guests love the idea of illegality, the notion that they could get busted. It’s not so much extreme sport, but the thrill of extreme dining. I have to admit, I do play up this aspect. Guests are asked to memorise a password before they can enter. I tell them that if we get raided by the police, start singing Happy Birthday! (In reality I’ve had policemen come as guests and they don’t have a problem with it!) It evokes memories of the 1920s prohibition era, as does the Argentinean term for underground restaurants, puertas cerradas – ‘closed door restaurants’.
A SUPPER CLUB IS A CHANCE TO CATAPULT YOURSELF INSTANTLY TO THE POSITION OF CHEF/PATRON:
…if you are too old or have too many family commitments to work your way through the ranks.
…if it is too late to go to catering college, to train via the accepted route.
…if you just want to cook part time, want a practice run before you open a mainstream restaurant.
…if you lack the finances to rent a premises, hire staff, enter into contracts with suppliers.
…if you have discovered, like me, rather late in the day, that this is where your heart lies.
Open an underground restaurant. I double-dare you…
The Story of MsMarmiteLover
I’ve always cooked. I remember the first dish: I was at nursery school and we baked chocolate butterfly cakes. Even all these years later, I remember how incredibly pleased I was with myself. It seemed a magical process. The trick of removing the top of the cake and cutting it in half to make wings was unbelievably cool. I became obsessed with cakes for a while after that. I’d get up early before my parents awoke and get busy cake-mixing. One day I decided to go a step further and turn the oven on. At 6 a.m. my parents awoke to the smell of burning plastic – I’d decided to bake my cake in a red plastic bowl. My mum came downstairs and opened her brand new oven; the red plastic was dripping through the bars of the rack. ‘You can’t heat up plastic!’ she cried. And for a while, that was the end of my baking career.
At the age of eight I was given a copy of Good Housekeeping’s Children’s Cookbook, which gave step-by-step instructions in black-and-white photographs of how to make a cup of tea or toast a slice of bread. Many of the instructions started with ‘First comb your hair…’ From this I learnt how to make macaroni cheese, fudge, peppermint creams and coconut ice.
When I was 15, I got a Saturday job at WHSmith. A new series of magazines had come out: Supercook. As staff, I got a ten per cent discount. Every week, a copy of Supercook was set aside for me, illustrated with typically 70s food photography showing wood-varnished chickens and earthenware pots. The colour brown was big in the 70s. Three months into the subscription, I made a Sunday lunch for the family, from Supercook recipes. As the series was in alphabetic order – a letter a month – I’d only got up to ‘C’, which limited the menu to…Cabbage, Chestnut stuffing, Chicken, Chocolate mousse.
Eventually I got the sack from WHSmith. Not for my punky spiked green and blue hair (to match the uniform, I was pushing the brand!) but for lateness. This meant that my Supercook issues stopped at ‘R’. I could not cook dishes starting with the letter ‘S’.
This didn’t deter me. I hosted a dinner party for a guy I thought fancied me. My menu was sophisticated: grilled grapefruit halves with glacé cherries, spaghetti bolognese (the only thing beginning with ‘S’ that I knew how to cook) and baked apples with custard. I had 12 guests, a ridiculously large amount for a 15-year-old. Grilling the grapefruits took forever and the main course didn’t get served until 11 p.m., by which time I was exhausted and drunk. Then my friend Clare kissed the object of my affection, a cocky guy with a mullet, whose millionaire father owned a plastic-bag factory. Story of my life: I’m sweating in the kitchen, imagining that my beautiful food would attract soul mates, while my friends are outside, wearing platforms, face glitter and flicked-up fringes, getting some action. What idiot came up with that phrase, ‘The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’? It’s so not true.
When I left school, however, I decided to become a photographer, not a cook. Becoming a chef didn’t seem within the realm of possibilities. TV schedules were not full of cookery game shows as they are now. I loved the Galloping Gourmet and Fanny Cradock, but that was about it. My mum had a boxed set of Elizabeth David books, but there were no photos and I wouldn’t cook something unless it had a photo with it. She also had Robert Carrier cooking cards. These were in a cardboard box, like a file, and each one had a photograph of the dish.
My parents had sophisticated tastes in food. They had a house in France, a wrecked stone cottage with twelfth-century walls that were three-feet thick and a fireplace you could sit in. It was outside a small town named Condom, 100km south of Bordeaux in the Aquitaine region. Every school holiday it took us two days to drive there from London. The route to Condom was devised around recommendations in a red, plastic-bound volume, Le Guide des Relais Routiers de France. It was our job as kids in the back seat to spot the Routier logo. Usually they were proper restaurants, cheap, with a set menu and a parking lot full of lorries. Sometimes, however, you would go into a private house listed in the guide and eat in a woman’s kitchen, just one table covered with a chequered oilcloth. The woman would be wearing her flowery apron and cooking in front of you, turning around from her gas stove to plonk platters down on the table. Once for hors d’oeuvres we were given a dish of long red radishes with their green tops still on, a basket of fresh baguette with a sourdough tang, a small hunk of unsalted butter and a pile of salt. We all looked at it, including my parents, not quite knowing what we were supposed to do with this array of ingredients. The son of the woman, noticing our hesitation, laughed and showed us what to do: he cut a little cross in the end of the radish, smeared on a scrape of butter, then dipped it in salt, crunching the radish with torn-off chunks of bread. So simple, just fresh produce, but so delicious.
Wine was always included and everybody, even children, had a little carafe of rough red table wine. This impressed us kids enormously, we felt so grown-up.
In those days I ate meat. My favourite meal, when we were allowed to order à la carte, was steak and chips. One night near Rouen, we stopped at a hotel-restaurant. We kids, as usual, ordered steak frites. There were strange mutterings from the proprietor; there seemed to be a problem. But then no, it was fine, steak frites it was.
When the steak arrived, I bit into it.
‘What do you think?’ asked my dad.
‘It’s yummy. Sort of sweet.’
‘But you like it?’ he asked, in a rare display of interest in my opinion.
‘Yeah, it’s great,’ I enthused.
At the end of the meal my dad told us that it was horse meat.
So I’ve been brought up to eat well, to eat adventurously. My parents loved to travel even before they had kids; my dad, in an attempt to woo my mum, suggested that they go on a cheap tour of Europe. They hitched everywhere. Their budget was the equivalent of 50p a day. When they arrived in Cologne, my mum perused the menu at a restaurant and