Offal advocacy

“There were 260 specialist tripe shops in Manchester in 1906: in 1994 there are none.” So opens the book Tripe: A Most Excellent Dish, encapsulating the decline of offal in Britain.

Also in 1994, on St John Street in east London, Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver opened St John restaurant, serving jellied tripe, pea and pig’s ear soup, grilled lamb heart and many other unfashionable squidgy ingredients. Where other chefs were obsessed with prime cuts, foie gras and lobster, St John felt like a “fuck you to all that was haute”, recalled the chef Tom Harris in 2015.

Slowly, it worked. “The unmistakable St John idiom has changed the way we eat,” declared the Good Food Guide in 2011.

That influence endures in adventurous restaurants serving plates of duck neck sausage (Mýse in Yorkshire), beef offal ragu (Manteca in London) or lamb belly and heart skewers (Erst in Manchester). The rationale Henderson outlined in his 1999 cookbook, Nose to Tail Eating, that it is “disingenuous” not to eat the whole animal and its “delights, textural and flavoursome, beyond the fillet”, is embedded in kitchen culture.

Things on toast

Beef mince, grouse offal, cod’s roe: St John was topping toast with interesting things long before hip wine bars. Henderson’s inspiration? Possibly the smørrebrød at one of his favourite restaurants, Tivolihallen in Copenhagen.

Pared-back dish design

St John was born into a world of balsamic drizzle and parsley garnishes; a Britain still suffering a bad case of nouvelle cuisine (large plates; tiny, geometric portions). It came of age amid that zany circus, molecular gastronomy. Henderson ignored all frippery, plating ingredients in the plain style of European peasant cooking or, sometimes, a 1950s British works canteen. Other chefs such as Alastair Little, Shaun Hill and Rowley Leigh also cooked “in a pared-back style” of “flavour and integrity rather than elaboration”, remembers Hill. But they were rare and St John was militant.

The bone-marrow pie funnel

Sometimes this technique is handed down directly. When working under the ex-St John chef Jonathan Jones at the Anchor & Hope, Mike Davies, now chef-owner at London’s Camberwell Arms, was taught to push a bone through the pastry. This serves as structural support and vent, and to add flavouring (the marrow melts into the pie).

Other times, the method is simply in the ether. Robin Gill wasn’t consciously channelling St John in his beef shin and bone marrow pie, which he crowned with swirling croissant dough, at Darby’s. He had “completely forgotten” visiting St John to study its pie game in 2006.

Could that bone-chimney idea have lain dormant until 2019? “Definitely,” he replies. “Chefs are putting on dishes linked to St John without realising. That’s how strong its DNA is in the restaurant scene.”

Provenance praxis

St John rarely shouts about its high-quality suppliers. Henderson once told the Good Food Guide he was proud of “in my small way, helping British produce”. But you must dig to discover that the restaurant uses vegetables from Linley Estate or Swaledale’s meat.

“Others talk, but didn’t give a shit,” says baker Dan Lepard, an early St John employee. “Do ingredients add value or the chef? Fergus absolutely believed ingredients did.”

The alumni effect

St John changes chefs. They often leave with a love of offal (Elliot Hashtroudi’s Camille in London). Or like Lee Tiernan, the chef at the boisterous FKABAM, the confidence to create restaurants that, like St John, are unapologetically different.

Looking after its people

Testaments abound to how St John runs enlightened kitchens: no shouting; sensible hours; appetising staff meals (“a true nurturer,” says Anna Hansen). As alumna Ravneet Gill told Observer Food Monthly in 2019, “We used to joke St John cares more about its staff than its customers.”

An artisan skill set

In 2024, every chef is pickling and fermenting. Thirty years ago, chefs “didn’t want to do butchery; they certainly didn’t want to make bread”, says Lepard. These were menial tasks. The glamour lay in cooking expensive proteins.

For Henderson, such skills – salting cod, curing beef – are essential. As the fine-dining foams of the 2000s dissolved, that belief spread. “We woke up,” says Lepard.

