It all started with the tongue.
I had fancied myself a decent cook for some time, so when I fell in love with Madeleine, a Glaswegian chef who told me her restaurant hosted regular stages for trainees, I sent an email to her boss and was told to present myself outside the place at 7:30AM two weeks later. The restaurant was called St. JOHN and was famous for its gleefully tipsy owner and former head chef Fergus Henderson, a bespectacled eccentric in pinstripes who coined the term ‘nose-to-tail eating’. His approach to dining revolutionised British food in the 1990s and celebrated all the types of meat that were usually tossed to the side – lamb kidneys, ox hearts, lungs and then some. But Fergus’s first love was the pig and St. JOHN prided itself on using just about every type of offal, cartilage and collagen that the animal had to offer. At a time when legions of health fanatics were sermonising about the dangers of fat, the menu Fergus served up was something of a clarion call to gluttons everywhere. Eat the pig, they implored – all of it. Revel in its bounty and leave the vegans to their bilious slop.
St. JOHN is located just up the road from the Smithfield meat market near Farringdon tube station. The ridged concrete towers of the Barbican loom in the distance as men in white smocks flecked with blood empty lorries to supply the restaurants and butchers of London. It’s an industrial scene in Cockney and Polish that Madeleine and I wafted by on the way to work for the better part of a month. While the blood is less visible inside the restaurant, the stainless steel features set against white walls are all there and the guts are too, just behind closed doors. I figured there would be a lot of guts given its reputation. I was right.
The head chef, Stevie, a bearded bear of a Canadian in his late thirties, would talk out loud as he went about designing the day’s menu. It was as if he was playing a delicate game of Tetris with the contents of the walk-in fridge, waiting for inspiration to strike, only his materials were pigs’ blood, brains, tails and testicles, all of which would all be tossed into enormous pots or vats of boiling oil. ‘So we’re going to do ox tongue, green sauce and turnips – we got turnips?’ he would holler at one of his orderlies in the morning, flouncing his pen about like a conductor’s baton. ‘Ah – no turnips? Okay, ox tongue, green sauce, leaves and pickled walnut… Wait, no. Too much acid.’
Silence would reign for a moment, Stevie would look up quizzically, then descend to earth with the coup de grace. ‘Carrots! We got carrots? Okay, tongue, sauce, carrots – that’s it, we got it, it’s done.’ And that evening, a slab of violet flesh half-submerged in green shrapnel would sit next door to improbably knobbly root veg.
The chefs there sometimes joke they’re on janitorial duty, sweeping the halls of a storied repertoire, and that’s because the cooking at St. JOHN has its very own syntax and grammar, born of a very specific mind. Fergus Henderson began his career as a chef flogging sandwiches out of The Globe in Notting Hill before taking over the kitchen of The French House with his future wife, Margot Henderson. When St. JOHN’s opened its doors in October of 1994, it slowly gained a following amid London’s literary and arts set. Mainstream appeal came around 2000, after Anthony Bourdain visited for the first time and began proclaiming it ‘the restaurant of his dreams’ to just about anyone who would listen. In 2009, St. JOHN was awarded a Michelin star.
Today, Fergus is no longer in the kitchen, but you will find him in the dining room most days, the arrival of early-onset Parkinson’s confining him to the role of something between softly spoken oracle and benevolent superintendent. He usually rounds off the morning hours with a caraway seed cake washed down with a generous glass of Madeira for elevenses. This is followed by a bit of shop talk, before a lunch spent getting gently rosy-cheeked on red Burgundy. The repertoire he created but can no longer cook is an ode to pared-back simplicity and the best British ingredients, all shot through with the kind of obsessive attitude towards form that could only come from an architect, the profession for which Fergus originally trained.
It follows, then, that everything at St. JOHN screams minimalism. The restaurant, formerly a smokehouse, is now an unassuming white shopfront with an effigy of a pig hanging on a banner outside. Step inside and you’ll find yourself heading down a long concrete corridor lined with tables, beside a bar with a zinc countertop over which a glass ceiling leaps up a couple of metres, bathing the space in antiseptic light. Turn from the waiters pulling pints and you’ll find a cantilevered dining room, where the concrete floor gives way to hardwood panelling and a main kitchen fully in view.
