. But it was like shooting fish in a barrel, and I’d done that before, in South Africa, except they weren’t exactly fish. But for every Sydney in the world there is a Melbourne. And that’s where I headed next.
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If Sydney is Australia’s LA, then Melbourne is its New York. Melbourne, where people are more up themselves and more vaguely removed from their own immediate past than any other parochial city on earth. As one of my Melbourne restaurant’s backers said over a long lunch one day, just prior to my Melbourne opening, ‘If Australia is the arsehole of the earth, Gav, then Melbourne’s its sphincter.’ That comment seems too harsh even for me nowadays, but maybe that’s because I have such a soft spot for Melbourne; I took heaps of money out of that city, and all thanks to the generosity of its completely misguided people, all of whom somehow imagine they are ‘true internationals’. They fucking well are not, let me tell you! I’m a true international if there ever was one. Yet in the Melbourne restaurant scene every Alex is an Alessandro, every Jim a Giacomo, every Daryl a Darilio. But putting that to one side, there was one thing that made them great restaurateurs. They had all, in their late teens, been fringe drug dealers, and a drug dealer’s sense of business practice and fiscal responsibility serves a restaurateur well. These boys made money. And they made money out of food. Food was just a new drug, though one that saw them raided by the police less frequently than in their old caravans out in the suburbs. If you are making meth for scumbag dickheads and the cops come, you’re done; but if you’re making ravioli for scumbag dickheads and the health inspector or liquor licensing police arrive, you just give them some champagne and an open bar tab. More importantly, if you ran restaurants you got into the society pages, often photographed with a gangster’s moll. If
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you made drugs all you got was a mug shot on page three. The gangster’s moll was still photographed, of course, but she was not exactly on your arm at an opening night. I’ve been lucky enough to go out with these sorts of women and, believe me, they are wonderful girls. Sure, they’ve got faults, but they’ve got hearts of gold. The Melbourne drug and food scene got a bit confusing for the Melbourne drug and food scene, however, and once it had lost its focus I knew, instinctively, it was time to move on. I’ve got nothing against food or drugs or Melbourne, but it just wasn’t jelling. And all chefs need jelly. Particularly if you are doing some sort of pressed tongue dish. So having served a rigorous apprenticeship, and then moving quickly into the business world and running my own restaurants and travelling the world learning the secrets that now lay in the heart that is the passion of my cuisine, it was obviously time to ‘do that thing, that thing that I had to do’, as I’d mentioned to my mother at the Le Souillé Pantalon all those years ago. Running restaurants and cooking exquisite dishes never seen or tasted before had been, up until this point, my entire raison d’être, which is a French term meaning ‘business model’. And I’d got there so young that it sort of made me feel like I’d hit a wall, or a void, or possibly even the wrong firstyear apprentice. Of course, a lot of mere chefs would get to this very same stage (it’d take them much longer than me, naturally enough) but then they’d be happy to sit on their arse. They’d fill in the days by raking a bit of cash off the weekly profits and maybe doing a JV with a barbecue sauce manufacturer. They’d ‘spend more time with their wife and kids’ before shacking up
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with their restaurant manageress or the young brand ambassadrix for some Italian mineral water company. They’d grow fat and go bald and contract untreatable bankruptcy before ending up as the Executive Chef in some shit-hole fourstar hotel in Sri Lanka or Croatia. Their penultimate media appearance would be years down the track in one of those fucking awful weekend newspaper lifestyle lift-outs, under the tag line ‘Where Are They Now?’. Their final media spot would be an obituary—if they’re lucky. And the obit might even misspell their surname. What a fucking embarrassment. How could you call yourself a chef if you lived and died like that— your whole life wasted, cooking food for people? Those sorts of chefs just don’t have the passion. But my thirst for passion was unquenchable, which is why I knew I had to take the next step: I had to become a worldwide brand. A celebrity. An opinion-former. I had to become Gavin. Not just a chef, not just a chef de chef, and not even an über chef; I had to take the idea of being a chef to a new height. And you can’t do that by standing around in a kitchen fucking well cooking all day.
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Infusier Printemps aux Gavin A SPRING INFUSION O F G AV I N
NOTHING EVOKES THE NEW SPRING MORE THAN A BEAUTIFUL INFUSION OF SHOWROOM-FRESH VERTS. ACTUALLY, I LIKE TO SELECT THE VERTS MYSELF, BY HAND, BUT I UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS SOMETHING A LOT OF HOME COOKS WOULD FIND DIFFICULT TO DO. WHEN BUYING VERTS LOOK FOR GREENNESS AND FOR LEAF SHAPES AND PATTERNS THAT ARE ARCHITECTURAL.
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EDIBILITY IS ANOTHER FACTOR YOU MAY CARE TO CONSIDER , BUT THIS IS NOT ESSENTIAL.
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1 kilo of mixed verts
1100 ml of desalinated and thrice-distilled Norwegian fjord water (if this is unavailable use Evian, which is a brand that’s easy to remember, as it is naive spelled backwards)
100 g fresh white truffle
1 small lobster, alive
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Disembark the fjord water into a large, shallow, stainless-steel bowl. (The stainless steel should be marine grade.) Gently lower the lobster into the water and set your kitchen timer for three seconds. Remove the lobster and discard. Throw out the timer, too. Thoroughly wash the verts in plenty of tap water and spin dry in a salad spinner. Repeat this wash/dry process three times. Bring the fjord water to a low simmer and reduce in volume by one-eleventh. Turn off heat and allow the water to cool to sub-prime room temperature. Place the verts into the pot and, keeping a very close eye on them, allow to infuse for 15 minutes. Timing here is critical. (If the infusion seems to be going too quickly or too slowly, add a drop of extra water or a metric sprig of extra vert.) Remove verts and allow to drain. Ladle a very small amount of the water onto plates and garnish with half a dozen or so fronds of vert. Serve with some crusty bread and an old knife. Sublime with pinot gris.
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SERVES 4
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The trouble with raw ingredients is that you have to cook them. RAYMOND BLANC, BLANC MANGE
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Chapter 2
The Ingredients
‘Ingredient’ is one of my favourite words.
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And rummaging around the storerooms of some of the world’s great providores—whether it be online or by video link— always uplifts and inspires me. Finding new and exciting ingredients helps to further bolster my boundless enthusiasm for food and for cooking. Yet ‘ingredient’ can also be a very scary word for many people. Particularly lower socioeconomic people who lead fairly trashy lives and try to find some sort of meaning by reading food magazines. They look at the lavish photo-study of the sausages-andmash recipe prepared by some former heroin addict-cumcelebrity chef and they think, ‘Oh, gosh, I can cook that! Besides, I used to take heroin!’ These people think they’ve connected with the chef and, through that chef, with the ingredient. If only cooking were as simple as the people that buy these magazines.
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But look, don’t get me wrong. As my great mate Sir Russell Crowe once so famously said, I’m on the side of the people who find themselves on the wrong side of adversity. Besides, if you invest time in these trashy people then you can run quite legitimate charity events at your restaurant, which guarantees media coverage and a paying guest list of CEOs and the like. Why, with only a 10 per cent return-visit rate, it’ll boost your monthly earnings vis-à-vis takings in a way that is only positive. And, let’s not forget, whilst building your business and your brand, you’ve done something for the no-hopers along the way. And that’s what it’s all about, surely. But I should get back to my first love: ingredients. Ingredients are the things that apprentices chop up. The ingredients are often bigger things that arrive from a supplier. Or a providore. Or, as people at home would say, the supermarket. You buy them and you chop them up and then you cook them. Finally you serve them. I know this sounds pretty technical, but that’s what happens in real restaurants. You don’t believe me, do you? Whenever I tell gathered audiences this stuff about ingredients they kind of laugh nervously, as if doubting such complex and technical cooking could really be that straightforward. But it is. And that’s part of the reason that my dog, Scrubby, cooked his own Steak Diane on one of the episodes of my last TV series, Shit-Hot Cooking with Gav, Yeah! Scrubby didn’t eat the steak, of course, because he has a Diane intolerance, but I thought it was really lovely the way he cooked that dish for those three disabled kids. Admittedly, as a dog, he couldn’t help them eat the vitamised version of the steak through their straws, because dogs don’t have opposing
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thumbs (nor did one of the kids!), but it is the sentiment that counts. And it made great TV. I’ll take criticism from anyone or any quarter, but when that which you’ve poured your heart and soul into makes great TV, and you’ve done it with your dog, well, that’s when I’ll bow-wow to no one. Never work with disabled children or animals, my producers warned me. But, boy, did we laugh afterwards! Any one of my kitchens around the world contains a standard inventory of ingredients. Chinese wok-masters might have their master-stocks, pastry chefs might have their marblecovered benches and McDonald’s McMuffin chefs might have their workplace contracts, but I’ve got my hit list of ingredients—or inGAVients, as my staff have come to call them lovingly over the years. Let’s start at the top.
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Cornflour
Seriously, I don’t know how anyone could painstakingly prepare a genuine sauce or jus or gravy or soup without this traditional Aztec ingredient. I only use Aztec cornflour, and I buy it from an antiquarian conquistador cornflour merchant in Spain. It costs a fortune, and people at home will never be able to get it, but if you don’t have it then you are just kidding yourself and you’re insulting your guests and your family every time you serve them food that’s not been tossed through this essential glistening agent. Not tossing food through cornflour before serving it is equivalent to not splashing on some aftershave before you go to a nightclub. But that’s the world we live in nowadays ...
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Butter
A bit like nightclub patrons, butter is not what it used to be. It used to have lots of cholesterol in it. That’s been refined out of our latter-day butter, to the point where very few of my customers die anymore. You could say that’s a good thing, I suppose, but I’m a traditionalist of sorts, and when butter used to kill people more regularly, well, I don’t know, it gave every dining experience a frisson of excitement. I only use unsalted butter from Norway. You won’t find this in your local supermarket, but if you buy an unsalted butter from any one of the Scandinavian countries then you are doing the right thing. Half a pound/250 g of unsalted butter is the minimum you’d need for any dinner for four guests. Obviously, if you’re cooking fish, potatoes, béchamel, or bread and butter pudding—and all that preceded by cucumber sandwiches—then you’d need to allow for maybe a kilo of butter per person. One final tip when using unsalted butter: make sure you season everything really, really well before sending out the plated dishes, otherwise it’ll taste a bit bland.
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Olive oil
Olive oil is not butter. It can be used to fry things in as well as being used to ‘drizzle’ on other foods that have not been fried. Olive oil is full of good fats, so you tend to swear more when you’ve got olive oil in your system, which is why so many European cultures don’t fucking well swear like they used to. None of them use olive oil anymore, because they are selling it to wanker Americans and the English, who’ll not be able to eat their morning Cornflakes or porridge without a drizzle of ‘extra virgin’ on top. Most olive oil is now made by Delia Smith, and that’s a reliable brand for people at home to use. Or drizzle. Italian ‘extra virgin’ olive oil should be used on salads; Greek ‘semi virgin’ olive oil is best for frying.
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Sea salt
Besides giving us fish and mushrooms, the sea is also a great provider of salt. If you’ve got your own bit of coastal property then you can easily harvest the salt from the foreshore using special tools available at most supermarkets. You’ll find these tools next to the lightbulb section. I use salt at every single stage of the cooking process. Salt, besides being a preservative and a laxative, is also a great aphrodisiac. So salt waitresses well before using them.
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Big white plates
Keep plenty of these in your fridge or freezer at all times. Heat them up in a low oven (gas mark 1) for twenty minutes before garnishing with foodstuffs. If I had a dollar for every big white plate I’ve sold I’d be a substantially more wealthy man than I am today. And I’m very fucking well-off, let me tell you. Bransonesque, if you know what I mean.
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Infusions
Place anything you find in your refrigerator into a pot and then pour boiling water over it. Let it stand overnight, or for fifteen minutes, strain through a muslin cloth, and there you have it: an infusion. Use such infusions as a simple party-starter or as a first course or as a light summer luncheon dish. They are great with lots of crusty bread and some sauvignon blanc. Eat with chopsticks to bring a real air of the Far East to your al fresco table.
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Froth
Perhaps the oldest and most human of all foodstuffs, froths go back—like way back—to a time when mastodons roamed the earth and Homo sapiens weren’t even homo yet. (Which makes you wonder what the world did for maitre d’hotels back then.) Froths are the cornerstone of so much cooking, which is why I rarely start or finish any dish without some sort of frothing. Lots of chefs now use froth as a mainstay or key A-list ingredient in their signature dishes. How fucking rabid. Froth can only be used when incorporated into an existing three-hat Michelin recipe. If you use froth in any other way you might as well be serving caviar with dirt. Which is a dish I’ve actually eaten, albeit in Afghanistan, whilst serving as the UN ambassador for the Free-Food-Slow-Trade Love Alliance. We were trying to get Afghani opium-poppy growers to move away from industrial cropping and fertilisers and overhead spray irrigation and into a more organic and sustainable opium-poppy-growing agriculture. It’s a work-in-progress and I’m confident that we’ll get there one day soon. In the meantime you can help by only buying certified organic heroin. But back to froth ... Froth has one key attribute. Substance. In a world of celebrity chefs and style gurus, froth stands up and is happy to be counted. It is subtle yet solid; digestible yet unforthcoming; cheap to make yet very easy to sell at a high mark-up. That’s ying and yang for you, though. Which is why the Chinese know so much about running restaurants. And why I learned so much from being Chinese, back in the day. If I had only one ingredient left to cook—like, on a desert island or something— it would be a bucket of froth.
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Medleys
I suppose a lot of us remember back to our childhoods and to institutionalised life and think of the old meat and three veg. Gosh, haven’t we all come a long way, ’cos now we have medleys. Which is, roughly speaking, a collection of about three vegetable-based food items arranged by multiple apprentices’ hands on a plate, over which a tiny piece of protein is then placed. Pour froth and cornflour over everything and there you have it—restaurant-quality cuisine: the sort of food you can never possibly hope to make at home. (Note: the secret to great medleys is in the touch—the finished vegetables have to be handled at least a dozen times by the apprentice chefs before they are plated. If you skip this step then it won’t taste like a medley, it’ll just taste like fucking vegetables.)
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Various types of degustations
Degustation is a relatively new ingredient that has burst onto the cooking scene over the last three years. It has a history that goes back further than that, however. Degustations were first served in London in the 1690s, by a man who ran an oyster stall. Back then, degustations were simple estuarine foodstuffs for simple people. No one at court ate them. Now, what with organic farming and windbreaks, degustations are being bred humanely and quickly, and are sold all around the world, tankfresh, thanks to the genius that is airfreight. I keep degustations in a tank in my restaurants, and serve them upon order at €1000 per 15 grams. They fucking well walk out the door— and that’s what’s so funny, I guess. They are amphibians!
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Seafood
The world’s seas are rapidly being depleted. Fish and other underwater ingredients aren’t being replaced. Maybe if we all did something to help, then, like, maybe we could save our oceans and their inhabitants? Such simple ideas can achieve a lot. Which is why whenever I take the girls on a day to the seaside to do some filming or get some new promo shots for one of my Gavin-branded offshoots, like beachwear, for instance, I always take a little container of fish food. We stop by a pet shop on the way and Aga runs in and buys a little pot of the stuff. We get to the beach and we drive along the sand just where the water is breaking and the girls sprinkle little bits of the fish food into the ocean. It makes me want to cry, you know, that two little girls could be so caring and giving when it comes to the fish— particularly when you consider that Aga doesn’t actually like eating fish and little Moulinex has a dietary intolerance to it! Her face goes purple and her lips go a bit Angelina Jolie when she even touches the stuff, which is why she has to don a surgical mask and surgical gloves before she feeds the ocean’s fish from the backseat of the Range Rover. They say to me they want to do it, though, ‘for children that are poorer than we are, Daddy’. What touching childish naivety. Poor and impoverished kids can’t afford real fish! Well, they can and they can’t. After all, there’s considerably more finger in fish fingers than there is seafood, let me tell you!
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I use fish widely—almost wantonly—in all of my restaurants. It’s healthy food, it’s versatile food, to be sure; but more importantly, it is an ingredient which can be used to highlight a chef ’s genius. It’s also a wonderful ingredient because whenever it appears on a menu it always reads ‘market price’. Those two words, on a menu, they are music to my ears. Because, let’s face it, if you have to ask the price, you can’t fucking well afford it.
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Waygu*
Waygu is an exciting meat-based product. It is a little bit like seafood extender, but more salty. I use waygu in all my restaurants now because it is the emperor’s-new-clothes and as such it commands outstanding mark-ups. Waygu quality is rated according to how much warbling it does. A completely silent piece of waygu gets a warbling grade of zero. But a piece of waygu that warbles away like a canary in a Chinese coal mine gets a grade of twelve. Grade twelve is the quality gear. And this is how you should treat it. Silence the waygu either by putting it into a deep freeze overnight, or by dropping it into a big pot of water on the rolling boil. Remove, slice, plate, garnish and serve with some stunning New Zealand pinot gris. Leftover waygu can be a problem, however—principally because of cross-contamination issues. So at the end of every service I get the apprentice to mince it all up and then fashion it into hamburger patties. Yes! Hamburgers. Waygu hamburgers! I sell them in the restaurant’s holding bar for €69 a go. We can’t make enough of them!
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* A word of warning. Always check your waygu is waygu and not wagyu. Wagyu is pure-bred Japanese beef that’s about 99 per cent fat and completely awful. The Japanese eat it, but they’ll eat anything that swims, let’s face it—even if it’s in a wetsuit. Wagyu beef will never catch on in the West. No way. Not even Australian restaurant diners are stupid or gullible enough to pay for, let alone eat, a $100 piece of briefly seared Wagyu fat. You’d have more luck selling them bits of sumo-wrestler buttock— candied, battered and then deep-fried on a stick ... Hang on a minute; I’ll just jot that down.