Soft power

American chefs are remarkably fond of Henderson, Anthony Bourdain was a champion, and Momofuku’s David Chang called him “a rock star”. Pre-Covid, after rapturously received guest events in the US, St John had even planned to open a restaurant in Los Angeles (no update, currently, though there was a pop-up in Brooklyn in July). In a country where you can find city guides such as A Bone Marrow Tour of Dallas (Dallas Observer, 2022), perhaps St John is pushing at an open door.

Modern Brit … ish?

Henderson is regularly hailed as the father of modern British cooking. But he was brought up on Marcella Hazan’s Italian recipes and often treats British ingredients with a Mediterranean simplicity. This approach, he explained to Esquire, “is not modern British, it is permanent British. It is not olde worlde … nor is it plucking senselessly from around the world.”

He was seeking fresh ways to use native ingredients that would endure, a challenge exciting restaurants such as Manchester’s Higher Ground still grapple with.

Pigging out

Pork was rare on top restaurant menus in the 1990s, says the Sportsman’s chef-owner Stephen Harris: “Look at old cookbooks, the meat was always lamb, duck, beef.” St John’s ingenious use of cheaper, fatty cuts such as pork belly helped overcome that prejudice.

Boosting rare breeds

In 2002, sourcing rare breed pork was novel enough for the foodies of online forum eGullet to compare notes on eating old spot or middlewhite at St John.

Normalising bone marrow

Inspired by greedy bone-sucking in the 1970s film La Grande Bouffe, St John’s signature roast bone marrow and parsley salad blazed a trail. In 2013, Waitrose started selling its own bone marrow. This summer, it is selling bone-marrow-enriched burgers.

Cookbook as philosophical treatise

Nose to Tail Eating sold modestly, but transformed chefs who read it. It is, as Bourdain wrote in the 2004 edition, “a cult masterpiece”.

In its chic design, ironic tone (pig’s head is “a perfect romantic supper”), intellectual curiosity, hangover cures and lip-smacking appetites, it was also an attractive portal into a bohemian lifestyle.

Philosophically, St John encapsulates “a way of being in the world”, Henderson once said. By 2019, The Book of St John’s knowing title suggested he and Gulliver were gently sending up all this.

Reframing food’s visual language

Today, so-called “flat lay’” photography is everywhere. But in 1999, the style of images that the photographer Jason Lowe created for Nose to Tail Eating was far less familiar. Overhead shots of hands reaching across a table, sharing food, taken at Henderson’s flat with no stylists involved, were, says Lowe, “intimate, personal, real”.

In subsequent books, taking inspiration from art and film, Lowe and Henderson would create more esoteric images (a visceral close-up of tripe, a cupid’s arrow through a pig’s heart above the word “mother”), which anticipated a new kind of provocative food photography. There are few images of Henderson. “He’s a man of little ego,” says Lowe. “It’s from him, not about him – from his heart.”

Scoff the beaten track

Opening St John in then run-down, semi-industrial east London was maverick. Today, restaurants thrive in many unlikely locations.

Sustainable (before it was commonplace)

“We don’t throw anything away,” Lee Tiernan was told when he joined St John. As Henderson wrote in the book Coco, eating the whole animal “can only have a happy effect on the planet”.

Everyday excellence

From chips to scotch eggs, talented chefs now apply themselves to elevating the mundane. In the 2000s, when Gulliver and Henderson’s second restaurant, St John Bread & Wine, was serving an astonishing bacon sandwich (grilled white bread from the in-house bakery, butter, ketchup, home-cured Gloucester old spot), it was something of an outlier.

Started the sharing, small plates thing … maybe

St John Bread & Wine was serving small plates and large sharing dishes for several years before, in 2009, Polpo drew on Venetian restaurants, giving that format mass exposure. In its two-or-three component starters and bar snacks (carrots with aioli; jellied skate cheeks with samphire), St John helped popularise a dish style that would become very familiar.

