It started with a phone call and ended on a motorbike, so recalled the then-Margot Clayton. “I was working at The Eagle in Farringdon,” she says, “and I met Fergus and his sister Annabelle there one Sunday.” The following day, Annabelle Henderson pops back into The Eagle, and Margot sends some information back down the wire. “I said, ‘Oh, your brother and I should open a restaurant together.’” Fergus, an architect and west London gourmand of some repute by this stage in 1991, was intrigued. “He called me that night and said, ‘I don’t know why we haven’t thought of it before. When do you finish work?’”	

Sensing the need for an elaborate entrance, Margot called upon The Eagle’s owner and head chef, David Eyre, to assist. “David had just built an amazing motorbike in the basement, and he took it out through the beer flaps on to the street. I got on the back of it, and sped down Farringdon Road to meet Fergus.” That evening, they mostly talked about coriander. “And then we fell madly in love and never spent another night apart.”

So begins our love story – a story so woven into 

 that it feels, all these years later, like its foundational myth. Fergus and Margot Henderson, thirty-three years on from that herb chat-by-candlelight, have four restaurants, three children, two OBEs and a pub between them. 

food critic Jay Rayner describes them as “chef poets-in-chief,” and the metre of their culinary outlook has remained pleasingly, enduringly rigid as the world around it has changed. Indeed, Fergus’ restaurant, St. JOHN, marked its 30th birthday this year by restoring his unaltered menu to its 1994 prices.

“I remember our first ever interview together,” Margot tells me, chatting against the pleasingly quotidian hum of her own restaurant, Shoreditch’s Rochelle Canteen. “Fergus just always had this knack of giving beautiful answers, which I probably copy a bit.” Margot gives most of the couple’s answers, as Parkinson’s disease limits Fergus’s speech these days, but as we sit together on the last sunny morning of the year, memories of London’s past and love’s present stir easily in the pair. When Margot arrived in London from Wellington, New Zealand in 1984, “three forces” ran the restaurant scene: Simon Hopkinson, Rowley Leigh and Alastair Little, kings of Chelsea, Kensington and Soho respectively. “Their cookbooks were right next to us most days.” Margot’s career began in humbler surroundings. “Pizza Express in Wimbledon Village – I took the job the day I got here, I even got the certificate in pizzology.”

Shuffling from kitchen to kitchen on the eternally dismal wage packet of a trainee chef, Margot would crash out after work each night at the 24hr Polo Bar cafe on Liverpool Street, for cheap, strong cocktails and mammoth bowls of pasta. Unbeknownst to her at the time, Fergus was likely doing the same in the other corner of the cafe. “I always had the pesto,” Fergus interjects. “The pesto was really good. I ate so much I turned green.” Working in the National Gallery and living in the Post Office Tower “in a council flat with no bath”, Margot would pass through buzzy Greek Street in Soho each day, marvelling at the unreachable, gilded L’Escargot, the neighbourhood’s oldest dining room. “I always vowed I’d go in one day.” When a wealthy cousin came to stay, Margot got her wish, “and it was so glamorous and wonderful, but the bill was a whole month’s pay for me.”

Fergus was altogether more experienced with Soho’s 

, and the capital’s. Born to a well-heeled, sybaritic architecture family, Henderson had, by some estimation, eaten everywhere of repute in the city, from Mayfair brasserie Langan’s and Smith’s in Covent Garden to his beloved Sweetings in the Square Mile. “Fergus has had the same waiter there for fifty years, Angelo,” Margot says of the restaurant he would later propose to her inside. For their first date, he had somewhere yet more special in mind for Margot. “If you went down this tiny little alleyway running next to the Royal Opera House, there was the private members’ club, Two Brydges Place.” The pair ate sausages and mash while the artist Peter Doig tended bar. “It was heaven.”

Now that they’d got the romance out of the way, Fergus and Margot could return to the original point of their phone call: opening a restaurant together. “We knew each other for about three weeks, but we were pretty close already with our vision for it.” They found a relatively disused kitchen above The French House in Soho, the claret-stained den of iniquity famed and named, so the legend goes, for refreshing the exiled Charles de Gaulle as he penned his rallying speeches. “I knew it as a place to get free drinks off of dirty old men,” Margot remembers.

Fergus brought the feel, Margot brought the food. At first, the strength of Fergus’ vision was a bit startling. “He wanted the staff to wear patrol jackets, I didn’t get it at all. ‘It’s not that kind of place,’ I said. ‘But it is,’ he said. And then I got it. And it was brilliant.” Their food in 1992 was much as it is now – sparse, unadorned, built outwards from first principles. “We made our own puff pastry, we made our ice cream.” One early experiment did get shelved: fresh eels. “We couldn’t kill them. Even with their heads off, they kept moving – that was so scary. We had to use smoked ones instead.”

So came the first thrums of success. The legendary anatomical pig now synonymous with Fergus made its first appearance on the chalkboard of The French House; the pair’s first interview hit the shelves in the Independent’s “big, lovely” weekend magazine, “and we went running to the shops to get it,” Margot beams. Soon after, Fergus and their maître d’, Jon Spiteri, were offered the chance to inhabit a set of old smokehouses next to Smithfield meat market by restaurateur, Trevor Gulliver. St. JOHN opened in October 1994, while Margot assumed control of The French House with Spiteri’s then-wife, Melanie Arnold.

