Jeremy Lee MBE (JL) is the legendary chef proprietor of Quo Vadis in Soho, cookbook author and Great British Menu judge. In this interview he talks to Amanda David (AD) about his Scottish upbringing, his influences, his love of British produce, Soho, the genesis of the smoked eel sandwich, his writing and much more.
AD: Jeremy, you grew up in a family that was very interested in food. Can you tell me a little more about that?
JL: Yes, every weekend we would get The Times and The Observer and my mum used to pull out all the supplements; she had incredible files full of Claudia Roden and Jane Grigson and Arabella Boxer. It was the sixties, they were a young couple with inquisitive minds, and very creative: he was an artist, she was very dextrous and good at making things.
We grew up with very few rules. Without ever making a performance out of it, mum always had Elizabeth David books lying around; she read them and cooked from them. We grew up on really good cooking from both her and my grandmother and so were just used to great food. What’s really interesting about back then is that there were no supermarkets, which is hard to believe now; they just didn’t exist. There was a little Spar corner shop but that was about it. We all thought courgettes were impossibly glamorous!
AD: So did you always want to cook?
JL: Well, we went to absolutely the wrong school, which was very posh and deeply academic, and we didn’t fit in at all, me or my siblings. We were made to feel very thick and stupid because we liked painting, drawing, cooking and doing things with our hands; this was the dark ages when nobody stopped to think that if you were not excelling then there might be a problem that you could talk about.
I thought I was headed to art college like my grandfather, my dad and my brothers. I remember we came back from a big family camping holiday abroad, my results envelope was waiting for me, and miraculously I had the grades I needed. I hadn’t even filled out any of the forms to apply to art college so I got an interim place at commercial college thinking I could start to build a portfolio and apply the following year. To earn some pocket money I worked in this lovely little local hotel which did really good food; plain, simple Scots fare but using really good produce. Without consciously realising it, I’ve always gravitated to kitchens where the produce was exceptional.
AD: Were you cooking at home as well, at this point?
JL: The kitchen was my mother’s domain and her sanctuary, but we were allowed to pootle about in it. I baked, cooked Elizabeth David recipes and when Madhur Jaffrey came out I started to make curries, which was exciting. Then at work it was completely classical, just Escoffier. It was actually quite magical as I wove the two together without any real planning; I didn’t know enough at the time to impose any structure, cooking was just built into my DNA. It’s only looking back that I think, ‘Wow, that was incredible’.
I put some sourdough on the grill and thought oh, smoked eel adores horseradish, so I grabbed some of that, and then some mustard. I tasted it and thought, ‘God, that’s good!’. Back then it was just a huge flat sandwich, not at all the elegant Greek temple that it is today; it morphed over the years and it’s just stuck
AD: What was it like working in a kitchen, having grown up with so much freedom?
JL: Well I actually started as a waiter but I was so bad at it – I just gossiped with everyone and dropped things, it was terrible – and instead of sacking me they put me in the kitchen, which tells you all you need to know about a chef’s place in the great firmament back then. Something just clicked, to this day I have no idea what it was; luckily my parents were completely unfazed that their middle-class, privately educated son wanted to work in a kitchen. In those days there was the idea that it was all ne’er-do-wells and no-hopers going into kitchens, which was absolute bloody nonsense, but as a career it had a really bad press.
It was proper Scots hotel training but luckily it wasn’t a brutal kitchen or one where it was all ‘oui chef’; we all had names and used them, it was quite civilised. They were strict when I mucked up that’s for sure, I think teenagers need that, but there was no pan-hurling. I was quite bookish and nerdy so it strangely suited me, this almost monkish lifestyle. I ended up serving an apprenticeship there for several years. Then the head chef put me in contact with someone he knew at Boodles, a gentleman’s club in St James’s, and before you could bat an eyelid I was on a train to London.
AD: Was that a culture shock?
