Derek Brown

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2003

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Derek Brown the Director of the Michelin Red Guides which are the French bible for restaurants. The original Guide was invented in 1900 to help travellers in France find good food at reasonable prices. These days the annual publication always creates a stir with restaurateurs and gourmands alike, all waiting on tenterhooks to see who has been awarded the prestigious Michelin stars - or who has had them taken away. In recent years some high profile chefs have created controversy by sending back their stars, although Brown says the stars don't belong to the chefs but are awarded to the restaurant itself and judged purely on the experience of the meal on the day.

Derek Brown himself comes from a middle-class Portsmouth family and his first ambition was to be a history teacher. After spending a summer earning pocket money as a waiter he realised that hotel management was his path in life and cherished a dream of owning his own hotel. At twenty-seven he saw an advert for Michelin inspectors and gradually worked his way up to the top job.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: 2nd Movement of Symphony No.7 in A Major by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens Luxury: A steamer chair

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an inspector. He and his team carry out their work
0:27.4	anonymously like Macavity the Mystery Cat they come and go unannounced.
0:31.2	Only later to the subjects of their investigations
0:33.4	discover they've been there. Discovery can mean joy or despair because these
0:37.6	inspectors are from the Michelin guide and the stars they bestow or indeed take
0:41.9	away are the most coveted in the world's
0:43.9	restaurant trade. This gastronomic legend-on-er is a uniquely French
0:48.9	invention. All the more surprising then to discover that the man who presides over it is an Englishman who
0:54.7	trained in hotel management in Bournemouth.
0:57.7	His appointment caused uproar in France where it's commonly understood that the English
1:01.4	can't cook. He dismisses such concern with
1:04.4	appropriate English aplom. You don't have to be German to appreciate Beethoven, he
1:09.6	says. He is Derek Brown. The first thing to say, Mr Brown, is quite personal, but entirely relevant,
1:16.0	which is that you don't look like a Michelin man.
1:18.0	There's not lots of sort of spare tyres everywhere, which must be difficult if you eat for a living.
1:22.0	Well, it is, and one has to be very careful of one's ways and to look after one's health because it's
1:27.6	quite a rigorous job, but good cooking doesn't necessarily make you fat, eating the wrong things I think makes you fat.
1:33.0	And eating too much.
1:34.0	Because I mean there's less sort of Robert Carrier gallons of cream in everything, isn't that?
1:38.0	That's right. I mean, cooking is much more attuned to the way people want to live today.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.