The Birth of the Cool

Where TV Learned to Eat

Photo by Bruno Martins on Unsplash

Notting Hill in the 1980s was home to an expanding BBC as BBC Worldwide began to sprawl out from TV Centre, where fans would queue for hours for a glimpse of their heroes driving through the famous gates to record Top of the Pops. BBC Worldwide was a product of the Thatcher era, created to sell the BBC across the world and driven by a new breed of television salespeople proving that there was an international market hungry for British stories.

A tension was building between the old and the new, urging creatives and controllers to think differently. Slowly at first, by the 1990s and into the first decade of the 21^st century, British television would be telling stories that sold throughout the world.

Notting Hill was a cab ride away from BBC’s worldwide mission and a place already tried and tested in the art of renaissance. It had already housed the first wave of Caribbean immigrants as HMT Empire Windrush ferried its cargo of would-be bus drivers and nurses to British shores, and with them the smells and tastes of home. Pricking the nostrils of the curious and inciting the fury of those less so, it would become synonymous with class, clash and culinary experimentation over the next thirty years.

Just streets away, Ladbroke Grove was the fulcrum of rebellion squatter and hippy outsider culture, a place already defined by breaking the rules. Portobello with its bric a brac stalls and second hand street markets joined it to the sweeping crescents of Notting Hill and old fashioned upper class Britain. A maelstrom of different influences, with British working culture sitting side by side middle class hippies and immigrants from Ireland to Jamaica, this tiny area of West London was becoming increasingly unstable, a ripped up and patched together multi-coloured canvas on which to etch a new Britain.

The intersecting influences of music, art and food of Notting Hill between 1950 and 1990 is the story for another book, but it was this extraordinary perfect storm, prodded by Thatcher’s conspicuous consumerism that led to a revolution in eating out, with a tiny number of restaurants, mostly in W1 and W11 beginning to play with big ideas around food and eating, and attracting some of the most entrepreneurial chefs in the UK.

Of course many other factors were involved; TV chef, Antony Worrall Thompson told me for a previous book that it was the recession of 1980 that was responsible for the creation of London’s café society. He said that it mimicked Madrid, Paris, New York; ‘We’d never had that. We ate out for special occasions but we didn’t eat out as a matter of course. When prices came down in Britain, a lot of executives traded down because they didn’t want their employees seeing them pay lots of money for food, and afterwards they’d say ‘Actually, I quite enjoyed that. It wasn’t all stiff and starchy.’’ (Smith, 2008)

Some of them would go on to change London’s eating habits forever. Rose Gray of the River Cafe had been making crepes at the Rainbow Theatre in the 1970s; she had brought some of the best ideas from her travels across Europe to what might be known now as a ‘pop-up’ business. ‘I saw people making crepes on the streets in Paris and thought ‘what a great idea’. I bought six crepe machines and, with various girlfriends helping me, I used to make crepes at pop concerts like Pink Floyd and Rod Stewart. I remember the Alice Cooper gig particularly because everyone was so stoned that they came rushing to my crepe stand. I used to do bitter chocolate with crème fraiche and marrons glaces with sour cherries and honey and nuts.’ (Smith, 2008)

Gray would later take her turn in the kitchen at 192 Kensington Park Road, one of London’s landmark moments in its food history as chef, Alistair Little led the way towards a simpler culinary culture in the capital with a focus of Mediterranean recipes and the freshest of ingredients.

Little had come from l’Escargot where he set up the kitchen for Nick Lander and his wife, Jancis Robinson, who would go on to become the wine presenter of BBC2’s Food and Drink.  Gray was at 192 for just six weeks prior to setting up River Café with Ruth Rogers in 1987, but she joined Little and Rowley Leigh (Kensington Place), Dan Evans (Odette's) and Adam Robinson (the Brackenbury) in helping to make 192 the kind of place that was name-checked by Martin Amis in ‘Money’ and Helen Fielding in ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary (Hickman, 2002).

