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By Root 675 0

love food, who know what’s good about wiping grease off their chins, can congregate without fear, safe from the dark clouds of processed food gathering over Europe. A meal at St. John is only one of the great dining experiences one can have in England. I’m not going to bother to give you an overview – reciting the names of all the sharp, ambitious, well-trained chefs who have, in recent years, completely reversed the widely held perception that English food was crap. Suffice it to say that most of these guys could kick their French counterparts’ asses around the block. An Englishman in the kitchen – be it in New York, Melbourne, or anywhere else – is a promise of good things to come. A meal at St. John is not just one of the great eating experiences on the planet – it’s a call to the barricades.

Because it will not end with the marrow (which already has to be imported from Holland). The enemy wants your cheese. They want you never again to risk the possibility of pleasure with a reeking, unpasteurized Stilton, an artisanal wine, an oyster on the half shell. They have designs on stock. Stock! (Bones, you know – can’t have that.) The backbone of everything good! They want your sausage. And your balls, too. In short, they want you to feel that same level of discomfort approaching a plate of food that so many used to feel about sex.

Do I overstate the case? Go to Wisconsin. Spend an hour in an airport or a food court in the Midwest; watch the pale, doughy masses of pasty-faced, Pringle-fattened, morbidly obese teenagers. Then tell me I’m worried about nothing. These are the end products of the Masterminds of Safety and Ethics, bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that isn’t really oil, overcooked gray disks of what might once upon a time have been meat, a steady diet of Ho-Hos and muffins, butterless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless light beer. A docile, uncomprehending herd, led slowly to a dumb, lingering, and joyless slaughter.

I’ve never eaten Marco Pierre White’s food, though I’ve lingered longingly over his cookbooks. He, I believe, no longer cooks personally at his restaurants – and is no longer the haunted-looking bad boy of the British culinary scene. Nowadays, he looks more like a well-fed Venetian merchant prince. But back in the old days, he was a hugely important figure in the UK culinary firmament and a crucial trunk in the genealogy of next-generation chefs. He remains a hero to me for two reasons. First, his food was important – defiantly retro (with his pig trotters, for instance), unapologetically French (he took them on at their own game – and won). His food was (and is) creative, beautiful to look at, and, I am reliably informed, delicious in every way. Second, he threw customers he didn’t like out of his dining rooms – a move that caused shudders of pleasure among chefs around the world. And third – and most important to me – his was the first cookbook where the chef looked like the chefs I knew – gaunt, driven, unkempt. That groundbreaking photograph of Marco smoking a cigarette in White Heat made so many of us everywhere say, ‘I am not alone! There are others like me!’ (I’m not saying, by the way, that I can cook anywhere near as well as Marco Pierre White. Just that I smoke in my kitchen, too.)

Finally, there’s England’s greatest chef, or England’s biggest bully, depending on which paper you’re reading at the time – the fearsome and prodigiously talented Gordon Ramsay. I’d been hearing about this guy for years. Ex-footballer. Formerly with Robuchon, Ducasse, Guy Savoy, Marco Pierre White. A legendary wordsmith in the kitchen – famed for excoriating his crew, ejecting food critics, speaking his mind bluntly and undiplomatically. A while back, I was told about the cinéma vérité Boiling Point series, in which the beleaguered Ramsay was said to behave monstrously to his staff. Intrigued, I managed to track down a copy of the videotape series. To my mind, Ramsay was sympathetic from beginning to end. I rooted for him as he sweated out the beginning of a service period