Miles Collins

If it’s good enough for Marco….

In the 1990’s every chef in England wanted to be Marco Pierre White . He had brought what he had started in the late eighties to the fore with the exceptional three michelin starred The Restaurant Marco Pierre White at the Hyde Park Hotel in London. His food, style and personality struck a chord with chefs and his influence would spread across the world.

As technically brilliant as he was, Marco stuck to the rules. He believed in the disciplines of French gastronomy and applied them to his dishes with a noticeable nod towards Italy. His presentation was copied far and wide, usually badly, and former apprentices were snapped up by city traders dabbling in the restaurant business in the hope of finding the next Marco.

The problem with Marco’s food for a lot of chefs was that it was too hard to do, the techniques were too refined and the ingredients too expensive. Gary Rhodes became an overnight success with the public and chefs alike with his take on modern British food because it was cheap and relatively easy to cook. All of a sudden it was cool to cook liver again, a hot pot with some additional turned vegetables to show artistic flair became all the rage.

As the influence of the internet grew and with it a sense that far away countries where electronically on your doorstep it was only a matter of time before chefs became more aware of what their foreign counterparts were doing. The nineties saw an explosion in new raw materials for the chef to work with, vegetables, herbs and exotic seafood began to be imported into the UK on a regular basis from across the globe and this in turn pushed chefs to look further afield for inspiration.

This inspiration became known as fusion cooking. Personally, I found some of it very influential and most of it apalling, those chefs who got it right, i.e Peter Gordon, Neil Perry, Tetsuya Wakuda and Charlie Trotter pushed the boundries of food combinations to great success and still do so to this day. As with most things, however, it also led to some truly mind boggling dishes which smack of over ambitious chefs whose only experience of Asian cuisine was a Chinese takeaway or late night curry.

Up until the 1996 I was busy cooking other chefs dishes, I was still quite young and wanted to be Marco one week and the world’s greatest dim sum chef the next. When I was given the opportunity to come up with a dish of my own as a special it would probably have been over complicated with too many fancy touches to satisfy my ego and, er, cold.

The problem was that I, along with virtually every other chef of my generation was struggling to find an identity. The food culture in the UK began to change again and the pressure to come up with an alternative to what had gone before was hard to handle. All of a sudden there were too many choices from too many countries, in the old days it was easy, you served French, nothing else. So what did we do? Pick another country and stick with it? No, we used as many ingredients from as many countries as possible and combined them to make a menu which looked like a prison riot.

Looking back at cookery books from that decade I no longer get the sense of excitement that I once had, and that is a shame. Charlie Trotter’s book on seafood was a bolt of lightning for me at the time but as brilliant as he is the book hasn’t stood the test of time in the way that Marco Pierre White’s book; White Heat has.

The end of the 90’s, for me, saw a generation of chef’s grow up and for that we should be thankfull.