One Friday afternoon early this summer I drove down from Toulouse to a village called Homps, east of Carcassonne, parked in a narrow, cobbled lane in the hot sun and wandered across a shaded square into the cool kitchen of a house beside the Canal du Midi. That afternoon, the house had become an outpost of London’s most distinctive and influential restaurant, St John. The grainy grey light of Smithfield meat market had been swapped for a big Mediterranean sky, but the intense “nose to tail” spirit of the London restaurant prevailed.
In the kitchen, Fergus Henderson, St John’s indomitable philosopher-in-chief, was working alongside his Canadian head chef, Steve Darou and a posse of staff and friends, using kitchen scissors to nip the heads and snip the backbones from 120 quail. The quail – set aside to marinate on a layered bed of parsley stalks, sliced garlic and olive oil – would form the centrepiece of the St John’s annual fête du vin the next day.
For the regulars at this event, now in its sixth year, the feast has become a pilgrimage, and like all pilgrimages it is as much about storytelling as destination. No sooner have I arrived in the kitchen, therefore, than I am regaled with fete legends. The year that the lunch up in the hills ended at the local firemen’s ball in the early hours, an event involving Johnny Hallyday karaoke and paddling pools full of rosé; the year that one particularly gobby English food writer was decked mid-sentence by a local octogenarian vigneron; the year the editor of this magazine locked everyone out of their hotel and went awol with their keys; the year of the naked Dutchman (a convoluted story involving a jacuzzi and a dozen takeaway pizzas).
The house in Homps belongs to Trevor Gulliver, who established St John with Henderson a quarter of a century ago and who has been equally integral to its own story ever since, not least to its French-only wine list (“Fergus puts it on the plate and I put it in the glass,” says Gulliver). In 2010 Gulliver fulfilled a long-held ambition and established St John’s own winery here in the Minervois. When I arrive he is on his way back down from the St John vineyards, which are up on a high ridge in the foothills of the Montagne noire, Cathar country.
To celebrate their achievement in putting heart and brains into British cooking for 25 years Henderson and Gulliver are about to publish The Book of St John, part food gospel, part memoir, part recipe book. I have carried a draft of it with me as a kind of Baedeker for the weekend. In among the tales of devilled kidneys and brine buckets and all things pig there is a fine photograph of the two of them facing the entrance of St John, backs to the world; Henderson in his chalkstripe suit, Gulliver in a worsted tweed. Both men are pugnacious in silhouette; Gulliver was a prop forward in Richmond’s first XV and has the recent hip replacement to prove it. Seen together they have something in common with that other east London pairing, Gilbert and George. And like the artists – as they insist in their book, and in person – what they do is always more important than what they say.
I get my first lesson in that principle when Gulliver arrives back and gives me a tour of the house, part of which is built into a medieval church. He and Henderson, in the kitchen, immediately fall into their singular double act. As a result of the Parkinson’s disease that first afflicted him 20 years ago, Henderson finds sustained conversation a challenge, though he is the most active of listeners, and his devoted staff hang on his every measured word and gesture, particularly where questions of taste are involved. Gulliver, meanwhile, is the storyteller’s equivalent of a chainsmoker – one anecdote is lit from the last, and three tales about local folklore, London restaurant politics and long lunches past are always on the go at once.
At the heart of their relationship – which began through an introduction from an olive oil seller and, inevitably, a long lunch – is a shared faith in the sustaining joys of life. Both men are steeped in what you might call the rigour of gastronomic pleasure. The articles of St John’s faith are all about constancy and conviction, doing good things extremely well. When they first opened the restaurant, with its menu of tripes and bone marrow and welsh rarebit and addictive custard, they were accused of being 200 years out of date, which they took as an enormous compliment.
One of their key beliefs is that a great restaurant should insist on making a human shape to the day, beginning early with the baking of bread, and ending late with a final glass of something special. In an age of working lunches and clean eating, they have held fast to that principle. As a young man Henderson studied architecture – both his parents were architects – and he carried a profound understanding of structure into his eventual vocation. The foundations of that, he suggests to me as he works, were boyhood holidays to the Dordogne, where each morning the family would crack open the Michelin guide and ask the only two questions that ever really mattered: “Where shall we have lunch?” and “Where shall we have dinner?”
Though St John – and its offspring, St John Bread and Wine in Spitalfields, and the St John Bakery – is in some ways the most English of restaurants, it has a Francophile devotion to daily ritual. Henderson insists, for example, on the lost art of elevenses – a seed cake and a glass of madeira add a comfort and sharpness to each morning – and he brings that understanding of the perfect pace of small pleasures to the weekend’s events in France.
The fête du vin was established as a thank you to La Lavinière, the hillside village in which the St John winery is based. In the six years since, spontaneous adventure has matured into tradition. The pilgrimage has much-loved stations of the cross. Starting point for the weekend’s festivities is Gilbert’s, confidently believed by Gulliver and Henderson to be the “best bar in the world”. The party, numbering now a couple of dozen, travels, as tradition demands, from Homps up to the hills in convoy, not least because Gilbert’s is not known to satnav. There is a little excitement on the way there when our minibus is forced off a single-track road and into a ditch by a determined farmer’s wife in a Renault, who will not give a centimetre. The assembled party ends up lifting the rear axle back to the road; Henderson is stranded for a moment on the far side of the ditch, before being half piggy-backed to the road.