Margot’s first impression of St. JOHN remains both as brilliant-white (and sepia-tinted) thirty years on as the walls were back then. “It did look pretty chic – like nowhere you’d ever been. And of course, we were all smoking!” The restaurant was incredibly busy from its opening day, “and then you get the dip,” Margot points out: the inevitable, and sometimes fatal, business slowdown after the initial rush that really tests the mettle of your culinary vision. “The dip kept going and going. I was shouting, ‘put some chips on the menu! Fuck the bone marrow!’ And Fergus really did say, ‘it’ll be okay, stick with it, stick with it.’” (The Roast Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad is on today’s menu at £16.50, and remains their most popular order.)		

As Fergus rooted himself in Smithfield, Margot and Melanie Arnold continued cooking from Soho, while branching out into the weirder, wilder kitchens of the capital through a side-business of party-throwing. “We’ve cooked in gentlemen’s clubs, they’re fun to take over. There’s Freemasons Hall, too, although we don’t host dinners in the room with the big chair.” The pair left The French House in 2001, and pushed on with their catering company, drily named Arnold & Henderson to explicitly evoke that of an austere law firm.	

With the pair’s reputations blooming independent of one another as chefs, they dovetailed as diners during this time – it was from near here, around the turn of the millennium, that a Henderson table-for-two became the closest thing to a Papal visit that London’s restaurants could receive. “Ikeda, in Mayfair – our children practically grew up from babies under their table. The Ivy, too, the original one. I remember bringing Hector in there in his giant bassinet when he must’ve been five days old, I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.”

Through the ructions of life, work and fame – the birth of their three children, Fergus’ Parkinson’s diagnosis, and the Sisyphean grind innate to working in hospitality – home life was paramount for the pair. “We were together, and that’s why it worked. We’d alternate on who would cook the kids’ dinner, depending on who had the evening shift, and after eating we’d sit up talking about the restaurants all night.” Margot commends Fergus for his patience for one particularly trying time, as Arnold and Henderson catered a 500 person event from the family flat. “We destroyed our kitchen. We were using whole rooms as fridges, throwing out the kids’ toys and opening up the windows.”

Rochelle Canteen, Margot’s metropole in the sprawling Henderson empire, began as respite from this predicament, and has transformed, although its evolution has been incremental. Starting out as a communal staff canteen in the bike sheds of an old Victorian school, Margot – once more in partnership with Melanie Arnold – was not initially welcomed by the neighbours. “We had oranges thrown at us,” Margot laughs, aghast, “Oranges! There were really naughty little kids. We did a big event in here, and Mrs. Prada was there, and they threw stones and oranges. There was blood. People were running for their cars!”

With time, though, followed acceptance and expansion, first gaining a licence to open in the evenings, then building a glass-roof canopy during COVID. For a restaurant without any kind of street presence (a small buzzer on an old black door is the only give- away), it has always been hard to get a table. Today, there is a different Henderson at the helm of Rochelle Canteen: Hector is the restaurant’s present head chef, supported in front-of-house by his sister Frances. Among the staff are those same children of friends and colleagues who came to the open houses at The Eagle, the lock-ins at The French House, the long, raucous St. JOHN lunches. Out in the city, too, are the protégés who have passed through the Henderson’s kitchens, and taken some time to learn at their feet. “Lee Tiernan at Black Axe Mangal, he’s a brilliant chef. You really feel that he listened to Fergus, got it, then did his own thing with it.”

Then there’s Tim Siadatan of Trullo and Padella. “Clear vision,” as Margot puts it, “always going to do his own thing.” Anna Hansen, too, who started out as a kitchen porter at The French House, and climbed the ranks before opening The Modern Pantry in Clerkenwell. But sometimes, Margot cautions, “we’ve been to people’s places, and said ‘God, well, they didn’t learn anything’. Other times, I think, chefs are dying to get away from us.”

From their favoured vantage point, a midday lunch reservation, Fergus and Margot have watched as the city they fell in love in faded into the rearview – as all cities do – only to come alive all over again for the generation ahead. “I love the idea that we can travel around London now, eating really well. Before, you had to go to Soho, and now it’s everywhere.” Not least Marylebone and Spitalfields, where St. JOHN now finds its outposts; nor Margot’s chocolate-box pub in verdant Somerset, The Three Horseshoes, her first business venture beyond metropolitan city limits.

That said, the Soho of today seems to have held onto the ineffable energy of the Hendersons’ heyday. “I absolutely love Mountain, I love it. It’s a great room. There’s so much going on. I love a busy restaurant. The French House, too.” The French House’s kitchen is currently run by Neil Borthwick, and very much cooks in their guileful, uncomplicated tradition. “Neil’s doing such a great job. I think I found it harder to deal with Neil than when anyone else was there, because it was so perfect!”

Closest to their hearts for a long, long time was the old Jade Garden in nearby Chinatown. “When I met Fergus, I really learned how to eat in Cantonese restaurants.” Poached chicken, pigeon, scallops in the shell, wind-dried meats; turnip cake, Char Sui buns and mounds and mounds of sour, spicy, slippery jellyfish.

“Always order jellyfish,” advises Margot. “It shows them that you’re serious, that you want the whole lot.” Fergus raises his eyebrows mischievously. “The wobbly bits.” But after years of hosting staff parties and family birthdays, the Jade Garden fell victim to an appropriately unforgivable offence. “They tried to jazz it up,” Margot says, still shaking her head, and rubbing Fergus by the shoulder. “We like places that never change.”

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