Every Cook Is a Relay

The chefs who make us, and the ones we make

TL;DR: Influence in a kitchen is stranger than the tribute pieces admit. It arrives in an order; it comes from people and places and books, and as much of it teaches you what never to become as what to do. I trace my own line, from the RAF to Nico Ladenis’s book to a difficult genius in Battersea to Ian McAndrew to Keith Floyd, not as a memoir, but to make a case: every cook is shaped by a chain of others and is a link in that chain for someone else. Work out your own list. The good and the difficult are both.

A quick word before we start, because the voice on this platform usually belongs to Ian McAndrew, and this time it doesn’t. It’s Shaun. I’ve worked alongside Ian for the best part of thirty years, in his kitchens and out of them, and he is one of the people I’m going to talk about here, which would be an odd trick to pull off if I were him.

This is a piece about the people who shape a cook. Not the famous ones necessarily, and not the ones you’d put on a poster. The ones who get into your hands and your habits and stay there, whether you wanted them to or not. Because influence is a stranger business than we tend to admit. We talk about it as though it only ever means the good stuff, the mentor, the teacher, and the book that changed everything. It doesn’t. Some of the deepest marks are left by people you couldn’t wait to get away from. You learn what to do from a few of them and what never to become from the rest, and years later you’re still keeping both lessons without always remembering which is which.

I’m going to use my own path to show you what I mean, because it’s the one I know best. But the story isn’t really the point. The point is underneath it, and it belongs to you as much as me. Every cook reading this has a version of the same list, whether they’ve ever sat down and named it or not. So take mine as a prompt rather than a memoir. I’ll go first.

The floor

The Royal Air Force taught me to cook, though not the way you might think. It didn’t teach me fancy food. There were no small plates, no sauces reduced to a whisper, nothing you’d recognise from a Michelin kitchen. It taught me plain food, done well, done the same way every single time, whether you felt like it or not. Discipline. Standards. Consistency.

I didn’t know it then, but that was the most important thing anyone ever taught me. Because everything that came after, all the finer, cleverer, more beautiful cooking I fell in love with later, only meant anything because the floor was already solid. You can’t build on nothing. Show a cook clever plates before he can turn out the same dish twice, and all you get is inconsistent cleverness. The RAF made sure the boring part was in my bones before anyone let me near the interesting part.

That is the first thing worth saying about influence. It arrives in an order, and you have to be ready for it. The person who could change you at thirty would have been wasted on you at nineteen. I needed the floor first. Everyone does, whether they got it in the military, in a catering college, or standing at a sink watching a section they weren’t allowed to touch yet.

The first time I changed my mind

The RAF gave me the floor under my feet. The first thing that got into my head came off a page.

You have to remember there was no Google in those days. If you wanted to know how the best minds in the profession actually thought, you didn’t scroll; you went to your local Waterstones, and you stood there, and you bought the book. That was the whole apparatus of inspiration, a bookshop and your own curiosity, and it cost you money and effort, which is perhaps why it stuck.

In 1987 Nico Ladenis published his first book, My Gastronomy, and it landed on me like a challenge. Part of his manifesto was that you didn’t need to deglaze a pan after cooking a piece of meat, not if you’d built your stock and your sauce properly and raised them to the level they should be at in the first place. That sounds like a small technical point. It wasn’t. It was a man saying, out loud and in print, that a thing everyone did without thinking might not need doing at all if you were good enough elsewhere. That was a revolution to me. It was very probably the first time I was ever genuinely influenced, and more than that, it was the beginning of my curiosity, the first time I asked what else that everyone took for granted might be worth tearing up.

There is a detail I didn’t appreciate at the time. That same year, 1987, a chef called Ian McAndrew published his first book, A Feast of Fish. So the two of them sat on the same shelf, in the same shop, in the same year, and I bought into both worlds without the faintest idea that one of those authors would still be at my side thirty years later or that I’d one day have a hand in the sequel to the other book. You never know, standing in a bookshop, which pages are going to follow you home for good.

