The Green Giant

Twenty-two years ago, with $80,000, John Bishop
opened a restaurant—and started a culinary revolution

By Andrew Morrison

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.

School was a complete disaster: “Nothing grabbed me at all.” He loathed the sciences, shunned sports, and at age 15 considered joining the Royal Navy. “I wanted to see the world,” he smiles. His mother nixed the idea, recalling that his grandfather had returned from the Navy with tattoos and a drinking habit, “a rolling stone the rest of his life.” He enjoyed art so he tried his hand at watercolours only to discover he had no talent. His mother, at a loss, convinced him to apply at the Llandudno Hotel and Catering College, six hours to the north. He was accepted, but couldn’t begin classes until he was 16. In the intervening year, he worked as a “scullery lad,” filling creamer jugs and shuttling breakfast trays at the Elephant & Castle, a small hotel close to home. British cooking was stuck in the doldrums, the hangover of the rationed war years lingering long into the 1960s. “It was awful,” he recalls. “Everything was overcooked, and seldom was anything seasoned.”

Despite the hotel’s culinary failings, it was here that Bishop first considered food’s origins. The hotelier, Mrs. Pugh, did her best to source foodstuffs locally and avoid expensive imports. “A lot of the produce in the summertime would come from the walled garden,” he remembers. Fresh, line-caught salmon would arrive from the Severn nearby.

In his first year of school he knew that cooking was his calling; he was enthralled with the idea of instructors handing down a craft. The curriculum included training in service, but his left-handedness made it difficult for him to serve and clear. “Oh, I didn’t like it at all,” he says. “It was much more fun in the kitchen.” The cooking itself was French, of course—fusion had yet to be discovered by the culinary orthodoxy and ingredients now commonplace, like balsamic vinegar and fresh ginger, were either anathema or unknown.

After receiving his certificate, Bishop worked for a year at the Danish Club in London before moving to the south of Ireland. There he cooked on and off in the coastal town of Kinsale for the better part of 10 years, eventually becoming a partner in a restaurant called Man Friday. In the off-season of 1964 (the year The Beatles released A Hard Day’s Night) he went back to England to work as a line cook at the Glyndebourne Opera House in Sussex. On short-term larks he cooked aboard the Queen Mary and the Mauritania (on the former he prepared meals for the skeleton crew at Southampton; the latter took him as far afield as the Caribbean).

He left the U.K. for good in 1973, following a friend from cooking school to Vancouver. Canada held many sources of allure, but it was the landscape that made him stay. “I fell in love with Vancouver right away.” Taking an apartment on Triumph Street on the east side, he toiled at Gastown’s Harp and Heather, a long-forgotten Irish club where, he says with amusement, “they just wanted to sell booze.”

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