So, we have a very special guest on Cam’s Kitchen this week. Jamie Brittain – creator of Skins, fellow greedy bitch and dear friend has written a post about beginning his love affair with food. Enjoy…
“A couple of years ago, I battled a night of insomnia by reading Jay Rayner’s book ‘The Man Who Ate The World’ in one go. It’s a great, fun, funny book, where Jay travels the world eating at the most fabulous, expensive restaurants around the globe. His wonderful, alternately damning and praising descriptions of the food he encounters are hilarious and evocative, but more than anything, they inspire great hunger. Terrible hunger. A very special kind of hunger, only experienced when you’ve been up all night reading a book full of amazing food you have never eaten, and all you’ve had to eat in the last eight hours is a scotch egg you found under your bed.
I’ve always liked food (we always say this, but who, exactly, doesn’t like food?). But my relationship with it has been rather dull. My mother is not what you’d call the best cook in the world, my dad is pretty good but wasn’t around much. Trips to restaurants and take-outs were frequent, but as we lived in the Lake District, there wasn’t exactly a dearth of sumptuous cuisine on offer (not true anymore – take a bow l’Enclume et al). Even if there was we couldn’t afford. Mostly we ate at Italian places, and McDonalds for a special treat.
I was pretty happy with this, not knowing any better, until at about age 7 or 8, I was taken to the Chinese restaurant in Windermere for a birthday – The Magic Wok (I just googled it, it’s still there). I had never had Chinese food before. The meal I had there was so astounding, so wonderfully amazing I have never forgotten it. I did not know food could taste like that. Tiny bowls of soup in which little parcels of something that might be meat or might be fish floated like scientific curiosities in formaldehyde. Plates of chicken covered in brightly coloured sauce that was sweet and spicy at the same time. Something green, crispy and shredded, dusted with a mysterious musky brown powder, which I was told was seaweed (you can eat seaweed?). Rice that was fried, and came alive in your mouth when you dribbled an alien, black salty liquid on it. Something like spaghetti but better, greasy and delicious. Pancakes with duck in them, rather than lemon and sugar. And there was so much of it, plates and plates and plates of it. Far more than anyone could eat. Far more than the whole family could eat. And yet I ate and ate and ate.
If the best meal of your life is defined by being something life-changing, revelatory, then that meal at The Magic Wok after watching Beethoven’s 2nd, was the best meal of my life. Nothing since has been so affecting. Getting home, stomach bloated with MSG, I realized some shit was going to have to change. First of all, what the fuck? Why has this been kept from me? Do my parents hate me? Why have I been eating fish fingers and under-seasoned spag bol all this time, when there’s stuff like that?
From then on, every chance I got, I went to The Magic Wok. There weren’t that many chances – in fact there was one a year, my birthday. The rest of the time, not being able to go to The Magic Wok every night was torturous. Occasionally, after what I imagine was a lot of begging from me, we got takeout from another Chinese in Kendal (which was nearer), but it wasn’t as good. You didn’t get as much, and we never had any soy sauce in the house – by now, I was seriously addicted to soy sauce – in fact, I still am. Very occasionally, on holiday, or trip to a city, we’d have a meal at a mid-range restaurant. I would always, and I mean always, order the most expensive thing on the menu, something which still annoys my mother even though, these days, I’m usually paying. But that expensive dish would never be good enough. As far as I was concerned, there were two types of meal.
1) The Magic Wok. The absolute pinnacle of all gastronomy, to which everything else is a lesser derivation…
and
2) …Everything else.
Over the years, whilst growing up, moving home a couple of times, I’ve had good meals. A wonderful fruit de mers platter in St Tropez, which was, to be honest, pretty hair raising, but I loved the spicy langoustine. Another in Barcelona, in a little place in a back alley that, we were told, was Gary Lineker’s favourite place in the city (one wonders quite how many restaurants in Barcelona make this claim). There I tasted deep fried whitebait and baby octopus. A totally rock and roll foie gras soup in a restaurant in Paris which totally owned. More recently, I dined at St John for my stepmothers birthday, which was, to be honest, absolutely extraordinary – whole roast suckling pig, maybe at that point the single best meat eating experience I’d had. I made a mental note to come back for their roast bone marrow, which I did (it’s excellent, though the bone marrow served with the ox cheek at the Bull and Last is even better – mainly because they stuff it with foie gras).
Those flashpoints were all great, but nothing was as earth shaking, world changing, as that Chinese. I’d eaten stuff that had made me go ‘wow’, but had never had another transformative experience in a foodery.
So there I was closing Jay Rayner’s book as the sun came up. The first thing I did was think ‘I have got to have some of this food’. The second thing I did was to go online and book a table at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay for my approaching birthday. Jay barely mentions Ramsay in his book, though acknowledges his importance, but I reckoned Ramsay wouldn’t let me down. I’d seen him on telly and seemed to know his shit, though his constant reference to middle-aged restraunteurs testicles was slightly disconcerting.