Gilbert’s lives up to its billing. It has an interior that would have made Cezanne’s card players feel right at home. There are ancient football scarves on the walls, a destitute museum of rabbit rotisseries on one table, a 20-year-old cat on another. Music is provided by a jukebox that only takes old-style francs. There is one pression beer on tap, and a row of pastis and digestifs on a shelf. Gilbert, the proprietor and sole barman, works in the neighbouring vineyard by day and opens the bar at night. He has been doing that every day, he tells me, without complaint, for 43 years.
You can see why that dedication might appeal to Henderson and Gulliver, though they flinch at the suggestion that St John is on its way to becoming an equally venerable institution. They took their initial inspiration from the classic French brasseries, Henderson suggests. “We had a sense of what a restaurant should be,” Gulliver says. “It should be an old friend. And everything about it should matter.” He is a little scathing of the concept of the pop-up eatery. He defines the ethos of St John as much by what it does not do, as what it does: “No, we will not ‘roll out’ St John Bread and Wine. No, we will never introduce ‘set lunch’ menus. And no, we never cook salmon or scallops [because they are] easy sells that have no magic.”
The day of the fete begins for Henderson with a sharpener at the Café de la Poste before we all head up to La Lavinière, and the winery, at lunchtime. The vineyard is mostly Gulliver’s obsession. He started his business career in rock’n’roll merchandise; when he opened the landmark Fire Station restaurant down by London’s Old Vic in 1990, he looked at importing his own wines, but at the time the wine trade was in the hands of one or two suppliers. When he joined forces with Henderson, however, Gulliver was determined the spirit that informed the food at St John – built on close relationships with a family of trusted farmers and suppliers – had equally to be applied to the wine list.
Gulliver drove a hire car around Burgundy and the Languedoc every summer establishing relationships with growers. “Years of knocking on doors and late, wine-sodden nights,” he recalls. “Over time you build up shared memories: ‘Do you remember that 4am drive home from the hills? The year it hailed during harvest?’” Gulliver learned a few important lessons on these travels: one was that it is always the little dog that will bite you when you climb out of the car in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. Another was that you can buy the greatest wine in Burgundy but if you leave it on a pallet at Calais for three days in the sun, it will be the worst cooking plonk by the time it arrives in London.
The St John winery is set into the ramparts of La Lavinière. Gulliver discovered it derelict and for sale; it was love at first sight. He and his two young sons spent the summer of 2010 cleaning out the old wine tanks. As with St John, the name of the operation was suggested by the street on which it stands: Boulevard Napoleon. Gulliver made three years of wine before producing a bottle that brought a smile to Henderson’s face.
On the Saturday of the fete a crowd has already assembled in the Napoleon courtyard sampling the vintages that have followed. The guests include villagers and winegrower friends. Guest of honour is the mayor (“Rule number one in France,” says Henderson, “always make friends with the mayor.”) and his wife who bustles in with her home-baked oreillettes, a Minervois delicacy of deep-fried wafers, flavoured with orange water.
The sun is hot and Gulliver, in a straw hat, is manning the fire of old vines over which the quail will be roasted (“You can tell they are done when the blush goes from their armpits”). Inside, behind great oak doors, among the wine vats two trestle tables have been set up in the cool. Henderson is in a makeshift kitchen hefting, with concentrated determination, a bucket of green beans into a pan. You are reminded, watching him, that he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s just five years after they set up St John, aged only 36. He and his wife Margot – with whom he had made his name cooking at the French House in Soho – had three young children. “What a bugger it was,” he says of the diagnosis, in his book, “not just for me but for everyone in my kitchen – as time went on I increasingly became a flailing nutter, losing order slips and terrifying chefs in proximity to me every time I picked up a knife.” His condition was improved and stabilised with the pioneering use of electrodes in his head. “Deep brain stimulation was a life-transforming miracle: I no longer flail, but I am slow. Too slow for the kitchen.”
There is an enduring poignancy to watching him work, seeing him in his element, as if he has found in the calamity of his illness a kind of metier and purpose. Over the course of the weekend, and later during a typically long lunch with him and Gulliver at St John, I ask a couple of times about might have beens, about the undoubted frustrations of his life. He does not answer directly, though at one point, at that later lunch, by way of reply he simply gestures around the restaurant, as if to say: “What is not to love about this life?”
The fete lunch begins with lamb’s brains on toast, with fresh parsley and wild garlic, a dish which becomes a kind of triumphant symbol of that latter sentiment. “Every time I eat brains (which I do as frequently as possible),” says Henderson, “I think of what wondrous things they are: imagine eating a cloud, for which you have managed to form a crisp exterior. Another miracle – this time textural!”
