EATING OUT - 1966

FROM MY BOOK 'SOUR MOUTH, SWEET BOTTOM', PUBLISHED By UNBOUND

My friend Vicki Wickham called me one evening to say she was bringing two friends to dinner: where should we eat? I pitched the Bistro, a small French place in South Kensington with individual cubicles and banquette seating.

The guests she brought turned out to be Ike and Tina Turner, top of the charts that week with ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ and still in a relationship, though the impression I got was that it was deteriorating.

Vicki was in charge of booking acts for Ready Steady Go! and they’d been on the show the previous evening. There was a lot of sexual tension round the table. Ike seemed to have plans for him and Vicki. Vicki looked more interested in Tina. Tina kept staring meaningfully at me. And I was trying to pull one of the waiters.

All this high tension snapped in a flash when Tina found a caterpillar in her cauliflower au gratin. Screaming ad libs far more thrilling than any she’d recorded up to that moment, she leaped up and stood on her chair, as if the poor dead caterpillar were a live rat.

In the sixties, eating out was where everything happened and I soon became addicted to it. Restaurants, I decided, were where I functioned best. I loved food but it wasn’t just that; it was the bustle, the ambiance, the waiters, the wine and good conversation with friends.

I was first inducted into restaurant eating by my film director father. When I was ten, I started going in the school holidays to his cutting rooms in Soho where lunch was an important part of the day. With film directors who were later to become famous, like Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, I was taken off to Italian and Greek restaurants in Soho – Hector’s, with chianti bottles hung round the ceiling, Jimmy the Greek’s, nicknamed ‘the toilet’ because it was in a basement, tiled from floor to ceiling, or Ley-On’s in Wardour Street, one of only four Chinese restaurants in London. And on one rare occasion to Le Caprice, where I saw Picasso eating spaghetti.

In 1951, when I was twelve, I went on a summer exchange visit to Paris. The boy I’d exchanged with had gone on a summer course. His parents had no interest in me and were out all day. They gave me money each morning for lunch. For two weeks I had my run of Paris bistros – 250 francs a day for a set lunch (about five shillings but the equivalent of £10 today). Every street, every corner, every turning, had another restaurant − tempting, tantalising, bustling.

When I got back to England I was condemned to five years of prison food at public school. During my second term, I was called into the career master’s study. ‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’ he asked.

‘Eat in restaurants, sir,’ I told him.

But it got deferred. First there was my two years in America where eating was mainly about quick meals at drugstore counters. Then, when I got back to England, there was the small matter of first having to find enough money to live on. But by the beginning of the sixties I was doing well − still only twenty-three, I was working as an assistant film editor, surrounded by people who ate out all the time. And it was around then that London’s restaurant scene started to flourish.

I read a book I liked and had an idea to make a film of it - Look Down in Mercy, by a man called Walter Baxter, about his wartime experiences in Burma. I went off to see him and discuss the possibility of him giving me an option to try and set it up. I was far too young and inexperienced to deserve it, but he agreed provided I could bring film celebrities to the restaurant he’d opened, the Chanterelle in Brompton Road.

Working as a cutting room assistant on the film Nothing But the Best, I’d got to know Alan Bates, its star, and got on rather well with him. I gave him a copy of the book and asked if he’d liked to appear in it. He said we should talk about it so I took him to dinner at the Chanterelle.

Walter Baxter was delighted - who else could I bring? Alan Bates lived with his boyfriend Peter Wyngarde, the star of the TV show Jason King. I decided he should be in my film, too, so off we went to the Chanterelle again for more discussions.

Walter had a friend who was also a restaurateur, Hillary James, a psychiatrist. He’d opened La Bicyclette and Le Matelot a few yards from each other in Elizabeth Street and unselfishly Walter suggested I share my friends with him too. So I took Alan and Peter there and they arrived with Rudolf Nureyev, the ballet dancer. He was so impressed with La Bicyclette’s iced shrimp soup that he came back with half the Royal Ballet. Suddenly I was being put on the A-list at restaurants as someone who brought them stars – meals weren’t free but the best tables were always guaranteed,

These were bright, well-decorated, trendy restaurants in the smartest parts of town. But in the mid-sixties a new one came along that bucked the trend. The chef from the Chinese embassy had defected, claimed political asylum and opened Kuo Yuan in Willesden at premises that had been a workmen’s café. And he didn’t even bother to redecorate.

It was the first place in Britain to serve Peking duck so people flocked to it. They couldn’t book - it took three months to get a phone line installed and the owner couldn’t wait - neither did it have a licence to serve alcohol, you had to bring your own. And there was absolutely no A-listing. I was standing in the queue with friends one night when Princess Margaret and Tony Armstrong- Jones arrived clasping a bottle of wine. They stood meekly, if briefly, at the back of a line of twenty people before the owner came rushing out to take them inside. Another night the prime minister turned up – Harold Wilson. He refused to queue and sulked in the back of his car till a table was ready.

All this was before I got into the music business. By the time I got there my list of regular haunts extended to over thirty restaurants. Lunch and dinner every day for a fortnight was barely enough to cover them all – the Terrazza, the Casserole, Meridiana, San Frediano, Alexander’s, Au Jardin des Gourmets, Nico’s, Kettners, the Ivy − the list went on and on. Eating was now the basis of my business life. These were places where ideas turned into projects and projects became reality.

In the 1960s, in the music business, a normal lunch was two bottles of wine for two people, one white, one red, some food, then a few brandies. Back at the office you’d struggle through what was left of the afternoon before a quick hour at home to spruce up for dinner, which was a far bigger event. This would morph into club-time around midnight – the Ad Lib, the Scotch of St James, or the Cromwellian – till three in the morning.

Up at eight, a couple of Shredded Wheat, a brisk walk to work and the whole process started again.

These days I’m not so keen on the Shredded Wheat.

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