Owned by the founders of The Groucho Club, Soho’s celebrity private drinking haven, 192 opened in 1983. It had the feeling of a cross between Central Perk and the Queen Vic, according to journalist Nick Foulkes (2002) who spoke to a key member of the 192 team; ‘’I think it started because Ben (Wordsworth), Tony (Mackintosh), Tchaik (Chassay) and John Armit (a wine salesman) lived round the corner and wanted somewhere to eat, and there really was nothing in Notting Hill,' says front-of-house manager Mary-Lou Sturridge, who started work at 192 in 1986. It sounds silly now, but in the early Eighties, 192 was about as far north in Notting Hill as some people dared go.’

192 gave birth to what became known as ‘modern British' food, the cool, innovative style that mixed French with Italian – as much from New York as Tuscany, with the confidence, creativity and expression of an artist.   The menu changed twice a day and would include ground breaking dishes such as Buffalo mozzarella, panettone bread-and-butter pudding, ideas that came from their creators’ travel diaries rather than just an Elizabeth David cookbook.

London had never seen dishes like vegetable tempura, carpaccio of beef, chicken liver mousse with red onion marmalade, rocket and pousse side salad, gravadlax and potato rosti (Hickman, 2002). Peter Gordon, a young chef from New Zealand came to London in 1989, spearheading a new movement in antipodean food with The Sugar Club in Notting Hill. Like most of the young chefs heading west at this time, his recipe ideas came in the form of scribbles on the back of a travellers’ guide; ‘I spent a year in Asia hitchhiking around,’ he told me for the delicious podcast in 2016. ‘I was far more excited about some air-dried squid that was dipped in chilli sugar syrup and barbequed and served with sticky rice than a buttery sauce served on poached meat.’ 

Cooking in London was becoming exciting; before the words ‘celebrity chef’ were part of the national vocabulary, Marco Pierre White was breaking new ground in a kitchen in Wandsworth. He had attracted the attention of Fay Maschler, the food critic of the London Evening Standard who is credited with charting the rise of the capital’s gastro-scene since 1972. As she reflected on her 40 years of eating at the best restaurants in London at her 70th birthday in 2015, she said that her favourite was Marco Pierre White’s Harvey’s in Wandsworth (1987-1993). ‘I’ve never eaten better food than when he cooked at Harveys. He had almost become the food. He would identify with a piece of salmon so closely that he’d understand exactly what to do with it.’  Alistair Little agreed:  ‘Marco did something that was different. He reworked food in a really intelligent manner. He had a good look at it and broke it down, and modernised it into Nouvelle cuisine. He kind of dumbed it down but in a really good way.’

By the age of 33, White had become the youngest chef ever to be awarded three Michelin stars, but it was more than his ability to cook that influenced a new generation of chef in the late 1980s; his rock star swagger, his tousled hair and smouldering gastro-punk attitude combined with a Modern European style of cooking were captured in his book, White Heat with its moody black-and-white photographs of his fiery kitchen by advertising photographer, Bob Carlos-Clarke, and summed up a new spirit of perfectionism and drive. His punk attitude was part of the package;  ‘If I came to your house for dinner an hour late, then criticised all your furniture and your wife’s haircut, and said all your opinions were stupid, how would you feel?’ he wrote in White Heat (1990). ‘People still come here and expect a three-course meal in an hour. What do they think I do – pull rabbits out of a fucking hat? I’m not a magician.’

The swearing and the swagger were almost as exciting as the food itself for young chefs like Jean-Christophe Novelli.  ‘Marco was the transition between the past and the future,’ he told me. ‘What France had brought to the market was a traditional style, but it meant that you just do the same thing all the time. Marco went to the edges of that. He thought, ‘Fuck that recipe, let’s do a dauphinoise with shellfish reduction!’ He pushed the boundaries of cooking and had an attitude that wasn’t traditional.  He was very rock and roll – he gave these young chefs freedom of expression.’

