Chef who saved British meat and serves vegans
Henderson’s philosophy is that food and drink can enact a change of spirit, which is why everbody comes to him
WE’RE NOT ANONYMOUS. WE ’ RE PERSONALITY-LED. IT’S QUITE NICE, AS IT MAKES US VERY UNAPPROACHABLE [FOR BUYERS]
When I arrive at St John for lunch with Fergus Henderson, I’ve walked to the famous “nose to tail” restaurant through the coolness of London’s Smithfield Market, where meat has been traded in one form or other (dead or alive) since the 12th century. Smithfield did some pretty hard medieval partying — jousting, drinking and cutting up traitors — and, centuries later, it still has a faintly hungover air.
The dining philosophy of St John, now in its 25th year, is a belief in food and drink’s ability to enact subtle and sometimes vital changes of spirit — to be “nutriment that feeds the mind”, as Jonathan Swift put it — but also riotously good fun. Henderson is very much a chef’s chef, revered globally by industry peers for his simple but irresistible language of British ingredients, which he pursued at a time when most professional kitchens were more intent on dicing carrots.
His childhood household, living in 1970s Chelsea and then Soho, valued the power of the dinner table to knit a family together: “Both my parents were my education in food. Mum taught me how to cook, dad taught me how to eat.”
Henderson arguably rescued British meat from the lowly rank it had sunk to by the 1990s, sliced at lacklustre roast dinners in pubs and carveries, or sold cheaply at supermarkets via impersonal, industrial farms. Against this backdrop, St John’s credo of nose-to-tail eating became fashionable for its novelty, daring the customer to try trotter paste on toast or pig’s head pie, and to appreciate what would otherwise go to waste.
“My hope is that St John is an institution, in the good sense of the word,” he says as we move into the dining room. “Like a chemist or a cinema, something you need. Feeding you, watering you and dining you.” Glancing around, I see signs of an orderly institution at work, such as the note on the menu reminding customers to order whole suckling pig a week in advance.
Henderson’s speech is, at times, hard to make out, the result of early onset Parkinson’s and its deep-brain implant treatment — so for clearer acoustics we sit side by side, as if banqueting. Lunch is “very much my favourite meal ... a wonderful thing. The strange thing is the more people tut over [long] lunch, the more delicious. The more tuts the better.” I decide it’s a good idea to let Henderson order for us: the crayfish and aioli special, deepfried salt cod to share, then brill, roast Tamworth [pig], broad beans, potatoes and greens, a bottle of Trimbach Pinot Noir and an ice bucket. “Now we can relax,” he says confidently.
Henderson likes to eat here almost every day, “which is a good thing and a bad thing. Bad for my tummy. It’s bigger than I wish it was”. When I ask if this is inevitable, there’s a flash of spikiness. “You’re not saying our food is unhealthy?” he says defensively, and I find myself denying the accusation, even if the St John diet might be hard on the waistline. We discuss the rise of the vegans, and he says he has no objections, other than “the smugness”.
“How do you tell someone is a vegan?” he asks. Answer: “They tell you.” This is a stock Fergus joke, but he chuckles gently at it, and adds, “We always have something vegan up our sleeve on the menu. Many vegans say we’re their favourite restaurant.”
Henderson’s daily presence is a form of quality control now that Parkinson’s has separated him from the kitchen. The menu changes twice a day: “It’s hard for chefs if menus change all the time, but it keeps you on your toes. St John is nature-led. Runner beans come in, fish changes all the time [from boats off the east coast], nature starts hurling birds. Nature and time are the two things that have affected us since we began.”
We discuss St John’s longevity, a quarter of a century being almost freakishly long in London’s restaurant world. Resistance to passing fads has helped. “Fashion and food don’t go hand in hand. Fashion doesn’t do you any good, eating-wise. Watch out for Gucci food. Something’s wrong with it.”
