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JANUARY — FEBRUARY 20 20

FOOD & DRINK

T H I R D WAV E S A N D W I C H E S / F O O D O N D R U G S / T H E O U T R A G E O U S I TA L I A N S TA K I N G L O N D O N B Y S T O R M / I N S E A R C H O F T H E O R I G I N A L H O T S AU C E B I S C U I T S / H E S T O N B LU M E N T H A L’ S L O N G J O U R N E Y H O M E / W I L L S E L F ’ S O D E T O B O U I L L A B A I S S E / A N D R E W O ’ H AG A N ’ S M A N - C AV E / K N I T W E A R / C AV I A R ’ S M U R K Y H I S T O R Y / TA S T Y M E N S W E A R / F I C T I O N B Y C H I G O Z I E O B I O M A / S K I G O G G L E S / S O M E R S E T / C H U N K Y S H O E S , C H U N K Y WAT C H E S / D I G E S T I F S

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CONTENTS

January – February 2020 Bulletin 031

Chicago artist Theaster Gates

043

Ann Demeulemeester’s ﬁne china

036

The all-electric Porsche Taycan

044

The Inis Meáin Knitting Company

039

A modern overhaul of men’s underwear

049

Heavy sounds from Sweden

040

Film director Reed Morano

050

Rocking rings by The Great Frog

Phil Dunlop | Danny Lowe

060

072

052

Highland Park’s Esquire Single Cask malt

066

Celebrating Le Bristol hotel in Paris

053

Courchevel: the height of luxury skiing

072

Sophie Cookson plays Christine Keeler

055

Paula Scher’s storied life in design

075

Minimalist lighting by John Pawson

059

Back to basics with Light Phone II

077

The Clash’s London Calling memorabilia

060

Statement watches meet hefty shoes

078

The Esquire Edit — all your style essentials

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January – February 2020 Journal 083

The Little Man-Cave on the Prairie by Andrew O’Hagan

088

A Cookie Full of Arsenic by Alex Bilmes

084

Near West by Charlie Teasdale

090

My Luddite Birthday by Andrew Ridker

086

The Gunslinger by Michael Holden

091

Full coverage of our annual cultural event

Townhouse

164

116

The new Italian takeover of London dining

146

Tom Parker Bowles is hot on the Tabasco trail

126

Matthew Fort tells the story of caviar

154

Decadent third wave sandwiches make the cut

130

Scoring ‘high cuisine’ in Amsterdam

160

Will Self eulogises authentic bouillabaisse

136

Front of house: new winter menswear

164

Heston Blumenthal hosts Alex Bilmes at home

Simon Emmett | Richard Dowker

Food

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January – February 2020 Fiction

178

Spiders in the House of Men by Chigozie Obioma

Market

187

Fountain pens, ski goggles, digestifs, scarves, loafers, biscuits and more

Backstage

202

A balancing act with Heston Blumenthal at his home in Provence

On the Cover A cut above: the third wave of sandwiches Photographed by Chris Brooks

From top: Ham, Egg ’N’ Chips, Max’s Sandwich Shop; Prawn S+Dwich, Sons + Daughters; Iberian Katsu Sando, Tōu

Jesse Laitinen

136

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MASTHEAD

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CONTRIBUTORS

CHIGOZIE OBIOMA

CHRIS BROOKS Brooks’ work is usually found in Esquire’s fashion pages. This month, he turns his lens to sandwiches. Not just any sandwiches and not just any lens: Brooks shot on a 10 x 8 large format ﬁeld camera, producing detailed images 64 times larger than the standard 35mm negative or digital SLR sensor. He is also a contributor to *Wallpaper, WSJ and W Magazine.

Twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, ﬁrst in 2015 for his debut novel, The Fisherman, and again in 2019 for its follow-up, An Orchestra of Minorities, Nigerian author Obioma is recognised as one of the most exciting writers of ﬁction currently working. For Esquire, he contributes a new short story “Spiders in the House of Men”, set in the country of his birth. Obioma has also written for The Guardian, and The New York Times, which has called him “the heir to Chinua Achebe”. He is assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

ANDREW RIDKER

For his ﬁrst Esquire piece, the Boston-born, Brooklyn-based writer explores the pressures and pitfalls of growing up in the digital age, speciﬁcally celebrating birthdays on Facebook. Ridker’s debut novel, The Altruists, was published last year and selected as an editors’ choice by The New York Times.

CHRIS FLOYD

ANDREW O’HAGAN

TIM LEWIS

Novelist, essayist, critic, reporter: O’Hagan’s is an essential voice in the culture. No wonder he craves a man-cave to withdraw to when it all gets a bit much. For Journal, the Esquire editor-at-large extols owning somewhere where a chap can spend time “devoid of responsibility, in the company of beer and Maltesers”. O’Hagan’s new novel, Mayﬂies, will be published in summer 2020.

A former deputy editor of Esquire, and currently a features writer at The Observer, Lewis has long been among the magazine’s most stylish and inventive writers. This month, he proﬁles the Big Mamma restaurateurs keeping hip Londoners in pizza and pasta. And he also praises the new breed of third wave sandwiches, three of which are featured across this month’s covers.

Renowned both for his celebrity portraiture and his reportage, Floyd is an Esquire contributing photographer whose work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. For this issue, he was reunited with an old travelling companion, Tom Parker Bowles, with whom he has made numerous gastronomic expeditions. This time, they fetched up in America’s swampy Deep South, in search of one infamously hot sauce.

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CONTRIBUTORS

SIMON EMMETT

WILL SELF

The photographer and film-maker is a veteran of Esquire celebrity profiles, having worked alongside editor-in-chief Alex Bilmes on countless stories, from Sir Michael Caine in London, to Tony Blair in Jerusalem and Cara Delevingne in LA. Our Food and Drink issue took the pair to Provence to seek out chef Heston Blumenthal. Apart from Bilmes locking Emmett’s cameras in the boot of a hire car, then losing the keys, everything went swimmingly. A contributor to Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and more, Emmett is finishing his documentary on rock band The Darkness.

Instantly recognisable on the page and the airwaves, Self is perhaps our most singular and distinctive novelist, journalist, broadcaster and critic. Following his epic trilogy of modernist novels, the Booker-shortlisted Umbrella, Shark and Phone, Self recently published a memoir of his drug-addiction days, Will. An Esquire editor-at-large and a regular ﬁxture in these pages, for this issue Self follows his nose to Marseille, in praise of a very particular ﬁsh stew.

TOM PARKER BOWLES

The longtime Esquire contributor writes on many topics but always comes back to food and travel. For this issue, he made a pilgrimage to Louisiana, home of the sauce that spiced up the world: Tabasco. He also ﬁtted in a side trip to New Orleans for gumbo, oysters and beignets. Parker Bowles is the restaurant critic for The Mail on Sunday and, most recently, author of Fortnum & Mason: Christmas & Other Winter Feasts.

MIRANDA COLLINGE Esquire’s features director has a relish for stories that entertain and, occasionally, bafﬂe. She experienced both these emotions on her trip to Amsterdam, reporting on chefs cooking with psychoactive substances — read about ‘high cuisine’ on page 130. Collinge is one of this magazine’s most enlivening voices and has been shortlisted for PPA Magazine Writer of the Year for her work.

YOSHIYUKI MATSUMURA Osaka-born, New York-based, photographer Matsumura travelled upstate to the home of director Reed Morano, who is about to release her new spy thriller, The Rhythm Section, starring Jude Law and Blake Lively. New to Esquire, he has also shot for Vogue Hommes Paris and M Le Magazine du Monde.

MATTHEW FORT

Former food and drink editor of The Guardian, Esquire contributor Fort is among Britain’s most illustrious and erudite commentators on food. A broadcaster (the BBC’s The Great British Menu) and writer (Financial Times, Country Living, The Daily Telegraph), Fort is the author of a number of books, including Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons: Travels in Sicily on a Vespa. This issue, he dives into the murky history of caviar, the most provocative of eggs.

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Food envy YOU BECOME INURED TO IT, after a time. The vicious emails, the tearful phone calls, the claim and counter-claim, the malevolence, the hissyfits, the recriminations, the threats of legal action… it all becomes routine. Negotiating the cover story of a glossy magazine is much like I imagine it must be to take part in an illegal, bare-knuckle boxing fight in a provincial car park, though less convivial — we, too, allow biting and gouging, but we don’t do mutual respect, and we certainly don’t tolerate sweat. And no consoling hugs afterwards in the pub. Like me, you may recently have seen the new Noah Baumbach film, Marriage Story. It’s a dramatisation of the director’s own painful divorce — and about 70 per cent as much fun as that makes it sound. After the screening I went to, people remarked on the excellence of the acting (true) and the raw honesty of the writing (I guess) and the sexual magnetism of the lead players (if you say so), and they praised in particular one scene, set in a greige Los Angeles hotel room, in which the protagonists abandon all pretence at civility and rage at each other like banshees. Gorgeous, talented, wealthy banshees, with interesting hair and famous noses, but banshees all the same. The scene culminates

Alex Bilmes EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

in Adam Driver punching a hole in a wall and telling Scarlett Johansson he wished she were dead, before collapsing at her feet, convulsive sobs racking his body. Pshhht! I thought. I’ve had far worse said to me by Hollywood publicists, quite a few of whom I hadn’t even slept with, let alone married. (That’s a joke: I’ve never slept with a Hollywood publicist. Although I certainly have collapsed at one’s feet in a greige Los Angeles hotel room, convulsive sobs racking my body.) As I say, like a combat medic or a children’s party planner, you soon become accustomed to the high drama: the blood and guts, the snotty tantrums, the screaming and stamping of feet, the hurling of insults and the explosions of ego. It’s essential, but also easy, to shrug it off and move on to the next one. Still, it was a rare pleasure, this issue, not to have to endure the usual hysteria. We photographed six possible subjects for our cover, narrowed that number down to three and then, because the editor’s indecision is ﬁnal, I failed to make a choice, so we’ve published a trio of covers. Hey! Why not avoid food envy and collect them all? Unless I missed something, not so much as a raised voice was heard during the making of those covers. No one made unreasonable demands. No one failed to keep a promise. No one tried to engineer the collapse of anyone else’s career. (By the way, this goes both ways: journalists are just as horrible to publicists as publicists are to journalists.) There is a simple reason for this cessation of violence. This is our Food and Drink issue. We ordered some food, took photos of it, and stuck them on our covers. Bliss! And, also, yum! Instead of Tom Hardy or Idris Elba or Daniel Craig or any of our regular men’s mag hunks: a sandwich. Or, rather, three sandwiches. Not just any sandwiches. These are “third wave sandwiches”, a new breed of smart-casual takeaway, as explained on page 154 by Tim Lewis, Esquire contributor extraordinaire. I hope you’ll agree that Chris Brooks’ handsome photos of the sandwiches capture them, in the time honoured magazine cover custom: as you’ve never seen them before! We could have used, as our cover, a photo of one of the subjects of Tim’s other feature in this issue, Gloria and Circolo Popolare — two almost obscenely opulent Italian restaurants, both opened in the past 12 months by the Parisian company Big Mamma, that have, against considerable odds, taken the London dining scene by storm. A pair of OTT Italians, run by Frenchmen, →

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in Britain, in 2019? It shouldn’t have worked but, on reflection, perhaps there is some strange poetic justice in this jarring clash of cultures becoming the toast of the town in this most idiotic of moments in our public life. Perhaps, as the nation suffers a nervous breakdown, people just want to party? Tim made it his mission to find out. We could equally have used a photograph from Avery Island, Louisiana, where Tom Parker Bowles and Chris Floyd — an established Esquire double-act — went in search of the very special sauce that has put a kick into millions of meals that would otherwise have been as bland and predictable as a glossy magazine with a film star on its cover. Or we could have used one of Simon Emmett’s photos of my own subject in this issue: Heston Blumenthal, who Simon and I visited at his new home in the south of France. Blumenthal, the most acclaimed British chef of his generation — of any generation — is a man with a singular worldview and a distinctive way of expressing it. He is a dream interviewee, because he can’t shut up. Like the Walrus and the Carpenter, Blumenthal and I talked of many things. An incomplete list of the topics covered just over the course of one memorable lunch would include kabbalism, parallel universes, photosynthesis, the joys of flatulence, the Taj Mahal, the significance of the number seven, why dogs yawn, a TV programme called Derek Tastes of Earwax, Karl Jung — and whether pigs have wings. “Did we cultivate wheat?” Blumenthal asked me, at one point. “Or did wheat cultivate us, to cultivate wheat?” I didn’t know the answer to that. (We cultivated wheat?) But I enjoyed our talks. They were sometimes baffling. But they were never boring. And these are just the offcuts: turn to page 164 for the full English. On the subject of food, and British food especially — a subject we did, after many hours, eventually manage to broach — Blumenthal reminded me that, even as recently as 2005, our national cuisine was a source of shame. Ruefully, he remembered how in that year the late Jacques Chirac, then the President of France, made disobliging remarks about our food at a G7 summit. “You can’t trust people who cook as badly as that,” sneered Chirac, charmer that he was. Warming to his theme, he added, to chortles from Gerhard Schröder and Vladimir Putin, “The only thing [the British] have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow.” Our cooking was a joke, our animal husbandry

EDITOR’S LETTER

a punchline. Blumenthal didn’t mention it for this reason — he was talking generally about foreign perceptions of British food — but 2005 also happens to be the year that his restaurant, The Fat Duck, was voted the Best Restaurant in the World, proving that even back then, Chirac was talking out of his chapeau. Thanks to Blumenthal, and others in his business, our food culture is now thriving, in a way that the stuckist French can only envy. We have restaurants to rival any in the world. We also have terriﬁc writing on food. Herewith: Matthew Fort on caviar; Will Self on bouillabaisse (French, admittedly); and Miranda Collinge, letting her

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freak flag fly over Amsterdam, on the use of psychoactive substances in the kitchen. Readers who are not interested in food — really? — are well catered for, too. We have a lovely piece by Andrew O’Hagan, on man’s need for a cave of his own (in his case one with Wi-Fi); new fiction by Chigozie Obioma; pieces on growing up, getting on, and marking the time, by Charlie Teasdale, Michael Holden and Andrew Ridker; plus previews of the latest in style, culture and design. And some chocolate biscuits. Which didn’t make the cover this time, but might do, one day. Depends whether their publicists play ball. ○

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PEOPLE TO WATCH, PLACES TO BE, PRODUCTS TO BUY

BULLETIN

Getting his skates on An artist in a hurry swaps Chicago’s South Side for Merseyside By Miranda Collinge Portrait by Jeremy Liebman

Theaster Gates photographed for Esquire in front of his work ‘Houseberg’ at Park Avenue Armory, New York, October 2019

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Bulletin

‘Artists are always busy making, just sometimes we don’t have a light shone on the work’

Close to midnight on an early October night in central London, at a pop-up social club hosted by Prada, the artist Theaster Gates performed some gospel hymns from his childhood. The club was dark, the racially and sartorially diverse crowd noisily drinking and yapping, but Gates, who is 46 and comes from Chicago, decided to change the mood. Up on a small stage and dressed in an olive-green boiler suit, with a simple piano accompaniment from his band, The Black Monks, he removed his glasses and began to sing. The crowd took a little cajoling — the drinks were free, after all — but eventually, an unusual serenity descended. It felt, if you tried not to be too English about it, a little spiritual. “It was my intent initially to just play an album and I would have done my job,” says Gates on the phone a week later, after he has flown from London to New York where he is currently artist-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory, a vast cultural space on the Upper East Side. “But I decided there would be real value in being even more intimate; that if I could pull it off, it might help other people be more intimate. You know what it’s like when you come to someone else’s town and there’s a lot of hype. I just decided to come and be as humble and present as I could. I feel like I left London with a bunch of new friends.” In Gates’ case, the hype is quite something, as are the friends: he can count Kanye West, Venus Williams and Barack Obama among his high-profile supporters (did I mention that nestled between The Black Monks on stage in London was Naomi Campbell?). Gates is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated artists in the world right now, with shows, as you read this, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Haus Der Kunst in Munich, with his first major UK exhibition opening at Tate Liverpool this month. On top of those, he’s preparing for a major display of new work at Gagosian Gallery in New York next spring. “I feel like the clip is especially fast at the moment,” he says. “I probably said yes to a lot of things two or three years ago and those things are coming home to roost, but artists are always busy making, just sometimes we don’t have a light shone on the work.” Come, come now. “It may be that I’m a little more busy than some,” he concedes. “But I think there’s a kind of urgency to make. There are all these different ideas in my little head.” A work by Theaster Gates might be a

Clockwise from top: ‘Malaga Department of Tourism’ from Amalgam (2019), Palais de Tokyo, Paris; a 1969 Hahn ﬁretruck from ‘My Labor is My Protest’ (2012), White Cube Bermondsey, London; a video installation included in the ‘Freedom of Assembly’ exhibition (2015), White Cube Bermondsey

→

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‘This exhibition is an attempt at unpacking the complexity of blackness, and how whiteness is inexplicability tied to blackness’ performance, or a ﬁlm, or a sculpture, or a song. It might also be a housing development, or a cinema or a library; in the South Side of Chicago where Gates lives (he’s a professor of visual arts at the University of Chicago), he has pulled off a remarkable transformation, taking over old buildings near his studio — including a former crack house — and transforming them into cultural hubs that celebrate and preserve black culture and its history. It breathed new life into his block, then his neighbourhood, then his city. “We brought some heat,” as Gates put it in his 2015 TED Talk (for which he received a standing ovation). Gates, who grew up on Chicago’s West Side with eight older sisters — his mother was a schoolteacher and his father a roofer — is in fact uniquely qualiﬁed for such a varied oeuvre. At the Iowa State University, he studied urban planning with a minor in sculpture (he focused on ceramics), though even he didn’t suspect that both would come in handy later. “I thought

I would be an urban planner,” he says. “Those were my ﬁrst legit art classes ever in my life.” Though he was always the “most artsy” member of his family, that kind of creativity was not a priority at home. “We were working-class people, so it was like, how you were going to eat was creative. We weren’t painting and drawing. I didn’t wake up and everybody’s singing. My family was a family of super-practical people that could creatively solve problems. I actually think that’s the part that I inherited from my parents. You work, and you do the best you can. And if I’m going to spend my time doing something, it should have meaning.” At Tate Liverpool, Gates will show a body of work called Amalgam, which focuses on a littleknown chapter in American history. In 1912, the last of the black, white and mixed-race residents of Malaga, a small island off the coast of Maine, were driven from their homes by the state, which had decided they were not living at an acceptable standard. The community was

disbanded, given minimal funds to resettle and in some instances institutionalised; their dead were disinterred and reburied on the mainland. The island has been uninhabited ever since. Gates came across the story by chance, while he was artist-in-residence at Colby College, a liberal arts college in Waterville, Maine. “I was going about my business in Maine, when friends of mine started saying, ‘Hey, let’s go get some fish and chips and some clam chowder. And by the way there’s this island where the rumour is it used to be an island of mixed-race people and the governor kicked them all off.’ So we got on a boat and we went, and that was the beginning. This exhibition is a kind of first attempt at unpacking the complexity of blackness, and how whiteness is inexplicability tied to blackness.” Choosing a Liverpool gallery to show Amalgam — the elements of which include bronze casts of African masks on a field of wooden plinths, a film made with choreographer Kyle Abraham, and an imagined headquarters for Malaga’s Department of Tourism — should have resonance given that the city was a major slave port into the early 19th century. “I think it’s different from other parts of the UK and other parts of Europe that were a little bit protected from the presence of blacks,” says Gates. “They just received the money that came as a result of slave labour. Liverpool has the complexity of race built within its contemporary DNA in a more palpable way.” When we speak the Tate Liverpool show is still several weeks away, which by Gates’ schedule is an age; two days after our interview he would launch his annual Black Artists Retreat at the Armory, a gathering for black visual artists to commune and share ideas, and his other reason for being in New York. There would be talks, screenings, conversations and, on the closing day, a roller disco (or, more specifically a “Chicago-style, James Brown-infused skating party”). “My roller skates just arrived from Chicago,” says Gates, with audible vim, “and the first thing on my agenda is to test the floor.” How’s his skating these days? Does he worry he could be a bit rusty? In the context of Gates’ expansive ambition, the prospect of getting up on roller-skates aged 46 is, apparently, no biggie. “Oh,” he says, lightly, “once it’s in you it never leaves you.” ○ Theaster Gates: Amalgam, 13 December – 3 May 2020, Tate Liverpool; tate.org.uk

Above: Gates at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, where he is currently artist-in-residence

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Electric shock The most important car of the year arrives at its end By Will Hersey

You might remember The Simpsons episode when Homer joins the Stonecutters, a secretive and influential masonic-like society whose club song boasts, “Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star? We do.” Guttenberg’s career has long since slid out of sight, and now with the launch of the Porsche Taycan (pronounced “tie-khan” to save your blushes), we can finally say the electric car has been held back no longer. Why now? It’s hardly the first electric car on the scene after all, but it makes a strong case for being the most significant. For a start, it’s the first all-electric production supercar from one of the industry’s true heavyweights. Yes, the Tesla Model S is already on the scene but Porsche, whose flagship model the 911 has been an unofficial ambassador of the combustion engine era for over 55 years, has unveiled a car that they hope will do a similar job in the new dawn. And pound for pound, it can stake a strong claim to being the most advanced car on the planet. Graceful, unflappable, astonishingly fast; as a technical feat of engineering, the execution and detail on show put this car into a new category. Perhaps most tellingly, it manages to feel both completely different to any Porsche that has come before it, yet still you know it’s a Porsche. For this reason, the decision to keep the styling and interior design pretty familiar looks a smart one. That most petroleum-based

word “Turbo” has even been retained to denote the fastest car in its range, electric or otherwise. We’re going to need our hands held into this coming epoch, and Porsche understands that. We can almost say that the Taycan is practical, too. Size-wise, it’s closer to a Panamera and as the first electric car with an 800v power system (most have 400v) it can charge an extra 62 miles in just five minutes, making it increasingly viable for long trips where its quiet poise and technical know-how should come into its own. And it’s worth pointing out that this is no limited-edition niche designed purely to grab some headlines — Porsche could make as many as 40,000 of these in its first year. The Taycan is certainly a big deal for Porsche. Even picking the name took a year-anda-half. It’s the first marker down on a €6bn (£5.18bn) investment into its electric future, after all. “My vision is that the Taycan will become the icon of this new era, almost like a synonym for a purely electric sports car,” says the company’s head of styling, Michael Mauer. “Just like what the 911 has achieved in its segment over the past decades.” Electric cars still have limitations and are certainly no panacea for our environmental woes, but in strictly technological terms the shift has arrived and the Taycan is its poster child. Don’t expect a Steve Guttenberg comeback anytime soon. ○

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Jockeying for position A new breed of pants brands is trying to overthrow the biggest names in smalls By Charlie Teasdale

Presented with a series of scantily clad female models at a lingerie shoot, Swedish photographer Andreas Palm had an idea: “I wanted to feel sexy in underwear too.” Three years later, his idea has become a brand: CDLP, which Palm founded with friend Christian Larson, sells premium men’s underwear designed to offer the same choice, ritual and enjoyment as women get from theirs. “Something that would add an emotion when you put it on in the morning,” Palm says. Cut from Lyocell — a cellulose ﬁbre made from wood pulp that’s more breathable than cotton and naturally antibacterial and biodegradable — CDLP pants are pitched at modern men who expect more from their underwear’s maker. “What we’ve been seeing are athletic football

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Left: men’s underwear by CDLP and Les Girls Les Boys. Above: using sustainable Lyocell, CDLP aims to ‘disrupt’ its industry with a ‘new way to portray men in underwear’

players in black and white photos flashing their abs, and it’s a very dated view on masculinity,” says Palm of typical men’s underwear campaigns. “I’m surprised that it’s taken up until now for people to respond. When we started CDLP, we needed to make a great product, but once we had done that we felt like we wanted to disrupt, or find a new way to portray men in underwear.” CDLP’s early adopters were “in the fashion scene”, but their customer base is now much broader. One City high-flyer ordered 48 pairs in a single transaction. CDLP is not alone, however. Fellow Scandinavian brand Organic Basics has put sustainability and ethical production at its core. The label designs underwear and a wider apparel collection to offer simplicity, functionality and longevity.

It offers full transparency on its production line, revealing the difference between the carbon and waste created in making its garments, compared to that of traditional practices. Closer to home, Les Girls Les Boys takes a more culturally progressive angle. The “modern intimates” brand by Agent Provocateur co-founder Serena Rees is decidedly ﬂuid in its outlook and with its “bed to street” concept, is perhaps pitched at a Gen Z audience. But it makes excellent boxers in woven cotton, and some desirable briefs in lightweight leopard-print jersey. As Palm says, the trick is getting guys to realise that pants are clothes too. “It’s hard to put words on it,” he offers, “but it’s a ritual. You put our underwear on in the morning and you feel a bit better.” ○

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Director-producer Reed Morano photographed for Esquire at home in South Salem, New York, August 2019

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Finding her rhythm Reed Morano reinvents the British spy thriller By Paul Wilson Portrait by Yoshiyuki Matsumura

A film’s “title drop”, when a character speaks the name of the movie as part of the dialogue, usually has audience members grinning (or groaning) in recognition. The Rhythm Section, however, has one that gets you moving to the music of your insides. Jude Law is on title-dropping duty, as his former MI6 operative Boyd — that’s Boyd, not Bond — explains to would-be assassin Stephanie Patrick, played by Blake Lively, that to fire her gun accurately she must first control her body’s rhythm section, to think of the heart as the drums and breathing as the bass. Esquire’s man, rapt in row B of Paramount Pictures’ London screening room, could not help but retune his internal percussion on Law’s instruction, and achieved an unexpected moment of zen, along with Lively on screen. Several other sequences in the film turbo-charge your cardiovascular system in more traditional action-movie ways: a punishing knife fight in the kitchen of a Scottish cottage, seemingly done in one take; another “oner”, a car chase on the streets of Tangier, with a genuine sense of peril; and the frantic tackling of armed terrorists on a packed tourist bus in Marseille. As it trots the globe, avoiding spy-saga cliché and introducing a very modern hero, The Rhythm Section hits all the right notes. Lively is outstanding in the lead and her British accent is flawless. The film’s co-producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson have performed a similar role together on the most recent nine Bond movies, including the forthcoming No Time to Die. So, since the Bond-makers now have a female cinematic secret agent, who needs a woman as 007? “Of course, it was a very cool experience for me to make my first action film with those two,” says Reed Morano, director of The Rhythm Section, “but we weren’t making a Bond film. The stunt people had worked on Bond movies and Star Wars and [Broccoli and Wilson] bring other people in the crew who’ve worked with them before. They really supported me in doing my thing, which was to bring something unorthodox to the table as we created something from scratch. I was able to be experimental and do action in ways people weren’t accustomed to.”

Action-movie lovers have a very specific set of buttons that need to be pushed, yet the best action movies — from Die Hard to Mad Max: Fury Road, via Speed, The Matrix, Casino Royale, The Bourne Ultimatum and John Wick — expand the genre’s playbook. Morano’s USP is action with a realness and rawness that gives its hero a palpable sense of potential failure. Even when 007 and the rest are really up against it, you know they’re going shake off that last punch and rally to save the day. In The Rhythm Section, right until the final act of kick-assery, it’s never clear how Stephanie Patrick will complete her missions, or even if she will. “That is exactly why I did the project,” says Morano. “I wanted to reflect a character who is

‘I love movies. I walk out of a movie theatre having seen something I love and feel I am the main character’ imperfect and ﬂawed and couldn’t automatically do all these insane skills. The cool opportunity was to see a woman trying, almost pretending, to be an assassin. I love movies and want to see things I don’t see all the time.” When directing, Morano likes natural light as much as possible, and doesn’t go for the super-fast edits now a hallmark of modern movie mayhem. This makes her action sequences beautiful but not overblown. It’s a visual style she developed as a cinematographer, on indie movies and HBO shows, and in the “Sandcastles” segment of Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and has perfected in episodes of premium TV and feature ﬁlms. Before The Rhythm Section, she directed the familybreakdown drama Meadowland (2015) and the post-apocalyptic I Think We’re Alone Now (2018),

in which Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning play the last two people alive. A 42-year-old native of Omaha, Nebraska, now based in New York, Morano has made movies since she was eight, when her stepfather gave her a video camera. When she ran out of things to film, she wrote plays and commercials and cast her siblings. Film was a family passion and she remembers being taken to the cinema aged three, with her babe-in-arms brother, by her thensingle-mother, when a babysitter wasn’t an option. “As a kid, I would get obsessed with people my age, or people portraying my age, on film,” she says. “ET, I wanted to be Eliot. With The Goonies it was Mikey and all I wanted was to go on an epic adventure looking for buried treasure. Even now, I walk out of a movie theatre having seen something I love and feel I am the main character. I watched Mad Max: Fury Road at Camerimage [film festival] because I was on the jury. My leg was in a cast, I was on crutches and even like that, I came out feeling like Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. But I guess that’s my life’s love of movies.” In 2017, Morano became the first woman in 22 years to win the Emmy for “Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series” thanks to her work on the pilot of The Handmaid’s Tale. The success of that show has four major elements: Margaret Atwood’s story, Elisabeth Moss’s lead performance, perfect timeliness, and its aesthetic. That stark, modernist-yet-human look and feel was set by Morano, who also directed the second and third episodes of season one. “I’m glad I got the opportunity to do that, it feels it was the right thing, for me and them, and it gave the show a distinct feeling. The only regret I have is it would have been nice to stay on the show as a producer to continue to be a helpful person. To help raise your baby. So that’s what I’ll be doing from now on.” Next up, she will be producing and directing some episodes of The Power, an adaptation for TV of Naomi Alderman’s brilliant sci-fi novel in which women become the dominant gender. Having risen to the top of directing TV and film, Morano can empathise with that. ○ The Rhythm Section is out on 31 January

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In Ann Demeulemeester’s Dé porcelain collection for Serax, each piece has a unique, hand-painted ﬁnish

China in her hands Ann Demeulemeester brings her distinctive style to the table

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By Miranda Collinge

It’s impossible not to look for aesthetic continuity between Ann Demeulemeester’s iconic men’s and women’s clothing design — with its tendency towards the willowy, the gothic and the monochromatic — and the new range of ceramics she has produced for Belgian homewares company Serax, her ﬁrst major creative endeavour since leaving her eponymous label six years ago. And sure enough, it’s there: the stark blacks and intense off-whites (also, some reds), the delicate yet decisive detailing, the uncanny ability to take a familiar object — say, a 14cm side plate — and turn it into a portal for contemplation of the unknowability of the universe (you see it too, right?!). They may be plates and cups, not coats and boots, but their progenitor is unmistakable. “Whether you’re working on a piece of tableware or a piece of clothing, the mental process is very similar, only the materials and techniques you’re working with are different,” Demeulemeester tells Esquire, not unfairly. As one of the ground-breaking Belgian fashion designers known as the Antwerp Six (alongside names including Dries Van Noten and Walter

Van Beirendonck), Demeulemeester has always had a reputation for singular vision: during the 28 years she ran her label she is reputed to have rebuffed the advances of a number of other fashion houses. When she left it in 2013, she did so on her own terms, announcing her departure with a handwritten letter: “I feel it’s time to separate our paths”. That path that led her to hole herself up in the country house outside Antwerp she shares with her photographer husband Patrick Robyn, where she spent ﬁve years learning the techniques that would eventually lead to the Dé collection with its dégradé painting style, and the other ranges she has designed for Serax (glassware, cutlery and a second tableware collection, all available now; a lighting range will launch in January 2020). When Dé went into production, she gave WhatsApp tutorials to the porcelain painters in China who were tasked with replicating her brushwork. “The pleasure,” she says, is of “making something that would never have existed without you.” In her case, perhaps more than most, she means it absolutely. ○

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Population: 160 On a tiny Irish island, a knitwear company isÂ making clothes with global appeal Words and photographs by Finlay Renwick

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Above and opposite: originally from Dublin, Tarlach de Blácam founded Inis Meáin Knitting Company after moving to the remote Aran Island in 1973

Shuddering against the impact of the North Atlantic Ocean, the boat rocks wildly from side to side, as if in the clutches of a giant, malevolent toddler at bath time. It’s too much for one passenger, who seeks solace in a sick bag. A pensioner in a leather jacket and scuffed loafers snoozes gently beside him, counting king crab in his sleep. “A bit choppy out there,” says the ferry’s captain, appearing unfazed as towering columns of roiling surf erupt from every angle. Eventually, a beacon appears through the October evening gloom. Three dim spotlights and the tiny harbour of Inis Meáin. Thirty miles off the west coast of Ireland, at the mouth of Galway Bay, Inis Meáin (population: 160) is the middle and least populous of the three Aran Islands, joining Inis Mór and Inis Oírr as lonely, limestone outcrops huddled together against the great stormy caprices of the Atlantic. Sail due west for some 2,000 miles and the next land is the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. It is certainly an unlikely spot for a luxury fashion brand. The Inis Meáin Knitting Company, founded in 1976, is based in a handsome, whitewashed building with a corrugated steel roof near the island’s centre, just down the hill from the church and the primary school with its roll of 20 students. A solitary sheep stands in a windswept ﬁeld opposite the factory, staring impassively off into nothing in between mouthfuls of grass tinged the colour of rust. White and pastel houses pockmark the otherworldly landscape in the distance.