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Nowadays ingredients ain’t necessarily
ingredients. As we move further away from an age of expansion and growth and closer and closer to a new age of superstition, moral panic and silly fads (hocus-pocus ideas like ‘climate change’, or keeping minke whales in our swimming pools, for instance) we’ve, all of us, become much more aware of and sensitive to very important food issues. Air miles, carbon footprints, genetically modified waitresses, organics, locavores, fair trading, sustainability, ethicureans, biodiversity and biodiesel (which is a terrific oil for shallow-frying, by the way)—all of these are pressing issues. Just how pressing they are can be seen in the very simple ingredients we use on a daily basis to muddle together some sort of soggy stir-fry. These ingredients—their price, quality and availability—hint at the sort of environmental knife edge we are living on. We have to change. A simple beginning would be to get more information on an ingredient’s packaging than the mere use-by date. The modern hunter/gatherer wants all of her ingredients’ packaging clearly and thoroughly marked. Country of origin, port of shipping, name of woman who packed the thing, name of girl who harvested it, and name of girl’s father and which bar he was in whilst girl was doing the harvesting. This is the sort of information you’ll often find in your Lonely Planet guidebook, but for some reason it can’t be found on our food packaging. And yet it should be—and it must be. Staple foodstuffs—like saffron, Spanish paprika, white truffle oil, and ground antler felt—they have to sport these sorts of bona fides. Otherwise people are just going to
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vote with their consumer dollars and not buy these things anymore. And what a loss to quick, easy and healthy eating that would be. We all have to stop and smell the roses, because they are becoming scentless thanks to our shocking overfishing of the seas—garden fish emulsion is just not what it used to be. We have to wake up and smell the coffee; it smells like third-world coffee farmers getting their bollocks roasted by the big banks and the multinationals. We all have to tighten our belts and get our combined social consciousness off the back burner and become leaner and meaner. Agricultural sustainability is not just the new flavour of the month. Anyone worth their salt will quickly understand that if we don’t embrace change then we’ll soon have egg on our faces as the world’s food crops go pearshaped. What people have got to realise about feeding the world is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. As a chef very much in the media spotlight and as a chef so often asked for opinions and analysis vis-à-vis sustainability and air miles and famine and obesity, I’m keen to take a considered, even-handed, cautious yet not anti-innovative approach to broadacre farming, food exports, third-world despots and fat people. The part can sometimes help to explain the whole, as Bono once said, so let’s look at the story of the North Atlantic Ocean Shrimp in order to gain a better understanding of the problems we face. Let me paint a picture ... Just over 40 nautical miles east-north-east of Aberdeenshire’s famous fishing port of Peterhead slowly motors a fishing trawler, the Ciorstaidh Ealasaid. At sea now for just over two days the trawler is in search of Pandalus Borealis,
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or the Cold Water Prawn, as it is commonly known—or, rather, mis-known. For Pandalus Borealis is not a prawn, but a shrimp, as anyone who’s ever been on a fishing boat could probably tell you. And this is my point. Goodness me, if we can’t even get the damn animal’s name right when catching it and eating it, how are we going to help it survive in the first place? But back to the trawler. Chugging about the sea, this trawler, this killing machine— along with many other vessels of its type—contributes to the genocide of the North Sea’s marine life. On average about 2.3 million tonnes of fish are caught in the North Sea every year. On top of this about 150,000 tonnes of by-catch are caught (that’s the fish you didn’t actually mean to catch), and also about 85,000 tonnes of injured or dead invertebrates—or prawns. Or shrimps. Or other invalid vertebrates, which is what an invertebrate actually is. (As you can see, there is so much about the ocean and its bountiful harvest that so many of us don’t properly understand.) Ignoring the wastefulness of all the by-catch and invertebrate collateral damage, the most shocking thing is what then happens to the Pandalus Borealis. They’re snap-frozen at sea, a bit like Han Solo was carbon frozen by Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back—which is a great film for foodies, by the way, particularly when Jabba the Hutt is eating that tank-fresh antipasto, whilst reclining, Roman emperor-like, on his Hutt settee. Now that’s what I call sustainable and thoughtful agriculture! So, the Pandalus Borealis. They’ve been carbon frozen— I mean snap-frozen—and they are then returned as helpless
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hostages to the wonderful port of Peterhead where they are packaged into plastic-lined boxes and shipped to Amsterdam. From Amsterdam they continue their ghoulish journey by sea to Thailand, where they are defrosted, shelled by hand, returned to their plastic-lined boxes, and returned via sea passage to London. Shortly thereafter they grace the entrée plates of top restaurants as ‘ocean-fresh’ North Sea Cold Water Prawns. But not on my menu they don’t. And it should be very fucking obvious why not. They are too expensive. You send anyone or anything to the other side of the world, give it a Thai massage and then ship it back, and it’s going to add loads of dosh to your overall kitchen spend. And this is why chefs like me—and other celebrities—have become so passionately involved in the Thai/UK Shrimp Refugee Relocation Plan. Like a lot of effective not-for-profit programs, its success lies in its blinding simplicity. Rather than ship a shrimp from the North Sea to London via Thailand, why not ship Thai prawns to London? Genius, isn’t it! And there are so many benefits for the environment, fossil fuels, Thais and— let’s not forget them—London restaurateurs. For a start, we can now quite legitimately call the Cold Water Prawn a prawn, and not insult shrimp by misnaming them. We also effectively cut the sea miles of this dish in half. In half. Furthermore, the people that need the most support in all of this—the restaurateurs—get the gear at about half the landed cost. This saving is then passed directly on to the restaurateur. Everyone is a winner. You know, it’s moments like these when I feel so lucky; so lucky that I can help. And that’s the thing, I guess: don’t just be a ‘part of the change’; be the change.
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When choosing ingredients there are a few things
we always get wrong. I mean that you get wrong. We fall into habits, we buy ingredients as if by some sort of default setting— which is why so many domestic pantries have 43 tins of baked beans and yet no olive oil. We get lazy, we don’t plan our home menus; we buy food items that are familiar, cheap and easily available. And we do this—I mean you do this—because you have lost your passion, if you ever had any in the first place. But I’m Gavin and I’m here to help. If I can convince you to try a little harder when provisioning your larder, then that’s another victory for me. If I can only get my TV fans out of the frozen fast-food TV-dinner section of the supermarket and into the semi-fresh aisles then, ditto, another victory per moi. So there are a couple of things I want you to look for when doing your morning, midday and evening fresh-food shop. Colour. Look for really vivid colours when you buy food. Apples should be brilliant red or almost iridescent green. Oranges should shout out their innate orangeness; they are not fucking well called oranges for nothing, are they? Corn should be as yellow as a submarine. As should chicken, particularly if it’s been corn-fed. Speaking of yellow, it is a very good colour for pasta. Not the pasta itself; I’m talking about the packet. A good bright-yellow-coloured packet. Strong Mediterranean blue (almost azure) is also a top colour for pasta packets. Go
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for herbs that radiate forest green, and look for celery that’s just a shade lighter than Kermit the Frog. Butter should be dreamy-creamy, and also come in a really strongly coloured wrapper—once again, look for something in a bold primary colour with a clear and unambiguous design. You want your butter wrapper to be unfussy. Simple yet stylish. Fresh and cured meats should always come in an Italianesque sort of rustic parchment wrapping; a light brown kind of recycled paper look is also fine. Oh, and eggplants are fantastic too; their aubergine colour always makes for such a striking contrast. As you can see, in just a short paragraph I’ve already quickly pointed out some fabulous ways you can introduce great saturated colour into your kitchen. And as long as you’ve got plenty of natural light and you’re shooting with a really high digital pixel count, you can get almost magazine-quality images out of these ingredients. But you can’t judge a book—or even a magazine—by its cover. Which is why you also need to look for texture when buying food. Textural foods add fantastic depth-of-field to all food photography. Sure, the just-out-of-the-salad-spinner wet look is great for lettuce leaves, and the juice-dripping, mouthwatering breast of poultry is a camera magnet, of course. But textural foods play an all-so-important role filling in that little bit of space to the left or the right of every dish, particularly when you are shooting it at about a 45-degree angle from topdead-centre. Over the years I’ve always gone for the classics when it comes to textural side dishes: couscous is a great all-rounder,
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although I like it best when it’s unadorned, just sort of giving that goat tagine a bit of a rough, sort of earthy cushion. Polenta is another one that you can use with great versatility, which is why it’s probably known as the food stylist’s best friend. Soft and wet, or hard and fried, polenta gives you options, and that’s critical when you’re shooting outside in iffy weather. Chickpeas and lentils make for a more masculine and unapologetic look, so they are best suited to photo shoots in very genuine locations, like Morocco, Italy or Gascony. But, hey, I sometimes serve a simple chickpea dish at home and no one dies or anything. Sure, it’s fundamentally wrong, but if you do it in moderation then no great harm can come from it. Just be sure to remember that, though; moderation is the key. I’ve seen perfectly nice young chefs—admittedly a little bit swarthy in appearance—go all ape shit over chickpeas, cooking them this way and that, and in cities a long way from Morocco. And you know what? These young chefs end up North African. They start wearing a fez and growing beards and all that sort of shit. Which just goes to show, North Africans don’t kill people, chickpeas kill people. Being a seasonal food shopper is also a very important habit to acquire, whether you buy the habit online or learn how to do it at an adult education night class, it matters not. Buying your food seasonally also puts you in harmony with the earth’s great internal clock. You move from spring to summer and to autumn with an ever-keen eye towards those ingredients that are at their seasonal best. You don’t bother in winter, of course, because you’ll be holidaying in the south of France or the Maldives or some such place, letting some other twat do all the fucking
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cooking. So please do consider seasonal shopping. Start slowly if you like. Simply diarise ‘food shopping’ for the first day of March, the first day of June, and the first day of September. Even if, come the day, you’ve got something else on, you can always send the nanny out to do it.
A lot of people who watch
me on telly write me letters and send emails and so on saying very flattering things about my show and my cooking and mostly nice things about me. And I find that embarrassingly flattering. They ask a lot of questions, too, about cooking tips and the like. And that’d be fine if I were some sort of publicly funded free fucking vending machine, spitting out solutions for every Tom, Dick and Harbhajan who came along with a cooking dilemma. But I’m not. I’m a chef, a businessman, and a corporate citizen. Nevertheless people still seem desperate for my free advice, so here it is—and let this be the end of it, alright? Here are the five ingredients you should always have in your home pantry, the five cooking utensils you should have in your home kitchen, and the five cooking tricks you should use when desperately trying to bring some edibility—not to mention flavour—to your food.
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Ingredients
• Olive oil: Drizzled over other things, fizzing in a pan, or even just sitting in its bottle. It’s amazing stuff. Always have lots of bottles of it in the background and foreground of the shot. And always use about three or four times too much. • Racks of lamb: Cooked or uncooked or even in the process of being cooked, these are top-notch props. • Grape alcohol: A cheap and effective way of getting some flare-up in your pans on a gas stove. A bit of fire in the pan and you’ve got a better than even chance of getting off cable telly and onto one of the free-to-air networks. • Mixed lettuce leaves: These appeal to vegetarians, who are not too fucking well proud to watch TV, let me tell you. • Pre-prepared, frozen froth: Quickly defrost in the microwave, whisk up into froth, and pour over anything the food stylist has cooked.
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Utensils
• A whisk: Whisks are the new knives. Any would-be superstar chef can slice a courgette like Superman reading the telephone book, but only a real actor can use a whisk. • A stylist: Someone has to do the fucking chopping up, don’t they? • An internet-ready vitamiser: These machines are great because they give every home cook the chance to use the words ‘blitz’, ‘whizz’ or ‘jazz’. • An outdoor wood-fired oven: One day every kitchen will have one of these fantastic appliances. • A camera: Essential utensil, really. Best if you get a cameraman too.
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Cooking tips
• Always have a clean tea towel over your shoulder or in your belt loop. • In extreme close-ups, always make sure it is your hand doing the chopping. • Whilst cooking food always talk about how fantastic it is looking and how fantastic it will taste. • Never fry, braise, sweat, sauté or brown—only ever cook-off. As in ‘Let’s just cook off the chopped onion for a few moments ...’ • Never be seen doing any cleaning up; if you’re caught cleaning up the kitchen on film then the whole job’s fucked. Cooking needs all the romance it can get, so don’t ruin it for the poor tossers who watch cooking shows.
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Consommé Alphabetique ALPHABETISED SOUP
THIS IS POSSIBLY THE COMPLETE SOUP. THE PERFECT SOUP. AND YET IT IS ALSO A POWERFUL YET LIGHT CONSOMMÉ AND YET IT IS ALSO A HEAVENLY YET HEFTY PASTA DISH. NO WONDER IT IS SO VERSATILE, OR VERSATILÉ, AS WE SAY IN THE FRENCH. IT IS ALSO UNMISTAKABLY A CREATION OF ITS CREATOR—ME. INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH, IF YOU ‘PLAY’ WITH THE PASTA SHAPES BEFORE EATING THE SOUP YOU CAN REPOSITION THEM SO AS TO SPELL ‘GNAVI’, WHICH IS BOTH AN ANCIENT ETRUSCAN AND A ROYAL ZULU WORD MEANING ‘STRENGTH’. SO THERE REALLY IS SOMETHING MAGICAL AND WONDERFUL ABOUT THIS DISH, WHICH SPEAKS ACROSS BORDERS AND CULTURES AND TIME. BUT I AM JUST THE CHEF.
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LET THE RECIPE SPEAK FOR ITSELF.
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1 litre of Bird of Paradise broth, passed through a fine sieve lined with muslin (supermarket B of P stock is an okay substitute)
4 ‘G’ pasta shapes
4 ‘A ’ pasta shapes
4 ‘V’ pasta shapes
4 ‘I’ pasta shapes
4 ‘N ’ pasta shapes
100 g fresh white truffle
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Start by making the pasta. You will need equal amounts of spinach pasta, red pepper pasta and double egg yolk pasta dough. As we all know how to make pasta dough I will not bother to go on about it again here now. Once the dough is made and rolled out to a 1.5 mm thickness, use the alphabet attachment on your pasta machine to produce the letters. (Remember to set the machine to CAPS LOCK). Get an apprentice to bring the broth to a rolling boil. Add the pasta shapes in alphabetical order, except the I’s. Add them last. Let the water return to the boil and then say my full name—Gavin Paris Canardéaux— ten times over. Now work very quickly. Remove and refresh the pasta before arranging gavinalically in a small soup bowl containing 187.5 ml of the hot broth. Serve with a dictionary and some crusty bread.
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BE MADE I N A D VA N C E O R F R OZ E N .
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Cooking is actually quite aggressive and controlling and sometimes, yes, there is an element of force-feeding going on. NIGELLA LAWSON
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Chapter 3
The Menu
The menu must always obey the ‘Four S’ rule.
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Seasonal. Sustainable. Semi-fresh. Seriously overpriced. Find a chef who understands these principles and you’ll have in him (or her) a man that knows how to cook, knows how to inspire and knows how to passionately make money. Without passion (which is sort of an S word, too, as it has two S’s in it, doesn’t it?), a chef won’t be able to see the Four S rule for the biodynamic forest. Of course he couldn’t. Such chefs shit me beyond belief. They are the sort of people who want everything handed to them on a plate. I won’t mince words: these chefs and their crappy little restaurants are nothing more than a recipe for disaster. Speaking of recipes, so many of the pretenders—the mere chefs—have so few recipes. They might have a dozen recipes. They might have twenty, or thirty. They do not have 31,796 and
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a 1⁄2 true and authentic, and authenticated, recipes like I do. These recipes have all been measured by the Atomic Clock in Paris, and are indeed lodged in a vault next to that very same instrument, hermetically sealed so as to lose none of their lustre or shape or shine or authenticity. Or passion. But back to the fake chefs. More laughably still, these pretender-chefs all claim to have a signature dish. Sacre bleur! Signature dish? Dishes like these in the hands of those pretenders are not worth the blogs they are written on. They are worse than counterfeit cash, art fraud or fake breasts. And the way these pretenders do go on about their little signature dish! The poor fools! Ignore them and their infantile rip-offs. Listen to me instead. Do I have a signature dish? Of course not. I have three. The most renowned of my signature dishes is probably my Consommé Alphabetique. But when I say ‘probably’, who am I kidding? Of course it is my standout SD, as we call such dishes in the business. Having won a UNICEF prize, and having been named by Sir Bob Geldof as one of the most important humanitarian and educational inventions in the twenty-first century (after the iPod), Consommé Alphabetique is clearly a winner. Many people ask me what it is that makes such a seemingly simple dish so inspiring and heavenly. Of course the answer, like so many things, is right in front of them. Look closely at my Consommé Alphabetique. Look at the little organic pasta letters floating in the sublime Bird of Paradise broth. Now try to use those letters to spell your name. You cannot. It is impossible for you to spell your name. Daryl? No. Impossible.
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Brad? No. Kylie? No. But then try to spell Gavin. G. A. V. I. N. These are the only letters in my signature dish. They, if assembled in the correct order, spell my name. Of course, so many other chefs have tried to copy my art. Gordon Ramsay made something he passed off as a Zuppa de Alphabetica. This soup was ridiculous. The only letters in it were G, O, R, D and N. He even put in double the O’s. Gordon is not even an Italian name! The man is a fool, and his cynically copied soup was merde. I ate it with an elephant gun. It all goes to show one thing: you cannot just make this stuff up. Signature dishes must resound with passion d’cuisine. They must be dishes never before seen or tasted. They must be as original as they are impossible to recreate in the standard home, or even apartment. Of course signature dishes—such as my Consommé Alphabetique, my Infusier Printemps aux Gavin, and Canardéaux de Canardéaux—are the cornerstones of my menus all over the world. And whilst I find this so embarrassingly flattering, it also disappoints me in a small way, too. Let me explain. Destination restaurants with their signature dishes and icon chefs are a lot like destination tourist destinations. Mr and Mrs John and Jenny High-Street will save up their money from their crappy local council administrative jobs and do some budgeting at home—like only drinking one bottle of chardonnay every night instead of two, and sharing the Guardian in the morning over breakfast rather than buying one each on the way to work—and they will do this in the hope they can travel to faraway places. They’ll go to Rome to see the
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Colosseum (but they won’t visit my great mate Marco Fabricato’s incredible trattoria in the Via Cloaca), they’ll go to New Zealand to see Milford Sound (but they won’t see a rugby match) and they’ll go to Machu Picchu to see other tourists seeing Machu Picchu. Yes, it is pathetic, isn’t it? I don’t mean Machu Picchu; I mean John and Jenny’s idea of tourism and cultural self-improvement. Fucking well pathetic. Yet just as the world’s tourist destinations abound with Johns and Jennys, so too do a lot of outstanding five-star restaurants. Admittedly these food tourists—or gastronauts, as I like to call them—do not have names like John and Jenny (they’re usually names like Mike or Donald or Claude or Britney or Trinny), but whatever they are called they can still bring down the tone and the beauty and the natural grace of a superb restaurant as much as a herd of backpackers can ruin the tranquil, other-earthly atmospherics of Machu Picchu. Gastronauts are out to make trophies of as many menus and signature dishes as they can; in this sense they share so much in common with butterfly collectors—the principal factor being they can’t just let the creature be. They have to net it and kill it and pin it to a mounting board before putting the whole thing under glass. Gastronauts do the same thing to my dishes. They order them and they photograph them with their fucking little mobile phones and they sometimes even eat the fucking thing. Sure, they’ve ordered and will pay for the food, but why can’t they just taste? Why do butterfly collectors have to kill the creature of their admiration? Why can’t they just watch it butterflying about Nature’s wonderland? Similarly, why do gastronauts have to eat the whole dish? How fucking barbaric.
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Of course, a lot of top restaurants around the world—of which, including my four temples to cuisine, probably, let’s be honest, only amount to maybe a total of, say, six restaurants—wouldn’t survive if it wasn’t for the patronage of the world’s gastronauts, of which there are currently 11,783, according to the latest American Express data. And I’m not too proud to recognise the important function these gastronauts play in the microcosm that is the world’s très-haute-cuisine. Without these wonderful people a lot of restaurants would go belly up, which is why I’m about to start shooting a new TV series about these amazing people and their incredible lifestyles. HBO are making it and it’s set to be released in the spring. Gav and the Gastronauts, it’s called. Watch out for it. It’ll blow your mind and give you a new and much more profound understanding of what it is to be a restaurant goer. ’Cos a lot of you—let me say—have absolutely no fucking idea how to do it, let alone do it properly. But I’m getting ahead of myself, which is a habit a lot of gogetters and committed self-starters committed to excellence share. It’s true. I’m sometimes in the jacuzzi before the new waitress has even started to breathe normally again. In this chapter I want to talk to you about my menus, about creating menus, and about injecting some passion into them—and through them, into your customers/guests.
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and in the countryside and in the seas and oceans; the trees, the hedgerows, the rivers
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and the streams. In the well-tilled earth, the pristine estuaries; the honey-pots, the herb gardens, the lettuce beds, and in the beat of a farmer’s passionate heart. That’s right. Menus start wherever you can get some really good still photography. Film or high-quality video is better, of course; but as long as you can get some poof photographer out on a boat or a tractor or in a chook shed then you’ll at least have some visual aids around which to hang each season’s PR campaign, brochure, menu artwork and website design. Because, let’s face it, we live in a visual age, and if you don’t have a pretty picture of some sort of animal, vegetable or mineral to plaster all over your spring release you might as well chuck it all in and go run a takeaway chip caravan at a trash and treasure market. (Having said that, there’s some good dosh to be made in the cash economy’s egg and bacon roll, let me tell you ...) Photography and seasonality can be quarrelsome lovers, however. For instance, it’s mid-winter and you’ve just signed off on a deal with BBC2 to do a Gav’s Summer Holiday Special, and you have to deliver the damn thing in six weeks or it’s your productions company’s bollocks on the chopping block. Sure, you could go to Malta and shoot the whole fucking 90 minutes there, but every Jamie, Gordon and Nigella have done that, haven’t they? Better to shoot everything in Kent and get the film altered in post-production; and better to fly in all the summery ingredients from Cyprus. Add a suntan here and there and a few select backing tracks from your production company’s corporate partner at a record label and the job’s sorted. Barbecue everything, have a few shots of the kids/neighbours/
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gardener being jolly, and you won’t believe how the telly special will help book sales. Once again—and I know I’ve said this like about a thousand times—but it is not rocket science. It’s just good menu planning. But let’s get into some nitty-gritty now. Menus have a start, a middle and an end. Then they have a cheese course. But that’s about it. There are a few variants on this bulletproof rule, of course there are, but that’s all most home cooks need to know about photographing their menus. Before we start there is a surprise, however, and it is the sort of surprise that never ceases to amaze me.
$$$ Amuse-bouche
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hasn’t ordered, doesn’t understand, and—but for the fact you’ve sprung it on them with the complete element of surprise— wouldn’t, in the normal course of events, even like. I’m talking about amusing bushes, or, as we say in the French, an amusebouche. These are leftovers served with great attention to detail in terms of assembly, smallness and no-cost-to-you. If you’ve busted a gut making stuffed pig’s trotters on Tuesday and only sold 80 per cent of them by Thursday then you can rip off some of the trotter, deep-fry it, and plonk it on a wafer with a bit of curried pumpkin froth. Serve on a big white plate—just one per plate, mind—to everyone on table 12, just after they’ve been
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traded up to the bottle of Dom Perignon, and there’s a 99 per cent chance you’ll get a second order for the Dom—not to mention the other bolt-on extras over the course of the evening. Fuck me, they’ll probably even order the green salad side dishes—one per fucking person! So, amuse-bouches—or hors d’oueveresoeurs, as they are known in more bourgeois circles. Start your menu with these tiny delights and you’ll have everyone in the room thinking about the ‘market price’ specials before you can say Marco Pierre White, let me tell you. This isn’t rocket science so much as simple human psychology. Give some pretentious twat a freebie just as they are getting some alcohol into their toxified systems and suddenly they’ll be thinking they’re Sir Richard-fucking-Branson—except they’ll order more extravagantly! (Only joking, Rich!) Over the years I’ve found that the best amuse-bouches are those ones with plenty of salt in them. Marry a shitty pig-food ingredient (like pumpkin) with something hinting at the exotic (like saffron) and then put it on a bee’s-dick-thick biscuit (pronounced ‘waffer’) and the customers will cream their jeans over its rapturous effect. Like, it’s cost me zero to make, a few quid to serve, but—on the other side of the ledger—it’s made these fuckwitted customers think their own shit doesn’t stink. This, after even a morsel of that deep-fried pig trotter, will not be the case, let me assure you. After the free stuff menus move into the ‘entrée’ territory, and this is your chance to shine as a chef, particularly if there are food critics in the house—which, let’s face it, there usually are. I’ve got about a dozen food critics in any one of my restaurants any night of the week—and the minute that changes
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I’ll know I’ve got to sack someone. Like the maitre d’, the chef, the sous chef, the manager, the sommelier, the valet parking attendant and the masseuse.
