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[title]I vividly remember my first meal at St. John. It was the kind of lunch that started out with white tablecloths and the sun beaming through the Clerkenwell restaurant’s skylight. It ended, hours later, with red wine and Fernet Branca stains soiling every napkin, the winter light long gone, greasy spots left on the table under crumbs of cheesy rarebit and crockery licked clean of the unguent trotter pie juices. Transformative, and maybe even slightly hallucinatory (though I think we can blame the Fernet for that), I knew then that I would return again and again, chasing that first high and, more often than not, having an equally dazzling experience.
St. John has been a London landmark for 30 years. It opened in 1994 in a former bacon smokehouse by Smithfield meat market. While their contemporaries were overloading interiors with the work of the YBAs, St. John’s aesthetic was clean and crisp and sparse. Walls were whitewashed and the colour was on the plate. Chef Fergus Henderson’s now famous nose-to-tail ethos saw that the entirety of an animal was used in dishes so old school that at some points they seemed downright medieval. We’re talking roast bone marrow, crispy fried pig’s tail, and eel with bacon and mash.
But such an anachronistic spot quickly found favour with the London food industry. Anthony Bourdian was one of the restaurant’s most effusive flag-wavers, and it became a training ground for some of today’s most storied chefs. Opening a second site, St. John Bread and Wine, in Spitalfields in 2003, the original then landed a Michelin star in 2009, which it has held onto ever since. It’s still a pain in the arse to get a table at short notice, and it’s still the best place in London to have lunch.
Three decades after first opening, St. John now has three London restaurants, a bakery and winery. We spoke to some of its starriest alumni about what makes it so special.
Max Rocha, chef/owner, Café Cecilia
‘I worked at St. John Bread and Wine under Farokh Talati, who is still head chef there. I was obsessed with working at St. John. I basically begged! I staged there for almost too long, and then I left really upset when there wasn’t anything full time and took another job elsewhere. Then, one day Farokh called me to say a space had opened up. It was probably the happiest moment in my cooking career.
The atmosphere feels like what a restaurant should feel like
‘It’s such an inspiring kitchen. There were notes of Irish cooking; a lot of ham hock, a lot of pork. I love the simplicity of it and the confidence in it. The atmosphere in the restaurant feels like what a restaurant should feel like, even when it’s quiet, just because everyone respects the ethos of the cooking.
‘A big thing I’ve taken from St. John is the whole animal butchery – it’s a really sustainable way of working. We get an animal a week, a pig, a lamb or a quarter cow, and learn how to use it all. I last sat at the counter three weeks ago and had a chocolate terrine and Farokh gave me some braised cuttlefish. I wouldn’t have my restaurant if it wasn’t for St. John – I owe everything to it.’
Gizzi Erskine, chef and food writer
‘It was 2003 and I was at catering school and had a huge list of places to go and stage at. I started ticking them off, but hadn’t had a good experience at any of them. I also lived in east London and most of them were south-west, which was near the school. I was on my way home from Liverpool Street one day and walked past Bread and Wine. I went in and asked if they would give me a stage and they did. I was there for five or six months and did loads of shifts there after that.
‘They just put me wherever they wanted and, weirdly, I ended up working quite a lot in pastry, even though I’m not really a pastry chef – I cook more with meat and offal. I had to feed the sourdough every day and also got to work with Justin Gellatly, who went on to co-found Bread Ahead. We’d do loads of experiments; how you make crumpets, how you make donuts. He taught me so much; he was so in depth about how he took on all these things. I also loved how suppliers would come in throughout the day – it wasn’t just at the start of the day; a fish supplier would come up from Cornwall just before second service with the freshest catch. That is what I really took away from it. It was all about experiences and how they attacked each thing in such an interesting way.
‘I remember Anthony Bourdain coming in once. I was so nervous that I had to take myself away and go outside for a cigarette.’
James Lowe, chef/owner Lyle’s
‘The first dish I ever had at St. John Bread and Wine was duck leg and carrots. I thought it was beautifully simple, but also spoke very much of what St. John and Fergus is all about. You roast off duck legs and cook out the chunky sliced carrots with a bit of wine stock and onions. It’s the most basic of braises, but is all about exchange of flavours.
‘Something Fergus is particularly good at is creating analogies for cooking techniques to get people to understand how to do something – like filling the tray with stock until the duck legs look like crocodiles in the swamp, with the nostrils sticking out. It’s one of those analogies I’ve used ever since.
The restaurants are very plain and white – they allow the food and people to provide the colour
‘I think we both have always shared a love of simplicity. The dishes in my early career that I loved the most were very simple or clever combinations. I never went for the theatrical. St. John shows that it’s not necessary to do that. People could view the food with respect and realise that it’s of a high standard.
‘The restaurants are very plain and clean and white because they allow the food and the people to provide the colour. When I worked at Bread and Wine from 2006 to 2011, I used to aspire to put dishes on that Fergus would say were cheeky or racy. That was some of the best feedback I’ve ever had in my career. I felt a lot of freedom cooking there and had scope to do what I wanted to do.’
Lee Tiernan, chef/owner, FKA Black Axe Mangal
‘I was 24 at the time, green as hell, brimming with enthusiasm and looking for somewhere that would take me for a two week work placement so I could pass my mature student culinary NVQ. I first read about St. John and Fergus in Anthony Bourdain’s book ‘‘A Cook’s Tour’’. Anthony’s description of the St. John dining room, the kitchen and his obvious affection for Fergus struck a chord, but what really got me going was the way he talked about the food. Bone marrow, pig heads, spleens, ox heart. It sounded so unique and interesting. Phrases like ‘‘this was a very noble pig’’ resonated with me.
‘I thought to myself ‘‘this is someone I could work for’’, so I looked up the number in the Yellow Pages and gave them a ring. That was in June 2003 and the two week work placement turned into a decade.
‘Working at St. John is the best education a young chef can have and I’m forever grateful for every fascinating lesson. The kind kitchen culture, the nose-to-tail approach to butchery and cooking is the perfect philosophy to which I still apply in my restaurant today. It’s also bloody delicious.
‘One of the most important things Fergus said is: ‘‘if you’re going to kill an animal it’s only polite to eat the whole thing’’. We would all do well to remember that.’