“It might sound like an old-fashioned company,” says Tarlach de Blácam as he shows me around the production floor, a whirl of activity, spools of colourful fabric and cardboard boxes full of orders ready to be shipped off on the Monday morning boat to the mainland. “But we’re actually very modern.” He gestures proudly towards a high-tech Japanese knitting machine that is able to weave 12-gauge fabric. “That’s really opened things up for us,” he says. “It means we can create extra fine and soft garments.” A row of six local women are busy hand-finishing jumpers in various shades of navy, burgundy, ecru and sage, silent in their mutual concentration. “It’s a very difficult skill. Some of these ladies have been with the company since we founded it.” The factory currently employs 21 staff and is by far the island’s biggest employer. Its lookbook is modelled by a Galway fisherman fortunately blessed with a set of high cheekbones. Spry, refined and smartly dressed in a navy Donegal sweater, gingham shirt, indigo denim and tortoiseshell frames, de Blácam is a tall, 72-year-old man. A Dubliner by birth, he moved to the island in 1973 with his wife, Áine Ní Chonghaile, a native of Inis Meáin who was teaching in the Irish capital when they first met. “We came here intending to write,” says de Blácam, who studied Celtic languages at Trinity College, “and ended up setting up the knitwear industry! Back then there was nothing on the island whatsoever. No electricity or running water, no proper pier for the ferry. The place

was disintegrating. A lot of people were leaving for good. We wanted to do something to create employment. It made sense to focus on a trade that honoured the island’s heritage.” De Blácam and Ní Chonghaile felt there could be a wider demand for traditionally-crafted Aran knitwear: the hard-wearing, heavy yarn sweaters that had been knitted by the women of the island for millennia, updated with more luxury-centred fabrics. “I thought if we targeted high-end stores in Europe and Japan we might be onto something,” de Blácam says. Today, its jumpers, cardigans and unstructured jackets — which range in price from around £200 to £400 — as well as accessories, are stocked by Anderson & Sheppard, Matches Fashion, Macy’s in New York and boutiques and department stores in Italy, Germany, Japan and China. “Inis Meáin is one of those brands which is an absolute expert in its field,” says Damien Paul, head of menswear at Matches Fashion. “It creates understated, best-in-class knitwear in muted colours and tones that can work for any man. It’s the sort of product you end up having for years and is far removed from seasonal trends. It’s definitely a brand that chimes with the emerging slower approach to fashion our customers appreciate.” “Nowadays, I have to hold back on sales. It’s been a hard slog to get to this place,” says de Blácam, who remembers the “awful” winter of 2009 when the world economy tanked. Suddenly, artisanal Irish knitwear didn’t factor into most people’s budgets. “Now we’re flavour of →

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the month! I can’t afford to overbook and that’s the danger. It seems like young guys care more about where their clothes come from nowadays and want to get kitted out, which is great for us.” Barely three by four miles in diameter, Inis Meáin means, fairly straightforwardly, “Middle Island” in Gaelic, the first language of its residents. In the evenings during my guest-house stay, I sit alone in a room painted Rothko red, eating homemade soup and soda bread while a radio plays traditional music — jolly, fiddle-heavy ditties interspersed with music-less songs, strange and salty calls to prayer recited with a quivering beauty. Across a moonless sky, the weak amber lights of the harbour are the only break in the darkness. The renowned Irish language playwright, poet and folklorist John Millington Synge, who spent summers on the island, studying its rich heritage, wrote in his 1907 book The Aran Islands: “This is the last outpost of ancient Europe: I am privileged to see it before it disappears forever.” The Aran Islands are home to around 200 bird species, including puffins, herons, ringed plovers, cuckoos, stonechats, skylarks and linnets, I’m trailed by a suspicious crow as I trek first to the remains of a 4,000-year-old Celtic fortress

and then on to the far northwestern corner of the island on de Blácam’s recommendation, a place where Synge would often meditate facing out to the horizon. In May, wild flowers erupt here in a sea of colour, owing to the relatively temperate climate and fertile soil. “I’m always looking at the colours and shapes of the local fauna and flora for our collections,” de Blácam says. At this time of year, with the flowers long since decayed, wild thistles poke up from between moss-covered rocks and thickets of blackberries line the roads. Traditional drystone walls snake around the land creating a primordial maze. As you reach the cliff edge, Inis Mór comes into view, obscured through a prism of sea spray. With 800 residents, it is jokingly referred to as “The Metropolis” by locals on the smaller island. “A lot of people might find it lonely here,” de Blácam says over a lunch of ham with potato salad and tomatoes grown in his eldest son Rory’s weather-proof polytunnel, “but I wasn’t made for cities.” He still swims in the sea, even as winter approaches, off the black pebble beach, and has a boat for fishing: cod, plaice, mackerel in summer and the occasional monkfish. “I used to scuba dive, but I’m TFO now… Too Fucking Old!” “I’ll be sad when some of the old folk go off,”

he adds, nursing a cup of tea at the kitchen table of the family home, a book-lined, converted schoolhouse in the same white as the factory with a neatly-painted blue door. “I admire the independence and the way of life. Because this place was so isolated, they had to be able to adapt. You couldn’t rely on anyone else.” Before the pier was built, de Blácam would have to row out to meet the ferry, moored off the island, in a traditional Irish wood-framed boat called a currach. “That was the only option if I wanted to get my orders shipped!” Lunch over, he gathers himself to head back to the factory as America wakes up and comes online, to check for new knitwear orders. A large kitchen window faces out towards the Atlantic, as do many on Inis Meáin. During the winter, Tarlach and Áine might sit and watch a storm roll in, the salt air rattling against the glass. “We’ve seen it all!” she says as empty plates are cleared. “The storms, the wind and rain. Waves like you wouldn’t believe.” Today, there’ll be no such spectacle. A brief biblical shower has given way to a hazy afternoon, the soft light turning the rusty grass golden, the fury of the Atlantic reduced to a gentle lapping against the island’s ancient shores. ○

‘We’re flavour of the month! Young guys care more about where their clothes come from nowadays and want to get kitted out, which is great for us’

Above: Inis Meáin Knitting Company has export markets all over the world, its clothing bearing the symbol of an upturned currach — a traditional Irish small boat

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Heavy metal A Swedish blacksmith is forging precision hi-fi speakers from recycled steel By Johnny Davis Photograph by Drew Burns

In 2018, the audio company Transparent Sound launched a speaker unlike any other. While everyone else did big, black boxes, they did the opposite. Constructed using a single aluminium “uniframe” and tempered glass panels, the literally-named Small Transparent Speaker was an interior design object as much as a bit of hi-ﬁ. The Conran Shop sold it. It looked great on a Vitra bookcase, surrounded by succulents in a mid-century modern ﬂat. Now, Transparent Sound has done a 180. Its Steel Speaker is a beast

of a big, black box, handcrafted by a blacksmith called Jonas Majors in his workshop on the island of Mörkö, south of Stockholm, and weighs in at 20kg. Welded and blackened, it looks rough but sounds polished. “We wanted to ask, ‘What is a speaker?’” says cofounder Martin Willers. “They don’t have to look like UFOs, with blinking blue lights. People said they couldn’t be made from glass: we proved them wrong. Now we have made a piece of sculpture.” ○ £2,250; transparentspeaker.com

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Every ring designed by The Great Frog starts off as a block of wax in the hands of Reino Lehtonen-Riley. It might end up as a skull or an eerily lifelike eyeball framed in nine-carat gold, made by the same woman who creates prosthetics for the London Eye Hospital, or a simple silver wedding band. First the wax, followed by a master ring, a metal cast and then the final product, which will be worked into shape by one of the 40-odd jewellers inside The Great Frog’s windowless, subterranean Shoreditch workshop, beneath the coffee shops and construction sites of East London. With his stubble and slicked-back hair, Lehtonen-Riley, 40, is the archetypal rock ’n’ roll jeweller. “I’m also the owner, designer, cleaner, HR and shop-fitter,” he says. On the morning I visit him, he’s wearing a leather jacket, selvedge denim jeans, motorcycle boots, a fistful of rings and nursing a hangover: “One too many last night, sorry.” He reposes on a leather armchair inside his dimly-lit shop, an American gas-guzzler — a 1987 Buick Grand National — looming behind him, glistening black and chrome. Cabinets that once belonged to Damien Hirst span the wall, stacked full of rings, bracelets and necklaces of Lehtonen-Riley’s creation. This is The Great Frog’s flagship UK store; there are also TGF outposts in London’s Soho, New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans, with one in Tokyo soon to come. The impeccably trendy fashion supermarket Dover Street Market is the brand’s sole third-party stockist. The Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Ringo Starr, Lemmy, Johnny Depp, Slash, Kate Moss, David Beckham, Lenny Kravitz, Debbie Harry, Michael

Jordan and Keira Knightley are just a selection of the famous whose fingers, wrists and necks have been adorned by jewellery from The Great Frog. But success was a long time coming. “I think the first time I felt like we were becoming successful was when the bailiffs stopped turning up at the door,” Lehtonen-Riley grimaces. “From the outside we looked successful. Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell were wearing our pieces on the covers of magazines, but it never really worked. We were always struggling, never made any money.” The Great Frog was founded in 1972 by Lehtonen-Riley’s parents, who turned its original tiny, black-painted cubbyhole off London’s Carnaby Street into a place of countercultural pilgrimage. A self-taught jeweller, LehtonenRiley’s father, Paterson Riley, started out importing cheap rings from Morocco, before realising that, as first rock, heavy metal and then punk took hold in Britain, there was a new taste for outlandish but high-quality pieces he could make in his own improvised Soho workshop. “People had never seen it before,” says Lehtonen-Riley. “A black shop, full of skulls and crazy rings. We used to have Christians protesting outside, holding Bibles because they thought there was devil worship going on!” For years, Lehtonen-Riley resisted the pull of his parents’ business, as well as their lifestyle. After a childhood spent being ferried to school on the back of a Hell’s Angels-style hog, he rebelled by becoming a preppy. “I would be there in my pale blue polo shirt and neat hair, while my dad looked like Ozzy Osbourne.” He studied industrial engineering. “I was adamant, desperate not to get involved in the business.”

In 2002, while he was living in Australia, he received a call from his dad. The family business was folding. “He said, ‘We owe the bank all this money, they’re going to close it. Can you come home and help me dissolve the company?’” “I came back to England and had a few drinks with my dad. By then I’d realised that a future in industrial engineering wasn’t for me. I went to the bank and borrowed £80,000, which is a lot of fucking money! Assuming all the debt in my name. I just felt like we could make it work.” He set about remaking the business and expanding its clientele. “It used to be you could pick out The Great Frog guys,” he says. “Huge, lumbering bikers and rockers with tattoos, standing out like sore thumbs on Carnaby Street. Now our clientele is 60 per cent women.” Today, The Great Frog is in rude health, favoured by current celebrities including Jay Z and Gigi Hadid, who can sell out an entire production run of rings with a single Instagram post. Lehtonen-Riley has also created custom pieces for Kanye West and Harry Styles. There’s a Vans trainer collaboration in the works and a limited run of Harley Davidson motorcycles, ﬁnished with his own hand-engraving, which he is currently working on. Lehtonen-Riley is now the sole owner. “We don’t have any investors or loans, it’s entirely selffunded and we’re still all handmade. I’d probably be a very wealthy man if I was to move our production to somewhere like China, but that’s not what it’s about for me. I’ve got everything I need here.” And not a bailiff in sight. ○ The Great Frog, 1–4 Holywell Lane, London EC2A and 2 Newburgh Street, London W1F

Lord of the rings

By Finlay Renwick

Right: Reino Lehtonen-Riley photographed for Esquire at The Great Frog East, London, October 2019 Opposite: thanks to celebrity clients like Slash and Jay-Z among others, the jeweller has gained prominence, recently adding a Shoreditch workshop where a black 1987 Buick Grand National is part of the decor

Finlay Renwick | Getty | Matt McGinle

How The Great Frog went from Seventies rock ’n’ roll casualty to the modern style icon’s power jeweller

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Whisky galore Introducing our new house single malt Photograph by David Lineton

In a genuine ﬁrst for Esquire, we’ve collaborated with Highland Park to create a unique limited-edition whisky — the Highland Park Esquire Single Cask (ABV 60.3 per cent), launched at this year’s Townhouse event. Carefully chosen by master whisky maker Gordon Motion for its special combination of strength and subtlety, the aromas are easy to detect and arrive in waves — marzipan, nut, vanilla. Trademark Highland Park notes of heather honey with a touch of peatiness, born of the

distillery’s Orkney location, are also very much in evidence. On tasting it for the ﬁrst time, Martin Markvardsen, Highland Park’s global brand ambassador, immediately put it in his top ﬁve of all the single casks he’s ever tasted. And considering that number runs to a couple of hundred, it tells its own story. Experience it for yourself by ordering at The Whisky Shop, £200/70cl; whiskyshop.com/highland-park-esquire

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Clockwise from top left: the hotel’s Le 1947 restaurant, holder of three Michelin stars; the Cheval Blanc is sited 1,850m up in the French Alps; outdoor views from the hot tub in the spa’s sauna

High style A hotel in Courchevel takes luxury skiing to a new level By Charlie Teasdale

The boot room at the Cheval Blanc hotel in Courchevel is a thing of wonder. An airlock to the snowy stratosphere, it is plush, warm and nestled between the fragrant spa and a forgivingly-sloped stretch of treelined piste. There are plump sofas, high-pile rugs and hidden cabinets meticulously laden with gleaming ski kit and mini bottles of mineral water. Not only do the staff heat boots ready for your arrival in the morning, they wrench them off and swap them for ﬂuffy slippers when it’s time for a Panaché Pêche and three nips of something bracing at the end of the day. Experience is le nom du jeu at Cheval Blanc. There is Le 1947 restaurant, with three Michelin stars and just 25 seats, named after the Cheval Blanc winery’s near-mythical Saint-Emilion vintage. Tables are placed

beneath large acoustic-enhancing discs that focus the sound of conversation below, and diners are regularly escorted into the kitchen for a snoop around while gourmet dinners are being prepared. Beyond food, nimble-fingered staff at the aforementioned spa expertly quash the strains of a day on the slopes with hot stones and fragrant Guerlain oils. Guests are invited to flit scantily-clad between the heat of a Russian banya and the chill of the snow, which the hotel assures does wonders for restoring ski-tired limbs. Empty, perfectly groomed pistes are normally the reserve of the pisteurs themselves and the occasional (totally rad) marmot, but from this coming season, guests at Courchevel will get to the top of the mountain before everyone else. The hotel’s new First Tracks programme, on the corrugated idyll of the Trois Vallées — the largest ski fields in the world — will be private for a good 45 minutes or so before any other, less shrewdly stationed skiers have even shuffled from their chalet. The thrill of being alone on a just-bashed, sun-soaked, black run overlooking the resort is as pure, transcendent and exhilarating as thrills come. The hotel has also enlisted the help of Manu Gaidet, a former Freeride World Champion skier, as a guide for visitors who want to experience the best off-piste the mountain has to offer. Few people know the area better than the stoic, square-jawed Courchevellian, and he has that canny alpine ability to sense the depth of snow and the angle of an incline from a distance of 100m. Handy for those guests who are perhaps better suited to a cocktail lounge than a couloir. ○ Cheval Blanc Courchevel is open 13 December until 5 April 2020; prices start from £1,600 per night (half board included); Le Jardin Alpin, 73120 Courchevel 1850, France; +33 4 79 00 50 50; chevalblanc.com

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Design of the times A celebrated graphic designer looks back at a lifetime of groundbreaking work, from brands to bands to burgers By Johnny Davis

Scher’s handiwork, clockwise from top: Bob James’s H (1980) album cover; the Museum of Modern Art logo (2009); India screenprint (2010); the brand identity for Shake Shack (2003); Wilbert Longmire’s Sunny Side Up (1978) album cover

There’s a running joke among the partners at Pentagram, the celebrated design agency, sparked by a recent AGM, where they all piled into a bus. “We’re being driven up a mountain and it’s very bendy,” recalls Angus Hyland, when we meet at its London HQ. “When we get to the top someone said, ‘I imagined the headlines: “Fatal Road Crash: Paula Scher, and others…”’” Pentagram designs architecture and interiors, books, branding and corporate “identities”, films, products, posters and websites and has five international offices, including London and New York. It is the world’s largest independent design consultancy and maybe unique. By its own admission it was established by “three hippies” and remains owned and run by 21 partners. They have equal say. There is no CEO, CFO or COO. Profits are shared equally. They have designed London taxis, Paracetamol packaging for Boots, The Guardian and logos for Claridge’s and The Savoy. It turns 50 in 2022. Yet while all partners are equal, some partners are more equal than others. Paula Scher became its first female partner in 1991 and has been described as “the most influential woman graphic designer on the planet”. At 71, she is about to complete what is arguably her most successful year, at least in

terms of recognition. In June, she was honoured as a fellow by the Society of Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD). In October, she received the Pratt Institute Legends Award, which celebrates “individuals… whose works have helped shape the cultural landscape”. In November, she headlined Design Manchester. She also had a show in Netflix’s series, Abstract: The Art of Design. “She’s the first lady of design,” Hyland says. “She’s a force of nature with an amazing, diverse portfolio. And she keeps doing amazing work.” Scher brushes off the attention. “I seem to be getting a lot of it,” she says, down the line from New York. “Maybe people think I’m going to die soon.” There’s probably more to it than that. If you’ve used Microsoft Windows, eaten at Shake Shack or paid money into Citibank, you have interacted with Scher’s work. But it is in New York where she has had the greatest impact. It’s no exaggeration to say she has changed the landscape of that city. She rebranded the Museum of Modern Art as MoMA. She redid the signage for all the city’s parks, replacing a dog’s dinner of instructional signs (“No bare feet”, “No glass bottles”, “No explosives, firearms or weapons”, “No airplane, hot air balloon, parachute, hang gilder or other aerial craft”, and, →

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‘I’m always bothered by bad design. I was in a hotel last night and thought, “Why is the shower curtain like this?”’

Above and below: Paula Scher, whose music posters include Best of Jazz (1979) for a compilation of jazz albums, a US promotion for Elvis Costello’s Trust (1981), and a campaign for The Public Theater’s 1995–’96 season

V&A and MoMA. Later, she created Michael Jackson’s Bad cover. “I was 26 years old. I made 150 covers a year,” she says. “I was just this little brat running around doing things. I didn’t even know I had a good job.” Today, one of her talents is creating unifying templates: MoMA is a good example. It’s hefty black logo, in the Franklin Gothic font, is so impactful you can display anything behind it: abstract expressionist paintings, black and white photography or a disparate group show; there is cohesion. “Pentagram is a great place to work,” says Scher, who was born in Virginia, and whose father worked for the US Geographical Society (handpainted maps, artworks really, are one of her sidelines). “If you share proﬁt, it’s excellent because not everybody is likely to have a bad year. And you don’t want to be doing bad work in this group. Because the group is terriﬁcally talented. You feel terrible if you’re making terrible work.” Still, switching off is a problem. “I’m bothered by bad design. I was in a hotel last night and thought, ‘Why is the shower curtain like this?’ Me walking around complaining about the crappy [park] signs was real. Why do I do this? Given the political nightmares in my country, I really shouldn’t care about the typeface on a billboard. But, you know,” she says, “it’s my job to notice.” ○

Portrait by John Madere

indeed, “No dogs”) with a slotting system of uniﬁed, celadon-coloured plaques that are neatly ordered and can be read without feeling like you’re being told off. She is also in no small way responsible for The High Line, the 1.45-mile elevated rail trail on Manhattan’s West Side that is now one of the city’s most visited attractions. Before they shopped around for funding, its two backers, operating as Friends of the High Line, begged a logo from Scher. She came up with an “H” with double horizontal lines that recalled train tracks, then politely persuaded them that their counter-suggestion (an “F” for “Friends”) kind of missed the point. “We didn’t have any money to build it, we didn’t know what it should be,” Robert Hammond, one of the pair, says. “One of Mayor Giuliani’s henchmen, at a public hearing, said, ‘All this project is, is two guys... and a logo’. But you can do a lot with ‘two guys… and a logo’. It was critical.” Scher has produced countless posters for theatre productions all over the city, while her powerful Shakespeare in the Park campaigns have become a seasonal tradition. “It’s very gratifying, I love working in New York,” she says. “Design lives, and it lives in all kinds of different forms.” Always the same but always different, if Scher has a go-to style it is to illustrate with type — she’s fond of 45° lettering and De Stijl-inspired grids, though like any designer, she resists pigeonholing. “I use typography to convey spirit. Something silly, something serious, something happy, something stupid. Any point can be made with a word; or a letter form.” She dislikes the idea that design should be clean (art speak for minimal). “When I was young I rebelled against the International Style, particularly the font Helvetica, because everybody uses it. They’re still using it now! If everybody is using it, how can it be distinctive?” Before Pentagram, Scher was East Coast art director at CBS Records. Her work for jazz star Bob James’s H, a giant hotdog complete with zippy mustard squiggle, and Sunny Side Up for rocker Wilbert Longmire, a fried egg, remain pop art archetypes. They’re in the permanent collections at the

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MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE Discover the complex flavours of the world’s finest bourbon: Woodford Reserve the number one choice for one of the world’s most famous cocktails? “In an Old Fashioned, the ingredients are few, so the bourbon has to shine,” explains brand ambassador Tom Vernon. “The sugar, bitters and orange really help accentuate the flavours of Woodford Reserve, bringing everything together for a balanced cocktail.” You might think that mastering one awardwinning bourbon would be enough, but the Woodford Reserve team continue to evolve and innovate. The distillery has created a whole range of whiskeys, including a bold rye with hints of pepper and tobacco, a mature double-oak blend, which has a sweet oak character, and a nutty malt that has been aged in new charred-oak barrels. So next time you’re looking for an enticing whiskey to keep you company in your armchair, forget the Highlands and take a trek out into the Bluegrass State. Y’all hear us? ○ Discover the flavours of Woodford Reserve® yourself at woodfordreserve.com

“It boasts more than 200 ﬂavour notes, from bold grain to sweet aromatics”

Left: Woodford Reserve Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey – the perfect sweet-and-spice blend for mixing up an Old Fashioned (above)

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Smart alternative The Light Phone II aims to disconnect your tech addiction By Johnny Davis Photograph by Adam Goodison

Two years ago, Kaiwei Tang and his business partner raised £310,000 to launch Light Phone, a credit card-sized device that only did three things (calls, texts, alarm) and offered respite from our connected world. For Light Phone II it was £2.75m. “The timing resonates more,” Tang says. “Google, Samsung and Apple have all introduced wellness apps, trying to react to this social media backlash. You sit in a restaurant, or a subway, or in your living room not talking, and it’s crazy how we’re all staring down. This problem is only going to get worse.” Light Phone II does more than its predecessor. It keeps the same minimalist aesthetic but adds Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. You can

also add functionality like a calculator or music player. There’s an apparent contradiction: more things on something whose USP was bare-bones usefulness. Not so, says Tang. While you may now add a playlist, you can’t connect to Spotify. “It’s not about search.” Which begs the question, will there be a Light Phone III? “We never thought there’d be a Light Phone II. The idea is to redesign tech so it’s not driven by an online advertisement model.” The same principle could be applied to a writers-only laptop. Or a camera with photos you can only review on a computer. “Light Phone just happened to be ﬁrst,” says Tang. ○ $350 (£290) pre-order; thelightphone.com

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Setting the pace Chunky statement watches go best with chunky winter shoes Edit by Charlie Teasdale Photographs by Phil Dunlop

Dark grey/white chalk stripe wool-alpacacashmere-blend suit, £1,950; white/mauve striped Italian cotton shirt, £145; navy merino jumper, £185; charcoal cotton socks, £22, all by Pink Shirtmaker. Dark brown leather shoes, £695, by Manolo Blahnik Pilot’s Watch Chronograph Top Gun Edition ‘Mojave Desert’, 44.5mm sandcoloured ceramic on beige rubber strap, £8,490, by IWC Schaffhausen

Right: blue large-check wool jacket, £190; blue large-check wool trousers, £100, both by Kin by John Lewis & Partners. Pale blue cotton socks, £13, by Pantherella. Black suede Wallabee boots, £125, by Clarks Captain Cook Automatic Blue, 42mm stainless steel on stainless steel bracelet, £1,780, by Rado

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Left: pink/green checked wool jacket, £1,150; burnt henna Italian wool jumper, £475; pink/green checked wool trousers, £490, all by Holland & Holland. Navy/black/blue cotton-blend socks, £16, by Pantherella. Tobacco suede loafers, £1,050, by John Lobb RM 025 Manual Winding Tourbillon Chronograph Diver’s, 50.7mm Grade 5 titanium alloy on black rubber strap, £671,500, by Richard Mille

Khaki stretch-ﬂannel jacket, £545; pale blue cotton-twill shirt, £245; khaki stretchﬂannel trousers, £275, all by Joseph. White cotton socks, £13, by Pantherella. Black leather loafers, £460, by Church’s Type XXI 3817 Flyback Chronograph, 42mm stainless steel on brown calfskin strap, £11,500, by Breguet

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64 Black/brown checked wool blazer, £275; blue chambray shirt, £90; black/brown checked wool trousers, £125, all by Reiss. Brown virgin woolblend socks, £14, by Falke. Brown suede Chelsea boots, £265, by Russell & Bromley

Right: black Penton corduroy jacket, £360; black Penton corduroy trousers, £195, both by Oliver Spencer. Black cotton socks, £13, by Pantherella. Black grain leather Pembroke shoes, £450, by Crockett & Jones

Heritage Small Seconds, 43mm stainless steel on black leather strap, £2,020, by Longines

Superocean Heritage Chronograph 44 Outerknown, 44mm steel-black steel on blue Econyl yarn strap, £5,600, by Breitling

Photographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s assistant: Tom Skinner | Model: Everton @ Wilhelmina | See Stockists page for details

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Left: a stylishly appointed corner suite in Le Bristol Paris; French patisserie from the hotel’s award-winning kitchen

Bons anniversaires A hero of French cooking celebrates a series of star-studded birthdays By Alex Bilmes

In the febrile world of Parisian haute cuisine, to win and then hold on to three Michelin stars for a decade at the same location is an achievement worth celebrating, with an elaborate supper at the very least. Head chef Eric Frechon joined Le Bristol, the exceptionally chic luxury hotel on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in 1999, and was immediately awarded a star for his cooking. The second came in 2001, the third in 2009. The restaurant he commands, Epicure, is renowned as among the very finest in the city: a place of gastronomic pilgrimage. Frechon holds a fourth star, for his onsite “brasserie de luxe”, 114 Faubourg, making Le Bristol the most celestial hotel in Paris. All of which makes it sound as if the food is the only reason for visiting. It isn’t. Le Bristol, which opened in 1925 in an aristocratic 18thcentury mansion in the eighth arrondissement, close to the Élysée Palace, takes as its mantra “l’art du vivre”, the peculiarly French art of living well. It will come as news to no one that Paris is home to an embarrassment of awe-inspiring luxury hotels: “palace” hotels, as they are known. Which one you choose as your home from home in the French capital will depend on a multitude of factors, but if you settle on Le Bristol, you’ll have chosen well. The rooms and suites are stylish, comfortable and just the right side of grand; for all the glowing marble and the hushed air of exclusivity, there is an appealing cosiness about Le Bristol. The house cat, Fa-Raon, a handsome white Birman (the same rarefied breed as the late Karl Lagerfeld’s much-loved puss, Choupette) who has his own suite next door to the concierge desk, is permitted to preen and put on airs, but everyone else is uncharacteristically unassuming. Le Bristol has sheltered countless notables over the decades, from Charlie Chaplin and Henry Kissinger to George Clooney and David Beckham. But the glamour is low-key, rather than emphatic. The top-floor swimming pool offers splendid views over those famous Mansard roofs. The bar is snug and forgivingly low-lit. And on a fine day, there is no better place in Paris to sit outside with a bottle on ice than the elegant courtyard garden. There is, of course,

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Above: Le Bristol Paris occupies an enviable site in the heart of the city’s chic eighth arrondisement Right: the hotel’s Eric Frechon, lauded head chef and quadruple Michelin star holder

a spoiling spa and a well-equipped gym. But back to that elaborate anniversary supper: it’s an eight-course tasting menu consisting of all of Frechon’s signature dishes, including caviar from Sologne, mousseline potatoes and smoked haddock; gratinéed stuffed macaroni with black truffle, artichoke and duck foie gras; and the spectacular Bresse farm hen poached with wine, crayﬁsh, sweet offal

and black truffle. And if the large portrait of Marie-Antoinette overlooking Café Antonia, the most relaxed restaurant on the premises, has anything to say about it, you may also be allowed cake. ○ Le Bristol Paris, 112 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris, +33 1 5343 430; Epicure restaurant, +33 1 5343 4340; epicure@oetkercollection.com

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MADE OF SOMETHING DIFFERENT The new American Express Platinum Card ® — now in metal, it’s a conversation starter Photography by Baker & Evans

“Paying with plastic” becomes an entirely different experience when you use the new Platinum Card from American Express — for one thing, it’s made of metal. Strong, sleek and reassuringly weighty, the iconic brand’s first-ever steel card heralds a new aesthetic for your wallet that matches your own curated, international lifestyle. Don’t be surprised if dropping your Card down on the dinner table becomes a conversation starter — the burnished silver finish makes picking up the bill an experience, leaving a lasting impression in its wake. Of course, the new Platinum Card is more than just a pretty face. For one thing, it will transform the way you travel, offering comprehensive worldwide travel insurance for you and your family (as well as your Supplementary Cardmembers). You will also benefit from complimentary access to 1,200 airport lounges across 130 countries, not to mention room upgrades whenever available at over 1,000 luxury hotels worldwide. The Card even makes getting to the airport easier, with a recurring monthly £10 Addison Lee credit. What about once you’re there? Think a guaranteed 4pm late checkout, complimentary breakfasts and $100 worth of amenity credits to use at your leisure. And the benefits don’t end there. With every purchase you’ll accrue Membership Rewards® points, which can be spent on anything from a new luxury suit to a weekend away. They never expire — and The Platinum Card even offers 30,000 Membership Rewards points when you spend £4,000 in your first three months of Cardmembership. Not bad. Central to The Platinum Card experience is the American Express Platinum Concierge service: a dedicated team who are on hand 24/7, by phone or online through the Amex App. From tickets to that sold-out gig to those flowers that you meant to order yesterday but definitely need to arrive later today, they’re there to field any request you might have. You can also reserve tables at some of the world’s finest restaurants, thanks to the American Express Global Dining Collection. So you can enjoy Chateaubriand with friends at Hawksmoor, breakfast with the in-laws at The Wolseley or the Valentine’s Day tasting menu with your partner at Clos Maggiore. And that’s the new Amex Platinum Card — made of something different, because they know you are, too. ○ To find out more or to apply for The Platinum Card, search ‘Amex Platinum’. Annual fee £575. Terms and Conditions apply*

This is an Advertisement Feature in association with The Platinum Card from American Express. *If you’d prefer a Card without any rewards, other features or a Cardmembership fee, an alternative is available: the Basic Card. Applicants must be 18 or over. Approval is subject to status. Terms and Conditions apply. Full details of travel protection Terms, Conditions and Exclusions can be found at americanexpress.co.uk/PlatinumInsurance. Subject to enrolment. Terms and Conditions apply to all Membership Rewards points earnings and redemptions. American Express Services Europe Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority

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Sophie Cookson photographed for Esquire, London, October 2019. Grey mohair jumper; white Seventies collar poplin shirt, both by Victoria Beckham

Girl, interrupted In a new miniseries about the Profumo Affair, Sophie Cookson gives Christine Keeler a voice By Olivia Ovenden Portrait by Danny Lowe

wanted to be seen as a victim,” and she found the brash and mouthy aspects of Keeler’s character appealing to play. “The entire country was brought to a standstill because of one girl.” (Keeler died in 2017, aged 75, but will long be remembered as the subject of one of the most iconic photographs of the Sixties: Lewis Morley’s nude portrait of her, sitting astride a modernist chair.) Cookson and Keeler, perhaps, share something of a mindset. When Cookson ﬁrst began working as an actress she was advised not to kick up a fuss about grievances she experienced on set, in case she’d be branded a “difficult woman”. “Sod that,” she says with a cackle. “You have to be able to stand your ground.” ○ The Trial of Christine Keeler is on BBC One in January 2020

Styling: Tilly Wheating | Hair: Ken O’Rourke | Make-up: Liz Pugh

While the actress Sophie Cookson was filming The Trial of Christine Keeler, a new BBC drama series about the Profumo affair of the early Sixties, in which the 19-year-old showgirl was revealed to be having simultaneous liaisons with the Conservative Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and a Soviet naval attaché — a scandal that eventually helped bring down the government of Harold Macmillan — she noticed a contemporary parallel. Former Conservative Party publicist Carrie Symonds was plastered over the front pages for her relationship with Boris Johnson. “So often still the focus is on the young woman,” says Cookson, who plays Keeler. “So this does feel like the perfect story to be telling.” It’s mid-afternoon and Cookson is sitting cross-legged in jeans and trainers in a members’ club in central London, her hair honeycoloured and loose. The 29-year-old, who grew up in Sussex and Suffolk, landed her first major role straight after graduating from Oxford Drama School, in Matthew Vaughn’s 2014 film, Kingsman: The Secret Service. Last year, she made her West End debut opposite Orlando Bloom in Tracy Letts’ Killer Joe. The Trial of Christine Keeler, which Cookson says has “all of those classic ingredients: espionage, sex, politics and an underdog,” also stars Ben Miles as Profumo and James Norton as osteopath and high-society “fixer” Stephen Ward. While Cookson is non-committal on Norton’s rumoured taking over of Daniel Craig’s Aston Martin, she does reveal that he is, “very good at doing an imitation of a trumpet, so is useful at a party.” There have been other dramatisations of the affair, most notably the 1989 film Scandal starring Joanne Whalley as Keeler and John Hurt as Ward, yet the new series will tell events from Keeler’s perspective. It aims to show how unjust it was that a 19-year-old woman was vilified by the press, called a “tart” by the prime minister and pelted with eggs on the way to court. Still, Cookson maintains, “Christine never

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Out of the darkness A new collaboration shines a light on a king of minimalism By Johnny Davis Photograph by Sam Hofman

Set design: Zena May Hendrick

John Pawson has a problem with lights. “The big issue is seeing [home] ﬁttings during the daytime. I always want to put them away and bring them out at night, like candles.” He concedes they do have their fans. “I suppose a lot of people like to look at antique lamps. And obviously they’re useful. It’s just in the daytime, they’re a thing that you… fall over.” The celebrated minimalist and architect to both monks and Calvin Klein is known for his austerity, restraint and love of empty spaces. You’re unlikely to fall over anything in one of his projects. So when it came to designing lighting with WonderGlass, the high-end “London company with an Italian soul”, the solution was a collection that “kind of disappears” in the daytime. Inspired by his work at the Grade II-listed St John at Hackney Church in London, it consists of Sleeve, Horizon Light and Pendant Tube: concentric cylinders, handblown in Venice, combining traditional craft with modernity. “It’s all you need,” he says. “Murano glass already has a lot of character.” ○

From clockwise: Horizon, £1,650; Pendant Tube, £1,470; Sleeve (large), £1,200, all by John Pawson for WonderGlass; wonderglass.com

Bulletin

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Bulletin

London recalling The Clash commemorate their finest hour By Johnny Davis

Beatrice Behlen suspected she was onto a winner when they worked out her email. “I mean, it’s not that hard to do, but I’m baffled by the devotion of their fans,” the senior curator of fashion and decorative arts at the Museum of London says. “I’m not sure there’s another band like it. People emailing saying, ‘Can you get me into the opening?’” Behlen is the co-curator of The Clash: London Calling, an exhibition of more than 100 items associated with the group, celebrating the 40th anniversary of its double album and drawing on the personal archives of guitarist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon, photographer Pennie Smith, on-tour designer Ray Lowry, DJ Barry “Scratchy” Myers, roadie Johnny Green and intimate Robin Banks. It is co-curated by Robert Gordon McHarg III, Canadian-born artist, gallerist, friend of the band and custodian of their archive. “I’m not gonna say it!” McHarg says, asked to name the rarest of the never-before-seen items. “There are secrets in there, and that’s the fun of it.” We can conﬁrm one of late frontman Joe Strummer’s notebooks from 1979, open at “Ice Age”, words that would become lyrics to the title track. Also the handwritten album running order by Jones. Drumsticks from Nicky “Topper” Headon and a shattered Fender Precision bass, smashed on stage at The New York Palladium on 20 September 1979 by Simonon, an act captured by Smith and used for arguably rock’s most iconic cover. “They were a global band,” says McHarg. “A global sound. London plays a huge role. We’re also trying to tell the story of ’79: what was happening in the band, in London and the world. Because all those things are the subject matter of the record.” A shortlist of those subjects would include generational conﬂict (“Rudie Can’t Fail”), racial divide (“The Guns of Brixton”), institutional oppression (“Clampdown”) and a rallying cry to action (“London Calling”). “It all still seems to have

Right: the Fender Precision bass guitar smashed by Paul Simonon in 1979, a moment immortalised on London Calling’s cover, is one of 100-plus items on show at The Museum of London exhibition

so much relevance, you can still feel and hear the same issues,” says McHarg. “It’s a timeless call of awareness.” It is the ﬁrst music show for the museum, which opened three years before London Calling. “It’s quite different for us,” Behlen says. In fact, it wouldn’t have happened without them. “It’s happening because we’re doing it with the Museum of London, and it’s free,” says McHarg. “So if you have money for a donation to the museum, great. But if you don’t have anything, you’re still welcome. That’s always been a part of The Clash. Like folklore history. All welcoming, for all.” ○ The Clash: London Calling, The Museum of London, 150 London Wall, EC2Y, now until 19 April 2020

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Taste of success How a London-based Spanish restaurant cracked the culinary scene with its uniqueness, sophistication and performance By Jamie Carson Photography by Dan Wilton

Above: Barraﬁna executive chef Angel Zapata Martin and co-founder Sam Hart

In an era where everyone can be everything (think DJs who are models who are also designers), it’s hard to remember a time when professionals focused on one speciality rather than myriad options. But behind the hustle and bustle of London’s King’s Cross Station, in the rejuvenated area of Coal Drops Yard, is the latest Barraﬁna, a contemporary Spanish kitchen that steers clear of the “do it all” trend in favour of a different kind of ethos. “My philosophy is based on simplicity, seasonality and respect for the product,” says executive chef Angel Zapata Martin, as he slices an artichoke with the precision of a bomb disposal expert. “Whatever you see on the plate, you can identify. Very pure and simple.” This doesn’t mean that it’s just a case of slapping some Serrano ham on a plate — the customers aren’t common house cats, after all. No, to put it paradoxically, Martin’s effortlessness is a little more sophisticated than that, as encapsulated by his three favourite dishes. THE CURED MONKFISH — “This style of ceviche is something I used to make all the time in Catalonia. It’s one of the most popular dishes on the menu, and not just in the UK,” says Martin. “We’ve run popups in New York and Singapore and it was very successful there too.” It’s almost a shame to disturb the layered decoration of a dish that looks more like it should be hanging on a wall than placed on a table. The monkﬁsh is cured in salt, sugar, Fino sherry and paprika, then adorned with date purée, avocado mousse and sun-dried tomatoes, which have a subtle ginger aftertaste. And Martin’s statement is true: you can identify everything after one bite; nothing is amiss. It is what it is — and what it is is good food.

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THE SALT COD A LA CATALANA — “When I first tasted this, I knew it was a flavour I would not forget. Now, artichokes and romesco are two ingredients I always keep with me.” Martin’s adoration for artichokes stems from his hometown of Barcelona. They’re commonplace in Spanish cooking, so Martin knows what he’s doing when he teams them with salted cod and a fragrant romesco sauce — both of which are amplified by the addition of pickled chillies on top. THE HAM CROQUETAS — “Croquetas are something so traditional, so unique. They have a lot of respect, so you have to keep them as they are. You have to appreciate traditions.” Think of a mac and cheese ball fit for royalty and you’ve got the idea of this luxury take on the classic croqueta. It’s filled with chunks of Spanish jamon and oozing with a rich bechamel sauce. Crispy

Sure, lines outside restaurants are great for creating a buzz, but that’s not what went through Hart’s mind when making this decision. In fact, it meant they could provide a better service. “People ask what the customer gets from it. The answer is that we have 12 people working on any service for 23 customers, so that’s a ratio of 1:2. The seated customer gets a lot of service and attention at a much lower price than they would do normally. We can afford to do that because we turn so many stools, so it works for both sides.” This structure also ﬁts in with the Spanish authenticity. As well as having Spanish chefs creating Spanish dishes, the way the place is set out is inspired by Hart’s own experience of the country. “The idea for Barraﬁna came from when I was living in Barcelona,” he reveals. “I discovered a restaurant that was basically an eating bar with all the cooking going on straight behind it. No tables, no reservations, just the freshest seafood — and I absolutely loved it.”

Left to right: Barraﬁna’s Cured Monkﬁsh, Salt Cod a la Catalana and Ham Croquetas — three of Martin’s favourite dishes

Hair and grooming: Aga Dobosz. Art direction: Leo Goddard

and golden on the outside, delightfully moist on the inside, this is a starter so decadent you’ll ﬁnd it hard not to place the entire thing in your mouth and demolish it in one bite. Word of Martin’s culinary performance has swept across London. On whatever day you visit, you’ll ﬁnd the bar swarming with people methodically studying the menu, devising a plan among themselves of what dishes to share (or not share) in order to avoid food envy. Even on a Friday at 11.30am, while we’re shooting the dishes in the closed restaurant, hopeful customers are sticking their heads through the door asking if they can come in. But don’t bother searching online for a reservation form, as the establishment infamously doesn’t take bookings. However, there is a method to the madness. “Ah, the no-reservations thing,” says co-founder Sam Hart, with a hint of a smirk. “The original bar only had 23 seats, so what you couldn’t do is have those 23 seats booked for 8pm and then just sit there waiting for people to turn up. We knew from the start that because the restaurant was so small we would have to have a no-reservations policy, which we were a bit nervous about.”

