Max Pearson

And then he went on with his interview and I rushed to get a New Yorker issue published.

Tony, as he was often known, had spent months trying to get this piece published, but with no success.

So he sent it to the magazine unsolicited.

So I was stunned that he had, A, written the piece, B, that it was such a great piece, and C, that it got published in the New Yorker.

Within hours, the phone was off the hook.

People were just calling in and wanting to come to that restaurant.

It all changed when Tony published that piece.

In 1999, the top restaurants in the US and Europe were still in the era of fine dining.

The restaurant experience was always very, you know, codified.

So, for example, you would go to a French restaurant

And you would expect the staff to be stiff and haughty and the chef being some kind of godlike creature and talking down to you because you asked for something different than what the menu offered.

That filtered through to food writing too.

Any publication, any book, any article was always lofty and, if not pretentious, talking about food and their experiences from when they were little.

Then came this article.

When, in Tony's case, it was very underground.

And here's a flavour of what he wrote in The New Yorker, voiced up by someone reading that famous essay.

All his writing then and later reflected more the noise, the pressure, the craziness, the sweat, the burn, everything that is going on in the kitchen.

It's about danger, risking the dark bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese and shellfish.

For Tony, he was just trying to get a few laughs out of his fellow chefs and kitchen colleagues.

That was such a pivotal moment, a seminal moment in the restaurant world and the kitchen world in particular, because it was really what was happening there.