Rowley Leigh
The opening of Le Café Anglais at Whiteleys sees the welcome return of Rowley Leigh to the Grove restaurant scene. Bill Knott catches up with him
Above: Rowley Leigh at Le Cafe Anglais. Photographed by Vicky Dawe
Chefs have been characterised in many ways in the popular imagination: cheery fat blokes with ruddy faces, bow-tied boozers, volatile control freaks, prima donna Frenchmen, even foul-mouthed ex-footballers.
Rowley Leigh, former head chef at Kensington Place and cookery writer for the Financial Times, is none of the above. Seeing him sitting outside the Starbucks in Whiteleys, poring over a sheaf of papers, you might mistake him for a university lecturer or a dealer in antiquarian books.
The sheaf of papers, however, comprises a couple of dozen CVs. A few yards from Starbucks, on the site at Whiteleys that used to be McDonald’s, his new project is taking shape. Called Le Café Anglais, it is a 170-seater modern brasserie, and the most ambitious restaurant to open in West London for decades – since Kensington Place, in fact – and it will need lots of staff.
Rowley’s vision for Le Café Anglais is clear. This is not a project he has fallen into: it is the culmination of half a lifetime of living, sleeping, breathing and – most importantly – eating restaurants. ‘I want it to be glamorous and affordable, and I want people to treat it as their second home.’ He has, he says, a ‘substantial shareholding’ in the new venture, and ‘a huge team of wonderfully supportive backers.’ There no doubt that his investors have been wise enough to let their hugely experienced leader build the restaurant in his own image.
The gestation period of a new restaurant can be a trying time, but Rowley seems to be taking it in his stride. The chap sorting through the CVs with him seems a little edgier, especially when he notices that some of the prospective commis chefs don’t even live in Britain. Has Rowley remembered to give that fishmonger in Cornwall a ring, he asks. ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper,’ replies Rowley.
Chefs do not quote Evelyn Waugh. It is not in their nature; apart, that is, from a small school of 1980s enfants terribles who had the temerity to bypass the rigours of City and Guilds 7061/2.
Rowley, Alastair Little, Rick Stein and Shaun Hill actually went to university before they fell into cooking for a living. A couple of years ago, Rowley even appeared on a special edition of University Challenge and did extremely well. ‘I had a good run’, he says, modestly.
Rowley’s early career path was vague, to put it mildly. After a couple of years at Christ’s College, Cambridge – ‘I’d got in, that was the main thing. I didn’t see much point after that’ – he hung around Cambridge for a year, then went to live in the countryside and became a dairy farmer. ‘I was very fond of cows.Work started far too early every morning though, and I was working with my father, which is never a good idea.’
A few years later, in 1975, he moved to London. ‘I decided I was a writer, so I messed about for a while not writing a novel, then realised that I needed to get a job in a hurry.I flicked through the Standard and found a job at a hamburger joint.’
Moving to Joe Allen, in Covent Garden, he started to pick up some skills. ‘The head chef used to bugger off at weekends, so I’d be in charge: they had the most ridiculously long menu of egg dishes, which was great experience.’
His big break came when he lied to Albert Roux, claiming rather more experience at the stove than he actually had. ‘I went down like a sack of shit. Albert told the chef to fire me, but I appealed, told him I’d work for nothing.’
Always keen on a bargain, Albert gave him a variety of jobs in the Roux empire, including several stints at now-defunct City restaurant Le Poulbot. He refused to have anything to do with the Roux Brothers’ brief infatuation with sousvide cooking (a sort of posh boil-in-the-bag) ‘for which Albert respected me, I think’, then became sous-chef at Le Poulbot. ‘I hated it. It’s middle management, like being a sergeant major. Although,’ he adds quickly, ‘my sous-chef at Le Café Anglais is terrifically talented.’
Eventually, he got the top job at Le Poulbot: ‘Three glorious years. We were restaurant of the year in The Times, we were more highly rated in the Gault-Millau than Le Gavroche, which must have pissed Albert off, and because it was in the City I only did five shifts a week: I’d work from 6am to 6pm, then go home and sit in an armchair smoking joints, dreaming up dishes for the next day.’
West London –’and its depraved habits’ – started to appeal more and more to him. He became friends with Tony Macintosh, owner of 192, and spent a year and a half as Alastair Little’s relief chef.
Then, in 1987, he became head chef of Kensington Place. At the time, KP (as it is universally known) was a revolution in London restaurants, and Rowley was its mentor. ‘I wanted to do Gavroche food in a Joe Allen setting. Was I evangelical? Absolutely.’
The style of bustling modern brasserie that Rowley pioneered is commonplace today, but back then it was a novelty. ‘Customers used to turn up just to watch us having fun.’ His signature dishes – scallops with pea purée, foie gras with sweetcorn pancakes – rapidly became something akin to fashion accessories for the West London media crowd who colonised KP’s plate glass windows.
These days, Rowley worries just a little that he may have created a monster. ‘There was a definite shift in power from manager to chef. In the old days, a manager might say to a diner: “I’ve got some lovely seabass”, and he would mean it. He was in charge of the menu, and the chef cooked it.
‘Menus became far too prescriptive. For which, I might be partly responsible. Chefs frequently don’t have any understanding of how to eat: there is no raised consciousness about food.’ Le Café Anglais menu is far from prescriptive. It is long, seasonal, classic (in a modern sort of way) and reasonably priced, with meats from the rotisserie a speciality. French and Italian dishes make up the bulk of the menu, with a smattering of British shellfish and smoked fish, a hint of Spanish, good cheeses and a few comfort puds.
The opening menu is long on game, with red-leg partridge at £15, for instance, while white truffle hounds can feast on fonduta or veal tartare scattered with shavings of the precious fungus.
The concept of Le Café Anglais is – above all – flexibility, and a healthy respect for the whims of the diner. As Rowley says, ‘I want people to come in for an omelette before the movies, or oysters and a steak afterwards.’
Rowley will be on the pass, in the middle of the restaurant, but still definitely on the kitchen side of the divide. The general manager is the hugely experienced Graham Williams. The signature dishes from KP have gone: ‘If anybody thinks that’s all I can do, f**k ‘em!’
Even before the chefs’ hats replace the hard hats, the building looks beautiful. High ceilings – plastered by a man on stilts who, Rowley says, ‘turned out to be a moonlighting conjuror: he gave me his card’ – and beautiful, original, 22-foot-high leaded windows more than do justice to the grand old building, laid low for so long by tatty chain stores, now starting to recapture its grandeur.
While Rowley can sometimes seem grumpy and world-weary – especially when fulminating about pretentious young chefs, or excoriating the Conservative Party – there is one subject which still exercises the same fascination for him that it always has: restaurants. He is dotty about them.
Will Café Anglais be fun? ‘You bet!’ And he means it.
Le Café Anglais
8 Porchester Gardens, W2