St John moved to this address after a successful run at the French House, a one-room restaurant above a pub in Soho, where Henderson cooked alongside his chef wife Margot. Before that, he cooked at the
Globe dive bar in Notting Hill, where Lucian Freud was a regular and goat’s neck soup was a staple of the menu, a dish the owner promised would make his customers “go all night”. The new digs on St John Street were covered in pork fat and smoke, but, “One look at it, I was sold. That was that.”
St John has managed to keep its trotters dry as a resilient operator, with additional revenue from a wholesale bakery, a second restaurant, St John Bread & Wine, plus a winery in the Minervois, which is overseen by Henderson’s business partner Trevor Gulliver. The winery is “reassuring” when he considers what Brexit could do to wine prices. “Brexit is terrible. It’s like some hellish creature has been unleashed. Mr Boris. But we got what we deserved. It’s a sad business.” (He concedes one point of admiration: “Boris is very good on green issues.”)
A rare misstep came in 2011, when the St John group gathered new investors and headed into the hotel business, opening a hotel-restaurant version of St John on the edge of London’s Leicester Square that imploded after a year. “Covent Garden, yes. What happens when you try to grow too quickly? There lies trouble.”
He moves the conversation on to a more recent collapse, that of Jamie Oliver’s casual restaurant chain, Jamie’s Italian. “I feel very sorry for him. He’ sa very nice chap. Patisserie Valerie is worse — I used to love eating there on Old Compton Street. Now, all gone. London seems to have encouraged these large chains. It’s moneyled. Why would you want a huge chain of restaurants?”
St John is no longer wooed for expansion. “I don’t think anyone’s really interested in us now. We’re not anonymous restaurants. We’re personalityled. It’s quite nice, as it makes us very unapproachable.”
The crayfish arrive, fat and livid red, next to the deep-fried salt cod with ketchup; two opposite levels of dexterity are required for eating, crayfish not being the easiest things to shell.
If he doesn’t attract investment, personality goes a long way, with “Fergus” attracting cultish fans from Japan and the US, and forging friendships with people such as the late Anthony Bourdain. The two men were “great chums”, he says, and Bourdain’s suicide in 2018 was “really sad. I hadn’t really seen a dark side to him, he was very jolly, always.”
As a child, he was impressed by the regal interior of Le Grand Véfour in Paris, which he was taken to by his late father. “It’s really beautiful. I can be swayed by the look of a restaurant. We had soufflé of frogs’ legs. It was good. I can’t remember the middle course. For pudding, he said, ‘You choose the wine’ .I was 10 or something, and I went to the end of the list and said ‘Yquem’. My old man was very generous and said, ‘Ah, perfect, son’.” He laughs heartily.
Though he’s no longer at the stove, he does still issue corrections to service, and he also offers reading lists to his staff, such as Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian. “The captain must be everyone’s friend, but keep a distance.” Modern chefs are showy, televisual creatures, adept at Instagram, whereas Henderson admits he is “quite shy really. Shyness is underrated”. This said, he is unerringly sociable. “I’m hopeless at being by myself, I hate it.” His limit for solitude is “a plane journey or a train journey, an hour and a half. It’ sa weakness, shallow side of me”.
The plates are cleared and Henderson advises the peach sorbet and Russian vodka, with a half dozen madeleines. After that I believe lunch is now more or less finished, but he suggests we have a digestif. Fine, I say, not wholly sure of my stamina.
It definitely turns out to be a stretch when he says he wants to go to the Groucho, in his boyhood heartland of Soho. Henderson is greeted at the door like a part-owner (he isn’t). We talk a bit about the “strangeness” of being in business with the same person for decades on end.
Now, with about four hours on the lunch clock, I make to say my goodbyes, a touch guilty to be leaving Henderson on his own, but presumably not for long. “I can’t eat if I’m alone,” he says. “I have no interest. One bite of toast, that’s it.” A good thing it’s nearly dinner time. /©