The long road back

Chef Mark Hix is starting over

It’s that time of year when, in any other circumstances, I’d be escaping the British winter. Twelve months ago, I was having a fishing holiday in the Bahamas with my angling companion, Robin Hutson from The Pig hotels.

There is no money for holidays now, with my new pub and restaurant down here in Dorset both locked down. So, instead of an evening drink looking over the Caribbean, I go into my garden at Charmouth and am perfectly satisfied by the view over Lyme Bay.

On the way back indoors, I stop off in the vegetable patch I created last spring when I was out of work. My Jerusalem artichokes are doing really well and then there are some red spring onions and kalettes – a cross between Brussels sprouts and kale. Plenty, in other words, to rustle up a delicious dinner without spending anything. Perfect.

I am once again trying to put all this enforced idleness to good use, writing a vegan cookbook to quash the rumour that vegan food can’t be sexy. As an experiment, last night I made Jerusalem artichokes with a truffle dressing and grated truffle.

Luckily I had a few Somerset truffles in the back of the fridge that a friend brought into the pub just before it was closed. They are the best English truffles I’ve ever smelt or tasted – but he wouldn’t tell me where he found them. The result was delicious. That recipe is definitely going in the book.

I’m not big into TV, but customers at the fish truck – my only source of income at the moment – keep giving me recommendations. One episode of Emily in Paris was enough for me, but I found myself gobbling up The Queen’s Gambit in two sittings.

As you can see, it’s definitely not the bright lights of the London restaurant scene, but a good TV binge takes my mind off the latest obstacle in my long road back. Because I opened up the pub after 31 October, there is some quesover tion whether we qualify for furlough under the Government’s current rules. The logic escapes me but my accounts manager, Julia – also our coffee supremo – is on the case. We are one of the many new and reopened businesses praying for a change of heart.

What might make me more confident is if there were a dedicated minister for the hospitality industry. We employ – or used to employ before lockdown – three milpeople lion and bring in £38 billion in tax revenue each year. Surely that should count for something? Over 200,000 people have signed an online petition to create such a minisi’d ter. happily put myself up for it. I’ve got a bit of spare time right now. Instead it’s the small things that keep me going. Like going to the local Lidl for swedes – they do really good English vegetables, without too much packaging – and finding, in those magical middle aisles, a basket with three-metre rolls of vacuum bags for £3, perfect for packing the salmon that I am smoking in my garden.

And then there are my seeds that I am growing on my living-room windowsill. Even in winter, it catches the sun for a couple hours of the day. There’s lots of salad stuff coming up: a mixture of Italian leaves, radicchio tardiva, parsley, chives, wild rocket and New Zealand spinach. When they’re ready, I am going to transplant them into the polytunnel in my new kitchen garden behind The Fox Inn.

In the space this lockdown has opened up, I am catching myself looking back. Being in Dorset permanently for the first time in 40 years, I am constantly being brought up short by stumbling on places I associate with my youth. The other day I had to collect something from Crewkerne, where out nearest station is.

Into my mind came a picture of me and my dad standing on the platform. I was 18, had just finished catering college in Weymouth and had finally got a job in London. I must have written over 100 application letters. Some of my mates had been taken on at the Dorchester, but I’d ended up in the staff canteen at the Hilton.

I didn’t care. Part of me was apprehensive, but mainly it was the excitement of going to the big city after sleepy Dorset. I had my suitcase in one hand and my dad was trying to put a £20 note in the other. And I was telling him, ‘No, no, no’.

I’d been working in a plumbers’ shop since school, as well as in a pub, and I’d saved a bit of money in my TSB account. I wanted to be independent.

The money didn’t last long. A few weeks in, four of us rented a flat in South Kensington. It was £21 a week each, and I was earning £30. To afford it, I took on shifts in the kitchen at HMS Belfast, moored in the Thames, and at the US ambassador’s residence, where I knew the head chef.

I still never had any money, but it was such an important curve in my life. Today it’s not so much curve as full circle with me back in Dorset. Some days I bring in less on my fish truck than I was making as an 18-yearold in London. But with no regrets.

Somedaysibringin less on my fish truck than I was making as an 18-year-old in London