Fairlie was taking a break in the Far East in January before plunging into the most important project of his life — serving the leaders of the G8 nations at the Gleneagles summit. That would crown a career that has already garnered two Michelin stars and three Scottish chef of the year awards.
But in his bedroom in the resort of Muime he suddenly felt something strange in his left hand. “We’d been there three weeks,” he recalls, “and I’d never felt physically better in my life. I was getting energised for the G8. I’d just had a shower and was about to put on some sun lotion when . . . bang . . . this thing came into my hand. It was like it was on fire. I tried to throw the bottle away but I couldn’t. A pain travelled up my arm into my chest. I tried to scream but I couldn’t do that either.”
The first signs of the brain tumour that was to lay Fairlie low for two months were profoundly shocking, he says, the classic life-flashing-before-your-eyes scenario. In five seconds he saw visions of his two children, and of ending up in a wheelchair. He had time to reflect on the oddity of dying in a Vietnamese hotel bedroom. “I decided quickly that I was having a stroke,” he says. He collapsed and woke up surrounded by a doctor, his girlfriend, Annie, and several hotel workers. The doctor diagnosed dehydration.
In his four years at Gleneagles, Fairlie has established himself as the conscience of Scottish cooking, a high-style puritan whose creations eschew gimmickry and reframe the verities of classic French cuisine in a modern Caledonian vernacular.
He trained under Michel Guérard in Les Prés d’Eugénie, won his first Michelin star at One Devonshire Gardens in Glasgow and has turned his Gleneagles restaurant into one of the most consistently hailed, high-spec establishments in the country, an unofficial canteen in the overlapping worlds of ultra-wealth, showbusiness and golf. He already had plenty going for him before the brain tumour and, bizarrely, feels he has even more after: “The one thing I didn ’t want was Mo Mowlam headlines,” he says over lunch in Glasgow (his work at Gleneagles is, for the moment, part-time). “Because, on the whole, having a brain tumour has been a positive experience.”
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A few days after his first attack Fairlie, 41, returned to his flat in the west end of Glasgow in a fug of fatigue and jet lag, determined to exercise himself back to full fitness. He was preparing to go on a run one morning, however, when a familiar sensation appeared again in his left hand. This time he could manage a yelp of distress, bringing Annie to witness his full-scale, six-minute seizure. “I was beginning to resign myself to adult epilepsy,” he says. A series of blood tests at the Western Infirmary showed nothing amiss, but Fairlie was also given CT and MRI scans. He returned for the results a week later. “The doctor asked if I had anything to report,” says Fairlie. “I told him no, I felt great. Then he said, ‘Well, I’m afraid I do . . .’ ”
He didn’t have to be a doctor, he reflects, to know that the four-inch white streak along the right side of his cranial x-ray meant bad news in the extreme. Before visiting a neurologist to have the diagnosis of a tumour confirmed, Fairlie and his girlfriend spent an evening at the cinema, watching the film Sideways, then bumped into the television presenter Dougie Donnelly and his wife, Linda: “How do you tell someone you have a brain tumour?” asks Fairlie. “It was absolutely surreal. They were floored, they didn’t know what the hell to say. I felt terrible for putting this thing on them.”
The tumour turned out to have been growing there for more than a year. Fairlie was given the option of immediate surgery or a fortnight’s wait during which more tests would be carried out. “I asked the neurosurgeon what he’d do if he had a brain tumour,” Fairlie recalls. “He said he’d wait for the tests, so that was good enough for me.” Surgery, his doctor Vakis Papanastassiou at Glasgow’s Southern General told him, could have any of three outcomes: death, paralysis or complete recovery, though the latter was the likeliest. “He didn’t hide the fact there’d be some debilitation after the operation but he assured me he’d limit the damage and that I wouldn’t die. He told me I wouldn’t be able to throw a cricket ball with my left hand as far as I could before surgery. It didn’t seem much of a sacrifice.”
Strangely, Archie Forrest, the artist whose paintings adorn the dark walls of Fairlie’s luxuriously intimate restaurant, was diagnosed with testicular cancer around the same time, creating a mutual support group for the two men.
In the meantime, the rumour mill in the gossipy restaurant world had begun to churn. Fairlie counts off the claims: “I had cancer, I’d had a brain haemorrhage, I was in a coma, the restaurant was up for sale, all kinds of things.” When even the restaurant’s diners began inquiring about the rumours, Fairlie told his staff formally. “I was beginning to find the whole business ridiculous,” he says. “The idea that because someone owns a restaurant then their tumour is more noteworthy than Joe Bloggs’s tumour.”
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To the militant coward, Fairlie’s brusque, practical attitude to his tumour and surgery defy full comprehension, particularly when he says the prospect of surgery hardly troubled him. To hear him talk, the saga was no more problematic than finding a new sous chef or juggling a schedule. The discipline of running a Michelin-level kitchen clearly breeds a kind of phlegmatic steeliness that’s alien to less focused individuals. The night before the operation, on March 16, Annie and her friend Vivian shaved Fairlie’s head. The operation itself took seven hours, with Fairlie’s skull sawn through and lifted off.
“The only aspect of the experience that bothered me was the association with cancer,” he says. “I call it the tumour, I don’t see it as a form of cancer, though obviously it was. I hate the word cancer, I hate the term, I hate that people might think I had it. I had a growth in my head, as far as I’m concerned, and that’s it.”
As predicted, Fairlie came out with some weakness in his left arm, which physiotherapy has now limited to two fingers. As ever, his handshake with the other hand is wincingly firm. His hair has grown back to cover the operation scars. “It was like taking two weeks off work with gastric flu,” he says. “It was really no big deal. I was told to expect some heavy retarded shock, but that hasn’t happened either.”
He has, though, recently bought a flat in Auchterarder to limit his daily commute and foresees changes in his relationship with the restaurant: “The 14-hour days are at an end, that’s for certain,” he says.
The staff he trained can now perform the basic kitchen functions such as vegetable preparation better than he can “and certainly quicker”, he says, flexing his two weak fingers. He has headed Andrew Fairlie at Gleneagles for four years now and could easily take on an executive chef role or franchise himself in the same way as his former mentor Gordon Ramsay, but Fairlie remains dedicated to the creative purity and freedom he has found in Perthshire. “The temptation’s always been there to go and do other things or endorse certain products, but I look at Gordon, he has £10m and eight restaurants and he’s on the David Letterman show and I have no idea how he does it. I don’t have the skill or intellect to carry that off. I got into this to be a great restaurateur and to wear my white jacket with pride, not to appear on Ready Steady Cook.”
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Restrictions placed by the Commonwealth Office mean he can’t reveal what will be on his G8 menus, though it’s a safe bet his smoked lobster will make an appearance. Equally, Fairlie is resigned to the presence of secret service agents in his kitchen over the summit’s length, to prevent any possible poisonings, deliberate or otherwise, of the American president.
“In a way, the G8 dinners represent less pressure than a normal night in the restaurant,” he says. “It’s two dinners of 30 set meals, which is a lot easier than doing 44 à la carte meals. We’ve always dealt with wealthy, celebrity world travellers at Gleneagles. The real challenge is to make people who’re not accustomed to that environment feel comfortable. That, to me, is more satisfying than knowing you’re making Tony Blair’s dinner.”