First published on May 21, 2011
A.A. Gill woke stupefied at his kitchen table surrounded by blood and feathers. The blackout wasn't remarkable, Gill was a drunk. A Bukowskian drunk. Some days his delirium tremens was so bad that his first hit was taken with the aid of a belt looped around his drinking wrist and slung over his neck so he could lever the glass to his mouth with his free hand without spilling the booze or smashing his teeth.
But the blood was a little alarming. And the feathers entirely new.
"I remember thinking, 'Oh my god. What the f--- have I done this time,'" says Gill, recalling the fog and the blood and the feathers as he sits in bright winter sun at the best table at what many regard as the best restaurant in Australia.
He quickly pieced it together. There before him was a brace of grouse, perfectly dressed and roasted, cold and congealed. Gill's wasted twenties were not entirely wasted - the art school layabout had taught himself to cook.
This week, 26 years since his last drink, Gill strides into Quay restaurant wearing a tweed jacket over a skivvy that is the same hue of purple as the carpet. He is tanned and trim, he has the hair George Clooney had 20 years ago and the crows feet Clint Eastwood had a decade earlier.
It takes about 10 seconds for Gill's arrival to register. A manager appears at the back bench table I had secured days earlier. It would be "an honour" to move us.
We are led to the rotunda at the corner of the overseas passenger terminal and seated in the centre by the window. Gill faces the Opera House. I am offered a sliver of Harbour Bridge. Gill's napkin is draped in his lap. Mine is forgotten.
I'm not offended. Though he also writes about travel and television, A.A. Gill - Adrian to his friends - is probably the best-known food critic in the world. He might be the most loved and is almost certainly the most feared.
No restaurant is safe. Gill travels constantly and is published across the world, in London's Sunday Times, in Vanity Fair and in Australian Gourmet Traveller.
His writing is precise and poised, profane and savage. It is famously, horribly funny. It is marked by wild, mean metaphor and simile. In an evisceration of the Parisian bistro L'Ami Louis published last month (now the subject of 752,000 web references) he bestowed upon its waiters the "meaty malevolence of gouty buffalo" and described its oversized snails as "dinosaur boogers".
Gill's burlesque prose would collapse under its own weight if it weren't for the carefully crafted frame on which it is built. Phrases and sentences tumble over one another and rhythms erupt before he sinks the slipper. "It's all timing, everything is timing," he says. "Iambic pentameter. We speak in threes."
Gill has pissed a lot of people off with his iambic pentameter. His Wikipedia entry is a list of complainants. There are the Welsh ("loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls"; the English ("lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed"); residents of Norfolk ("the hernia on the end of England"); of the Isle of Man ("[it has] fallen off the back of the history lorry to lie amnesiac in the road to progress"); the Albanians ("short and ferretfaced, with the unisex stumpy, slightly bowed legs of Shetland ponies").
I'm surprised the list is so brief. What about women? Gill claims not to remember his essay about the ugliness of British women.
"You know, the one where you give them "second division mouths", I prompt.
"No," says Gill in his almost effeminate, almost posh voice. "Don't remember it. Good line though," he adds happily.
Over lunch Gill is charming. His manners are easy and elegant. He answers questions he has already fielded dozens of times generously and fully. He even asks some of his own. He has that cheery English bloodlust.
"Why did you shoot the baboon?" I ask him as I stick a knife into a quail breast floating on a pudding of pumpernickel, morel and "ethical" foie gras.
"Why not?"
I was referring to a column Gill began with the words, "I shot a baboon in Africa, last Wednesday, just after lunch." He went on to clumsily bolt a description of the slaughter onto a review of the London restaurant The Luxe (Three stars out of five).
Normally there is serious intent behind the linguistic stunts. Like the time he unfavourably compared Elizabeth David with Hitler. In Britain, David is a trinity of Margaret Fulton, Stephanie Alexander and Mary MacKillop.
"Two appalling things happened to British food in the 20th century," Gill wrote. "One was the Second World War, the other was Elizabeth David. Of the two Elizabeth David was probably the worst."
He goes on to argue that in the wake of the war a shell-shocked nation used to the thrift and blandness of rationing was seduced by vivid descriptions of Mediterranean food in David's otherwise pedestrian cookbooks. Rather than relearning its own cuisine, Britain turned to an ersatz version of Italy's, one that was geographically and culturally inappropriate. It has never fully recovered, he argued.
This is Gill at his best, attacking his food greedily and from every angle - at once journalist and historian, critic and sociologist.
We are served an amuse bouche of jellied eel on white carrot cream.
Gill raises the shot glass, looks at the perfect golden little cubes of eel jelly and then looks at me.
"This whole business of this thing that I did not order, the amuse, I'm quite over it," he says.
A waitress arrives with a platter of breads and describes the lineage of each item.
"A bread basket that needs a f---ing atlas," he says in her wake.
Our conversation shifts to annoying food trends (none of which he attributes to Quay, despite its generous bread selection and wonderful eel jelly).
"Smears," he begins. "Plates that are smeared, dotted, scattered, daubed, dabbed.
"And f---ing foam! It looks as though a camel has sneezed on my plate."
I try to egg him on. "What about soil," I ask.
"Soil, like at Noma? I love Noma." Noma is the Danish restaurant that is now ranked first in the world in the San Pellegrino listing. Quay, the pre-eminent Australian, is No 26.
We move on to molecular gastronomy. "You go and eat Heston [Blumenthal]'s food or Ferran Adria's and it is fabulous. The next rung down makes you want to go into the kitchen with a machete. There isn't a half-measure with molecular.
"And I am completely over a waiter coming and saying to me, 'Can I explain our concept?'
"I know what your f---ing concept is. I order too many little dishes. You bring them in the order that suits you. I don't like most of them and then I pay too much."
Gill's second course appears, a plump and pink half moon of marron, dressed for the occasion.
"That's really quite beautiful."
I don't prompt him for more. You can't invite a bloke to lunch and then make him perform like a seal.
Normally when he is recognised at a restaurant everything gets worse, Gill has said in the past. Nervous staff flutter about, no good for him or for other guests.
If that is happening at Quay it's not obvious to me. Gill asks questions of waiters. Some of the replies seem a little nervous, but he is satisfied that they know their menu.
Three courses later, dessert. Gill has ordered the snow egg, a dish with a bigger media profile in this town than most soap stars. Our conversation has wandered to his children by now, but I need his comment on the egg to justify the bill. I was the only one drinking.
A flutter and a silence goes about the rotunda and I'm suddenly reminded that I'm dining with a star. "So this is the snow egg," says Gill with gracious fuss. A woman at the table behind him raises a camera phone as he raises his spoon.
He pierces the little dome and I wait, then bully comment from him. "It's very, very, very good," he says precisely, and slides back to our conversation. If he has a line on the snow egg he is keeping it for himself.
I ask him if he is jaded by his work. He isn't."Restaurants are the highest point of civilisation," he says through shards of toffee and crystallised guava.
"Everything else has to happen before you can have restaurants.
"You have to have a middle class. You have to have people with leisure time. You have to have banking, you have to have a supply of food you can trust, you have to have freedom of association, freedom of speech."
He leans forward and generously swaps the remains of his snow egg for my chocolate cake.
"Every time you walk into a restaurant it is a vote for the good guys."
