Sunday, September 24, 2006

Giorgio Locatelli; From 'Wop' to One of Britain's Finest Restaurateurs and Cook Book Authors

The ANNOTICO Report

 

After immigrating to Britain, and  an apprenticeship of being verbally abused and routinely called 'wop', Giorgio Locatelli, not only serves up brilliant fare, but has a well treated, well paid, happy staff.

 

He looks back on his upbringing in the northern Italian town of Corgeno, where he worked in the family restaurant from the age of five. There's his uncle, the resistance fighter, and his grandfathers, the communists. There's his first job in London at the Savoy. His years of hell working in Paris which were so traumatic he's claimed he's blanked them from his mind. And then his return to London, first at Olivo, then to great acclaim at Zafferano, which earned him a Michelin star, his catastrophic falling out with the other owners, then opening up two pizza restaurants, Spiga and Spighetta, his marriage to Plaxy, the near-death experience of his daughter, and then, finally, the culmination of it all, the opening of his very own restaurant, Locanda Locatelli.

 

Locanda Locatelli. has become London's leading celebrity magnet.  Madonna, who lives around the corner, has been known to come in three times a week. Kate Moss. Giorgio Armani. Donatella Versace. Lucian Freud. Nigella Lawson. All the fashion people. And the food people. And the art people. And then your usual run-of-the-mill A-list celebrity types. But what he insists most upon doing, is treating everyone the same. And, I realise the celebs appreciate that as much as us plebs.

 

Giorgio is Italian, and has a particularly 'fervent following among women'. And no wonder. Forget his curly locks and his Italian accent, it's because he is a man who betrays an earthy joyfulness that is the antithesis of everything Anglo Saxon and prissy and buttoned-up.

 

He shows none of the British emotional constipation and snobbery; and although semi-famous, he disdains the "celebrity chef" moniker. 

 

Us Brits, I say, we're so repressed, but he refuses to be rude about us as a nation, even when I try my best to goad him into it.

 

But he certainly is "salty" in his conversation which the female interviewer finds intriguing.

 

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THE ITALIAN'S JOB


After an apprenticeship of being verbally abused and routinely called 'wop', he's now running one of Britain's finest restaurants and the author of the best cookbook of the year. Carole Cadwalladr meets Giorgio Locatelli

 

The Observer

London Guardian

Carole Cadwalladr
Sunday September 24, 2006

I agree with AA Gill. I can't tell you what a disagreeable sentence that is to write and why it pains me, really, actually, pains me to admit it. But he gave Locanda Locatelli his first-ever five-star restaurant review, four of which he awarded to the chef-patron, Giorgio Locatelli, 43, on the basis that his food is 'properly brilliant' and one of which was because he employs an 'unnecessarily large' staff so that they can actually have lives as well as jobs. 'This is pathetically rare in kitchens with first-class pretensions, so Locatelli gets top marks because he's enthusiastic and brilliant but not at the expense of others.'

He's right, except, sod the food, actually, because ultimately when everything's said and done, it is just food, and I'll leave it to the critics to get their knickers in a twist over whether he can cook a four-star pasta sauce, or a five-star one. The fact is that Locatelli should get top marks not just because this is pathetically rare in kitchens, but because it's pathetically rare in life.

We're sitting in the restaurant, just chatting, after my five-hour-long induction into the Locatelli way, and suddenly he's off.

'It is such crap! Crap! It is no way to treat people! And it is not OK! It is just ego ... I grew up in a restaurant and you know, for 17 years I never heard somebody bullying somebody else. I never heard anybody screaming or saying, "You're an idiot". And I was just very much of the opinion that you have to have a joyful team in order to have a joyful restaurant. And I've been proved wrong so many times. There are so many of these restaurants, they have one, two, three Michelin stars, they are the best restaurants in the world, and they treat their staff like dogs! We lived like dogs! All this joy that is given to people is paid with so much suffering from the other side.'

Of course, this could all be so much talk except that during the five hours in and around his kitchen I don't hear a single person shout. Or even raise their voice. I don't see anybody getting a bollocking and I know something about this as I waitressed for years, including a stint in a celebrity-studded restaurant in Soho, and spent most of my at least 12-hour-long days getting it in the neck from whoever happened to be closest to hand.

