Nico Ladenis
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 1997
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The castaway on Desert Island Discs this week is a chef. His food is the culinary equivalent of haute couture, but in the 1980s Nico Ladenis was known as much for his temper tantrums as his truffle sauce. His refusal to offer his customers salt and pepper, and his insistence as to how they should eat their meal, caught the headlines more frequently than his fine cooking. But, as he tells Sue Lawley, these days he has come out of the kitchen and become a cooler and much calmer man.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a chef of Greek descent he was brought up in colonial Africa where he |
| 0:35.2 | received an English education and learned to like Yorkshire pudding. He went to |
| 0:39.8 | University in Hull and got a good degree but his explosive temperament prevented him |
| 0:44.6 | from getting a job. In his late 30s he opened his first restaurant in London and |
| 0:49.6 | began the long quest for three Michelin stars. More than 20 years later he achieved his dream. |
| 0:56.4 | Today this imperious, somewhat eccentric and completely self-taught master of the culinary art runs three of the capital's top restaurants. |
| 1:06.2 | I cannot understand people worrying about brown or white bread, butter or cream, he says. |
| 1:11.9 | People like that should go and live in Tibet. butter or |
| 1:13.7 | cream he says he is Nico Lardines or simply Nico. So healthy eating is anathema to you |
| 1:20.3 | is it Nico it's not what cooking and eating should be about. Not really to you enjoy |
| 1:27.4 | enjoy every kind of food, every part of food, but I'm not saying that these days one doesn't need to be a little bit more careful |
| 1:36.8 | with what they eat. You can hold back on the butter, you can hold back on the cream. The sources that used to be so easily used in the |
| 1:47.4 | kitchen in French cuisine, the burblanc, the cream sources with more else, you can create the same sources, but you can use |
| 1:57.5 | half the amount of cream and make them a bit lighter. |
| 2:00.8 | And do you? |
| 2:01.8 | I do. These days I do. Where, Nico, is your enjoyment in cooking? |
| 2:07.1 | Because it seems to me knowing about you that it's always been such a painful business |
| 2:11.8 | for. There's been a lot of angst and misery in your career. |
| 2:15.2 | It is. For me, it's been very painful, simply because I look at cooking and food as a means of getting towards a perfect situation. |
| 2:27.0 | Not that I don't like food, it's not mechanical, it comes from my heart, but when I create and when I cook I like to do it perfectly. |
... |
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