White knows his place in this very British revolution, marked as it by story and style, but as someone who has been accused of encouraging the bullying culture of the late 20^th century British kitchen, he says it was hard. He reflected in 2015, ‘I saw the tail end of the Escoffier world, and stepped into the modern world. Very few chefs had heard of Michelin and there were no celebrity chefs. Like the foreign legion, the industry accepted everybody. Young boys knocked on back doors to learn their trade, you didn't need qualifications. Lots of people were from working-class backgrounds. When you went for an interview you never asked how much you were going to earn, how many hours you were going to work, or in what section. If you ended up washing up, who cared? You were in a great house. When I went to the Box Tree, I got £26 a week, live-out. If I had to go in two hours early to do what I had to do well and properly, to be ready for service, I did it, I didn't question it.’ (The Caterer, 2007)

White preferred to gather Michelin stars than appear on television. This was before Jamie Oliver and the rise of the celebrity chef, when TV chefs were on Daytime TV and food was still a status symbol for the rich rather than just something to eat at home.  Supermarkets were yet to stock the kind of ingredients White would use in his kitchen, including the wines that would encourage the middle classes to try fine dining at home. This was the Thatcher era of conspicuous consumption in which being seen to eat out was the cultural capital of the day, a mark of sophistication and worldliness which the then Prime Minister had insisted would contribute to the ‘sell’ of her British brand on the world market. This currency of social mobility would blindside those who had considered British food culture to be little more than under-seasoned, over-industrialised and unloved fuel; Nouvelle Cuisine with its works of art on a plate would barely provide enough sustenance to get back to work after a business lunch, but it looked good, and that was enough for a nation more interested in style than content – for a short while at least.  

London was changing fast.  After the post-war period of rationing and the previous 100 years of industrial revolution formalising, scheduling and taming the country’s workforce, Britain was searching for identity. Teenage boys had thrown off the suits of their fathers while hems had moved up and down to the changing beats of the generations. During this intense period of reform, it was only food that was left out to dry. 

Food historian, Colin Spencer believes that it is when a country is at peace with itself that food can become the focus of the party. He notices a pattern for elegant dining among periods of social stasis, and describes the reign of Henry II which oversaw 35 years of political stability as a period of aesthetic exploration; ‘A culture of a period is all of a piece, and a rich elite fascinated by hem lines, shades of dye, types of fur lining and curling tongs also want the food they eat to have the same skill, time and delicacy spent upon it.’  (Spencer, 2002: 46). The household of Henry II may well have loved the art on the plates of 1980s London, but going home hungry would have been unthinkable.

AA Gill, the British food writer, credited Worrall Thompson with the invention of Nouvelle Cuisine, the culinary trend which attempted to make food an art form with its dainty, decorative dishes adding a new dimension to eating out.  In retrospect, Worrall Thompson is not proud of the overpriced stylized food craze that swept through London in the mid-1980s and which revealed the city’s superficial interest in style over content; ‘It was a French invention but they went back into their escargot shells when they realized what a horrendous nightmare they created and the English just went on from there.’  

But it changed the appetite for eating out in Britain, something that Antony Worrall Thompson attributes to women, previously an untapped market who were now paying the bills too. Popping into a stylish restaurant for a starter and a dessert, both beautiful and tiny, accompanied by a glass of wine was an acceptable business lunch for many people associating eating with gluttony.

Permission to move the image of eating out from the ‘fat cats’ to the ‘beautiful people’ exploded the market, creating demand for ever more exciting ideas in the kitchen, if still only in this tiny corner of Britain.  Fay Maschler wrote in the Standard that the most exciting period for London restaurants was the mid-Eighties, ‘when figures such as Rose Gray (River Café), Rowley Leigh (Kensington Place) and Simon Hopkinson (Bibendum) burst on to the scene. ‘Before then, you really struggled to find anyone actually using their intelligence in a kitchen.’

Sally Clarke had cooked with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, whose radical idea to create a simple menu of the day was inspired by what she had observed in France. Waters had gone home to Berkeley and created a choice of just three dishes per course, dependent only on the best available produce of the day. Waters would inspire a new trend for making simple but elegant and exciting new food from the best ingredients, and Clarke would bring her influence home to West London and the chefs and foodies who were ravenous for new ideas.