You feel this Spanish atmosphere resonating throughout the restaurant, in the openness of its layout with the exposed kitchen, the smell of roasted garlic that hits you upon entry and the chefs bantering as they chargrill over open flames. This all-access view means that Martin’s performance has to be flawless at all times. “Normally the kitchen is backstage, so it doesn’t matter because the customer is somewhere else,” says Hart. “Here, you’re putting it in front of them and looking them in the face, so we really have to up our game.” But if you’re looking for signs of performance anxiety, you won’t find any here. Martin thrives on his audience’s gaze: “It’s tough work, but when I’m pressured I feel more relaxed. It’s just in my nature; it’s easy for me to keep calm and smile. Above the philosophy, most of all we want to make guests feel like they’re at home.” With European airport lines looking likely to get a lot longer to wait in, Barrafina’s lack of reservations doesn’t seem like such a big price to pay. Being invited into this home is worth the wait. ○ Drive your passion with the CUPRA Ateca, the new SUV that combines performance and sophistication for a unique take on the classic sports vehicle. Hungry for more? Follow Sam and Angel’s journey at esquire.com/uk/cupra

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NOTES, ESSAYS AND PROVOCATIONS

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Real estate

Getty

THE LITTLE MAN-CAVE ON THE PRAIRIE Andrew O’Hagan

ur home life was a breach of the peace in nightly instalments. By the age of six, I wanted a moon of my own. I would’ve settled for a space-pad across the road from Luke Skywalker at the edge of the Tatooine Desert, or a lifetime in orbit on the Soyuz spacecraft, but I realised I might have to compromise and live in a chalet at the Chateau Marmont instead. You can’t always get what you want, as the man says, but wanting my own place was an early-onset depravity with me, and I had elaborate real-estate fantasies →

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at a time when your average teenager was only thinking about sex. None of the places I imagined contained other people. It wasn’t a six-bedroom house in Hampstead. It was a little man-cave on the prairie, where your actual, long-suffering correspondent would live a very wholesome life, one completely devoid of responsibility, in the company of beer and Maltesers. “What happened to the dream?” my imaginary friend asked me not long ago. (People think it’s only children that have imaginary friends: they know nothing about middle age.) “Oh, did it get lost in the post?” “Shut the fuck up,” I said. Then I did it. I bought a tin house by the sea. I filled it with foreign ashtrays and the complete works of Martin Scorsese. And now I am happy. I go from time to time when the breeze of everyday life begins to sting my eyes. I eat all the sausages. I smoke all the fags. I do press-ups on the beach and then eat three custard tarts. At night, I watch the sun go down, the pink sky making me think nothing matters anyhow. My wife knows more about men than I do. She smiles at my man-cave needs, sending me off with a kiss and a smile, and welcomes me back to London when my life as Grizzly McAndrew comes to seem less necessary. This is a developing story, however, and the truth is I find myself becoming increasingly house-proud at my mancave. I brought up one of those new Dysons the other day. I’m always hunting for surface-scouring materials. I festooned the place with bunting and put out cushions designed by Cressida Bell. The bedspread is pink. There are many scented candles and Chinese lanterns. I’ve been thinking of running up a few curtains in red gingham. And so, I begin to see that my initial fulfilment of all the male clichés flows ever so fluidly with my inner hausfrau. I am as proud of my little caravan as Mrs Hinch is of her Essex semi. What began with me wanting to escape the urban haze of masculine responsibility, ends with me in a flowery pinny, dusting my caravan with joy and extolling the virtues of lavender wipes. This is not what it said on the tin. The first known use of the phrase “man-cave” came in 1992 in the Toronto Star (Hemingway’s old paper, by the way), when the writer Joanne Lovering surveyed the typical male need for a dungeon: “With his cave of solitude secured against wifeintrusion by cold floors, musty smells and a few strategic cobwebs,” she wrote, “he will stay down there for hours nestled in very manly magazines and open boxes of tools. Let’s call the basement, man-cave.” Well, Ms Lovering, things had come to a

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pretty pass, and I have to report the man-cave of today is a bijou confection, a home-away-fromhome where the modern male may retreat for a spot of macramé. He may be found, of an evening, avoiding the rough and tumble of male sports, and tending, instead, to a warm bowl of Elizabeth David’s potage du père tranquille, that he made himself. The problem with clichés is their remedies become clichés, too, which is why most self-help books go out of fashion so quickly. I’ve been looking at a heap of them — from Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: the Emotional Costs of Everyday Life to The Nordic Theory of Everything: in Search of a Better Life — and I’m afraid they are, like those of us who read them, warped with ideals nobody can live up to. Beyond a certain age, time spent alone is just good preparation for time spent with others, and I enjoy the comedy of it all, running away from the charms of domestic life in order to replicate the charms of domestic life. What I really do when I go to the man-cave is work. The Scorseses remain in their sleeves. And that vintage bottle of rum, the one you can only get in one shop in Havana, remains undrunk. So, as well as a place in which to exercise one’s rage

for order, it’s also another office, and that was never on the list of expectations either when the man-cave ideal ﬁrst sprung into being. Maybe it’s Wi-Fi that has changed it all. When I dreamed as a child of being in my own house in a galaxy far, far way — well, the whole notion of “away” really meant something. You could be in a place without a phone, never mind Deliveroo. But such places become increasingly unimaginable, and my man-cave, blissful as it is, has perfect connectivity and I can surf to anywhere from that lonesome beach. Instead of lying in my boxer shorts under a huge pile of pizza boxes, I ﬁnd I am sitting at a well-polished table, learning a foreign language by internet correspondence, swapping seaside gardening hints with the male hausfraus of California, and writing several stories at once. Maybe the real realisation for the middle-aged monster, is that one no longer has the same appetites. Face it, cave-dweller: life socialised you. And when you’re supposed to be cutting all ties, you’re actually busy forging stronger ones. The alienation effect was just childhood, really, though I’d still take that pad on Tatooine, if only for the pleasure of advertising my aloneness on social media. ○

Coming home

NEAR WEST Charlie Teasdale

irst money, then poetry. Then money again, ideally. In the spring of 2011, I was fresh out of university, a newly anointed bachelor of humanities and a newly appointed barman of The Beckford Arms in Fonthill Gifford, south Wiltshire. Some pals had moved straight to London. Others, swimming nobly against the tide of middle-class graduates ﬂooding into Hackney, had opted for Bristol. Swimming harder still, I planned to travel America on a journey of inspiration that would result in me writing like the Americans I had come to love in tutorials — the likes of Auster, Easton Ellis, Poe and Whitman. Clearly,

the only way to do that was to go and be in North America for a while; just mooch about and pick idly at the fabric of the country until my own bildungsroman morphed into a novel of astonishing poignancy and I was launched into the literary stratosphere. (And providing some crucial seed money for a ﬂat in Hackney.) A summer at the Beckford would set me up for at least a few months of manifest destiny, I was sure. The vibe seems standard now, maybe even a touch passé. But nine years ago on the rolling banks of the A303, the Beckford was wholly alien. Daily (daily!) menus printed on weighty Elephant’s Breath-coloured paper; freshly baked

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Hannah Beal

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sausage rolls piled beneath a big cloche on a bar dressed with dried hops and ﬁtted with a ceramic-handled tap pouring Phoenix, the craft beer brewed exclusively for the pub. The Beckford had almost burned down the year before (hence the name of the beer) and the refurbishment was carried out by a former honcho of Babington House, the Soho House hotel and spa 23 miles away in Somerset. Cue broadsheets in the sitting room, pétanque pitch in the garden, sisal carpets and roll-top baths in the bedrooms. I had worked in country pubs since I was 14. First there was The George Inn in Mere, Wiltshire, where I picked up car park litter in return

for a modest cash-in-hand salary that came heavily offset by as much draft cola as I could guzzle. Eventually, I graduated to the bar, and even moonlighted at The Walnut Tree (where the cool dudes and pretty girls worked) on the other side of the village. But it was a week until my guilt got too much and I jacked it in. Then there was The White Lion Inn in Zeals, where I had a real rapport with the clientele (apart from two hellish, ruddy brothers who threw coins at me), but the management eventually grew tired of my refusal to charge friends for drinks. Each had its own agricultural charm but The Beckford was something else. It had been lifted straight out of a Richard Curtis ﬁlm, and

everyone loves those. Local (and latterly, national) up-at-heels came in their droves. The sausage rolls were gone before the cloche had a chance to condensate and we couldn’t change kegs of Phoenix quick enough; the sisal forever damp by way of carefree bathers. It wasn’t long until a second outpost, The Talbot Inn, in Mells, Somerset, was outshining all the other pubs in the area, too. And towards the end of 2018, the group’s third pub, The Lord Poulett Arms, opened in Hinton St George in the south of the county. You know, west of Haselbury Plucknett, east of Dowlish Wake. As has been documented, the “Near West” (my phrase) has been the food and culture →

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capital of the UK for a few years now. People suddenly realised there was nice stuff in the bit between Soho Farmhouse and Padstow, and now everyone who’s anyone is racing to Paddington after work on a Friday to make sure they’re in-country in time for the acid jazz and scrumpy barn dance* at Hauser & Wirth. The Somerset outpost of the gallery has been a totem of the irresistible rise of the Near West since it opened five years ago in Bruton. Among other emporia and eateries, it is home to At The Chapel: “a restaurant, bedrooms, bakery, terrace and clubroom” and former church in the centre of the market town that clearly ushered religion and grammar out the door when the open kitchen was installed. When it’s full (“Sorry, we are At Capacity”), visitors can decamp to a new hotel, The Newt in Somerset, which is what nearby stately home Hadspen House (whose foundations date back to the late 17th century) is now called thanks to owners Karen Roos and Koos Bekker. The South African couple have been renovating the old pile for the past six years, so at long last it has a hammam, a “cyder” press and a farm shop — things none of those feckless Georgians ever had the good sense to install. Then there’s Frome, which rhymes with “tomb”. The hilly, semi-cobbled town is home to the gargantuan street market “The Frome Independent”, with its slogan “Shop (independently) Eat (seasonally) Sleep (easily) Repeat (monthly)”, and entices thousands of visitors every four weeks. (As luck would have it, I’m writing this on a train that has just passed through Frome. The carriage is now full to the brim with exhausted get-awayers and tat-shoppers who have just this instant come to a stark and depressing realisation: the density of the crowd and the direction of travel has shown them they weren’t the first Londoners to come here. They probably weren’t even the first Batterseans to have exciting get-away sex in that yurt.) I grew up in the Near West, so I feel about it a little differently. I was born in Yeovil, which is an objectively shit place. A large Somerset town with a hospital at the top, a Frankie & Benny’s at the bottom and not much in between. My school was in Gillingham (hard “G”) in Dorset, which, like most towns in the area, has had its character gutted by the arrival of major supermarkets and discount stores. Legends, our nightclub, was on the trading estate. We would go to either Salisbury (“Sledge”) or Sherborne (“Shledge”) beforehand and get the last boozy train back. To finish, it was chips and cheese from Marmaris for the walk home.

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There was no Josper grill at Legends, sadly. Independent markets were scarce, but we had the Gillingham & Shaftesbury Show once a year, where you could buy tractors and meat and cartons of thick brown cider. My older sisters went to school in Bruton, so I would often go with mum or dad in the Montego to pick them up. By my recollection, it was always raining in Bruton, but that can’t be true, unless there was some pathetic fallacy for my anguish at having to move to the back seat when the girls got in. We’d also go there to play football against Sexey’s (seriously), the fellow comprehensive whose Dickensian pitch was atop a high plateau behind a housing estate. Their goalkeeper, who I’m sure was a nice chap, was the lardiest 17-year-old I had ever seen. Fine from long distance but a nightmare one-on-one. On the way out of town, the one-way system took you under a railway bridge, past Texaco and the turning for outdoor-activity-centre-and-tetanus-jab-waiting-to-happen, Mill on the Brue, before swinging right up to the dark, narrow, vaguely threatening high street. There was something

of the night about Bruton; something on which Tim Burton could base an animated ﬁlm. Ironically, I am both beholden to and tempted by the Near West. I have to go there a few times a year to see my family, but I also want to go there because I’m a thirty-something Londoner with disposable income and an Instagram account thirsty for authentic experiences. I, like my fellow lifestyle curators, search high and low for the holy trinity of artisanal pies, locally-ﬁred pottery and Aesop-approved bathrooms. The Near West has loads of all three. I never went to America on that voyage of literary discovery. I spent all my Beckford money on petrol, Golden Virginia and lock-ins at the The Benett Arms (which is a very Beat triumvirate, as it happens). But if I had, I might have come back to a home I didn’t recognise. A home that belied my own memory, a home that was at once the same and completely different. Instead, the path of my life has lead to me living above a chicken shop in Finsbury Park, so the Near West is my Shangri-La. ○ *Not a real thing, sorry.

Fitness

THE GUNSLINGER Michael Holden

e need a new photograph of you!” yells the receptionist at the gym. Not because I am slimmer or fitter or stronger in some before-and-after way that might serve the gym’s own push for self-promotion. No. They need a new picture of me because I have aged. The receptionist, probably still at school when I first came here, is trying to read my expression, since I have frozen just past the turnstile to contemplate my fate in one of the place’s many mirrors. To contemplate my fate, and the fact it has indeed been 16 years since I first came in. “Sixteen years of fitness!” he shouts as I trudge down to change.

There, in another inescapable mirror, I see what I’ve become. Balder and wiser, a living witness to gravity. This is about the size of it, and me. The bulk, the power, the hench and the heft have somehow proved elusive. What has not escaped me, on this long excursion into the underworld of unnecessary effort, is the rise in my fellows’ vanity. I’m sure it never used to be this way, or at least not quite so open. Since the early 2000s, the changing room has devolved into a humid crevice of literal, balls-out, self-regard. One move has come to typify this, I call it “The Gunslinger”. Those who do this I condemn to a class of their own. There are a pair of hairdryers before a mirror by the lockers. To perform the perfect

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JOURNAL

Gunslinger, one must emerge still damp from the showers (itself a capital crime), toss one’s towel to the floor with maximum disregard for it, me and the cleaning staff, and then apply both dryers simultaneously to everything but the hair on your head while maintaining eye contact with yourself for the duration. That one might come here to exercise yet find the final act of towelling oneself dry unconscionable is baffling enough. That such behaviour is twinned to a complete absence of selfawareness is perhaps less surprising. To achieve full marks here, one must then cover one’s bone-dry-at-the-expense-of-theplanet body with a cloud of spray deodorant and leave briskly, past the sinks. (Where someone will be having a shave, and not cleaning

that up — another habit whose punishment hell ought be expanded to fit.) If you think men are getting more sensitive because they are buying more cosmetics or being sold them in a different way, I bring terrible news. The beast that would, for sport, entrap his mate to huff flatulence beneath a duvet, has not died but just become more fragrant, the better to admire himself. Odds are the scented Gunslinger will have spent much of his “session” sat motionless on each piece of equipment you would like to use, while staring at his phone. This behaviour is no more than a decade old but has gone from dick-move to de rigueur with grim acceleration. Smartphones have even muscled into the sauna. The first person I saw doing this

— steam-swiping — then exited and left the door open. If you and I were to be the last ones left alive on this dying planet and you asked me when exactly the death knell rang, I would offer this as my suggestion, before towelling myself dry of tears, and jogging proudly away with moderate if visually unremarkable fitness for someone of my age. Even the most annoying man in history, who has been coming here almost as long as I have and likes to scream “Yes!” and whoop, grunt and wheeze as he drops incredible arrays of free weights to the mat in triumph, is powerless against this self-regarding new wave. This man moves so quickly through the equipment that the noise he makes is offset by the speed of the display. Yet I have seen even him retreat from a younger man who looks like a tattooed Ralph Fiennes and trains with his girlfriend (separate circle of hell, again, for couples’ fitness) and isn’t getting out of anyone’s way until he’s done laughing at his phone and talking to her about how much money he makes. One expects to find the music or the dialect or the politics of the young in some measure ridiculous as one grows old, such are the scant perks of ageing, but one is puzzled above all by what is happening to their bodies. A phenomenon even more baffling than what has not happened to mine. Between the phone staring and the mirror glancing and the unabashed bicep kissing, there is a dramatic upsurge in men’s size. When Geordie Shore started in 2011, you would have been forgiven for thinking this archetype — body-hairless fist-man with neat but volumised coiffure — was just a regional problem. But as you will have noticed, this is now nationwide and going global. Where, given all the vanity and inertia on display, do they find the time? It seems that many of us don’t, as there is much chat among the mists between gorillas about how to cut corners in the quest for muscle definition that cannot be defined by mere biology and effort. “Tabs or jabs?” is the question among the steroid brethren. What, I would ask, if this were a more convivial space, are you going to do with all that meat you’re manifesting? What do you get up to when you get home? Is this, perhaps, the tragedy of the modern metro strongman? All that muscle, and nothing to lift but a phone. I slip past the young, dysmorphic giants and leave the gym unnoticed, resolving to keep my ageless, reverse-Dorian Gray snapshot in the system, for another 16 years, ideally. Which is, of course, a vanity of its own. I hide from my reflection one last time and recite the mid-life mantra and serenity plea: “It must be them; it can’t be me.” ○ →

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Enthusiasms

A COOKIE FULL OF ARSENIC Alex Bilmes

SIDNEY FALCO: “Sure, the columnists can’t do without us, except our good and great friend JJ forgets to mention that. You see, we furnish him with items.” JJ HUNSECKER: “What, some cheap, gruesome gags?” SIDNEY FALCO: “You print ’em, don’t ya?” JJ HUNSECKER: “Yes, with your clients’ names attached. That’s the only reason the poor slobs pay you — to see their names in my column all over the world. Now, I make it out, you’re doing me a favour... The day I can’t get along without a press agents’ handouts, I’ll close up shop and move to Alaska, lock, stock, and barrel.” — Tony Curtis as PR man Sidney Falco and Burt Lancaster as gossip columnist JJ Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success n Barry Levinson’s caloriﬁc 1982 comedy Diner, the ﬁrst and best of the director’s benevolent quartet of features about the Baltimore of his youth, there is an oddball minor character, an intense geek in a checked shirt, who speaks only to parrot lines of dialogue from Sweet Smell of Success, the hardboiled New York noir from 1957. “JJ!” he barks, irrelevantly, in an electrical store, “it’s one thing to wear your dog collar but when it turns into a noose I’d rather have my freedom!” I’m not as bad as that guy. But I’m pretty bad. There is no rat-a-tat exchange between Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster, in the course of that blaring siren of a movie, that I cannot chorus along to, in my limp approximation of mid-century Noo Yoik. We are not children, we do not have to commit ourselves to favourites. But when I am

asked, as we all are on occasion, to name the film I love the most, I always say Sweet Smell of Success. With the exception of those bank holiday TV standbys that every boy of my background and generation has seen multiple times (Goldfinger, The Great Escape), Sweet Smell must be the film I’ve watched most often. I don’t say it’s the best film ever made. It’s not Bicycle Thieves or The 400 Blows or Blue Velvet, but I fell for it as a teenager and my love for it deepens as I age and become knackered and decrepit and it stays the same: angry, vital, terrifying. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, the presiding genius of Ealing Studios, making his first film in Hollywood, Sweet Smell of Success, from a peerless screenplay by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, is a high-contrast portrait of corruption and depravity among Fifties Manhattan’s nocturnal movers and shakers — the slick, glib, switchblade-sharp predators of 21 and El Morocco, and their soft-skinned prey. A movie near-deranged with cynicism, drunk on cocktails and contempt, Sweet Smell of Success is a howl of despair at the way the city brutalises its citizens, and the society that has risen from its sewers like a stink. It’s as cool as an icy wind off the East River; as bracing as a punch in the gut. And yet, to these eyes it is a thing of beauty: a film that fizzes with wit, crackles with intelligence, hums like neon, seethes and throbs and pulses with excitement and energy. And so, even while it dismays, it seduces. The editing is furious. Elmer Bernstein’s score is a blast from a jet engine. And James Wong Howe’s camera watches the shadows lengthen and the walls close in with a sense of dreadful fascination. It shames me to admit it, and it demonstrates so vividly my inability to check my white male privilege — this is the film that puts the “toxic”

in “toxic masculinity”, and who would want to be a black man, or a gay man, or a woman of any colour or creed or sexuality, in Manhattan in 1957? — but still there is a part of me, I confess, which would love to be there, talking tough and drinking stiff with the bent coppers and the yellow reporters and the corrupt politicos and the dry-eyed hat-check girls. Sweet Smell of Success tells the story of a venal PR man for crummy nightclub acts, Sidney Falco, played by Curtis, and his efforts to flatter and cajole a monstrous tabloid gossip columnist, JJ Hunsecker, played by Lancaster and based on the famous columnist, Walter Winchell. It’s hard to say that those two greats of Hollywood’s Golden Age were never better than here — both gave indelible performances in more famous and acclaimed films — but in my view these are their most revealing roles, and this is the film that made the most of their dazzling but dubious charms. In Sweet Smell, both actors discover within themselves reserves of loathsomeness that went untapped — understandably — in more palatable performances. There is a pathetic neediness in Curtis’s compromised press agent and there is a streak of something truly nasty, something vicious and perverse, in Lancaster’s selfregarding bully. Never have their good looks been used to better effect, even as they are subverted. Curtis, the Jewish exotic, is “so pretty”, as one character remarks, you’d think he were an actor. (A pointed gag, that one.) Lancaster is a rock of a man, a slab of Harlem concrete made flesh and fitted with old-lady glasses, but here his beauty is so hard as to be almost grotesque, inhuman. The plot — not, admittedly, the film’s strongest point — details Hunsecker’s attempts to manipulate Falco into breaking up the love affair between his innocent younger sister, whose life he ruthlessly polices and with whom he is, it is suggested, sexually obsessed, and her milquetoast musician boyfriend. All does not go according to plan. Both men sink further into the moral abyss than they ever have before. By the end they’re drowning. For all the verbal sparkle and the chiaroscuro camerawork, there’s something real about Falco and Hunsecker that is rarely seen on screen. The male characters in Levinson’s movie-mad Diner, to take an example of an American film with a more conventional approach to mid-century masculinity, are, like so many heroes of Hollywood, loveable man-children. Their arrested development is regarded with benign indulgence. For all their flaws, these guys are softies. They’re cute.

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Think of a more recent dual portrait of midlife manhood: Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Quentin Tarantino’s wonderful Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Both stars are tremendous in the film: charismatic, funny, handsome, winning in every way. But their characters — a faded TV actor and his stuntman amanuensis — are kidults, toddlers in sunglasses. Tarantino loves them, you can tell. He forgives them their foibles, their crises, their solipsisms. Sidney Falco and JJ Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success are fully grown men, and their flaws are there for all to see. I was a teenager when I first saw the film and they confirmed all my worst suspicions about what fully grown men are like: selfish, mendacious, compromised. I was repelled and, of course, hopelessly drawn to them, to their swagger, their sophistication. Not everyone is. In 1957, Sweet Smell of Success bombed. Audiences were repulsed by its desolate vision of human nature. The scapegoat for this failure was Alexander Mackendrick, who was fired by the same producers,

Harold Hecht, James Hill and Burt Lancaster himself, two weeks into his next film. His career never fully recovered. Others suffered collateral damage: apart from a 1960 B-movie, Susan Harrison, who played Lancaster’s sister, never worked in Hollywood again. Elmer Bernstein, the composer, likened the atmosphere on the set of Sweet Smell of Success to “a snake pit”. Ernest Lehman, the screenwriter whose novella the film is based on, said of his experience working with Hecht-Hill-Lancaster that “I really sank into the depths when I decided to work with them”. You might argue that Sweet Smell of Success has a special resonance for me, a secret sauce that makes me forgive the potboiler narrative, the dodgy sexual politics and the rapacious unpleasantness of the men who made it. And you’d be right. For obvious reasons, stories about desperate publicity people being pushed around by powerful journalists have considerable appeal for hacks such as myself. I loved the film long before I fell into the world of celebrity

journalism — by which I mean journalism about celebrities, rather than journalism by celebrities (there is a difference, or there used to be) — but once I had fallen, Sweet Smell of Success cushioned the blow. Today, social media has considerably diminished the power of celebrity publicists and showbiz journalists both. We are, all of us, bypassed by the performers themselves, who use Twitter and Instagram to talk directly to their audiences. Kim Kardashian has no use for either of us; she writes her own press. Perhaps that’s how it should be. So the film is a period piece. But when I was growing up, these figures still stalked the earth, just about. There were still showbiz newspaper columnists with the power to make or break careers, and scuttling publicists who wished to influence them — and vice versa. It was a shabby, disreputable business. But it had its compensations. “I love this dirty town,” says Lancaster’s crooked newspaperman. Me too, JJ. ○

→

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Socials

MY LUDDITE BIRTHDAY Andrew Ridker

joined Facebook when I was 14. The ﬁrst status I posted, on 5 September 2006, at 11.42am, read, simply, “Cold lampin’”. (I was a big Public Enemy fan.) All that cold lampin’ must have worn me out, though, because at 4.27pm, I updated my status to read, “Exhausted”. Whenever I think to delete my Facebook account — which, since Mark Zuckerberg’s charmless testimony before Congress in 2018, has become a daily occurrence — I remember that the company already has a record of my thoughts and feelings going back more than 13 years. Facebook knows, for instance, that on 23 September 2006, at 9.59am, I was “getting my Jew on”. At 1.20pm that same day, I was “blasting music and shouting ‘Wu-Tang! Wu-Tang!’” Facebook knows that on 3 October of that year, I was thinking of auditioning for the freshman play, and that on 4 December I was “worried about the play”. By 5 December I was “praying for the freshman play”. Combing through these early posts, a few key themes emerge: being Jewish, listening to hip-hop, and, of course, the freshman play. Nothing I post at 27 years old could be more banal or embarrassing than whatever I posted at 14. Why quit now? Many of my friends have left Facebook for Instagram or Twitter. So has Generation Z. (I guess “Generation Climate Disaster” doesn’t really roll off the tongue.) But me? I’m still on Facebook with the Baby Boomers. I never saw the appeal of Instagram, where people post pictures of food I’m not eating and beaches I’m not lounging on, like they’re running their own personal Fyre Festivals. Twitter is like having a conversation with a friend over coffee, except that you can only talk for six seconds at a time, your

friend hates you, and the coffee is poisoned. Also, the café is full of Nazis. Facebook, too, is terrible. I don’t like that my data was harvested by Cambridge Analytica. I don’t like that the company manipulates my newsfeed to conduct psychological experiments. I’m not so troubled by the fake Russian troll accounts —have you seen their posts? — but I’m sickened by the platform’s role in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Nonetheless, Facebook and I have a history. It knows where I went to school, what movies I like, and who I’ve dated. It knows where I’ve

been, which politicians I support, and could pick my face out of a crowd. Much of this information I have given over willingly. (Much — but not all.) Facebook has a record of my entire adolescence. What would happen to that data — which is to say, my memory — if I left the site completely? And then there are the unexpected ways the platform has insinuated itself into my life. Take the birthday feature, for example. I can imagine that in the olden days, you might take the time to memorise your friends’ birthdays, or at least write them into your papyrus day-planner. I’ve

never had a need for that. Facebook remembers my friends’ birthdays for me. Better yet, Facebook remembers mine. Every year since I was 14, I could count on receiving dozens, if not hundreds, of posts on my birthday, from close friends and distant acquaintances alike. I’d go 364 days without thinking of my pre-school playmate, or my high school French teacher, but then, on my birthday, they’d suddenly materialise. Better yet — they’d wish me well! A funny thing happened on my birthday last December. I woke up, checked Facebook, and was surprised to ﬁnd that I hadn’t yet received any birthday posts. I have friends in foreign time zones, and could usually depend on a handful of posts appearing overnight. I didn’t think much of it until 9.00am rolled around, then 10. Still nothing. I’d received texts and phone calls from close friends and family but nothing was happening online. I checked Facebook again. My birthday was still listed. What was happening? Where was my high school French teacher? My younger sister informed me that people just weren’t using Facebook anymore. That might have explained the drop in birthday posts. But zero? By late afternoon I was despairing. I’d planned to spend the day walking to my favourite bookstores, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave the apartment. I would have settled for a single post. Zero was intolerable. What had happened to me over the past year? I had let my relationships deteriorate. In splitting my time between the Midwest and the East Coast, I had neglected friends in both places. I’d grown selfish and antisocial. I spent too much time alone. In devoting myself to writing, I had forsaken human connection. By sundown I was reevaluating my entire life. That evening, on my way to meet my girlfriend for dinner, a friend texted to wish me happy birthday. She would have posted on my wall, she wrote, but Facebook wouldn’t let her. That’s when I remembered: I had disabled that feature months ago. Only I could post on my wall. It was like a twist out of Maupassant, except there was no moral and I hadn’t learned anything. But there was irony. I had disabled my wall in an effort to use the site less. My plan was for a slow withdrawal: ﬁrst I’d prevent friends from posting, then gradually I’d stop posting myself, until I became a digital hermit and abandoned the platform entirely. At dinner, sitting across from my candlelit girlfriend, sharing a plate of highly-edible chickpea fritters, I put my phone away and vowed to leave the site by my 28th birthday. We’ll see how that goes. I still have a few weeks left. ○

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Now in its fourth year, Esquire Townhouse rolled into St Jamesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, London, in October, bringing Britainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most stylish and sophisticated magazine to life, with celebrity interviews, expert masterclasses, exclusive supper clubs, drinks, screenings and more. Over the following 20 pages we celebrate the best of the Townhouse from 2019. Feeling left out? Join us next year

Event scheduling and reporting by Will Hersey and Tom Macklin Additional reporting: Annie Simon. Special thanks: Max Lewis Photographs by Oliver Holms

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Film and TV

Alexander Skarsgård He has the talent, charm and family connections that might suggest becoming one of the industry’s most in-demand actors was easy. Not so, as the Swede explained in his own disarming way

Acting was never Alexander Skarsgård’s childhood dream, but being the son of one of Sweden’s best-known actors, Stellan Skarsgård, naturally exposed him to the industry. At 13, he landed the lead role in the Swedish film, Hunden som log [The Dog that Smiled]. Suddenly, Skarsgård was being recognised in the street, but fame didn’t agree with him: “It’s an awkward age when you’re 13 for any kid and I just wanted to be normal.” Skarsgård quit acting completely and it was eight years before he found his way back. After a stint in drama school, he starred in a Swedish theatre production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? Hollywood wasn’t even in the game plan at that point. In fact, Skarsgård’s first taste of international appeal came about by accident. The actor was visiting his father on set in America, when his father’s manager asked if he wanted to go to an audition. “I thought that sounded fun,” Skarsgård remembers, “mostly because it was a great story to tell my friends back home: ‘I was in Hollywood and I went to an audition.’” The audition was for Zoolander. “It was a very surreal experience,” he admitted. “Ben Stiller was in the room. I got the part. They flew me business class, which I’d never flown before, and put me up in a nice hotel.” (Skarsgård was a model in the iconic “gas fight” scene.) “It was pretty nice, but it also gave me a very warped idea of life in Hollywood. I remember thinking, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll go back to Hollywood, it’s super-easy.’” So Skarsgård moved to Los Angeles in 2004, but his repertoire of Swedish dramas and art house productions didn’t translate into instant stardom. Three lean years followed, as he worked to find his footing in the acting world: “I realised how difficult it was, and how competitive, and that I wasn’t going to get served anything.” The actor went to countless open auditions with no success. “It was quite demoralising,” Skarsgård admits. By 2007, he was completely disillusioned and ready to move back to Sweden when David Simon’s Generation Kill, Skarsgård’s most significant break, finally landed. “It was some of the best writing I’ve ever

Right: Alexander Skarsgård spoke to Esquire contributing editor Paul Wilson on the Saturday night of the Townhouse

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Esquire Townhouse

‘[During my first three years as an actor] I realised how difficult it was, and how competitive, and that I wasn’t going to get served anything’ read,” he said, and crucially, they were looking for unknown actors. That was the turning point; True Blood came knocking before Generation Kill had even wrapped, offering him the role of Eric Northman, the Vikingvampire-bad-boy that sent him into a whole new orbit. Since then it’s been a busy time for Skarsgård who starred in David Yates’s The Legend of Tarzan, and whose performance in Big Little Lies won him a spate of awards. Currently filming The Stand, he is following his brother Bill (of Pennywise fame) by playing another notorious Stephen King villain, Randall Flagg. Being in demand has its challenges. On arriving in London for the Esquire Townhouse, he told someone: “It’s great to be back in Los Angeles.” “It was my ‘Hello, Cleveland!’ moment,” he later confessed. Alexander Skarsgård appeared at Esquire Townhouse as a Clarks ambassador

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Esquire Townhouse

Fashion

Kim Jones: What I’ve Learned Wisdom from the Dior Men’s artistic director’s conversation with Esquire editor-in-chief Alex Bilmes

“My childhood was quite nomadic. Ethiopia, Botswana, Ecuador, Bahamas. I was quite obsessed by nature. I was trying to catch any animal I could, like poisonous snakes, to keep them as a pet.” “The ﬁrst piece of clothing I became obsessed with was a T-shirt with a lion on which I refused to take off. I was probably about four.” “I came back to London properly at about 14 and saw magazines like The Face and i-D, and I just immediately wanted to be part of that world.” “Just after college, I met Lee McQueen — Alexander McQueen — and he was like an older brother to me. He worked like a pure artist. We didn’t really talk about work things, we’d just drive around in his car listening to Shalamar and having a laugh and go out to clubs and pretend to be builders. He’d always talk about me which I thought was incredibly generous. And from that I work with quite a lot of young designers and I support them.” “It’s very intense when we work because I’m very fast and I know exactly what I like and generally the collections don’t change from the minute that we start them till the end. We’re working on three or four collections at a time. The pace is very fast.” “What McLaren and Westwood did together was the most exciting, modern thing ever. The fact that they could take a school blazer from John Lewis and then turn it into this really avant-garde punk thing is just the coolest.”

“One thing I love about Christian Dior is that he was a gallerist before he was a couturier, and he worked with Picasso and Salvador Dali. That was a really interesting thing to bring into the world of Dior because it’s so inherent in him.” “I really love Kanye [West], and it’s interesting to see what he’s doing now because he was talking about it back then. I admire that vision of someone where they have that constant ﬂow going forwards.” “I don’t like the word ‘streetwear’. When I had my own label, I think ‘sportswear’ was more appropriate — American sportswear, which includes tailoring. So I was mixing it all up and I think that’s what people liked.” “I think people in London take risks. There is that thing of just going out and doing it. I don’t know if it’s coming from a small island that makes people do that. Japan’s also quite similar.” “Fashion is an art-versus-commerce conversation. I’m a commercial artist — more Warhol than an avant-garde painter.” “I love facts and sales ﬁgures. I go to every store around the world when I’m in a place and meet the people that work in there and ask them what customers want, because in the end you’re working for the customer.” “I’ve always had that thing where I think, ‘The worst someone will say to you is “no”.’ I’ve always thought big. I don’t know why — it’s just in me.”

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Books

John Lanchester: writings on The Wall When an author’s dystopian novel starts to read like non-ﬁction

“I kept having this sort of recurring dream,” novelist and journalist John Lanchester said about the genesis of his fifth novel, while in conversation with fellow writer Andrew O’Hagan (left and right, below). “It started with an image of a bloke standing on a wall. Alone. At night.” “Literally a dream?” O’Hagan queried. “Literally a dream,” Lanchester confirmed with a nod. It was only after several nights of dreaming the same scene that Lanchester began to imagine the wider story around it. Implicit in this one image was a world existing in the aftermath of catastrophic climate change. Joseph Kavanagh, Lanchester’s protagonist, is a young “Defender” stationed on “The Wall”, a concrete structure surrounding the entirety of the British coast. In a form of compulsory national service, the Defenders are enlisted to prevent the “Others” — desperate migrants that populate the surrounding seas — from crossing the border. In the current climate, O’Hagan noted, this perhaps hits a little too close for comfort: “It feels that the terra firma of the book is very recognisable. It feels like it could be now, and it could be here.” Indeed, what sets The Wall apart is how close its dystopian “future” seems. The world a degree or so warmer, isolationism in full force, a fear of migrants: you’ve stepped right into Lanchester’s dream. Perhaps this place is so recognisable because it isn’t that much of a stretch. This frightening closeness to reality is something of which Lanchester is well aware. “I’m fine with it being called dystopian, but in my head [The Wall] was something actually slightly darker, because it was almost like a form of non-fiction.” And yet, Lanchester started writing the book well before some of the key events that make it feel contemporary; before Extinction Rebellion dominated headlines, before Brexit (Lanchester went back to doublecheck dates), before Trump had even mentioned his own wall. Looking back now, Lanchester revealed, “If you’d asked me if I was thinking about climate change, I’d have said no, not particularly.” Lanchester noted that although climate change is real and is here, “the people who are most severely affected haven’t been born yet. They’re the unborn poor of the world near the equator. And that’s a new thing in human history: to take radical action to change our lives for the benefit of people who don’t yet exist.” He believes the uniqueness of this problem presents the arts with a crucial role to play: “to imagine those people into being and to imagine the consequences of not acting in order to prompt us to act.”

