Alasdair Gill: "I really felt connected to Boiling Point when I watched it... That felt like a couple of the shifts I’ve done"

While rock ‘n’ roll has become markedly less boozy and druggy these past few years – I mean, when was the last time a musician’s pancreas exploded á la Duff McKagan? – you can always rely on the pressure cooker environment of a busy restaurant kitchen to produce some spectacularly bad behaviour.

Confirmation of this is provided by Knives And Spoons: A Chef’s Story Of Kitchens, Addictions And Mayhem, which finds Alasdair Gill dishing the dirt on some of London’s more idiosyncratic dining establishments.

In addition to the ketamine, cocaine and heroin-fuelled yarns, Alasdair also explores the complex relationship he had with his late writer father A.A. Gill; recalls his time in posh rehab (“The cast of Trainspotting had wandered on to the set of Bridgerton”): and treats us to 60-pages of his favourite recipes – Cow-Arse Pie anyone? – with accompanying doodles.

The saga starts with Alasdair working in a London East End eatery where the crack cocaine was mighty, and scoring in a Dickensian hotel awash with desperado drug dealers.

Asked to paint a picture of the latter establishment, the amiable Gill says, “This ‘hotel’ was actually one of the biggest drug operations I’ve ever seen. Saying it like that makes it sound like it was really professional but it wasn’t. It was full of all sorts of old rock stars and people who hadn’t quite made it. I remember being with someone there who claimed to have given the knife to Sid Vicious that killed Nancy. It was rich with these characters who’d survived through the ‘80s and ‘90s. It was dynamite for a kid like me who was walking round with a matchstick.”

Whilst he dabbled in heroin — “I took it much more in my later teens and was lucky that I was singularly never hooked on it”  — Alasdair’s workplace drugs of choice were coke, ketamine and black market Xanax laced with fentanyl.

“I only learned when I got clean that you can die just by touching fentanyl which I was eating every day. I was like, ‘Fucking hell!’ I had withdrawals from it when I went to rehab.

“It’s definitely a certain type of person smashing ketamine every day,” he notes. “It’s a very selfish anti-social drug. If you know someone who’s a K-head you don’t want them round your house. You’re so far removed from your body when you take it. You’re completely lobotomised. This was the thing getting me most removed from situations I didn’t want to be in.”

The 33-year-old pauses for a moment and adds: “I just found being sober so boring, painfully dull.”

Alasdair’s drug-taking sounds much more like self-medicating a mental health condition than a desire to be hedonistic.

“Yeah, that’s for sure,” he concurs. “I always say that the longest relationship I’ve had is with alcohol and drugs. There was a honeymoon period to that. It was an amazing sense of purpose and completeness, and feeling comfortable in my own skin for the first time in many ways.”

Did he feel alienated growing up?

“I was quite distant from my household when I was young,” he confirms. “I was looking to get away and wasn’t very present in anyone’s life for a time. People would say, ‘You were around all the time and were quite sociable’, but I felt like I was alienated and didn’t really connect like I do today.”

While Alasdair quickly realised that he’d inherited his father’s dyslexia, it was only in his late twenties that he was diagnosed as having chronic ADHD.

“Dad was even more dyslexic than me and dictated his articles but I just write very slowly,” he reveals. “At the beginning it’d be pretty unintelligible but then I go over and over it.”

Knives And Spoons features a brief cameo from Anthony Bourdain, the American chef, writer and bon viveur who was good pals with A.A. Gill.

“They had a lot in common and did a few tours together. Dad was in an episode of Parts Unknown when they visited Scotland. It’s changed now but he did the original foreword for Tony’s Kitchen Confidential book when it came out. I got a really good vibe from him.”

Anthony Bourdain and A.A. Gill filming Parts Unknown in Scotland

I had a couple of awesome nights on the town with Mr. Bourdain – he adored Dublin, Thin Lizzy, Guinness and black pudding – who told me that the worst thing he’d ever eaten was either a palpating cobra heart or a foetal bird egg. Can Gill match that?

“I’ve tried cockroaches and tarantulas in Southeast Asia,” he winces. “Deep-fried things all taste the same, but I remember having a spider leg stuck in my throat for about a week after. That made me think, ‘I’m not going to eat a tarantula again!’”

Tony did not take to celebrity TV chef culture. In fact, he called them “a bunch of cunts.” Has Alasdair been welcomed into that cosy world?

“Definitely not,” he smiles. “If you know anyone who has, please put a word in for me! I don’t know how many young chefs are doing what Jamie Oliver and Ainsley Harriott did. The new wave of culinary heroes are more likely to be found on TikTok and Instagram. Weirdly enough, they’re people who don’t tend to have had formal training or worked in a restaurant.”

Knives And Spoons refers to Alasdair being banged up for three days in a Laos (as distinct from Laois) prison on opium charges, but doesn’t go into the whys and wherefores.

“Yeah, my sister said, ‘If I’d written a book, that would have been a whole chapter!’” he laughs. “When I went to Laos, I was working in a bar in Van Vieng that sold drugs. One day there was a huge police raid and we were all locked up. I was tripping so hard off mushrooms when it happened. They loaded us into the back of their trucks. I don’t know what he’d taken but our manager was so fucked he was cross-eyed. The silence between us was suddenly broken by him looking at me and saying, ‘When we get there, tell them that we’re going out with each other.’ I was like, ‘Okay, cool, we’re a couple’, and the guy next to us prodded me and said, ‘I think he’s talking to her, mate!’”

