My creativity was spurred on by having a boring childhood. I grew up on the west coast of Scotland, in the middle of nowhere, and there wasn’t a lot to do apart from put two jumpers on a hill and pretend you’re playing football. Being bored made me more inquisitive. Even though I had no massive fascination with food as a kid, I started playing around with it out of boredom. Baking came first. The idea that you could mix all those ingredients together, put it in the oven and watch it rise to become a delicious cake seemed amazing to me.
The naivety you have as a kid diminishes as you get older and more cynical, but I try to hold onto that naivety as a source of creativity. The big thing is to stop caring about what people think. We’re too polite in Britain, too worried about fitting in, and that stops us from being more creative. You shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions, even if they might sound silly. I don’t give a damn. I’m always asking, “What’s this, what’s that?”
Once you start asking questions, it’s hard to stop. The next part is getting everybody else involved. That’s basically my role at Gordon Ramsay Group [Petrie was hired to develop talent and creativity across its UK restaurants]. I’ve jumped from one restaurant to 14 and there are a lot more people to manage, but all you need is one person to champion your way of thinking in each restaurant. So either I bring somebody into the business who I’ve worked with before and thinks the same way as me, or I get the chefs themselves to start asking questions.
Every two weeks we have a head-chef meeting. We all sit around a table and discuss what’s new in each restaurant – a new ingredient, a new dish on the menu. All ears prick up when someone says, “I started doing this new chicken dish and we’re brining the chicken.” That gets everyone thinking. It’s not like I’m trying to take over; instead, I’m getting people to champion their own ideas.
I’m constantly telling the chefs they have to make mistakes. We have a chicken paillard dish on the menu right now at Heddon Street Kitchen. It’s a simple dish – chicken, chorizo and garlic mayo – but it’s probably been through 20 versions. Each time, the guys say, “I can’t believe we’re having to do this again.” I tell them we’re doing it to perfect it. Even if you end up going back to the original version, the difference is that now you’ve properly looked at every ingredient and what part it’s playing in the dish.
One dish I created at the Fat Duck, a black forest gateau, took six months of development and a further year and a half to get it on the menu. It was only about the size of a matchbox, but it was so complicated, with 18 different elements. I looked at every black forest gateau recipe I could find. I was in a room with no windows, covered in recipes floor to ceiling. It was like torture: my whole life was a black forest gateau. But – and this is what I’m trying to teach people – you can’t just sit down and come up with an idea, it doesn’t happen. The guys I’m working with always hit the point where they’re like, no, I don’t want to do this again. I have to tell them, it’s OK, this is what’s meant to happen. This is how creativity works. You’ve got to have self-control, you’ve got to persevere.
You have to be observant, too, and pick up on details that other people might not notice. Some of my best days out with my wife involve going around the shops. I get inspired by everything: I’ll see a precision drill in a DIY shop and think, I could use that to drill tiny holes in a crispy bun.
Every question is worth asking – the more the merrier. But it’s how you get an answer to that question that counts. You’ve got to take your head out of the clouds, so to speak, and make the idea edible. Actually, I created a dish that involves putting your head in the clouds. For an event, I got a massive vase and pumped it full of dry ice using a device (which I helped develop) called the Cloud Pour. The dry ice was scented with pear, violet, rosemary and lemon, to match the flavours in a dessert. You could suck the cloud out with a straw or you could grab hold of the vase and literally stick your head in the clouds. How cool is that?