Opening night

Breitling dinner We celebrated the launch of this year’s event with contributors and friends, toasting the occasion with Pommery Champagne and giving our guests the chance to have a ﬁrst look inside the Esquire Townhouse

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Esquire Townhouse

1. Esquire’s Will Hersey and actor Aki Omoshaybi 2. Model Daisy Lowe and Gavin Murphy, MD Breitling UK 3. Ballet dancer Eric Underwood and model Erin O’Connor 4. Actor Will Poulter 5. Actor Dean Charles Chapman, actress/model Anna Brewster and actor Joe Doyle 6. Alex Bilmes, editor-in-chief of Esquire, welcoming guests 7. Tennis player Johanna Konta, fashion designer Tan France and husband Robert France 8. Actress Eleanor Tomlinson and Esquire’s Tom Macklin 9. Nicholas Cullinan, artistic director of the National Portrait Gallery 10. Esquire’s Johnny Davis and Catherine Hayward 11. Actors Wendell Pierce and Dominic West

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Film and TV

Edgar Wright: my life on screen Ahead of his upcoming ﬁlm, Last Night in Soho, the celebrated British director spoke to broadcaster Alex Zane about his very ﬁrst hit

It says something that we had to bend the Townhouse health and safety rules to cram everyone into this conversation with the British film-maker. In association with Fairmont, Wright went through all his films from Shaun of the Dead to Baby Driver, but was eager to return to where it all started 20 years ago, with sitcom Spaced. “I’m still incredibly proud of the show. And it’s funny. Like the other day, I watched some of it and I hadn’t watched it for maybe 10 years. I can say this because I didn’t write it — Simon [Pegg] and Jess [Hynes] wrote that one — but I was just in awe of how many jokes are in it. I remember I was texting Simon and Jess about something else and I said, ‘Hey, I just watched episode two from the ﬁrst series again, I always thought that was one of the weaker ones but my God, it was crammed full of jokes.’ “It’s easy for me to enjoy it because it reminds me of such a great time that we had. And it’s that weird thing where the making of the show and my own life have sort of started to blend together in my head. We felt that other ‘youthy’ sort of sitcoms around at the time all seemed to be written by people who were 20–30 years older than the characters. And I think the thing

with Spaced is because we were all in our mid-twenties and were all living in North London when we made it, it felt very authentic. “It was low-budget enough that Channel Four were like, ‘Oh yeah, ﬁne, whatever’, which is again, unusual. I feel kind of spoiled by it in a way because I think that because we had a low budget and there were maybe low expectations, we could just get away with anything. And then it was on in between Friends and Frazier on a Friday night, which is really strange. “I do think if I were coming up now, would I have had that opportunity to be that experimental and ambitious with a sitcom? And would it be on network TV on a Friday night? You know? It also didn’t outstay its welcome and we didn’t get bored of doing it. And so it’s a really sort of happy time. The fact that we’re all still friends is a big part of that. “But I also like the fact that it never grew stale. That’s not to say that if Simon and Jess wanted to do something else with it — they absolutely could, and they have that right to. But there’s something about just leaving those characters kind of crystallised in amber, just at the end of that second series. I don’t know, I mean, I’m so proud of those 14 episodes.”

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Film

How to write (and sell) that script Our screenwriting panel with Fairmont brought together a range of voices to pass on their industry insight

IF IN DOUBT, SHOOT IT YOURSELF

YOU’RE ALREADY A SCREENWRITER

MAKE PITCHING PERSONAL

YOU HAVE ENOUGH LIFE EXPERIENCE

Craig Roberts, actor, writer/ director, Eternal Beauty

Daisy Haggard, creator/ actor, Back To Life

Dustin Lance Black, Oscarwinning screenwriter of Milk

Lynn Renee Maxcy, staff writer, The Handmaid’s Tale

Shoot with your friends. Filmic Pro is an app and costs £15. Sean Baker shot Tangerine on it and it shoots in 4k. The biggest room in the world is the internet so just put it on there.

You can think you’re not following a structure, but it’s ingrained. You just feel the moment where a character needs to have more drive or something needs to happen — you feel your way.

The executives you’re pitching to have heard every idea there is. What they’re looking for is the one person to tell that story. So start by telling them who you are in relation to your story.

Obviously, I didn’t grow up in where The Handmaid’s Tale’s set, but there was a lot from my own life and the lives of my friends that I was able to put on screen.

Film

Asif Kapadia: documenting fame Below: Asif Kapadia was interviewed on Friday night at the Townhouse, in association with Fairmont

The Oscar-winner on his quest for rare, unseen footage

Listening to the Oscar-winning film-maker behind Amy, Senna and Diego Maradona, it became clear that making great documentaries requires the optimism, resilience and persuasiveness of a serial entrepreneur. But, above everything else, it starts with tracking down that all-important footage. “In 1981, Maradona’s agent has this idea, ‘Let’s film him, make a movie, sell it in America and get loads of sponsorship’. Someone finds a cameraman and they went off with the tapes which end up in a back room somewhere. “There are these tapes that we found outside Naples. Rumour is that there are more, and that his ex-wife Claudia has got all of his memorabilia. We interviewed Claudia and I was like, ‘I heard you might have some footage?’ “She said, ‘I don’t know, there might be something in the back room.’ We go in and there’s a huge trunk. We open it — it’s full of tapes sticking together, because it’s so humid in Buenos Aires. So I say, ‘Can I digitise the material to save it for future generations?’ And eventually she agreed. “People who are mad Maradona fans, who feel like they've seen everything, there’s loads that they’ve never seen, that we found on those tapes.” Diego Maradona is out now on DVD

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101

Music

Tracey Thorn on ‘Missing’ The Everything But The Girl singer and Miranda Sawyer deconstructed the group’s biggest hit

Everything But The Girl released the song “Missing” on their Amplified Heart album in 1994. “You know, we thought ‘Missing’ was a hit when we wrote it, honestly,” Thorn conﬁded, “and when it didn’t quite happen, we were disappointed.” But after the album’s release, there came a slew of remixes and Thorn was excited by the prospect: “When you hand something over for a remix it’s that sort of purest form of

collaboration, really, in that there is no compromise. I think we found it quite liberating.” Todd Terry’s version, produced for American clubs, took off and hit the charts. It was an uncomplicated mix that changed very little compared to some alternatives, but it worked. Thorn admits it was, “slightly unexpected. Certainly when it came in no one went, ‘Oh, that’s a smash hit’. People just went, ‘Oh, that’s a good mix for the US clubs. It’s good, basic; it’ll do the job.’”

Does Thorn ever begrudge its success? “No I never, ever resent it… It’s a brilliant mix. It’s an absolute banger. I’m incredibly grateful to it. “Todd’s very kind when he talks about it,” she continued. “He says, ‘Oh, man, I didn’t do much, they did everything: they wrote the song, they did the production. I just made it dance’, which is great. And you know, making it dance was what made the difference… And yeah, actually I danced to it not that long ago.”

Wine

Luca Dusi’s great taste Discovering Italian wine with a man who knows all about it

Above: Tracey Thorn, right, talking with Miranda Sawyer Left: Passione Vino’s wine guy Luca Dusi

Passione Vino is Luca Dusi’s wine shop in Shoreditch, now also an atmospheric bar and restaurant, but it may as well be his personal mantra. “I believe you should do what you know and in the best possible way. We want to get into the deep, obscure, unknown producers.” It stocks 75 independent, artisanal Italian winemakers, each of which must pass three tests before hitting Dusi’s shelves: he needs to love the wine; he must like the producer and their principles; and feel a good “energy” about the way they do things. Tell Dusi the occasion for which you need a bottle, what you’re eating, who you’re drinking with and how much you want to spend and he’ll deliver three options: a classic/safe bet, a thoughtful alternative, and a curveball. For Esquire Townhouse, he reappraised some of the more misunderstood Italian wines — Prosecco, Valpolicella, rosé and even Lambrusco — to show these modern producers’ capabilities. “My favourite area right now is Valtellina, a tiny valley near the Alps [in Lombardy]. They’re all young producers, mountaineers, very vigorous,” he says. “The vineyards are very small terraces and you feel the hard work that goes into it and the passion is beyond belief.” It’s a feeling Dusi understands.

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Around the House Away from the main stages, there was much to explore in the rooms of 10–11 Carlton House Terrace. Here’s a whistle-stop tour:

Breitling Loft The Breitling Loft space showcased Breitling’s three worlds — Air, Land and Sea — highlighting the brand’s most revered collections alongside an exhibition of iconic timepieces from the Thirties to the present day.

The Grooming Room with Sebastian Professional

An explorer’s life

Our pop-up grooming salon, in partnership with Sebastian Professional, provided complimentary styling sessions with expert barbers from Hob Salons while showcasing the newest Sebastian Professional products for men.

Mark Wood hosted an intimate talk about the ups and downs of life as a professional adventurer in association with CUPRA, touching on how guests can take some of these lessons to redeﬁne their own outlook.

Berry Bros & Rudd gin tasting

CUPRA car service

London’s oldest wine and spirit merchant launched its No 3 gin in 2010, the name referring to the company’s historic St James’s premises. During its special tasting, guests were shown how to perfect a classic martini.

Marking a ﬁrst for this year’s event, official car sponsor CUPRA ran a car concierge desk for Townhouse guests over the three days, allowing the chance for a free ride while inspecting this new performance car brand up close.

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Esquire Townhouse

B&O screenings

Highland Park x Esquire

As our sound and vision partner, Bang & Olufsen provided all of the screens within the Townhouse, with the lounge bar showing ﬁlms Vertigo and Blade Runner 2049, as well as the Rugby World Cup and Premier League football.

Our whisky partner Highland Park created an Esquire single cask to toast the Townhouse, which was unveiled at a series of special tastings hosted by Martin Markvardsen, Highland Park’s global brand ambassador. (See page 52.)

Personal styling with Harvey Nichols

The Breitling Lounge

The department store set up shop in Townhouse this year with its very own pop-up space, where guests could browse the Esquire Editor’s Choice collection and receive personal styling tips and advice.

This downstairs space was a hub of Townhouse activity: a relaxed spot for a daytime coffee, and a place to enjoy something a little stronger later on, as well as hosting our opening night drinks reception.

Maltese supper club

Cocktails and Champagne

Our Taste of Malta supper club, hosted by the Maltese Tourism Authority, saw acclaimed chef Rafel Sammut showcase the best of the island’s gastro scene with classic local dishes paired with wine from the Marsovin vineyard.

The two bars were busier than ever this year, with Highland Park curating a special cocktail list including the ridiculously popular Salted Honey Old-Fashioned, while Pommery presented its Champagne bar.

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104

Drinks

Mr Lyan The award-winning cocktail house on how to create a show-stopping tipple

So you’ve ditched single-use plastics and turn off the tap while brushing your teeth, but there are other habits still to be tweaked. Even making cocktails. At Townhouse, Mr Lyan Studio shared its recipe for an easy whisky drink guaranteed to hit the spot, sustainably. Here’s how: make some infused syrup by boiling a one-to-one ratio of sugar and water with four chopped up apple cores and four black cardamom pods. Simmer for three minutes, turn off the heat and add some mint stems, agitating them a bit in the mixture. Leave to cool before passing through a sieve. Infusing is a great way to use up your food waste creatively, and using dried herbs and spices ensures you cut spoilage from fresh produce. Choose a British-made whisky such as Highland Park to lower the carbon footprint of your drink. In a glass, pour in 45ml whisky, 10ml Great British Dry Vermouth, 10ml of the infused syrup. Add a dash of Angostura and Reagan’s Orange Bitters each. Add ice, give it a stir and serve with thin slices of apples.

Above: Mr Lyan Studio’s sustainable whisky cocktail Opposite: R.E.M.’s Mike Mills and Michael Stipe spoke on the Thursday night of Esquire Townhouse

Music

R.E.M.: remembering ‘Monster’ 25 years on

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Michael Stipe: We wanted to tour and had just released our two most famous records (Out of Time and Automatic for the People) and were on a different level now. But they were really quiet records. So we needed a record that was loud and raw and had swagger, some chutzpah. And what we wound up doing is going back to our love of glam rock — Slade, Bowie, New York Dolls, The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, T Rex and Marc Bolan. Mike Mills: A lot of the things that we did on this record and on the tour were kind of a wink and a nod to our fans about, “Well, yes, we’re huge, but it’s kind of silly and we all know that”. So I said, “I’m going to wear the most outrageous suits.” And that’s perfect for this. MS: I had gone from being recognisable on the street to people that were around our age and loved music, to being recognised by everyone. Every granny. Every old guy in a cab. But I was in my thirties so I was ready for it. MM: When you have four people in the band, you will often have two who believe one thing and two who believe in another. Our producer Scott Litt was strong enough and smart enough for us to trust him in all those situations in the studio. So when he asked if he could have another shot at it [Greg Calbi also remastered the album for the anniversary box set] we listened. MS: From 1989 to 1994, there were seismic shifts happening culturally, politically, socially, and certainly in music and in pop culture. Suddenly, we were insanely famous. So we were trying to address all these things, without losing the respect of ourselves first, but also without losing the respect of all those people, like Nirvana, who had spoken about how much they loved R.E.M. MM: The song “Let Me In” [about the death of Kurt Cobain] has enormous importance to us. And a lot of other people. He was a friend of ours, but he was an icon to millions of people. MS: As long as there are teenagers who feel alienated and alone and pissed off about the world, then Kurt’s going to represent something very profound. MS: I used the phrase, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” as a symbol of confusion and chaos, which is where this guy finds himself. I’m not a great fiction writer, but I think I’m a good, and sometimes great, fiction writer of short pop lyrics. I’m able to flesh out an entire arc of a narrative. Ask any question you want about any of those characters within the canon of the 31 years that we wrote and I’ll tell you the backstory. MS: I decided for the promotion of the record to publicly announce my sexuality, which slotted very nicely. And so we had a new look: Mike had his suits, I was queer as fuck and the whole world knew it. Those who hadn’t figured it out yet — I’m sorry. But there it was, and away we went. And we had a great year on tour. The Monster 25th Anniversary box set is out now at remhq.com

Michael Stipe and Mike Mills came to the Esquire Townhouse to mark the 25th anniversary reissue of R.E.M.’s classic album Monster, ﬁrst released in a massive year for music and which saw the band at the height of its powers — and fame — as the singer and bassist remembered while in conversation with DJ Matt Everitt

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106

Business

How heritage brands stay relevant As part of our St James’s series, Helen Brocklebank, CEO of Walpole, the ofﬁcial sector body for UK luxury, chaired a panel of three great British brands which have successfully adapted to modern demands

BUILD A COMMUNITY

CURATE A BRAND EXPERIENCE

ALWAYS BE RELEVANT

Jon Graham, CEO, Floris

Jess McGuire-Dudley, global marketing and design director, John Smedley

Tim Little, owner and creative director, Grenson

When you’ve been making products for 300 years, people want to buy into that product, and you want to make sure they understand the blood, sweat, and tears that are going into it. And that global community of people, on social media, who champion your brand is really important.

Make sure you can experience the same brand values shopping online or in stores. The consumer wants to be able to get things whenever they want them. But they still want to have an experience; the ﬁrst touchpoint might be social media but often it’s the store experience that seals that deal.

Don’t start with heritage, start with what’s relevant today. What do people want to buy? Don’t be strangled by your heritage and don’t ever become a museum brand. People buy a product because they love it. They don’t buy just because of the heritage; the heritage is a bonus, not the reason to purchase.

Food

Stevie Parle: Pasta Master The Pastaio ace on the pasta renaissance

Stevie Parle’s Pastaio is a love letter to his favourite food. The chef and owner of Rotorino, Craft London and Palatino added the no-reservations fresh pasta restaurant to his portfolio in 2017 and it has thrived ever since, with a new branch opening in Westﬁeld London. “I’m just trying to look after people, and feed people, and make them feel restored,” he said, “and pasta is immensely comforting, and delicious, and just works.” One of the things Parle was keen to do with Pastaio was to make a high quality but accessible restaurant. “When I’m making pasta, I can use the produce that I use in Craft, which has a tasting menu at £75, but I can make it work so you can have the meals for £6, and it’s fast and it’s delicious and everyone likes it.” And yes, everyone loves it. Even salad-lovers are on the look-out for high-quality cheat meals. “If you’re going to eat pasta, you want it to be

really, really good. No one wants that studenty stodge, so you’re going to eat pasta at Pastaio and it’s a massive treat.” To bring a little more Pastaio to your home-cooked meals, try to take the time to make fresh pasta, a process he took people through at this year’s Townhouse. “It’s not an everyday thing,” Parle acknowledges, “it takes time and you’ve got to luxuriate in that and enjoy the process, but I think that’s really important.” Beyond that, avoid these ultimate pasta-making sins: too small a saucepan of water, too little salt in the water, overcooked pasta, and too little sauce to serve. His favourite pasta dish? “I was really hungover yesterday and I went to Pastaio and had carbonara,” he smiles, where the dish is made with guanciale (cured pork cheeks), Kentish eggs, pecorino, Parmesan and black pepper. “And, oh my God, it sorted me right out.”

Above: Stevie Parle cooks for Townhouse guests as part of Saturday night’s schedule

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108

Books

Adam Kay: humour with a purpose The bestselling author spoke about the state of the NHS and the strangeness of selecting an actor to play himself

You’re probably very aware of Adam Kay and his book This is Going to Hurt — 1.5m people have read it, after all – and two years on it’s still on The Sunday Times bestseller list. “It still feels utterly surreal,” said Kay. Compiled from the diaries he kept when working as a junior doctor, the memoir/love letter/cry-for-help draws both laughs and tears. “It was kind of ﬂogged as a funny book,” Kay commented, “but by the nature of the job, it can’t ever just be funny stuff. Actually, it’s quite a sad book.” But it is an accurate representation of the job and Kay has a purpose: “I’m very lucky and honoured to have a loud voice, in a way that most doctors don’t, and if I can help in some way then that’s what I think I need to do.” Kay published that ﬁrst book as a defence of junior doctors after they were criticised during their 2016 strikes. Since then, he’s drawn attention

to the lack of mental health support and training provided to healthcare professionals. “It’s a stiff upper lip culture — you’re a bloody doctor and you bloody get on with it,” but that culture has to change to solve the staff retention crisis in the NHS, Kay said. His second memoir, Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas, featuring the festive cuts of his diaries, is out now and Kay is currently working on the script for the TV adaptation of This is Going to Hurt. “It’s really weird to be in some horrible BBC basement having these discussions which are like standard dinner party questions: ‘Who would play you in the ﬁlm version of your life?’” Does he have an answer? “I have some ideas, but I don’t want to say them out loud in case I jinx them,” he demurs. Kay won’t go back to practising medicine, “But I deﬁnitely see myself going back in a teaching capacity or policy-creating capacity. And I think when life is a bit quieter that’s something I would enjoy doing.”

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Adventure

Ben Fogle: the hardest thing I’ve ever done The broadcaster, writer, adventurer and Breitling ambassador reﬂected on the gruelling ordeal of rowing across the Atlantic with James Cracknell

“At the time, I’d never experienced anything like that, not on that scale of deprivation. We were at sea for two months, rowing two hours on, two hours off, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “I don’t think a smile was broken the whole way across, but it remains one of my proudest achievements. People want to know which was harder — rowing the Atlantic, climbing Everest, or walking to the South Pole — and all of them had their own hardships. But where Everest had moments of complete beauty, I don’t recall any of those on the Atlantic. I just remember a really grumpy Olympian shouting at me.

“We capsized halfway across. There was a huge storm. I was on the oars very early one morning and we got pitchpoled. By this stage, we’d become incredibly complacent, we’d stopped wearing life jackets or safety harnesses. I found myself in the water with nothing, just my emergency watch. “The boat was upturned, no sign of James. Somehow, I got back to the boat and was able to right it. I was ready to pull that emergency beacon to summon the rescue. We’d lost our solar panels, our water desalinaters. We’d lost our stove, satellite phone, navigation — everything

was lost. And James chucked a wet towel at me and said, ‘Right, you’ve got ﬁve minutes to pull yourself together and get back on the oars before we lose our position in the race’. [I was] like, what? “But it was the best decision we could have made, because that night 10 boats capsized. Amazingly our boat was intact; lots of them shattered. But we got through it. It’s the old cliché, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. I realised that who you are is all in the mind, and if you have conﬁdence about what you can do, you can achieve unbelievable things.”

Food

The Ginger Pig The capital’s most celebrated butcher shared some wisdom on how to raise your steak game Master butchers The Ginger Pig hosted a steak dinner with a difference. George Donnelly (pictured far left), manager at The Ginger Pig Borough Market and butchery class instructor, showed guests how to break down a rib and loin of beef, demonstrating the origins of each cut and the particular qualities when cooked. He also compared different ages, from a minimum 28-day aged steak up to a 45-day, which offers a much richer, more intense flavour. There’s a fad, he said, for taking ageing to extremes — over 100 days — though the result is definitely an acquired taste. Rump emerged as the most misunderstood and underrated cut. Cooked correctly, it can be the most tender and flavoursome of all. It’s also founder Tim Wilson’s favourite, a man who should know. Buy a whole “six slice”, cook it as one piece in a pan, rest, then slice thinly to serve. You can buy online or book a butchery course of your own at thegingerpig.co.uk

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110

Art

How to grow your collection Our art panel with St James’s examined how to navigate the market as a new collector in 2020

FIND THE BEST AND MOST REPUTABLE GALLERIES

THE ART APP THAT CONNECTS YOU TO A NEW GENERATION OF ARTISTS

BUY WHAT YOU LOVE

Matthew Slotover, co-founder, Frieze

Robert Sheffield, chairman, Serpentine Future Contemporaries

Stefano Amoretti, contemporary art specialist, Christie’s

There are over 100 great galleries in London who put on free shows. At London Frieze Masters, almost all the good galleries in Britain apply and we have a three-day selection process to choose the best ones. So if you want to know what the best galleries are, look down the list of participants in Frieze fairs.

A good place to start would be those young galleries in East London. There’s an app called “See Saw” that tells you what’s on. Download that and go and meet the gallerists, and they’ll happily chat to help. Whereas if you want to go to Mayfair and speak to the big gallery owners, it’s not going to happen.

At Christie’s, we strongly advise you to buy something you can enjoy and, ultimately, contemporary art is a commodity we want to consume as much as possible. I would say it’s quintessentially dangerous to buy as pure investment.

Wine

A sommelier speaks Pierre-Marie Faure, the newly appointed head sommelier at Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, hosted an introductory masterclass to drinking better wine, more of the time

“Where there is a sommelier, trust them,” Faure advised, but also to be direct about your tastes and budget. If choosing wines yourself, “try not to look at the mainstream areas” and also look to experiment more with your food pairings; use “the sparkliness of Champagne to balance fattiness”, and in summertime if you have “burrata or something with tomato you can play a bit with rosé”. “In general, we serve white wine too cold and red wine too warm,” said Faure. He recommended serving white between 10–14°C and red under 20°C. And don’t forget to “put every young wine in a carafe, white or red, to make them breathe a little bit” before you serve.

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Sport

Ben Ainslie’s sail of the century The most successful sailor in Olympic history has a new focus — to lead the ﬁrst British victory in the America’s Cup for 170 years

It’s fair to say something happens to Ben Ainslie’s personality when he gets in a boat. His friend and fellow Team GB sailor Iain Percy once described him as “the most competitive man in the world”. It may have been different if his family hadn’t moved to Cornwall when he was a child. There was an adventurous spirit in his parents, both sailors, and his father captained a yacht in the 1973 Whitbread Round the World Race. Perhaps his formative memory is as an eight-year-old, being plonked into a second-hand Optimist dinghy in a duffel coat and wellies — no life jacket — and told by his dad that they were going to the pub which was two miles up the creek and that they’d see him there for lunch. “I hadn’t really sailed a dinghy on my own before. I turned back to him and said, ‘What happens if I capsize?’ He said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, you’ll be all right’,” Ainslie remembers. At the local yacht club he capsized more than everyone else, which his coaches soon realised was a good thing — he sailed on the edge. At 19, he won an Olympic silver, missing gold at the hands of world number one Robert Scheidt, but an early lesson was learnt on the art of winning. He picked up gold in the next four consecutive Olympic Games, his last in London.

Above: Sir Ben Ainslie, left, talking to ‘Don't Tell Me the Score’ podcast host Simon Mundie

When it comes to pressure, he puts one factor above all others: preparation. “If you’re going into a high-pressure scenario and you know you’ve done everything you possibly can, that makes a big, big difference.” The other is relishing being in those situations: “That’s why I compete, because the harder it is and the greater the challenge, then the more I enjoy it.” Next, he skippered Team Oracle USA to what might be the greatest sporting comeback of all-time in the 2013 America’s Cup. “That’s the first time I ever heard of anyone watching sailing in the pub. It was definitely a transformative moment in our sport.” And now, with the Jim Ratcliffe-backed Team INEOS, he is preparing to fulfill a lifelong dream to win the America’s Cup for Britain in New Zealand in 2021. “These boats are lifting up out of the water on foils and get close to 60mph. That’s a complete transformation in sailing terms.” The challenge is underway, requiring designers, engineers, boat builders and support staff as well as the sailors themselves to find the right formula. “It’s a massive team effort,” Ainslie says. “We’ve got to really come up with something special.” Well, if anyone can…. Sir Ben Ainslie appeared at Townhouse as a Belstaff ambassador

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112

Fitness

2020: predicting next year’s trends

Five London training brands transformed Townhouse into a luxury ﬁtness club on its ﬁnal day, giving guests the opportunity to spin, sweat and stretch. We asked each of them to predict what health trends are on next year’s horizon

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Esquire Townhouse

1. Equinox: sleep — the ﬁnal frontier We all know the importance of sleep and recovery for performance levels. Rooms at the new Equinox Hotel in New York City are soundproofed, climate-controlled and devoid of ambient light to ensure sleep conditions are as close to perfect as possible. Two more hotels are scheduled for Seattle and Los Angeles, the latter designed by Frank Gehry. Meanwhile, Equinox Kensington and St James’s offer sleep coaching, using medically approved methods, a little closer to home. equinox.com

2. Third Space: introducing the mind gym Creating spaces that cater for both physical and mental wellbeing has been a key focus in ﬁtness. Third Space’s new Islington club offers guided meditations in purpose-built quiet rooms to help members relax and recover. It also offers ‘Little Space’, a dedicated zone for children featuring a custombuilt athletic rig and group activities including gymnastics, football and martial arts. So while you unwind, the kids get a run-out. thirdspace.london

3. BXR London: the niche fitness retreat Dedicating a week of valuable holiday time to health and fitness is a growing trend, focusing on specialist skills and themes to make real progress in a short time. Anthony Joshua’s specialist boxing gym BXR will partner with Daios Cove Luxury Resort and Villas to open its first fitness retreat on Crete, giving guests the chance to hone skills and build stamina in sunny surroundings. There will be eight week-long retreats throughout the year, across seasons, with the opportunity to work with trainers on bespoke programmes. bxrlondon.com

4. Boom Cycle: feel-good ﬁtness

Wellness

As the mental side of health increasingly attracts attention, so the moodlifting beneﬁts of exercise are becoming more tailored. At Boom Cycle, workouts are geared towards elevating mood and supporting mental wellbeing through a rush of endorphins, addictive beats and a high-energy environment. Next year, the spin class specialists will be collaborating with the suicide prevention charity, Campaign Against Living Miserably to support its mental health work. boomcycle.co.uk

Intermittent fasting

5. Blok London: the holistic fitness class Blok recognised the goal of gym-goers is to be well-rounded, building strength and flexibility in equal measure, which is why it is launching “Blokmove”, a class which uses drill-based repetition to achieve progressive and sustainable improvements. Whether you can’t touch your toes or want to get stronger, it works on weaknesses to get you back in balance. In 2020, Blok will add a third studio, its first outside London, in Manchester. bloklondon.com

Above right: Justin Jacobs, Winder Ton and Sarah Ann Macklin on stage during the Townhouse’s specialist ﬁtness morning on Saturday

It’s a much-heard phrase in the health and ﬁtness sector, and our panel, part of the St James’s Series, of Winder Ton, Justin Jacobs and Sarah Ann Macklin, looked into the trend

Justin Jacobs, Tier X manager, Equinox Fitness “Intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating are extended periods of not eating. These fasting periods could be as short as 10–12 hours, or as long as a full day. The most widely used is 16:8, ie 16 hours fasting, including overnight, eight hours of regular meals. Physiological beneﬁts can include increased fat burning, reduced insulin resistance, improved body composition, increased energy and better digestion. Improved relationship with food and hunger are additional potential psychological beneﬁts. All this, plus the easy and non-restrictive nature of fasting, have made it one of the fastest growing trends in wellness.”

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Esquire Townhouse

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Books

Salman Rushdie: how I write The award-winning author this year published his 14th novel, Quichotte, inspired by the Cervantes classic Don Quixote, set in modern-day America. He spoke with broadcaster Nikki Bedi about an author’s life

“When I told my father I wanted to be a writer he said with genuine pain, ‘What will I tell my friends?’ Fortunately, he lived long enough for his friends to start calling and congratulating him and then obviously, he took the credit.” “We all have this very rich, imagined story life and then most of us grow out of it. And I think there’s a few freakish people who don’t grow out of it and they become writers.” “What I would say to Western readers about Midnight’s Children and those early books is, this isn’t fantasy, this is understatement. The real thing is so much stranger that if I put that in a book you wouldn’t believe it.” “Margaret Atwood is my old buddy and I’m happy for her that at the age of 80 she’s having

this colossal triumph. We were sending each other mischievous messages before the Booker, in which she said to me, ‘I think we’re there to represent the still-ambulatory old poops’.” “Some people, particularly very young reviewers reviewing my books, do tend to say I am prone to what they call ‘dad jokes’. That’s a new thing: they didn’t used to be ‘dad jokes’; they used to just be bad jokes.” “I like having another language up my sleeve. When you switch language, in a way, you switch character a little bit.” “I remember the ﬁrst time I was ever asked to do a book reading. A lady stood up and said, ‘Thank you, Mr Rushdie, because you have told my story’. And I almost cried. I thought, ‘God,

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

I didn’t expect the book to have that kind of effect on people’.” “You have personal fears, which are to do with growing older and I think this novel [Quichotte] is about mortality — it’s about people facing that fact which is there for all of us.” “And there’s the professional fear, which is you worry about not having another good book in you. There’s always that.” “I’m much closer to the kind of jazz version of writing than to the symphonic version. When I was younger, I needed to have the skeleton before I could put ﬂesh on it. As time has gone on, I’m much more willing to trust the moment of creation — to see what happens in the act of writing.”

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MAMMAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S BOYS Heard the one about the Frenchmen who opened an Italian restaurant in London? Somehow, what should have been a recipe for disaster became the unlikely gastronomic hit of the year By Tim Lewis Photographs by Richard Dowker

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‘The success, I believe, is due to four things: it’s good, cheap, served with a smile, and in a nice restaurant. The second any of our restaurants stop delivering this, it’s going to stop being successful’ — Victor Lugger

ON 22 FEBRUARY 2019, A NEW RESTAURANT, Gloria, opened halfway down Great Eastern Street in London’s Shoreditch. To describe it as “highly anticipated” would not be accurate. Not only was there little to suggest that Gloria would be successful or popular or good, there were hints that it could be an epic, of-the-ages case study of wrong place, wrong time. The location was great — in 2012. Now the kids had moved further east or south, and the crowd in Shoreditch is what New Yorkers would call “bridge-and-tunnel”. Gloria’s parents were Victor Lugger and Tigrane Seydoux, also known as Big Mamma. They are French but Gloria would be exuberantly Italian: Italian food, bought direct from small-scale Italian producers, served by Italian staff. These are confounding times to be a cosmopolitan, Euro-leaning business in Britain; you might have noticed, but Lugger and Seydoux didn’t seem to. And Gloria would be aimed at the midmarket: an unforgiving, overcrowded sector with paper-thin margins, especially if you’re serving pizza and pasta. Ask Jamie Oliver or Pizza Express. Lugger and Seydoux wanted to throw a party to celebrate the launch of Gloria, but their public relations advisors weren’t sure. It would cost a fortune to ﬁll the restaurant, a sprawling 160-cover site spread over a ground ﬂoor and cavernous basement, and you couldn’t be sure of much publicity

Above: Big Mamma Group co-founder Tigrane Seydoux. Opposite: Gloria’s pasta al tartufo — mafalda ribbons, black Molise truffle, mascarpone and button mushrooms

from it. Serious reviewers, for certain, would have to come back another time. Lugger and Seydoux, 35 and 34 respectively, chose to ignore them. The clue is in their name: Big Mamma. The group has six relentlessly busy restaurants in Paris, as well as overseeing La Felicità food market in the 13th arrondissement, which seats more than 1,000 people in Europe’s biggest restaurant space. On Gloria’s opening night, they stockpiled bottles of limoncello like they were expecting the apocalypse and planned to drink through it. The word “Brexitalia” was hastily sprayed on what looked like a bedsheet and hung over the front door. It might as well have read, “Fuck you.” Nine months later, we are still talking about Gloria. On its first day, a Friday, a long queue snaked round the building. They served 600 diners. Day two: 700. Within four weeks, Gloria was at absolute capacity: a near-mythical state for restaurants that, even if doing improbably well, might take six months or more likely two years to attain. It would be almost unprecedented, except for the fact it has happened to the Mamma boys a few times now. Their ability to open a new restaurant, pack it and keep it packed makes them, at least in London in 2019, something close to alchemists. Not that they see it that way. “So the first day you have 600 people and, since it’s not our first restaurant and I think we know what we’re doing, people had a good time,” says Lugger, over lunch at Gloria. “These people each tell 10 people: ‘I had the most amazing dinner in that new restaurant’. So the next day there is 6,000 wanting to come. The next day there is 60,000. And the next day 600,000. By the end of the week there’s five million people who know about your restaurant. That’s how fast it goes.” Lugger wears thick-rimmed, round spectacles, and a fitted, black rollneck, just in case anyone wasn’t sure he was French. He first learned English when he was packed off to Gordonstoun boarding school in Scotland for a term when he was a teenager — “I was a real piece of shit and it did me a lot of good to come here and be a little bit bullied by all of the kids” — and moved to London two years ago with his family when the Big Mamma group was preparing to open Gloria. He goes on, “People love to talk about movies they’ve seen and restaurants they’ve been in, and slightly later they talk about their kids. Period.” Not long after opening, the reviews landed. These can be collated as: “I thought I’d hate Gloria, but…” Because there’s much aesthetically and gastronomically you might take issue with. The restaurant was designed by Lugger and Seydoux with a declared aim to recreate Capri in the Seventies: gaudy velour booths, lampshades with frilly fringes, a jungle of plants and preposterously large laminated menus. The music jumps from opera to Euro bangers like you’ve got an old man and a teenage girl in a car passive-aggressively arguing over radio stations. Even the loos are a talking point: the cubicle doors (the women’s, not the men’s) are fitted with two-way mirrors. But it is the food that is perhaps the most un-2019 thing about Gloria. There is no auteur chef behind the project, only indulgent, highcal Italian-ish staples often with groan-inducing titles. There’s Filippo’s Spicy Balls, meatballs made from slow-cooked pork and nduja; carbonara is served in a giant wheel of pecorino; pizza options include the Robert →

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Clockwise from top right: the dining room, frontage and downstairs at Gloria on Great Eastern Street, London; the interior and entrance across town at Circolo Popolare in Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia

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de Nitro. Nothing about this place isn’t a bit cheesy. Then, this summer, Big Mamma opened a second London site, a temple of Bacchanalia that made Gloria look prim and reserved. Footballpitch big, Circolo Popolare could fit 280 diners at one time. Its location, off Oxford Street in Fitzrovia, was a bit odd, but, as Lugger says, “We immediately saw we can do a fuck-off restaurant here”. The puns were perhaps even worse — who ordered the I Wanna ’Nduja? — and on the walls were 20,000 bottles of booze, an idea Lugger took from a restaurant in rural Italy. “I spend my life in restaurants and I can tell you there are not many things you can put on a wall that look good,” he says. “There is a window, there are frames, there are bottles. That’s pretty much it.” Besides, that other restaurant only had about 50 bottles on its wall. “So when we steal an idea from someone or from so many people, at least we try to do it with panache — would you say ‘panache’ in English?” Circolo Popolare didn’t quite match the buzz of Gloria, but in any other year, it would have been a stand-out London opening. Articles now proliferated attempting to explain why, when everyone else in the restaurant industry was finding life hard, Big Mamma made it look so easy. The Sunday Times’ Marina O’Loughlin asked, “Have the owners created something completely, perhaps slightly alarmingly new, verging on the subversive? Could this be the first upscale restaurant where the food is irrelevant? Because this bunch don’t open restaurants to feed people or win culinary awards, but as all-caps EVENTS.” Elsewhere, Big Mamma’s popularity was put down to the need for escapism in the Brexit age or millennials seeking out cut-price experiences or the power of Instagram in disseminating cool. I put these theories to Lugger: which does he think is most important? “In my opinion, which is very personal and with zero hindsight, because it’s my company and I work like 13 hours in these restaurants for six years, all that is…” he pauses, carefully choosing the word, “over-rationalising. Yes, you can say it’s because of Instagram, millennials, the perfect alignment of planets, but I feel there are many things here that are ephemera.” So what is it then? “We have been doing this for four-and-a-half years and every day, with no exception, we have more clients in every one of our restaurants,” he says. “The success, I believe, is due to four things: it’s good, cheap, served with a smile, [and] in a nice restaurant. The second any of our restaurants stop delivering this, it’s going to stop being successful. And the second it starts doing this again, it’s going to be successful. Every restaurant in the fucking world, and I can open another one here and another one here” — Lugger gestures out of the windows of Gloria — “if they are good, cheap, service with a smile and nice design, they will be packed. That is the reason for the success.” EATING LUNCH WITH LUGGER IS FUN BUT NOT EXACTLY RESTFUL. He is convivial, entertaining company: wry, generous and very, very opinionated. But his brain is always whirring, taking in everything around him. “This is my job: I see,” he says, and both he and Seydoux try to eat at their restaurants eight to 10 times a week. “Right now, I’ve seen 20 problems that happen today at lunch. It’s just that they are small problems so they are fine.” For example? Lugger points to a man at a table over my left shoulder. He’s alone, waiting for his companion to come back from the loos and looks to me like he’s wondering if he has enough time to check his phone, but not be caught. Lugger sees something different. “He’s waiting for his food and now it’s probably been two minutes too long,” he says. “He’s starting to think it’s too long. I’m thinking, ‘OK, it’s too long, why?’ I’m going to see what he gets as a dish and maybe I know this dish takes a long time and I’ll say, ‘It’s fine, I knew it when we conceived it, but this dish is so amazing it will offset his anger or anxiety’. But if it’s a burrata and it takes too long, we are just fucking up. And at the end he will maybe not write a review, when on →