Entrées Entrées help a chef stand out
for one very simple reason: when the entrée is ordered, and when it is served, and when it is enjoyed by the diner, there is a very, very strong chance the diner can still do the cognitive, chronological thinking thing. That is, they’ve not gassed up on to much Dom or gin yet. They can still remember what they ordered, how the menu described it, and what their initial perceptions of the described dish might be. Obviously enough, entrées are therefore critical. They can make or break a chef. Serve some pissed advertising exec a pavlova instead of a rum baba at midnight and you’ll probably double the tip, but get the angle of the blue swimmer crab claw perched atop the medley of rockpool creature parts wrong in the entrée and you can kiss the end of year ad company Xmas party goodbye. Your name will be mud all around town, too. ‘That Canardéaux blue swimmer crab dish is just so recherché,’ they’ll be saying over their post-bike-ride decaffaccinos. ‘How can the left claw of a blue swimmer crab be pointing to the right?’ And you want to know something? I’m with them on that one. They are right. They might be fuckwits with big incomes and an ad man’s tiny penis, but they are right about left-hand crab claws.
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And that’s why I’m a stickler for entrées, and for entrées performing at 110 per cent. The main course can be dog turds boiled in balsamic vinegar, and the dessert can be a plate of sugar with a frozen lemon on top, but the entrée has to shine.
Main course Two things make or break a main course: verticality
and foamosity. Most food that normal people buy to badly cook at home comes in a horizontal format: pizza, minute steak, crumbed chicken breast, pre-sliced tofu, frozen omelettes. It is flat-pack food that ships well, is assembled easily (often with the aid of a little IKEA-style Allen key), and doesn’t tend to fall off your plate when you fall asleep in front of the telly watching another bog-awful episode of ‘Jamie Force-Feeds Kids for Britain!’ Horizontal food is all fine and good for the home environment. But in a restaurant—not to mention a Gavin restaurant—the food has to be presented in a manner that is an entire world and philosophy and spirituality away from soggylooking ingredients laying flat on a microwavable plate. And that is why I present all of my main courses in a vertical and very architectural format, or mis-en-scene-vertical. This way my fans and my customers get to appreciate both the positive and negative space that is created by the dichotomous fusion of the ingredients’ verticality. Stab your fork towards the
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cantilevered medley of Patagonian Toothfish Darns and what do you find? Fish? Empty space? That’s the art. That’s the intrigue and—on the chef’s part—the mastery. It also means a chef can use less fish to make the plate seem groaning with food, which—stick-chick food magazine editors aside—is what everyone wants to see. Oh, and you’ll need a plop of foamed Peruvian heirloom potato, too, just to one side of the fish, with some sort of organic flower petal on top of it as garnish. Pile little bits of fish, piece by piece, as high as you can on a plate, and then add some foamed vegie to the side, and you’ll win food guide awards like there’s no tomorrow.
Dessert
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eye-candy of all my restaurants. Like my waitresses, they look superb, they taste superb, and they sell superbly well. They—the desserts, not the waitresses—also cost me virtually nothing to make, excepting the very minor wages of the two shy little girls running my centralised patisserie near Gatwick Airport. The key to good desserts is so simple that I can’t believe I’ve won a Cuban Sugar Industry Excellence Award for Excellence in the Field of Sugar Use (Cookery). And the key? The secret to my astonishing success? Buy a fucking measuring cup.
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Making desserts is not brain surgery. Mix fresh fruits with carefully measured units of sugar and then cook the mixture until your candy thermometer says ‘READY’. Fuck me dead ...
Bêtes noires Of course, one of the trickiest moves on any
menu is not the entrée or the main or the dessert or the cheese; rather, it is the gear change between each step. All my cars have gears, but if you don’t know how to use a clutch you might as well drive an automatic and eat at the McDonald’s drive-thru. If I had a dollar for every entrée list that doubled up so appallingly with the mains then I’d be a substantially betteroff bloke than I already am, let me assure you. And I’m very fucking rich, and I’m not in any way ashamed by that wealth, which is a lesson a lot of kids should learn. How many times have you walked into a restaurant and perused the menu only to discover that the entrée items—the overripe tomato in a flan thing, the goat’s cheese soufflé with a pesto smear, and the car-parkaggio of dead fish with some sort of herb oil all over it—are all mini-me versions of the main courses! The lamb cutlet comes with a tomato flan, the waygu comes with a goat’s cheese and pesto roulade, and the bouillabaisse is finished with a herb oil roux ... It is as if the chef is cooking out of the one refrigerator, and it is a very small refrigerator at that. Entrées should be very different to main
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courses; both should observe some sort of culinary theme, of course, but they have to offer gear changes. The trouble is that too many menus don’t come with a clutch! This is why I never order from menus. I look at them, of course, mainly to laugh or to amuse myself in some sort of way. I guess you could say that other chefs’ menus make me feel superior, but I don’t need that sort of propping up. So when the waiter or—more usually—the maitre d’ or the owner’s wife offers me the menu I simply yet always very politely refuse it. Unless you’ve got a lot of space around you there’s never any room to manoeuvre a menu anyway. These days they’re about as large in format as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and some of them are even thicker. It is just a shame they don’t contain any useful—let alone edifying— information. This is but one sign indicating a broader and more desperate problem: the restaurateur or chef is completely up himself.
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sort of rant is not really in my nature, but I think it is important that you—ordinary dumb fucks—know what really goes on in the world of menus.) If the restaurant is in an English-speaking country—like Germany, Greece, Thailand or parts of the UK—and has some sort of faux French or Italian name (or, worse still, a Spanish one, like Le Jamon) expect the menu to follow the bad linguistic trend. Bad French or bad Italian, or bad Spanish. Only
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Michelin-starred chefs can properly name their restaurants in French. That’s what I was brought up to believe; that’s what my classic training taught me; it is how it should remain. But I’m lucky, of course; having lived for so long in France and having spent so much of my childhood there, my French is très bon. I guess I’d be considered a native speaker, a little bit like Tony Blair is. Unlike Tony Blair, however, I’ve also got superb Italian and Spanish, but that’s what you find in a lot of icon chefs. These are men who pick up languages as quickly as they discover exotic ingredients and as quickly as they master new and exciting foreign dishes or cuisines or waitresses. I know I’ve said it before, but I never tire of saying it: it’s about passion. Be also wary of menus that begin with a ten-thousand-word essay on the chef’s philosophy, often written by the chef himself. This overwrought use of the term ‘philosophy’ has done so much harm to food and to fine dining and, I believe, to restaurant profitability. Unless a chef has studied philosophy—or has earned an honorary degree in philosophy, such as I have, courtesy of the Culinary Institute of America’s Atlanta campus—then the chef has no right to bang on about some spurious philosophy de cuisine. Chefs do not need philosophies; they need sober staff and a reliable brigade of terrified chefs to do their bidding—to bring to the tables of a restaurant the dishes that an icon chef has dared to dream of and whose genius has enabled him to create. Philosophies are for wimps. Great chefs have passion. (Of course, philosophies are fine for philosophers, and for winemakers, of course. Speaking of which ...) Be very afraid of menus with wine suggestions accompanying each listed dish. If a customer in any one of my restaurants
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needed such condescending advice then they would clearly be the sort of customer I did not want in my restaurants. People who don’t know their own mind when it comes to great wines of the world are the sort of people who should be gulping down cans of lager in front of their plasma television screens, watching FA Cup highlights DVDs. They shouldn’t be in my restaurant. Walk out of any restaurant with a menu containing such adjectives as ‘seasonal’, ‘free-range’ or ‘bio-dio-organic’. The chef responsible for these expletives is obviously not a businessman, but probably some sort of leftover hippie from the 1960s, or a gypsy mawkishly copying the fad words of the day. Once again, proper customers from proper postcodes know when a tomato is in season, they know when it is that one week of the year when one eats asparagus, they know that animals have been bred in order for us to eat them. Proper customers are not going to be squeamish about how an animal has been raised. As long as it is frightened and occasionally fed (the animal, not the customer), then you have restaurantquality produce ready to adorn any plate. Menus suggesting otherwise are a joke. Some other thoughts ... If you are presented with a menu printed on recycled paper, call for a cigarette lighter and a glass of Armagnac. Burn the menu. Burn it. Do not stand for anything secondhand. If you are presented with not a menu but a thin gay waiter ‘verbalising’ the chef’s dishes of the day, tell him to go away and write it all down. Have him then post it to your lawyer. Leave the restaurant. Do not tip.
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More unimaginable than this, if a thin gay waiter presents you with menus and then proceeds to read out all the dishes on the menu, interrupt him immediately. Ask him if he could bring you a roll of lavatory paper from the lavatory. If he refuses to do this, or questions your request, demand that he be sacked. If a waiter presents you with a menu and then fawningly apologises that the chef ’s signature dish of Afghani Lamb cooked in Three Confusing Ways is, unfortunately, unavailable, reply in kind. Get up and leave. Be unavailable. Enough, though. I know too well that my readers would never question my authority in these matters, yet I feel I have become too pedantic. As with curry vindaloo so with menu criticism: a little goes a long way. Yet I can also hear my many readers wonder, ‘What does one do sans menu?’ As I do, of course. Once I have graciously declined the menu I call for the wine list. In order to bring the floor staff back on side, I then order the second cheapest bottle of chardonnay on the list. This is a request they know, and they know all too well. It makes them feel in control. So order the wine and then, just as they turn to fetch it, call them back and laugh one of your best are-you-joking laughs. As if you would order such shit wine! Make light of this and order Dom. Reject any further inquiries as to what you might like to eat, and then reject the first bottle of Dom. Corked. Tell them it is corked. Not obviously corked, just randomly corked. Get the replacement bottle poured and then take a sip. Now order. And this is how I do it ... Chefs love to be tested. So put the chef of whatever fucking
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awful restaurant you are unfortunate enough to find yourself in through these hoops. If you are in a faux Italian eatery call ‘Guido’ over and put in the following order: ‘Ah, Guido, eccellente! Posso la ordero la cena, se? Va bene, va bene. We’ll have the steamed dumplings, the san choy bow, the Peking duck and the special fried rice—sorry, the special fried risotto—and some Misto Verdure Cinese. Grazie, per favore ...’ If at any stage Guido looks at you a little blankly, remind him of the term ‘racial tolerance’. Similarly, if you are in a faux Cantonese restaurant, call the owner’s son over and say, ‘Hey, Guido, we’ll have the zuppa con polenta e pollo, the spaghetti alla XO ragu, and then a few porco ribs arrosto a la barbecue, alright? Oh and the Misto Verdure Cinese, thanks mate ... Yeah we are having a terrific time, no worries ...’ What I am trying to demonstrate—and I think I do it very effectively—is that if you treat a restaurant like it’s your mum’s place then the restaurant will respect you. Older women like nothing more than a son’s love and attention. Restaurants are the same. It’s not rocket scientology.
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Degustations Some menus, however, leave you very little sea-room.
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Once you get through the chef’s philosophy and the sommelier’s philosophy, and why the kitchen is a dedicated non-plastic-bag
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consumer, then you’ll finally find a page that has one very odd word on it. It is a word I both love and hate: degustation. I love it because degustations are fantastic fresh ingredients so suited to our Mediterranean lifestyles. But I hate it because degustations are often raised in enclosures without airconditioning or cable TV. Degustations also take all night to cook, and you have to serve them piece-meal, little bit by little bit, otherwise they can curdle and then separate. Don’t get me wrong, I have degustations on all my menus and I have more testimonials from US senators and Bon Jovi bass players about their superior quality than I do any of my other dishes. Yet despite the critical and popular acclaim, and despite the shameful amounts of money I make out of these dishes, I have inner doubts and demons and naggings. Sometimes I wake at night—usually around 1.20 am—imagining I am living in a world without degustations. They are extinct. Not even in zoos. Not a breeding pair anywhere, not even in Papua New Guinea’s highlands, nor in a backyard in Tunbridge Wells. But this is the sort of guy I am—a bit of a softie at heart. I usually get out of bed at this time and go and check on my daughters, Aga and Moulinex. I go upstairs to their rooms and in the dim light of the late, late hours, I peer at their beds. And the beds are empty! And that’s when I realise they are in Ibiza with their mother, at DJ school! But, fuck, it does give me a shock for a moment. And that’s the way I feel about degustations, I guess. If we don’t treat these amazing ingredients with respect then one day they might not be there. Not even in Ibiza.
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Menus, as if the disrespect and informality shown
them by some customers is already not enough, nowadays have new enemies. ‘Shared plates’. ‘Communal dining’. And no-reservations policies ... Fuck a duck. What are we? Are we customers in a restaurant or detainees in a POW camp? Sitting at such a communal table recently (this was for a magazine photo shoot, I hasten to add), Chef sent me out one of these shared plates. ‘Excuse me, Mr Canardéaux,’ the excited little waitress said, ‘Chef would like to present this complimentary shared plate to you ... Here we have the escebeche of quail head next to the pressed lark’s liver alongside the cured, salted and pickled frog brains.’ Well I don’t know who the fuck Chef imagined I was going to share the thing with—certainly not him and, judging by the microscopic size of the portions, not the fucking stylists or camera crew, either. Not that stylists ever eat anything anyway, but that’s hardly the point. I ordered another Campari Soda (with no ‘and’) and pushed the spastic and confused dish towards my publishing house’s publicist. He said he couldn’t possibly eat it, as he was doing detox at the moment, but over the next fifteen minutes he managed to down the lot in about four or five forkfuls. It just goes to show—never trust a healthbingeing publicist. Chef must have seen the empty shared plate return because the next thing I knew the excited little waitress had plonked a ceramic grilling dish in front of me with a chorizo sausage on top. She poured grape alcohol into the bottom of the dish and, before lighting it with a long match, gave me a silly-looking
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Iberian sausage prodder and informed me that if I turned the chorizo over a few times in the flame it would be ready to slice and enjoy in about five minutes. No it fucking well was not. This really was taking the piss. I told the little thing to kindly blow out the flames, remove the sausage prodder from my presence, and return the chorizo to the fucking kitchen for the chef to fucking well cook. Jesus. Not only am I expected to sit in some sort of boarding school dining hall and share my food with my lessers, I now bloody well have to cook the stuff too? Not on your nelly. All this sort of circus-act stuff when it comes to menus serves none of us any good. When I say none of us, I mean us, of course. Chefs and restaurateurs. I don’t mean customers. Keep your customers on a short leash. Move the menu around a little through the seasons, but if the customers have a thing for the Ox Cheek Braise with Truffled Mash and Thrice Reduced Demi-Glace Glue, then keep it on the menu, even if your restaurant is in Barbados, by the sea, and only open in the high season. If customers whinge and whine when you don’t have the bog-awful roast duck on the menu, well put the horrendous thing back on. Why anyone would want to eat a Peking duck roasted badly over two days served with shrivelled-up vegetables and more of that ubiquitous demi-glace, well, I can’t say I don’t understand it, because I understand all too well. A lot of customers want high-priced consistency and obvious flavours. They might fancy themselves as gourmets, but they are only doing what the working classes do when they go to a fast-food joint, or get some bad takeaway curry. The ‘gourmets’ want just as much same-same, only they feel better about it if it costs
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them shitloads and some fag waiter greets them by name as they make their royal progress through the restaurant to their usual table. And this is why menus need to be great balancing acts: some sublime dishes for people you like, and—mostly—dog’s breakfast dishes so confused and exotic and silly that only cashed-up knobs and (invariably unqualified) food critics will like them. Such a menu is a real recipe for success. Bring passion to such a menu, and the world’s your oyster.
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Waygu Burygu A J A PA N ES E O R I G I N A L- B U R G E R
THIS DISH HAS BROUGHT ME MUCH CRITICAL ACCLAIM AND MANY PUBLIC AND PERSONAL WORDS AND STATEMENTS OF THANKS, PARTICULARLY FROM THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT, WHICH HAS BEEN SO IMPRESSED BY MY ABILITY TO SINGLE-HANDEDLY BRING THE BURGER BACK TO ITS ROOTS AND BACK INTO THE RARIFIED ATMOSPHERES OF WORLD-CLASS SUSHI RESTAURANTS. ‘HAMBURGERS’ HAVE DONE SO MUCH TO RUIN THE REPUTATION OF THE TRUE BURGER, SOMETHING FOR WHICH GEORGE DUBYA
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BUSH MUST ACCEPT MOST OF THE BLAME. THIS DISH SEEKS TO RECTIFY THAT, AND TO BRING ABOUT REAL CHANGE IN WORLD PEACE. IT IS NO WONDER BONO EATS THESE FOR BREAKFAST EVERY DAY.
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5 litres of semi-virgin olive oil
1 organic hamburger bun, halved horizontally, or across-the-grain, and then dissected
20 g house-minced waygu
5 ml house-made mayonnaise
5 ml household tomato ketchup
5 ml house-bought Dijon mustard
1 thin horizontal slice of organic tinned beetroot
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1 fried onion ring (pre-packaged rings are fine)
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1 slice pickled gherkin
100 g fresh white truffle
(Note: with the exception of the oil, you will find all these ingredients in your local specialty Japanese or Asian food store. These are such fascinating and inspirational places.)
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Flatten out the mince until it is so translucent that one could read a newspaper’s headline through it. Freeze this thin disc of mince overnight. The next morning, just before breakfast, deep-fry the frozen mince disc in the oil for 3 minutes at 174°C. Drain and keep this burger in a warm place. Grill the two halves of the bun over your wood-fired oven, gas mark 6. In a logical manner place all the remaining ingredients—including the burger, but excluding the white truffle—into a traditional Japanese sushi box. Place the bun’s top at the top, or head, of the box—this step is critical. Serve and, once again, as tradition dictates, eat everything except the pickled gherkin. Pickled gherkins are fucking awful.