There are a lot of bad places to work, but kitchens are among the worst; the hours, the pay, the heat, but mostly it's the bullying. Kitchens, trading floors of merchant banks, newsrooms, Russian coalmines during the Stalinist era: they all share certain common features - a volatile cocktail of daily deadlines and old-fashioned machismo. As Locatelli knows, because he put up with it for years on his way to the top, which is when most people promptly turn into the tossers they once despised. Locatelli, on the other hand, has refused to become the tosser.

Here everybody works a 40-45 hour week, on largely single shifts, which is, as far as I'm aware, unprecedented in London restaurants, and forget the battery chickens, it's the African dishwashers I've always thought need liberating. They're the backbone of almost every posh restaurant kitchen in the capital, as they are here, too. 'Kitchens are always the first port of call for new immigrants,' says Locatelli, when I ask him about them. But then he adds, as a by-the-by, that they're paid #11.10 an hour. Which is what? Nearly #24 grand a year? Jesus. That's pretty good going for an entry level job by anybody's standards, and it's why even if his restaurant looked like an Angus Steak House and specialised in deep-fried puppies, I'd still recommend you go there.

That and the fact that he's not yet Giorgio, in the way that Gordon is Gordon and Jamie is Jamie and Nigella is Nigella. Because although he's semi-famous, he's refused to go the whole celebrity hog, and in this day and age, to be a Michelin-starred chef with tousled Latin locks and a rumpled, lived-in face and not appear across all the major prime-time schedules is in itself something of an achievement. He did do a series for the BBC back in 2002 with his friend, Tony Allan, Tony and Giorgio, but he's resisted the rest of the usual celebrity chef lures. He hates celebrity chefs. Hates the idea of them. Which from anybody else just about to trip off to do a magazine cover shoot, I'd just think, yeah, right, so I'll quote him at length on the matter:

'I'm very hungry for happiness. I am not very hungry for that bullshit. I think it's bullshit. I really didn't like it after Tony and Giorgio was on the television. I really didn't like to go to the airport and have people look at me. It's much better to have your money in your pocket and not be known by anybody and do whatever you want and go wherever you want. It is so nice to have your own restaurant. You come in here. This is our house, our home. You live with this extended family of people. And you eat, shit, swear, and be together all day and you just kind of live this life that has a different rhythm than other lives. I have to leave at three o'clock to have my photo taken. But you know we are putting the oxtail on at three, and I really wanted to taste that before I go, and for me, the oxtail is maybe more important ...'

But, Giorgio, I say, you're about to get trussed up in a toga and put on a plinth. And he shrugs his shoulders and says, 'I like John [Reardon - the photographer], he's a lot of fun ... And you have to play the game. You do a book and it takes five years to do it, so it would be stupid not to promote it. But there was this thing the other day and this woman was saying, I can't believe you don't want to do these interviews? And I think, I have a potato boiling, what do you mean? Get over your bloody self. I mean who cares? I mean, if I do a fantastic potato I'm going to make 20 people so much happier than if I tell them what I would take with me to a desert island. I mean, Vafanculo!'

What can I say? He swears so wonderfully well, fluently, in two languages, sometimes simultaneously, that it's just a joy to listen to. And what I think it's impossible to underestimate is how much shadow the figure of Marco Pierre White still casts and why a sense of humour and a tolerance to being photographed next to a stuffed pig is now just what chefs do.

'There was the chef BM, Before Marco, and then there's after Marco. Marco stands there as a sort of Christ figure in the chef's world. Before Marco there was the short, fat, ugly guy in the big chef's hat. And then there's the rock-and-roll chef. Marco was very inspirational because we were so young and he showed us that you don't need the central-London location, and you don't need crystal, what's important is the food.'

It's all about the food with Giorgio. And the book, the book that took five years to write, with Sheila Keating, is something more than just another cookbook. It's called Made in Italy: Food and Stories and it's the size of a telephone directory, 600-odd pages long, and is a big book in anybody's terms. It's a cross between a recipe book, an autobiography, and a faintly academic treatise on the historical origins and sociological significance of Italian food. Everything in his life, he says, is reflected in his food, so it's all here.

