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   CLUB SANDWICH 67

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EAT YOUR HEARTS OUT!

They're the cooks of the house...any house, any arena, any stadium, anywhere. Name the place, name the dish, they'll prepare it before you can say "haute cuisine". They're Eat Your Hearts Out! - purveyors of stunningly impressive food to the touring McCartneys and their support services - and Mark Lewisohn went to meet them

            Gone are the days when going on tour meant a roadie, a transit van and a roadside transport cafe. Long gone.
            Big-name rock touring, 1990s style, demands a wealth of accoutrements, few -probably none - more important than the travelling catering corps, whose job it is to provide sustenance to musician and crew member alike. The McCartneys, as you might imagine, employ arguably the best in the business: a company named Eat Your Hearts Out! (Their exclamation-mark, not mine.) And, yes, they serve vegetarian food, unarguably the best around.
            Whether or not vegetarians themselves, few people fortunate enough to have sampled EYHO's culinary delights are in any doubt about this, be the event a full-fledged McCartney concert, a rehearsal or a TV/video shoot. It's patently obvious - everyone lingers just that bit longer than usual around the beautifully arranged buffet tables, piling up just one more platter, plucking just one last grape, slicing just one last sliver of a rare cheese, or spooning just one last portion of a truly exquisite dessert.
            Eat Your Hearts Out! was formed some 14 years ago by two school-leavers from Melbourne, Australia - Kim Davenport and Debbie Sharpe - who backpacked to England for three months, got work and stayed. Debbie has since moved on to Chicago, to open EYHO's first base in the USA, while Kim remains in London, running the UK/European end of the operation. Luciano Pavarotti, Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart and Michael Jackson number among their clients, but their most prestigious are Paul and Linda. And delighted by their services, the McCartneys have in turn opened a good many doors for EYHO, and given them a prominence in the vegetarian marketplace which they hadn't previously sought. (The company is not exclusively veggie.)
            Like a light hors d'oeuvre before a feast, EYHO's initial appointment with the McCartneys gave no clue as to the enormity of what was to follow. As Kim Davenport recalls: "The original idea was that we'd just cook for the band itself -our first time was at the July 1989 showcases at the Playhouse Theatre in London - which meant feeding only eight people. But it quickly went from there to 500 because they brought us in on the World Tour and asked us to cater for everyone. So we went from eight people in London to 500 around the world! And Paul and Linda insisted that - since they refused to allow their money to spent on killing animals - we cook only vegetarian food.
            "To be honest, we were fairly inexperienced at it to begin with, and it was pretty terrifying: to cook a selection of different vegetarian meals every day, for several hundred people, without resorting to pasta. We thought then that the solution would be to employ only vegetarian chefs and not consider at all the wishes of carnivores, but that raised a few eyebrows and so on the New World Tour we've also taken on a couple of meat chefs to provide vegetarian meals for the meat-eaters, because they're more sympathetic to the needs of the carnivores and it keeps the grizzlers and whingers at bay."
            Kim remembers all too well from that first tour just what can transpire when a beefy beef-eater does "grizzle and whinge" upon being denied the staple food of a lifetime. "There was no problem at all with the main crew, the crew that travelled with us," she recounts. "They'd been told in advance that they'd have to eat vegetarian meals and accepted it very well. The trouble arose when we got to some places in America where the crew was being augmented for odd days by local stagehands. Then it got a bit rough - huge Texan guys would be making very sarcastic comments, and someone lobbed a huge bowl of chilli at me. The worst days were always the 'outs', when the show is over and everyone is packing up to move on: people are really tired by then and tempers fray. Also, people wrongly assumed that once Linda and Paul had left town we'd relax the rules and suddenly produce meat meals, which was ridiculous.
            "Some people think that if they don't eat meat they're going to die. They have this silly notion that they must get their protein to give them strength. It's like a 'hit'. These people became so desperate that they formed a secret carnivores club, but Paul and Linda said they weren't going to pay for it - if people wanted to go off and eat meat then they had to pay for it themselves."
