The cult of St John

In recent years, we’ve become used to restaurants with the life expectancy of a mayfly. PR burst, “soft” launch, three-month waiting list, ubiquity, obscurity, fail and repeat. Covid lockdowns and a de facto recession have killed off lots of the old stagers, too. Le Gavroche has retired gracefully, Galvin at Windows shuttered, and Marcus closed at the Berkeley, largely unmourned. So a 30th birthday is worth celebrating. Particularly when it’s somewhere as important to our national restaurant scene as St John, which at this point, to reinforce cliché, I should describe as the offal-serving, nose-to-tail modern British restaurant in London’s Smithfield.

Of its three sites, St John’s first and main restaurant, the “mothership”, is still in the same place it’s been since 1994 — a Georgian building about a hundred yards north of the historic meat market. Back then, the idea of turning a naked-brick-and-girder industrial space into a restaurant was a wild and courageous innovation. The place had been a squat, the offices of a leftist newspaper, and, at some point, a bacon smokehouse — and the smell persisted as strongly as the spirit. It’s hard to imagine today what a leap of faith it must have been to see a restaurant there, but chef Fergus Henderson and restaurateur Trevor Gulliver did. “It had good bones”, says Gulliver.

I’ve been a devotee of St John since I first moved to London, not long after it opened. It wasn’t just a great restaurant when there weren’t so many of those around. It seemed to represent something bigger even then. A sort of ethos, a belief system, an approach to things. People sometimes say that about El Bulli or maybe Noma, but to me, neither held a candle to St John. Modest, unshowy, uniquely British, but no less of a cult.

Today I’m having lunch at St John during a three-week celebratory period in September, for which the restaurant is offering variations of its first menus from 1994. There are two big carrots on my plate. Not matched in size, not “curated” or smooth or perfect in shape. They’re scrubbed but not peeled, with the leaves still attached and hanging over on to the paper tablecloth. There’s a perfect just-hard boiled egg and a pot of aioli that’s strong enough to strip the “Architects White” emulsion off the old bricks. Alain Passard once famously scandalised Paris by serving a single raw carrot at the three-star Arpége. This is emphatically not an Arpége starter, though you can be absolutely positive that the connection has not escaped the chefs. These carrots are vehicles for the aioli, in which the viridian olive oil just lightly colours the translucent gel of the emulsifying garlic.

When St John opened, there was much discussion of the offal on the menu (they still serve some cracking devilled kidneys) and there’s venison liver on today’s 1994 menu. I remember, on my first pilgrimage, being shown a salted liver, hung to dry in one of the old smokehouse chimneys. It was partly an expression of Henderson’s nose-to-tail eating philosophy. Tangentially it was terrific PR (though St John haven’t historically “done” PR), but most importantly, it was a challenge. Quiet, polite, but a challenge: “If you have a genuine love and curiosity about food like us, then we think you’ll like it as much as we do.” 

It’s a phenomenal trick. One that invites diners into the experience of eating in a way that every chef with pretensions would love to carry off, but almost never succeeds. The carrots and garlicky aioli have precisely the same effect, as the more famous bone marrow on toast. It is impossible not to be drawn in, drawn together by the experience of sharing food — and when it’s simpler, or sometimes more polarising, the effect is even stronger.

Part of the magic of St John lies in how fully Henderson seems to understand and live this. I was once commissioned to spend a day in the kitchen with him. We braised half a pig head. He had me shave it with a Bic razor, then we sank it in a bath of his renowned “trotter-gear” stock. One eye and an ear poked above the surface — “alligator-style”, he called it. It cooked for most of the day, then we sat down to eat it. “I think”, he said, “That this is the most romantic of dishes”. And he was precisely right. If someone can sit opposite you, look into your eyes and share in the joy of the half-head staring at them from the table, dig out the soft parts around the eye-sockets for you or giggle with you at the subtle crunch of the ear . . . you know you are joined for life.

Henderson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1997 and began a gentle transition out of the kitchen. When I saw that date, it pulled me up short. Not only has he survived an incredible time, but that means he was already leaving his kitchen at St John before the whole British renaissance began. Before Gordon Ramsay appeared on our televisions or Jamie Oliver became a publishing phenomenon. And yet his global influence persists.