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‘I enjoy having in my restaurant a billionaire from Abu Dhabi who buys a £500 bottle of wine. But we also have the workers from next door that come for a pizza. The mother with ﬁve kids on brunch, the foodie blogger, girls from the bank, everyone’ — Victor Lugger

the contrary if it had come faster he would have written a five-star review.” Seydoux, meanwhile, whom I had met alone a couple of weeks earlier (Lugger had been ill), is more measured, less bombastic. He, too, is handsome, with a big sweep of chestnut hair and pale skin that reminds you of Léa, his Bond girl cousin. Seydoux has stayed living in Paris, ostensibly looking after the French interests for Big Mamma, but in truth he and Lugger are inseparable, taking all decisions together. Broadly speaking, Seydoux does people and Lugger does food, but you notice after you’ve spoken to both that there is nothing substantive they don’t agree on. They met at a business school, a prestigious grande école called HEC Paris that has been turning out French politicians and intellectuals since 1881. At the time, Lugger was a music producer and Seydoux worked for one of France’s most successful entrepreneurs, but quickly they were pulled towards doing restaurants. Seydoux had a background in hospitality (his father, Jacques, managed ultra-deluxe hotels in Monaco and Paris) while Lugger was obsessive about food. Their first decision was what their places would serve. “Quite fast we went to the Italian cuisine because we love the food,” says Seydoux. “Stupid, but it’s the first reason.” Next came the business model. Most restaurateurs, Lugger and Seydoux

Above: Big Mamma Group co-founder Victor Lugger. Opposite: la gran carbonara at Gloria — spaghetti chitarra, pecorino, crispy guanciale, egg yolk, parmigiano and a lot of pepper, swirled around and served from a wheel of pecorino

started to believe, fixated on margins when what’s really important is volume. In other words, if your place is full you will make money. “It’s very simple, the restaurant industry,” explains Lugger. “If there is a queue or a waiting list, the restaurant turns profit 99 per cent of the time. If it’s empty or half-empty it’s not working. It’s simple maths.” Lugger and Seydoux were drawn to large sites: they were the riskiest but offered the greatest rewards. They would need to be in a decent neighbourhood, but not the prime spot. Now, how to control food costs and guarantee quality? They decided the only way was to work directly with producers in Italy. For a year-and-a-half, Lugger and Seydoux went back and forth, up and down the country meeting farmers. “We were going to Italy for a month, renting a car, it was quite nice!” recalls Seydoux. At the end, Big Mamma had struck deals with around 180 of them, cutting out middlemen. This might all sound a bit technical, but this early groundwork is crucial to the experience of going to any Big Mamma restaurant. Say it again: good, cheap, service with a smile, and in a nice place. Eating at Gloria feels luxurious, even decadent. Their best-selling dish is twisty ribbons of fresh mafalda pasta with mascarpone and a shower of black Molise truffle, for £18. There’s a joke that every dish comes with burrata, mozzarella’s fancy creamand-curd-laced cousin, and half a dozen do. Yet the average spend in Gloria is around £25 per head. (Here’s another way in which Lugger and Seydoux are smart. Black truffle might seem indulgent, but it costs a fraction of the price of white truffle: “In Umbria, truffle pasta is their tomato pasta,” says Lugger. He would love to have, for example, turbot on the menu, but it would be far too expensive for the price points they want to hit.) “I enjoy having in my restaurant a billionaire from Abu Dhabi who is staying at Chiltern Firehouse and comes here on a Saturday evening and buys a £500 bottle of wine,” says Lugger. “But we also have the workers from next door that come for a pizza. And the single mother with five kids on brunch and the foodie blogger and the girls from the bank next door. Everyone.” I don’t know how many workers from the building site across the road I saw in Gloria, but it’s true that it does attract an unexpectedly diverse crowd. If you want to eat with, to pluck two recent sightings at random, Alexa Chung or David Schwimmer in London’s most-talked-about restaurant, you just have to queue, like anyone else. Good, cheap, service with a smile, in a nice place: it all starts to feel transgressively democratic. WHEN BIG MAMMA WAS STARTING OUT IN PARIS IN 2015, Seydoux liked to call his restaurants “antidepressants”. And it’s a perfect description. I’ve eaten some memorably excellent food at Gloria and Circolo Popolare — that truffle pasta; mind-blowing tiramisu — some soporific, claggy things, but I’ve never left there without a bounce in my step (apart from the time I had a massive row with my girlfriend in Circolo, but it seems unfair to blame that on Lugger and Seydoux). Perhaps it’s the house limoncello they finish the meal with, whether you want it or not, but there’s also the flirty waiters and a sense of geniality and warmth that does make you feel like you are on holiday, or certainly not in Britain. →

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“There are many restaurants where it’s going to be challenging and you’re going to learn a lot about life and about yourself,” says Lugger. “That’s not what we do. We are a trip in Italy. It’s probably going to be warm and everyone is going to be nice, the sun is going to shine and there is going to be a lot of atmosphere. You’re going to get drunk and smile and laugh and eat generous, tasty food along the way. That’s what we do. “So I’m the biggest competitor to Ryanair. Don’t write that, it’s stupid” — sorry Victor — “but that is my analysis. It’s not just millennials that want cheap, good food; everyone wants good value for money! Not just millennials.” In so many respects, Gloria and Circolo Popolare are the perfect restaurants for the Instagram age. The plates and bowls are hand-painted in eyepopping colours in ceramic workshops in Deruta, Umbria. Serious money has been spent on the interiors and then styled to look like it hasn’t been. “Look at this fabric,” says Lugger, running his fingers over the banquette on which we are sitting, which has vertical stripes of red and blue. “This looks very ugly in a small sample. You would see that and not put that in your home. It’s ugly-beautiful, but if you know Italy, you can say that’s something you could find in Italy. Creating authenticity — of course, it’s a contradiction in itself — is the hardest and funnest and greatest part of our job.” Partly the restaurants’ designs reflect Lugger and Seydoux’s personal taste. “We’re definitely not minimalist people,” says Seydoux. “We’re not Swedish.” They are also self-aware enough to know a restaurant needs a strong visual identity. But they insist it is not connected to Instagram (neither man has a personal account, though Big Mamma has 180,000 followers) and are adamant they have never spoken to consultants to make their dishes more photogenic. “We try to build restaurants and cook dishes that taste good, smell good and look good,” says Lugger. “You can be as smart as you want, but if you never wash your teeth, it’s going to be hard for you to hook up with a girl. Same with food. It has to taste good, smell good and look good, and if you do that, it will end up on Instagram.” How long Gloria will reign in London, you wouldn’t like to guess. Nowhere was hotter than the Polpo restaurants five or six years ago, but this year, as debts mounted, multiple sites closed. What makes Big Mamma think it will be any different for Gloria and Circolo Popolare? What happens when trends in food change? “No! I totally disagree,” exclaims Lugger. “Trends in food don’t change. Maybe you’ll think, ‘Oh there’s a new trend: al pastor tacos…’. I love al pastor tacos; I could feed myself with Indian food and al pastor tacos, to be honest. But it’s not a big thing. No one gives a shit about al pastor tacos apart from the three small restaurants that cook them and the press because they have to come up with new things. “People,” he goes on, “are still eating pizza, burgers, classic British food, classic French food. And, well, two-thirds of the world are eating Indian and Chinese food and some sushi. That has not changed a lot for a very, very, very long time. We can have an appointment for 10 years when maybe we fail and people ask me, ‘Why?’ Then I hope I will not tell you, ‘Oh, it’s because trends changed’. Please! In 10 years, people will still be eating Italian food. If in 10 years or tomorrow morning we fail, it’s because we are not achieving quality and consistency. And as long as we do I am very confident that we are going to fill as many restaurants as we have.” Good. Cheap. Service with a smile. Nice place. Can it really be that simple? As the limoncellos arrive, Lugger is clear-eyed that the formula is irresistible. In 2020, Big Mamma will open its first restaurant in Spain, with Seydoux moving his family to Madrid to oversee it. They have looked at more sites in London, but they weren’t quite right. “The restaurant business is both threatening and reassuring,” concludes Lugger. “It’s threatening because it’s a job that starts again every lunchtime, every dinner. But it’s very reassuring because it’s all on our shoulders. If we do our job, it’s going to work.” ○

Some of the 20,000 bottles adorning the walls at Circolo Popolare — a design feature which Lugger noticed in a small, rural Italian trattoria and expanded upon — Gloria, 54–56 Great Eastern Street, Shoreditch, London EC2A Circolo Popolare, 40–41 Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia, London W1T bigmammagroup.com

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FISHY BUSINESS The murky, moreish story of caviar

ONCE, 1976 I THINK IT WAS, I HAD A FRIEND in London who decided to celebrate selling her house with a party. The property had been completely cleared of all furniture and pictures, and was bare but for a freezer full of ice-cold bottles of vodka and a small table on which sat a kilogram tin of wild Beluga caviar. There was music, too, from a cassette player. I sat on the deep freeze with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a table knife in the other that I dug into the caviar at regular intervals, and ate the gleaming black pearls off the blade. I was delirious and deliriously happy. I knew then that I’d never have the chance to indulge in this way again. Nor have I, though God knows, I’ve tried. This gross, vulgar, happy indulgence didn’t mark the beginning of my love affair with ﬁsh eggs. I’d already inherited from my father a fondness for herring roes fried in butter, arranged on toast, doused with lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce and dusted with cayenne pepper. I’d even come across keta (salmon eggs)

and Avruga (caviar made from herring eggs). But I realised that these fruits of fishes’ reproductive systems were base metal the first time I tasted caviar from a sturgeon, when my uncle John had brought a tin of Russian caviar of unknown pedigree to share with my family. I was about 11, and feeling those tiny, fragile capsules burst softly against the roof of my mouth, letting the ethereal, buttery, seaweed-andiodine juices roll down my throat, was a moment of revelation. My childhood infatuation turned into a fullblown love affair around 1975 when I discovered the Rivoli Bar at the Ritz. In those days, it was situated below stairs in the hotel, and it used to serve foie gras sandwiches and/or caviar sandwiches plus half a bottle of Champagne for £5 at lunch. And when I say sandwiches I mean two slices of the Chorleywood bread process’s finest sliced white with a slab of foie gras pâté or a black wodge of finest Beluga stuffed between them. The crusts of the bread had been

cut off, naturally, and the slices cut diagonally, but it was that de haut en bas combination of the highest of high-end gastronomic luxury and low-caste carb that proved irresistible. I nearly bankrupted myself treating myself to these essential dainties. I wasn’t much interested in the provenance, type, quality, history or mythology of caviar back then. But that unlikely culinary masterpiece was to awaken a passion that I’ve never been able to satisfy as frequently as I would’ve liked. While the vodka-and-Beluga-fuelled house-leaving bash marked a high point in terms of caviar consumption, it wasn’t until a caviar tasting given by the eminent importers, WG White, at the Connaught Hotel in 1994, that my curiosity was seriously piqued. As one of a group of dedicated researchers (ie, slacker food writers) I worked my way through Beluga, Oscietra and Sevruga from Russia, Iran and China, nine in all, with such reﬁned discrimination, that I had what you might call an →

Reproduced from the book A Taste of America (Phaidon Press)

By Matthew Fort Illustration by Joël Penkman

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epiphany. The tasting revealed how varied caviars could be, depending on breed of sturgeon, season and feed. If my memory is correct, Oz Clarke and I decided Chinese Oscietra from a spring-caught ﬁsh, was the most complex and satisfying of those on show. More particularly, we were told two tales that encapsulated the exotic and mysterious world of caviar production. IN THOSE DAYS, THE WORLD OF CAVIAR was relatively simple. There were — and are — some 27 species of sturgeon all told in the Acipenseridae family, some only found in certain parts of the world. Although almost all have been treated as sources of the precious eggs at one time or another, three species were, and remain, the backbone of caviar production: huso huso for Beluga, Acipenser gueldenstaedtii for Oscietra and Acipenser stellatus for Sevruga. The steel grey to obsidian black Beluga was generally acknowledged as the boss caviar as the eggs are the largest. However, some connoisseurs

This was made possible, so we were told, by one of the last acts of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1983, who approved the reclassification of sturgeon as scaled fish, which as such could be handled by devout Muslims, so important was the foreign exchange earned by the export of caviar to the fledgling Islamic republic. It seemed so improbable, it must be true, and was. Even more bizarre was the tale of China’s modern caviar industry. The Chinese had never made such a thing of caviar as their Russian and Iranian neighbours, although Acipenser schrenckii and Huso dauricus were numerous in the Amur River that forms the boundary between China and Russia. Then, at the height of the Cold War in the Sixties, China decided to create a caviar industry of its own for much the same reason that the ayatollahs of Iran later did. This was easier planned than done. At the time, the Chinese and Russian armies were drawn up on either side of the Amur River, shelling each other intermittently,

of the Caspian Sea and its rivers — Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, as well as Russia and Iran — all started exercising their rights to harvest caviar. In the absence of an enforcement agency, Caspian caviar production became a true free market, in which Russian criminal gangs took a keen interest. Never exactly a transparent industry, it now became a murky free-for-all, with only Iranian caviar production maintaining any kind of integrity or quality control. Overﬁshing became rampant. Pollution took its toll. Perhaps most damaging of all, dams had been built on the Volga, Ural and Terek rivers that ﬂow into the Caspian, restricting the movements of the sturgeon. Catches on the Caspian Sea declined by 70 per cent between 1978 and 1994. The sturgeon of the Amur River eventually succumbed to the same fate as those in the Caspian. Indeed, the global situation for sturgeon became so bad that in 1998 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES)

There’s lots of money to be made — and lost — in caviar. Demand for this, the most desirable of fish eggs, like that for diamonds, always endures

preferred Oscietra, which was smaller and the colour of which ranged from dirty ivory to green through gold. It was, they said, more subtle and complex. The slate grey to charcoal black Sevruga was smaller than either, and, while not to be ignored, was generally held to be not of the same interest or quality. There was also pressed caviar made of damaged eggs that looked like tar, smelt forcefully of fish, and was prized by hard-core caviar aficionados. At the time, and, indeed, until the Nineties, 80–90 per cent of all caviar came from fish that swam wild in the Caspian Sea and the rivers that flowed into it. The production of Russian caviar was firmly controlled by its Ministry of Fisheries. The situation on the Iranian side was confused thanks to bitter squabbles between Iran’s (actually Persia back then) various rulers before the Islamic revolution of 1979. After that, it took the Shilat Trading Company, the Iranian state fishing operation, 10 years to sort out the situation and take control.

and America wasn’t talking to Russia or China because they were black-hearted communists. So, while official diplomatic relations between the three superpowers were strained, the sturgeon-fishing stations on the Chinese side of the Amur River were built by the Bechtel Corporation of America, to specifications provided by Russian experts; the whole project being financed by the Californian Sunshine Fine Foods company, thus illustrating the power of financial self-interest to overcome any obstacle. For a brief period in the Eighties, sturgeon fishing and caviar production was an orderly and relatively well-managed business. However, Caspian sturgeon were already having a tricky time thanks to poor river management, overfishing, pollution and natural happenstance, and were in steep decline. Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and with it the Ministry of Fisheries, guarantor of Russian caviar production. Suddenly, centralised control vanished and those states with coastal claims to parts

persuaded the Caspian countries and the Chinese to stop the sale of caviar from wild fish altogether. And that, by and large, is the situation today. I’m told it is possible to find caviar from poached wild fish in Iran, Russia and Azerbaijan, but if anyone offers you wild caviar, it almost certainly isn’t; and even if it is, you shouldn’t be buying it. It’s caviar from farmed fish all round. Farming sturgeon, however, has not brought clarity to the industry. If the former situation was murky, it now becomes bewilderingly fragmented. As well as Russia, Iran and China, sturgeon farming is carried out in France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Israel, Moldova, Poland, Spain, Saudi Arabia, the USA and Uruguay. There are even two caviar producers in the UK: Exmoor Caviar in the West Country and KC Caviar in Yorkshire. New countries are joining the caviar club almost by the month. China is the world’s largest producer, and Hangzhou Qiandaohu Xunlong Sci-Tech Company Limited, the largest

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farming operation, is responsible for 30 per cent of the world’s total. In the confusing realm of international caviar, the largest shareholder (24 per cent) in Hangzhou is Bill Holst, a scrapmetal merchant from Wisconsin, USA. IT’S NO SURPRISE THE INDUSTRY HAS EXPLODED in recent years. While caviar from wild fish might be all but non-existent, the growth in demand has been exponential. The system for producing caviar is disarmingly simple. Modern distribution systems are quick and smooth. Computerisation gives instant traceability. What could possibly go wrong? Well, rather a lot, to judge by the number of sturgeon farms that have gone bust. First off, you need fish, a good body of clean water, and time — lots of time. Anyone hoping to make quick returns from farming sturgeon is going to be disappointed. Sturgeon of whatever species take a long time to reach sexual maturity when they start producing eggs. Different species mature at different times. For example, females of the largest of the sturgeon family, Beluga, require 16 to 18 years to reach that point. That’s one of the reasons why Beluga caviar is so expensive. Incidentally, the largest sturgeon ever recorded was a female Beluga caught in the Volga in 1827; she weighed 1,571kg, was 7.2m long and estimated to be well over 100 years old. Other sturgeons — Acipenser gueldenstaedtii and Acipenser stellatus — don’t take so long to mature, but still it will be a minimum eight to 10 years before eggs can be harvested. Of course, this isn’t quite quick enough for the industry, so various species have been crossbred to produce a faster-maturing fish. These hybrid fish have added their own caviars to the Beluga, Oscietra and Sevruga line up, namely Imperial (eggs of Huso dauricus bred with Acipenser schrenckii); and Platinum (gueldenstaedtii bred with Acipenser baerrii — the Siberian native). Whatever the species, it takes an unconscionably long time before you start getting a return on your investment and sturgeon take a good deal of looking after. They’re prone to various bacterial and fungal infections, particularly in high-density stocking systems. They have to be fed. In the wild, sturgeon are bottom-feeding omnivores. In farms, they are fed on high-protein pellets. As with all fish farming, there’s a great deal of waste matter that needs to be dealt with. And when you do begin to think your troubles are at an end, there are the delicate and highly-perishable eggs. Handling and grading them requires skill and judgement. Mixing

them with salt, ditto. Packing them, ditto. And all that’s before you start selling your caviar into an unforgivingly competitive market. Small wonder that so many caviar farmers have gone bankrupt. On the other hand, one farmer’s bankruptcy is another wannabe sturgeon farmer’s opportunity. It takes so much effort to set up a farm, that, as Sergei Reviakin of Mottra Caviar, which trades in London but farms sturgeon and produces caviar in Riga, Latvia, says, “If you really want to get started in this business, the cheapest way is to buy up a bankrupt producer.” This brings us to another thorny issue: fish welfare. Traditionally, female sturgeons are killed in order to extract the valuable eggs as rapidly as possible. The remaining body flesh is sold on for eating fresh or smoking. To some, this seems wasteful, and in recent years sundry methods have been developed with a view to sparing the fish, so that she can produce several seasons of ovulation. In theory, this seems an admirable move as well as a practical one, and has generally been hailed as “ethical”, “sustainable”, “compassionate” and other terms that resonate in contemporary food marketing. Various companies around the world have developed processes along the same lines. Mottra, the Russian/Latvian venture, is hailed by chefs Mark Hix, Mitch Tonks and Francesco Mazzei, as well as Ewan Venters, CEO of Fortnum & Mason, and Vivace GmbH of Germany (now sadly gone bust). A Swiss company, Zwyer Caviar, raises its sturgeon “deep in the heart of Uruguay”; while KC Caviar has 500 fish in South Milford, Yorkshire. All very admirable. Needless to say, things aren’t quite as simple as that. The technique for “stripping” fish of their roe has been around for centuries, though modern technology has made it less hit and miss. Using ultrasound, farmers can keep track of the development of the fishes’ eggs. When the time draws near, the fish are injected with a naturally occurring hormone to induce ovulation and facilitate the stripping process. However, according to many connoisseurs, caviar produced by the “ethical” system, not only does not have the same intensity as caviar produced by the traditional method, but the eggs don’t have the same firmness, either, because they’re not fully mature. There are even dark mutterings of “spherification”, the technique of using sodium alginate and calcium chloride or calcium gluconate lactate (among others) to form squishy, fishy spheres just like real eggs, in order to actually create “caviar”. Once the eggs have been taken from the fish by whatever method, speed is of the essence. The eggs are handled with a gentleness their

delicacy and price demands. Wastage is too costly to be allowed. They are separated from the sac containing them and pressed carefully through a special sieve. The eggs are washed several times to get rid of impurities and then patted dry before being mixed with salt, or salt and borax, to heighten flavour and act as a preservative. Now the caviar can be stored until required, when it’s packed into specially lined tins. Most caviar in the UK is sold between three and six months from the moment of extraction. Some countries, France and America, for example, prefer a stronger-flavoured caviar, which is stored for up to 12 months before packing and selling. IT STILL REMAINS A CONFUSED, CONFUSING AND opaque business. Information, misinformation, smoke and mirrors, mystique and mythology overlay anything to do with caviar. Nor does there appear to be a lot of love lost among caviar producers, who seem only too ready to cast aspersions and worse on their competitors. Perhaps not surprisingly. There’s lots of money to made — and lost — in caviar. Demand for this, the most desirable of fish eggs, like that for diamonds, always endures. Of course, chefs play their part in this. Caviar has always had a place in classic French sauces for fish. Great chefs have found ways of representing caviar as it were, frequently teaming it with unorthodox ingredients. Jacques Pic’s “Filet de loup au caviar” seems almost traditional compared to Joël Robuchon’s legendary “Gelée de caviar à la créme de chou-fleur”, or Marco Pierre White’s “Tagliatelle of oysters with caviar”. Heston Blumenthal upped the stakes by teaming caviar with white chocolate (oddly successful). More recently, Jason Atherton created a dish under the humble title of “Fish and chip”. A substantial log of potato is braised in turbot stock until it absorbs all the liquid and becomes crisp on the outside. This is topped by a generous thatch of gleaming black Sevruga. However, farmed caviar has led to a certain ubiquity. In the last run of The Great British Menu, the BBC TV series on which I am a judge, dish after dish came slathered in the stuff (and haystacks of shaved truffles, too). But will caviar ever lose its allure, cachet or price? Probably not. Far too much time, trouble, money and romance is invested in it. Caviar remains a benchmark of luxury, and luxury is ineffably sexy. As Ludwig Bemelmans, that great chronicler of high-end dining at the beginning of the last century, put it: “Caviar is to dining what a sable coat is to a girl in evening dress.” ○

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London-born, Amsterdam-based chef Anthony Joseph, who, alongside New Yorker Noah Tucker, founded Fraîche Hospitality

HUNGRY TAKES A TRIP

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AS ATTITUDES AND LAWS SURROUNDING SOFT DRUGS START TO SHIFT, SO TOO ARE THE WAYS THEY CAN BE CONSUMED. TWO CHEFS IN AMSTERDAM ARE DETERMINED TO PIONEER ‘HIGH CUISINE’. WILL ANYONE FOLLOW THEIR LEAD? BY MIRANDA COLLINGE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LUKE AND NIK

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ON 11 SEPTEMBER THIS YEAR, RENE REDZEPI, CHEF AND OWNER OF NOMA in Copenhagen, considered by many to be the best restaurant in the world, posted a screenshot on Instagram of a direct message he’d received. “Hi Rene,” the first text-bubble read (Redzepi had cropped out the name of the sender). “I’m reaching out whilst in the middle of a psychedellic [sic] experience with mushrooms. Do you guys already experiment with a psychedellic take on things one way or another? If not I can totally bring some psy truffles over from the Netherlands. I feel this is BIG man.” Another bubble: “You probabaly dont [sic] need with Christiania next door.” Another: “But still.” And finally: “Dude, even totem animals. The spirit world. The dining experience. It makes so much sense.” It wasn’t clear if Redzepi had responded directly to the sender, but he did write a caption below the screenshot. “Name someone that has better followers,” it read. It was crazy, of course, and funny, as the 2,662 (at time of going to press) comments beneath Redzepi’s post attested; the kind of message that seems like an excellent idea to send when you’re, you know, high on magic mushrooms. But then again, maybe it wasn’t that crazy. Across the world, often prompted by governmental policy towards the illicit drugs trade or medicinal research, attitudes towards drugs are changing (although not all drugs admittedly, or all attitudes). Since Uruguay became the first country to legalise recreational cannabis in 2013, several others have followed: Canada, Spain, South Africa, Georgia, parts of Australia and a number of the United States including California. In July, a group of cross-party British MPs who visited Canada predicted that the UK would fully legalise cannabis in the next five to 10 years. It’s not just cannabis: in May, the city of Denver, Colorado, voted by a slim margin to decriminalise magic mushrooms, or psilocybe, making it the first US city to do so, though there is a move to do the same in the state of Oregon. In those places where such substances have already been legalised, the question is no longer how to get hold of the stuff, but how to ingest it. Increasingly popular are cannabis “edibles”, which allow you to eat or drink the cannabinoids such as THC and CBD found in weed or hash rather than smoke them. Edibles are very much the spiritual heir to the hash brownie (chocolate chip cookies! Gummy sweets! Fizzy pop!) — a high-glucose means to an end — and it’s a growing market: the industry was worth $2.4m in 2018 but is predicted to be worth $11.6m by 2025. It seems obvious that, at the dawn of a new food-related trend, the restaurant industry might want in. Not only is there money to be made, but we are in an era of cooking that is particularly experimental. There are out-there ingredients: at Central in Lima, Peru, currently number five on The 50 Best Restaurants in the World list, chefs Virgilio Martínez and Pía León serve crispy piranha skin served on a bowl of frozen piranha heads. There are pioneering processes, such as Australian chef Josh Niland, who has gained a cult following for inventing a new technique of filleting fish “nose to tail” to reduce wastage, including using the eyeballs and the spleen. And food is being served in increasingly bizarre, “experiential” ways: at Alchemist in Copenhagen, which I went to recently for this magazine, one of the dishes on chef Rasmus Munk’s 50-course tasting menu is ice cream you have to suck from a silicon udder (though — psych! — only one of the teats has a hole). In the current restaurant landscape, cooking with drugs isn’t so much an outlandish proposal as an obvious next step. It is beginning, certainly. In October, America’s first cannabis café opened: Lowell Café in Los Angeles, whose backers include musicians Miley Cyrus and Mark Ronson, serves “farm fresh food, coffee, juice and cannabis daily”. Rooting around on the internet, it is easy to find private supper clubs in the US and certain parts of Europe that offer “medicated” or “infused” food, although this tends to mean — at least as far as their marketing materials admit — cooking with products such as cannabis

butters and oils (THC and CBD only form with the application of heat). But what about other drugs with psychoactive properties? Not just cannabis, but magic mushrooms and truffles and all the other fungi and plants that can stimulate and stupefy the senses? Is anyone looking at the wider spectrum of ingredients? And is anyone actually trying to make drug-infused food taste not just “edible”, but really, really good? Somebody, somewhere must be thinking about it. Among the 2,662 comments beneath René Redzepi’s “psychedellic mushrooms” post, was a comment from the account of an American chef called Noah Tucker. He began his comment by tagging another account, @highcuisineworld, that he shares with his business partner, a British chef called Anthony Joseph. “That’s us, buddy,” he wrote. Then he added a second comment, this time tagging @reneredzepinoma too: “Maybe this is a start.” IT’S A GREY, MIZZLY DAY IN AMSTERDAM WHEN I MEET TUCKER AND JOSEPH, who goes by “Tony”, in their small test kitchen, which is down a dark passageway under a tall canal-side house close to the city centre. There’s an island unit in the middle of the room for prepping ingredients, cupboards and hobs at the back, and at the far end of the room, a small chest of drawers in which they keep some of their more “particular” ingredients. They refer to the space as their “lab”, and it is here that they experiment with what they believe could be a radical new form of cooking. They call it “high cuisine”. The pair met 12 years ago in a restaurant in Amsterdam at which Joseph, who is 48, tall, and comes from Stepney in East London, was head chef and Tucker, who is 42, shorter, and hails from New York, New York, was sous chef. Joseph is serious, meticulous and wears chef’s whites; Tucker laughs and swears a lot and prefers a denim apron and an ever-present shallow beanie hat. They are both married with two children and have backgrounds of cooking at high-profile restaurants: Joseph’s CV includes establishments run by Marco Pierre White such as Mirabelle and the Oak Room; Tucker worked at New York equivalents including Daniel and Jean-Georges. When they both found themselves living in Amsterdam (Joseph’s wife is Dutch; Tucker had other motivations) they decided to open a restaurant together in 2011 called Fraîche. It was there they had their brainwave. “We were braising off wild boar cheeks with quince and some kind of hazelnut dashi,” remembers Tucker, “and I was like, why wouldn’t this take magic mushrooms right now? Chanterelles or black trumpets would go, so why wouldn’t they go? Same family, same kind of flavour profile. So then we started looking at everything, and because we’re in Amsterdam it’s right here; a 10-minute bike ride and I can go and collect those ingredients. So we just started doing that.” Tucker, who likes to get high — he smokes a sizeable joint during our interview — says he got the idea from teenaged misadventures with friends in Brooklyn: “We used to go get McDonald’s and spike our cheeseburgers with mushrooms.” But Joseph, who doesn’t like to get high, says there was appeal for him, too, in exploring cannabis and psilocybe, but also roots, flowers, seeds and leaves with mind-altering properties, often used by indigenous, non-Western cultures for rituals or medicine. “This new spectrum of herbs has just been opened up to me,” he says. “So from a chef’s point of view, there’s now this holy grail of all these ingredients that no one is using” (for the record, aside from piranhas, Central in Lima has experimented with coca leaves) although he admits, “not all of these things taste very nice. Some do, some don’t. Mushrooms taste horrible.” Five years ago, they began to host what Tucker describes as “tastings” at Fraîche, after service on Friday nights. “We’d invite people over — friends, industry people — and we would do a little three- or four-courser and it would have this stuff in it, just for fun,” says Tucker. “I was curious and I think we really wanted to see what the impact was.” He was pretty sure they

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‘REALLY? YOU JUST BOUGHT 1,000-EURO WORTH OF BUD AND YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE PIZZA WITH IT?’

were on to something. “Everybody wants yummy food, that’s not a crazy guess. But we also realised that most people like to get high. I mean, wine is the most classic pairing with food ever invented and wine does nothing else. I don’t care if you’re telling me you smell fucking slate or wet leaves or leather — you drink it because you’re going get drunk.” They’d serve their guests dishes like sea bass sashimi, pink grapefruit, and smoked avocado with vapourised mango cannabis, or braised wild boar cheeks with toasted barley, Brussels sprouts, miso broth and magic truffle (like magic mushrooms, which are illegal, magic truffles contain psilocybin, but they come under a legal loophole in the Netherlands’ Opium Act because they are sclerotia, not mushrooms). But they’d also serve dishes incorporating blue lotus flower, which contains the psychoactive chemical aporphine; and areca nut (also known as betel nut), which contains arecoline, a chemical similar to nicotine; and Mexican tarragon, the calming effects of which are rumoured to have been deployed by the Aztecs — legend has it they blew it as a powder into the faces of human sacrifices before they cut out their hearts (let’s hope it did the trick!). The balance was key, says Tucker. “We might start with a sativa [a subspecies of cannabis thought to be more stimulating] to get your head kind of high, then we’ll give you some indica [a more relaxing variety] to get you hungry, then we’ll give you some mushrooms, then some kanna [a mood-elevating leaf from South Africa] to centre you and help your stomach relax… it’s a bit of a voyage.” Their guests, he says, “loved it, they were game”. One happened to be a photographer, and suggested filming proceedings. “We have a ton of old footage of us plating food at 11.30 at night,” says Tucker, “and in the midst of that it was like: this is a show.” In April of 2019, the TV series High Cuisine was launched on the Dutch video-on-demand platform Videoland. In the four half-hour episodes, Tucker and Joseph travel around the Netherlands exploring their adopted country’s culinary traditions — oyster farming, venison hunting — after which they build a menu for the chefs and producers they’ve met, adding a few special ingredients of their own. Each episode ends with a dinner party, before the increasingly heavy-lidded guests give their giggly verdicts. It has to be said, it looks like fun. The chefs make a likeable TV double act: Tucker is freewheeling and up for anything while Joseph is quietly inquisitive and, sometimes, soberly resigned (“Imagine the show if the pair of us are high,” he says, “it’s not great to watch”). And yet they initially struggled to find a broadcaster for High

Cuisine. The subject matter was, of course, controversial, and there were some logistical issues — who would want to advertise? — plus they wanted to maintain control of the rights and the format. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t turn it into a hippy drug-fest, a bullshit show,” says Tucker. “There’s tons of them, and they’re all cannabis-heavy, and it’s a free-for-all. They’re like, ‘OK, we’ve got super-cool ingredients, let’s make pizzas!’ And it’s like, really? You just bought 1,000 euro-worth of bud and you’re gonna make fucking pizzas with it?! Great job, guys.” “First and foremost we’re chefs,” says Joseph. “And that’s how we come across. All this is secondary.” (In the name of research I did watch several episodes of a Netﬂix show called Cooking on High, in which two chefs go head-to-head cooking cannabis-infused food for a “celebrity” panel. The judges’ feedback includes lines such as, “This is amazing. It’s shaped like a vagina!” and, “Wait, there was pot in that?! I gotta go see my PO [parole officer]!” Tucker and Joseph have seen it, too. “Cooking on High. What does that even mean?” says Tucker. “Where did they get that idea from?” says Joseph. Controlling the format also means controlling the narrative. In the opening sequence of High Cuisine, as Tucker’s and Joseph’s voice-overs talk viewers through the show’s premise, there’s a shot of a magazine article with the headline “Too High Cuisine”, over which Joseph’s sombre voice announces, “Not all of our experiments were a success…” (I contacted the author of the article, Kees van Unen, who attended an early dinner and wrote about it for the newspaper Het Parool. “It was a complete disaster,” he told me, “people were freaking out.” According to van Unen, only four of the 16 diners lasted until dessert.) “…But we learned from them,” Joseph’s narration concludes. “I’m not ashamed of the numbers,” says Tucker today. “Out of the 160 people we’ve probably fed, we had, like, 10 people who had a moment. It’s like, let’s take 160 people out drinking. Just drinking. Beers and wine, not even hard liquor. For sure there’s more than 10 people that have a fucking catnap, right? There’s a good 60 of us that are going down hard. So you have to look at the real numbers and you have to look at how humans’ indulgence levels are in general. We really learned that.” “You can ask people what they’ve done, and they sign a waiver, and I have to believe that you’re good with this,” adds Joseph. “Now the people we have on the TV show are people that we know or people who have been vetted. Because if you don’t know him or me, are you comfortable sitting →

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Opposite: red and golden beetroot with areca nut dressing, prepared by Noah Tucker and Tony Joseph of High Cuisine

down with us? Think about it. Is there something in there you don’t want me to be seeing about you, or is there something you don’t want to reveal?” I’m nodding as Joseph says all this, but I can’t help reflecting on the fact that I am with complete strangers — Tucker and Joseph, but also one of the Esquire photographers, Luke Norman, and one of High Cuisine’s producers, Isidoor Roebers — and that the whole time we’ve been talking they have been preparing two dishes for me to try. One is tiny discs of raw and cooked red and golden beetroot with an olive oil, cider vinegar and areca nut dressing, the other is miniature florets of raw and fermented cauliflower and Romanesco with black truffle (and magic truffle) tapenade. Both are versions of dishes that appear in their recently released cookbook, High Cuisine Bites (the opening pages of which contain a sizeable disclaimer). I can’t deny that sampling some “high cuisine” had been part of the attraction of doing this story — I may even have been a bit Billy Big Boots about the whole thing — but now that I’m here, alone, and in a vaguely professional capacity, I start to wonder if being off my box isn’t quite where I need to be. So it’s a relief — though maybe still a tiny bit of a disappointment — when they inform me that there will only be one gramme of magic truffle in the dish. (In the “Dosage Advice” section of their book, they suggest two grammes of magic truffle for a “light” effect, ranging up to four grammes for “heavy”.) “The thing is,” says Tucker, “we’re always hesitant because I haven’t questioned you, I don’t know the last time you did this. It could have been 30 years ago. [It’s 20, but still.] That means you don’t do it. I’d rather you walk away from here like, ‘I don’t really feel so much’ instead of, ‘What the fuck, man? Stop, stop, I want this to stop!’” “And that wouldn’t be a great article, would it?” says Joseph. (Actually, I want to say, it kind of would — “and then I threw my Dictaphone at a policeman and jumped in a canal!” etc — but I can see where he’s coming from. It’s hard to say if the dishes, which were very pretty and tasty, had any effect, but all I will say that is when I got back to my hotel room afterwards I felt compelled to watch a Friends marathon and it was way funnier than I remembered.) Tucker, however, says he intends to take some magic truffles himself that very afternoon, even though he and Joseph would be working the dinner shift at Yerba, the “plant-forward” restaurant in Amsterdam’s Museum District of which they are two of four co-owners; at one point they had five restaurants in Amsterdam, but they sold them in 2017 before opening this one. Joseph speaks of Tucker’s consumption with quiet reverence: “He manages to do what he needs to do on a day-to-day basis. I don’t know how he manages to do it half the time, and that’s beautiful,” he says. “Also, you’ve got to remember, we work for ourselves, so if he decides to be a little wayzy, that’s OK too.” (I went to their restaurant for dinner later and, at least as far as I could tell, Tucker seemed completely fine.) It should be noted that there are no drugs on the menu at Yerba. “You cannot serve this in a restaurant,” says Tucker. “No, you cannot,” emphasises Joseph. The law in the Netherlands means that those early experimental dinners at Fraîche had to be both private and free: while the sale and possession of soft drugs such as cannabis and magic truffles are rarely prosecuted, they are still technically illegal; ergo you can’t put them on a menu. “You become a dealer,” explains Tucker. (They have said, however, that they plan to include a “golden ticket” in one copy of their cookbook,

the lucky recipient of which will win themselves a private dinner, and yes, one of their experimental ones.) I ask Tucker and Joseph who else is doing what they’re doing, joining their merry bandwagon. Both say that while there is a lot of off-the-record support for what they’re doing from friends in the industry, it has proved difficult to get other chefs to come and say so in public. “I’m going to be really honest,” says Tucker, “a lot of chefs that are trying to get accolades, make names for themselves, they don’t want to label themselves with this stuff. It has a stigma, I get it. The propaganda’s been huge the last 50 years, people don’t know the truth. They don’t know much about it. But the majority, once we speak to them, they’re like, ‘Yo, this is cool as fuck.’” There might also be a particular reticence among those in the restaurant trade, they feel, which has a particular reputation as far as drugs are concerned. They mention a 2018 TV documentary fronted by Gordon Ramsay, in which he visited his own restaurants and wiped down the sinks and toilets in the staff and customer lavatories with wipes that turn blue when they come into contact with cocaine. (“Look at the colour of that!” says Ramsay in the programme, brandishing a specimen baggie, “It’s like a J-Cloth, it’s that blue!”) “Everyone knows what it’s like within the industry,” says Joseph. While Joseph and Tucker are waiting for the food world, or perhaps society as a whole, to come round to the “high cuisine” concept, they’ll just “keep it prevalent in people’s minds, make it the norm,” Joseph says. They hope to make more episodes of High Cuisine next year — to travel the world in search of farther-ﬂung psychedelic ingredients to cook with — but they are entrepreneurial types and have fall-back options. They’re working on a “payment and service” app, to help address the chronic staffing problem in the restaurant business, and also intend to open a new restaurant of their own in Amsterdam next year called Heritage, based on “craveable, nostalgic food”. (And if that’s not an idea conceived by someone who likes a smoke I don’t know what is.) It may be, of course, that high cuisine will never take off, that the legislation will never allow it to become a viable business prospect, that cooking with drugs will remain a novelty that makes for nothing more than good television. Or it may be that the other industry players, as Joseph describes it, are “just waiting for one person to legitimise it. Somebody big.” Still, Joseph is resolute about what he and Tucker have achieved. “I’ve been cooking for 30-plus years, he’s been cooking for 20-plus. I’ve got nothing to prove to anyone. This is completely new to the game of cooking. Think about how cooking goes: nouvelle cuisine, slow food, sous-vide, molecular… What’s next? This is something that’s not been done. We’ve invented something.” A COUPLE OF WEEKS AFTER I GOT BACK FROM AMSTERDAM, and just on the off-chance, I sent René Redzepi, chef and owner of the maybe-best restaurant in the world, a message on Instagram. (Hey, it’s social media, and you never know.) I explained that I was researching a piece about psychoactive drugs in high-end cooking, had seen his screenshot post in September and wondered if, jokes aside, it is something he might ever consider. I can’t say I was surprised that he didn’t reply. In mid-October, however, Redzepi posted another screenshot of a message he’d received, again with the name of the sender cropped out. “Hi Rene,” it read. “I want to make tar tar [sic] from a beaver, how do you look at it? Can you give some advice?” Was this was just another funny, unhinged suggestion of the many he receives, like, say, cooking with drugs? Or was it — like, say, cooking with drugs — a legitimate idea in an age of madcap culinary exploration? (Maybe beaver tartare tastes really, really good?) As before, it was impossible to know if Redzepi had responded, or what he really thought, but once again he’d written a caption. “Name someone that has better followers…” it read. ○