S E R V E S 1 . ( M AY
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BE SHARED AS A SHARED DISH, BUT SHAREES M U S T O N LY C O M M U N I C A T E IN HARAGEI—THE T R A D I T I O N A L J A PA N ES E FO R M O F N O N -V E R B A L C O M M U N I C AT I O N . )
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Restaurants with peppermills the size of fire extinguishers and big red menus with the entries spelled with f’s instead of s’s are always expensive. MISS PIGGY, MISS PIGGY’S GUIDE TO LIFE
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Chapter 4
The Restaurants
People say a chef can be judged by his restaurants—how
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many of them he has, how highprofile they are, how often they have been frequented by gangster-rappers, and so on and so forth. Merde. That’s all I have to say about that. Chefs must be, and should be, judged—and praised—by so many more criterionii than this. Let me expand on this. In my ongoing current role I have four restaurants. Four. 4. F-O-U-R. Four. Not five, not three. Four. It is an ancient Chinese number signifying balance. One more restaurant here or one more restaurant there and you are out-of-balance, as Chinese feng shui restaurant critics say. But this is not the sort of wisdom you’ll get by being friendly to your Chinese waiter next time you are down the high street buying takeaway—or cocaine! You have to go to China and open a restaurant to learn
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this sort of wisdom. And not just learn it, but absorb it, a bit like kitchen paper absorbs canola oil after you’ve drained your first deep-fry of tempura pork tails. And that’s what I did. Not the kitchen paper thing—I’ve done that millions of times—but the going to China bit. As you know I went to Hong Kong when I was a young chef driven so profoundly by finding what I now like to call the soul of the heart of my passion. It is a simple enough idea, yet so many people and other non-media representatives fail to see it. You can’t be genuine and you can’t—it follows—cook profoundly if you haven’t, like, been to CHINA. China: home to 690 billion people, many of whom are women. China: home to pandas and to Chinese dragons. China: where dim sum (not dim sim, you fuckwit!) is the way you say hors d’ouervereoure. That’s what struck me most, I guess. China and France—the latter country wherein I spent so much of my youth and childhood and adolescence. I guess you could say it is where I grew up. China and France are pretty similar when you stop and smell the poppies. They both pride themselves on smoking, misogyny and a love of camping. It is no wonder I was made to feel so at home when I first landed in Hong Kong, in the heart of what was then rural China. Looking back on those days now it strikes me as being fairly amazing that I didn’t stay on to open a fantastically successful restaurant and enjoy the wonderful, bucolic lifestyle of Hong Kong, what with its charming country girls and ugly farmers—all of whom so happily tend the freeranging rice flocks of this traditional Chinese paradise. But something deeper and yet even more profound kept calling me.
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Consommé Alphabetique
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Waygu Burygu
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T-Bone
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To professionally chop an onion you must always start in this position.
‘Chestnut pans: I use them a lot, of course I do; but I never trust them. It’s why they respect me.’
‘Range Rover ran this bike up for me as a commemorative gift. It’s a great way for me to deliver 5-Star Michelin food to homeless people, which is something I like to do on a whim …’
‘An old knife, and a fav, I must say. Chéf de Chéf of the Xanadu Shangri-La Orientalé hotel in Hong Kong, Winston Pong, threw it at me on the first day of my apprenticeship there. The chip out of its blade corresponds exactly to a chip out of my third rib. That was discipline, that was training, that was passion …’
FIN
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Sometimes, when wandering the moors amidst the sleeping flocks of yet-shorn Usuabi rice, I imagined I could hear it call my name. ‘Gavin!’ it whispered down through the aeons. ‘Gavin!’ it would cry wistfully once more. ‘Gavin!’ it would reprise. ‘Wake up and smell the rice—you will not make money here! And the TV network is underdeveloped. They’ve got virtually no lifestyle media outside of Manga comics! Fuck off back to Britain and get your thing started!’ It was deep speaking to deep, I guess. And the sort of spiritual balance I gained by living amongst the Chinese really did help me in the mid-to-short and long terms. Marco Polo knew something of this when he, much like me, made his first trip to Hong Kong as a young man. His endeavour was more mercantile than mine, it is only fair to say, of course. But just as I have contributed to my own world through the prism that is the poetry of my cuisine, so did Marco Polo—he brought back Amway. Not a lot of people know that, but it is true. Just don’t let the Chinese know that I told you! Cheeky! But Cuisine du Moi. Let’s talk about this icon restaurant a little bit now.
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My icon restaurant—CdM, as it is known—is still my
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first love. And it happened as if by strange accident. It was back in the heady days of 2003. I’d been living in Greenwich Village for about 36 hours, and I guess you could say I’d become a bit of a local and a bit of an identity; I’d fitted in.
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Normal people—like butchers and bakers and candlestick makers—knew who I was and knew what the word Gavin meant. But that’s what you get when you invest time in a living community; that’s what you get when you don’t just fluff about in some sort of fake city with a stylist and a PR agency and an ambition to build your image. It is about putting in the time. All 36 hours. And it paid off. When Cuisine du Moi opened it was as if a long-lost son had returned to a struggling village and given it back its zest and verve and passion and life and heart and soul and meaning and PIN numbers. I guess you could say I was about as New York as you could be—or Noo Yark, as we say. But let’s make no mistake about this. I’m not Jewish, nor will I ever be. Cuisine du Moi began its amazing life on a Tuesday night in summer at 6.01 pm. Having found an old shop front in the lower-upper sub-53rd Street arrondissement that is lowerupper Little Italy, I knew I’d found a place that was both here, now, then and if. It was a shop with nothing, but with everything. It had no natural light, but it had a fire escape. It had no parking, but it was on a corner. It was without any working toilets, but it had a cheap 15 x 15 x 15 lease. It made no sense to a business analyst, but what do these people know of cooking and of food! It spoke to me, so I signed the lease. We had some mock-up photos of the place computer-corrected in LA, and then I staged a pre-opening masterclass dinner for some of America’s top restaurant reviewers in Wolfgang Puck’s Las Vegas restaurant, complete with backdrops of the stillunopened Cuisine du Moi from my designer’s workshop. It was authentically CdM, as I say, albeit in Vegas. I cooked authentic
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Noo Yark cuisine in a bold and modern and international style reflecting the realisations of my superb 53rd Street temple, CdM. The result spoke for itself. Reviewers raved. They wrote of nothing but CdM in Noo Yark for months; indeed, they wrote of nothing but CdM right up until the time I managed to open the restaurant itself in the following winter! And it was as authentic as that first degustation dinner I served in Vegas all those months before. When CdM finally opened, Wolfgang even flew in to be photographed and interviewed, which to this day I think was such a gentlemanly and old-fashioned European touch, or touche, as we say in the French. But planning and media savvy don’t cut it alone. The reason CdM worked is simple. Costings. This is a lesson all would-be über chefs should learn. Twice. They certainly don’t fucking well learn it the first time around. God! But there I go again. Sorry; do excuse my French! Costings are critical in the success of any restaurant. This is evidenced by the fact that virtually anyone can run the Bank of England, yet very few people can run a restaurant. Running a restaurant profitably means you need to stick to some fundamental fiscal rules. The first of these is the old 30/30/30 rule. Of all your ingoings and outcomings and costs and expenses and petty cash, 30 per cent must be food costs, 30 per cent must be staff wages and lease payments, and 30 per cent must be profit. This gives you a business running at 100 per cent, allowing for the 10 per cent you rake off the till every week. This last bit of the equation is very important. I haven’t met a successful chef yet who doesn’t have a bit of serious ‘flash’ money on him. Without
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it you just come across as some wide-boy, lager lout in a bad pinstripe suit. Cash is king. The other critical fiscal rule is portion control. Part of the chef’s art is being able to take a perfectly good 200 gram piece of meat—like fish or lamb or tofu—and turn it into about eight main course dishes. Typically, this is how we do it at CdM. Cook each little morsel of meat in an ice-cream maker, balance said morsel on top of some wilted organic weeds that have been tossed through cornflour, and then garnish with about five or six grains of finely milled polenta. Serve to table in a small enamelled smoker before finally bathing the finished dish with a specimen jar of sumac froth. This makes a great €38 luncheon dish. And it is not hard to do the maths. You’ve turned a €6 piece of meat into €304. And 10 per cent of that is a couple of nice drinks for me and a special new lady friend at a bar one night. Cash. And it’s cost me nothing.
C Whilst New York’s CdM is my great love I’ve still got
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a great and burning passion for my other three premises, all of which so proudly hum the tune that is Gavin Canardéaux, admittedly in slightly different keys. And that’s what you want, I guess. Any idiot can fluke a successful and trendy restaurant and then franchise the shit out of it, having carbon-copy versions of the place all over the world—Sydney, Auckland, LA, Tokyo. This tried and tested game plan is pretty straightforward. Keep the franchised restaurant names the
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same, with the city’s name attached—like CdM Sydney. Or go for something fairly similar—maybe a concrete nounal phrase like Bubble Bath, or The President, or maybe Puppy Parlour. And make sure you get your own name embroidered on every chef’s tunic, whether you are wearing it or not. Also have a few standard signature dishes and cocktails in each different place, and get the floor staff all wearing the same fashion designer uniform. A good spray of accents is handy amongst the floor staff, too; this gives the place a truly international feel. And all this guarantees that, come what may, you’ll get a steady crowd of Formula One drivers and models and rock stars in your restaurants most nights of the week. Even more predictable than the gastronauts, these sorts of people like the familiar surroundings, the same waiting staff outfits, the same drinks and the same food. If you get all your systems correctly in place you’ll turn over a good dollar for a three- to five-year period, no problems—particularly if you get hotel consortiums or newly moneyed businessmen to back each project. (Believe me, there’s some former TV exec or a recently retired gazillionaire ad man around every restaurant corner—and they’ve all just discovered ‘how amazing food is’ ...) The advantage here is that there’s none of your own money upfront, you personally only do a maximum of three or four events at each place per annum, and, well, to the rest of the world it looks like you are cooking intercontinentally 24/7—and 365 days a year. Fuck me dead, you might even get named Vogue’s Man of the Year, as I’ve been named twice now, although the second time around the award was titled Person of the Year. I was fine with that. In fact, it made me feel even more special; not only had I beaten all the
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other men in line for the award, but I’d beaten the ladies, too. So it’s clearly a much tougher award to win. I’m very proud of that. But franchising the one restaurant model is not me. It’s not my style. The problem is that anyone can do it, and I don’t want to be anyone; I want to be Gavin, or me. Sure, I could have got identikit versions of Cuisine du Moi up and running all over the wealthier bits of the globe, but I wanted something more. And something more versatile, too. But back to CdM. What makes CdM so special to me is, of course, not just one thing. It is an amalgam of so many parts of the restaurant: the Louis XIV cutlery, the rainforest feature wall, the Concord seats matched with the Luftwaffe mess hall tables, the Chewings fescue lawn on the floor (which is re-laid every Sunday), the brushed stainless-steel crockery and the jade chopsticks. The aluminium-foil shirts worn by the wait staff, the trapdoor entry, the open lavatories. It is bold, it is new, it is brave and it is also very comforting and welcoming. But that’s my own, personal cuisine du moi, I guess. That’s how I like to cook and eat and live and laugh. No wonder so many customers tell me that whenever they manage to gain entrance into CdM, well, they ‘feel like they are coming home’. That comment really touches me; and it is a comment that I don’t think many chefs ever receive—unless, of course, after being prosecuted for tax fraud, they run into some old customers in prison. And so if, as it has recently been suggested in that fucking slag-raking piece of shit called the Sunday Times—I’m guilty of devoting too much time to CdM, then I’ll valiantly—nay, proudly—admit to the crime. The other very important thing to
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remember is that CdM is no longer my temple to cuisine. It is New York’s temple. It’s the world’s temple. CdM is not my private little plaything. It has somehow become an important and essential part of cuisine’s intellectual and physical journey. I am nowadays more like its custodian, or helmsman, if you like. In fact I almost feel that I don’t really own the place anymore, which is funny, in a way, as the restaurant is part of some sort of family trust under the guidance of a company called Miss A. & Miss M. Canardéaux Holdings Pty Ltd. But my other restaurants. No doubt you will want to hear my own very personal story about them all. I reckon that so many of my customers understand that there is a kind of Canardéaux League Table of Canardéaux restaurants. I think my customers realise that CdM sits at the top, and my other temples to cuisine, of which so much has already been written, awarded, photographed and filmed, stand loyally below.
AGF
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in Napa, is clearly second on my own list of my own restaurants. What I’m saying, if you can’t keep up with this, is that if I couldn’t eat at CdM, then I’d eat at AGF—that is, Le Auxerre de Gavoir Faux, in Napa. This is not to suggest that I couldn’t get into CdM, of course not, don’t be silly—I can walk in there anytime I like. What I’m saying is that it costs more for plonker punters like you to eat at CdM than it does for you to eat at AGF. It is only
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very marginally more expensive, but it is still money we are talking about, and I’m in the business of making money, not fucking worrying over which restaurant I’m going to eat at tonight. Let me explain this further. The 26-course degustation at CdM is €360 a head, plus wine; the 29-course degustation at AGF, by comparison, is only €295 per head, and not only do I have to serve slightly more food at AGF, I don’t make as much of a margin on the wine list in Napa as I do in New York, which really fucking shits me, let me tell you. Yet this is typical of top-end restaurants in wine regions: you’re frequented by ill-bred wine tossers who all think they know how to run restaurants and how to order and what fucking wine is going to go better with the vineyardcaught vole terrine entrée. They also all think they know what the wine has cost me to put on my wine list, so it makes it fucking hard to bump the prices up, let me tell you. And then every second one of them wants to bring ‘a special bottle’. Fucking hell! What is it with wine wankers that makes them think they’re somehow allowed to overlook a restaurant’s door policies? I’d tell them all to fuck off, but for the fact that wine people are the only customers pretentious enough to fork out the sort of big coin required to eat in a world-class restaurant in a wine region. Le Auxerre de Gavoir Faux came about following some presentation dinners I was cooking for various Napa wineries back in the day. I think I’d had my first cover on Saveur magazine and my media presence was steadily beginning to grow, so I was a natural choice for the vignerons of Napa Valley to embrace and pay very large amounts of cash to. At the same
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time a lot of ‘name’ chefs in both Napa and San Fran were beginning to, well, how should I best put this? They were becoming a little up themselves. A little too self-important and a little bit egotistical. Pride comes before a fall, as I tell a lot of my sous chefs, and Napa was ready to embrace a new chef with new ideas and a totally new fee schedule and endorsement-deal contract. Part of becoming the ‘face’ of Napa was to have some sort of digs there, and maybe a restaurant too. We looked around the valley for a suitable building to turn into a three-star Michelin restaurant and after a lot of setbacks and frustrations and difficulties dealing with the mostly Spanish-speaking local authorities, we found an old stone piggery in Yountville, which, at the turn of the second-last century, was run by a Frenchman renowned in the area for producing superior animals for ham. Naming the restaurant was therefore very easy, and in keeping and respectful of local history—Le Auxerre de Gavoir Faux. It simply means ‘The Deaf French Ham Producer from Auxerre’. Once opened, AGF took off like a rocket, and before we knew it we had the NBC Today Show’s weatherman out there eating my food whilst reporting on the snow storms around the Great Lakes area—all live via satellite to the entire country. I guess you could say, looking back, that this was probably a big turning point for me in my quest to become the best possible chef I could be. It was when I realised that prepping food and cooking food for fourteen hours a day in a hot and cramped kitchen was for idiots. Give me a hot and cramped TV studio any day. Sure, making this change involved jettisoning some of those qualities and skills that had made me who I was,
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but on television I could still get to cook and, better still, no one got to eat my food. No one got to destroy it. If I have one regret about those early days at AGF it is probably a regret about avocados. Sometimes now I feel guilty about all those avocados I slaughtered. Yes, those avocados. Californians cannot go a minute without eating one of the fucking things, which was good for me in terms of business, because avocados are great cash cows and they are, in this sense, a superb and even sublime ingredient. There was a stage where I was having nearly 10 per cent of Baja’s avocado flock trucked up to Napa every year. It was a recipe for success. Have a freerange avocado hung in feather for two weeks, then, using a voile-vent hammer, tenderise the meat before serving demicarapace with some neige carbonique. What made the dish sing, however, was the white zinfandel I would insist on serving with the dish. It’s the reason I got the three Michelin stars, there’s no doubt.
LAD GAV
Yet Le Auxerre de Gavoir Faux has moved on from
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all of this, and in so many ways. When we first opened another popular dish was my roasted scallops floating on an undulating froth of raw salmon gills. It was served at the table with its own spear gun. Certainly it was a dish of its time. Some smart-arse, try-hard pretender chefs might even suggest that it would now be terribly dated. Nowadays, of course, I grill the gills over Judas Tree coals before serving them on a milk-pond of scallop
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froth. The spear gun has been replaced with a fully franked carbon credit, printed on sustainable paper. That’s cuisine, though: always evolving. It’s what keeps me so passionate, too. Next restaurant in my Canardéaux pantheon is without doubt Lad Gav, my fantastically innovative, outside-thesquare noshery in London, with a kitchen partly staffed by non-English-speaking teenage disabled life-term high-risk prisoners from Mozambique. It is an amazing restaurant because of the amazing presence and passion these violent criminals bring to it—many of whom, let’s be totally honest, are yet to be fully reformed. But, look, if they still want to get on the gear and do a few violent burgs then, as long as they turn up for their shift with a clean kit and they don’t steal from the tips jar, that’s cool with me. Lad Gav’s aim was to bring non-English-speaking teenage criminals from Africa into London to learn how to be underpaid first-year apprentice chefs. They’d work long hours, they’d get a lot of lip from their chefs, they’d no doubt have moments when, under the invasive and inhuman scrutiny of a television camera’s intense close-up, they’d lose it. They’d break down. They cry and maybe even call out pathetically for their long-murdered mother. But through all of this they’d learn self-respect, they’d learn a trade—like how to peel a potato or something—and they’d learn that if you can just stop taking the piss for a moment then you can discover these amazing things about yourself and your abilities and, like, finally get a fucking life. Of course, it’s not really their own life yet, as when they’ve finished their stint at Lad Gav they go back to Mozambique to finish their prison sentences, but they’ll finish them as better
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people—and as people passionate about providoring the very best ingredients they can source. I guess that Lad Gav has been a pretty amazing journey for all of us, though—not just the ‘Gavsters’, as we’ve affectionately come to call the African kids. There have been times when me and the team of chefs trying to help these little rascals have had to question what it is we are doing with our own lives. Like, when little Mawi (he’s a right devil, that one!) has deep-fried the pasta again—and deep-fried it in the plastic packet!—you sort of say to yourself, ‘What the fuck am I bothering to do all this for?’, but you give him a right bollocking—and on TV and all—and then you get him to eat the deep-fried pasta (and the plastic packet) and then we all get on with it. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s not about you and it’s not about me and it’s not about Mawi—it’s not even about doing telly, to be sort of perfectly honest. It is about the customers out in the dining room waiting for their pasta. And we’ve got to all work together to give them the best fucking Spaghettellarini alla con Ieri Pranzo they’ve ever had. One of the hardest things to get into the kids’ heads, though, has been notions of taste. Like, it is unbelievable to think, but a lot of these kids just don’t know what some of the simplest fresh ingredients actually taste like. It is as if they’ve never eaten anything but badly boiled rice. And that’s something that really upsets me; but it also inspires me, too. It inspires me to teach and to facilitate and to train and to—well—inspire. So, like, we’ll get the kids into the dining room between services and we’ll get them to put on blindfolds (which some of them don’t like much, let me tell you—talk about post-traumatic stress
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pussies!) and we’ll get them to smell and to taste a few different, really fresh yet simple, everyday ingredients. Like black truffle, shark fin, foie gras, caviar, king crab and mince. The initial results are quite hilarious (and great for telly). You get one of the kids telling you that the truffle smells disgusting and is maybe something from a cow shed. Another one of the little blighters will reckon that the foie gras is mushed-up rice pudding. We even had one of them tell us that the shark fin reminded him of ‘man’ ... we obviously didn’t let that one go through to the final edit. All of this—and much more besides—has helped the Gavsters become a closer team and a better brigade of trainee chefs. The results have been plain for any one of Lad Gav’s customers to see—and to smell and taste. Sure, we get customers that come along because of my name, I guess, and because maybe they think they’ll get to see me, or maybe they will be in on a night when the TV crew is doing some filming and they might manage to get themselves in the background of a shot or something. And I think that’s pretty pathetic, to be honest—that some people would come to Lad Gav just in the hope of getting themselves on telly for four seconds. That’s a pathetic cheap thrill. And it is taking the piss a bit, too. But for the most part we get quality customers interested in quality ingredients cooked under the supervision of a quality chef—me. That’s the true spirit of charity at work, I suppose. And it is working. The Lad Gav Foundation now has a solid financial base, employing over 50 NFP, NGO aid professionals, all at an executive level. And they are doing an amazing job with the PR, the media, the government grants and the associated
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business tie-ins. The way they have stayed on message has been staggering. Really, the way they’ve handled the campaign would make some image professionals look like hack amateurs. As a result of this, Lad Gav London will soon expand into Europe and Australia. Indeed, there are loads of countries screaming out to get us to come and set up shop. There’s no lack of support and interest from the world’s leading aid and charity organisations. Indeed, the hardest thing seems to be getting the right sort of displaced or disaffected youth! Who would have thought in the strife-torn and grief-ravaged world of today that finding a self-destructive no-hoper in order to film them being given a second chance would be such a difficult task! As much as I love my charity work, it doesn’t put food on the table, at least not in the volume and currency that I’m used to. And I know that there are plenty of people out there who think that I try to do too much. That I am trying more than one man should to ‘give something back’. Rest easy. Part of my ongoing and balanced lifestyle sees me devote plenty of time to hardnosed business. Business models that screw every last cent out of every invested dollar, or euro, or staff member, or customer.
ricky’s Which leads us finally (and I don’t mean this like in
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an ‘it’s-come-last’ sort of way) to my new Sydney restaurant, Ricky’s Sportsbar and Steakhouse Hamburger Grill and Bar.