            Rather like an army catering corps (except that there's a world of difference in the food quality), EYHO have to make the best of the most cramped and trying of situations and circumstances. Improvisation? The word might have been coined just for them. As Anna Sedgwick - one of the EYHO chefs on the Australasian and North American legs of the New World Tour - comments, the work is never less than interesting and unpredictable. "I had to learn to adapt pretty fast - sometimes I might be cooking in a marquee, other times I might be lucky enough to have access to a kitchen. The power system failed a few times, and we had problems with water. If the overhead lights went down we just had to carry on by candlelight until someone arrived to fix the problem. We just had to work on - people have to eat."
            Traversing the world, cooking for famous people...it sounds very glamorous, and doubtless there'd be more than a few applicants if such a position were ever to be advertised. (They're not, by the way.) But, of course, the reality is different. "There's little or no hobnobbing with the stars," confirms Anna. "And I never even got to see a full concert all the time I was with the New World Tour! We were there to work, not to watch, and though I could always hear them, and did see little bits, I never saw any of the shows in full."
            Since the perpetual moan about vegetarianism (from meat-eaters, at least) is that there is a limited number of tasty, attractive meals to make, one can't help but be impressed at how EYHO so successfully manage to create such a wide range of fabulous food day after day, without obvious repetition. The reason is that their chefs are always open to ideas: from books (including Linda's), from magazines, from other chefs, from eating in restaurants around the globe, from their own experimentation and, yes, from adversity. "We're often forced to invent recipes, some of which have proven really successful, just by the most trying of circumstances," admits Kim Davenport. "Like having inadequate facilities, or because someone returns from a shopping expedition without the things we've asked for. On the first day of this tour, in Perth, our pastry chef had to roll pastry inside the refrigerated van because it was melting in the tent, where it was 120 degrees." Club Sandwich 67
            "Our real speciality is desserts," Kim continues, "because we've realised that, with vegetarian cooking, it can be quite hard to give someone a real treat. A carnivore could be given lobster, say, or smoked salmon or caviar, but not so vegetarians. So we make a conscious attempt to make the desserts as special as we can. It's our way of giving luxury."
            As one fortunate enough to have indulged in EYHO desserts I can certainly vouch for this; the only pity is that they and EYHO's other creations cannot be sampled by everyone. Conversion from carnivore to veggie would be swift and numerous if only more people could get to taste just how wonderfully good vegetarian cuisine can be. It's a point not lost on Kim Davenport, who remarks upon "The amount of people who come up to us at one of Paul's gigs and say 'My God, I never realised that vegetarian food could be like this!'. It pleases me, yes, but it also makes me sad - this type of cooking should be much more available.
            "What really saddens me is that there is no vegetarian class offered in any of the cookery schools. Most of the chefs I interview - and I interview about 20 a month - think that vegetarian food means lasagne or cauliflower cheese, full stop! I mean, about six years ago I toured America with Simple Minds, and Jim Kerr was vegetarian. I couldn't believe the food he was being served: an omelette! Or just the vegetables from the main meal. In those days, to serve up a lasagne was showing 'serious care'. I do think a lot of the problem dates back to the cranky name vegetarianism got in the hippy days of the 1960s: there are still too many people who, as soon as they hear the word vegetarian, think 'rabbit-food'."
            No one is more thrilled at the success of EYHO's vegetarian cuisine than Linda McCartney. What with this and the soaring sales of her own frozen foods she is witnessing a culinary revolution scarcely dreamed of just a few short years ago. "Yes, she's incredibly happy with it all," confirms Kim. "She visits the catering tent at least every other day, comes into the kitchens to talk to the chefs and find out how it's all going. And she sent me a telegram the other day, which wasn't expected, just to thank all the crew once again. She said she'd been thinking about all the food and how pleased everyone was, and that she couldn't thank everyone enough."
            Actually, the appreciation is mutual, for EYHO has certainly benefited from being involved with the McCartneys. "We've learned so much from being with them," says Kim, "and now it seems that whenever an artist wants vegetarian food they approach us. Also -and not many people know this - before Paul did it with us in 1989/90 no one had ever taken caterers around the world with them, providing for the crew as well as the band. Especially not to America because it's all franchised out there, with unions in every place. Paul stopped that and opened up the market for everyone, so that now an English catering company like us can get work there. Once Paul had done it Morrissey did it, then U2, then Rod Stewart. I'm not even sure if he's aware of this, and I've often wanted to say thank you to him."
            (He's aware of it now, Kim.)