Some people travel to London for neckties, and some to take a peek at the Turner watercolors in the Tate. Virgin jumbos bulge with Americans eager to transform themselves into finely tuned machines dedicated to the consumption of theater, catching a bit of the Ye Olde, or dancing until dawn. Then there are those poor deluded fools like me. I went to London looking for an epiphany of cuisine.
More specifically, I was hoping to be thrown out of Gordon Ramsay's restaurant on Royal Hospital Road, which, with three Michelin stars, is officially the best restaurant in Britain. Getting thrown out of Ramsay's is what one does in London, apparently, as one might attempt a bit of heli-skiing in British Columbia or an audience with the king when in Tonga. Some of Britain's finest restaurant critics have been tossed out of Ramsay's for disparaging the soup or slighting the chef's term as a teenage footballer with Glasgow Rangers, and the sweep of his famous temper was prominently displayed on Boiling Point, a six-part kitchen documentary that aired on Channel 4. Any twit with a functioning American Express card can arrange to be fawned over-I wanted the full treatment, the sort of personal service that London chefs such as Ramsay, Marco Pierre White, and Nico Ladenis are uniquely situated to provide.
I had done my homework, of course. For years, Americans have been hearing about the London restaurant scene, reputed at one point to be the most robust in the world, and though I had never tasted a speck of food prepared by Marco, Nico, or Gordo, I seemed to know everything about them from British journals like The Times, The Observer, and a short-lived foodie lad mag called Eat Soup: their cars, their kids, their politics, their favorite football teams, their sexual proclivities, and in whose restaurant's back room Posh and Becks held their engagement party.
When artists were hip, Marco did a brasserie with Damien Hirst, then re-replaced all the art with his own glittering masterpieces when the two had their inevitable row. When the '90s financial boom made mere kitchen work seem like a mug's game, Marco and Nico gave back their hard-won Michelin stars and concentrated on building their respective empires rather than cooking for the Man. Gordo, in the meantime, muscled in on the ultraluxury hotel-restaurant game with the vigor of an East Jersey don.
White, the most famous French chef in the country, bragged at one point that he had never been to France. In the introduction to his first cookbook, Ladenis asserted that the customer is not always right. My shelves groaned under the weight of volumes from Ramsay, White, Rogers and Gray, David Thompson, Pierre Koffmann, Gary Rhodes, the Roux brothers, and a place called The Ivy, where reservations were said to be fantastically difficult although the recipes seemed to be of the sort common on first-class airline menus.
Half the movies coming out of London seemed to feature mad chefs, from the cannibalistic cuisinière in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover to the lunatic creations (Clams and Ham, Liver in Lager) in Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet, where restaurant excess stood in neatly as a metaphor for pure, unchecked Thatcherism.
It must be said, the news trickling from London didn't exactly make me want to catch the next flight out-when the food press finally got around to describing the actual dishes, they sounded incredibly overwrought, the three-ingredients-too-many school of British cooking that Calvin Trillin once characterized as "Stuff-Stuff with Heavy," only laced with black pudding instead of sauce mousseline.
On my last trip to London, in 1988, during the Acid House season that the music magazines were calling the Summer of Love, I managed to hit some of the high points of London cuisine without really trying. My wife and I went to Sally Clarke's, where I remember being knocked silly by a piece of farmhouse Cheddar, and we had a bollito misto at the River Cafe that was almost as good as the ones you get in Modena. We had the haddock and chips at the renowned Sea Shell, near the Marylebone tube station, oysters and Champagne at Bibendum, and a nouvelle pheasant banger at Alastair Little, on Frith Street-it made us laugh out loud to see the tiny sausage, no bigger than a child's curled pinky, marooned on an acre of naked crockery. We had a vaguely Asian-influenced meal in a restaurant in Hampstead that had been extravagantly praised by the Evening Standard, although it would barely have passed muster back in California. I would like to say that we made a pilgrimage to Harvey's restaurant, in suburban Wandsworth, where Marco Pierre White was already beginning to make an impression as a gastro-terrorist, but the night we planned to visit, we somehow ended up eating doner kebabs on the street outside an all-night rave in Brixton. Once, I arranged for a meal to be delivered to our room from Bombay Brasserie, which happened both to be close to the hotel and London's swankest Indian restaurant at the time, and my wife, still convinced that I had chosen it randomly from the telephone directory, continues to think of it as the best Indian meal she's ever eaten.
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