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I’ve got to admit, this place is a real favourite of mine at the moment, despite what you might have read in so-called food and wine liftouts in so-called newspapers. There’s been a lot of negative and very (grossly) misinformed press about Ricky’s not really being a Canardéaux restaurant. No staggeringly inventive and beyond-sublime signature dishes, no award-winning architectural architecture, no degustations. Not even one swimming around in a tank somewhere. And, sure, I’m the first to admit that Ricky’s is certainly not classic Canardéaux oeuvre. But Ricky’s is not a restaurant—it’s a bar with food. And I don’t see anything wrong with that, particularly in a place like Sydney, where there is like a shitload of top-end, fine-dining restaurants, but really nowhere for working men and girls to go for a simple meal and a few drinks. And we do a lot of external catering through the kitchen at Ricky’s, which I find so stimulating as a chef. We cook a lot of food for corporates, for the races, for film premieres and for Keith and Nicole’s dinner parties. I find it a very humbling and a very Buddhist sort of thing to do—to cook tiny little bits of finger and party food for socialite nuffnuffs. And it is good exposure and good money. And I’m not ashamed of that. I employ fourteen people at Ricky’s, just in the kitchen alone, and without my very democratic view of food and of cuisine and of cooking and feeding paying customers, those fourteen kids would probably be on the fucking streets or something. They might even be working in supermarkets. Or in one of my Lad Gavs. Ricky’s has also helped me finally find a happy home for so much of the amazing Gavin memorabilia that I’ve collected over
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the years. Which is why we needed just over a thousand square metres of floorspace, on three levels. The three levels is key to it all, too. Hang three framed, autographed photos of you and Tiger Woods (he signed it too) teeing off together whilst enjoying a Gavin degustation or two and people might start to think the photos are a bit same-same. One on its own is amazing, and customers will come into the bar and eat and drink just to stare at the photo. But three together and the thing can be devalued. Which is why the three of them are on separate floors. Ricky’s has also enabled me to revive some classic recipes that once so happily fed a less sophisticated Australian or Queenslander. Gav’s Mum’s Beaut Meatloaf, Gav’s Classic Burger, Gav’s Favourite Fish ’n’ Chips of the Day. These sorts of dishes recall a time past when Australia resounded with the ANZAC spirit, and when its men and women ate their dinner at midday and their tea at 6.15 pm. When food was served to feed hungry mouths, not gorge the self-obsessed minds of any one of our many food and restaurant critics—all of whom are more than welcome at Ricky’s, of course. And I guess that is something that does tie my Sydney Sportsbar to all my other restaurants. It is a common thread that runs through my temples to cuisine. It is that sense and spirit of welcoming. If you don’t have that, you don’t deserve to be in the restaurant game.
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De-re-unconstructed T-bone Foam A
C L AS S I C FOA M
SOMETIMES, WHEN I HAVE HAD A PARTICULARLY GRUELLING WEEK OR I’VE BEEN OUT ALL DAY RIDING ROUGH ON ONE OF MY HORSES OR GIRLFRIENDS, MY APPETITE CAN BE ENORMOUS.
THAT’S WHEN I LIKE TO EAT A SIMPLE T-BONE. WHEN ONE SPENDS AS MUCH TIME AS I DO IN KITCHENS CONSTANTLY PERFECTING IMPERFECTABLE DISHES NEVER BEFORE SEEN OR TASTED, IT IS NICE TO COOK SOMETHING SO SIMPLE YET SO SUSTAINING. SIMPLICITY IN THE KITCHEN—AS ANY OF WE GREAT CHEFS WILL
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TELL YOU—IS, AFTER ALL, KING.
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1 x 650 g T-bone ( free-range, not battery)
350 g sea salt, hand-harvested
1 tbsp agar
1 metric sprig of parsley
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Cook the T-bone perfectly over your Tuscan or Provençal charcoal grill. I tend to do this in Tuscany or Provence, but if you can’t get there import one of these grills and the effect will be pretty similar, particularly if you use some rosemary to brush over the steak as it cooks. (Brushing meat with rosemary gives you great options back in the editing suite, too.) In any case, a 650 g T-bone that is 45 mm in thickness will need 6 minutes on its left side. Salt the meat, turn onto its right side. Cook another 3 minutes. Remove from grill and rest in a warm place, such as Florida, for a further 3 minutes. Debone the T-bone. Remove any fat and discard. Keep the bone, however. Process the meat in a vitamiser on high for 10 minutes. Mix this pureed meat with the agar and then force into a whipped-cream canister equipped with an N2O cartridge (available in most supermarkets). Place the T-bone onto a plate and then extrude the foam around the T-bone. The extrusion should take the shape and form of a perfectly chargrilled steak. Garnish with parsley. It is the only way to appreciate this cut of beef. This is beef in its most natural state.
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OR IDE AL AS A P H OTO S H O OT FO R S E V E R A L FO O D ST Y L I STS .
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People say I’m a monster, but I’m not a monster. I just have to maintain a high standard that people are paying a fortune for. GORDON RAMSAY
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Chapter 5
L’attitude
People often talk about business and pleasure. As I’ve often said, I did not become a power icon
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celebrity chef de chef in order to spend my life in kitchens. But don’t get me wrong. I am passionate about designing kitchens and am passionate about the people who work in them. It is not work, though. It is a calling, a vocation, a right, a privilege, a state of mind. As I’m saying, I am passionate about kitchens. And I’m passionate about sagaciously combining business and pleasure in this, my life of lives. No doubt this is why I am so often approached by top modelling agencies and luxury goods conglomerates to endorse their kitchen accessories. I don’t have any ethical problems with this. I drive a Ferrari; in fact I drive several, but not simultaneously, of course. Although if a reality TV show asked me to do it, I’m sure I could. But look, if I choose to drive a Ferrari why would I not endorse a Ferrari-branded egg
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whisk? It’s red, it’s Italian designed, and it is never less than US $2295. That resounds with artisanal quality and vocationality, if you ask me. There’s a fine line, however, between commercial reality, self-respect and selling out. I tell this to every apprentice pastry chef who walks into my kitchen, whether they are dressed or not. They often approach me in awe, having seen me on TV, having read so many of my books and associated magazine articles, or having drooled over any one of my lavish photo studies. My message is a simple one, which is why, I suppose, I reach out to so many simple people. Many of them are in fact from special accommodation homes, which I find as humbling as I do uplifting. Which is why I tell them: food doesn’t make you spastic; people make you spastic. That’s when they usually applaud and we hug. There’s something about TV cameras that brings that on. These occasions always see me cry. I’m not ashamed of it. I love TV. A passionate attitude must exist in all areas of your restaurant life. Passion in the kitchen when cooking; passion when serving, when greeting customers and celebrities; passion when even dining in another restaurant yourself. I’m so passionate about this last point that I always tip upon arrival. I walk into some such restaurant, purported to be the new clothes of the new emperor. The maitre d’ instantly recognises me, of course. He or she will try to shake my hand—not out of any friendliness or naive politeness, but more because they just want to touch me. This is when I slip them a hundred-dollar bill, or fifty-pound note. (I never tip in euros.) Service then goes without a hitch, as I have so inexpensively bought the
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restaurant for the night. It is now mine to use as I wish. And I do. But in this regard I fear I am the last of the Mohicans—that wonderful Native American tribe so committed to biodynamic and organic cuisine and restaurants. Yes, I am the last of a dying breed. A man who knows how to use a restaurant; a man who knows what a restaurant is for. Too few of us nowadays know— let alone remember—how to drive a restaurant. You don’t need a licence to do this, of course; just talent. And a lack of fear. Oh, and you need plenty of money. But everyone I know has money, so I don’t usually count that. To drive a restaurant you need spunk and guts. You don’t need a seatbelt or a helmet, which are the wardrobe accessories most people who dine in restaurants seem to be invisibly wearing. They are afraid. They are scared little people who, quite frankly, do not deserve to eat the noble offerings they have been served; they do not even deserve to shit said noble offerings out later on—and certainly not in your restaurant’s restroom. To use a restaurant properly you need l’attitude. And so it follows that to run a restaurant properly you also need—yes— that special ingredient again: l’attitude. To cook and to raise your manna-like foodstuffs to culinary heights never before seen or tasted you also need this attitude of l’attitude. Before service in whichever one of my restaurants I happen to be in at the time—whether cooking, handling staff, or being photographed—I always make sure I have a little bit of quiet time, or Gavin Time, as we call it. The l’attitude is, of course, always with me; but like any sort of warrior I need to go through a ritual before I enter the field, or the kitchen. This enables me to enter that zone—or les zones, as we call it in haute
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cooking—where cuisine becomes my new universe, and I am driven by a strange, all-binding, omni-powerful, essential force. I see some of the pretender chefs try to mimic this zone, but they fail miserably. They drink four cans of Red Bull and then take some pseudoephedrine and some party pills but all it does is turn them into even more powerful role models for their apprentices; it does nothing for their cuisine. They take some food and they cook it; they do not become an artist creating art. They are not in les zones; they are de-zoned. And they remain this way for the greater part of their so-called professional lives. Of course, being Gavin on a 24/7 sort of schedule would take it out of anybody. It even takes it out of me. And I’ve found that for general all-round mental and physical health and fitness I need to peak and trough, to go into the zone and come out of the zone. I have taught myself how to become ‘me’ the chef, and then to become ‘me’ the man. And then ‘me’ the chef again, and so on and so forth. I often explain this process to people, like journalists and talk-show hosts and sometimes even apprentice chefs, but I really think you have to be a very naturally, innately spiritual person to really get the idea. Sometimes waitresses and models and PR girls will pretend to get it, but, believe me, I know when a woman is faking it, don’t you worry. If they really were getting it, they wouldn’t have the glazed look in their eyes, I’ll tell you that for nothing. This notion of entering and exiting les zones I’ve condensed to a very quick and simple process, involving no yoga or hypnosis or tantric sex—whatever the tabloids might have splashed across their front pages! What I do is very, very
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simple yet also powerfully symbolic and powerfully effective. To enter the zone I don my chef’s tunic. To exit the zone I take my chef’s tunic off. This was a trick that Superman used to use quite effectively, although it had its downside—Clark Kent was a complete arse. With me you’ve got a more handsomely balanced dual personality: the impassioned chef de chef on the one hand, and—sans tunic—the calm, loving, giving, yet strong and dependable man on the other. I guess the greatest compliment people pay with regard to the way I balance my ongoing lifestyle is the ‘way you make it all look so easy’. That’s the phrase they often use. And that’s a great compliment; but as any great actor will tell you, making it look so easy takes years and years of hard work and dedication. And that’s just to act well. Chefing is more difficult still. But being an icon chef and being a financially successful philanthropist and being a celebrity, well, I find all these aspects of my life rewarding, yet I still want more. In order to keep that sense of passion and that sense of always wanting to be even better than I already am, I can’t help myself, I have to keep testing boundaries. I have to always find new ways to get out of my comfort zone—which is an entirely different zone to les zones of which I spoke so eloquently just before. I do this out-of-comfort-zone thing by exploring new areas of my expanding business portfolio. And I guess the most successful area of this journey of self-discovery has been my range of homewares and providoring stores—Essential Moi. But it was no bed of roses, let me tell you. In fact, I will tell you. When I opened my first Essential Moi store a lot of the so-called heavy hitters within the food and wine and
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shopping-event sector scoffed. I admit, it was an innovative move—for a successful and very photogenic TV celebrity chef de chef to risk it all in a retail franchise involving EU funding and a 49 per cent partnership with Glaxo and IKEA, well, it was always going to be tough. By-the-seat-of-your-pants sort of gear. But I thrive on challenges as much as a biodynamic zucchini thrives on chemical fertiliser. We opened the store and we waited. That was at 10 am on a Saturday. By 10.01 we knew we were on a winner. True story. Hundreds of people and other TV reporters poured through the airlocks before entering the holding bar before entering the store. They used credit cards like I’d never seen them used before. But what a relief. That one minute from 10 am till 10.01 was one of the most stressful and emotionally draining minutes of my life, in which I have lived every second as if it were my last. One minute you’re here; the next you’re not. Minute steaks know nothing of what I went through in that minute in the very early hours of a Saturday morning. It gave me a new understanding of steak, and of business, and of how precious every moment is, particularly when you are being interviewed. Essential Moi stores are now found all over the globe. We’ve even got three in Dubai, but it is a very big airport. I think what has made Essential Moi work is the way we’ve been very keen to range the fair trade products so proudly alongside the semi-fair trade products. You know, it seems like a simple enough idea, but what we’ve done here is give the customer a choice. Sure, you can buy a €27 mud-coloured hessian coffee storage bag made by repatriated farmers’ widows from Costa Rica, and, make no bones about it, it is a quality product; and it
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is a quality product from which—once sold—an undeclared but ‘fair’ percentage of the money will be returned to the farmers’ widows foundation’s umbrella group’s management fund. And all of that is just fantastic. But if you’ve already got a coffee storage bag, or if you want one that’s red and not mud-coloured, then who am I to tell you that it is wrong to buy the €279 Alessi titanium one? Similarly, if you are after a fragrance or a perfume, Essential Moi gives you choice. Do you want the fair trade Bogota Water Orchid Essence (€92/125 ml) or, perhaps, one of my own fragrances, such as Canardéaux pour Homme (€180/200 ml) or Gavin Give-In pour Femme (€360/70 ml)? I think the most important thing all of this shows is that if you’ve got l’attitude then you can really make a difference in the world. You are not going to change it overnight, and no matter how many people buy my fragrances I can’t stop the icecaps from melting, but I can help bring awareness to the fact that the icecaps are melting, and if that gets me a reference in a newspaper alongside a shot of a polar bear, then there’s a chance I might sell more fragrance. Having l’attitude doesn’t just mean you protect polar bears, however; sometimes it means you do things that might go against popular opinion. You might do something that, if not responsibly and diligently reported by a fair and free press, might, at a glib, tabloid sort of glance, come across as a bit too in-your-face. A bit over-the-top. Maybe even a bit inhumane or even brutal. What I’m trying to say is that I’m no hypocrite. Unfortunately, however, and I don’t say this lightly, I think a lot of my multimedia audience is. They watch Rick Stein catching
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a fish and holding it in his two hands as he quotes William Wordsworth and then they watch him cut its head off and fillet it and they can’t wait till the show is over so they can pop up to Sainsbury’s and buy some cod to fry badly in the wrong pan. They watch Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall IV tromp around some boggy paddock hammering nails through the heads of eels and ripping the gizzards out of blood-warm dead rabbits and they suddenly long for an olde England where we ate every morsel of every beast we caught. They even watch Jamie Oliver trying to demonstrate some classic Muslim tagine dishes by slitting the throat of his own sheep and—despite a few murmurs in the ‘quality’ newspapers—they still rush out and buy his latest cookbook, Carry On Jamie! And me? What happens to me? I go on television and bite the head off one ortolan—and a superbly prepared and cooked ortolan at that—and I’m made out to be some sort of Dr Mengele. I mean, what has become of the world! It is as if people just want to block their ears and close their eyes to the fact that animals come in all shapes and sizes and that we eat many of them, mostly after we have humanely and hygienically slaughtered them. Yet making a statement like that lands me in more trouble than saying the ‘f’ word over and over again on daytime television. Demonstrate in a very real and A to Z sort of way that humans eat animals and I get people who want to fucking well string me up! I’ve even had to change my daughters’ school because some loony vegetarian got on YouTube and said they were going to do to my daughters what
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I did to ortolans. Jesus! Do these people have any idea how inconvenient it is to change schools? Putting aside these problems for a moment, I think the first thing people need to realise is where ortolans sit in the pantheon of haute cuisine: they are illegal food. I think it is important to address that issue straightaway. The ortolan is a little songbird, not much different to larks, found in France’s south-west. The French banned their consumption in 1999. And they were banned because some crackpots got it into their empty heads that eating ortolan was somehow gluttonous and even a bit sadistic. Bullshit. The following description of ortolan preparation and enjoyment should clear this matter up for good. First you have to don some fairly serious hunting gear. Also arm yourself with a shotgun. A few dogs won’t hurt, and maybe a hipflask of brandy. Have your staff erect fine bird netting in the lower canopy of your estate’s woods. Woods in old Aquitaine are best. Walk through the woods and have your staff pluck out any ortolan found caught in the netting. Be careful when handling the little birds, as they need to be returned to your kitchen alive. Besides, they are tiny, fragile little things, and they break easily. Place the ortolan in a box containing plenty of millet or oats or some-such grain. Organic grain is best. Close the box, making sure its interior is completely dark. The little birds, not being able to see, will entertain themselves by gorging on the grain. Leave them to do this for about three days. After this time remove the plumpened birds and promptly drown them in a pitcher of brandy.
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Now roast each bird whole—innards and all—in a small ramekin for seven minutes. The oven should be very hot: 250°C at least. Serve. And this is how. Place a large white napkin over your head. Under it draw the cooked ortolan and bite off the beak. Place the beak on your plate and then breathe in the other-worldy aromas of the debeaked bird. Place the whole bird in your mouth and start chewing. Ortolan connoisseurs say that the flesh and fat of the bird is like the love of God. They say that the earthiness and bitterness of the innards is like the suffering of Jesus. And they say that the crunching of the tiny bones is the Holy Spirit— mingling now with the sweet fat and the bitter innards, thus forming the Holy Trinity. By the time you’ve finished this ortolan communion about twelve minutes will have elapsed. Some people crunch on the beak afterwards. Others keep it as a memento of a fantastic occasion. Once the bird has been enjoyed, drink your finest Bordeaux, with a minimum bottle age of at least ten years. Now, if anyone can tell me what is wrong or inhumane or barbaric about this charming French culinary tradition, rooted in centuries of rustic lore, then I will go ‘He’. Of course, the selfishness and appalling gluttony of the late French President François Mitterand has not helped the ortolan’s cause. At the cancerous President’s last meal, a week before he fell off the perch (so to speak), he held an enormous feast for his closest friends. Served amongst oysters and foie gras were some perfectly prepared and cooked 60-gram
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ortolans. According to some accounts, the dying President ate two. He was clearly a disgusting man. A monster. And his behaviour has done so much, I believe, to damage the beautiful reputation of this delicate little songbird. A gentleman and a true humanitarian would only ever eat one ortolan. When all of this started I didn’t even do that; I just bit the head off.