Alice Waters led a new trend for using simple, organic produce when she first opened her restaurant, Chez Panisse in 1971. Based on the farmers’ markets she had lived among while studying in France, she created a movement for using only the best organic ingredients that were available on the day. ‘It wasn’t a new philosophy’, she told me. ‘It had been around since the beginning of time but we’d moved so far away from it.’ She said that what was happening in Berkeley was a reworking of the classic French; ‘We were just further down the wrong path and there were people here who understood European philosophy. We learned from (food writers like) Elizabeth David and Richard Olney who had a lot less imprisonment around fancy cookery. We were free in America to do what we wanted to do – for good or bad. There was a big free speech movement in Berkeley and everyone was setting up businesses in what they believed in, run the way you want it. There was an entrepreneurial culture as well as this beautiful climate that allowed us to grow great produce.’ When we spoke for another project in 2006, she told me that New York City hasn’t advanced in the same way. ‘They’re still catching up. It’s more difficult there. They’re trying to do the same thing but it’s more difficult for them to grow food and greenhouse. There’s a sense of not knowing what regional cuisine can be.’

 ‘Alistair Little had just opened down the road at Kensington Park Road’ she told me, referring to 192, ‘and Simon Hopkinson was cooking at Hilaire in South Kensington. Rowley Leigh hadn’t quite opened at Kensington Place, but…Alistair and Simon were the two most exciting new chefs (in London). They were cooking seasonally and they were cooking food that was from named farms and producers. They were definitely cooking in the Elizabeth David web.’  

Clarke’s opened on the Kensington side of Notting Hill in 1984 and immediately attracted a mix of Kensington locals and Californians. By the end of the decade, she had also attracted the attention of a young cookery student called Jamie Oliver who, like the Notting Hill chefs was fascinated by this new emphasis on freshness and seasonality.

Notting Hill was also home to New Zealander, Peter Gordon, who had come to London in 1989 from Melbourne. He and John Torode, who would go on to present MasterChef UK, had come to London as young graduates from catering college in Melbourne, looking for new adventures, and would both become major influences on the London food scene.

‘My first introduction in Notting Hill was The First Floor restaurant on the corner of Portobello Road,’ Gordon told me. ‘We had Books for Cooks, which was a fantastic shop where Clarissa Dickson-Wright used to sit and sell you books. Notting Hill at the time was the foodie sort of destination in London. I remember Kensington Place was open just round the corner. Sally Clarke was just down there. And it seemed to be the centre of attention for food. But I think it was just a place, a centre of attention. It wasn’t in the West End; people were doing food that wasn’t just British or French.’ The success of The Sugar Club, his Notting Hill restaurant which brought culinary ideas from the New World into this mix of new Mediterranean, was accompanied by a youthful Kiwi surfie style which ramped up the cool in West London’s scene. Gordon was even one of Nigel Slater’s guests on the first episode of his first Real Food series in 1998, along with a young food writer called Nigella Lawson. 

Peter Gordon believes that Britain has always been creative in its fashion, its music and its art, and that food was the last bastion. ‘You’ve got an environment where you can encourage creativity and invention’, he said. ‘Whether that’s the creativity of Heston Blumenthal or that’s the simplicity of Fergus Henderson or you know someone like the chap at Lyle’s who’s doing little funky things. I think creativity is important. For a long time, you couldn’t bend the rules, and actually what happened during that period in the late eighties was that everyone was breaking the rules. You had an American and an English woman running one of the best Italian restaurants in England (The River Café). You’ve got Alistair Little doing his lovely Italian European stuff that lightened everything up. I remember having some beautiful figs and Parma ham at Alistair Little’s and just thinking, ‘Oh this is heaven.’ But I hadn’t had it that good before.’

The food was on the table, but that has never been enough for Britain which loves its storytelling as much as its fashions. By the mid-eighties, the London food scene was a media-fed revolution in an aspirant society in which good-looking young role models showed off how to live. New style magazines i-D and The Face which both launched in 1980 and targeted men – gay and straight - as well as women for the first time, featured ‘hot’ young chefs, such as Alistair Little and his good friend from Cambridge University, Rowley Leigh.