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FRONT OF HOUSE TURNING UP THE HEAT ON WINTER MENSWEAR

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSE LAITINEN

FASHION BY CATHERINE HAYWARD

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Far left: green vintage cotton jacket, £2,470; off white/ brown silk shirt, £780; green vintage cotton boutonne trousers, £690, all by GUCCI

Metallic calf leather parka, £7,400; grey double-layered cotton jacket, £3,250; metallic calf leather mid-layer, £1,880; grey cotton trousers, £780; black leather trainers, £800, all by LOUIS VUITTON

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Grey/black wool-blend double-breasted jacket, £1,600; ebony cotton-blend shirt, £540; grey/black woolblend pleated trousers, £720; black leather ankle boots, £720, all by GIORGIO ARMANI

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Black wool-twill jacket, £1,390; white/ blue leopard-print twill short-sleeved shirt, £450; black rinsewashed denim jeans, £300, all by BURBERRY

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Raspberry silk turtleneck, £960, by HERMÈS Right: light blue silkvirgin wool suit, £695; navy cotton shirt, £140, both by BOSS

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Orange/white striped cotton shirt, £215; green/blue paisley silk tie, £135; grey wool-flannel trousers, £295, all by TURNBULL & ASSER

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Black double-wool jacket, £2,185; black/turquoise nylon turtleneck, £865; black double-wool trousers, £1,230; black leather shoes, £845, all by BOTTEGA VENETA

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In search of a location fit for the season’s best menswear, the Esquire fashion team reserved a table at Hélène Darroze at The Connaught. Recently reopened, the results of a two-month refurbishment are exceptional. French interior designer Pierre Yovanovitch has reimagined the main dining room, using deep hues and rich textiles to create a modern, refined space, while the redesigned show kitchen downstairs boasts a Chef’s Table where up to 10 guests can dine in an informal setting, with dishes prepared and presented personally by the chefs. The refreshed menu complements the surroundings, too, ensuring the two Michelin-starred restaurant remains the perfect venue for intimate, fine dining — as well as an Esquire fashion shoot. Carlos Place, Mayfair, London W1; the-connaught.co.uk

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Left: purple silk-cottonsatin shawl-collar tuxedo jacket, £2,050; purple technical satin effect leopard print jacquard shirt, £800; purple silkcotton-satin trousers, £750, all by DIOR Blue cotton crystalembroidered shirt, £1,575; black satin-wool trousers, £880, both by PRADA Photographer’s assistant/ digital operator: Marsy Hild Thorsdottir | Fashion assistant: Dan Choppen | Grooming: Mark Francome Painter @ CLM Hair and Makeup using Evo Hair and Beauty | Model: Ty Ogunkoya @ Premier Models See Stockists page for details

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HEAT SEEKER IN LOUISIANA’S CAJUN COUNTRY, ESQUIRE’S TOM PARKER BOWLES MAKES A PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOME OF TABASCO, THE SPICY RED SAUCE THAT CHANGED HIS LIFE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRIS FLOYD

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ONE DROP. THAT’S ALL IT TOOK, TO LEAD ME down that red road to ruin, to start an addiction so fierce and fiery that my life can be reduced to two acronyms: BT and AT. Before Tabasco. And After Tabasco. Monochrome versus Technicolor. Cliff Richard eclipsed by Iggy Pop. Boycott beaten by Botham. Not that my home diet was dreary. But the nearest I’d ever got to spice was a mouthful of that vile Coronation chicken. If that was exotic, then count me out. Tabasco was different. It lived on the drinks table, for a start, among the heavy decanters of whisky and vodka, the soda syphons, sticky bottles of Martini Rosso and home-made damson gin. Not the cupboard. Never the cupboard. But with its neat red top, slim shoulders, the gleaming green foil that wrapped around its neck, and that iconic diamond label, it offered not just a taste of America. But danger too. This sauce bit back. The liquid at home was no longer red, rather a muddy brown. The same bottle had lingered on that table for what seemed like years. Because a couple of jigs in a Bloody Mary, a couple of times per week, was about as much action as it got, used for subtle piquancy, not base power. But my sister and me were obsessed. We’d start with that drop: rich, sharp and thrillingly dangerous. Vinegar first, a jolt to the mouth, followed by a hint of sweetness, and complexity, then a slow, insidious chilli burn that rolled across our virgin palates in great flaming waves. We’d shriek and giggle and gape, spangled on natural endorphins, our tongues engorged, our taste buds priapic with chilli lust. This was no mere sauce, rather a thrill, a kick, a dabble on the dark side. And we’d dare each other to take more, until our cheeks flushed scarlet, our eyes filled with tears and we were convinced that steam blew out of our ears. Like Wile E Coyote, or that damned cat, Tom. If any guest was fool enough to leave their drink unattended, we’d slip in a slug, Medici-style. And sit back to await the show. But one day we took it too far. Emptied a whole bottle into a friend’s Virgin Mary. He collapsed, crying, grasping his belly, as if struck by a poisoned dart. Parents came running in, questions were asked, blame apportioned. They were not disappointed. They were angry. And that was the end of the games. But it was just the start of my addiction. First Tabasco, the gateway drug. Then a brief flirtation with Madras, quickly escalating to vindaloo. Before I knew it, I was deep in Caribbean hot sauce, Chinese chilli oil and Thai nam prik. With an expensive Chile Pepper magazine habit too. I reached rock bottom with a brief but markedly painful brush with “extract sauces”, the crystal

meth of the chilli world. If Tabasco sits around 5000 on the Scoville scale (a system of measuring a chilli’s heat), then the likes of Blair’s 3AM Reserve comes in at a whopping two million. This stuff could take down King Kong. IT ALL, THOUGH, STARTED WITH THAT FIRST DROP. And it’s another of those drops that currently sits upon the soft, labial folds of a Gulf Coast oyster in Bourbon House, New Orleans. You only need one drop, to cosset and flatter that fleeting marine sweetness. Any more, and the briny elegance of the oyster is all but lost. But an oyster without Tabasco is like a belle without a beau. It just ain’t right. I’m with my friend Chris, who also happens to be a photographer, here in New Orleans, a sybaritic stop-off en route to the south of Louisiana, and Avery Island, the birthplace and home of Tabasco. I’ve made the pilgrimage before, twice to be precise. Of course I have. It’s my secular Lourdes, a chilli spiked Camino de Santiago. While others bow to higher powers, I put my faith in the sauce. But first, New Orleans — the Big Easy, Crescent City — the place where clichés never sleep. Voodoo and vampires, beignets and beads, jazz, juju and muffuletta sandwiches as big as a wheel. The muddy Mississippi and those eerily magnificent cities of the dead; clanging streetcars, the intricately wrought-iron balconies of the Garden District, the plaintive cry of the freight trains passing through. And the corporate-sponsored hedonism of Bourbon Street. In short, a Creole-flavoured Xanadu, a place where America comes to play. Yet it’s also a city with the nation’s highest poverty rate, a place still wearing the deep scars of Hurricane Katrina. Away from bright lights and drivethrough daiquiri stands, the strip joints, voodoo shops and 24-hour bars, New Orleans has a darker side. It’s a place where malnutrition, corruption, crime and desperation are rife. And beneath the bonhomie, there’s a palpable edge. It’s not a city where you stumble into the wrong neighbourhood, half-cut and late at night. Everything is jumbled up here in one vast, ever-whirring, Creole blender: races, religions, cultures, accents and food. Not so much melting pot as seething, bubbling cauldron; a great and glorious gumbo where too much is not enough. Dining here can be hard work. It requires tenacity, perseverance and grit. Most things are deep fried (oysters, shrimp, catfish, crawfish or chicken), or lavished with so much butter and cream that even Auguste Escoffier would baulk. This is, though, one of the world’s great eating cities. Whatever your desire — peer-

If the roux is the heart of Creole and Cajun cooking, onion, pepper and celery its soul, then Tabasco is its lifeblood

Previous pages and above: Louisiana has been the home of Tabasco since 1868, and today more than 700,000 bottles of the sauce are produced every day

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less Vietnamese, serious steak, spanking fresh seafood, new wave, old school, haute and low down — you’ll ﬁnd it here. We spend a day and night doing what tourists do: queueing for coffee with chicory, and ﬂuffy beignets buried in sugar at Café Du Monde, watching the touts and panhandlers and horse-drawn carts plying their trade. We sway happily among the crowds, then, as it’s just past 10am, wander to the corner of Bourbon and Bienville Streets, to the Old Absinthe House. I always seem to end up here. Or start off. It opens at 8am but I’m fairly sure it never closes. Sitting at the bar,

Highway 90 into the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest river swamp in the United States, covering nearly a million acres, towards Avery Island and into the heart of Cajun country, where vowels are thick as gumbo, names are French, and everything’s ﬁt for the pot. One of my favourite local cookbooks is by Marcelle Bienvenu and called Who’s Your Mama, are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux? It seems to say it all. Originally known as Acadians, they were French settlers, ﬁshermen and farmers, forced from their Novia Scotia homeland of Acadia by the British in the mid-18th century, and even-

a tired, peeling, sun-faded ennui, as we pass trailer parks and motor homes, boat shops, clapboard houses, strip malls, rain ditches, cane ﬁelds and endless Smoke’ n Go discount tobacco shops. Advertisements tout for business — grinning, white-teethed lawyers offering compensation for oil rig injuries. Since the downturn in the oil business, times are even harder. Signs supporting local politicians are entirely Republican red. We arrive in New Iberia, a place I’ve never been but feel I know already. It’s the home of Dave Robicheaux, the grizzled, good-hearted,

among the tourists and locals, we sip absinthe frappés, icy cold and lethally strong. Then totter off for lunch at Cochon, a sort of St John with a N’awlins accent. And eat gumbo, intense, thick and blacker than Baron Samedi’s soul. It’s all about that roux, the combination of fat and ﬂour, both thickener and ﬂavour enhancer. There’s a touch of the Cajun here, too, like boudin, a spiced, rice-stuffed pork sausage. The food of rural Louisiana, Creole’s spicier, more robust country cousin. The next morning, the sky is a drab grey as we climb into the car and head west, taking

tually settling in Southern Louisiana. The soil was fertile, the rivers, swamps and sea crawling with crawﬁsh, turtles, frogs, crabs and shrimp. If the roux is the heart of Creole and Cajun cooking, and the holy trinity (onion, peppers and celery) its soul, then Tabasco is its lifeblood. We cross old iron bridges, speckled with rust, and catch glimmers of the bayou’s dull green and ﬂashes of white from startled egrets. Trees are exotically named: persimmon, cypress, pecan. But it’s hardly the South of popular imagination. There’s a starkness,

alcoholic Cajun cop in James Lee Burke’s lyrical crime novels, with a pretty Main Street, grand old houses, art deco Evangeline Theatre and handsome parish courthouse. We stop as we cross Bayou Teche, the waterway which meanders slowly and brownly through town. The Bon Creole Lunch Counter, another of Robicheaux’s haunts, is a single-storey brick building. Inside, past the order bar, is the main room, the walls covered with antlers, elk and bison heads, even a whole blue marlin. Here we meet John Simmons, the Senior Manager of Agriculture for the privately owned →

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Fashion

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Tabasco brand, responsible for overseeing the growth of every single pepper used to make Tabasco sauce, and a sixth generation member of the McIlhenny family. He’s warm and broadshouldered, with a gleaming bald head and laconic smile. Although trained as a lawyer, he rejoined the family business a few years back, having spent college summers hoeing the pepper ﬁelds and rehooping and repairing barrels. “Tabasco is so simple, just three ingredients,” he says. “Vinegar, red pepper and salt. We start with pepper cultivation, grown in Central and South America on small farms, as well as in

was rebuffed), and a man with a taste for peppers. One legend goes that he bumped into a veteran of the Mexican-American War (1846– ’48), who gave him a fistful of chillies from the Mexican state of Tabasco. He planted these on Avery Island, and, once the American Civil War (1861—’65) was over (the McIlhennys fled to Texas before the Union forces got hold of them), returned to find them flourishing. And so in 1868, he made his sauce, decanting it into small, used cologne bottles. And an empire was born. Other versions claim Edmund McIlhenny was given the peppers by a New Orleans plant-

he says, dousing his chicken and sausage gumbo with Tabasco, then pouring it over rice and potato salad. “But we ship to more than 195 countries and territories. That’s more than McDonald’s.” There’s a murky sharpness to the gumbo, and a soothing depth. We talk about Louisiana’s ever-shrinking coastline, where the equivalent of a football field is lost to the sea every hourand-a-half. The thousands of miles of levees and flood walls built to manage the Mississippi may keep Southern Louisiana safe from the floods but this comes at huge cost to the coast. Add in the rising sea level and storm surges, and the

Zimbabwe and South Africa, from our own seed stock. All picked by hand. The peppers are mashed with salt, sent back here, aged for three years in charred American oak bourbon barrels. We add vinegar, mix it up for a few weeks, remove the seeds and pulp, and bottle it up. That’s it.” Avery Island was originally a sugar plantation called Petite Anse Island, owned by Daniel Dudley Avery, whose daughter, Mary Eliza married, in 1859, Edmund McIlhenny, a rich, successful New Orleans banker. He was also Avery’s best friend (the original proposal

er, or that he found a single pepper plant growing when he returned to the island. Whatever the truth, 1868 saw the ﬁrst commercial pepper crop. And in 1869, 658 bottles of pepper sauce were produced. The sauce was not fermented for three years in wooden barrels, rather for 60 days in jars. By 1889, 42,472 bottles were manufactured and distributed across the whole of the United States. And beyond. “Jaaahhnnn,” cries a voice from the hatch. “Gumbo and po’ boys for Jaaahhnnn.” Simmons gets up to collect our lunch. “It’s a family business in many different ways,”

future is decidedly uncertain. “We have kids come in the summer to plant grass. That helps.” We move onto the po’ boys, a sandwich of utter magniﬁcence: soft, sweetish baguette-style bread with a crisp crust, stuffed with artfully fried shrimp. And mayonnaise, tomato and lettuce. And lashings of Tabasco. Of course. If it’s ubiquitous in New Orleans, it’s endemic here. THE JOURNEY TO AVERY ISLAND IS SHORT, JUST A few miles southwest of New Iberia. We pass an ivy-clad visitor centre, red brick houses, storage barns for the barrels, and the factory and bot-

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Previous pages: some 70,000 barrels, three-and-a-half years’ worth of stock, are stored inside the company’s warehouse on Avery Island Below: ‘ just three ingredients, vinegar, red pepper, salt’ go into each giant vat of Tabasco mash to ferment; a Louisiana crawﬁsh boil, with its compulsory hot sauce accompaniment

‘We ship to more than 195 countries and territories. That’s more than McDonald’s’

tling plant. There’s a verdant feel to the place, built on a salt dome, with a working salt mine. And 170 acres of semi-tropical Jungle Gardens, taking in the Bird City refuge, where thousands of snowy egrets, with their Jimmy Savile hairdos and long, black beaks, nest. (It was set up by Edward “Ned” Avery, son of the founder, Edmund McIlhenny, in 1895; the popularity of the birds’ plumes saw them hunted almost to extinction.) A Buddha statue, given to Ned by friends, sits benignly in a Japanese pagoda, among an incongruous bamboo forest. The ubiquitous Southern live oaks are draped in Spanish moss, with a mournful, haunting allure. A place of Confederate ghosts, and Southern Gothic charm, at once lushly bucolic and mildly unsettling. ’Gators float by with lazy menace, occasionally crawling up onto the banks. “Every single bottle produced in the world comes from here,” Simmons says, as we enter the storage warehouse where 70,000 barrels, three-and-a-half years’ worth of stock, are gently fermenting and ageing, piled five-high, their tops sealed with salt, as far as the eye can see. It reminds me of that last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark is stored away among the millions of other government boxes. The smell is musty, acrid and vinegary, creeping up one’s nose. We taste the unaged fresh pepper mash; pillar-box red, sharp, strong and aggressive. Three years later, and the crimson has changed to rust, the flavours softer, more complex, with hints of tobacco, raisin and oak. The key is to produce an utterly consistent product, no mean feat when blending chillies from many different farms. We inspect vast steel vats where the aged mash is mixed with the vinegar for 30 days. The odour is pungent in here, hitting the back of the throat like pepper spray. And pass through the laboratories, where the sauces and mashes are constantly tested, for acidity, and pH, and viscosity and moisture. Every batch is tested six times and every bottle must taste the same. Then into the cacophonous din of the bottling plant, where I stare, entranced, at the hypnotic machines, filling bottles, screwing on caps, sticking on labels and packing into boxes, ready for delivery across the globe. The process is both blissfully simple and mind-bogglingly technical, too. Later, we drive with Simmons to Abbeville, a small town a few miles away, to Richard’s (pronounced Reechard’s) Seafood Patio. It’s little more than a shack, with concrete floors and corrugated iron walls and red and white chequered plastic tablecloths. We’re here to eat crayfish, or crawfish, boiled up in seasoned water and served by the kilo. The season runs

from the end of February to May. And the boil is more religion than meal. All around us, piles of crawfish are being demolished in respectful silence, diners’ heads bowed deep in worship. “Everyone has a view on how to do the crawfish boil,” says Simmons, as we chew on deep-fried ’gator. “Some boil with seasoning. Some boil in salt, then finish with the seasoning powder. [And] their way is, of course, the only true way. “Some people won’t eat crawfish in a restaurant,” he says between bites. “Part of the fun is drinking beer.” It’s as much social gathering as it is crustacean feast. The crawfish arrive, a violent red, boiled along with corn and potatoes and mushrooms. You twist the body to remove the head, unwrapping the hard carapace to get to the luscious meat. Then use your pinky to dig out the sweetly fetid head goo. By the end, my lips are tingling, my hands filthy, a broad smile plastered fat across my face. The best crawfish is rarely found in the poshest places. We try more in The Boiling Point, off the main road to Lafayette, a great aircraft hangar of a building. “Bud and Boiling” says the neon sign. “Pull your pants up,” cries another. And, “I’ve never met a crawfish I didn’t like.” Before that, we’d dropped in at Legnon’s Boucherie in New Iberia for worldclass boudin sausage, made fresh every day and sold hot from the steamer. “Rice, Boston butt, onions, garlic, cayenne pepper. That’s it,” says Ted Legnon, with short, neat, white hair and a red apron. “We sell 1,200 pounds of hot sausage per day. I’ve been doing this for 38 years.” It shows. The first bite sees the snap of the casing then the sweetness of pork, and the kick of pepper, and the soft squidge of rice. It’s up there with the best sausages I’ve ever eaten. Damned good hot crackling too. It’s on the way back to New Orleans that we spot a sign for Dago’s II Crawfish Shack. “Boiling today,” it reads. So we drive a few more miles to a remote gas station, where the food counter, little more than a shelf with three chairs, is wedged behind the till. There’s one other diner, Harvey Blanchard Jr, a sugar cane farmer from up the road. These are the best so far, lustily spicy, yet the flesh sweet and succulent. I eat two kilos. My last crawfish feast. “If they were any better, the Good Lord would keep them for Himself,” says Blanchard with a grin. He sees me dousing the crawfish with my favourite hot sauce, and nods approvingly. “Tabasco,” he says, his face suddenly serious. “A little piece of Louisiana that conquered the world.” ○

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THE SANDWICH’S THIRD WAVE* AFTER 250 YEARS, THE EARL’S GAMBLING SNACK IS FINALLY GETTING A MAKEOVER FROM SERIOUS CHEFS BY TIM LEWIS PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRIS BROOKS

CONSIDERING THE SANDWICH WAS “INVENTED” circa 1762, a quarter-millennium ago, it took a long time for someone to realise that putting ﬁsts of ham hock, a fried egg, shoestring fries, piccalilli and malt vinegar mayo in the middle of some focaccia would be off-the-charts mind-blowing. It was, in fact, late 2014 and the visionary was Max Halley, the 37-year-old proprietor of Max’s

Sandwich Shop in Crouch Hill, north London, and author of Max’s Sandwich Book. The third wave sandwich was born. As beﬁts his creations, Halley has maverick tendencies. He swears he’s worn a black polo shirt every day for 12 years (no particular brand: “Fruit of the Loom?”) He has a visceral hatred of cheese. He has a quite literally unhealthy obsession with

throwing strange ingredients in a deep-fat fryer. But when he came up with “Ham, Egg ’N’ Chips” he knew he was onto something: “I thought, ‘Holy God, if I just make sure there’s hot, cold, sweet, sour, crunchy and soft in my sandwiches, that’s the secret of deliciousness’. It’s such a good little mantra.” Hot, cold, sweet, sour, crunchy, soft: the →

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HAM, EGG ’N’ CHIPS

PRAWN S+DWICH

Slow-cooked ham hock, fried egg,

Prawns, prawn crackers, napa

shoestring fries, piccalilli, malt

cabbage, pickled ginger and jalapeño

vinegar mayonnaise; £8.50

vinaigrette, S+D mayonnaise; £9

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MAX’S SANDWICH SHOP

SONS + DAUGHTERS

19 Crouch Hill, London N4 maxssandwichshop.com

Coal Drops Yard, Kings Cross, London N1C sonsanddaughterslondon.com

*So, wave one was John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, asking for some beef between two slices of toasted bread — perhaps late at night playing cards, or maybe just working after hours — and eating it with his hands. The second wave came in 1980 when M&S started hawking sad little cartons of egg and cress, or a few years later when Pret a Manger went modestly experimental with its crayﬁsh and rocket.

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manifesto of the sandwich’s third wave. And it’s taken a few years to percolate through, but deranged, high-concept sandwiches are deﬁnitely a thing now, at least in London. One of the most ’grammed dishes of recent times is the Iberian Katsu Sando, made by Ana Gonçalves and Zijun Meng at Tōu in the Arcade Food Theatre (its real name) in Centre Point. The

sando is pleasingly palindromic in appearance: a slice of toasted brioche, a slab of pork neck that’s been breaded in panko shards and deepfried, then more brioche. It sells for £14. Over at Bodega Rita’s in King’s Cross, Gabriel Pryce and Missy Flynn have reimagined the Vietnamese staple Bánh Mì in such an ingenious, umami-dense way — the trad grilled

meat is replaced with roast oyster mushrooms, peanut butter and red chilli — that you’d bet the house it couldn’t be vegan. The Evening Standard called it “a moistmaker”, a nod to Ross Geller’s gravy-soaked turkey sandwich on Friends. Where the third wave differs from previous incarnations though, is the rise in specialist offerings as more and more chefs deign the snack →

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BABI GULING AND PICKLED WATERMELON

THE SUB MARINE

Balinese spiced porchetta, pickled watermelon,

Slow-cooked pork, torched scallops, marinated

tamarind sambal, fermented chilli mayonnaise; £8.50

calamari, salsa verde mayonnaise, crackling; £9

–

SNACKBAR

SUB CULT

20 Dalston Lane, London E8 snackbarlondon.com

82 Watling St, London EC4M subcult.com

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worthy of their consideration. At Pidgin in east London, James Ramsden and Sam Herlihy shoot for Michelin stars, but at Sons + Daughters, their new takeaway also in King’s Cross, they believe they can be equally subversive between two slices of bread. They do an egg and cress but with miso mayonnaise and truffle crisps. The snap and tang in their prawn sandwich is from

crushed prawn crackers and jalapeño vinaigrette. “There’s something comforting about the sandwich,” says Ramsden. “Given everything going on in the world, potentially that’s why the sandwich is having its moment. There’s nothing intimidating,” a pause, a smile, “but we’re trying to change that.” All these pioneers see no reason why a sandwich shouldn’t be dinner. They’d all say the only

limit on your home creations is imagination. But what they really agree on is there’s no way to eat their ﬁlling-stuffed behemoths with any modicum of dignity. Don’t take a date to a third wave sandwich shop. “Yep, nobody wants to see gravy mayonnaise dribbling down their date’s chin,” agrees Halley. “Not until you’ve gone to each other’s houses for Christmas anyway.” ○

Styling by Cressida O’Mahony

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THE KING BANH-MI

IBERIAN KATSU SANDO

Roasted king oyster mushrooms, peanut butter, carrot

Iberico pork katsu, cabbage, massa pimentão

and daikon pickle, coriander, peanuts, mint chilli; £7

(fermented pepper), raspberry jam; £14

–

BODEGA RITA’S

TŌU

Unit 114 Lower Stable Street, London N1C ritasdining.com

Arcade Food Theatre, 101–103 Oxford Street, London WC1A arcade-london.com

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THE WORLD IN A STEW In praise of bouillabaisse

Food styling: Iain Graham | Set design: Elena Horn

By Will Self Photograph by Aaron Tilley

“WHAT IS IT LIKE?” IS SURELY ONE of the questions any piece of descriptive prose — such as an article about that storied Marseillais dish, the bouillabaisse — must answer. And to answer this, “What is it like?” adequately, it must in turn give its readers some sense of not just the fish stew’s taste, but its appearance, its texture, its aromas, its sheer nourishing heft. This is by no means all, for the merely sensuous cannot hope to capture the full essence of the bouillabaisse. Why? Because one thing that must be said of it at the very outset — in advance of any attempt to describe this gastronomic gestalt at all — is that a true bouillabaisse is, in its own way, not so much thick fish broth into which chunks of yet more fish have been added, together with shingles of bread slathered with saffron-coloured and lemony-garlic flavoured goo, but a world entire. What do I mean by this? Well, here’s an analogy: there are those countries — India,

Brazil, China, the USA — that, by reason of their vast size and economic diversity, attain such world-like status. Everywhere you look in the crowded Indian city street, India is reflected back at you; all tumultuous things and seething individuals having been made there. While, at the other end of the spectrum, it can be said of any complex object that it demands a world somehow commensurate with itself, so summons one into existence. For example, it’s hard to conceive of a whoopee cushion without a bouillabaisse-filled, Provençal bourgeois’ hefty derriere about to descend upon it, wouldn’t you agree? But the bouillabaisse itself cuts both ways — it’s a true synecdoche — and one can say of it, as one would of a grain of sand, “I will show you the world in a bouillabaisse… and show you, also, that the world is but a bouillabaisse.” If this makes the bouillabaisse sound like the most substantial of dishes, then it’s only fitting. But besides this, the bouillabaisse is

also the most active of stews, the very name of which is a compound of its own cooking method. Derived from the Provençal Occitan word bolhabaissa, one should perhaps always think of it as ever restive, although not running away with the spoon, simply being stirred by it until reaching the boil (bolhir, “to boil”), whereupon the heat is reduced (abaissar, “to simmer”). The single French word bouillabaisse captures the event in real time, forever. So, just as in the coda to Rupert Brooke’s celebrated poem, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”, the clock always stands at ten to three, and there is indeed, always “honey still for tea”; so this very ascription constantly draws our attention to the precise moment at which ﬁsh chunks are added to the primordial stew, and the whole maddening mystery of life on this watery Earth gets going. Or at least my life. We all have rites of passage, don’t we; those moments when we crossed a threshold into a whole new room of experience, and realised that henceforth life would →

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never be the same. For some of us it’s making love for the first time, for others going on an adventure, or learning to drive, or graduating from university. But for me, I truly became adult on a chilly, windy, Provençal spring day 35 years ago, when I entered a restaurant named, suitably enough, Au Royaume de la Bouillabaisse, which at that time occupied premises on the blustery seafront at Six-Fours-les-Plages. Again: you can perhaps forgive the vagaries of memory (alternatively, since the restaurant has now closed, perhaps you’ll allow my poetic licence to replace its alcoholic one), but as I recall, we sat in a sort of glass-and-concrete box, surrounded by bubbling tanks within which were the relatives of the fish and crustacea we were about to eat. It was, if you like, a bizarre sort of mise en abyme: floating in a human tank, surrounded by fish ones. Raindrops spattered the windows and out there, across the choppy sound, lowered the chilly dunes and dank marram grass of the Île

each occupied by a bourgeois with a giant and lurid cocktail. What passed for culture was indeed past, and in its slipstream had come petrol-scented marketing. Still, we did our best to recapture the bohemian wildness of that golden age, by diving off the Calanques near Marseille then — sunburnt and saltscoured — heading into town for long oyster and lobster lunches on this or that terrace, where we’d slump, stunned by the heat and the local rosé. But that was in the summer when the last thing anyone would’ve desired was a hearty, hot stew. The bouillabaisse experience, as I say, came on a blustery spring day. I was already familiar with the warming and filling capabilities of a good soupe de poissons, served complete with grated Gruyère, rouille and croutons, but this was a further intensification, a sort of “squaring”, if you will, of the soupe, since the fish broth effectively doubles the fishiness of the bouillabaisse, given

One can hypothesise that it was part of the wholesale move during this period for plebeian cultural practices to be adopted as mainstream, a tendency which intensiﬁed into the 20th century, and which now, in the current era, takes the form of the chief executives of Fortune 500 companies clad entirely in blue denim workwear. Anyway, think of Vaughan Williams searching out obscure folk tunes, or the peasant sabots painted by van Gogh, it’s here that we should locate the bouillabaisse, which, in common with the waxed cotton jacket originally worn by Tyneside dockers, is something that was developed entirely for its utility, but which latterly became a fashionable accessory. Actually, the comparison doesn’t end there: in common with the Barbour, the bouillabaisse envelops you in a pungent aroma — in the former’s case it’s one of paraffin, in the latter’s a bouquet garni — while warming you up from deep within. On a recent visit to Marseille, where my

The omphalos of the bouillabaisse’s being lies in the old port of Marseille, nowadays full of tourists, crap eateries and electric scooters, but once upon a time a harbour where fish were landed daily

de Grand Gaou, but, as the broth was decanted into our wide, white bowls, and the fish arrived — firm-fleshed, soft, gelatinous and shelled — piled high on steely salvers, it was as if some sort of boiler or stove had ignited in my belly, sending great waves of warm and fishy pleasure pulsing out to all my extremities. Yes, I confess: it was one of the great gastronomic coups de foudre: my falling in love with bouillabaisse. Like all lain low by such obsessions, of course, I was ripe for it. I’d been visiting the French Mediterranean region for a couple of years at this stage, staying at the home of a wealthy Anglo-French friend. True, even in the early Eighties, the Riviera was already living on its past cultural glories, rather than cultivating new ones. The days when Scott and Zelda caromed along the corniche, Picasso painted it, and Willie Maugham fiddled about at Cap Ferrat were long gone; instead, at high season, as far as the eye could see, the beaches were subdivided into recliner-sized rental units,

it contains in concentrated form the essence of the chunks of cooked fish that are added to it. And, if you are indeed what you eat, it made perfect sense that when I ate this dishthat’s-a-world-entire, I did indeed become more… worldly. OF COURSE, THE ORIGINS OF THIS MAGNIFICENT repast (regal enough, like Poseidon, to have had its own kingdom) lie in serendipity and toil. The omphalos (or navel) of the bouillabaisse’s being lies in the old port of Marseille, nowadays full of tourists, crap eateries and electric scooters, but once upon a time a harbour where fish were landed daily. But which fish? One way of considering the bouillabaisse is to think of it as the Barbour jacket of French fish dishes. Originally, the bony and spiny specimens caught by the Marseillais fisher-folk were deemed too repugnant for clientele in tony restaurants, but this began to change at the end of the 19th century.

partner and I stayed in a hotel located in the belly of Le Corbusier’s celebrated Unité d’Habitation (a behemoth of a residential block, which also houses a restaurant called, suitably enough, La Ventre de l’Architecte), we ventured out to swim. There’s a little notch of a harbour called the Vallon des Auffes, around the headland from Marseille’s Old Port, and here are both ragged rocks and, in season, ragged rascals running and splashing around them, together with tall Dutch girls wearing nose rings. I ﬂoated in the Mediterranean, which may’ve been the requisitely Homeric “winedark”, but I think not in a good way, especially given the amount of corkage. From where I modestly rocked and rolled, I could see the yet rockier isle, three or four kilometres off shore, that supports the bastion known as the Chateau d’If, wherein Alexandre Dumas’ ﬁctional Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned. The count was in reality a commoner called Edmond Dantès, who purchased his title;

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really a similar sort of socially-rising parabola to the one described by my adored fish stew. Moreover, lazily hand-flipping through my own 180° parabola, I was able to look back at the shore, the little harbour, and the off-white jumble of buildings surrounding it. In among them — as I knew — is Chez Fonfon, the restaurant where we were due to reenter the bouillabaisse universe in a couple of aperitifs’ time. Chez Fonfon doubtless has many claims to fame — and, as you’ll shortly discover, the establishment fancies itself as one of the principal arbiters of the echt bouillabaisse — but my familiarity with the restaurant is a result of its bulky rectilinear presence in the background of an early scene in The French Connection where two men are in urgent, furtive conversation. This is a scene which develops from a still earlier one on the ramparts of the Chateau d’If, where drug kingpin Alain Charnier (played by Fernando Rey) orders the assassination of an undercover detective who’s infiltrated

of preparation of the one, the only, the acceptno-substitute, Chez Fonfon bouillabaisse… My instructor ran on, telling me things I’d known for, well, ever since that windy spring day at Au Royaume de la Bouillabaisse, in Six-Foursles-Plages, when, hobbyist that I really am, I’d asked the waiter for the self-same instruction. Anyway, no contemporary bouillabaisse comes without it, since the display of the ﬁsh to be eaten long since became so common, it’s been incorporated into the ritual. And so our waiter brought them, on their steely salvers — the rascasse, the turbot, the grondin rouge — and some conger eel, although not the head mandated by tradition. Indeed, the parade des poissons slightly threw me: these were not all the precise species mandated by… well, mandated by whom, exactly? The bouillabaisse is an extempore dish, so presumably even the chart’s rules must be broken from time to time? Questions I would’ve posed to the voluble waiter, were my French rather better than it in

those extremities were full right up, and shortly after that, my stomach felt as taut as a beach ball tossed between two Dutch girls sporting nose rings. (And those Dutch girls know how to inflate things.) It was as if I had, indeed, put on a Barbour jacket and zipped it up to the collar: I sat, looking out through the wide windows of Chez Fonfon, down onto the harbourside below, where a number of adipose motor launches were pulled up on the slipway. I felt quite as plump and powerless as they. But then hunger is, I think, always the finest spice, bringing true piquancy to a chiller-cabinet sausage roll, or a bag of stale crisps. The bouillabaisse Chez Fonfon is undoubtedly superb but I was in no condition to appreciate it. After all, if the English middle classes walk for hours through cold and sodden fields on Sunday mornings, simply to work up the necessary hunger required to appreciate their brown beef and breeze-block roasties, then surely something roughly commensurate is required if a Provençal