If that’d been Thailand, Alasdair would probably still be residing in the Hotel Bangkok. How did he get sprung?

“A couple of days after confiscating my passport, they said, ‘We can either take you to the capital where there’s the death penalty or you can pay $80,” he resumes. “We weighed it up and paid!”

Were Gill’s addiction issues ever used as a stick with which to beat his politician mother, Amber Rudd, whose ministerial career spanned three successive Conservative governments in the UK?

“Somehow with the Laos incident, the papers were on mum’s doorstep the next day,” he sighs. “I was in the most remote place, but they still found out.”

A few other quick things you need to know about Alasdair Gill are that he studied in a well-known West Cork cookery school which he strangely declines to name both in the book and today (“I couldn’t possibly say!”); his hero of foodie heroes is Marco Pierre White (see below); and he correctly believes The Clash to be The Greatest Band In The World… Ever! with ‘White Man In Hammersmith Palais’, ‘Jimmy Jazz’ and ‘The Magnificent Seven’ the pick of the Westway Warriors’ back catalogue.

Knives And Spoons joins Kitchen Confidential and Marco Pierre’s The Devil In The Kitchen as one of the best books about professional cooking, but what are the TV series and films that capture the essence of it best?

“I really felt connected to Boiling Point when I watched it,” Alasdair proffers. “It was remarkably made and directed and portrayed by Stephen Graham. That felt like a couple of the shifts I’ve done. As a bit of light relief after that, I’d say Ratatouille!”

Stephen Graham in Boiling Point

There’s a very moving moment in the book when Alasdair’s in rehab and discovers his dad’s Pour Me: A Life memoir in the library.

“I’d always known he was an alcoholic, but not like this,” he writes in Knives And Spoons. “He never seemed broken. How naïve I was. He had already walked away from everything I was crawling through: the hallucinations, the shakes, the colossal boredom, the despair that coated every morning. It was my story, but decades before, by someone I never thought I’d resembled.

“He was gone, but he’d left something behind – a map drawn in his own wreckage, one last bit of guidance. It was proof that survival, somehow, was hereditary too.”

And, no, you’re not the only one whose eyes have just moistened.

“There was this incredibly profound moment where I got to have this new relationship with him, reading his work as I got clean,” Alasdair expands now, also tearing up. “Realising that he was just like me – we shared the same guilt and shame and even used to pass out in the same pubs – was the foundation of me getting clean. He was just another addict showing me, ‘This is how I did it’, which is an incredible thing to have.”

Looking back, could anything have been done to stop his addiction earlier or did it just have to play out?

“It’s easier for me to think, ‘This is part of who I was’ and there wasn’t any other option than seeing it through to the end,” he states. “The more you’re around addiction, you start to see how amazing the gift of desperation is. To really get to that rock bottom. I know so many people who can pull it together for a bit and spend their whole life struggling and thinking, ‘I did a week clean, so maybe it’s okay…’ I’m very lucky that it was so clear: ‘This is what happens when I drink. This is what happens when I do drugs. And it’s killing me.’”

Alasdair’s rock bottom was being told that early-stage cirrhosis had “turned my liver into parfait. There was scarring on my bladder, heart irregularities, cracked lungs and chronic constipation” – and that if he didn’t immediately stop, he’d be dead by Christmas. How’s his health now?

“I was at the age where they said my liver should be able to make a full recovery,” he resumes. “I went for a six-month check-up, and it was going a bit slower than they’d hoped, but it was making progress. That was the last time I checked to be fair, but I’m feeling good.”

He looks it too. I was talking recently to the Secret Drug Addict who said that the birth of his daughter is the most profound thing that’s ever happened to him – partly because throughout his dependency, he thought himself incapable of ever being a parent.

Has the recent arrival of little Arlo had a similar effect on Alasdair?

“Yeah, totally,” he nods. “His birth was the most incredible ‘This is what life’s all about!’ moment. It was terrifying at first knowing this was going to happen, but now it feels so right. I didn’t realise how much I wanted to be a father. My heart is completely full with him.

“My partner’s father whose name was Arthur had passed away too, so we called him Arlo Arthur. He’s also A.A., which is a nod to both of our dads.”

Alasdair with his son, Arlo

Knives And Spoons’ doubly happy ending is that Alasdair is now a much-in-demand private chef who’s today braving 35º temperatures in the South of France. What’s on the menu later?

“I’m cooking a shoulder of lamb with potato fondants,” he concludes. “I just baked a big chocolate brownie cake. I’m also doing some chilled pea & mint soup because it’s absolutely humid here.

“It’s the equivalent of going from the Premier League to the Saudi League. You’ve given up a bit of relevance and aren’t really in the game anymore, but it’s a nicer lifestyle which allows you to pick and choose when you work and have lots of quality family time. Honestly, I feel blessed.”

• Alasdair Gill’s Knives And Spoons is out now published by Macmillan. The next episode of Dealing With Drugs: A Hot Press Podcast will feature a longer form version of this interview.