Typically for a one-time Rangers player, Gordon Ramsay missed. Half three on a late summer's afternoon, stuck in a baking arc-lit photographic studio, and Britain's latest three-star chef decided to get playful with Observer photographer John Reardon.
John casually took half a second out from corralling, cajoling and charming 13 of the most unruly egos in the business (and trying to take a few pictures along the way) to dodge a poorly-thrown fig. Still, the game was afoot, the dander up, and within a few minutes, not unfuelled by wine, the disciples were involved in a wonderfully unseemly food-fight. Nuts and oranges and rough hunks of olive bread flew, and then magically, at one point, an entire brie floated over the heads of the multitude, spending one thousandth of a second halo-ing the head of Gordon Ramsay. At that precise point, the shutter clicked.
It is an extraordinary picture. Not simply for the art and technique involved, nor the frankly unlearnable skill of getting so many rocket-fuelled chefs so relaxed, natural and biddable, but because of the people involved, and what their presence says about the state of British cuisine today. There are now 106 Michelin-starred chefs in this country, two of them three-starred, 11 of them two-starred: we chose for this occasion to picture the Last Supper, but could with ease have gathered enough big-ticket chefs to recreate both Trimalchio's and Balshazzar's feasts, wine and figs and studio space and danger-money permitting.
When the famous red guide launched here in 1974 it struggled through a grudging soggy minefield of melba toast, chicken Kiev and Black Forest gateaux to find 25 restaurants in the whole of Britain worthy of one star, to Gallic jeers and garlicky laughter from the 624 favoured establishments in France. Today, 25 million words about food are now written and eagerly consumed in Britain every year.
In 1994, when the TV chef of the last generation, Fanny Cradock, was being laid to rest - 12 people turned up for her funeral - her successor, Delia Smith, was starting to cover the nation in cranberries: today Delia is, according to Collins dictionary, a noun. Nigella will shortly be cooking for George W. Bush. Two years ago the first English pub (the Stagg Inn at Titley in Herefordshire) won a Michelin star. Lemongrass and galangal litter our supermarket aisles, frozen food is shunned, fresh and local supplies rediscovered. By any standards you care to choose - cultural, culinary, economic, aesthetic, intellectual, internationalist - there has been an unprecedented and wholesale revolution in the British attitude to food, in roughly the lifetime of EastEnders. So I tried to catch our chefs, between shots, to find out why.
It would have been easier had they not been so busy eating. There is no Biblical record of what was on the table for the Last Supper other than some earlier references to mint and dill and cumin. Da Vinci, in his subversive masterpiece - he painted, to Christ's right, what many believe to be a woman, which makes our inclusion of Connaught chef Angela Hartnett neatly apposite - loaded his table with wine, bread and fowl. We added figs, asparagus, tomatoes, plums, walnuts, cheeses and a goodly amount more wine. And it seems a stupidly obvious thing to say about chefs, but they do like their food. An eager Ramsay looks up at one point and asks 'Can we begin yet?', and off they go in seconds: tearing, breaking, plucking, cracking, spearing and swapping and spitting out pits, they make short happy work of the groaning table, and give brief food-flecked answers. Air travel ... European holidays ... better supermarkets ... more money ... Albert Roux ... Marco ... munch, mmm.
Away from the morass, I called the asperic critic Jonathan Meades, who did me the great honour of not speaking with his mouth full. 'I suppose you have to remember that up until the late Seventies, early Eighties, the kind of people who were cooking were those who couldn't do anything else; it didn't have any prestige whatsoever. Then you began to get people from university or whatever applying a bit of intelligence to cooking - and this was all happening at just the same time as a large chunk of the population was having its expectations raised by the ubiquity of foreign travel. 'I don't know, looking back, if it was all as bad as we seem to remember. Some British domestic cooking was fine. Look at the Good Food Guides from the Fifties, and they were practically empty except for an expected few London names. We tended, for a very long time, in a very British and puritanical way, to regard food as simply utilitarian, as basic fuel. Like sex, it was seen as slightly suspect if it dared become enjoyable.' It is no coincidence, he says, that no book has ever been published under the title 'The John Knox Cookbook'.
This paper's restaurant critic, Jay Rayner, five years into a job in which he's increased sales and girth in joyously related measure, sees 'micro and macro reasons. The micros are people such as Albert Roux at Le Gavroche, who stayed there long enough to put an extraordinary number of young chefs through, who have gone on to transform cooking in this country. Marco Pierre White played a big part too; his personality, yes, but mainly the cooking, for people who can still remember the joy of finding his place Harvey's on Wandsworth Common; it was seminal.' Among the macros was of course the rise of international travel, particularly to Europe, with all the concomitant broadening of minds and palates.
It is easy to forget, and astounding to recall, a couple of facts about the far-off Sixties: one is that olive oil was mainly sold, then, in chemists, and another is that there was a £50 currency limitation on foreign travel. That changed, slowly, the Seventies changed, more quickly, and then we were into the revolutionary Eighties.