The open door

When I came out of the RAF, a chef called Francis Craig Rourke gave me a job. He had been head chef at Ménage à Trois in New York, and he took me on in his own kitchen. He wasn’t well, though, and it didn’t last. But rather than simply let me go, he arranged a job for me at Ménage à Trois in Knightsbridge.

I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. Rourke didn’t teach me a technique I still use. He didn’t leave a mark on my cooking that I could point to on a plate. What he did was open a door and then step back through it, quietly, at a point when he had every reason to be thinking about himself rather than me. Some of the most important people in a cook’s life are not the ones who shaped his hands. They’re the ones who put him in the room where the shaping could happen. We rarely name them, because the influence doesn’t show up in the food. It shows up in where you ended up standing.

The fine dining and the man who backed me

Knightsbridge was where the cooking changed. Ménage à Trois introduced me to a different way of thinking entirely: the smaller plates, the cross-referencing of cuisines and cultures, and the idea that a plate could be an argument rather than just dinner. This is where I started being influenced by other people’s kitchen ideologies rather than simply executing to a standard. The floor was solid, so the cleverness had somewhere to stand.

The head chef there was Christopher Suter, and he was a genuinely talented man. His sauce work in particular was an education. He had worked under Louis Outhier at 90 Park Lane, the fine-dining room at Grosvenor House, where Outhier had come in during the eighties as consulting chef and turned the kitchen into one of the more serious rooms in London. That is where Christopher learned his craft, and one of the things he passed on to me was a sauce of Outhier’s own devising, Sauce Jacqueline, which he served with John Dory. Carrot and butter cooked down together until the butter itself took the colour, then set and worked back into a fish stock to finish. Simple on paper and quietly extraordinary on the plate. I never worked for Outhier and never could claim to, but through Christopher a bit of that kitchen ended up in my hands, and it never really left them. Years later, when I helped Ian McAndrew write the recipes for A Feast of Fish 2, I used Sauce Jacqueline in one of them, and there it sits in print to this day. So a sauce devised in a three-starred French kitchen reached me second-hand through Christopher and then went forward again through me into a book, into the hands of people who’ll never know whose it was or how far it travelled to get to them. That is worth pausing on, because it’s the clearest thing in this whole story. Influence is not a gift you keep. Every cook is a relay, whether he knows it or not, and the good stuff only survives because somebody bothered to pass it on.

Christopher saw something in me that seemed to spark against his own creativity, and when he moved on to Bishopstrow House in Warminster, he asked me to come with him. I did.

That is its own kind of influence and a rarer one than people think. Rourke opened a door. Suter did something more: he backed me. He didn’t just teach me and let me drift off to the next kitchen. He wanted me with him for the next thing, which is a vote of confidence you don’t forget and don’t always deserve at the time.

The one who taught me what never to become

I should mention, while we’re here, the owner of Ménage à Trois in that period, Anthony Worrall Thompson. He was rarely in the kitchen. He was, more than anything, a self-publicist, and his greatest skill was the skill of using other people’s. I remember him coming in one day, putting a new book down on the service pass, and telling me directly that I was working for one of the greatest British chefs ever. I laughed at him.

I didn’t understand it at the time, but that laugh was a lesson landing. I’d already been formed enough, by the RAF and by proper graft, to know the difference between a man who does the work and a man who takes the credit for it. He taught me something valuable without meaning to, and without laying a finger on my cooking. He taught me what I never wanted to become. That is negative influence, and it goes in deeper than the positive kind, precisely because you absorb it through the back of your neck rather than being handed it.

The garden

Bishopstrow was where I met the countryside.

Up to this point, every influence had been a person. Bishopstrow was a place. The house had been bought by the Blandy Brothers, the Madeira wine family, somewhere in the mid-to-late eighties, part of the country house revolution that was going on then. It had a wonderful kitchen garden, and for the first time I properly understood where food came from before it reached a kitchen. Not as an idea, but as a daily fact: what was ready, what wasn’t, what tasted of itself and what didn’t. It only lasted eighteen months or so, but it changed how I thought about produce for good.