The simple miracles keep coming over lunch and long into the afternoon – the platters of quail on a bed of green beans, the great bowls of Carcassonne cherries on ice, the slabs of local cheese, and bottle after bottle of St John wine. The St John philosophy has been boiled down – reduced – to “nose-to-tail” as if it is simply an approach to using every last part of “the pivotal pig”. It is more than that, though, as Henderson insists: “It is a way of being in the world.”
One thing the fete proves is that the way of being which St John celebrates is entirely exportable. The lunch eventually ends in the early evening with a hair-raising drive down the hillside; in the absence of the firemen’s shindig the night continues at the Café de la Poste. There are more traditions to enjoy; the next morning, Gulliver rattles me up the mountain tracks to the vineyard, while Henderson enjoys his morning madeira. Then the previous day’s survivors head, as ever, to Carcassonne for soothing cassoulet. The weekend, I have realised by now, works on the same principle as the restaurant it celebrates: if it works, why ever change it? I’m intrigued that after 25 years, Henderson and Gulliver still eat most days at St John. When I ask why, Gulliver replies, bluntly and in all honesty: “Why wouldn’t you?”
Henderson, in the book, provides a fuller version of that sentiment, the best endorsement any chef could offer: “Standing in the open kitchen it used to take every scrap of willpower that I could muster to prevent myself from jumping over the pass to join the throngs for lunch. There they were in front of me, swilling glasses of burgundy and chomping happily! I was consumed with quivering envy every day – it was almost more than I could bear.” His illness provided him with the perfect excuse to join them whenever he wished. “So you see,” he declares, “it’s not all bad!” We can all drink to that.
‘What better education could a chef have?’ – St John alumni reflect on their time there
Ravneet Gill, pastry chef and founder of Countertalk: St John 2015-2016
I was about to leave the restaurant industry when I applied for a baking job at St John. It was meant to be an interim position but I loved it so much that I ended up staying for a year and a half – it made me want to continue working as a chef.
We used to joke that St John cares more about their staff than their customers. You’re encouraged to be friends and socialise outside of work. They make great staff food – toad in the hole, mushrooms on toast, carrot and coriander soup, a full English breakfast every Monday – and after your shift you can have a drink at the bar, cost price. The ethos seems to have always been there – I think it filtered down from Fergus Henderson. He’s always very approachable, always at the bar, open to talk to anybody.
Since then I’ve worked at a couple of restaurants started by St John alumni and they had the same ethos. Last year I set up an organisation called Countertalk, which is all about staff welfare and getting people in hospitality better treatment. It’s definitely possible. St John is proof of that.
James Lowe, chef-owner of Lyle’s: St John Bread & Wine 2006-2011
When I first ate there in 2003, the choices they were making weren’t obvious. At the time everyone was obsessed with Gordon Ramsay and super-fancy food whereas Fergus’s food was very bare-boned, based on flavour and simplicity. Nose-to-tail cookery is what St John has become synonymous with, but I’d go further and say the food is very commonsense. That’s the way we describe our food at Lyle’s. We’re very careful with what we throw away. There’s a real focus on, is it true to its ingredients? Have we made sure it’s not too fancy? These are all things carried over from St John.
Within six months of starting at Bread & Wine as sous chef, I ended up taking over the kitchen. I felt untested, but it was an opportunity to learn. I always thought of it as my own restaurant – and now at Lyle’s, I really want the people I work with to feel like it’s their restaurant too. I love Fergus’s idea that people within a restaurant are what give it character. They hired people based on personalities rather than CVs, and I learned to see the value in that. It makes for a more interesting team, and hopefully better food.
When I started cooking, I was told that kitchens were environments where bullying was rife and you had to work mad hours. It was easy for me not to go down that route: Fergus didn’t have bullying in the kitchen; St John had a six-shift week. They just challenged all the norms.
Lee Tiernan, chef-owner of Black Axe Mangal: St John Bread & Wine 2003-2013
I was at catering college in south London in 2003 and needed to do a two-week stage in a restaurant to complete my qualification. I called St John to see if they’d take me. I didn’t think for one minute that they’d offer me a full-time position, because I didn’t know my arse from my elbow, but four days into my stint, one of the chefs handed in his notice and the head chef Ed Lewis said: “Do you want a job?”
One of the first things I had to do was butcher a sirloin and a shoulder of beef. I was shaving and brining pig heads and roasting bone marrow, all sorts of stuff. I remember butchering a Middle White pig one day and throwing the skin away. Ed came over and said: “We don’t throw anything away here really, nothing gets wasted.” He showed me a box in the walk-in fridge full of skin and salt and said: “If we have a busy night and I need a starter, I’ve got one here.” As Fergus says, if you’re going to kill an animal, it’s only polite to eat the whole thing. What better education could a young chef have?
I left in the autumn of 2013, by which time I was head chef at Bread & Wine, but if I’m honest I don’t think I’ve really ever left. I still feel like part of the family. I call Trevor “uncle”, I call Fergus “boss”, and I’ve gotten to know them on a more personal level. I’d like to think that Trevor and Fergus are proud of how my wife Kate, who worked at St John for nine years, and I have carried ourselves since leaving. You don’t want to let your parents down, you want them to be proud of you, and I want Trevor and Fergus to be proud of us as well.
Interviews by Killian Fox