Nose to tail.

The card was tripe, crispy pig's tail, eel, chicken liver and crab on toast, and the roast bone marrow with parsley salad that has never come off it. Nose to tail is a rule about what a kitchen is allowed to throw away, and St. John applied it to a whole menu in a former smokehouse in the Clerkenwell industrial enclave, opposite the meat market. 1 2 Mid-nineties London, in Anna Cafolla's account, "was obsessed with foams and gold leaf. This kitchen sent out squidge, jellies, and offal presented on white table cloths". 1

Jonathan Nunn splits Modern British cooking in two. He writes that "there are now two schools of Modern British cooking: light and heavy, one more in debt to Italy, vegetables, fish, Elizabeth David, Alastair Little, city cooking and The River Café; and the other to France, Fergus Henderson, meat, country cooking and Jane Grigson". 5 Marksman Public House, The Camberwell Arms and The Anchor & Hope are all cooking out of the second school, and all three are run by cooks who came through St John. And Nunn does not think the original won: "almost every place it has influenced is undeniably more pleasurable than the mother ship". 5

The menu is rewritten twice a day, and a fish can change between the two. Nîcolas Payne-Baader, who worked the floor at Marylebone, quotes the briefing: that John Dory? It's brill now! 1 Behind that is a back of house doing four jobs most peer kitchens had stopped doing, and Cafolla names them: they fermented, cured, butchered, and baked. 1 The potatoes and greens are always on the card, and the MICHELIN inspector's note is that the varieties and types change regularly. 6 The bone marrow itself is two or three sawn veal bones roasted until the middle melts, a parsley, shallot and caper salad, toast, coarse salt and a lobster pick instead of a marrow spoon. 2

Fergus Henderson was cooking above a Soho pub when this started. He and Margot Henderson opened The French House's seven-table dining room in 1992, and an olive oil supplier introduced him to Trevor Gulliver, who had a Smithfield site to show him. 3 When Henderson and Spiteri left for it in 1994, Melanie Arnold took the partnership over from them upstairs at the French House. 4 After that the cooks came out. Jonathan Jones spent three years in the St John kitchen before The Anchor & Hope, and met his future business partner behind its bar. 11 Tom Harris and Jon Rotheram took Marksman Public House without touching the interior. 9 Mike Davies came through St John Bread and Wine on his way to The Camberwell Arms, and James Lowe says what he did with it: "Why can't we put certain ingredients into the British model?" 2 Lee Tiernan left the head chef's job at Bread and Wine in 2013 and opened Black Axe Mangal two years later. 2

St. John is the Smithfield room, and the practice has three addresses now. The bakery beside Spitalfields Market became St John Bread and Wine in 2003, where the snacks handed over with the loaves "preceded London's now-dominant small plates culture"; a dedicated bakery opened in Bermondsey in 2010, and St. John Marylebone in 2023. 1 If the offal is what is putting you off, Mina Holland has the counter-case from inside the fan club: "They might have a reputation for bone marrow and offal, but they are magic at meat-free food." 1

Smithfield was not a destination in 1994. Gulliver's description of the block is a strange hinterland whose neighbours were "a curry house and two brothels", and the same streets now hold design studios and a row of restaurants. 2 The market itself, trading since the twelfth century, is due to close; St John buys its bones elsewhere. 2 For the thirtieth anniversary in 2024 the kitchen cooked the 1994 menu at 1994 prices, and the seatings sold out. 7