“I think Fergus is the ‘Sublime Being’,” says Gulliver. “Everyone knows I’m the one that’s spiky about fish and vineyards. People or politics. But when Fergus says something, people all lean into him. Because he’s the Great Fergus.” 

“In a brigade kitchen,” Gulliver continues, “He can explain with his hands. There was one time we were in Australia. They just wanted to get the bread right to do the bone marrow. We found the bread and Fergus was happy, but he was trying to explain the amount of crust on it . . . the sear. Fergus just went [he makes a nod, a gesture and a gentle hum] and they got it.”

Gulliver calls them “The Alumni”. The intensely loyal cadre who’ve been through the kitchen and now are spread all over the world. It’s a tenet that you won’t know the name of the head chef in any St John kitchen while you’re eating there, but nobody seems to mind. (Head chef in the Smithfield kitchen is Jonathan Whittle, a calm, brilliant and inspiring Newfoundlander. There are some privileges to my job). The training they receive is priceless and, more, they are welcomed into a family. Gulliver says more than 400 people from around the world, chefs and front of house, are expected to attend the alumni anniversary party, “just to say thank you”. I ask if I can get a copy of the invitations list but he shifts the conversation. My privileges only stretch so far.

I catch sight of Henderson across the room, sitting with his wife Margot and a couple of guests, under the restaurant’s trademark row of white shaker pegs. He’s calmly operating on the brill. It’s an intricate task, traditionally performed tableside by a waiter. Henderson has always been an evangelist for the power of sharing food, and nothing could be more symbolic than this ritual of preparation and service. He looks utterly happy.

People will tell you that St John is rigorously British cooking, that it was the epicentre of “Modern British” cuisine — whatever that might be. But my main course — hare saddle with braised red cabbage, another of the early recipes — shows how, from the very beginning, St John has been massively French. Sure, the ingredients are British and some recipes hark back to gentlemen’s clubs or earlier. But everything bears that touch of Gallic inspiration that has been the backbone of British cooking for aeons. The loins are served on the bone, gamey and with assertive texture. The proudly British, shameless “gravy” is significant and robust enough to be considered a “jus” or a “sauce”.

A visit to St John should involve the Welsh rarebit, which we’d heard of before the restaurant, but they took the long forgotten idea of a savoury, the British ingredients, the comforting “snack” quality and reintroduced it to the dining room. The rarebit is a staggering indulgence built of the simplest and most sturdy of ingredients into something rich and rare. They have a signature technique for applying the Worcestershire sauce and Aficionados drop into the bar just for a fortifying rarebit and a glass of wine. Its revival was a uniquely Henderson flex. Though God knows what he’d make of the term.

In a break between courses, I meet an enlivened old chap in the gents, wearing a suit that looks like it cost more than I make in a year. He asks if I’m one of the old guard, and I suppose I am. St John has been there for me and part of my life since before they called us “foodies”. Aside from the local business crowd, today’s customers are a fine mix of Bohemians of a certain age, obvious hipsters for whom it remains stubbornly relevant, and the ever-present trickle of Americans and other tourists following the Bourdain path. Gulliver, a restaurateur to his very bones, loves them all. “You see some regulars just once a year. And some we still haven’t met yet,” he says.

As a writer and food geek, I’ve always felt that St John spoke to me more than any other restaurant. For many of us, a relationship with St John predates the great restaurant craze and social media, and being “included” in it felt like an earned privilege and a badge of belonging. Something bigger, even than the astounding menu which still, as always, speaks for itself.

After Eccles cake and Lancashire cheese, I ask for the madeleines, which are made fresh to order and have always been on the menu. Something for the already late end of lunch, to stretch things into the early evening.

The day after my meal, someone shares on Instagram a terrific snap of “Fergus and Trevor”, a benign Gilbert and George of hospitality, sharing lunch at the restaurant. There is the usual air of bibulous bonhomerie, the idiosyncratic clothes and the buzz of the dining room behind. But also, on top of the paper tablecloth, they are holding hands.

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