Heat (15 page)

Even in modest-seeming things, Marco conveys a feeling of recklessness. In June, the two of us were having lunch on a terrace at the Belvedere, a restaurant he co-owns in Holland Park (originally a tea-room run by Lyons, the tea people—one of Marco’s tricks is to pick up cherished English restaurants and reinvent them). It was a warm afternoon, and the park was busy. Marco finished a cigarette and tossed it over the balustrade. I thought: Was that wise?

A woman screamed. Then, with great irritation, the same woman shouted:
“Marco!”

We both stood up and looked over. “Oh, fancy that,” Marco said. “It’s my wife, Mati. What’s she doing there?” She was standing behind a baby stroller and was furious: the cigarette had landed in their child’s lap. Both the mother and daughter were staring up at us angrily, the mother with her hands on her hips, the child with her arms crossed in front.

Another time, White invited me to join him on a dawn hunting expedition. We were on our way back to London, White slumped in the front seat, his boots propped up on the dashboard, when he spotted a field of bright blue flowers. They were framed by a break in a hedge and the early-morning sun, big and red and watery, and White told Mr. Ishii to go back so he could look at the field again.

“Isn’t it wonderful, Bill. Look at that! They’re linseed flowers. They bloomed when the sun came up. They weren’t here when we drove by earlier.” He then put his boots through the windshield. He’d got too excited. (“Oh, so sorry, Mr. Ishii, you’re going to have to get a new one.”)

I joined White on another hunt at the end of the summer, on the Lord Rank estate, a sprawling property in Hampshire, south of London. There were plenty of deer (“Look at the light—do you see how it’s turning gray-brown, just like the hills, and how the animals’ hides blend in with the trees, the sky, everything?”), when Marco spotted four men with greyhounds (“Oh, this doesn’t look good”). They were Irish migrant workers, tough-looking—one had a crescent slash-scar across his cheek—and evasive (“We’re just out for an evening’s stroll”), and the dogs, on their hind legs, eagerly eyeing two does, were for coursing, an illegal blood sport: it involves chasing down a prey and keeping it “on course” until it’s exhausted, when the dogs then rip it apart. “In this hand,” Marco told them, “I have a cell phone. In this one, I have a rifle. With this hand, I’m phoning the gamekeeper, and if you’re not off his property by the time he answers, I am shooting your dogs dead.” He lifted the rifle, rested it against the opened window, and, cradling the phone between his head and shoulder, aimed at a dog. He finished dialing the number and released the safety.

“Please,” I found myself whispering. “Please leave. He’s really, really, really going to shoot your animals. Then he may shoot you.” The men departed with gratifying haste. They were justifiably afraid. Everyone could see that White was a beat away from firing. Later I reflected: Why do I continue to accompany this man when he’s armed?

But I did. And just before the light disappeared on what would be our last trip, at the end of September, we shot a young buck. “There’s nothing like a deer you’ve shot yourself, is there, Bill? You’ve had this long love affair with the animal and, because you’ve done the killing, you can taste so much more of it.” I’d persisted because this was what White now did—he chased animals—and I was interested in his views on game, the least adulterated of meats but lean and tricky to cook. This, I decided, was a subject where I’d learn something, and White had much to say, on game birds especially, which I discovered the next night, when we ate grouse in the dining room of 50 St James, the new purchase.

The British are proud of their grouse. The season opens on August 12th, the “Glorious Twelfth,” and there is a ritual preparation involving a bread sauce, fried bread crumbs, sometimes rowan jelly, croutons, watercress, and a wine-based sauce, surrounding a bird that is roasted to a specific degree of pinkness. Our waiter was terrified by White and, as though infected by a degenerative disease, lost more of his coordination on each trip to our table (dropping cutlery and napkins, bumping into our chairs), until finally, when the grouse arrived, White relieved the man of his duties and carved up the bird himself. The waiter retreated and watched our table helplessly.

White had a bite of the bird (scooping up some bread sauce). I had a bite (scooping up some bread sauce) and then looked to him to see what he thought. I was probably looking to him to see what I thought, when I was happily surprised by what was in my mouth. You don’t taste this kind of thing in American restaurants, where, by law, the game has to be farmed.

“Five days,” he said.

“Five days?” I asked.

“Five days. It has been aged five days.”

“Right,” I said. “Five days.”