JL: Well I’d been to London numerous times before as I had great friends down here, but rocking up and moving straight in to St James’s Street was definitely a piece of luck. We were feeding the entire Who’s Who of London; in fact, the only two people not allowed in were the most powerful people in the country at the time, Margaret Thatcher and the Queen, as it was men only.
Again, we had incredible produce: Covent Garden was still flying high, we had meat delivered from all the Mayfair butchers and this vast basement kitchen to service all the dining rooms. The menu was very plain, mostly comfort food; impeccable lamb, game, offal, fish pie, sausage and mash, that kind of thing. I didn’t stay very long at Boodles; it was all beautifully done but not exciting for a young chef, hungry to learn.
One of the things that is so interesting about my journey is that I arrived just as things were about to erupt in the restaurant industry in the capital. Nouvelle cuisine had just crashed onto our shores and another thing that was burgeoning back then was delis. It was the days of the Silver Palate in New York and I was rather taken up by this so I joined this company called Duff & Trotter, where I met Matthew Fort and other amazing pillars of the establishment. We used to cook dinner for these grandees and one evening I rocked up at this amazing house in Holland Park and was taken down this huge hallway to the kitchen, which had the most basic cooker you could imagine.
I have no idea how I managed it, the whole evening was a blur. Anyway, the next morning I was summoned upstairs by the bosses; I was all ready to apologise for whatever I’d done wrong but they informed me I had been given a thousand-pound tip, which was an absolute fortune back then, and they said they’d like to take me to dinner wherever I wanted. Bibendum had just opened, and Terence Conran had unveiled his newly-restored Michelin building, which just shone.
It was magnificent, with this amazing menu of French onion soup, lobster mayonnaise, and snails, just an incredible dinner; I applied for a job almost there and then on the spot, I think.
AD: And how did your bosses take the news?
JL: They were very sweet about it, thankfully, and we’re still great chums. I began to work with Simon Hopkinson and that’s when all the stars aligned.
AD: The kitchen at Bibendum, at that moment, was almost like the Young British Artists of cooking; an extraordinary group of talented chefs, in the same place, at the same time, all destined for great things.
JL: We were a bunch of bright-eyed kids, just starting out; I mean, you still had to have serious kitchen experience to get a job there, but it was a new generation of kitchen. It wasn’t cheffy in the least. We all became great chums, and we still are.
AD: So, it was led by Simon Hopkinson?
JL: Yes, and there was Henry Harris and his brother Matthew, Lucy Crabb, then there was Matthew Jones who set up Bread Ahead bakery, Phil Howard, Bruce Poole, Ian Bates – some of them might even have been my commis for a short while! We did have job titles, but we really were a team that just cooked together.
I think that was very interesting as well; that although there has to be a backbone and a structure to a kitchen, really your great strength is working together as a team.
Then I left Bibendum to go and cook with Alastair [Little]. I may have had a couple of martinis for Dutch courage before I asked him; I couldn’t believe he said yes. It was there I fell in love with using smoked eel, actually; back then you couldn’t give them away, they were cheap as chips and nobody was interested. Then a friend opened this tiny little restaurant in Islington called Euphorium, so I left to cook there; it was hard, I’ve never been good at saying goodbye.
AD: You do seem to stay in jobs for an unusually long time.
JL: I’m a sticker! Then Terence [Conran] offered me The Blueprint [Café]. I loved it there; it had this amazing location, right on the river, overlooking Tower Bridge and the City with these lovely huge East End skies. Canary Wharf was being built, and Britannia used to sail out every summer. It was the only dining room that Terence designed absolutely by himself. It was a doozy of a room, with this enormous glass wall and amazing light; it was so special.
AD: I remember that, it was gorgeous.
JL: One of the really interesting things about being in The Blueprint down in SE1 was that it was literally a three-minute walk from Tower Bridge but at that time it might as well have been in Timbuktu, everyone thought it was too far away.