The pair would bring together the neighbourhood cool of 192, mix it with the aspirational elegance of Neal Street and the borrowed culture of l’Escargot and create Kensington Place, a temple of conspicuous consumerism. With over 300 covers and showy window display of the Beautiful People at lunch, Kensington Place was all about looking good, and would set the scene for designer Terence Conran’s gastrodomes, Bibendum in Knightsbridge which reworked the French brasserie into a tableau of style and cool, and Quaglino’s, the enormous theatre of food in Mayfair where walking to your table became as much an art form as what was on the table.  It was about mimicking the best of New York, Sydney, LA rather than Milan or Paris; ‘To be fashionable a restaurant needs a buzz,’ Alan Yau told Kathryn Flett in the Guardian (2005). ‘I remember the first time I went to Balthazar Brasserie in New York a few years ago. I got a late flight and arrived around midnight on a Monday. I went there and I just thought ‘wow’: the energy level was incredible. The Mercer, also in Manhattan, has a similar vibe. You can't create a so-called fashionable restaurant artificially - if you do, it feels superficial. You can control certain things, like the size of tables (they should never be too big) and the space between them (not too vast), and the lighting and music to enhance the dining experience but you can do all of that and still not create the right environment.’

Style was a way of enticing the British palate to try something new. The Thatcher government had downgraded cookery classes on the school curriculum in 1988, while at the same time, the introduction of microwave meals had encouraged millions to become what Carolyn Steel calls ‘fuellies, happy to let food take a back seat as we get on with our busy lives, unconscious of what it takes to keep us fuelled.’ (Steel, 2008). As the Thatcher era became synonymous with industry closure and hardship in some parts of the country and enormous city bonuses in the capital, food became symbolically conflicted; with mixed messages from ‘experts’ and the food industry on how to eat inexpensive healthy food, and microwaving was fast becoming the preferred way to safeguard nutritional value while preparing quick TV dinners for the family. As food became shrink wrapped, so consumers lost connection with the ingredients and the sense of what to do with them.

While the rest of the country was limited to rare chef finds, where to eat was part of the storyline for some Londoners. In 1983 the first ‘Time Out Guide to Eating Out in London’, costing £1.75 was published, listing 1,000 ‘dining, drinking and lunching places in town’. It was an immediate success and became an annual publication. Nouvelle Cuisine, the craze for small but beautifully designed dishes on vast plates came and went, but the mash up of elegant, cool restaurants with the demand for fresh seasonal produce in the kitchens was here to stay. As chefs from all over the world – notably Australia and New Zealand – caught the word on the wind, including a stint in a London restaurant was a must on the Overseas Experience. 

The opening of Terence Conran’s Quaglino’s in 1993 with Australian chef, Martin Webb at the helm, was a metaphor for post-Thatcherism/pre-Britpop Britishness. He had brought the Mod Oz tradition to London, introducing Eurasian fusion of classics like saddle of hare, roasted and served with morels and celeriac from his Perth restaurant, Café Polperrot. But as diners sashayed down Quaglino’s art deco staircase and through the 450 tables of this cavernous Parisian brasserie style restaurant, it wasn’t always Mod Oz that they were thinking of. Channelling the spirit of the 1920s when, run by its original owner Giovanni Quaglino’s, it had attracted the future Edward VIII and the Mountbattens, Charlie Chaplin and Evelyn Waugh who came to dine and tango, stylish young Londoners went to Quaglino’s to be seen to eat. On its revival in 2014, Zoe Williams wrote in The Telegraph ‘Quaglino’s, when I were a lass, was the height of Mayfair wonder, slick but never crazily pricey, the perfect destination for urban know-it-alls who wanted to be considered discerning but never cared overmuch what they ate.’