In common with Barbour jackets originally worn by Tyneside dockers, bouillabaisse is something that was developed entirely for its utility, but which latterly became a fashionable accessory

his multimillion-dollar drug-running syndicate. Obviously, to compare a fish stew with a drug of addiction would be surpassing strange, and altogether unacceptable; yet I don’t think it’s contentious to assert that events both fictional and real permeate places and spaces: the spoon we raise to our lips is already infused with the past and brimming with the future. So, sitting down in the upstairs room of Chez Fonfon, I can be partially excused for having asked the neophyte’s question of the waiter: what makes the bouillabaisse served here so very authentic? What, if he liked, was the quiddity of la bouillabaisse Chez Fonfon? The answer came quickly — and it came forcefully. There were a number of restaurants in the Old Port area… five or six, he couldn’t be precise… but anyway, some of the most ancient and venerable, had, in the face of the tragic abasement of this proud dish by touristic clip joints, bonded together to create a chart, which set out the exact ingredients and method

fact is. As things stood, I’d to wait until my partner’s attention wavered away from a table in the vicinity. “See that couple?” she said. “He’s a typical sort of caillou…” (meaning “pebble”, a reference to his baldness) “…with a much younger pouffe-pétasse.” (Literally “pouf-bitch”, but “armcandy” captures the sense a little more kindly.) “But she’s a street goddess — she can handle him.” She could handle her bouillabaisse as well: chunking the discoid croutons with rouille, positively hurling them into the broth, then attacking with spoon and fork, elbows raised. I was fully prepared to do the same until, that is, ours arrived. Perhaps I hadn’t been rock ’n’ rolling in the Med sufficiently to build up my appetite; or, conceivably, it’s never a good idea to tackle a warming fish stew on a hot July evening. True, the first few mouthfuls were sublime, these several fishes, their textures and tastes, doubled and then redoubled by the broth, pulsing out towards my extremities, but all too soon

bourgeois wishes to experience the full savour of his bouillabaisse, rather than the ridicule of his fellow diners when he sits on the proverbial whoopee cushion. A vigorous swim out to the Chateau d’If and back would probably do the trick, or failing that, a brief career in the heroin trade. Any which way, the important thing is not to succumb to a sort of ragoût de l’ennui — as our poor waiter seemed to be. As we were rolling down the stairs towards the exit, my partner asked him whether he liked the signature dish he’d just served us. He thought for a moment, then said: “I do love it — but I spend all day smelling it and touching it. To be frank, I’m pretty fed up with the stuff…” Yes, for this young man, bouillabaisse was continuing in its active mode, having transformed from staple food to delicacy, it had undergone a further bouleversement, becoming his daily bread, in every sense. And this, too, we must surely agree, is also what it’s truly like. ○

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STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Heston Blumenthal returns to the source By Alex Bilmes Photographs by Simon Emmett

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1. LUNCH, BACKWARDS

The table had been booked for one o’clock, but two was fast approaching and we hadn’t yet taken our seats. A fierce wind hurried clouds across the sky and ushered leaves across the terrace of L’Oustau de Baumanière, in the town of Les Baux-de-Provence, in the south of France. Heston Blumenthal had just started on his negroni, and sparked up a Marlboro, when a waiter approached and wondered if the famous chef would prefer to eat his lunch in reverse, as he had done once before at this restaurant: begin with petits fours, then pudding, followed by cheese, then main courses, starters, finally amuse bouche. The wine would go backwards, too: dessert, red, white. It was a Thursday in early October. We were a party of four: Blumenthal, chef-proprietor of The Fat Duck, Britain’s most adventurous restaurant; James Winter, a former TV executive whose email signature describes him as head of creative strategy, Fat Duck Group; Simon Emmett, who took the photos on these pages; and me. Four Englishmen in early middle age, anticipating a convivial lunch in the name of research: Blumenthal, assisted by Winter, continuing his lifelong quest to understand the art and science of taste and flavour, and how those two, in harness with the other senses, can unlock memory, and release emotion; Emmett and me continuing our study of Blumenthal himself, which had begun that morning at his rented house, in the nearby village of Eygalières. Blumenthal is a solid man of 53, burly, well fed, with a shaved head and spectacles in the shape of raised eyebrows — he has perhaps 60 pairs, made to his specifications by the London optician Tom Davies — giving him an appearance of impatient inquisitiveness. Blumenthal favours Nike trainers, jeans, and V-neck T-shirts, often with his own coat of arms printed on the chest, an assemblage of symbols that took him seven years to design and is, he told me, unexpectedly, his proudest achievement. It includes his motto: “Question everything.” Blumenthal was immediately taken by the idea of the backwards lunch. “Great idea!” he said, waving his broken wrist at the waiter. (Some weeks previously he’d fallen off his electric mountain bike while cycling in the local mountains, Les Alpilles.) The notion had a whimsical, topsy-turvy, Lewis Carroll eccentricity to it, which is very Heston Blumenthal. Also, it offered a chance to experiment on the taste buds, to surprise them into action, offer them something unexpected, and confounding, and fun, all of which is quintessentially Blumenthalian. Blumenthal’s character is fixed in the psyches of foodies, and in the consciousness of the wider public, even those who have never and wouldn’t necessarily want to eat in a Michelin-starred restaurant. He is the mad scientist of British cooking, his chef ’s jacket doubling as a lab coat. It is an image that frustrates him — he finds it reductive — but also one that he must accept some considerable responsibility for creating. He is, if not mad, then certainly eccentric. And his scientific bona fides, while not formal, are substantial; he is the only chef to be an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Blumenthal made his name in the late Nineties and early Noughties experimenting with what became known as “food pairing”

— identifying molecular similarities in different ingredients not previously used together, and combining them in a dish. He became associated with “molecular gastronomy”, a term he rejects (“boiling an egg is molecular gastronomy”, he told me), and famous as the creator of such provocations as snail porridge and crab ice cream. He developed many of his best-known dishes in a laboratory, rather than in a kitchen. He has repeatedly allowed himself to be photographed posing with test tubes and beakers, perhaps pouring liquid nitrogen onto frozen fruit, his glasses acting as goggles. His first TV series was called Kitchen Chemistry. So was his first book. You will struggle to find a profile of him that does not describe him as the Willy Wonka of the food world, as if Willy Wonka were not already the Willy Wonka of the food world. The backwards lunch, then: could the kitchen do it at short notice, Blumenthal wanted to know? We didn’t want to make a fuss. Not at all, demurred the waiter. Blumenthal was disconcerted by the fact that we were already halfway through our aperitifs. Shouldn’t they come last, rather than first? But he accepted defeat on that point, and we headed inside to commence our feast. For me, all this was new; I had never eaten at L’Oustau de Baumanière forwards, let alone in reverse. For Blumenthal, it was a homecoming, of sorts. It was at this restaurant, in the summer of 1982, that he first fell down a rabbit hole, as he puts it, into a world of multi-sensory wonder. He was 16, on holiday with his parents and his younger sister, none of whom had been to a Michelinstarred restaurant before. “I had never seen an oyster,” Blumenthal told me. They had lived — were still living, as most of us were, at that time — in a food culture that was, by today’s standards, unrecognisably unsophisticated. “Olive oil you had to buy from the chemist,” he said. “It was used for unblocking ears.” Standing outside the Baumanière 37 years on from his first visit, I asked him if he could remember where the family had sat that day. He pointed to a table under a tree. He said I had to imagine it in the dark, with the trees lit up. “I can still remember the noise of the feet of the waiting staff crunching on soft gravel,” he said. “The sound of the crickets in summer is so loud, and the intoxicating smell of lavender everywhere, the chink of glasses. The sommelier had a leather apron and the cheese trolley was the size of a chariot. I’d never seen anything like this. Never.” He was immediately struck by the idea that he should learn to cook. It was a decision that led, circuitously, to the opening, in 1995, of The Fat Duck, the tiny Berkshire restaurant that would, in 2004, receive its third Michelin star, and the following year top the annual list of The 50 Best Restaurants in the World. He still remembers what he ate, in 1982. “I had a red mullet dish, with sauce vierge, which was tomatoes, olive oil, basil, little bit of pickled lemon. Then I had leg of lamb in pastry, with some green beans and gratin potatoes, and then I had the crêpes Baumanière, which are like souffléed pancakes.” But the quality of the food, and the skill of the cooking, while by no means incidental, is not the point. “When I was describing it over the years, I realised I was actually talking more about everything else. It was the effect of everything around me that made the experience amazing. “We eat with our eyes and we eat with our noses and we eat with our hands and we eat with our emotions,” he said. “Sight,

Previous pages: the countryside around Heston Blumenthal’s new hometown, the village of Eygalières, in Provence, includes natural spring water that the chef, pictured making lunch at his house, is focussing his experiments on. Opposite: Blumenthal at lunch in October at L’Oustau de Baumanière, the restaurant where, aged 16, he ﬁrst discovered ﬁne dining

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sound, smell, taste, memory, mood, awareness: all these affect our relationship with food, how we perceive taste and flavour.” This is his credo, these are the articles of his faith. Returning to the Baumanière, Blumenthal experiences the Proustian rush that smell and taste — a madeleine dipped in tea, for example — can supply. “Your most important relationship is with yourself,” Blumenthal told me. Food, cooked and consumed “mindfully”, can bring you closer, or return you, to yourself. Blumenthal’s sensibility is oxymoronic: he is a nostalgic futurologist, a chef-scientist determined to invent new and better ways of cooking food, and serving it, and eating it, in order to return to a specific, epiphanic moment in his own life, and to take his customers back to similar moments in theirs. To do that, he believes he needs to understand the science not only of cooking, but of feeling. Why, exactly, had he been so affected, as a teenager, by that meal at the Baumanière? Could he, by understanding that, take his cooking, and his restaurants, to a new level of excellence? More than that, a new level of significance? In terms of skill and reputation, Blumenthal operates at the Olympian heights of fine dining, with the other demigods of foodism, one of late capitalism’s secular religions: Ferran Adrià of El Bulli, René Redzepi of Noma, Thomas Keller of The French Laundry, and the eminences grises of French cuisine de haut en bas: Joël Robuchon, Alain Ducasse. He could have been forgiven for preparing, as 2020 looms, to make a lap of honour celebrating 25 years since the opening of his era-defining restaurant. Instead, he is plotting radical changes to the way he runs The Fat Duck. In 2014, he closed the restaurant for six months, temporarily relocating his team to Melbourne, Australia, where they worked on the launch of that city’s Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, sister to Blumenthal’s restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental in London. When The Fat Duck reopened it was with a new emphasis on “storytelling”, on personalisation — dishes created to the specific tastes and requirements, and even experiences, of individual diners. I went for lunch in October and, after phone and email consultations with my allocated “Storyteller”, Salvatore, was presented, at the end of my meal, with a small corduroy pillow, the size of a cookbook, upon which sat two chocolate cigarettes, each containing strawberry sauce. Days earlier, at his prompting, I had described to Salvatore a memory of my own, of a formative moment in my life, in which I happened to be smoking a cigarette and drinking strawberry Ribena. My immediate response to the chocolate cigs was childlike delight — not something I feel too often, sad to say. Allied to that, a sort of giddy appreciation: this was a joke I was in on. It was the culmination of a lunch that had been a series of bedazzlements, a symphony of the strange and the arresting and the sensational, including a number of Blumenthal’s greatest hits: hot and cold tea; mock turtle soup; snail porridge. For all this magic, though, Blumenthal regards The Fat Duck as a work in progress. It’s nowhere near the place he wants it to be. “It’s too clumsy,” he told me. He’d been thinking about the work of Punchdrunk, the British company who pioneered “immersive theatre,” breaking free of the sterility of the stalls and the circle and the proscenium, taking audiences into spaces outside the auditorium, interacting with theatregoers, making them part of the performance. Why should The Fat Duck not be the first “immersive restaurant”, liberated from the strictures of formal fine dining? Why should it be limited to a single location? Why should it have to involve tables and →

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chairs and tablecloths and waiters and wine lists and all the other hidebound traditions of eating out? What began to emerge, as we talked, was that Blumenthal’s journey of intellectual and emotional discovery had lately taken on a new aspect: it had broadened, and also intensified. He mentioned Joseph Campbell, the controversial American professor of literature, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and proponent of the notion of the “monomyth” — the idea that all our foundational stories tell of a hero’s journey. Blumenthal used the most recent Mad Max film to illustrate the point. He also mentioned Homer’s Odyssey, and Woody, from Toy Story. The hero’s journey, pace Campbell, is often a journey home. This was Blumenthal’s journey, too. It was a return to the source. Blumenthal felt he needed to go back to the beginning, so that he could start again. At the Baumanière, Blumenthal wanted to demonstrate to me the power of emotion to affect taste, just as taste can affect emotion. “Pick up your wine,” he said. I readied my glass. “The first sip,” he continued, “I want you to close your eyes and picture someone who fills you with love and happiness.” I pictured my kids, and took a swig. “Now picture someone who fills you with rage and dislike, anger, frustration, hatred.” I pictured Gordon Ramsay. (Just kidding, I pictured Paul Hollywood.) “It’s like a different wine,” said Blumenthal. It was true: the first sip was warm and smooth and rounded and full. The second: thin and sharp and bitter. Despite the apparent success of his experiment, I must have looked sceptical. “I could look at you in your eyes and change the taste of that wine,” he said. It was a challenge. “Go on, then.” “The first time you look into my eyes,” he said, “it’ll be me looking at you. The second time I look at you, I’ll put myself back into my old fighting days. I’m imagining with my eyes open.” It felt a bit unusual, staring into the eyes of a man I’d only just met. But Blumenthal’s is a benign presence, and I did it. Then I did it again, and he gave me a menacing glare. I enjoyed the second sip less. There were more tests to come. He took out a pad and improvised two flashcards. On each he wrote the word “wine”: the first time in a curvaceous, bubble-font, the second time in a spiked, jagged script. After a few of these experiments it became harder to judge their efficacy; I blame the wine. 2. SOMETHING IN THE WATER

Is it the sunshine that bathes the Provençal countryside in soft light, buttering the farmhouses, caramelising the ﬁelds, sparkling on the streams? Is it the wind, the mysterious Mistral that spins across the landscape, twisting the trees? Is it the mountains, dramatic thrusts of limestone and bauxite, that dominate each horizon? Is it the soil, so fertile, in which the locals cultivate olives and ﬁgs and fruit, and grapes for wine, and goats for cheese? Is it the sky, so wide, and the air so clear? What is it, that caused Blumenthal to move with his young family, in the late summer of 2018, from their home in London to a tiny village in remote rural France? It was morning in Eygalières, Blumenthal’s new home, a place with the unmistakable fragrance of recent investment. The village →

‘It’s different here, I actually feel like a local person’: at the boulangerie in Eygalières, Blumenthal buys bread for lunch

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‘I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SAY IT WITHOUT SOUNDING CHEESY, BUT THIS IS A BIT OF A NEW CHAPTER’

itself is not much more than a slender high street, sloping steeply upwards, past the church, towards a ruined tower. It is lined by cafés and restaurants of considerable appeal, plus an épicerie, a butcher, a chic bakery, a new wine shop. The buildings appear freshly painted, the streets are spotless. The view is a panorama of olive groves and vineyards, hills and valleys. This is the traditional French village as the animators at Pixar might computer-generate it. Five minutes outside town, at the Blumenthal residence, he and I sat at a table on a terrace outside the kitchen. This was a rented house that he was then living in with his wife, Stephanie, their daughter, Shea-Rose, aged two, and Luna, nine, Stephanie’s daughter from a previous relationship. (Blumenthal has three grown-up children from his first marriage, to Zanna; they divorced in 2017, after 28 years.) The place was in some disorder because he and Stephanie and the girls were preparing to leave, after six months, for another, hopefully more permanent home, on the other side of the village. It would be their third house in the area in just over a year. Blumenthal wasn’t able to give me a definitive answer to the question of why the family had moved here, probably because there isn’t one answer. We started with the water, the substance he was particularly focussed on at the moment. Eygalières, he said, was once called Aqualeria: “the land of water”. He told me about how, during a recent electrical storm, he had filled two bowls with tap water, left one outside and kept the other inside. In the morning he tasted them. The one that had been left outside tasted “thicker”. “We know what to do with water,” he said. “We drink it, we wash with it, we cook with it. But we don’t know what it is. Depending on who you listen to, it’s got 30 to 70 unique properties. So glaciers shouldn’t float. It does the opposite of what other things do. And there’s a lot of research being done at the moment on water’s ability to carry data.” What did he mean? “You can change the structure of it,” he said. “If there’s a big old river it’ll pick up data and information from people that have interacted with that river. And it has a memory and it can carry emotion.” When Blumenthal gets his new lab up and running in Eygalières — his top priority — his experiments on water will begin in earnest. Blumenthal becomes impassioned when talking about his scientific projects, and his mind seems to go spinning off in multiple directions, producing a flood of information. Call it a stream of consciousness. His preoccupations, enthusiasms and obsessions — a bubbling stew of the philosophical, the esoteric, the scientific and the speculative — seem to multiply by the moment, and the connections between them were not always clear to me. He began to speak about a Japanese man I’d never heard of, called Emoto. “He took water from different sources and subjected it to thought: gratitude, or love, or hate. Then he played it music, even

showed it signs. Then he froze the water, to –23°C I think it was. And then you see the crystals.” He showed me images on his iPad. The water crystals that had apparently been played soothing music were uniformly beautiful and sparkling. The crystals that had been in some way abused were malformed, ugly, dull. That night, back at my hotel, I Googled Emoto. The late Masaru Emoto was the author of a bestseller, The Hidden Messages in Water. He believed the molecular structure of water could be altered by human consciousness. He also conducted experiments on rice, including, according to Blumenthal, calling a bowl of the unsuspecting grain “a worthless piece of wotsit”. I think it’s fair to say his findings are disputed, though not by Blumenthal. The question of what all this had to do with the family’s move to France, is one I was still grappling with. But it wasn’t just Emoto that Blumenthal wanted to talk about. In our first half an hour of conversation, while I drank coffee and made concentrating faces, he made reference to the work of the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, an expert on time; a professor of bioengineering called Gerald Pollack who has talked about a fourth phase of water, after ice, vapour and liquid. He mentioned, not without embarrassment — “this is very rock ’n’ roll” — that in 2020 he is planning to go to the World Water Congress in Denmark. He talked about Luc Montagnier, who won a Nobel Prize for helping to discover the HIV virus, and then took up the work of the late French immunologist, Jacques Benveniste, who once published an article in Nature magazine about what was then called “water memory”. “People thought he was mad,” said Blumenthal of Benveniste. “He died of cancer, because of the stress levels of the science world trying to rubbish him.” He talked about an experiment involving the saliva of an astronaut, conducted by Cleve Backster, an interrogation specialist for the CIA and — this is true, I looked it up — former director of the Backster School of Lie Detection in San Diego, California. It was Backster, Blumenthal said, who experimented on plants with a polygraph machine and concluded that they feel pain. “In the Seventies,” said Blumenthal, “sheep learned to roll over cattle grids around the world.” He didn’t mean that one flock circumnavigated the globe by rolling over cattle grids. He meant that in a near-simultaneous moment of inspiration, or unseen intercontinental extrasensory communication, or quantum something, multiple flocks of sheep around the world realised, if that’s the word, that they could cross cattle grids by rolling over them. Plants in pain; water as a conductor for emotion; sheep in psychic sync; a man with the unimprovable Christian name “Cleve”. Increasingly, I felt myself to be setting out on a misadventure into the shadowy world of conspiracy theory and pseudoscience, in the manner of Jon Ronson, rather than a straightforward

‘Do I see myself spending the rest of my life here? Probably not. But I don’t know. I certainly am here for a good few years’: at the Friday morning market in Eygalières, Blumenthal buys vegetables to make ratatouille

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interview with a celebrity chef. This was just the beginning. Blumenthal talked about a hospital in Sydney, Australia, where by bashing gongs, researchers had apparently found they could alter the shape of human blood cells. “If you believe in string theory,” he said, “every single thing on this planet is connected. Nothing is ever still.” He did not pause before continuing. “And for me, relativity doesn’t work in a black hole for two main reasons. One is there’s never been nothing. We talk about the universe expanding? I think it’s breathing.” The universe is breathing? “Like DNA,” he said. “I’m jumping around a bit,” he said, possibly noticing my eyes crossing. Some days later, at Blumenthal’s direction, James Winter sent me an email with a Word document attached. It contained a scientific formula that aimed to explain the concept of “wisdom”. It had been written by Blumenthal’s “scientific advisor”, Bhusana Premanode, a “biological theoretical physicist” who apparently also goes by Pooh, as in Bear, and of whom he had spoken with great admiration, in Eygalières, describing him as “sort of my Buddhist monk”. It was Premanode — not, as I originally suspected, Freddie Mercury — who supplied the legend printed on the back of Blumenthal’s T-shirt: “Don’t stop me now”. As Blumenthal talked on, the family’s new bulldog puppy, Harry adopted a splayed position beside my chair, as if he had lately fallen from the sky and crash-landed on to his stomach in this Provençal back garden, narrowly missing the assortment of Heston Blumenthal-branded barbecues. Indications that the dog had survived his ordeal came from a deep, rumbling snore that served as a background to his master’s rabbiting. Harry seemed unconcerned about string theory, quantum physics and the breath of the universe as, I couldn’t help noticing, did his mistress, a petite, stylishly dressed Parisienne in her early thirties, with a tumble of tawny hair and a highly attuned bullshit detector. “You know,” she said to me in the local bakery the following day, as we bought coffee and excellent croissants, “It’s not easy being married to a crazy man.” She meant it fondly. But she definitely meant it. Blumenthal has ADHD. “I know I have a busy head but I don’t know how busy it is compared to everyone else’s,” he said. “But it’s very sensitive to temperature.” How so? “I can tell the temperature of a room to within a degree, roughly.” What was the temperature right now? “In here? 20. Between 19.5 and 20.5. Because my head starts to perspire, consistently, over a certain temperature.” This has been going on since he was a boy. “I know the temperature of most of the airlines,” he said, meaning the cabin temperature of passenger aircraft. “British Airways is 21. Qantas, 22. Singapore, 23 to 24 depending. Emirates is 25°C.” (I have not checked these, preferring to take Blumenthal at his head’s word.) He returned to the subject at hand — water, and how to restructure it — by referring to the Schumann resonances: “The sun hits the planet, you’ve got the magnetic field around the Earth, it deflects it otherwise we’d be dead, but what comes through, because we’re spinning at 24,000kmh, are these frequencies that run round the Earth, like a Tesla coil. Those seven main frequencies match up to the seven main chakras, various vital organs in the body. So, by applying certain sound treatment, resonance, to humans, you can make a very big difference to their health.” He drew me a diagram. My head was spinning by now. Perhaps not at 24,000kmh, but not far off. He was talking about Tibetan singing bowls, the →

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pH value of different emotions, the difference between a “human being” and a “human doing.” “So I’m here because I married a Frenchwoman,” he concluded. This line of reasoning I could grasp more readily. No diagram necessary. But he was immediately contradicted by his wife, who had rejoined us with a cup of coffee and a smoke. “No!” said Stephanie, puffing out her cheeks. “People think he’s here because I’m French, but no. I was so happy after ﬁve years in London! He decided to come and live here and I said yes. But it’s not because of me.” Blumenthal assented. “It wasn’t her choice to come here.” And he began to talk about the peculiar quality of the light, in this part of France, and the sharp contrast here between the light and the shadows, and why that resonates with him, particularly, because he believes that in order to live well, and fully, one must embrace the darkness as much as the light, and consider the invisible as much as the visible. “I’ll come back to water later,” he promised. 3. THE FAR QUENELLE

On our last day in Eygalières, Blumenthal cooked lunch. We met him early, at the market, where stalls sold truffles and lavenderscented soap and tomatoes. In the butcher’s, Blumenthal hunted down a hunk of steak, and from various stalls he gathered vegetables for ratatouille. Back at the house, Stephanie and I spent a good while plugging in and then unplugging different extension leads and trying to force cables to stretch farther than they wanted to, but we couldn’t get Blumenthal’s charcoal-burning barbecue to start. Probably the fuse had gone, suggested James Winter. There was another, bigger, charcoal-burning grill, but that, too, was malfunctioning. The more traditional grill had a broken lid, but it would do. When the grill had reached optimum temperature, Blumenthal put the steak on. He turned it every 30 seconds or so, while Simon Emmett took photos of the flames. He was making a point: the accepted thinking on cooking meat is that you first brown each side. “It doesn’t work,” he said. Blumenthal is self-taught. As a teenager he trained himself, in his parents’ kitchen in High Wycombe, working to recipes from the classic French cookbooks, which he translated using a FrenchEnglish dictionary. He had no idea, at that time, of opening a restaurant. He was just fascinated by food, as he was by savate, a French form of full-contact kick-boxing, which he practised with the same obsessiveness he brought to cooking. Later, he switched to tabletennis. Now it’s the mysteries of the cosmos. In 1984, when he was 18, Blumenthal came across a newspaper review of a book by Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen. He bought the book. “I’d failed my chemistry O level,” he said. “A lot of it was too complicated for me. But there was a comment in there that browning meat doesn’t keep in the juices. Which flies in the face of what everyone says.” If browning meat kept in the juices, as advertised, it would be impossible to have a well-done steak. “What sizzles is water,” he said. “The more you cook a steak, the more the proteins contract, like scrambled eggs, and they squeeze the water out.” Browning can

be very important for flavour, Blumenthal said. It gives a crust to the meat. But it doesn’t keep the juices in. “I thought, ‘Bloody hell, if that’s true, how many other things I’ve read aren’t true?’” It was then, he said, that he developed his “question everything” approach. His first experiments were with ice cream. “I wanted to know, since I had 20 French chefs’ cookbooks that all had vanilla ice cream recipes in them, how come none of them was the same? Do they know why they’re putting these ingredients in, or is it just what they’d been told?” He questioned everything: Why sugar? Why cream? Or milk, or skimmed milk, or eggs? Why cook the custard to the temperature you’re told to cook it to? What happens if you keep going past that? “I wasn’t overly keen on the eggyness of ice cream,” he said. “I wanted to try and get rid of it. Egg yolks coagulate at 82°, roughly. I wondered, ‘What happens if you cook the egg yolks to 69°, so the custard is not thicker, but then hold it for longer for pasteurisation, and end up with a much cleaner ice cream flavour?’” No, too thin. “Then, ‘What happens if you do exactly the opposite, intentionally fuck up the ice cream? Let’s scramble it, and then pass it through a sieve.’ It was thick, and it was just egg yolk. And it reminded me of having my cooked breakfasts at home, a Saturday treat. That’s when I thought, ‘Let’s try it with bacon.’ That’s how bacon and egg ice cream came about.” He wasn’t trying to invent that particular dish. “It was about the journey, the process of discovery, the curiosity. And that turned out to be my drive.” Around that same time — the mid-Eighties — Blumenthal wrote to the top 20 restaurants in the British Good Food Guide, seeking work. He received two replies. “One was a ‘No’, one was from Raymond at the Manoir.” Raymond Blanc was then and remains today one of the most respected chefs in the country. His Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, in Oxfordshire, is still a place of pilgrimage for gastronauts. On Blumenthal’s first morning, he was given a “skyscraper” of green beans to chop. “Some French guy walked past and said something to me so I threatened to smack him,” he remembered. “Probably not a common thing for a young commis to do. I heard this voice saying, ‘What are you doing over there? Come over here.’ It was Marco [Pierre White, the future enfant terrible of English cooking]. He was on the meat section. We became friends.” Blanc offered Blumenthal a permanent job. He turned it down, preferring to follow his own path, rather than serve an apprenticeship chopping beans. (It says something for both of them that he and Blanc remain friends.) Instead of an apprenticeship in a professional kitchen, Blumenthal found whatever work he could that would allow him to spend his evenings experimenting at home. “It turned out to be the harder option, I think,” he told me. He became a photocopier salesman. (“Horrible.”) A repo man. Then he did a bookkeeping course and went to work for his dad, keeping the ledger at the family office equipment hire firm. He did that for six or eight years. “I didn’t find it interesting,” was his summary of that period. The Fat Duck might have been called The Far Quenelle. That was Blumenthal’s father’s suggestion for a name for his son’s restaurant. (Say it out loud.) It was a rundown pub in the sleepy riverside

‘I know I can do this, I know I can cook’: in his Provençal back garden, Blumenthal grills steak, to serve with his ratatouille

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village of Bray when Blumenthal found it. “It was dodgy,” he remembered. “The ﬁrst week, someone pulled a knife on someone else in the garden.” In order to raise the £180,000 necessary to buy it, he sold the cottage he’d bought in High Wycombe and moved in with his parents, bringing with him a pregnant Zanna and their two-year-old son. Together, they were taking a leap in the dark. Blumenthal borrowed a further £70,000 for the refurbishment, including £10,000 from his father. The chairs cost £50 from a local ironmonger. The oven was secondhand; it had a gas burner, with domestic pressure rather than professional so that even boiling a pot of water was a chore. “I gave up everything and stuck myself in a concrete box,” he summarised. “It was chaos.” For close to a decade from 1995, he existed on 15 hours’ sleep a week. It sounds improbable, but Blumenthal can explain in detail how he left home each morning at 5am and often didn’t return until 1am, when he would start on paperwork. “It was a level of exhaustion I never knew existed,” he said. One day he was so tired he tried to light a blow torch with tap water. Hot tap water, he reassured me: he hadn’t completely lost it. For eight years he didn’t miss a single service. Not without shame, he told me that a colleague of his used to tell an anecdote in which he sent her an email at 2am and another at 5.30am, saying, ‘I haven’t heard from you: did you get my email?’” →

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The Fat Duck began as an unpretentious country bistro. “Five starters, ﬁve main courses, four desserts,” Blumenthal said. “I think dessert was £2.75. Only one main course broke the £10 mark: steak and chips, £10.50. It was me and a pot washer. Literally. And two people front of house.” If there was any clue to the future it would have been the chips, which were triple-cooked to a new recipe, developed by the young chef-patron himself, after much experimentation in his parents’ kitchen. The restrictions imposed by the size of the restaurant and its basic equipment were formative. “Having this poky, useless kitchen, that really shaped me,” he said. It was green beans, again, that caused a turning point. With his underpowered hob, he could only boil a few at a time. “It made me question: do you need salt in the water?” The review he had read of the Harold McGee book was by Nicholas Kurti, a Hungarian physicist whose hobby was cooking. Kurti was an advocate of applying scientiﬁc knowledge to culinary problems. In a sense he was the godfather of molecular gastronomy. Blumenthal tried to contact Kurti, in 1998, but learned he had recently died. Kurti’s widow supplied him with a list of names of sympathetic scientists and Blumenthal began to phone them, one after the other, asking the same question: do you need salt in the water to cook green beans? At length he reached Peter Barham, a physicist in Bristol. “He said to me, ‘Eureka! A chef who is interested!’” They began to collaborate. This was the early days of molecular gastronomy. Blumenthal’s test kitchen, at The Fat Duck, was at the forefront of this movement, along with El Bulli, in Roses, Catalonia. Those restaurants “changed the shape of food, changed the shape of cooking,” Blumenthal said. But there was a downside: “People started thinking it was about pipettes and tweezers and syringes and clipboards.” At the house in Eygalières, he sliced the steak roughly into uneven strips, one of which he handed to me. It was nubby and fatty and tender and juicy, and wholly delicious. I said so. “I know I can do that, I know I can cook,” he said to me. This was a statement of fact, plain and simple. It didn’t come across as boastful. But as he made it, he seemed emotional. I felt that perhaps he was frustrated by trying to communicate all his many other more complicated ideas. This idea, this thing — a steak, cooked to perfection by a man who knew, perhaps better than anyone on the planet, what he was doing — was easy to get across. And it was warmly received. 4. STARRY, STARRY NIGHT

Whatever else we did during our time in Provence, Blumenthal and James Winter were determined Emmett and I should see the asylum where Vincent van Gogh was a patient for a year, from May 1889, and made some of his most famous paintings. Apart from the fact that van Gogh was, as Blumenthal is, enchanted by the light and colours and landscape of this part of France, it wasn’t immediately clear to me why they were so adamant about this trip. The asylum was — and still is, though they don’t use the word asylum now — housed in a former monastery, just outside the nearest substantial town, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, about 20 minutes, by car, from Blumenthal’s house. There’s a visitor centre there →

Left: the village of Eygalières, in Provence, to which Blumenthal and his family relocated in the late summer of 2018

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now. It costs €6 to get in. Cheap, when you consider the price of entry for van Gogh was his left ear. And so we set off, four of us folded into a compact German hire car, all limited leg room and remarks on the beauty of the countryside, and segues into half-remembered French history. Once we were on the road, Blumenthal handed me a portable speaker, and instructed me to play “Starry, Starry Night”, meaning the Don McLean song, “Vincent”. As Winter steered us down tight, twisty roads, I fiddled with the Bluetooth settings on my phone, trying to connect first to the speaker, and then to access my Spotify account. Reception was patchy, and for a moment I worried it might not be possible, but Blumenthal was determined I should keep trying. Meanwhile, as the cypress trees whistled past, and Winter negotiated oncoming agricultural vehicles, Blumenthal talked us through his developing tastes in music. Reference was made to shopping for seven-inches at Woolworths, ELO’s “Mr Blue Sky”, Marshall Jefferson’s deathless Chicago house classic “Move Your Body” and nights at Soho’s much missed Wag Club. At length, I found a live version of the song — best I could manage under the circumstances — and it began to play. Blumenthal took the speaker back and turned up the volume. “Starry, starry night,” sang McLean, mournfully, as we approached the outskirts of Saint-Rémy, “Paint your palette blue and grey.” For an unusual moment, Blumenthal was silent, listening. “Look out on a summer’s day / With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.” Blumenthal twisted towards me, raised his spectacles and pointed at his left eye. It was filled with tears. “See?” he said, and he gritted his teeth. We arrived at Saint-Paul de Mausole, the asylum, where Winter squeezed the car into a space next to a family of Spanish tourists. Blumenthal and I marched inside. (“Chefs’ day out?” said an English punter to me, recognising my recognisable companion. “Something like that,” I said.) In a cloister by a walled garden, I asked him what it was about the song — and about van Gogh — that so moved him. What did he identify with? “I think it’s the frustration that most people feel,” he said. “I’m careful not to say I feel like I’m misunderstood.” I asked if, in fact, he felt like he was misunderstood? “Yes,” he said. “You get pigeonholed. This is not what people have actually said but that idea of, ‘Stick to what you’re good at: chopping onions.’” He was frustrated, he said, because he was trying to explain ideas he strongly believed in, to an unreceptive audience. Sometimes he thought he should stop talking, he said, “because they’re never going to understand you. And the more you talk to them, the more the likelihood of them resisting even more.” Why would people resist his ideas? “Because you might intimidate them. They might not understand, they might not be interested. So many reasons. But that feeling of not being understood, in some respects it’s pushed me even harder. But I’m feeling that the stuff I started to do 20 years ago or 15 years ago or 10 years ago is actually starting to get through. Like [the idea of] looking into the senses. Before, it was: ‘You’re just the snail porridge guy.’” I thought of the McLean song: “They would not listen, they did not know how / Perhaps they’ll listen now.” Vincent van Gogh was a tortured genius who committed suicide,

at the age of 37, by shooting himself in the chest, after years of periodic insanity and poverty. (Although Blumenthal has a theory about van Gogh’s death; he suspects foul play.) Blumenthal is a superchef, richly rewarded. At the time of writing, he is in possession of both ears. The connection is not an easy one to make. “In the last year of being here, and reflecting,” Blumenthal said, “I’ve realised how lonely I was, a few years ago. “I didn’t cry from when I was a kid until I was at least 45,” he said. “Never shed a tear. Blocked. Now I can cry. It’s a fantastic thing to be able to have.” At the Baumanière, I’d asked if Blumenthal missed England. “Do I see myself spending the rest of my life here?” he said. “Probably not, but I don’t know. I certainly am here for a good few years.” I wondered if some kind of crisis had precipitated his move. He allowed that it had, without going into specifics. “I don’t know how to say it without sounding cheesy,” he said. “But this is a bit of a new chapter. And part of that is cleaning up the old chapter. Putting stuff in place to be able to do all the things I want to do. I think I had to go through a period that I’m still going through,” he said, meaning — I think — a period of struggle and uncertainty. “It’s a stabilising process,” he said. “I haven’t fully settled in yet.” He said there had been too many distractions in England for him to be able to do the work he wanted to do. “But much of it was about me not having the discipline to ignore the distractions.” Some of his frustrations were with his work. It’s no news that running a restaurant, especially an exceptionally high-end restaurant — or a number of them, in his case — is a fraught venture. Blumenthal’s various enterprises employ close to 700 staff across about 20 separate companies. He listed his commercial interests with an air of acceptance, rather than achievement. “There’s Dinner in London, Dinner in Australia, there’s the Perfectionist’s Café [at Heathrow Airport]. There’s a book department. There’s Waitrose [the supermarket for which he produces an expansive range of products]. There’s Salter [thermometers]. There’s the TV stuff. And Everdure [barbecues].” “It’s not my business,” Blumenthal explained. “I sold it to my uncle years ago, so I could get on with what I’m telling you about now. It’s run by his company. It’s very complicated. “I don’t want to be a hamster on a wheel,” he said. “The more money I bring into the company the more it goes to pay the people that are needed to bring more money in. There’s just not enough hours in the day.” James Winter recalled a visit to the Guggenheim Museum, in New York, at which they stood in front of Impressionist paintings of this region of France. He turned to Blumenthal: “You were like, ‘This is where I need to be. In that landscape, with no telephone’.” At the van Gogh asylum, we came to “Vincent’s room”, which Winter suggested was not really Vincent’s room, but a simulacrum. Refusing to be discouraged, Blumenthal wondered if Emmett would like to take his picture sitting on Vincent’s bed. Or “Vincent’s bed”. Emmett looked unsure, but Blumenthal took up position. I was instructed to kneel on the floor, out of shot, holding back Vincent’s curtain, or “Vincent’s curtain”, so that the light fell on Blumenthal, who adopted a suitably sombre pose.