A couple of months later, I’m in a cab with my friend Camilla (for it is she) driving through Chelsea. I am in my best shirt and shoes, looking like a fat web-designer paedophile who has been dressed by his sister who he keeps locked in the cellar. Cam is wearing something utterly fabulous and sexy, as requested by me (to mark the occasion, you see, not because I like looking at her tits. Much). We spend quite a long time driving up and down Royal Hospital Road trying to find it, my first experience of the discreteness of the 3 star world. Eventually finding it, we pay the cabbie slightly more than expected, hop out into the warm summer air and are let in by the doorman. So begins the second life changing meal of my life.
Inside it’s very tasteful. Very very tasteful. Surprisingly small, furnished in cream pretty much exclusively. I don’t usually have an opinion on interior design, but I’m sure if you got me drunk I’d rave on about modernism and stuff like that. I was surprised to find myself liking it. Liking it very much. It was so calming, relaxing. The noise levels were low-ish, but not quiet. It was a nice place to be in. It seemed like a perfect place to spend an hour or threee.
The staff, bastions of good service, politeness and friendliness, showed us to our table and we sat down.
Jean Claude Breton, the maitre-de, comes over and asks who is ‘hosting’ the table. What the fuck does that mean? I say me, which is a mistake – I should have delegated to Cam, the confirmed and experienced foodie. But I am paying – and only my menu has the prices listed on it, so Cam can order whatever she wants safe in the knowledge that she retains plausible deniability. We barely look at the menu – we’re here for the tasting menu, and so order the Menu Prestige – with me having pigeon for my main, she having pork (or lamb or something. To be honest we didn’t pay each other that much attention in the hours that followed).
The wine list, which looks like something you could fly to Narnia on, is handed to me. Scanning the pages, I almost immediately have a panic attack. So when the sommelier comes over and asks what wine we’re having, I just tell him to bring whatever he thinks is best with each course. This is a tactic I’ve used many times since, and one I don’t recommend. It means the price of your meal is increased by about a third, all because I’m too much of a pussy to choose one myself. Nowadays I just order a mid-range Sancerre, which is always pretty damn good. Saying that, I drank some damn fine wines that night.
Anyway, then the food starts arriving. It starts off pretty damn good with a sort of ice cream cone of something avacado-ey and gets better and better. It’s like really good sex – a cliche I know, but that’s the only way I can describe. So there’s the caviar and the foie gras and some beautifully buttery brioche that me and Cam keep returning to throughout the meal. It’s all pretty stunning, but it’s foreplay. My first orgasm comes with the grilled scallop in pea sauce, which Jean Claude spoons onto my plate. I’m a bit meh about scallops, but this is perfectly cooked, tender and juicy. What makes it come alive, however, is the pea sauce. I never knew something could taste so much like a pea, sweet and earthy and gorgeous. Mixed with the scallop, it is utterly amazing. At that point it became the single greatest plate of food I have ever eaten, a accolade that lasts ten minutes, because then they bring out the pigeon.
Up until that point, I had no opinion on pigeons. If you’d asked me my opinion on pigeons before that night I would have told you that they hoot outside my window every morning until I scare them off, and it’s pretty annoying. Nowadays, if you ask me, I will tell you, that, if cooked by Clare Smyth under Gordon Ramsay, they are the single most delicious animal in the world.
Other stuff came with it, but I can’t remember what they were, apart from the fact they were fabulous. But the pigeon itself…jesus. Gamey and tender, cooked perfectly, with salty skin and slightly pink meat. Multiple, multiple orgasms. For the second time in my life, I couldn’t quite believe food could taste this good. It was, and I do realize I’m going a little over the top with the hyperbole, fucking cunting mothershitting good.
The meal continued with a seemingly endless parade of deserts, all lovely, the best being a sort of chocolate ginger tower that made me groan to look at with my full-to-busting belly, but was actually surprisingly light. And the chocolates, and some ‘strawberry champagne’, sucked through a straw. Also my first taste of desert wine, which I have now become seriously addicted to. Then coffee. Then the bill, which was enormous. But I didn’t care. The meal I had just eaten was the best meal I’d ever had my about a magnitude of ten. It had shaken my world. Shit was going to have to change, again.
Shit did change. In the year since Gordon Ramsay I have eaten at Nobu, The Fat Duck, The Ledbury, St John again, Marcus Wareing, a three star in Bruges called Die Karmelite, a two star Indian which name escapes me, Ippudo and Blue Smoke in New York and various other places. All have been at least good, some have been bloody excellent. None have been as good as my first time with Gordon, or in fact my second, earlier this year, exactly a year after my first visit. They remembered me. Isn’t that nice?
People are down on Gordon Ramsay, which isn’t surprising. No one needs another blog post on that subject. I don’t really know what to think. But I do know that the meal I had was amazing, and Clare Smyth, the chef at RGF can put food together like no-one else I’ve ever encountered.”
- Jamie F. Brittain – October 2011
