In 1983, after a few years as chef at The Shed (Dinas, Pembrokeshire) and another few as an inspector for the Egon Ronay restaurant guides, he started out at Hilaire on London’s Old Brompton Road. Within a few years the triumvirate of Hopkinson, Rowley Leigh and Alastair Little (RIP) were the hippest chefs in town. The city’s creative crowd was riding a wave of hedonism on a scale it hadn’t known since the 1960s. The carefree, not to say reckless, lifestyle of 1980s London would make today’s Gen Z-ers purse their lips in disapproval or possibly envy.
Chef Henry Harris, who worked at Hilaire and whose menu at neo-bistro Bouchon Racine is a loving homage to the kind of French bourgeois cooking Hopkinson has always admired, tells how after dinner service the two of them would drive down the Old Brompton Road to Pierre Martin’s Lou Pescadou for a midnight feast of pissaladière lubricated with a bottle or two of Provençal rosé. ‘Then I would drive home in my Renault 5. We did some mad things back then,’ smiles Hopkinson.
Next came Bibendum, where he was brought in by Terence Conran and Paul Hamlyn as a partner in the business. For seven years after the restaurant, atop Conran’s temple to design, opened in 1987, Hopkinson was riding high and the place was in its pomp, but the Bibendum phase ended in tears. Rumours continue to swirl about what exactly happened one summer night in 1994, when he suffered his own personal kitchen nightmare, but it sounds like an open-and-shut case of severe mental and physical stress. ‘It was the worst night ever. They’d overbooked ridiculously. For some reason everybody, but everybody, wanted the tête de veau that night. Then Alain Ducasse came into the kitchen wanting my recipe for steamed ginger pudding. And suddenly it was all too much,’ Hopkinson remembers. ‘For half an hour I was weeping and weeping, almost shrieking. And that was it for me: I couldn’t do it any more. I was never really like the other sort of modern chefs anyway. It always felt like a performance; I was never entirely happy.’
The London restaurant scene would mourn his absence, but for the rest of us there were compensations. Most notably Roast Chicken and Other Stories, first of the series of cookbooks he was now free to write, all of which turn on Hopkinson’s basic premise that good eating depends on a mixture – a mayonnaise-like emulsion, if you will – of common sense and good taste. The book was well received on publication, but for years sales were modest at best. That all changed when it was singled out for ‘most useful’ status by Waitrose. Suddenly it was flying off the shelves at a rate of 900 copies a day, knocking Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince off the top of Amazon’s bestsellers list.