Having l’attitude means that one moves on
and that you can quickly overcome adversity, even if it has been so appallingly misdirected by a mud-slinging media campaign. I know something about this sort of thing, having spent some time in Australia. They shit-sling there on a daily basis. Breakfast, lunch and tea. They even let their cricketers do it. So you shouldn’t really be too surprised by the banalities their restaurant critics get away with. Of course, having been a restaurant critic myself, for a Japanese television company and for a few select European fashion magazines, I know the game from both inside and out. Knowledge is all about sharing, as it nowadays has to be too often stated, so permit me to share. This is how the restaurant critic’s profession—or game— works ... To begin with, you need some media savvy. The reason most restaurant critics are former journalists is not, therefore, hard
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to see. Journalists, like rabbits, breed journalists. They keep to themselves and they look after themselves. Occasionally they will induct an outsider, but only under the condescending pretence that they are ‘doing a naturally talented writer a favour’. Induct them and then you’ve got them. The team remains happy and—more importantly—like-minded. Restaurant critics, logically enough, don’t like anyone else besides ill-informed journalists being restaurant critics because such people are not journalists. They lack the sort of journalistic training that brings an opaque or even transparent brilliance to every word of a food or wine review. More importantly yet, anyone who is not a journalist will not have a journalist’s A1 nose for the real and the true and the very essence of the story. Keep at the equation and you soon realise that only a journalist can accurately report on anything—whether it be a plate of food or a UN appointment or, perhaps, the current favourite colour of our latest prime minister. I guess what I am trying to say is that journalists are fantastic people to review restaurants and to comment on chefs, cuisine, the history and tradition of that cuisine, and also about the realities of running a restaurant in any capital city anywhere in the world. Even when said journalist has only been flown in for about three hours to do the job, and even when, right up until that moment, they’ve spent their entire journalistic career reporting on finance. Or sport. But let’s get this straight: without journalists restaurant criticism would not be in the newspaper, and that would be a great and shameful tragedy. Of course, knowing what it takes to become a critically acclaimed restaurant critic is only half the battle. Once you
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become a restaurant reviewer you then have to review restaurants. Often at night. And that can be a hell of a thing to do. So permit me to run through the standard procedure, so that all of us, one day, might be able to review restaurants for a common good, a common understanding, and maybe even a worthwhile charity. Always book under your wife’s maiden name. If you have recently left your wife for a younger woman, do the right thing. Do your ex-wife the courtesy of sticking with her maiden name. If you are gay—which is a very popular lifestyle decision for fringe restaurant critics in the fringe media—then use a booking surname that gives you a degree of self-titillation, and a name that you imagine might raise a laugh out of the young waiter you are catching up with later (‘for a glass of ...’). Always arrive at the restaurant in such a manner as to be recognised. Do something that only a restaurant critic would do in order to ensure this. Complain about the colour of the doormat or that the waiter hasn’t taken your coat yet or that the restaurant seems to be so hopelessly facing south as opposed to north. Do all of this loudly and you’ll soon have senior management out on the floor. About two seconds later you’ll be recognised and so therefore be in a position to thoroughly and anonymously review the restaurant. Once seated bring out a notepad and a digital camera from your otherwise sleek and unnoticeable over-the-shoulder bag. If this bag should be emblazoned with a recent food and wine festival’s motto, such as ‘NEW YORK FOOD CRITICS’ FESTIVAL 2008’, don’t feel ashamed. Anyone who is proud of their work is proud to wear a badge. Oh, and at about this stage the owner or
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chef should probably have come out to your table and exchanged pleasantries. It’s a first-name basis, gushy-gushy, enthusiastic handshake or maybe even a hug sort of thing. Ask about one another’s children and wives and recent holidays or renovations and promise each other to ‘catch up soon for dinner’. This is all fine and completely above board. Your disingenuousness will automatically cancel out the restaurateur’s disingenuousness. Now settle in to the job at hand. First task: in a very cranky manner get the waiter over to your table. Be indecisive about everything and then send the waiter away. On the waiter’s second call go for a très-funny ‘oh-thereyou-are’ line. And make sure to then quickly provide your own backing laughter track. Because no one else will be laughing. Try a few other lines, such as ‘Oh, so this is the menu?’, or, ‘You’re not going to tell me this is your first night, are you?’ In other words, do what you can to settle into a normal evening in a restaurant—shitting the wait staff being fun game number one. Then order two entrées. Stick to those dishes which are easy to spell. While you wait complain to the waiter about the water. Say that if you wanted mineral water you would have asked for it or, vice versa, complain that you have not been offered any mineral water. When the waiter is absent pick up the bread roll, look at it, look up at your ‘companion’, roll your eyes, and plonk the bread roll back down on the side plate with theatrical derision. When the food comes let forth with an amusing, curious, canthey-be-serious ‘Mmmm ...’. Then dine. Eat everything whilst whingeing to your ‘companion’ about that bitch who has taken over the glossy magazine ad section
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or about a senior editor who knows nothing about food yet always gets the top restaurant-review jobs. Do this ad nauseam until the dessert arrives and then take glowing review notes about it, no matter what it actually tastes like. This, of course, has nothing to do with the compulsory work seminar you attended the other day in which it was pointed out to staff writers that 98.9 per cent of readers were women who like eating ice-cream. I guess what I’m trying to do here is lay bare the transparency and ethics of good, solid, reputable food and restaurant journalism. Without this sort of due-diligence we’d have newspapers telling us stuff about food and wine that was well, let’s face it, a load of well-fed bollocks, and I for one would never stand for that.
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and of cooking and of newspapers, there’s one thing that both editors and even ordinary non-media people often ask me when it comes to holding dinner parties at home. ‘Gavin,’ they ask, ‘what are the five big mistakes I always make when I’m trying to run a dinner party at home?’ ‘Lucinda,’ I often reply (or Arabella, or Mia, or Sophia, or Moira—hello to all of you girls), ‘your only mistake, my darling thing, is not having enough confidence in yourself. You are an amazing woman with incredible skills in your career so
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there’s no reason you can’t put together a five-course, threeMichelin-star-worthy dinner for you and five girlfriends at home next Wednesday night.’ That’s what I say. What I’m thinking is something very fucking different, let me tell you. Like ‘what are the five big mistakes you make’? Jesus. More like the 500 fucking mistakes you make every time you open the fridge or turn on the gas hob. Fucking hell. These girls might be absolutely brill at attending magazine launch parties and getting on and off motor launches during the racing season but they cannot cook a fucking thing to save their lives. But I’m always flattered and deeply honoured to contribute to the food and wine liftouts of some newspaper or dedicated food magazine or other, so the same fact sheet I get my EA to bang through to them I’ll reproduce for you here now, at no extra cost to the purchase price of this book.
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Five Kitchen Nightmares (and how to avoid them). Nightmare #1: The Look. Get your kitchen
looking right before you attempt any sort of dinner party. All the surfaces should be spotless. Almost mirror-finish. A few vases of expensive flowers placed on the chopping boards, on the draining board, and maybe on the stove top. Have the fridge emptied and the interior thoroughly cleaned; restock it with a bottle of champagne, a piece of nicely wrapped cheese, some stunningly fresh fish, and a few small vases filled with asparagus and other such green vegetables.
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Nightmare #2: The Equipment. A brand-new
espresso machine is pretty much essential. Do not be tempted to use it before the dinner party as it will then look soiled. Some brand-new retro-style vitamisers and pasta makers and the like are also useful. Once again, try not to use them before the dinner party. Have an enormous block of knives in the corner somewhere, well away from the chopping board.
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Nightmare #3: The Preparation. The worst
thing most home cooks do when giving a dinner party is to pre-prepare some of the dishes. Where the fuck they got this loony-tune idea from I don’t know. Don’t cook, let alone chop up a thing, until the doorbell has rung and you’ve got everyone in the sitting room and on to the third bottle of sparkler. Then pop into the kitchen and quickly throw together the fish terrine or some homemade pasta and an oxtail stew and maybe make some ice-cream for dessert. This is really very basic and simple, straightforward food that I can cook on any one of my TV shows in about 23 minutes of air time. With confidence, and in the familiar surroundings of your own kitchen, you should be able to do this too.
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Nightmare #4: The Service. So many well-
meaning home cooks try to bring an unfussy and informal feel to their dinner parties by serving things on shared plates or, worse still, in the pots the food’s been cooked in. Your guests are then supposed to dig in and help themselves. Fucking hell. You are not in India, you know. You don’t have to eat like some sort of untouchable. So make sure you’ve got big white plates for your terrine, and then bigger shallow bowls for the pasta, and then really, really big white plates for the oxtail. Also use about three medium-sized side plates per person per course for such things as salad, parboiled greens, turned root vegetables and pills. With a good system in place you can plate up, serve, clear the table, plate up, serve, clear the table and so on all very nonchalantly and in such a way as to draw absolutely zero attention to yourself. There’s no reason why any of your guests should even notice your absence from the table for a moment.
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Nightmare #5: The Food Itself. Having
attended your dinner party your guests are obviously going to be fascinated by the dishes you’ve served and how you cooked them and your inspiration for them and the wines you served alongside of them and so on and so forth. Dinner-party guests, in my experience, can’t get enough of this sort of charming insight and sparkling infotainment. So don’t feel worried about really unleashing yourself and describing in great and passionate detail the way you managed to weave together the evening’s magical feast. Talk and talk and talk about the dinner-party’s preparation as if there is no tomorrow. And when everyone has finally departed in cabs, give the still near-spotless kitchen surfaces a quick wipe down and enjoy a sneaky post-prandial as you contemplate the gorgeous success of the night and browse through a few new cookbooks, looking for next Saturday night’s inspiration.
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Canardéaux de Canardéaux P U R E G AV I N
SO MUCH HAS ALREADY BEEN SAID AND WRITTEN ABOUT THIS CLASSIC SIGNATURE DISH THAT IT WOULD BE RIDICULOUS OF ME TO ADD ANYTHING MORE. THIS IS A DISH THAT DEMANDS YOUR BEST WINE, YOUR BEST WOMEN AND YOUR BEST DINNER SUIT. INDEED, IT CANNOT BE PROPERLY APPRECIATED UNLESS EVENING WEAR IS IN CLEAR AND FORMAL EVIDENCE. OF COURSE, ALTHOUGH THIS RECIPE IS KINDLY REPRINTED HERE (WITH MY PERMISSION) IT SHOULD ONLY BE READ AND IMAGINED. IT IS AN OFFENCE FOR ANYONE WHO IS NOT ME OR AN AUTHORISED REPRESENTATIVE OF ME TO COOK THIS DISH IN THE FOLLOWING COUNTRIES AND/OR GEOGRAPHIC REGIONS: THE EU, USA, CHILE, AUSTRALIA, NEW
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ZEALAND, TAIWAN, JAPAN AND ANTARCTICA.
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1 large duck neck, skin on, bone in
Bird of Paradise broth
1 packet instant aspic (available in most supermarkets or petrol stations)
1 kilo muscle-building protein powder (Hulk Hogan Formula # 314)
2 cubic metres watercress
100 g fresh white truffle
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Stuff as much of the protein powder as you can into the duck neck. Place in a Le Creuset terrine dish large enough to hold the neck. Barely cover with Bird of Paradise broth. Place terrine in a bainmarie large enough to hold the casserole dish. Cook in an Aga for 647 minutes at 70°C/gas mark 1/90W. Turn the oven off for 3 minutes every 28 minutes. Remove from oven. Place the cooked neck in a Le Creuset pan large enough to comfortably hold the duck neck. Mix the instant aspic into the B. of P. broth and pour around the neck. Wait until it sets. (This takes about four packets of cigarettes.) Serve in situ at room temperature with a Laguiole steak knife and a slice of orange. Totally ignore the side dish of watercress. Just let it sit to one side and wilt. Ducks do this; so should you. Tradition dictates that this dish be accompanied by Domaine de la RomanéeConti 1985—a great year for ducks.
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AS A SHARED DISH.
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I’ve been a shit husband. I feel sorry for my kids. JAMIE OLIVER
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Chapter 6
The Man
Dividing my time between my calling, my family,
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my charitable work, my TV appearances and my elite sporting interests doesn’t tend to leave much time for me. In fact, it is one of the hardest things for me to do, to find some ‘me-time’. But I have to do it, otherwise life just becomes this constant pursuit of career success. And that can soon get out of control. I’ve seen this sort of manic condition ruin the celebrity lives of too many power chefs. They spiral out of control and take drugs and make bad business decisions before marrying a pop diva or soap opera princess. Things quickly unravel. They might even end up on an embarrassingly bad reality TV show like Celebrity Survivor or Enough Rope. So that’s why I take every weekend off. Solo. Just me. I stay in one of my apartments in London or Manhattan or Dubai. It’s not much time, but it’s enough for me to recharge the batteries and continue being the man I want to be, for everyone—for family, friends, fans and
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franchises everywhere. This way they all get full and undivided pure Gav time five days a week (minus travel time, of course). But I guess it does take a particular sort of person to be both an über chef de chef and a well-balanced and happy, healthy human being. I think there are clear, personal qualities you need in order to make it in both cooking and in life. And I guess these are the qualities I try to impress on the young ladies of private girls’ schools whenever I visit to make guest speeches. Mostly I’m invited through customers whose daughters attend the school, or sometimes it is a professional engagement arranged through my management company. Sometimes, if I’m passing such a school and I’ve got a few spare minutes, I’ll just pop in unannounced and give an impromptu masterclass in life skills. ‘For a man to realise all his many potentials he needs three very important principles, or KPIs ...’ This is how I usually start such speeches. There’s no doubt about the first quality you need: passion. Not just ordinary passion, though, not just passable passion— that’s too passé, it’s too 1990s. And not just strong emotion or even violent enthusiasm. Having passion is not just about being passionate. But how do you know if you have the right sort of passion to make it in life, and as a chef? Well, if you have to ask yourself that question then there’s a 90 per cent chance you’ve not got it. You’re not passionate, you’re passive. There’s one question, however, that will elicit an answer indicative of someone who may well have the right stuffing: ask someone what their passion is. If they answer ‘Passion!’, you know you’ve got someone with whom you can work. If they answer
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‘cooking’ or ‘food’ or ‘restaurants’ then you know you’ve got someone who is pretty narrow-minded and unimaginative. They are not passionate people; they’ve just been listening to celebrity chefs too much. The other quality a man of sharpened steel needs is discipline. That’s right. You need to be the strictest taskmaster going around. You have to exert tight control over every animal, vegetable and mineral in your kitchen—and out in the dining room. You have to command obedience and loyalty. And the best way of doing this is to have everyone—whether they be waiters, sous chefs, customers or telly audiences—absolutely fucking terrified of you. Always on tenterhooks. Never relaxed or happy, but always nervously smiling, always about two seconds away from letting out a bit of nervous wee. If you’ve got everyone in this sort of mindset then you are going to have a happy and successful business. The third but by no means bronze medal sort of quality needed to be like me is probably the most obvious one: an open mind. There are plenty of egotistical chefs parading themselves around the swanky restaurants of the world, but without an ability to accept ideas that may be contrary to your own, and without an ability to adapt to change, your cuisine becomes arrogant and it quickly becomes dated. I see so many of these chefs, particularly in cities like Vegas and London. And their numbers seem to be growing, which I think is very sad for the restaurant business as a whole. Jesus, I even came across one running a little road-side food stall in Tibet the last time I was there with Sir Richard, doing a photo op. We gave the git a right bollocking, let me assure you. ‘How dare you send out food
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like that!’ I think I told him. ‘Stop taking the piss!’ chimed in Sir Richard. And this is the sort of change one can help bring about, but only if one has an open mind. Of course, these three personal qualities won’t automatically get you a thirteen-part BBC food safari series. There are obviously other more technical and practical skills and performance characteristics you need in order to make it in the world—and to make in the world of the über chef. Being fairly savvy with new technology—and being keen to embrace new technology—is critical. Personal communication devices, computer image-enhancing software, web hosting and a real-time online presence—you’ve got to be absolutely all over these sorts of things. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook—you need to spend as much time on these sites as you do in the kitchen. Otherwise, who the fuck is going to notice you? Constant media training is another thing many chefs aren’t paying close enough attention to. I see media training a bit like I see gym training. You don’t go to the gym once and then expect to be buff for the next ten years, do you? It is the same when it comes to keeping media fit. That’s why I get constant top-ups. Some voice training, some teeth whitening, some work-tocamera one-on-ones with someone like Sir Bob Hoskins, or Sir Ian Holm. Sure, these things take time. And a lot of chefs complain they are time-poor. That’s a cop-out, if you ask me. Make time, not fucking excuses. But maybe that’s where being a great chef starts. It is the man inside the chef’s tunic that brings to that tunic life and love. Put that man inside a fireman’s coat and he’d probably be saving children from the top floor of a burning council estate.
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Put him in a pilot’s double-breasted jacket and he’d probably be foiling terrorists before managing to safely land the sabotaged 747. Put him in an asbestos F1 suit and he’d probably be winning Grand Prix races and dedicating his victories to some endangered rainforest giraffes. It is the man that makes the chef, not the other way around. So if in this chapter I can convince myself to be a little more open and free about both my life and my private life, then I hope that in some small way that might inspire a kid out there to become the best possible person they can be. And then they will be able to do whatever they like with life. Play your cards right and the world is one big open cheque book, let me tell you. GIZA ,
GAVIN CANARDEAUX 5800858008
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of my life is my amazing family, which is probably why I am a little overprotective of them. Of course I am. But who wouldn’t be—particularly when some low-life scum journalist starts attacking my kids in the newspapers? Sure, my oldest, Aga, was named Aga as part of a lucrative endorsement deal with the manufacturers of that absolutely brill cooker, the Aga. What this low-life scum journo didn’t bother to research, though, was that the six-figure endorsement deal saw a percentage of monies go into creating the Miss Aga Canardéaux Foundation for Children without Seafood. It’s in its fifth year now, and during those five years the foundation
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has seen more than 11 million tonnes of ocean-fresh fish go into the homes of low- to middle-income earners in the Chelsea, Kensington and Sloane Square areas of London. For some of these kids it is the first time (and probably the last, if the truth be known) they’ve ever seen, let alone eaten, restaurant-quality, ocean-going seafood. We’re not talking about trawler-netted, snap-frozen cod, either. It’s all line-caught. The salmon is Scottish, some of it from my very own estate. They get lobster, they get caviar. Some of these poor little kids have even had the chance to try blow fish. Which is why the foundation’s seafood hampers now come with an adrenaline needle. So why wouldn’t you think about naming your daughter after an icon hospitality appliance if so much good was going to flow from it? And, by the way, I’m not noticing any scum journalist attacking the Aga Khan about his name. Of course, you can take these endorsement arrangements too far, to the point where they become a little tacky and a bit cheap. Nigella Lawson’s last daughter, Nutella, for instance. Look, don’t get me wrong, she’s a lovely little kid, but really ... There’s more to life than your publicity profile and getting your face on magazine covers. Or jars of sandwich spread. Moving on from my family, charity is one area of my business life that I really look forward to on a day-to-day basis. It’s not really work for me; I see it as fun, and as something that I can really indulge myself in. But I’m lucky in this respect— there are probably heaps of people out there who would really, really be interested in doing something for charities but they just don’t have the PR machine behind them to set it all in place. Like, for your average John and Jenny in the High Street, a
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charity would probably cost them some serious dosh to set up and run—and then there’d be no guarantee that they’d get anything out of it, either long or short term. And I guess that’s something that still gets my goat up about the post-Blair Britain. But like I said, I’m lucky in this way because every charity I patronise or own always provides me with a fully franked minimum return, vis-à-vis column inches, photo ops, or EU awards. The after-profit revenue some of the call centres in Bulgaria generate is pretty amazing too! And that’s part of the reason I’ve recently got involved in B.U.L.G.L.A.R.I.A.—a new charity to help provide state-ofthe-art Dolce & Kabana sunglasses for the visually impaired in that completely amazing nation and country, Bulgaria, near Russia. Like, I don’t know if you know this, but 96 per cent of the world’s most terrifyingly dangerous UV rays actually hit Bulgaria on or around about 22 July every year. Scientists still can’t work out why this is; one radical theory is that this time of year is summer. But in the meantime BULGLARIA and our team are trying to protect the retinas of visually impaired and often totally blind people in Bulgaria, until we can one day find a cure for this UV problem on 22 July. And, God, I will swear an oath on it, we will. Even if BULGLARIA can only help protect the vision of just a handful of these visionimpaired people then that is a great start. Sight is something so many of us take for granted, and I can’t imagine what these poor blind Bulgars are going through, like not being able to see even worse than they normally can’t see. I’d do more if I could, but the call centres have a pretty high staff turnover, and the tax regime in Bulgaria isn’t as inviting as it was in 1999.