Opposite: at Saint-Paul de Mausole, the asylum in Saint-Rémy where Vincent van Gogh was once a patient, Blumenthal takes a seat on the bed in a room recreating the one van Gogh occupied — ‘that feeling of not being understood, in some respects it’s pushed me even harder’

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In the gift shop, Blumenthal picked up some laminated “Starry, Starry Night” place mats. He waved them at me across the shop. “For lunch,” he said. “Cool,” I said. Then he spotted a painting of Karl Lagerfeld for sale. It was largish, and reddish, and I wasn’t sure why it was here in the van Gogh asylum gift shop. Nevertheless, he bought it for Stephanie, who is, he said, a devotee of the late Chanel designer. We walked back to the car, Blumenthal carrying the painting in his good hand. I carried the place mats. 5. THE BEST CHEF IN THE WORLD

One morning, Blumenthal, Stephanie and I sat outside a café in Eygalières, drinking coffee. Stephanie had been talking about her life as Mrs Blumenthal. I asked him if he thought he was a difficult man to live with? “The feeling of always playing a supporting role, that’s difficult,” he said, putting himself in Stephanie’s shoes. “If the roles were reversed and she was famous, how would I feel?” How would he feel? “Terrible!” he said. “I don’t think I’d have the strength. I think she handles it much better than I would.” Stephanie ran a hand through her hair and said she saw herself as her husband’s protector. “Heston is very nice,” she said. “He doesn’t see the bad in people.” Blumenthal nodded. “I’m a people-pleaser,” he said. “Every child develops a defence mechanism.

Mine was fighting, kick-boxing. But my physical strength, I think, was in inverse proportion to my mental strength.” As for his many schemes, scientific and otherwise, Stephanie was typically firm. “With Heston,” she said, “sometimes I say, ‘Non. It’s a lot of bullshit’. I try my best to keep Heston…” She searched for the word. Grounded? I suggested. “Yes, very important. He has his job, to be a chef, and all his restaurants, and the other part, I think it’s a problem for Heston, he wants to mix everything, it’s very difficult. I always say to Heston: ‘Your job is to be a chef, the best chef in the world.’” I repeated this, or a version of it, to her husband later that day, as he was outlining the difficulties of getting his lab set up in Eygalières, and convincing people that his experiments would bear fruit. I wondered if he didn’t miss the relative simplicity of turning up at a kitchen each morning and cooking for a living? Although running a traditional restaurant was exhausting, this adventure he was on, this desire to push at the limits of science, this need to reinvent not just his own restaurant, but the very idea of a place to serve and consume food, it all sounded so complicated. And, after all, he was so very good at the cooking. But he was adamant. “A chef is only part of who I am,” he said. “It’s not all I am. “I’m me,” he concluded. “Just like everyone is.” ○

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SPIDERS IN THE HOUSE OF MEN BY

Guy Le Querrec

CHIGOZIE OBIOMA

HE TRIED AGAIN THAT EVENING FOR WHAT MUST HAVE BEEN THE UMPTEENTH TIME. He hurried home after work, peeled from his body the coveralls that blew dust into the air as he slung them off over his head and put on clean clothes. Then he turned into the alley ﬁlled with potholes and approached the old house on Isolo Street. But by the time he got near the back fence, the courage that had accreted over the course of the long, hot day had leaked out. He saw the same woman from the previous day standing on the front porch, plaiting braids into the hair of a little girl. Even though close ﬁgures had begun to morph into silhouettes, there was still enough light for anyone who knew him to make him out. He pulled his cap closer down his face. He’d started to walk →

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away from the place when he saw his brother pull up, black smoke rising from the exhaust of his motorcycle. He crouched behind a tree and watched his brother as he kissed the little girl on the top of her head and disappeared into the house. Though he’d been making this kind of trip for weeks now, this was the first time he’d seen his brother. The first time in four years. Once again, he returned to his apartment with a deep, shattering regret. He sat down on the worn sofa Baba Aliyu had let him take home from the shop and unlocked the Nokia phone, placing his finger on the keypad until the torch came on. The phone, still new and nearly empty, a testament to his prison time. It had been a novelty when he left Nigeria in 2001, and now only five years later, everyone seemed to have one. In the phone’s torchlight he ambled slowly into the small space that was his kitchen, took the matchbox on the window pane, and lit the kerosene lantern. Bode sat down by the lantern as if by an ailing relative and with his eyes staring intently into the yellow prism of the fire. He thought about his brother’s wife and child, and about his own father and also, his mother. What he’d done to his family. What he needed to ask of them now and could not. Forgiveness. It was late into the night when the lantern burned out from lack of oil and the earthen smell of kerosene hung in the air. At work at the shop the following morning, he said nothing to anyone except greetings. But towards noon, as they finished work on a new school desk, Baba Aliyu asked him what was wrong with him. “Eh, what is the matter? Why you’re looking like someone who is about to be taken to firing squad?” He let himself laugh, then shook his head. “Nothing, sir.” Baba Aliyu bent again towards the desk, nailing fresh tacks into its joints while Bode held the new chiselled slab in place. “You say nothing, eh, when I can see it all over your face?” Though Bode tried to avoid this kind of enquiry,

he often found solace in the words of the older man who’d employed him the day after he returned to Akure. Now, he wiped his face with the back of his hand, inhaled, and told him of his failed trip to his brother’s house. Baba Aliyu rose from his crouching position, wiped his hands on his overcoat, and turned away from Bode. “What is the worst they can do?” Baba Aliyu said suddenly in his soggy Yoruba accent. “I just fear, I just fear,” Bode began saying, his eyes on the dab of spit on the head of the nail in Baba Aliyu’s grip. “Fear what?” Baba Aliyu said, and clamped the nail beside the wood he was to hammer into the other slab of wood. “That they will blame me for the deaths of, you see… Papa and Mama. They will say…” “What you already are already accusing yourself of, abi?” Baba Aliyu’s word cut into his. “Yes, but…” Baba Aliyu peered under the desk to see if the nail had gripped the right joint. He nodded to himself, licked the side of his lips and said, “But, you don’t know. You don’t know, son, what any other person can say.” Baba Aliyu assumed an erect position again, the hammer bent in his hand. Bode, still squatting, gazed up at the patches of yellow stain on the knees of his boss’s blue cotton work trousers. “Shebi, I have told you before about my ﬁrst wife, abi? I have told you what I did to her. Do you know, do you even know that she never angry for me? And I ran away from Ibadan to here, I ran away for many years and abandon my family.” Bode listened closely for the rising intensity in Baba Aliyu’s narration, marked by the sudden descent into badly-pronounced English that rendered “abandoned” something like “aba idan”, as if it were a Yoruba word. The man often did this whenever he told

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Bode of his own shame. “Eeviri-ba-ady, eeviri-ba-ady have done something bad,” Baba Aliyu said, switching completely to English as he often did when he gave advice. “Very, very bad things that can even make people to spit on them. There is a spider in the house of eeviri man, eeviri-ba-ady. It doesn’t matter oh, whether them rich oh or poor oh. You must ﬁnd spider there.” Bode looked away at a woman carrying a sack of corn who was trying to cross over to the other side of the road. His eyes were still ﬁxed on the distant woman when he heard Baba Aliyu say, in a voice as low as a whisper, “If you look closely.”

WHEN WORK ENDED THAT DAY, as Bode turned the corner towards his street, he saw a man who was his father’s friend, Mr Olisa. The man was driving a familiar silver-coloured Volvo, now much older, its rusted fenders accommodating a big hole. He recalled his father seated with the man on the same porch where he’d seen the woman and child the previous day. She must be his brother’s wife. What is the worst they can do? he asked himself as he crossed a gutter filled with litter amongst which was a mangled doll, its pink face smeared with grimy water. A woman roasting plantain on a spit beckoned on him as he passed her, trying to evade the swerving cars on the road. “Oga, ewa ra bole oh!” the woman called. He dismissed the plea with a shrug. From here he reached the crossroad with the street where his family had lived before he accepted to do the deal. This was why that day, five years ago, gathered in the unfinished building behind Oshinle Street that was hidden by tall bushes, he’d listened keenly as Yusuf had said, “Look at Jide; look at the kind of house he has built.” Later, Yusuf would ingest almost twice the amount of drugs as Bode and die in detention in London. But at the time, Bode, like others, had believed strongly that he would succeed.

“True, that is what we will become,” Agboola had said. “Yes, yes,” Bode had answered, partly elated and partly afraid. He’d pictured many things after the last of those meetings — the house, the luxury he would bequest upon his family. What he had not thought of at the time was what would become of his family if things did not go as he’d hoped. And when it all came down, when the border patrol dog inched towards him on the long line at Heathrow Airport and refused to stop sniffing at his legs until he and his friend were dragged away, those consequences had rushed at him, like a thing carried on many legs. The stroke his father suffered after Bode was arrested — from the shock, it was said. Then him dying two months later, his mother eight months after that. He could not argue that the fault was his. But presently, as he went home from work, challenged again by Baba Aliyu, he was determined. He would try again. He would go to his brother’s house. He would ask to be forgiven. So, he walked on, sweating under the heat, taking quieter roads. He walked, conscious of the people in the street as if he were in a new country. He glanced at every car to be sure he did not know someone in it. He was just a street from his brother’s house when he came upon a ﬁeld on which a group of boys, none above the age of 15, stood gazing at him as he passed. Their bare feet were covered with the dust and a broken green leaf was glued to the calf of one of the boys. “Uncle! Uncle!” they called to him. “Uncle, please help us,” the one with the leaf on his calf said when Bode turned to them. “Yes?” The ﬁrst boy made to speak, but another tugged at his shirt from behind so that the boy turned. The boy wrested himself from the quick hands of the other and cursed under his breath. “Yes, kilode?” Bode said in a determined voice to keep the boys in check. “Our ball,” said another boy. →

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“Ehen, what happened?” “It fell… we kicked it into the big house,” the first boy said, pointing to the upper floor of a two-storey building across the field. The house was familiar to him in a way he could not pinpoint. It was painted yellow with rough patches of plaster on its skin and a wooden staircase leading to the door of the upper floor. The door was shut and the windows were closed and shaded on the inside by a thick red curtain. The ground floor looked deserted, as if no one had been there in a long time. “We are playing and we mistakenly play shot and it fall inside that house,” one of the boys said. “Immediately, immediately, we go to take the ball but the woman, she pursue us away.” “Did you beg her?” he asked them. “Yes, uncle. We even kneel down and beg-beg-beg…” “Yes, sir, we begged very well.” His eyes passed from face to face, taking in the various expressions of agitation. “Please, uncle,” one of the boys pleaded, and two others followed. He stepped back, gazed around him and pulled his cap closer to his face. He was, he reckoned, almost in his own uncle’s neighbourhood and could be easily recognised. “What did the woman say?” he asked them. “She said the ball hit her wall and wake her baby, so she will not give us our ball again.” It was the English-speaking boy. “OK,” Bode said. “Follow me, let us go. I will talk to her.” The children stirred at once as if infused with new life. One of them slapped the leader on the back, and high-fived the other boy. Bode walked towards the building. One of the boys led him across the road and was about to reach the staircase when Bode stopped them. “Wait,” he said and gestured that they come closer. The boy descended towards him and the leaf detached

from his calf and fell across the stairs. Bode allowed himself to be distracted by its descent to the ground, watching it as if it was something of importance. He closed his eyes briefly and felt the sensation of something, a tightening in his chest, return. There were five of the boys now, two left in the field, waiting from the distance. “When the woman opens the door, I will talk to her. Eh?” he said. “Yes, uncle,” they said. “I will ask her to give you back your ball, but you also have to say something. You must beg her. Say all of you are sorry. Tell her, eh, it was a mistake.” He heard the sudden cry of a baby. One of the boys cupped his hands over his mouth and said, “That’s the woman’s child.” “Eh,” Bode said and glanced at the side window but he saw nothing. “Listen to me. Tell the woman it was a mistake. Tell her, everyone makes mistake.” “Yes, uncle.” They’d answered this time with weariness. He could see that they were already tired of this rehearsal and wanted to head right to the woman and retrieve their football. “Tell her, there is a spider in the house of everyone,” Bode said, looking into the eyes of the boys before him. “Whether rich or poor. You hear?” They nodded and looked at each other in what he knew was confusion. But he turned back and, without looking at them again, he ascended the stairs.

THE FIRST THING HE HEARD FROM BEHIND THE DOOR was the slow gasping of the child who’d been crying, followed by a woman’s voice from deep inside the house saying, “Okoo mi, stop crying, stop, eh. I will bring you pap soon.” He turned back to the boys who’d massed behind him, at different levels of the stairs, their eyes ﬁxed on him, their hands folded together. He recalled now in quick pictures the day his father had

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taken him to the farm outside Akure. He was only seven and had insisted on going. His father, an uncle, and his two older brothers had walked with him through a grassy path flanked on both sides by tall, whelp-marking creepers for a long time. He’d watched transparent flying insects and butterflies dazzle in the wind all through the walk, half-listening to his father and uncle talk about MKO Abiola and the upcoming elections when, suddenly, in the thicker entrails of the forest something slithered through the floor and rattled the bush. At first, he saw a marked tail, slowly he saw the head of the snake rise above the crowded plants. The snake, hissing, pulled into the path in a frenzied hurry and raised its head even higher. He’d been transfixed, gazing at the snake when he heard his father shout his name. Then he saw his father’s cutlass knock the snake into the bush. It balled up into a confused mass, and then writhed with great violence, crushing mushrooms as it fled. As he knocked on the woman’s door, he recalled in vivid pictures the panic he’d seen on his father’s face and the way his father had held his broad, panting chest. He knocked with calm determination until a voice within the house said, “Yes, who is there?” The boys shuffled their feet behind him. “Madam, my name is Bode! Bode Adesokan.” The footstep hesitated by the door. “Bode who?” “Bode Adesokan. I live on this, eh, street.” “And what do you want?” the woman said, but as he began to reply, he heard a bolt being pulled back. Then he watched the half-broken handle of the door twist slowly. The woman was about 30 years of age, fair-complexioned and with small marks of scarifications on both sides of her cheeks. “I said…” the woman started but stopped when she saw the boys behind Bode. “So na you be their father?” “No, madam,” he said and turned back, mostly to avoid the intensity of her gaze. He looked at the faces

of the boys. “I am just here to beg for them. Abeg, forgive them, na mistake dem make.” “Wait, wait, oh…” The child inside the house cried out again, cutting her short. Bode saw the child totter up to his mother now, holding a stuffed lizard toy from whose torn belly stuffed fibres were falling out. The weeping boy clasped his hands around his mother’s legs and knocked the toy against her, spraying fibres over the floor. She looked down at the child, squeezed his nose with her fingers, scooped out snot and rubbed it on the back of her skirt. “My prince, I am coming, oh?” she said. She raised her head and faced Bode again. “You see am, Oga? He was sleeping quietly, jeje like sick child. Now, him just dey cry-cry. And it is because of these stupid boys and their stupid ball. I no go give them back.” “Please ma, please ma,” the boys said. The Englishspeaking one knelt down as the woman stood with her hands on one side of the lintel, her face fixed into a frown. They pleaded with the woman, their voices morphing into a hurried liturgy, and one of them said in a voice at the verge of tears, “Please ma, everyone makes mistakes. Spider is in everybody house — whether rich or poor. Please ma-a.” Bode stood there, in the midst of the ululations, unsure of what to do. It was a moment he recognised like the twinkling of light in that instant upon awakening. He’d felt it strongly at the airport, from the muffled words uttered by one other Nigerian man at the first cell they’d taken him to inside the city. “This people? Huhm. They don’t accept beg at all — at all. You do the crime, you don’ go be that.” And, indeed, it had been true. It had seemed as though the white people understood him only when they asked him questions. But at other times when he pleaded incessantly, cried and prayed for them in Christ’s name, spoke about what could happen to his ailing father whose prostate →

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condition could be made worse by his imprisonment, or begged to be deported back to his country, it seemed as though he spoke a strange language which none of them could understand. “Ehh?” the woman said. “Spider abi?” she said as she clasped her hands. Then, hissing and shaking her head, she slammed the door. “All of you, get out of my house!” she shouted from inside the house. One of the boys behind him broke down in tears muttering that he did not have any money for a new ball. Others began begging him, but Bode passed them and walked down the stairs. He’d developed a palpitation the moment the woman slammed the door, and now he gazed into the distance towards the street where his brother lived with renewed fear. The boys had merely kicked a ball and woken a sleeping baby. Yet the anger at them for hurting an innocent child had been so strong the woman could not forgive. Innocent, the word sparkled in his mind like the strike of a match. His brother had used that word many times in the only two letters he had sent to Bode in prison to describe their parents: the way their innocent mother had refused to eat in the days following his innocent father’s death; the way their innocent mother had fallen one day and slumped. He made towards the road and began walking back home. The two boys who’d waited in the ﬁeld came up to him, their faces curious. “Tell your friends to keep trying,” he said as he walked past them. “It is not easy, but maybe they can succeed.” The words came out of him as if a part of him had fallen out. He passed the church he’d seen a few days before with a cracked bell swinging slowly in the quiet evening wind. An earth-brown dog sauntered along, turned to face him, opened its coloured teeth and barked. He stopped in front of the mango tree behind his compound where a woman roasted corn on a spit, plumes of smoke rising from the woman’s hearth and billowing up the tree. And now, as he waited for the woman

to wrap the roast corn in old newspapers, he noted that the mangoes were somewhat discoloured, almost blackish, as if the smoke had painted them.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, THE CONTRACT BABA ALIYU had been waiting for from the big Wema Bank branch materialised. Together with Aliyu, the oldest of Baba Aliyu’s six children, they worked till noon, offloading a dozen bad upholsteries from the back of a lorry. Although Bode had come to accept the job as a lifesaver, it often reminded him of what might have been. Had things turned out differently, he would have been met by members of a syndicate owned by the now infamous John Okayfor. They’d have lodged him in a hotel near London, given him a concoction that would have induced his delivery of the pellets. “Once that happens,” Yusuf had assured him, shaking his fist, “once it happens, oh boy forget! I say, forget! You’re made. They will give you your £100,000 in cash. Complete. On the spot there.” But none of that had happened. They’d barely stood in line to pass through security at Heathrow when a man in uniform with a dog on a leash approached the line. It was almost noon when they finished emptying the lorry. Tired, his body tense, Bode sat with Baba Aliyu on the bench in front of the workshop and drank cold bottles of 7-Up. He’d shake the bottle and watch a revolution build up to the neck of the bottle and spill out in suds. Baba Aliyu drank his slowly, his mouth swallowing in a way that reminded Bode of the mouth of the snake that almost bit him, his hand swatting away esurient flies. Then, between belches, the older man said, “So, did you go?” Although Bode knew at once what Baba Aliyu meant, he said, “Go where, sir?” “Your brother abi’s house. Did you go yesterday?” He shook his head. “No, sir.” Baba Aliyu smiled and started to say something, but he was distracted by a man on a motorcycle who

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stopped in front of the store but kept the engine running, constantly pushing the foot clutch while he talked with Baba Aliyu. By the time they’d exchanged prolonged pleasantries and the man had asked to bring Baba Aliyu some glass windows to the workshop later that day, it seemed the older man had forgotten what he and Bode had been discussing. The older man went into the back of the shop while Bode sat still, watching the streets. He paced the workshop that day, lifting chairs, packing stray wood, sweeping sawdust, striving not to be away from Baba Aliyu’s sight for even a moment. But by the end of the day, he’d said nothing to Bode. As Bode left for home, he wondered if the man had given up on him. “If I have urged you on, encouraged you, did all I could to help you confront your fears and you refuse, then so be it.” The words “so be it” reechoed in his head as if Baba Aliyu had shouted them from the distance. He headed back the way he’d gone the previous evening. The road was softer from the night’s rain, even though the sun was out and the air was humid and thick. He’d walked a few kilometres, thinking only of his parents and Baba Aliyu when, on raising his head, he saw the boys on the field playing with a ball. Their voices were loud, and when they saw him, they erupted in loud cheers. “Uncle! Uncle!” they called at him. “What, how, what happen?” The first boy who’d accosted him the previous evening picked up the ball and gave it to him. He told Bode they’d remained at the woman’s door, not giving up as he’d suggested to the two boys who stayed in the field. And just as they were about to leave, the woman had come out and given them the ball. “That’s very good,” he said. He tucked at his cap and gazed across the road to the building. He realised that his heart had begun palpitating again. “That’s very good,” he said again. “The woman say it was because of you, uncle,”

one of the kids said. “She say we shud promise her to bring you.” “Uncle, uncle, she likes you.” Later, it took him a while to decide, as he walked away from the boys, whether to go ﬁrst to the woman to thank her, or to his brother’s house. But he found, as he crossed back to the other side of the street, that he was headed to his brother’s. A rough wind had begun blowing and clouds were massing across the horizon, beating the bright colours of the day into a bleached grey. He stopped after crossing the footbridge over the Omi-Ala, and stepped to the side of the clearing to gather his thoughts, behind a crumbling fence halfcovered with rooﬁng sheets. As he waited, an elderly man rode past on a bicycle, carrying a woman who sat with both legs facing sideways as if on a moving stool. The woman greeted him, “E lee oh.” He nodded and waved at them, wondering if they might know him. The bicycle bumped into a few uneven cracks in the ground and a white handkerchief fell from the older woman’s pocket and hit the ground and rose under the wing of the wind. It tumbled towards him, rolling like a kite through the loose dirt. The old couple did not notice, they rode on, past a shed that was closing, past school children walking home in their uniforms. He picked up the handkerchief and ran after them, calling at the couple. By the time he reached them, he was only a few houses from his brother’s, the old house of his parents on Isolo Street he’d once called home. He removed his cap. Then he walked towards the house, its familiar door littered with gospel stickers and prayers. He walked slowly, watching his feet, his dust-coloured shoes. Then, at the porch, he stood erect as if his feet were trapped beneath the earth. He could hear movements within it, then a cough. He raised his hand to knock, but lifting his eyes to the edge of the ceiling, he saw a spider web. Empty, browned with loose dust, with what looked like a small stick hanging from it. His eyes were on it when he heard footfalls approaching from within the house coming towards the door. ○

CHIGOZIE OBIOMA

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAN MCALISTER

SANTOS DE CARTIER CHRONOGRAPH, Â£11,600

MARKET THE SHOPPING PAGES

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WOOD FRAGRANCES

1 2

1. ACQUA DI PARMA SANDALO, £190/100ML 2. GUCCI GUILTY ABSOLUTE, £70/90ML 3. MAISON FRANCIS KURKDJIAN AMYRIS, £235/70ML 4. BOTTEGA VENETA ILLUSIONE, £70/90ML 5. BOSS ABSOLUTE, £70/100ML 6. DIOR SAUVAGE, £105/100ML 7. CREED AVENTUS, £215/100ML 8. YMC BON PARFUMEUR, £45/50ML

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SKI GOGGLES

2 1

1. OAKLEY, £180 2. DRAGON ALLIANCE, £160 3. CÉBÉ, £150 4. FENDI, £450 5. BOLLÉ, £108 6. SALOMON, £86 7. MONCLER X MARCOLIN, £475 8. SMITH, £220

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FOUNTAIN PENS

1. CHOPARD BLACK RESIN-ROSE GOLD, £800 2. CARAN D’ACHE LEMAN BICOLOUR, £460 3. MONTEGRAPPA GNOMO LIMITED EDITION YELLOW, £440 4. ST DUPONT GREEN SUNBURST, £650 5. GRAF VON FABER-CASTELL CLASSIC PLATINUM-PLATED, £490 6. MONTBLANC SOLID GOLD LEAF FLEX NIB, £1,510 7. HERMÈS NAUTILUS X MARC NEWSON, £1,300 8. KAWECO NAVY CLASSIC SPORT, £20 9. MONTBLANC RED SIGNATURE M, £1,215 10. CARTIER EXCEPTIONAL PANTHÉRE, £16,100

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DIGESTIFS

Digestifs available from The Whisky Exchange

1. SOLERNO BLOOD ORANGE LIQUEUR, 40% ABV, £31/70CL 2. HENNESSY XO COGNAC, 40% ABV, £130/70CL 3. FERNET-BRANCA LIQUEUR BITTERS, 39% ABV, £24/70CL 4. HENRIQUES & HENRIQUES FINEST MEDIUM RICH FIVE-YEAR-OLD MADEIRA, 19% ABV, £11/50CL 5. ÄGRÄS AKVAVIT, 43.7% ABV, £34/50CL 6. COCCHI GRAPPA DORÉE, 44% ABV, £47/70CL 7. BARON DE SIGOGNAC XO PLATINUM ARMAGNAC, 40% ABV, £90/70CL 8. PALLINI LIMONCELLO LIQUEUR, 26% ABV, £20/70CL

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SCARVES

5 4

1. WILLIAM & SON, £430 2. LOEWE @ MR PORTER, £325 3. CANALI, £320 4. ACW, £225 5. HERMÈS, £420 6. GIORGIO ARMANI, £175 7. NOBIS, £195 8. GANT, £45 9. HACKETT, £175 10. AMI, £245 11. MHL BY MARGARET HOWELL, £75 12. OLIVER SPENCER, £90 13. ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, £POA 14. REISS, £50 15. MR P @ MR PORTER, £110

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COMPACT CAMERAS

8 7

1. SONY RX100 VI, £1,150 2. FUJIFILM X-A7, £700 3. NIKON COOLPIX A1000, £320 4. SIGMA C82900 DP3 QUATTRO, £750 5. CANON POWERSHOT G5 X MARK II, £830 6. OLYMPUS PEN E-PL9, £580 7. PANASONIC LUMIX DC-TZ200EB, £675 8. LEICA D-LUX 7, £995

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195

LOAFERS

1. LORO PIANA, £690 2. JOHN LOBB, £970 3. TRICKER’S, £395 4. RUSSELL & BROMLEY, £245 5. GH BASS & CO, £145 6. CHURCH’S, £530 7. BOSS, £370 8. GRENSON, £235

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196

CHRONOGRAPHS

1. SWATCH 42MM BLACK-ON, £93 2. DOXA 43MM SUB 200 TGRAPH PROFESSIONAL LIMITED EDITION, £4,690 3. CHRISTOPHER WARD 39MM C3 MORGAN, £450 4. ALPINA 44MM PILOT BIG DATE, £870 5. CERTINA 43MM DS ACTION, £680 6. TISSOT 45.5MM MEN’S SEASTAR 1000, £520 7. TAG HEUER CARRERA CALIBRE 16 41MM, £3,500

See Stockists page for details

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BISCUITS

3 4 5

1. MCVITIE’S HOBNOBS, £1/300G 2. HARVEY NICHOLS SOFT AMARETTI DI SASSELLO, £12/300G 3. BOURBON CREAMS, 75P/400G 4. FORTNUM & MASON TOFFOLOSSUS, £18/600G 5. SELFRIDGE’S FESTIVE WHITE CHOCOLATE AND PISTACHIO, £8/170G 6. WAITROSE DUCHY ORGANIC STEM GINGER ALL BUTTER SHORTBREAD, £2.20/150G 7. CUSTARD CREAMS, 36P/100G 8. FOX’S PARTY RINGS, 50P/125G 9. THE WOLSELEY SALTED CARAMEL FLORENTINES, £17/ 165 10. CARTWRIGHT & BUTLER CHOCOLATE WAFER CRISPIES, £3/140G

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ADVERTISING/FEATURE

ESQUIRE

Lifestyle essentials

Richmond Boot by Billy Ruffian The Billy Ruffian Richmond Boot, made on our wider last, using polished calf, full leather lining and a double sole, is not only extremely versatile but also wonderfully comfortable. Available in chestnut, the Richmond Boot can be worn with multiple trouser styles. From £149.95.

billyrufﬁan.co.uk

Halcyon Naturals

Jack Davison

Merci Maman

Halcyon Naturals is a luxury wellbeing brand that makes candles with handpoured, vegan-friendly wax and pure essential oils, tailored to lift your mood. Includes a subscription service.

Jack Davison offers the ﬁnest bespoke and made to measure tailoring. It brings the ﬂair of Mayfair to the City, while challenging the traditions of Savile Row with contemporary cuts and a keen eye for fabrics.

Say something special with the new Personalised Hammered Open Bangle (from £69) by Merci Maman. Each piece of jewellery is hand-engraved with the name, dates or short message of your choice and delivered to you in a signature gift box. Handmade in London and available in sterling silver, 18k gold plated or rose gold.

Enter EQ10 at halcyonnaturals.com for 10 per cent off your ﬁrst purchase. @halcyonnaturalsuk

Instagram: @jack-davison-bespoke Visit jack-davison.co.uk to make an appointment at its central London atelier

mercimamanboutique.com

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ADVERTISING/FEATURE

199

Lifestyle essentials

See the truth C W Dixey & Son of London has been creating elegant eyewear for a discerning, sophisticated clientele since 1777. Choose CW Dixey & Son frames and you’ll join an elite group of iconic clients including Sir Winston Churchill, Napoleon Bonaparte and Emperor Qianlong of China. It’s quite a story. Be part of our next chapter.

Visit cwdixeyandson.com

Code8: treat the woman in your life this Christmas Discover the latest collection from Code8, with two holiday sets that will take the stress out of gift-giving. Featuring a range of effortless makeup products in both sets. All you have to do is choose!

Party Essentials Kit

One Palette, 3 Looks

Uniting the best of beauty to survive any soiree in style, this impeccable kit is guaranteed to go down an absolute treat. It features our Iconoclast Eyeshadow Palette in Velvet Chrome, Lash Sophisticate High Deﬁnition Mascara in Classic Black, Precision Liquid Eyeliner in Carbon Black, Highlight HD Palette in Between two Women and Matte Velour Lipstick in Lima (a classic mauve with cool undertone). These streamlined, easyto-apply and long-lasting products are perfect for the It Girl in your life.

This is the ultimate set for creating inﬁnite looks — with just one palette. It contains our latest release, Iconoclast Eyeshadow Palette in Velvet Chrome, as well as AM/ PM Tinted Lip Balm in Chameleon (pH reactive nude pink), Glazé Lip Lacquer in Pisco (medium rosewood mauve), and Colour Brilliance Lipstick in Wanderlust (nude pink with peach undertone) that can be used to create any style to suit the mood or occasion. Our palette, paired with any of our lip colours, will take any look from desk to danceﬂoor!

TSXX by Terry Schiefer Founded in 2010 by Terry Schiefer, TSXX is home to luxurious and intricately handcrafted jewellery made in Japan. Inspired by royalty, powerful historical ﬁgures, architecture, pain, love, and beauty in nature, TSXX is for ageless, wild and fearless men and women who have a strong sense of style and love jewellery that makes them feel empowered, conﬁdent and luxurious at the same time.

Party Essentials Kit Shop our collection at codeeight.com, Net-a-Porter or Fenwick of Bond Street. Visit our store at 4 Burlington Arcade in Mayfair, London, for a consultation and bespoke services. #ﬁndyourcode. tsxx.jp Instagram: @tsxx.ofﬁcial

Follow @code8beauty on Instagram, Facebook and Youtube to keep up to date with new releases.

One Palette, 3 Looks

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ADVERTISING/FEATURE

ESQUIRE

Lifestyle essentials

What the world needs now: a rubbish fashion brand Is it possible to have a sustainable, ethicallyfocused fashion label without it beige-ing your look or breaking the bank? Well, yes. Say hello to TOBEFRANK, designed for people who want to know exactly what they’re wearing and who love fashion. Denim, T-shirts and leather are developed from creatively sourced, sustainable fabrics such as recycled ﬁbre, weed-dyed cotton, vegetable leather, zero-water technology washing and compressed apple juice waste. As well as creating clothing from plastic bottles and landﬁll, TOBEFRANK also runs a charity, the TOBEFRANK FOUNDATION, founded to help those in the supply chain and their surrounding communities. TOBEFRANK pays the living wage, implements training for personal and professional development, and supports projects including women’s empowerment in the workplace and gender equality initiatives. For TOBEFRANK, sustainability is about creating a stable way of living and working which doesn’t limit our goals of development and progression, and looks after the world for future generations. So when fashion is done properly, then it’s sustainable — it doesn’t mean banning all clothes and living in a cave. We’re not perfect, but we’re learning every day how to make the world a better place through fashion.

tbfuk.com @tobefrankuk

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STOCKISTS

PINK SHIRTMAKER thomaspink.com

ACQUA DI PARMA

DIOR

KAWECO

PRADA

acquadiparma.com

dior.com

kaweco-pen.com

prada.com

A-COLD-WALL*

DOXA

KIN BY JOHN LEWIS & PARTNERS

a-cold-wall.com

doxawatches.com

johnlewis.com

ÄGRÄS AKVAVIT

DRAGON ALLIANCE

available at thewhiskyexchange.com

dragonalliance.com

RADO rado.com

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN alexandermcqueen.com

ALICE MADE THIS

LEICA

REISS

leica-camera.com

reiss.com

alicemadethis.com

FALKE

LES GIRLS LES BOYS

RICHARD MILLE

ALPINA

falke.com

lesgirlslesboys.com

richardmille.com

alpinawatches.com

FENDI

LOCK & CO

RUSSELL & BROMLEY

AMI

fendi.com

lockhatters.co.uk

russellandbromley.co.uk

amiparis.com

FERNET-BRANCA

LOEWE

available at thewhiskyexchange.com

available at mrporter.com

FORTNUM & MASON

LONGINES

fortnumandmason.com

longines.co.uk

SALOMON

BARON DE SIGOGNAC

FOX’S

LORO PIANA

salomon.com

available at thewhiskyexchange.com

foxs-biscuits.co.uk

loropiana.com

SELFRIDGE’S

BELSTAFF

FUJIFILM

LOUIS VUITTON

selfridges.com

belstaff.co.uk

fujiﬁlm.eu

louisvuitton.com

SERAX

serax.com

BENNETT WINCH bennettwinch.com

SIGMA sigma-imaging-uk.com

BOLLÉ bolle.com

GANT

MAISON FRANCIS KURKDJIAN

SMITH

BOSS

gant.co.uk

franciskurkdjian.com

smithoptics.com

hugoboss.com

GH BASS & CO

MANOLO BLAHNIK

SOLERNO

BOTTEGA VENETA

ghbass-eu.com

manoloblahnik.com

available at thewhiskyexchange.com

bottegaveneta.com

GIORGIO ARMANI

MCVITIE’S

SONY

BREGUET

armani.com

mcvities.co.uk

sony.co.uk

breguet.com

GRAF VON FABER-CASTELL

MHL BY MARGARET HOWELL

ST DUPONT

BREITLING

graf-von-faber-castell.co.uk

margarethowell.co.uk

st-dupont.com

breitling.com

GRENSON

MONCLER X MARCOLIN

SWATCH

BURBERRY

grenson.com

moncler.com

swatch.com

burberry.com

GUCCI

MONTBLANC

gucci.com

montblanc.com

MONTEGRAPPA

H CANALI

montegrappa.co.uk

TAG HEUER

MR P @ MR PORTER

tagheuer.com

mrporter.com

THE GREAT FROG

canali.com

HACKETT

CANON

hackett.com

canon.co.uk

HARVEY NICHOLS

CARAN D’ACHE

harveynichols.com

carandache.com

HAWKSMILL

NIKON

THE WORKERS CLUB

CARTIER

hawksmill.com

nikon.co.uk

theworkersclub.co.uk

cartier.com

HENNESSY

NOBIS

TISSOT

CARTWRIGHT & BUTLER

available at thewhiskyexchange.com

nobis.com

tissotwatches.com

cartwrightandbutler.co.uk

HENRIQUES & HENRIQUES

CDLP

available at thewhiskyexchange.com

cdlp.com

HERMÈS

CÉBÉ

hermes.com

OAKLEY

cebe.com

HOLLAND & HOLLAND

oakley.com

CERTINA

hollandandholland.co.uk

OLIVER SPENCER

THE WOLSELEY thewolseley.com

TRICKER’S

trickers.com TURNBULL & ASSER turnbullandasser.co.uk

oliverspencer.co.uk

certina.com CHOPARD

thegreatfroglondon.com

chopard.com

OLYMPUS

WAITROSE

olympus.co.uk

waitrose.com

CHRISTOPHER WARD

INIS MEÁIN KNITTING COMPANY

ORGANIC BASICS

WILLIAM & SON

christopherward.co.uk

inismeain.ie

organicbasics.com

williamandson.com

CHURCH’S

IWC SCHAFFHAUSEN

church-footwear.com

iwc.com

wonderglass.com

PALLINI

WONDERGLASS

CLARKS clarks.co.uk

available at thewhiskyexchange.com

COCCHI available at thewhiskyexchange.com

JOHN LOBB

PANASONIC

YMC

CREED

johnlobb.com

panasonic.com

youmustcreate.com

creedfragrances.co.uk

JOSEPH

PANTHERELLA

CROCKETT & JONES

joseph-fashion.com

pantherella.com

crockettandjones.com

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Backstage

When Esquire arrived in rural Provence in October, to proﬁle Heston Blumenthal, perhaps Britain’s least predictable chef (see pages 164– 177), we found him in ﬁne fettle except for one inconvenient injury. Blumenthal’s right wrist was strapped up, the legacy of a cycling accident in the summer that had seen him take a boneshattering tumble from his state of the art electric mountain bike. He had been pedalling it in the local mountain range, Les Alpilles, and

Above: Esquire editor-in-chief Alex Bilmes and Heston Blumenthal, Eygalières, France, October 2019

had come a cropper when applying too much pressure to the front brake. It turned out Blumenthal wasn’t the only celebrity cook who’d done himself a mischief on this infernal machine. Malheureusement, Raymond Blanc, another recent visitor to the Blumenthal residence in the village of Eygalières, had a nasty fall just a few feet from where the above photograph was taken. He, too, had apparently squeezed too hard on the deathtrap left-hand brake. Happily, the 70-year-old chef patron of Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons lived to tell the tale, or at least to hear Blumenthal tell it for him, with much guffawing and delighted clapping of hands at the image of the elderly Frenchman ﬂying past the French windows.

(Are they called French windows in France? Possibly not.) As a result of all this, we forgive Esquire editor-in-chief Alex Bilmes, pictured above with Blumenthal, for his safety-ﬁrst approach when his turn came to steer the thing over the hard soil of the chef ’s back garden. Not, by any description, an experienced mountain-biker, certainly not an elegant rouleur, as you may be able to tell from his posture, Bilmes nevertheless managed to make it around in one piece. No land speed records were broken, but neither were any limbs. Simon Emmett was on hand, as he was throughout the visit, to capture the glorious moment on ﬁlm. No doubt endorsement deals from major cycling brands will be forthcoming. ○

Simon Emmett

Excerpts and outtakes from the pages of Esquire

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