There's his upbringing in the northern Italian town of Corgeno, where he worked in the family restaurant from the age of five. There's his uncle, the resistance fighter, and his grandfathers, the communists. There's his first job in London at the Savoy. His years of hell working in Paris which were so traumatic he's claimed he's blanked them from his mind. And then his return to London, first at Olivo, then to great acclaim at Zafferano, which earned him a Michelin star, his catastrophic falling out with the other owners, then opening up two pizza restaurants, Spiga and Spighetta, his marriage to Plaxy, the near-death experience of his daughter, and then, finally, the culmination of it all, the opening of his very own restaurant, Locanda Locatelli.

And then there's the food. So much food, so touchingly described. There's a whole entry devoted to salami, which he calls 'the voice of the people', and is, he claims, a better index to understanding a people and a culture than art or literature or music. A beautiful salami, he says, can bring tears to his eyes. Salami, capers, figs, tomatoes, eels. If only he could get more people to eat eels, he'd be so happy, although Tony Blair impressed him by having mackerel when he came to the restaurant; good, honest, 'healthy, proletarian food'.

And then, most momentously, there's truffles.Oh, the truffles. He is rapturous about truffles; poetic about them. This is Locatelli on truffles: 'Sometimes people say to me, "Oh they smell of feet. Horrible!" It hurts me to hear it, but I understand. If life could be described in a smell, then it is the smell of truffles. They smell of people and sweat. They just remind me so much of human beings: that is why I love them.'

His entry in Wikipedia points out that he has a particularly 'fervent following among women'. And no wonder. Forget his curly locks and his Italian accent, it's because any man who thinks like this about what is, after all, a fungus, albeit a really rather expensive one, betrays an earthy joyfulness that is the antithesis of everything Anglo Saxon and prissy and buttoned-up. Us Brits, I say, we're so repressed, but he refuses to be rude about us as a nation, even when I try my best to goad him into it.

'They are very passionate, the English. They are very passionate about different things. They are passionate about fair play.'

But it's not very sexy is it, fair play?

'No pero, to be on the other end of someone who cheats, it 'urts you so badly. And in Italy we always talk about the winners, we always look up at the winners, and we don't look at who has paid for what this guy has gained.'

It's a funny thing, of course, that someone who has staked their livelihood on certain ideas of social justice, and who tells me that 'with my daughter the worst thing I can imagine is that she comes back one of these days with Hello! or heat magazine', should inadvertently create a restaurant that has become London's leading celebrity magnet.

Madonna, who lives around the corner, has been known to come in three times a week. Kate Moss. Giorgio Armani. Donatella Versace. Lucian Freud. Nigella Lawson. All the fashion people. And the food people. And the art people. And then your usual run-of-the-mill A-list celebrity types.

But maybe it's not such a shock, actually, when you think about it. Because what he does, what he insists upon doing, is treating everyone the same. And, when I go there for dinner later that night, I realise it's the celebs who appreciate that as much as us plebs. But, in any case, it's all slightly beside the point: the Michelin star, the Who's Who roster of clients, the kind of reviews that make other chefs weep and beat their breasts, it's all so much icing on the cake. Because what Locatelli specialises in, although he never says it, is gastronomy without cruelty.

It's a deeply unfashionable position, of course. And if I was a television executive, I'd trample over baby seals and small children to get Giorgio Locatelli and Gordon Ramsay into a head-to-head live-action swear-off. Because Giorgio might eschew the whole Gordon Ramsay school of kitchen-discipline-cum-theatre-of-cruelty, but he's a stickler for manners, and if someone is rude, then they'd really better watch their back.

'I put everything in my body into making people feel welcome and comfortable and to make it the best experience that we can. I know that sometimes we can make mistakes. But if somebody is rude to me in my house, this is my house, OK, you cannot be rude to me or my staff in my house, you can just fuck off. If the girls come out and say there is someone who says get me Giorgio, I just go and blow him away. I blow him away!