Conran played the crowd; hindsight would suggest a clever move in democratising eating out which would lead to an unprecedented interest in eating at home and a demand for chic living/eating space. As he opened his twelve restaurants in London including the Blue Print Café in 1989 which was situated on the first floor of the Design Museum, the juxtaposition between style and substance was deliberate. Terence Conran’s influence over the preparation of food and dining both at home and out is profound. His designs around the home and in the kitchen in particular introduced more affordable but good looking utensils into the modern kitchen as early as the 1960s with the first Habitat home store in London’s Fulham Road. His pasta makers and yakitori skillets brought new ideas from around the world to the British high street about what to do in the kitchen, and won Habitat the accolade of being ‘the most exciting new store since Biba’ (Ind, 1995) With many of the influential chefs of the modern British era, Conran shared a love of French cooking, but while he borrowed design ideas from the cavernous golden-era brasseries like la Couple, it was its ‘authenticity, robustness, simplicity and substance’ (Ind, 1995) that he admired rather than the ‘unnecessary decoration and preciousness’ of the perception of French food in Britain.

Conran was a pioneer in democratising design and diversity, bringing home ideas from across the world. His travels were our gain.  At Pont de La Tour at Shad Thames, he created a food experience,  ‘a collection of food-related activities which appeal to those who are particularly interested in the variety of quality of food and drink.’ (Ind, 1995) It would draw people other than just diners to his gastrodome and thrill them with smells, tastes and inspiration. It opened in 1991 with a bar, grill and salon prive but also a bakery and a wine merchant, steadily luring a new crowd and expanding the desire for this new food scene beyond the ‘Beautiful People’.

Conran’s Bibendum, an enormous art deco building in South Kensington which had been the headquarters of the French tyre company, and Mezzo, with 700 tables in the heart of Soho, played up the storytelling. Conran was creating an experience in eating which was, as Popham, writes, an ‘escape from mundane English reality. In other cultures, to eat in a good restaurant is to commune with the soul of one’s nation or region or city, to enter into a sort of dialogue about identity. In London, it is to flee – whether to Thailand, to Provence or, at Mezzo, to a fantasy of the Jazz Age’ (Popham, 1995 in Bell and Valentine, 1997).

John Torode was head chef at Mezzo and co-author of the Mezzo cookbook (1997) which celebrated his Australian pedigree of what was known then as ‘Mod Oz’, the culinary fusion of Australia’s migrant communities. Mod Oz had already transformed the Melbourne and Sydney food scene, but Torode’s book spoke to a hip London crowd who wanted to be seen in the vast new Conran-designed food emporia, Mezzo, Bluebird, Quaglino and Bibendum. Conspicuous consumption may have started off as being seen to eat out but food, style and architectural design together was now beginning to push new buying habits in the capital’s supermarkets; lemongrass, galangal, fish sauce and star anise, once found only in Chinese supermarkets, were beginning to find their way onto the shelves of metropolitan Sainsbury’s and Tesco. It’s hard to remember how parochial food was in the early/mid-nineties;  ‘There was no soy sauce in the cupboard, no mirin, no sake, ginger, coriander, galangal or lemongrass’, Torode told me, remembering the early days with the Conran empire as head chef at Pont de la Tour. 

In Eighties London, eating tiny portions in Kensington Place would amass the cultural capital without altering the line of your Alaia skin tight dress. Kathryn Flett, editor of i-D magazine lived and breathed the paradox; ‘Fashionability and fine food make for an edgy, insecure, bitchy sort of a friendship, slippery and hard to define. If you're on a big night out wearing, for example, a brand new and fabulous pair of Georgina Goodman heels accessorised by a suitably expensive dress, you'll want to be seen, not seen to be stuffing your face.’

By the nineties, food was lifestyle, in the more affluent cities of the world at least. It was the cultural capital de jour, the evidence of travel and the mark of sophistication. For the executives at BBC and Channel 4, it was edgy, cool and compulsive, and the stuff of storytelling.

Next: The Manufacture of Delight, how TV taught us to salivate

From Taste and the TV Chef, Gilly Smith, 2020. Reproduced with permission from Intellect Books. You can buy the book here