Then, as the whole restaurant scene erupted, there was this trickle effect – well actually more of a tsunami – down to the producers, which prompted this whole tribe of amazing folk: Monika Linton starting Brindisa, Patricia Michelson with La Fromagerie, George Bennell at the Fresh Olive Company. Borough Market was saved and turned into a farmer’s market and we suddenly had all of the best producers in the country right in our back yard; the produce we had access to was amazing. There was Neal’s Yard Dairy, Monmouth Coffee, Mr Tony Booth with the most incredible vegetables, William Black the fishman, Natoora was burgeoning, all on our doorstep. It was never cheap – although nothing like what it costs now, which is just shocking.
The iconic smoked eel sandwich at Quo Vadis
Jeremy Lee in the kitchen at Quo Vadis (photo by Tim Atkins)
A cured trout salad at Quo Vadis
AD: Did that play into your hands, with your background? One of the things that strikes me about your cooking style is you use herbs very generously, more like a Mediterranean cook than a British one.
JL: Well thank you, that’s a great compliment! We grow every herb here, abundantly; walk through the English countryside in summertime and it’s unbelievable.
AD: So why do you think that the British don’t use them in the same way?
JL: I don’t know, it’s steeped in some weird fear of witchcraft and strange pagan rituals, or being poisoned; it’s bonkers. It’s astonishing that we might have a sprig of mint with Jersey Royals, and that’s about it.
Again, I think I just lucked out with my early influences; going out gathering herbs with my mother, reading Claudia Roden and Elizabeth David. Reading her now, I do wonder if she would be quite so damning of the Brits now as she was then, but we needed that shot across the bows to wake up and see the amazing produce we had.
AD: I feel as well that, as Brits, we have somehow accepted this myth that we don’t have a food culture.
JL: Yes, and I don’t know where that came from. I suppose we were so browbeaten by centuries of industrial revolution, war and rationing that we got used to everything coming out of a plastic tub. We were buying dried sage, looking like something you’d get out of a comb, while we had these huge bushes of beautiful green leaves on our doorstep. It was the era of the spice rack.
AD: How did this influx of new suppliers influence your cooking?
JL: It began to inform the menu writing, and it was also when our interest in Spanish cooking came to the fore. The mentality about eating out at the time was still that people wouldn’t order anything they thought could make at home. The other thing that came in back then was all the rare breeds, and the resurrection of mutton, hogget and kid, meats that had vanished. Then there was Fergus and his brilliant coup with nose-to-tail eating, bringing offal back to the table. St John opening up, with these wonderful salads and game dishes, was pivotal for our generation of chefs because it blew down what remained of the green baize door. The Michelin Guide, the Good Food Guide, just had to accept that this was here to stay, it’s significant and it’s massive.
AD: You also cook very seasonally. It is hard to believe but that wasn’t at all a given for restaurants at that time; a lot just didn’t change their menus at all.
JL: No – Michelin restaurants were famously predictable, apart from maybe some asparagus in June, that was about as giddy as it got. And if you look at titles of cookbooks, the word ‘season’ or ‘seasonal’ barely exists in the cooking pantheon.
AD: And now we have places like Bocca di Lupo changing their menu twice a day.
JL: When I was working with Alastair Little we had a daily changing menu, and Bibendum at lunch. You just had to have a kitchen so in tune with it, and at Bibendum we were somehow all on the same wavelength, so it worked. Then with Alastair Little, just his sheer force of personality drove it; it was all about him and his dishes, you didn’t have to come up with anything, you just chose which ones you wanted to cook. Whereas at The Blueprint we experimented loads, kept the dishes that worked and ditched the ones that didn’t. It was interesting, because a lot of cooks didn’t like it; they wanted to be taught by you, but we were saying no, grow your mind and your palate. We tried it at Quo Vadis but we were too big; Sam suggested we set the menu to change monthly and that changed everything here.