Almost all meat is aged—aging encourages the growth of an enzyme that breaks down tissue and makes for tenderness, and, as water evaporates, the flavors are intensified. In a wild animal, the inherent gamey flavors are intensified, and in England there is a practice that involves hanging a bird on a hook until its neck grows so rotten it tears in half. This is just before the maggot stage (unless you’re unlucky and it’s just after). The rotten thing is then served rare with considerable bravado: You think you like game? (Chuckle, chuckle.) I’ve long suspected a conspiracy. Unlike the United States, where hunting is usually done by the less affluent, shooting in Britain is the pastime of people who own the land. What better way of fending off outsiders than giving them an occasional taste of what they’re missing, so repellent they won’t be tempted to go back for more when the landlord isn’t looking?

White had another bite. I had another bite.

“I’d have aged it a bit more,” Marco said, “but not much.” He explained that he had experimented with aging. What he said in fact was this: “I’ve aged birds for one day, two days, three days, four days, five days, six days, seven days, eight days, nine days, ten days, eleven days, twelve days, thirteen days, fourteen days, fifteen days, sixteen days, seventeen days, eighteen days, nineteen days, twenty days, and twenty-one days.”

“Your conclusion?” I asked.

“Twenty-one days is too long,” he said.

“Pretty nasty?” I asked.

“Fucking inedible,” he said.

We carried on. He had a bite. I had a bite.

“The croutons are not correct,” Marco said.

I ate a crouton. Marco was looking at his as though he’d discovered an insect impaled on the tine of his fork. “It should have been darkened by the heart and liver,” he said. “You make the heart and liver into a kind of paste.”

He tasted the sauce. “It’s not right, is it, Bill?”

I tasted the sauce. To me, it tasted of—well, sauce. But was it right? I had no idea.

“You can serve the bird with a sauce,” Marco explained, “but the sauce needs to be light. Personally, I prefer the roasting juices. That’s my sauce: the natural juices of the bird, and nothing else. This sauce is too fancy.” He tasted it again. “It is made with a veal stock reduction, isn’t it, Bill?”

I tasted it again. Maybe I wasn’t very good at this. It really seemed like, you know, a sauce.

“Plus there’s a little port and Madeira, isn’t there, Bill? And butter at the end. You don’t need this kind of a sauce. It’s too intense. You can’t taste the bird.”

He had another bite. I had another bite.

“The bread crumbs—they’re disappointing, aren’t they, Bill?”

“Are they?” I asked. I duly tasted my bread crumbs. What did I know? Nothing, except that, until now, I had been enjoying my meal: erroneously, I was coming to understand.

“Well, they haven’t been cooked through, have they, Bill?” He ran his fork through his bread crumbs, the disgust on his face now undisguised. “They should be golden, the bread crumbs, shouldn’t they, Bill?”

He had a bite. I had a bite.

“The butter sauce,” he said. “I mean,
really.
It should have been foamy. And the bread sauce—it has been overcloved. A bread sauce, with grouse, is very important,” he said, sounding like an exasperated schoolteacher. “You take an onion, right?—a half, studded with a clove. You pour in your milk, bring it to a boil, and drop in your bread. But you don’t make it too fancy.
One
clove, do you understand me, Bill? Just one fucking clove. You’re not making a fucking dessert.” He was becoming agitated. I noticed—just past Marco’s shoulder—that our waiter had been joined by other members of the kitchen: you could see in their eyes that they saw the future and weren’t liking it.

Marco continued. “And there were too many herbs. A bird can be ruined by herbs. You have to be careful. We’re here to eat a fucking bird, are we not, Bill? Isn’t that why we’re here, to eat a fucking bird?” The waiters had been joined by a cook in a toque. Marco, meanwhile, was inching up to the edge of his chair, and his eyes were bulging again. “We’re not here to eat a fucking herb garden. Would I have ordered grouse if I wanted to eat a salad? And the parsley. I mean—look at it. There’s no fucking point, is there, Bill?” His eyes were darting round the room wildly. His eyes said: Some fucker was responsible for this, and I’m going to find out who. “I just don’t know why it’s there. Do you, Bill? Is there someone here who can tell me why this fucking parsley is sprinkled all over my grouse?” Marco was shouting. “If someone will tell me what it’s doing there, that will be fine. But I don’t have a fucking clue.”

He sighed heavily. “It’s all about good eating.” He said this quietly. “Good smells and good eating. Very straightforward, very English. Nothing fancy, except that it’s very hard to get the simple things right. What do I want? The pure taste of grouse. Not too strong. I want the gamey flavor without its being overpowering: I want to taste it here, in the back of my palate, a secondary flavor, evocative of the moors. Everything else is on the platter—the bird, the bread sauce, the bread crumbs, the gravy, and the carving of the bird, right there in front of you. It’s very visual. Nature is the artist.”