Fashion plates

Henderson and Gulliver cut a dash, usually in suits. “My armour,” Henderson calls his. Recently their fondness for blue “chore” jackets – created for French labourers, loved by hip creatives – has seen them identified as workwear inspirations. The “chefcore” fashion trend continues and St John has collaborations with clothing companies Service Works and Drake’s under its belt.

Redefining restaurant design

In 1995, Design Week magazine examined restaurant interiors. “Increasingly, the enterprising restaurateur is deciding to do it by himself, on a shoestring. Worse, the results are not bad at all.”

With its white walls, industrial lights and policy of no music, no art, no flowers, St John was hailed as dramatic. Others found its utilitarian aspect a little austere. Trained architect Henderson thought that “happy diners are all the decoration you need”.

In different forms, that stripped-back template persists. Created in a recessed space in the bar area, the St John bakery was left exposed in all its steel glory; a popular look later. “The intentional thing was don’t decorate machines. Don’t hide them,” says Lepard. St John presented as a practical place of work. “Everything was about purpose, never beauty,” says Lepard. “But it creates a beauty.”

St John also attracted the Young British Art crowd. As Margot Henderson, the co-owner of Rochelle Canteen and Fergus’s wife, would tell GQ: “Aesthetically, it’s an art piece in itself.”

Beyond the stars

It took Michelin 15 years to award St John a star, and by then it didn’t matter. As the US blogger Bonjwing Lee, aka The Ulterior Epicure, wrote at the time, St John had “achieved a non-commercial level of branding so unique … it doesn’t require Michelin’s approval”.

Linguistic brevity

“Terse, eccentric … a fun read,” was the Good Food Guide’s 2008 take on St John’s minimalist dish descriptions such as “snails and oak leaf”. That short, sharp style is now rampant.

Cultivating Noma’s radishes

The “seed” for Noma’s famous dish of radishes in edible soil was sown at St John when René Redzepi was served whole, steamed radishes. “It was so refreshing,” he told OFM in 2014.

Pioneers in seasonality

Whether serving bowls of peak-season cherries as dessert or various vegetables with its “anchovy gunge” dip, St John highlights fleeting seasonal flavours. “Nature writes our menu,” said Henderson in 2014.

Writing menus twice daily

Truly seasonal cooking requires kitchens to react to produce in real time. It is a discipline more chefs have adopted over the decades, partly due to St John’s example.

Grape leaps forward

French wines sourced direct from the makers; making its own wines, in collaborations and at its winery, Boulevard Napoleon; using bag-in-box wines or being early to the crémant trend; Gulliver ensures that St John remains ahead of the curve.

Long before natural wine swept London, St John was quietly serving predominantly low-intervention, biodynamic wines (no information on menus, staff would explain if asked). Sunny Hodge, owner of London wine bar Diogenes the Dog, was an early 2000s regular and remembers St John’s wines, cloudy ciders and funky beers as being “like nothing else in town”. St John helped “catalyse a movement”, he says.

Better bread, baked in

In 2024, chefs bake bread, restaurants launch spin-off bakeries, sourdough is ubiquitous. “Back in 1994,” says Dan Lepard, “only Fergus and Margot saw good bread as part of what a chef does.” Restaurants tended to buy in bread: “It was hard to get people interested, let alone in sourdough.”

Almost immediately, St John started selling bread to the public, other restaurants and eventually stores such as Selfridges. It now has three stand-alone bakeries: two retail sites and a Bermondsey wholesale bakery servicing 90 trade customers, which opened in 2010. St John has been key in cultivating London’s love of good bread, doughnuts and more.

Recruiting Fernet-Branca fans

“A miracle, curing all known ailments,” insisted Henderson in 2014, his evangelism for this herbal aperitif helping establish it as a cult drink among chefs and bar staff.

Historic foods

St John is no reenactment society but it merrily plunders the past (eton mess, eccles cakes, trifle) when useful. “Why are we not using fat like the 16th-century navy?” Henderson asked rhetorically in Nose to Tail Eating. Today, chefs’ interest in historical ingredients – whey, nettles, ancient grains, brined meats – has never been stronger.