When I arrive at St John for lunch with Fergus Henderson, it is 12.30pm on a Monday, the most bread-and-butter day of the week. I’ve walked to the famous “nose to tail” restaurant through the coolness of London’s Smithfield Market, where meat has been traded in one form or other (dead or alive) since the 12th century. Smithfield did some pretty hard medieval partying — jousting, drinking and cutting up traitors — and, centuries later, it still has a faintly hungover air. There is a similar mood as I enter the old smokehouse on St John Street, as if a punishing grade of gluttony was achieved at the weekend.
Henderson is already planted at the bar, half his considerable gravity leaning into the zinc counter, the other on to a walking stick. “So, this interview is ‘Have A Lunch With Fergus’,” he summarises thoughtfully after our hellos, in a soft smoker’s voice that emits from small, mischievous lips. “Would you like a glass of champagne to prepare yourself?” he asks, as if this would be a prudent thing to do.
The dining philosophy of St John, now in its 25th year of business, is a belief in food and drink’s ability to enact subtle and sometimes vital changes of spirit — to be “nutriment that feeds the mind”, as Jonathan Swift put it — but also riotously good fun, as per medieval tradition. Henderson once told me that a tomato salad “saved his life” during a gastronomic exploration of Barcelona with his sister; today he recalls an “epiphany” that came via a glass of potent Armagnac. Eating well is partly ordering well, and knowing what you need.
As befits his size, Henderson is very much a chef’s chef, revered globally by industry peers for his simple but irresistible language of British ingredients, which he pursued at a time when most professional kitchens were more intent on dicing carrots. His childhood household, living in 1970s Chelsea and then Soho, valued the power of the dinner table to knit a family together: “Both my parents were my education in food,” he says. “Mum taught me how to cook, dad taught me how to eat.”
When Henderson decided to quit architecture, his parents’ profession, after studying at the Architectural Association, his father gave his blessing, on one condition: “Dad said, ‘If you’re going to be a chef, be a good one’. I think I’ve turned out to be an OK one.”
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“OK” is a modest report from the man who arguably rescued British meat from the lowly rank it had sunk to by the 1990s, sliced at lacklustre roast dinners in pubs and carveries, or sold cheaply at supermarkets via impersonal, industrial farms. Against this backdrop, St John’s credo of “nose to tail” eating became fashionable for its novelty, daring the customer to try trotter paste on toast or pig’s head pie, and to appreciate what would otherwise go to waste.
“My hope is that St John is an institution, in the good sense of the word,” he says as we move into the dining room, gathering up the champagne. “Like a chemist or a cinema, something you need. Feeding you, watering you and dining you.” Glancing around, I see signs of an orderly institution at work, from the note on the menu reminding customers to order whole suckling pig a week in advance, to the waiters shuttling discreetly between tables in white drill jackets. Though he is the “face” of the enterprise, Henderson keeps a low profile. “I’m fairly Teflon to fame,” he says. “Fooo, fooo!” he adds, gesturing something flying over his head.
We are among the first customers to sit down and unfold our napkins. Henderson’s speech is at times hard to make out, the result of early onset Parkinson’s and its deep-brain implant treatment — so for clearer acoustics we sit side by side, as if banqueting. He says his consultant is “pleased with him” for his current bill of health, and he has a healthy, tanned look from a week at a friend’s villa in Greece, a holiday he describes as: “a nice pool…boats…grilled fish…roast kid. All the things.” Lunch, he says as we study the menu, is “very much my favourite meal. Lunch is a wonderful thing. The strange thing is the more people tut over [a long] lunch, the more delicious. The more tuts the better.”
A waiter brings warm sliced bread and a pat of yolk-coloured butter, and I decide it’s a good idea to let Henderson order for us: the crayfish and aioli special, deep-fried salt cod to share, then brill, roast Tamworth, broad beans, potatoes and greens, a bottle of Trimbach pinot noir and an ice bucket. “Now we can relax,” he says confidently. When I tell him that FT readers frequently bemoan the increasing sobriety of the “Have a Lunch with . . . ” encounters, his face brightens with delight. “Let’s give the readers what they want,” he says, as the Trimbach arrives and is poured.
Henderson likes to eat here almost every day, “which is a good thing and a bad thing. Bad for my tummy. It’s bigger than I wish it was.” When I ask if this is inevitable, there’s a flash of spikiness. “You’re not saying our food is unhealthy?” he says defensively, and I find myself denying the accusation, even if the St John diet might be hard on the waistline. We discuss the rise of the vegans, and he says he has no objections, other than “the smugness”. “How do you tell someone is a vegan?” he asks. Answer: “They tell you.” This is a stock Fergus joke, but he chuckles gently at it, and adds, “We always have something vegan up our sleeve on the menu. Many vegans say we’re their favourite restaurant.”
Henderson’s daily presence is a form of quality control now that Parkinson’s has separated him from the kitchen. The menu changes twice a day, and he keeps an eye on its delivery. “It’s hard for chefs if menus change all the time, but it keeps you on your toes. St John is nature-led. Runner beans come in, fish changes all the time [from boats off the east coast], nature starts hurling birds at us. Nature and time are sort of the two things that have affected us ever since we began.”