I don’t think you can overstate how much a garden teaches a cook and how little of it comes in words. You learn seasonality not from a chart but from disappointment and anticipation, from the first proper thing of the year and the last tired thing you should have left alone. That was the start of an obsession that has never really left me, and it came not from a chef standing over me but from the ground itself.

The one who won’t resolve

After Bishopstrow, I was offered a job at a Michelin-starred kitchen in London called Cavaliers, and there I met David Cavalier.

David was, without question, the most talented young chef I have ever met. I mean that with the utmost respect, and I want it on the record before I say the rest. The kitchen was at 129 Queenstown Road in Battersea, Nico Ladenis’s old room, which gave the whole thing a strange symmetry I only felt years later: the man whose book had first changed how I thought, and then, in the very kitchen he’d built, a lesson of an entirely different kind. For me it was a road to Damascus. I learned more about what a plate could be in that room than almost anywhere.

But he was completely devoid of empathy, thoughtfulness, or any kind of care for the people around him.

Both of those things are true of the same man, at the same time, and I’ve never been able to file him tidily as a good influence or a bad one. He was both, inseparably. He taught me what excellence at the stove actually looks like, and he taught me what it costs when it comes with nothing else attached.

We parted company over the way he treated the people under him. There came a point where I wasn’t prepared to stand in a kitchen and watch how the more junior staff were spoken to and handled, and I said so, and that was the end of it.

I’m not telling you this to settle anything. David is still working, still, I’m sure, a very talented chef, and I’ve no interest in a quarrel. I’m telling it because it’s the truest thing in this whole piece. That was the moment all the earlier influence stopped being theory. The discipline, the standards, the quiet promise I’d made watching Worrall Thompson – all of it came to a head in one decision, and it cost me a job in a starred kitchen to make it. That’s the difference between being influenced and being formed. Formation is what you do when it costs you something.

We held the star for my second year there. What happened to the kitchen after I left, I don’t really know, and I’d rather not guess. I left at the door, and the door is where I’ll leave it.

The one who brought it all together

By the time I reached Ireland, I’d changed. I had the floor, the fine dining, and the garden, and I’d just walked out of a Michelin kitchen on principle. What I had, though, was a collection of parts. Discipline from one place, finesse from another, a feel for produce from a third, a clear sense of what I wouldn’t stand for. Good things, all of them, but they sat in me as separate lessons learned from separate people. What I didn’t have was the thread that ran through them. That someone was Ian McAndrew.

I worked alongside Ian at Adare Manor, and not just with him, but with a wonderful chef called Andrew Fairlie, years before the two Michelin stars that would later make his name. I was lucky to catch him in his formative years. The two of us worked that kitchen, Andrew on the sauce and me on the starters and garnishes as an entremetier. The kitchen sat right beside the River Maigue, and we could watch the salmon leaping the weir from where we worked. It was a wonderful place, full of wonderful cooks.

Ian’s influence was the deepest of all of them, and it’s the hardest to describe, because he didn’t hand me a technique or open a door or teach me a single dish I could point to. What he did was change how I thought. He took the countryside I’d fallen for at Bishopstrow, the discipline the RAF had drilled into me, and the finesse I’d picked up in Knightsbridge, and he showed me they weren’t separate things at all. They were one thing. The country, the produce, the season, the standards, the cooking, all of it connected, all of it feeding the same idea of what good food actually is. He brought my whole past into the same room and made it make sense.

That is a rare gift for a chef and a rarer one to receive at the right moment. He didn’t just keep my standards up, though he did that too. He raised my thinking. He made a cook who had learned a lot of things into a cook who understood how they fitted together, and I’ve been grateful for it ever since.