'There were a few big things about that time,' adds Jay. 'One of them was the failure, here, of short-lived nouvelle cuisine, which actually freed home cooking from the clutches of the French.' When French restaurateurs are asked about British cuisine - as they were, when both Delia and Jamie Oliver launched their bestsellers on an affronted Paris - they grudgingly admit that we are far more open to foreign influence than France will ever be.
'Also, in those days, well, people might hate much of Thatcherism - though you'd get an argument there from your top chefs, pretty much arch-Tories every one - but it was, in a sense, anti-puritanical, in that it disrupted a lot of these old values that told you it was somehow indecent to spend a lot of money on food, and the result was this incredible change in restaurant culture. You still get it a little, in Britain - the howls of outrage when a new place opens charging £250 for a meal - but I don't really see why: who tells you off for spending the same on a concert, or a cup final, or something else you're truly into?' Howls of outrage lead to headlines, and headlines sell restaurants, and today's chefs need to pack the tables from day one. London rents are the highest in Europe; City financiers demand payback from the first serving. A top-of-the-range Rorgue stove costs £90,000. They need the tables packed, and the fastest way to do so is through the fat boy's star. There are 10 Michelin inspectors in Britain today: there can be few other industries in the land whose billions are so dependent on the say-so of such an esoteric and anonymous few. But is this, and all it entails - the joy that greets a January listing, the miserable fury that accompanies the loss of a star, the 20-hour days - entirely healthy?
'Sometimes I really don't think so,' says Meades. 'We have changed radically, yes, but there are a few things worth pointing out. One thing we're still not able to do is cheap quality food. Go to France, Italy, bits of Germany, even Belgium, and you will eat an absolutely top-level meal, no frills but great food, for about nine euros. And there's almost a trend away from Michelin stars now in Paris: top chefs opening simple old bistros, failing to do them up as a point of honour, then serving world-class food for about £18 a head. They'll never get awards because the place is so basic, but you get the likes of Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Adjani queuing up to get in. 'We've got a long way to go regarding class, too. The Toulouse labourer, at lunch, eats the same food as his employer. Can you imagine that in Britain? And we're still too obsessed here with presentation. The English eat with their eyes rather than their tongues. And, crucially, the revolution we're talking about still only affects a small percentage of the population. Actually, I don't even think we're at the end of the beginning.'
Jay Rayner is mildly less pessimistic. 'Yes, there's a class problem; the customers whose eating habits have been transformed are by and large a finite number, the kind of people who read broadsheets. Whereas I remember Albert Roux once telling me that your average Parisian cabbie wouldn't just know where to get the best truffles; he'd be saving up for them.' The French are estimated to spend 23 per cent of their disposable income on food, as opposed to our 11 per cent. 'I'd love that to change,' adds our restaurant critic. 'You sit in these high-class big-ticket places - Pétrus, the Connaught - and look around and realise that most of your fellow customers are actually very rich tossers. Facelifts, Manolo Blahniks - and that's only the men - but they're there because they can be, it's got very little to do with the food.'
And there is still, in some starred venues - though none, of course, of those cheffed by our elite food-throwers - too much pomp and ceremony for genuine ease; the places where you are asked to choose from a solemnly proffered bread basket with an intense care more normally reserved for organ transplantation. And there remain, in places, the pseud tautologies of language. ('Actually, for a change, could I not have it pan-fried, thanks. Could you see if you could fry it instead using a parachute, or maybe a pubic wig...') And, away from Mayfair, there is of course a whole country, much of which has a little way to go. British children consume, on average, their own body-weight in chips every nine months. Our corpses used to start to rot in three days: apparently it now takes three weeks because of the preservatives in us. But enough. We can still, for a captured moment in time, rest a little on our laurels, and squashed figs, and quietly celebrate a photograph which food writers of even 15 years ago would hardly have believed possible: a groaning table filled end-to-end with some of the best chefs in the world, and they're still only a tenth of the number now Michelin-starred in Britain. Personally, I'd give a special star to Marcus Wareing, on the far right as you look at our picture. Never mind the damn cooking, though he's apparently no slouch. More importantly, the boy really does know how to fling a brie.
What our chefs ate at OFM's last supper
Wine Berry Bros. & Rudd: Berry's Margaux, H. & O. Beyerman (single bottle price: £12.95, unmixed case bottle price: £12.30); 1997 Barbera d'Asti Superiore, DOC, Arbest, Bava (single bottle price: £10.95, unmixed case bottle price: £10.40); orders office: 0870 900 4300; e-mail: orders@bbr.com
Bread Poilne Bakery, 46 Elizabeth Street, SW1, 020 7808 4910
Suckling pig/ham/pheasant M. Moen and Sons, 24 The Pavement, London SW4, 020 7622 1624
Fruit/vegetables/cheeses/ lobsters/pies/nuts Waitrose, 0800 188 884
'Natalie' goblets and large antique copper bowl Habitat, 020 76313880
Gilded underplates and 'Fine Line' round bowl John Lewis, 020 7629 7711
