Sauce #60 | Farewell, Ajax
Polpo was the coolest place on earth.
No exaggeration.
I’d just moved to London and wanted to be ‘in food’, whatever that meant. And here was this newly opened restaurant that was so cool that any description of it, 16 years on, will be cliché upon cliché upon cliché. That’s how ground-breaking it was. That’s how cool it was. Everyone copied it for years. Still do.
Exposed brick. Tumblers for wine glasses. Staff in civvies. Negronis. Small plates. No reservations. So many tattoos. Cliché on top of cliché. But it wasn’t then because Russell and Richard invented that shit, or at least borrowed it from Brooklyn. As far as London was concerned, this was an untrodden path.
I don’t tend to linger in the past - forward momentum is good, progress is good, what may be is generally better than what has been - but if I could go back to the buzz of that moment in time I would. Young and dumb and full of Campari. What a thrill it was.
And behind the bar was this absolute unit, six foot five inches of body art and beard and belly, with a voice that came from the foundations of the building, from the earth’s core. Ajax.
Of course he was called Ajax. Nominative determinism has never been more perfect. He was a warrior. A leviathan. And an absolutely lethal person to know. Blink and there would be a negroni in front of you. Blink again and there would be a grappa. Ask him where to go out after dinner and you’d find yourself in a Soho dive bar, with him, at 3am, wondering what, in fact, is a pencil.
When Rosie and I met I was just beginning a tedious period of abstemiousness in preparation for the London Marathon. It was two years on from Polpo’s opening and, while it remained in the top five coolest places on earth, it had been surpassed by its sibling Spuntino, a Brooklyn-inspired small plates joint with sliders and Manhattans and the best fried olives you’ve ever tasted. If this sounds played out now I cannot overstate how fun and extraordinary and new it was at the time.
I said we’d go the day after the marathon for a marathon lunch. In I hobbled, on the stroke of midday, back in April 2011. And there was Ajax behind the bar - behind the stick, as he called it - poised to give us every bit of ammunition required to blow the doors off.
Rosie and I perched at the end of the bar, two loved-up kids, having the time of our lives, as Ajax poured beers on wines on negronis on so much - so much - absinthe. If my body had thought running 26 miles was a shock, this was something else.
He blew out of town, perhaps never to be seen again, to New York or to Greece or to god-knows-where. And Sam and I opened Pidgin and then, in a jumping-the-gunnish kind of way, started to think about our next project.
Around the same time, in late 2016, the aforementioned Russell Norman - another much missed and complicated soul - tweeted simply: “look who’s back” with a picture of him and Ajax. I immediately messaged Ajax, entreating him to come for a chat about future plans Sam and I were cooking up (and would later set fire to).
Getting him on board was much like I imagine Peter Ridsdale and David O’Leary must have felt when signing Rio Ferdinand (I’m afraid I have no more current sporting analogy). This is incredibly expensive. This might be a huge mistake. But goodness isn’t this exciting.
At least Ridsdale and O’Leary had a football team at the time. We did not have a role for Ajax (also the name of a football team, do keep up). We just knew we wanted this dude on our non-existent team. So we took on an ill-advised sublet with one of the worst human beings I’ve ever encountered and opened a bar called Enfant Terrible. Cool name. Unpronounceable to many people, but cool. Ajax made it extremely cool. Cocktails for days, a toastie machine, a lot of overproof rum, a slightly peeved team over at Pidgin doing the food prep. An absolute blast. For a month. Whereupon I called the landlord a ‘prick’ (not something I often do) and he kicked us out.
So we opened Magpie, with Ajax at the helm. It could have been a contender. But it wasn’t, located as it was somewhere between 200 yards and 5 miles west of where it would have been best suited. It wasn’t the best 18 months of my life. Mine and Ajax’s friendship disintegrated somewhat. I wouldn’t say we fell out because I suspect our mutual, sulky conflict-aversion meant nothing was ever put into words but we certainly drifted into a non-communicative, resentful, pissy kind of relationship. Sam was better at filtering Ajax’s Ajaxisms.
He died last August in Mexico City. Out of nowhere. This unstoppable force just…stopped.
There ought to be simpler and less distressing ways of clarifying one’s thoughts about a fellow traveler than, you know, them dying, but in the absence of such an apparatus it was somehow both heartwarming and heartbreaking to see things distilled in such a way. To realise I’d spent years angry and disappointed and frustrated by someone I nevertheless felt a profound, loving fondness for.
On Sunday, a hundred or so of us gathered in Soho for a service of thanksgiving, his parents and siblings and godparents speaking with extraordinary, superhuman composure as a slideshow of Ajax - big, beautiful Ajax - played behind them, his blue eyes staring us down, asking us what the fuck the fuss was about.
So there wasn’t any cooking that day, or for that matter much eating. But we raised a glass and shared stories and cherished the echoic memory of that deep, sonorous, mildly obscene laugh.