'I can be really nasty if I want. I fight a lot in my life. I've made the decision now I don't fight any more. But you know ... sometimes ...'

It'd be a fine thing to see him in a fight, I can't help thinking. He's fearless. And when I say that it seems to me that Gordon Ramsay is always trying to prove his masculinity, he says, 'Maybe it's because he's got a small dick. Who knows? I don't know. I've never seen it. I'll have to ask him next time, show me your dick.' And he's none too complimentary about Jamie Oliver's Sainsbury's deal either.

'He says that it's important that he fights them from the inside, something like that. But when you fight somebody, you don't get paid #5 million do you? You get fucking smacked in the head, don't you? Look, I've nothing against Jamie. I think he's a very nice guy and does a good job, but I see the position of the chef as a little bit different. Because he has a great capacity to cook food to a certain level and get people to eat it, he has this great thing, and this thing is called in-de-pend-ence. He does not ever, ever have to lick nobody's arse, ever.'

Not ever, ever having to lick nobody's arse, ever is a big thing for Giorgio. Because he's done his share, the worst of which was in Paris where at La Tour d'Argent he worked from 7.30am-1am, six days a week and cooked 140 ducks a day for their house speciality but never ever got a chance to taste it. His abiding memory is of sitting on a rubbish bin out the back of the kitchen, eating, 'while people inside the restaurant were paying half of what I earned for a portion of spinach ` la crhme'. For a year, he was referred to only as 'the wop'. When he left Paris, after working for two years at two of the best restaurants in the world, he was actually suffering from malnutrition.

It's the Zafferano experience that inflames him most though. He owned 25 per cent but, after a cataclysmic falling out with the management group, he walked away without a penny. And it was in the middle of this time that his daughter went into anaphylactic shock on holiday in France and they discovered she was allergic to more than 600 different foods. It's as cruel a disease as you could inflict on the child of a chef. More cruelly still, a specialist at St Thomas's Hospital believes it might be because she's the child of a chef. Because Margherita, now 10, was surrounded by food, and exposed to the chemical compounds in food before actually ingesting them, he theorises that it might have triggered a reaction that caused the condition.

'It changed me a lot. It changed the way I did things. And the way that I think about food. I have to shower before I even touch her.' It's under control now, but she has a complex, anxious attitude towards food, and 'when I come home and say to Plaxy, "We did this and we did that," and you can see that it turns Margherita off so completely she doesn't even want to know about it'.

His son, Jack, 18, is unlikely to follow his footsteps, either. He's always referred to him as his son in interviews, but technically Jack is his stepson, and has known Giorgio since he was two. 'I think children are yours if you make them yours. To me, he is my son, there's no doubting that. Does it make any difference?'

No, I say.

'To my family in Italy it does. Maybe that's why I'm so eager to say he's my son and that's it.'

It's funny but I think, quite possibly, it's this that's the key to his entire success. He's Italian but without the social conservatism and conformism; and British without the emotional constipation and snobbery; a thorough-going British-Italian amalgam reflected in his funny not-quite-Italian, not-quite-estuarine sentence construction, and his urban London-Italian-restaurant food.

Plaxy is 'very London' he says, and works in the restaurant, too, overseeing the front of house, but she isn't in on the day I visit. He met her in his Soho years when he lived in a big shared flat and hung out smoking dope with the art crowd. He's still friendly with them. Damien Hirst has given him two paintings for the restaurant on permanent loan and it was via another artist, Daniel Harvey, that he came to the attention of Peter Greenaway's art director, and was employed to create all the food for The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

It's the final bit of buffing that his CV needs, an art-house, smash-hit about love, food, sex and death....

He thinks of her whenever he thinks of the 'complicity' between restaurateur and guest. 'You become part of their lives and they become part of yours.' And what happens in his restaurant, whether a seduction succeeds or fails, whether it's the best day or your life, or your worst meal of the year, is, he says, 90 per cent in his control. Food of the gods delivered by happy little angels. It's really not just about kitchens, you see; it's pretty much what life is like, too. A whole lot better when there's fewer people shouting at you and no one calling you a wop.

 

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