AD: That seems a good balance; and of course, we get to enjoy the gorgeous illustrations from John Broadley every month, which are just delightful and signature Quo Vadis now.
JL: I know, we so lucked out; there hasn’t been a collaboration like that since the days of Bawden and Fortnum & Mason, or David Hockney and Langan’s – actually Neal Street, that was Hockney as well – but the great tradition of illustrating menus had almost completely died out.
AD: From your side, do you have a free hand in creating the menu?
JL: Amazingly, all the way through my career, I’ve never had anyone looking over my shoulder and tutting at me. Terence was brilliant at that; he was a hugely successful businessman and could be ruthless I’m sure, but with the creatives he liked he was always so encouraging and really pushed you to express yourself. He was such a gentle and genial man; his attitude was that if you trip and fall, just pick yourself up and get on with it. I miss him terribly.
AD: Do you think that was because, being creative himself, he understood the process?
JD: Hugely. The early Conran restaurant realm was incredible. The Design Museum was round the corner from Terence’s office so we used to lunch together a lot and we became great chums. Also this incredible parade of people came to eat, we fed every architect and designer under the sun at some point. They all thought they were going for some corporate thing and were always very complimentary about the food, the setting and the light. I always said that if I ever left Blueprint I would end up in some basement in Soho – and hello, guess what? As fate would have it, I fell into the arms of Eddie and Sam, and here we are.
When you go to somewhere you love you always get that sense that every single detail has been meticulously considered to make sure everything is just so. You almost have a sixth sense when you walk in, that you already know it’s going to be great.
AD: Wasn’t Quo Vadis (QV) closed before you came on board?
JL: Yes, when Eddie and Sam bought it I think they had to gut it; the investment was colossal and a lot of it was rewiring and things like that. It’s actually four London townhouses knocked higgledy-piggledy together, and all of them listed buildings.
AD: It’s the most gorgeous building though, I love it here.
JL: It’s an absolute dream. Downstairs, it was like running the Queen Mary, the dining room was enormous. It was much bigger than anything I’d ever done, and it took me a while to get used to how it worked. Then we adopted Barrafina and the room suddenly went from too big to too small; then James came along with this brilliant plan for the downstairs, which is what we have now, and it not only fitted beautifully but miraculously feels like it’s been here forever.
AD: Has it always had a members’ club?
JL: Yes, it’s built into its licence, funnily enough. When you have this acreage of space, what do you do with it? What’s great about the size of Quo Vadis is that it doesn’t even remotely compete with the Groucho or Soho House which are devotedly clubs. It’s a little oasis in Soho where you can sit and chat, or work, or have lunch, use the private rooms or the bar, and actually it’s cheap as chips – it works out to about a pound a day.
It’s incredibly satisfying to have finally figured out how the building works. In one respect Covid was a huge aspect of that, as it was too big to do anything with other than shutter it up. The whole of Soho went to sleep; I remember when I first came back and it was completely empty, like a dystopian film set. It was bizarre, and then the return was so slow and gradual. We were doing tons of stuff for the NHS; I turned my flat into a field kitchen and was cooking up a storm with mountains of produce that needed to be used before its sell-by date. The ridiculousness of everyone cramming into the supermarkets; you could just phone Brindisa and fill your boots, it was unbelievable. I also started drawing again, so that was quite fun.
AD: Do you think that lockdown made people appreciate the full experience of restaurants a bit more?
JL: Yes absolutely; the room, the service, it’s key to the whole thing. When you go to somewhere you love you always get that sense that every single detail has been meticulously considered to make sure everything is just so. You almost have a sixth sense when you walk in, that you already know it’s going to be great.
AD: And your book, Cooking, launched in September 2022?
JL: Yes, that went off like a rocket, it was all very exciting. But there we were, the night we were going to launch the book, and word came that the BBC was all shrouded in black and the Queen had passed away. We had this awful afternoon wondering what to do, what the protocol was and whether we should cancel but in the end we decided to go ahead and the team handled it immaculately. Then after that the book just took off, it was extraordinary; I did not see that coming.