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None of that makes me stray from BULGLARIA’s central message, however: For the cost of a pint and a perve down some slapper’s top at your local boozer of a Friday night, you could sponsor a pair of Dolce & Kabana sunglasses for a visually challenged and legally blind Bulgarian. Their eyes would then be protected for life. Can’t you see how easy it is? www.B.U.L.G.L.A.R.I.A.com
Reaching out and touching blind people is just one area of my ongoing concern for charitable work. I’ll touch anything if it’s got a charitable angle, let me tell you. But sometimes doing fantastic things for Eastern European blind people can seem a little bit, I don’t know ... untrendy? A bit off the radar? For instance, I will be having a rough, thrown-together, slap-up, wood-fired tagine with some old mates—like Sir Bob and Sir Bono and others—and they’ll be like, ‘Yeah, right, Gav; so you’ve given another pair of sunnies to some old twat in Bulgaria!’ and I’ll go, ‘Nah, nah, Sir Bob, it’s not like that ...’ and he’ll go, ‘Right! ’Course not! Guess it explains the way you drive that really shithouse Porsche, too, hey Gav! Fucked car, fucked charities! Ha ha ha!’ It’s all good-hearted banter, and we’ve usually had a few, but it still riles. I’m not made of armour. Or Teflon. Which is a really great, fantastic cookware surface, by the way. And a great name for a son, too. But, well, you can call it ambition, or my competitive spirit, or even my driving desire to help the best, freshest, impoverished people wherever I can find them, but
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I have to keep pushing the charity envelope. Which is why I started KnobvemberTM. KnobvemberTM is now probably my most successful charity in terms of brand exposure, pull-through, tax offsets and corporate citizenship. And it is an amazingly simple yet effective and incredibly fun way for completely normal people to help an endangered species realise its true potential and find sustainable work in an environment of fair and free trade. Yes, you know what I’m talking about. Of course I am. I am talking about orangutans. KnobvemberTM is a charity which runs every November, for the entire month. Its sole aim is to help raise funds for orangutans with erectile dysfunction, so that they might find new confidence and then new paths towards active and sustainable employment—maybe as baristas or sommeliers or something. With the wages they earn from this work they will then be able to buy Viagra online, thus conquering the voiceless, silent killer that is floppy-dick syndrome. Like I said, KnobvemberTM is a great charity. And it is realised in a very practical and easy-to-prepare way. Every November we encourage or instruct such men as bar staff, DJs, footballers and other high-end fuckwits to wear their penises outside their zippers. We put donation boxes in pubs and clubs and ask participants to make a gold-coin donation. The proudly paraded dicks are just a publicity stunt, I guess you could say, but it is all for a good cause. And we have a laugh! Although if you’ve ever visited the forests of Bintang and seen these orangutans with their limp little willies flailing about in the breeze, it would bring a tear to your eye. I saw it;
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I videoed it. I did a UNICEF ad for it. (I didn’t touch any of the little dicks though—talk about Fanta Pants!) But I knew I could do more. So, if you’re in London or New York on the first of November, and you see a totally buffed bloke wearing his dick outside his zipper, just shake my hand, and say, ‘Hi Gav! Thanks! Thanks for helping the orangutans!’ And if I’ve had a few or I’m with Naomi Campbell and tell you to fuck off, don’t take it the wrong way. Put a dollar in the donation box and fucking well move on. And get your dick out. Erectile dysfunction doesn’t kill orangutans; people kill orangutans. By being uncharitable. Speaking of which, not all charity work is selfless, anonymous and ... well ... charitable. So absurdly successful have some of my more top-end charities become—like KnobvemberTM—that some cynical and selfish prick will come along and try to copy it. And this is exactly what happened. The ‘charity’ in question is called—wait for it—‘Movember’. No, no, that doesn’t sound like Knobvember at all, does it? And what is the purported aim of this ‘charity’? You’re going to love this, let me tell you. Movember encourages men to grow and groom a moustache during the month of November in order to raise funds for—and this is the killer—men’s health issues ... Men’s health issues? A man with a moustache is not transformed into a cute, furry monkey, nor into an elderly and partially blind Bulgarian. Growing moustaches doesn’t put fresh fish on the tables of hungry little kids in Kensington. I guess if I were a petty man I’d ring the lawyers and get them to bang a ‘cease and desist’ order on these Movember queers, but that’s not the sort of thing I’d want to do—it’d just bring
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the business of charity into disrepute. I’m happy to turn the other cheek and just get on with my own humble charitable work and related media commitments. That benefits everyone’s interests, including my own. But, really, these Movember fuckers really are taking the piss.
When I’m not giving something
back I like to unwind by indulging in a few simple pleasures, like my classic car collection, my horses, or female company. I suppose my cars are my favourites, though, so let’s start with them. The collection now stands at about 26 pieces. These machines range from rare and luxury sports cars, to exotics, to vehicles of great historical import, and to a brace of Formula One beauties—‘Daddy’s toys’, as my daughters call them. At the centre of the collection are my three Porsche 944s— all in immaculate condition and officially rated by Croft’s as ‘Undiscovered’, which is the highest classification a car can receive. My original CV2 is still something a lot of people admire, although it is technically not classified as a motor vehicle. Including it in the collection is therefore a very deliberate shot over the bow of the narcissistic and insidious world of organised classic car clubs. My 1972 Skoda 100—one of only 602,020 ever made—still drives as well as it did the day it was pushed off the production line in Mladá. A lot of VIPs
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are amazed by my New York taxi, complete with a vomit stain in the back attributed to one of Andy Warhol’s dachshunds, either Amos or Archie; no one, not even dog handlers, can be sure which one was responsible, but that’s fine with me. Indeed, I think it adds a touch of mystery to the piece. Bono loves my original Guinness delivery van, but I think he secretly prefers to drive my Glass Transit Van, previously only ever driven once, by Lynda Carter, in an episode of Wonder Woman. I’ve got a Hummer, I have to admit, a stainless-steel one; but it is a hell of a thing to keep clean, so I’m not sure what I’ll end up doing with it. It’s been kitted out with a full kitchen in the back, and sometimes we use it to take the girls out picnicking, though I can’t help but think it unfair on my wife Roxanne to have to cook for us not only all week but also when we enjoy a family outing. Tinkering with these amazing cars is something I could do all day. Driving them on my own test track gives me nothing but unalloyed pleasure. Indeed, when I have to make one of my seemingly endless overseas visits or business trips I invariably take along a few DVDs of me racing my cars around the ‘Gavinheim’ (as some F1 mates have taken to calling my track). Just sitting back and watching this footage really helps me wind down at the end of the night. But if the truth be known about me and my cars, I’d have to admit to having my biggest soft spot for my everyday work vehicles. Although I don’t really see them as vehicles. In fact, when people ask me what sort of car I drive I reply very naturally with: ‘Oh, I don’t drive a car; I drive a Range Rover.’ Range Rovers. What can I say about these wonderful vessels? They are supreme machines; they are leather-
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upholstered sitting rooms on wheels. They are the Rolls-Royce of motor cars. Range Rover owners will know what I mean. As a symbol of superiority, of style and of breeding, the Range Rover is unsurpassed. I’ve got about four of them at the moment, plus Roxanne’s two. ‘Concubine Number 1’, as I call her, is the latest turbo sports model—the Range Rover, not Roxanne. I’ve had some serious customising going on with this baby, including some really innovative carbon-neutralising work. The body has been entirely Teflon coated, to begin with, which really saves on washing time and water volume. It has also been hermetically sealed to ensure that the new car smell lasts longer. A not-insignificant percentage of the machine’s power is derived from renewable sources, like tidal energy and compost. One of the most amazing modifications involves the automated tree planter, however. Fed by a reserve of seeds stored in the door cavity, a machine mounted inconspicuously on the bullbar fires a tree seed into the ground every 100 kilometres, thus generating a fantastic carbon-trading scheme for both me and the car. With this sort of carbon de-footprint I can muster some extra horsepower to tow the trailer, which contains my Toyota Prius. This fantastic hybrid vehicle follows us to the supermarket and mall where we unhitch it and then drive it around the food courts and luxury goods plazas. But for the capital expense, it costs us virtually nothing to run, and every time we drive it we know we are helping to save the earth. It really is the little things that matter. Speaking of towing things behind the Range Rovers, this is something I always insist on doing myself. Sure, a lot of the
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time I’m driven around in the stretch Range Rover by my driver, Raul, but when towing I insist on piloting the machine myself. I tow a lot. I’m very good at it. Plus, it usually involves the horse float, which contains a bar, a small retail outlet with some point-of-sale material, and a treatment room for my horse physiotherapist, Naomi. Of course a lot of people don’t know very much about polo ponies, about how they like a G&T between chukkas, how they are very natural salespeople, and how they often need remedial massage and manipulation to keep them on the field. This last point is where Naomi comes into play. Currently I’ve got a string of five ponies, so Naomi is kept pretty busy. My oldest horse, Spartacus, probably offers her the greatest professional and diagnostic challenges, but he is a gentle soul. My most expensive pony, Admirable Whisk, is a bit of a hypochondriac, always complaining about RSI. Mont au Buerre is a big softie, Chicken Wing is a relatively small horse good on wet fields, and On The Nose is kept in reserve for those opponents who like to play in the Buzkashi manner. I’m getting by okay with just the five ponies at the moment, which I think is part of the reason polo is becoming such a popular and successful sport. Unlike yacht racing it is very easy and inexpensive to put a game together; unlike motor sport it is environmentally very friendly; and unlike golf it is not silly. It is no wonder, then, that more polo is being played in schools of late. Being a chef and a classic car collector and a polista it hardly needs be added that as well as being an intensely private man I’m also very social. I’m a social being, or perhaps even a social animal. Which is why I derive loads of enjoyment from going
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out at night and painting the town Gavin. I also love intelligent female company, which is why I’m so often seen and photographed late at night with women my wife doesn’t know, or who are in fact her friends. But I’m an old-fashioned sort of man, I suppose; I have physical needs just like any man—or, rather, just like men used to have. I also subscribe to a fairly broad church when it comes to company and human companionship, and I think that this last aspect of my character explains my popularity. I don’t mean my media popularity; I’m talking here about my popularity at a more intimate level. It’d be disingenuous of me to deny the fact that I’m never short of an after-dinner date. Once again, old-fashioned gentlemanliness has something to do with this. And the fact that a lady knows what she is going to get when she trips the light fantastic with Gavin. When you go out for a drink with me you’ll soon realise that you’ve fallen into the sphere and under the spell of what I like to call my ‘Six C’s’: Chivalry, Courtesy, Charisma, Charm, Control and Chinese food. These are sort of my own personal rules, if you like; yet they are not really rules, they are more of a code by which I live my night-life. Yet I can’t help but think that having a set of rules is something that a beautiful woman enjoying an amazing night out finds reassuring. To wit, my ‘Three D’s’:
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D number 1: Don’t get drunk. Ladies should never
be more than tipsy, or bubbly, or slightly pissed. In this sense women can be like some of my favourite ingredients: you don’t want to fry them out of their mind or ruin them with too much seasoning or marinade. Cook them carefully and you’ll enjoy their flavour much more, so to speak.
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D number 2: Don’t go out with two women on the
one night, unless you are their father or their Univision sponsor.
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D number 3: Don’t ever let a lady see a bill. And if
you don’t see one yourself, even better.
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This sort of hectic social life can take its toll, however, which is why my fantastic wife, Roxanne, is so important to me. She helps keep me grounded. Often with the aid of quite powerful herbal drugs. It’s Roxanne who is really the one person in my life—even more so than any of my stylists—who helps me keep my head on the ground and makes sure that I don’t let all of this fame and fortune go to my feet. But that’s not so surprising. Roxanne is an accomplished woman very much in her own right. She’s French-speaking, she’s currently the World Trade Organization’s spokesperson for People Smuggling, and she’s also—in her own time—the online publisher of the ’Ello ’Ello fanzine. So it is no wonder that I regard the day I met her as the luckiest day of my life. I was competing in a charity celebrity Formula One event in Monaco and she was a grid girl, holding an umbrella over my cockpit. Roxanne was also responsible for a very important spiritual shift in my life, in terms of my spiritual life. I’ve always been a very spiritual person, of course, but despite very successful and profitable sorties into Scientology and Buddhism, I’d never really found any formalised and conventional spiritual framework within which to shine—until Roxanne bought me an incredible birthday present two years ago. I’d woken up at dawn, as I always do, and I was about to go for my morning triathlon when Roxanne said to me that today— being my birthday—should be all about me (she meant me, not her, of course). She said I should take the day off triathloning and just go down to my dojo behind the pool house and relax for a while. ‘Just centre yourself, my darling,’ she said. ‘Oh, and mon ami, you might find your birthday present in the dojo, too!’
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I jogged past the polo field and the test track and through the heritage-listed wilderness I’d recently had installed, and then on through the biodynamic vegetable garden, around the wood-fired oven area and beyond the pools and pool house to my dojo. And what did I find inside? Two DJ decks. Stainless steel with gyroscopic mounts. Getting behind those decks and suddenly creating this amazing feel and space and sound and aura liberated me and also made me think that I could probably generate quite good money and media out of it. In so many ways these DJ decks took me back to my days of Flair-Tending when—as a kind of hobby—I’d mix never before tasted drinks for people on stages in nightclubs. But cooking, DJing, Flair-Tending—all of these arts surely exist so that talented people can reach out and say, ‘Hey, world, I’m here and I’ve got something to say to you. So fucking listen.’ I think chefs do this better than anyone else, of course, and as much as I’ve mastered so many art forms, I still rank that of the chef the highest. Sure, call me biased. I’ve got no problems with that. Guilty as charged. I’m very happy to stand by my achievements and awards, and to stand up and be counted. It works in life and it fucking well works in the kitchen. And it works like you wouldn’t believe when you become a celebrity, which is what life’s all about, if you are honest with yourself.
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Glacier L’Eau Mer S E A W AT E R I C E- C R E A M
MANY OF MY CUSTOMERS ARE SWEET-TOOTHS, OR AMERICANS. THIS CLASSIC DISH WAS CREATED TO CHALLENGE THEM AND TO MAKE THEM RETHINK THE WAR ON TERROR AND THEIR SLAVISH RELIANCE ON MIDDLE EASTERN SUGAR WELLS. BUT IT IS MORE THAN JUST A MAGICALLY CRAFTED POLITICAL DESSERT. IT IS ALSO A VEHICLE FOR THE RICH AND SEDUCTIVE FLAVOURS OF SEA WATER—AN INGREDIENT SO UNDERUTILISED BY TOO MANY HOME COOKS.
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THE KEY TO THIS DISH’S SUCCESS IS THE FRESHNESS OF THE SEA WATER . IT HAS TO BE OCEAN-FRESH, CAUGHT ON THE SAME DAY YOU PLAN TO COOK IT.
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1 x 9-litre sachet of ocean-fresh sea water (brands such as North Sea, Bering Sea or South Pacific Ocean are all reliable and easily available in most specialty gourmet stores, which are places I simply adore)
15 egg yolks
1.5 litres double cream
1 cup dextrose
1 cryovac pack sun-dried gnocchi
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100 g fresh white truffle
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In a bain-marie whisk the yolks, cream and dextrose together until you become bored or have to change hands. (After all, cooking should be always easy and fun!) Pour this mixture into an ice-cream maker. Turn the machine to ON (this step is critical) and add the sea water, drop by drop, until the machine is full. Churn this mixture until Dimity, Tamsin and Jeremy arrive. Place the ice-cream in the freezer until dessert is served later in the evening. Garnish with the sun-dried gnocchi. (Pop these in your mouth using your fingers, giving a cheeky look to the camera as you do so.)
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S E R V E S 2 1⁄ 2 . ( W R A P
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ANY LE F TOVE RS IN A C LE AN, DAM P TE A TO W EL . THEY WILL KEEP WELL FO R U P TO A W E E K . )
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At this point in my career it’s very hard for me to turn down opportunities that I think are auspicious.
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MARIO BATALI
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Chapter 7
The Critics & the Media
When it comes to critics, food guides and awards
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ceremonies, I’m lucky. I’ve never had a bad review. No restaurant that I’ve ever worked in or owned or relinquished to one of my former wives has ever had negative press. Passion has a lot to do with this. If you’re passionate about passion then your kitchen becomes a temple to passionate food. Reviewers crave this as much as they need it and as much as they see its eternal worth and meaning. Reviewers, after all, are only people. Often they are not even that. They are gifted journalists who write Hemingwayesque prose unfit for the stultified and banal minds of their readers. When I opened Lad Gav in London in 2001, complete with the aforementioned kitchen brigade of untrained, non-Englishspeaking teenage disabled life-term high-risk prisoners from Mozambique, people said I was mad. It’s funny now to look back on that time. The industry was—once again—against me,
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but the critics soon understood and knew what it was I was somehow trying to say through the prism that is my cuisine’s poetry. Before Lad Gav opened—indeed, before I had even found a place to open it—I had a number of London’s key opinion formers and restaurant critics over to my place for dinner, in Majorca. We flew there together as a kind of ice breaker, which is funny in itself, because the jet had more ice on board than luggage, let me tell you! But what top lads, and ladettes! So intense was this three-day think-tank and free-flowing expression of cuisine de passion, none of us slept. We all cooked; everyone mucked in and contributed. Everyone was open and undaunted by my presence; I was more like some sort of conduit through which these incredibly gifted and passionate people could find a new QWERTY keyboard Nirvana; a place where they could be free. When, some weeks later, they would visit one of my restaurants, I could see this inner sense of peace in their eyes; I knew they had helped me help them find a flat surface upon which they could stop and smell the roses, albeit in powder form. But that’s modern cooking for you: you take a perfectly natural ingredient and deconstruct it so that it is easy for food critics to bring into restaurant bathrooms in order to snort up their nostrils. These people eat hard, type hard, play hard—which is probably why we are all such great mates. And this is the foundation of our unquestionable professionalism vis-à-vis their independent reviewing and photography of my restaurants. I demand they are tough and honest and impartial. I drive this particular point home every time we are drinking Bellinis in Venice together.
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Food guides are an altogether different kettle of fish, however, if you will pardon the cuisine pun. Food guides are always out of date, always written by people on diets, and always wrong. I’ve been lucky, of course; all of my restaurants have done nothing but sit at the top of the food guide table: Michelin, Gambero Rosso, even Finland’s little-known but highly respected Flaying Reindeer Restaurant Ratings Annual, all of these guides—and so many more—have always praised anything Canardéaux. As flattering as this is, I am no yes-man. I call it how it is. Food guides are all merde. It is not that I am determined to bite the hand that feeds me; being a committed vegetarian this would be impossible for me to do. No, it is more a moral stance. And I think that is all that needs to be said. A dignified silence is the one ingredient so often lacking in the world of haute cuisine, a world so full—indeed imploding— with ever-loquacious, verb-bending, adjective-spitting sound-biters, determined not to draw a breath lest they miss a news spot or photo op or radio grab or blog-bite or web reference. It’s like they cannot exist unless they are hearing the sound of their one hand clapping. Emotional retardation so proliferates in this business, it’s driving me bonkers. I could go on, I should go on, but I’ve got to go and do an interview with the BBC now. And then I’ve got a pre-record with Parky later on.
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We’ve talked already, in a really open way, about how
fantastic restaurant critics practise their fine art, and, just to be sure, let us be very clear about it again now: restaurant criticism is a fine art in its own right. Forget studying the classics or haiku or something, restaurant criticism is socially, culturally and advertorially profound. At the other end of the stick, so to speak, being the subject of profound and inspiring restaurant criticism and praise is a mind-blowing experience. Finding through the dream-like state that is the world’s best food journalism a sense of yourself, and of who you are as a chef, and of what your restaurant means in terms of vis-à-vis quality is a life-altering and yet at the same time a life-affirming revelation. And it gives you the confidence to take the next step in your journey towards being the world’s greatest living chef. Using this confidence—and all the newspaper inches you can muster—you can then launch yourself off into a higher stratosphere. I’ve seen chefs do this; I’ve done it myself. I could probably write a book about it, so let me put it down here and now. To move on from the mere kitchen and enter the rarified atmosphere that is celebrity chefing, you’ll need a few things. You’ll need a glamorous wife. The glamour should also have a homely angle; what I mean by this is that she shouldn’t work. Young kids are good too. I prefer daughters, but there’s no hard and fast rule here about which gender is better—boy or girl, it is very much a matter of personal taste. You’ll need to be very telly friendly—white teeth and a hairdo. Blond tips or streaks in your hair—even if you’ve already got blond hair—have been very effective for over a
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decade now; indeed, I used to wear them myself. But I feel a bit of a sea change coming for chef hairdos. I’m thinking that we’ll see more biodynamic styles. Certainly free-range hair is still popular with über chefs—that sort of just-got-out-of-bed look. One trend I’ve seen emerge recently is what I call a workin-progress hairstyle. I can’t say I approve of this new trend in food. Jamie, for instance: he’s constantly tweaking his hair message. It can even change a couple of times during the course of one 30-minute episode of Carry On Jamie! I think that a lot of foodies and keen home cooks find this confusing; I think it makes his recipes harder for these sorts of people to follow, too. Tattoos you don’t need. At least, not just yet. Sous chefs in real restaurants need to be covered in tattoos, of course; they like full sleeves and lots of those nationalistic tattoo designs so favoured by footballers. But where cooking really matters—on TV—tattoos are still maybe five years away. I’m not ruling them out, and I’m not making a moral judgment on tattoos. I’m just saying that media buyers are not ready to move on tattoos in the lifestyle-TV sector until maybe the ratings season of 2010. One thing you’ll definitely need is an accent. Not your own. And certainly not the accent of the country you find yourself in (with one exception that I’ll discuss in a moment). If you cook on cable in the USA you’ll need a regional English accent. Liverpudlian is popular at the moment. In the US you can also get by with an Italian accent, but not a Spanish one. Definitely not Spanish. A Chinese accent is okay in the States, too; but then it is also important to look Chinese, which can mean a lot of time in make-up and this certainly puts paid to doing bookstore signings or documentary-style food shows.
