Cry God for Fergus, England and St John

Thoughts from an English cook

Some of you might might have noticed that this newsletter was featured in Substack Reads last week. What an honour! As a consequence, there are quite a lot of new subscribers here - hello and thank you so much for joining me! I drafted most of the below before this feature, fortunately it feels nicely suited to introducing myself to new subscribers and telling my existing friends here a bit more about my journey.

“When having lunch at Sweetings, you sit at a bar behind which a waiter is trapped, you order your smoked eel, they yell to a runner who delivers your eel over your shoulder to the waiter, who then places it under the counter and then in front of you as if they had it all along. Not an entirely practical way of getting your food, but a splendid eating ritual, and a wonderful lunch.” - Fergus Henderson, Nose to Tail.

I first read Nose to Tail about 10 years ago. It wasn't the earth shattering revelation that it might've been had I read it when it was first published in 1999, but I was 5 then, and being raised by a single (vegetarian) mother, that was unlikely. By 2012, instagram was a thing, ‘foodie’ bloggers had ditched WordPress to bring you their opinions via a shiny new app complete with saturated square photos of things served in exposed brick rooms in Shoreditch, and restaurants were sort of onboard with it too. I might’ve even seen a picture of the iconic bone marrow and parsley toast before I ever picked up a copy.

I think I enjoyed the writing, thought the food looked interesting and then put it down. At that point I was just someone who liked food and had been told about this British cookbook I should read, so I did, but I was too busy sprinkling pomegranate seeds on whole roasted cumin cauliflowers and embracing the Ottolenghi zeitgeist, I didn't have time for cow’s tongue.

A few years later, having graduated into and then quit a soulless job in marketing and deciding to go and work in kitchens, I picked the book up again. The effect this time was different. The first time I’d skimmed the forward, it was written by some American guy. This time, it was written by Anthony Bourdain. The first time, the food had looked interesting, a bit odd and to me, not particularly British. I was born and raised here but I hadn’t grown up eating any of that stuff. British food was Shepherd’s Pie, Potato Smiley’s, Turkey Dinosaurs and Beans! This time around it looked like an invitation to learn about what our island had once eaten, a secret culinary past lost to industrialisation and a taste for the exotic.

There I was, an English cook working in England, cooking French and Italian food, and I’d never really questioned it - wasn’t being a chef all about cooking French and Italian food? Isn’t that what people went to restaurants to eat? It was around this time that I decided to go to the motherland and see where it all started, so I booked a flight to France, packed a bag and Tetris’d a few books in somewhere between my knife roll and swim shorts. (A side note to any ambitious young chefs with similar plans, don't bother with the swim shorts. You won’t use them, and if you do, the sight of your pale, emaciated body after months in a windowless kitchen will be so repulsive that you’ll ruin all chances of a summer romance with a bronzed local).

Distance has a profound effect on nostalgia. In France, the book took on new meaning. I was perplexed - I’d come all the way here to learn how to cook French food, the classics; pigs head, calf brains, pâté, tongue, liver - but every time I opened my book, there they were. How could that be? In one ear, the wine-breathed chef telling me this was French food, and on the pages in front of me, Fergus’ lilting prose cheerfully describing the same dish as a ‘kind of British cooking’. Was someone lying? Had we copied them? Had they copied us?

It turns out they were both right. The difference is that in France it was expected, in London it was daring. When it opened in 1994, eating well in England meant eating French food, and eating French food meant fine dining, but St John begged to differ. I was suddenly emboldened. We had a food pedigree too! Better yet, it wasn’t all so different to what I was learning to cook right here in France, the gastronomic centre of the universe. Then something bizarre began to happen. As I moved around France and cooked and worked in different restaurants, younger chefs would ask me about English food, and always about one restaurant in particular, St John. “That’s the place where the guy cooks the offal” they would say. “That place is cool man”. A creeping feeling came over me. Something that as an Englishman, aware of the weight of empire, colonialism and war hanging heavy in the history books, I don’t feel often. Patriotism.

Perhaps it’s strange to feel so much admiration for a chef I’ve never met and a restaurant that doesn’t cook my favourite kind of food. I would pick a good plate of pasta, a properly grilled kebab or a bowl of phō over anything on the menu at St John, and yet I’m so glad that none of those things are on the menu. Understand that I do not think it’s bad. I think it’s excellent, it’s just not my favourite. Too often, food and restaurants are talked about as good and bad and not as the deeply subjective matter of personal preference that they are. Purple isn’t my favourite colour, but it’s not a worse colour than blue or green. Capeesh?

A side note - It’s why food critics are essentially pointless. The collective opinion of 500 Google reviews is genuinely more useful. All you really need to know is that you’ll get roughly what you order, for a morally acceptable price, and won’t hammer the toilet with something resembling rusty water afterwards. Beyond that, eat what you like and screw what anyone else thinks.

I’ve gone off topic. Despite the above, St. John is the restaurant that I will always wish I had worked at. It’s the way more than the what they cook that I’m so into. London, and indeed the wider world, is now populated by ex St John disciples. You can feel it as soon as you walk in - the clue could be in the pared back decor, a particular ingredient (pickled walnut) or a certain wording (blood sausage, not black pudding). It’s beautifully no-bullshit, ingredient led, unpretentious seasonal cooking and that’s a legacy that can take you all the way.

You’ll notice that the photos peppered throughout this article are of Sweetings, not St John. That’s because originally I set out here to write about Sweetings, a restaurant I’ve wanted to eat at since I read the passage at the top of this article, and finally visited last week. I got sidetracked along the way, but also there isn’t much I need to say. Sweetings is not my favourite seafood restaurant, you can eat better fish for a better price. But I am so glad that it exists in the way that it does, with all of its unnecessary but completely charming eccentricities. I think it’s excellent, it’s just not my favourite.

Fan’s of Substack’s new Notes feature, or those who follow me on Instagram, might have noticed that I’m in France. Next week, I begin a 3 month trip travelling around France, Spain, Portugal and Italy to collect and document the traditional cooking of those countries in a new series ‘A Man With A Pan’.

Alongside a bag of clothes, a camera and my trusty all-purpose pan, this newsletter will come with me along the way. Each week, I’m aiming to film, edit and post a video of a dish, taught to me by someone wherever I am (this will be over on my Instagram) and along with that, write about who I meet, what I find and what I eat each week, right here. I can’t wait to share it with you all.