I was born and grew up in South Africa until I was eight. I was a good swimmer. Like most people in South Africa I could reach the end of a length. Then as a teen at boarding school in the UK, I swam and ran and played fives, but I certainly wasn’t a sports nut. The concepts of “health” and “wellbeing” didn’t cross my mind and wouldn’t until I was 30 years old.
At university I spent more time partying than doing anything particularly constructive. I studied microbiology and my friends were all anthropologists and archaeologists who were burning the candle at both ends – which I did too, but I struggled more with work. Yet I discovered the joy of cooking at university. I travelled afterwards for a year then came back, hit the top restaurants with begging letters and started rapidly, aged 22, on the journey of cooking professionally. It took over my life. At 24 I opened The Square – I wasn’t qualified and had no clear strategy – and for the next 15 years I worked full-tilt, six days a week from 7am to 11pm, or midnight, on four hours sleep per night. I’d sleep harder on my day off but eat hard and party hard, too.
When I think back to being a teen and a young man, when the conveyor belt of life was offering substances I hadn’t seen before, I wonder why I was one of those people who said yes to everything and jumped straight in, while others said no. My crash and burn was going to happen but I think the job and workload made it happen quicker. The restaurant became very successful and everything was going fantastically, on one level, but it was absolutely cripplingly exhausting, and I’d found cocaine did a phenomenal job of giving me energy and the belief that I could conquer the day’s work. I was the owner of a restaurant which took lots of cash and I had access to funds I certainly wouldn’t have had as an employee. The reality over the three years is that, very quickly, it became habitual and pretty quickly the consequences began to outweigh the benefits. It became a complicated hell-hole. When you become obsessed with cocaine, you don’t realise when the line’s been crossed – that you’ve gone from young and invincible to no longer being in the driving seat. You’re waking up thinking, “How? When? Where?” I became one of those guys who’d smoke crack cocaine first thing in the morning to get me up.
Ridiculous scenarios included walking out of the kitchen, saying, “I’ll be back in five minutes”, and not returning until the following day. A kitchen doesn’t collapse when the chef disappears but it’s hardly ideal. I wasn’t off doing anything particularly wild and exciting, but I was behaving inconsistently and deceitfully. And I can’t say towards the end of my use of drugs that they were serving my cooking well. It’s possible to go through the motions of cooking – burning a piece of meat, adding onions, caramelising, making stocks, there’s lots you can do, but ultimately fine judgment and taste is required, too. And if you’re preoccupied with smoking a drug down in the car park that effectively suppresses your appetite, your enthusiasm for cooking wanes and your ability to taste is compromised. I could still produce a great dish but that’s not the same as a great, great dish cooked with real precision and love.
I remember my business partner at the Square, Nigel [Platts-Martin], stopping me in the corridor one day, holding a mirror up to me and asking, “What the fuck’s going on?” I reached rock bottom, which is the point where the fear of change is less painful than the fear of continuing with what you’re doing. For me, it was a relatively uncomplicated sense of utter spiritual bankruptcy and very real pain as a result of fucking up both a young marriage – she left, with our child – and an apparently extremely successful career. Plus the realisation that continuing to use drugs would involve lies so cripplingly complex and toxic that it could finish me off.
I went into treatment – and the rest is history, really. You get told very clearly what the required changes are to remain clean and sober, and you start the journey, which is not easy but the benefits are so quick to come that they provide the fuel to go forward – and, once back in the kitchen, the ability to form, to lead, to cook was transformed. Initially, as soon as I put down the drugs, the first thing I remember doing is running and running. I used to break out of the treatment centre in Marylebone and run every day like a lunatic along Regent’s Canal. And it’s now been 20 years since I crashed and burned. Twenty years in which I’ve been conscious of maintaining my health, fitness and balance in life. Looking back – now I’m 50 and facing the ageing battle – I regret not being more focused on fitness when I was in my physical prime. I’ve done 25 marathons and 25 triathlons since, but it would have been better if I’d begun at 20. I don’t enjoy marathons and triathlons while I’m running them – they’re miserable and disgusting – but I love finishing and another being on the horizon and training for it.
My daily routine nowadays is much different, although I still sleep quite badly – I don’t know why. I wake up early and get out of bed and write menus, pay bills, plan projects, plan holidays. I’m most effective in the morning, when it’s peaceful and quiet. But I realise – and feel – that I need more sleep than I get at night, so for many years now, when I can, I’ve been snoozing for 20 or 30 minutes in the afternoon in my office, my spiritual sanctuary. It’ll make me feel right as rain. The other important thing for a chef is having time that is yours when getting home after work. That’s the chef’s biggest psychological struggle – spending so much time working that there isn’t enough time to achieve all a human being needs to achieve to be happy and content.
Earning back my wife’s trust after I recovered was the greatest thing. She hadn’t wanted to divorce me but she felt she had no other option than to remove a child from someone who was not playing his part. Because you’ve got to be there for your wife and family and friends. Just as important is finding time on your own to do things you want to do, whether it be drinking mojitos, reading or playing football. That’s balance. Ever since my crash and burn I’ve worked hard, but not to the point where I do nothing but work. Work sort of became secondary in my life.
What I feel, after all these years in recovery, is that I’ve had a net gain. The price was paid but then there was a lot to learn about life and how to operate. I feel most humans just get on with life and don’t contemplate why they act in certain ways, don’t access their own behaviour – whether it’s being super-chilled or forcing their thoughts down other peoples’ throats. All of us are different and all do things that have negative consequences on the way we feel about life, ourselves and others. But when you, like I did, plug into a spiritual programme that requires you to look very carefully at yourself and sheds a light on flaws and reveals how to operate in a more effective way, it’s really beneficial.
Narcotics Anonymous and such associations are, in my opinion, the only solution to addiction – and free of charge, 24/7, lifelong and extraordinary. I know for a fact I can’t smoke another cigarette or drink another drop of alcohol or take another drug. But after going to meetings for 20 years I’ve finally been tailing off with them during the last year. I still go to church and I like the way that makes me feel – nourishing my soul, big time. But I went to an NA meeting last Sunday and thought, “I do feel differently now.” Meanwhile, the kids have been leaving home and I’m entering a new stage in my life. My wife and I will be able to say, “Let’s fly away for the weekend.”
When you’ve been doing the same job in the same kitchen for 25 years, many aspects of life can get pretty entrenched in a comfortably furnished rut, and I have to admit food is one of them. I don’t have a particularly good diet. There’s no pint of green juice in the morning, but I like vegetables and I like chips and I’m not neurotic about what I eat. I like sweet things and I’m greedy for them, so what can I say? That’s the one completely unchallenged area of my life – what I eat. There comes a point in life when you think, “You know, I’m in pretty good shape, so it’s fine.” You’ve got to have one vice, for god’s sake.
Call Narcotics Anonymous on 0300 999 1212 or visit ukna.org