In normal life, “simplicity” is synonymous with “easy to do,” but when a chef uses the word it means “take a lifetime to learn.” I made a practice, therefore, of asking Marco about really simple things. I once asked him how he cooks an egg.

“Whoa,” he said, “an egg is
very
important. Give a chef an egg, and you’ll know what kind of cook he is. It takes a lot to cook an egg. You have to understand the egg in order to cook an egg, especially if it’s one you want to eat.”

For two days, we talked about eggs. How does he fry one, for instance?

“You start by
always
knowing the temperature of your pan—heating the butter in it, not too hot, never letting it froth—then add your egg and start touching it. And you keep touching it: you have to be on top of your temperature,
always,
waiting for the protein to firm up, not fully cooked, and at the last moment you spoon some of the butter on top.”

How does he scramble them?

“In the pan, never before—that’s where you whisk your eggs and then cook them
very
slowly.”

I asked him about other foods. A piece of wild salmon?

“Season the pan, not the fish, and flip it once to release the juices, which you use to cook it—never add oil. Then wipe out the pan before making your sauce.”

Foie gras?

“It’s all in preventing a shoe from forming—you need to put paper underneath it, otherwise it cooks too fast.”

How does he fry a potato?

“Know your supplier. Potatoes are grown on hilly fields. The top fields make the best chips. The bottom ones make shit chips. Soak them for two days to wash out the starch. Chip and blanch them in hot fat until half cooked—the French like
arachide
[ground nut oil] but I use beef drippings—and put them out on a tray. They will carry on cooking without coloring. If you cook them until they color, they’ll be hard in the middle. Then put them back in for a second time, which makes them crispy: now they’re soft in the middle.”

On fat?

“Cooked fat is delicious. Uncooked fat is not. Why do you stuff a goose or duck? Chefs today don’t know because they don’t learn the basics anymore. You stuff the bird so it cooks more slowly. With the empty cavity, you let in the heat, and the bird is cooked inside and out, and the meat is done before your fat is rendered. Stuff your bird with apple and sage, and the fat is rendered first.”

O
NE DAY,
I met Marco for lunch at the Drones club, his experiment in everyone’s-my-friend membership dining, a narrow room, with wood-paneled walls and large paintings of large women with very large breasts. Marco thinks of the place as an extension of his home (on the mantelpiece are pictures of his children and a pair of his shoes), although it also conveys an atmosphere of a gentlemen’s club: at lunch, the diners are male, with crisp white shirts and strands of long gray hair tucked behind their ears (at the table next to me, a man was negotiating a deal with someone from Tehran). It also looks like a Las Vegas cabaret bar from, say, forty years ago, done up for New Year’s Eve: suspended from the ceiling are pink balloons and two disco balls, and, at night, “the suits are replaced by unbelievable birds.” It’s the first restaurant where Marco has permitted music—principally Dean Martin. “Don’t you think it’s like a New York club?” Marco asked me, calling to mind a question he’d put to me when we’d eaten at Max’s, another White establishment (“It’s like a Paris bistro, innit?”). Marco is terrified of airplanes and has been to neither a Paris bistro nor a New York club. The truth is that Drones was like nothing in New York. It was Marco’s idea of how he likes to spend an evening.

Someone gave Marco his mail, which included a letter from Malcolm Reid, a co-owner of the Box Tree restaurant, in Yorkshire, where Marco worked after the hotel in Harrogate. (“The Box Tree turned my life from black and white to color.”) Marco put the letter on the table, and I read it upside down and happened to notice how much trouble he was having reading it right side up. His face was in pain. He was stuck on the first paragraph. “It’s dyslexia,” he conceded. “Very bad dyslexia. I didn’t find out about it until my children’s teacher told me about their problems—dyslexia is often hereditary—and I thought: Wait a minute! This is me!” He mentioned a recent fishing trip with his boys. “We went to get a boat, but I was confused by the sign. It said, ‘Mackerel fishing, no nemesis.’ What the fuck does that mean? No nemesis? I read it again. ‘Mackerel fishing. No nemesis.’ I don’t get it. I read it three more times. I said to my son, Marco, ‘Marco, what the fuck is “No nemesis”—this posh big word, from Latin—what’s it mean?’” The word was ‘omnibus.’ A mackerel omnibus, a shuttle boat. Marco had scrambled the letters, finding the “n” and “o” in omnibus and was unable to see the word any other way.