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There are chefs who cook for notoriety, or for their own gratification, and there are those who cook for the pleasure of others. Those of the second type certainly cook to make a living, but they’re motivated to guarantee that their customers have real pleasure, as opposed to demonstrating their own brilliance. Simon Hopkinson is a first-rate pleaser, a chef who was never after recognition but one who wanted to produce terrific food his customers would love. He’s best known as the founding chef of Bibendum, the London restaurant started by Terence Conran in 1987 and recognized as one of the restaurants that marked the end of that city’s postwar cooking slump.
Hopkinson’s history, quickly: He began cooking in a French kitchen as a teenager, ran his own place in Wales — the Shed, which had all of five tables — and by the time he was 23 was an Egon Ronay inspector traveling the countryside and rating restaurants and hotels. (“Thought it was the best job in the world,” he says now.)
Next was a period of private cooking, and in 1983 (not yet 30, mind you), he became the chef in a restaurant in London. Christened Hilaire, it quickly gained the reputation as a place where you would expect to find, Hopkinson says, “a certain intelligence about food and . . . good taste.”
Conran, who was a regular, lured Hopkinson to his new project, a showy landmark place in the 1911 Michelin Building in Chelsea, which Conran had recently purchased with a partner. That was Bibendum (not coincidentally the same name given to the Michelin Man icon in the late 19th century), and Bibendum, almost everyone agrees, was really good, three-star good by New York Times standards (my opinion): reliable, straightforward, brilliant food served informally.
It “was instantly the best place in town,” he told me when I visited his London apartment in April, serving the kind of classic “Continental food” that has become one of the few interesting European alternatives to the now-ubiquitous Italian.
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