That kitchen ended when Ian fell out with the owners, and we all moved on. But my time with Ian didn’t end there. Flitwick Manor in Bedfordshire was where we first landed on returning from Ireland, and from there we did consultancy for a number of companies, Waitrose among them. In 1997 we built something called The Repertoire, one of the first online portals for chefs, live from around that year onwards. Early days for that sort of thing. I’m still working with him now on this platform, which tells you everything about the kind of influence that doesn’t just keep your standards up but reorders how you see the whole trade. It doesn’t wear off. It compounds.

The one who wasn’t a chef at all

And then there was Floyd.

I first met Keith Floyd in Kinsale, at the Good Food Festival. He took an interest in me straight away, and it’s telling what interested him: not my sauces, not my sections, but the travelling and the food cultures I’d picked up along the way, and the years cooking for the royal family. The very things the RAF had set in motion, right back at the start of all this, were what drew him to me. He was curious about the world, and he’d found someone who’d seen a bit of it.

My work with Floyd ran intermittently after that, a year on, a few months off, which suited the consultancy with Ian nicely. Over the years we did three or four series together. And I’ll be honest about him, because this whole piece has tried to be honest about everyone: he was a difficult man to work with. Self-centred, often, and hardgoing. He taught me plenty, and not all of it was the kind of lesson you’d thank a man for at the time. Some of it was positive and some of it was not, which by now you’ll recognise as the pattern of nearly everyone who ever shaped me.

But here is what he gave me, and it outweighs all the difficulty. On paper, he wasn’t teaching me to cook, and he really wasn’t. Every influence up to this point had been about the food itself, cooking it, sourcing it, plating it, and holding a standard around it. Floyd was about something else entirely. He was about how you think about food, and how you talk about it, and how you bring other people into it. He showed me that food writing and food television could be genuinely curious about the world, rather than just instructional about the kitchen. That there was a whole life in food beyond the pass, in words and pictures and the sheer pleasure of arguing about it.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the influence that pointed at everything I do now. Because my work since those days has changed. It moved from consultancy to content creation to writing to developing recipes to the sort of thing you’re reading at this moment. The cook the RAF built and the starred kitchens sharpened became something else again, and the seed of that was planted by a difficult, self-centred, gloriously curious man who never once stood over me to correct a sauce. I’d not have missed it for anything.

What actually shapes a cook

So there they are. The floor, the book that first changed my mind, the open door, the man who backed me, the one who taught me what never to become, the garden, the one who won’t resolve, the one who brought it all together, and the one who wasn’t a chef at all.

Not one lineage. Not one great master, not one straight line up. A series of different forces, some of them people and some of them places, some by example and at least one by counter-example, arriving more or less in the right order, at points when I was finally ready to receive them.

That’s the thing about influence that the tribute pieces miss. It isn’t a warm word. It’s a reckoning, and you only understand who really shaped you once enough time has passed to be honest about it, including honest about the ones you’d rather forget. Every cook is carrying a crowd of people around in his hands, most of them uncredited, some of them people he never liked.

Have a think about yours. Not the ones you’d thank in a speech. The ones who are actually in there, in how you work and what you won’t stand for. The chef who taught you a technique you still use every service. The one who showed you exactly what kind of kitchen you’d never run. The book you read at nineteen that you’re still arguing with. The one who opened a door and stepped back. They’re all in your hands, and most of them have never been named out loud.

And here’s the part that ought to keep you honest. You’re doing it to someone else right now. Every commis watching how you treat the porter, every young cook learning a sauce off you without being told where it came from, every kitchen you set the temperature of by how you behave in it. You’re somebody’s influence, good or bad, whether you’ve noticed or not. The relay doesn’t stop at you. It never stops at anyone.

So name them. Sit down and work out your own list, honestly, the good and the difficult both, and I think you’ll be surprised what comes up and in what order. And if you feel like telling us who they were and what they left you with, we’d like to hear it. This is the first of these, not the last. I’ve gone first because it’s my platform, and that seemed only fair. I’d rather it didn’t stay a piece about me. I’d like it to become a conversation about us.

Shaun Smith-Roberts is a platform manager and editor at Chefs.studio