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In EU-based countries, particularly around the lowlands, an Australian accent has been known to drag in the viewers and book buyers, but it can’t be Australian-English. It has to be Australian-Dutch, or Australian-Danish, or whatever the case may be, depending on the country. This is okay, but it does mean you limit yourself to a fairly select audience of just a few million—and in only one nation. I think that’s a shame, and I think it also shows a lack of ambition. Speaking of which, if you want to go for a lifestyle option and head off to become a celebrity chef in Australia, then an English accent is critical. Either that or you need to be gay. The only country where the local accent works for local TV chefs is Britain. This is the exception that makes the rule, if you like. Britain is also a good country in which an aspiring lady TV chef might cast her net. Indeed, you don’t even have to go to the bother of being a chef. With the right look even a thirdrate food stylist can become a televisual queen of the proverbial canteen in good old Anglais Terre. Whether man or woman, chef or stylist, there’s one thing that all TV chefs need: a message. You’ll need a simple message that you can wring out in any number of ways at any number of events on any number of occasions. It might seem odd, but successfully typecasting yourself in this manner is very important for your long-term media strategy. Jamie has school dinners and kid’s health, which is a cracker of a message, I must admit, because it helps lever him into a wide suite of media angles and positions. He’s out of the food section of the newspaper and into general news. It’s genius. He’s no longer just a chef, but he’s a social improver, a bit like
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George Clooney. Rick has poetry and literature and animal welfare—not fish, I mean his terrier, Sooty or Potty or whatever its name is. Once again, a good strategy. Literary references make the middle-class bores who watch his shows think they are, well, literate. And the terrier bolt-on is pure gold. Who doesn’t like pets? Gordon’s message is simpler, but also more industry-focused—good ingredients, good cooking, good restaurant practice. It also has a business angle: do things right and you’ll run a profitable restaurant. Yes, yes, I know. Put it this way and it sounds a bit accountant-boring. Which is why Gordon works blue. Indeed, he works so blue that a lot of people don’t even see his message anymore. Obscuring the message with stylistic devices can be a blessing in disguise, however. Nigella, God love her, does this brilliantly. Her message is ‘be lazy’. My mate Nigel Slater didn’t call her the Queen of the Frozen Pea for nothing. Most of her ingredients are in packets or tins, she never uses anything less than about fourteen different utensils to do the one stirring job, and—as a result of this—makes more mess than she does finished food. But, fuck me dead, it works admirably well as far as an ongoing media franchise is concerned and, let’s face it, at the end of the day that’s what good cooking is all about. Of course, a lot of A-list chefs are mere props for their TV production company’s bottom lines and after-market sales franchises. These chefs—and let’s be honest here, they aren’t really chefs; they’re interested amateurs who have worked out which end of a wooden spoon to hold—are no more than photogenic gimmicks. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got a lot of respect for photogenicity. As I’ve said to both the UN and the
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BBC, cameras don’t make people ugly; people make people ugly—and usually at birth! But let’s focus again on the point at hand. There are chefs who do great TV, and there are non-chefs who do gastro porn. I could name names, I could really spill the beans here if I wanted to, but that would be to act in an ungentlemanly and unchivalrous manner. I’ve made my point; I think everyone can see it. No need to bang on and over-egg the pudding. Best if we change topic, change subject and change gear—and move on. Nigella. God. I’ve trained in over thirteen countries for over fourteen years and never once has a Samurai wok-master or Belgian waffle-spanker ever used the word ‘vociferous’ like Nigella does. It seems to be Nigella’s favourite culinary term. ‘Let’s pour ketchup into our dangly-jangly mixing bowl and then sort of penetrate the mixture with some naughty, firm prawns—they can be cooked or not cooked or even tinned—just whatever works for you. I know that I’m so vociferous some Wednesday evenings that I just want really satisfying and yet simple food that I can make whilst wearing a tight-fitting denim jacket ...’ She never even chops anything up on her TV show, except if she is using a mezzaluna—in the wrong direction, or even fucking well upside down! But how can you have one hand on the ingredients and one hand on the knife when you need one hand to flick your fabulously long and large hair out of the way of your décolletage? There is, of course, a fine line between being yourself and being a sold-out media luvvy. I’m not being judgmental about these things. That would be to go against my Buddhist beliefs. Yet putting on a media face is something, I think, that has
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become all too easy and, well, too accepted. Many young chefs seem to know too well how to do it. I blame the media for this. They rob young kids of their finest years and their most productive periods by forcing them to turn into some sort of warm prop. Putting on a media face is, as we all know, something that is completely contrived and fake. Practised by the wrong sort of people it can have devastating personal repercussions. And that’s why I wear mine 24/7. Forget who you once were. Embrace the new culture and be happy that you’ve become the face of food and of cooking. Use this new power and influence wisely, however. Do smart telly. Only endorse products that suggest a cleaner and brighter and happier future. Don’t do car ads. Bring out a range of organic intimate apparel. And stay on message. And that’s my message, I guess. It’s about me. It’s all about me. I’m not trying to spruik just one angle or one idea; I’m holistic when it comes to my media persona. I want to give you every inch of myself. This way I know that I’m not living some sort of lie.
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Awards. I’ve been lucky enough to receive a lot of
these things over the last few years. What I think is the most important thing about them is the way you receive them. Because, let’s face it, self-promotion aside, awards themselves, as far as the food business goes, are perfectly fucking useless. You can get them nail-gunned to the walls of your restaurants, I guess, but everyone does that. I think awards offer two unique opportunities to express your cuisine and, through that cuisine, yourself. Accepting awards, as I said, is what it is all about. It is a chance for you to generate press quotes and a chance for you to be photographed. I never go to an awards ceremony without at least three different suits and two stylists. I also have about three different speeches to deliver, all depending on what’s just happened with reference to world news. It really is important to be on top of these sorts of issues when you are in the public eye, otherwise people might start to think you are just some idiot cook out for the main chance. Your acceptance speech should of course be preceded by complete surprise. When the award for Best Restaurant or Best Chef or Best Restaurateur is being read out stay calm; the second they announce you’ve won it, throw your best Surprised! look at the cameras. Kiss your date and then head to the podium. A lot of chefs tend to lose it at this stage—they walk way too fast. I’ve even seen some of them run! This shows a complete lack of breeding and decorum. You’ll also need to be very careful not to show any signs of gloating. Gloating is something that comes very easily to many chefs, and I think there are certainly times and places for it, but
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not when accepting an award. Lesser members of the hospitality industry can misinterpret gloating, and they start to backstab you. The press don’t like it much either, no matter how many times you’ve flown them to Italy to drink some new brand of mineral water with you. Words of thanks come next. Start by addressing the assembled crowd generally, in descending order of rank. Make sure you bang a reference in to some posh politician or footballer or some such type, as this, by association, will give you an automatic leg up the social ladder. Whether these people are in attendance or not, it doesn’t matter. ‘The London Committee of Fine Dining, Monsieur Bertrand Michelin, the Leader of the Conservative Party, Mr David Cameron, ladies and gentlemen ...’ that sort of thing. This also tends to put the cat amongst the pigeons a bit, as people will be thinking that you’ve been clever enough to notice such quality guests, but they haven’t. It almost makes it seem that you’re friends with said celebrities. Which, in my case, I am; but as I mentioned earlier, I’m endeavouring to use this part of my book to help other chefs dare to dream. Let’s keep moving. ‘As many of you here tonight will know, this is my seventeenth restaurant award, but I will let you all in on a little secret—it’s already my most prized.’ Pause here for some applause. Then, raising your free hand to steady the crowd, beg just a little more of their time. ‘Let me just say that this award would have not been possible but for the tireless work of my amazing team at Lad Gav.’ (Obviously you would use the name of your own restaurant here.)
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Then it is important to name a few members of staff. This is another real minefield for a lot of top chefs. I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t sit around during my weekends away trying to memorise the tragic names of the useless twats that work for me—when they are bothering to work, that is. Jesus, half the time I’m having to put a fucking rocket up them just to get them to turn the stoves on or thrice-wash the organic shit off the baby spinach leaves. Better, then, to memorise a list of good, all-purpose hospitality industry names that you can confidently dolly out whenever you need to put on a public display of inclusiveness and generosity. Top celebrity chefs can often be perceived—and quite wrongly, I hasten to add—as tyrants. So use every opportunity you’ve got to come across as the great democrat. A man of the people. That sort of twaddle. Good names for staff include Jeremy, Frank, Maurizio, Donovan, Declan, Kylie, Tran, and The-Big-Man—you know who you are, son! Get a bit emotionally revved up when you recite the list of names, and finish with a flourish. Of course, if time permits you can always slice into the speech a few ‘heartfelts’ and ‘indebtednesses’ to people such as wives, kids or ‘mentors’. Mentors are pretty useful, actually, particularly celebrity mentors, because once again you garner some of their celebrity by association. I don’t know how many times I’ve thanked Keith Floyd, for instance, and I’ve never even met the bloke. Also use such speeches to deflect or realign the general food and wine news cycle. For instance, if you’ve been getting a bit too much news coverage of late, and it has all been
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amazingly glowing in its treatment of you, well, it is better if you jump off that wave before it dumps you. So if you can tear up a little bit, and lose the otherwise calm modulation of your voice, dedicate the award to your gravely ill uncle Giuseppe, who has been like a father to you, ‘and would have given anything to be here tonight to celebrate this award with me ...’. This sort of shit works a treat, and shows a human side.
Showing your human side
should be done with great caution and great restraint, however. Think of it this way: a chef should use his humanity as sparingly as he might use crushed raw garlic in a poached fruit summer pudding. Just a knife point of the stuff is all you need. Any more and the dish is flooded with rank garlic tastes; any less and the dish has no Mediterranean authenticity. Besides, the sorts of people who read your recipes in the weekend newspaper liftouts aren’t really interested in the private lives of most chefs. (There are exceptions to this, of course there are, and I’m clearly one of them.) They want tried and tested, precise recipes; they want a few Googled oddball facts about the key ingredient or the history of the dish you are presenting; and they want a head shot of you taken by some photographic Leonardo da Vinci, like my Lord Snowdon. (By the way, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my Lord for his stunning photographs contained herein.)
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Now whilst this newspaper recipe thing might sound like a bit of a formula, it’s not really. I guess I just make it sound so easy. Whereas it is, in fact, very fucking difficult to do properly. Which is why, by a simple process of clear thinking and extrapolation, it is very easy to see how 99 per cent of newspaper readers always manage to fuck the dish up when they try to cook it at home for Sunday lunch. This, however, is but one of many, many mistakes keen home cooks—or ‘foodies’, as they term themselves ... fucking hell—make when they embark on interpreting a newspaper liftout photo-essay recipe. The numero uno mistake, or the primus inter mistacus as the old Latin phrase goes, is the notion that the newspaper liftout photo-essay recipe should be even cooked in the first place. Seriously, I do not know where some people get their ideas from. Stunningly photographed and perfectly styled pieces of high art—such as the recipes featured in this book—are NOT for cooking. Really, the way some newspaper readers treat my recipes as some sort of instruction manual or DIY guide shits me—and shits a lot of us triple A-list chefs. I’m not alone here. Do these dim-witted readers also study the motoring section and read the new Range Rover review and then take their Vauxhall Astra out 4WDriving? Do they read the latest news about the Prime Minister’s utterings and then start holding press briefings for political reporters? More importantly, do these silly readers visit the Louvre and see the Mona Lisa and then go home and try to dress like her for dinner, with similar make-up? Of course not. No one does this. Well, not many people, at least.
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Food and wine sections in newspapers and magazines are the eye to the soul of haute cuisine. They allow the mere mortals a chance to glimpse fleetingly at the creations of the über chefs and icon cuisine gods of our era. And so they should be treated with much more respect by those people that buy them. Buy them, for sure; read them, certainly; that’s all good. But then to use the poetry and the art that is a sublime photo-essay recipe as some sort of sick motivation to try and cook the dish at home ... This is really taking the piss. And this is the core of the problem, or the disease, I guess: you can’t make, let alone magically and profoundly create, restaurant-quality food in a home kitchen. Not only is it impossible, but it is also to miss entirely the point of such published photo-essay recipes. They are not pieces of technical writing designed to explain the photographed subject matter’s preparation. They are branding opportunities. Branding, after all, is the nexus of the chef and the media. The chef, the media. Both tangible intangibles; both intangible tangibles. One without the other could not exist. Aspiring über chef de chefs would do well to take more time to study the skills that are required to create and maintain and grow a brand. In this sense an understanding and appreciation of the media and, indeed, a great love of it, is essential. To be a really successful and legendary chef you need the right media mix, the right media feel, the right media angles and the right media tone. And I’m not just talking about being interviewed, although that, clearly, is a very substantial and important part of your media profile. Being interviewed is not as easy as it seems, though. Any idiot can be interviewed. Yet being a great interviewee, now, there’s an art form.
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What young chefs need to realise is that the media is not just some sort of blank canvas upon which you project yourself. The media needs to be understood in more three-dimensional terms, I think—a bit like top chefs understand foam, for instance. I like to think of the media and my contribution to it in three ways. I call this the Canardéaux Techniqué, and it is a technique now used under commercial licence by a number of important fine art academies around the world, such as the Royal Ballet, the Office of the Governor of California, the New York Film Academy and the Australian Labour Party. I mean Labor Party. I’m sorry about that error. It’s just this silly mental block I have about Australia. For some strange reason I keep thinking it is British. But the Canardéaux Techniqué. Let’s get back to that. It is a technique that sees and understands and elucidates the media through three different prisms. Firstly there is the media prism as most ordinary knobheads know it. By this I mean the media that most Neanderthals out in the suburbs understand. Commercial TV. Commercial radio. Paparazzi women’s magazines. It’s about admiring the people on telly, on radio, and in the magazines. It is the cheap, voyeuristic, fifteenminutes-of-fame sort of media approach. People out in the suburbs like these losers on telly because they are, well, on telly. I call this prism the Folsom Prism. It is also the prism where we all have to start, as celebrities. It is were I began, for instance, doing my first appearances as the Extreme Make-Over Sports Chef on the wildly popular and critically acclaimed early 1990s homewares/lifestyle/leisure show, It’s Me or the Mortgage!.
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The second prism is a more sophisticated one. It’s the media of third-party-brand-endorsement—or advertising, as some people still insist on misnaming it. This is, of course, the area of the media that is the most influential, the most creative and the most discerning. Any halfwit can watch a reality show, but only an academic can discuss a TV ad in 15,000 words over three issues of a subscription-only architects’ periodical. I guess I do some of my proudest work in this sphere, via this second prism, which is termed the Open Prism. My ads for Leggo, for instance, have been fantastic vehicles for both me and spaghetti sauce in general. My Kentucky Fried Chicken ad in the UK was boldly daring in the way it attempted to understand and resolve the burning issues of gang- and race-related youth violence through its depiction of a young man on the brink of personal annihilation who is saved by the influence of a television celebrity chef showing him how to serve a bucket of chicken nuggets to his gang’s enemies. Call these devices ‘ads’ if you must, but don’t forget the fact that they are one of the last places people who actually give a damn can do something for our society. The third prism is the Private Prism. Here is found the media of counselling, affirmation, opinion and ideas. It is that area of the media where you are quoted, referred to, interviewed as an acknowledged expert, or stand on a red carpet with Kofi Annan. In this prism you almost transcend the media. And once you are here, you are virtually untouchable—unless you sleep with an underaged boy, bash your wife or throw an ethnic telephone at a hotel security guard. Chefs don’t do these sorts of things, though, and for one very good reason: they have
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discipline. And it is the brand of discipline that comes from years of training and apprenticeship; from years of being belittled, bullied, bastardised, balled-out, brain-fucked, badgered, beaten and bent over backwards with a barbed-wire stick and buggered. This sort of training and its lessons are at the moral core of most top chefs. It also explains why they are such amazing people. And why so many of them never want to see the inside of another fucking kitchen again.
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Conclusion
A bien a mon aux camellias des Faberge, Gav xxx
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And, finally, for you? What else can this man offer? What is there that I can give you to take away with you and be reminded of me and my passion? Perhaps a unique insight into my classic signature dish, Canardéaux de Canardéaux? Yes, I think so. Canardéaux de Canardéaux—as you know this dish is based around a duck neck, stuffed with muscle-building protein powder. The duck neck, it is neither boned nor skinned. Baked for 647 minutes in a bain-marie, it is then set in aspic. It is a sublime masterpiece, the epitome of cuisine de cuisine. And it is also a scaled-down imitation of my erect penis. This, after all, is what cooking is all about. You suck on my dick. We have the word for this in French—a connoisseur. It means, literally, a little dick sucker. I mean, a little sucker of dicks. All of this is too funny, however. My own name literally means ‘little duck’. A duck, a dick: these are but mere words. The cooking, the flavours, the tastes, the bill at the end of the night, the sexy new waitress—this is what food is about. Not names. My name is Gavin Canardéaux. This has been my book. Treasure it as you would your last single caviar egg, or your last spoonful of whale fat. Cooking my recipes can change your life. Remember, food doesn’t make people fat and ugly; people make people fat and ugly. But together, through this book, we, all of us, can be beautiful.
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Acknowledgements
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A big ‘thank you’ has to go out to a number of my people. First, my Executive Assistant, Fleur Slazenger-Du Pont; my Brand Communications Executive, Bree Stuyversánt-Stuyversánt; my Literary Agent, Horatio Youngmeadow; my Business Agent, Paul Wetherill & Associates; my personal trainer, Max Power; my stunt double, Awful Knawful; and my driver, Raul. No chef can exist, of course, without a team of dedicated food stylists. Thanks Rachel, Rochelle, Rebecca, Rosie, Renae, Renata, Robyn, Roz, Rowena and Rhiannon. And Ricky. I love you all. You are amazing women. Except you, Ricky, because you’re a poof. You’re still amazing, of course. Throughout my career I’ve also been lucky enough to work with some true industry professionals. Thanks to Rajid O’Flaherty at Villeroy & Boch, Kitty Nicholas at Miele, Marco Antonio Cannelloni at Parmolat, and everyone in the marketing department at Budget-Bugger-Me Supermarkets, who are so kindly making so many of the ingredients mentioned in this book available in their stores. I cannot go any further without saying heartfelt thanks to Tony and all the guys at Richmond Park Range Rover. If a chef relies on one piece of kitchen equipment more than any other, it is his fleet of Range Rovers.
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It would be remiss of me not to go on public record and thank my brigades at my restaurants, led watchfully by my sous chefs: Mick, Stick, Knackers, Donkey, Hiroyuki, Moose, Iceman, Jean-Claude, Alessandro, Rory, Fuck-Knuckle and New Boy. Keep up the good work, lads. You are all an absolute credit to me. Finally, let me say thanks to my wife Roxanne. Oh, and to M, L, D, R, R, R and R. You know who you are! Luv, Gav.
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But some of us are beginning to pull well away, in our irritation, from the exquisite tasters, the vintage snobs, the three-star Michelin gourmets. There is, we feel, a decent area somewhere between boiled carrots and Beluga caviar, sour plonk and Château Lafite, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them. J.B. PRIESTLEY
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