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It's easy now to forget how risky a venture The Canteen seemed at the time of its opening. The restaurant, owned by the Consequences-like pairing of Marco Pierre White and Michael Caine, was in a geographically unpromising location - the environs of Wandsworth Bridge being, for a restaurant whose economic viability would always depend on its being fashionable, a good domestic analogue to Tierra del Fuego.
The Canteen's specific setting was also grim. Chelsea Harbour had about it the chill of death, 1980s-style - brutalist, triumphalist architecture, celebrating a period which was over before the buildings that best commemorated it had been finished - an architecture of the recent past that already, bizarrely, possesses a kind of twisted historical interest. (Every ghost town was once a boom town.)
The name was a giveaway, too: there was a time when it seemed possible that words like `harbour' and `wharf' might enter the language as synonyms for the large-scale failure of anything radically misconceived. `I don't care what Bottomley says, the internal market is a total wharf.' `I'm sorry, but we'll be eating a bit later than planned - the oven timer went wrong and wharfed the moussaka.'
Making such a success of The Canteen - a packed-all-the-time, swarming-with-celebrities type success - was, therefore, a brilliant thing to have done. At the same time, there was something like a sense of waste about the fact that MPW himself was `executive chef' rather than chef chef.
White was often on display at his table in The Canteen with, I would imagine, beneficial effects on business there, and a deleterious effect on business at the restaurant that made him famous, Harveys. Can't blame him, in a way. being famous for being famous is probably a lot more fun than spending 16 hours a day in a kitchen. But still
Now, though, White has returned to the stove. He has said that he is going...