AD: How did you decide on the structure? I love that there are entire sections devoted to slightly niche ingredients like blood oranges or walnuts.
JL: Full credit goes to Louise Haines, my publisher at 4th Estate. I’d written newspaper columns and for lots of publications, but a book was very different. She suggested the A-Z format, just to get me started writing I think. I’d always said that if I did write a book it would be as arbitrary as Good Things by Jane Grigson; in fact I wanted to exhume her and beg for the rights, it’s the best title of a book ever. I stupidly thought I could do it whilst running Quo Vadis; there were moments that it was almost feasible, when the muse would land, and huge swathes of subconscious detail came out – it was surprisingly cathartic at times – but it took years, endless prodding and stellar work from my fabulous editor Carolyn Hart to get it finished.
AD: Is it difficult, as a chef, to write for a home cook?
JL: It is, in a restaurant. At first I was trying to test recipes at Quo Vadis but what was really interesting is that it just didn’t work in a restaurant kitchen. You can use the same produce; that used to be a problem, home cooks being unable to source certain ingredients, but since Covid it’s all available online, it’s amazing. That was hugely useful and really informed the recipes.
I could write at work, and certainly a lot was written burning the midnight oil up in the eaves, a very romantic writing spot under a crescent moon through a little window, but the cooking had to be done at home. In a restaurant you not only have access to all the dry stores and ingredients like fresh stock but, more than anything else, all the pots and pans are huge; it just doesn’t translate. I prepped and cooked everything at home in my little scullery with four burners and an electric stove – that was it.
AD: I love the bit on the jobs section of Bouchon Racine’s website where they say they cook the traditional, old-fashioned way with pots, pans and a sharp knife and that they are ‘not a home for tweezer-wielding water-bath warriors’. How much does that resonate with you?
JL: Almost entirely. What was it that Miss Jean Brodie said; ‘For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like’. I think there are two schools, and you’re either in one or the other; I’m definitely in Henry’s camp, for sure.
AD: I love the QV and Friends dinners that you have here, in collaboration with other chefs, which are open to non-members. How did they start?
JL: Well we’d always thrown these dinners to celebrate grouse season, truffles or Burns Night and so on. They were ad hoc and primarily for the members; generally corks flew, the bottles went down like skittles (and so did we), they were just enormously good fun. Then the great Sophie Orbaum came to work with us and suggested we made it a bit more structured and have a non-members version as they were so popular. We know lots of folk in the business so we started inviting them to cook with us and amazingly they all said yes.
It’s remarkable that Soho still exists and maintains a thriving community of smallholders and shopkeepers… Tailors still thrive, shoemakers sit happily alongside coffee shops; restaurants abound, with a wildly diverse new generation sat side by side with venerable names from an ancient regime
AD: Of course, we can’t talk about food at Quo Vadis without mentioning your smoked eel sandwich. How did that come about – I heard it was basically the world’s best fridge forage?
JL: Literally it was just that! One day I came in to the Blueprint with a particularly dented head from a rather enthusiastic time the night before and they were chopping up the smoked eel for this lovely potato pancake Alastair dish we used to do, with poached egg and bacon. It’s hard to believe now, but in those days the only sourdough you could buy was from Poilâne, which had to be bought from Paris. It was de rigueur, the toast that would be served with every terrine and rillettes in every restaurant, so we always had it on the cold starter section. We also always had smoked fish and pickles, and there was always horseradish around to go with onglet, so all of the different parts were there.
Anyway, there I was with this hangover, and I put some sourdough on the grill and thought oh, smoked eel adores horseradish, so I grabbed some of that, and then some mustard. I tasted it and thought, ‘God, that’s good!’. Back then it was just a huge flat sandwich, not at all the elegant Greek temple that it is today; it morphed over the years and it’s just stuck.
