Chef Profiles
The Green Giant: John Bishop, Bishop's
published May 1, 2007
AROUND NOON ON A WINTER'S DAY in 1985, a green 1962 Chrysler Saratoga pulled up outside Umberto Menghi’s iconic Yellow House on Hornby Street. It sat idling for a few minutes, then pulled back out into traffic. John Bishop, the 42-year-old Welshman at the wheel and Menghi’s long-time chef, had just decided to quit the best job he’d ever had.
It was a daring move for someone with few marketable skills other than those performed in a restaurant. Food and service were his life, and had been for as long as he could remember. When he was very young his parents divorced and his mother, Irene, moved John and his siblings from Shrewsbury, near Birmingham, to Newtown in Wales. He remembers his father’s personal setbacks as much as his love of fishing and gardening. Eric Bishop lost his job as a telephone engineer after suffering a nervous breakdown when his son was eight. He sold newspapers and remained, says his son, “a great friend of the river,” contributing angler reports for the BBC that related the conditions on the nearby river Severn. “As a kid,” Bishop remembers, “I often thought I would wake up [and suffer] a nervous breakdown, too.”
Bishop seems to have been born attuned to service. At the age of eight he brought a hot cup of tea to his mother’s bedside (she still wonders how he boiled the water). While she was at work, John’s older brother Adrian and younger sister Cherry would sit at the kitchen table after school and study while John made them syrupy orange drinks and soufflé omelettes (“to avoid doing my homework”). He’d race the omelettes round back of the semi-detached house to show the neighbours, a retired farming couple who always seemed to be sitting by their window. Only after their enthusiastic “Bravo!” did he run back to serve his appreciative siblings.