AD: It’s amazing how some dishes seem to take on a life of their own.
JL: It was very funny; it became our thing like the burger was at Joe Allen. When I first came to QV we were menu planning and I said why don’t we just pop the smoked eel on for now, we can revisit it later. It’s been on the menu from our first service. I think the only time we took it off was when it got blasted by some sustainability folk. We explained that we were buying it from the last company in the country that was supplying it, and that it was a great tradition that harked back centuries.
AD: It is so steeped in London history isn’t it, as a product and ingredient?
JL: There’s a great eel lore that goes right throughout Europe and British eel was central to that. It goes back to the Romans and beyond, it’s truly exceptional and so special. So we explained all that and said it was a story worth talking about and that needed to be kept alive, and if this goes, that’s it. We tried plucking at every heartstring but they wouldn’t listen. I spoke to Sam Hart and he said, ‘Let’s just take it off and let the dust settle a bit’.
Then, hilariously, Adrian Gill came in with a great table of grandees and said, ‘Where’s the smoked eel sandwich?’. That Sunday his column was all about us and he said that if we didn’t put the smoked eel sandwich back on the menu, he was going to close our restaurant. So we had no alternative, he put a gun to our head. Bravo Adrian; he was brilliant to us here, great fun and much missed.
AD: He’s one of my all-time favourite food writers. The fact that he dictated his copy with barely any editing as he was dyslexic is so humbling.
JL: I know, he had to phone his copy in, it was extraordinary. When I was coming up through the ranks it was the days of the great broadsheets, all of which have now been downsized: you had Faye at The Standard, Matthew at The Guardian, Emily at The Independent, Jonathan at The Times, Adrian at The Sunday Times – what a jaw-dropping line-up. They were all stellar; that really was a magnificent golden time.
AD: I think another classic dish of yours is the meringue tumble; it’s gorgeous, so gloriously celebratory.
JL: You’re so kind. Again, we have this entire top floor of private dining rooms and we needed a humdinger of a pudding that would work on these enormous tables; if you had a cake with some candles, it just wouldn’t have any impact. So we baked trays of these beautiful big, very delicately-shelled, soft mallow-centred things from my mother’s recipe, which I was taught at an early age. Amazingly they had enough structure to hold, sandwiched with the most unholy amount of cream; it went down a storm and it’s just stuck.
AD: How has Soho, as a neighbourhood, changed in your time at QV?
JL: Soho has a remarkable quality in its 400-year history of being a hunting ground of bending like a reed in the wind, as time marches on and change electrifies the air. It’s remarkable that Soho still exists and maintains a thriving community of smallholders and shopkeepers that have been purveyors of practically anything one can think of over many years. Tailors still thrive, shoemakers sit happily alongside coffee shops; restaurants abound, with a wildly diverse new generation sat side by side with venerable names from an ancient regime.
Soho seems to thrive on change and though Camisa sadly closed its doors after decades, Maison Bertaux thrives, as does the Vintage House, Gerry’s and Lina Stores, to name but a few.
AD: You’ve had a couple of appearances on TV, including of course The Great British Menu (GBM). Is there anything else in the pipeline? I can see you as a Scottish Stanley Tucci for British food.
JL: There were mutterings. I was speaking to the guys who produced Sophie Grigson’s utterly charming series, but I’ve had real problems with my leg and I had surgery scheduled, so it didn’t go anywhere. Now I’ve had the surgery and I’m back on the market!
AD: Let’s put that out there and see who bites!
JL: Exactly! I wasn’t mad about being a judge on GBM, because even if the food isn’t to your taste, I think folk work so hard, and judging felt weird. But celebrating great food, yum, gorgeous. I think that’s a really good thing, I’d love to do that. Let’s see!
Cover photo by Alexander Baxter.
Other photos by Amanda David.
December 2024
