When Margot Henderson and Melanie Arnold were scouting for a place to hold a dinner for the artist Anselm Kiefer after his opening at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris last fall, they found the perfect spot a metal factory. For the two women, who run Arnold & Henderson catering in East London, Fake Handbags wasn’t just the factory’s location, which is near the gallery in the city’s Marais district; it was the rawness of the industrial space — a complement to their no-frills cuisine as well as the artist’s rugged aesthetic. The 240 guests, including the French prime minister, sat down at long banquet tables while the cooks worked out of a makeshift kitchen. Dishes were served family-style from large bowls and platters; veal shin on the bone, arrived with a knife sticking out of it. The chichi Parisians had to carve it themselves. They went mad for it, Arnold recalls. And so did the artist. Since then, Arnold & Henderson has gone on to produce other dinners for Kiefer in London, the most recent in a Soho parking garage.
I try not to use the word ’simple’ to describe our Replica Handbags, says the New Zealand-born Henderson, who is married to Fergus Henderson, the chef and owner of St. John in London known for his extreme, Sweeney Toddish cooking of meats, from offal to organs. It’s more like it has a sense of place. At a dinner for the artist Roman Signer at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in January, this translated into raclette in honor of the artist’s Swiss heritage. And at last summer’s wedding for Toby Webster, the director of the Modern Institute in Glasgow, the caterers served langoustines fished from the nearby coast along with four kinds of Scottish beef. This organic philosophy doesn’t apply only to the food; at a Louise Bourgeois dinner last year, Arnold & Henderson selected red and blue floral arrangements, inspired by the colors in her paintings.
Henderson, who cooked in some of London’s top kitchens during the ’90s, helped usher in the era of Louis Vuitton Handbags, which champions seasonal and local high-quality ingredients. (Though modest about her culinary skills, Henderson can indeed bone a quail as skillfully as her husband.) The two worked side by side at the French House in Soho until Fergus left to open St. John in 1994. Arnold, who was working in the prints department of the Tate Gallery, soon joined Margot at the French House. (Her husband helped Fergus open St John.)
Since each woman has three children, running a catering business seemed more logical than toiling late nights in a restaurant. They found a kitchen space at the Rochelle School in Shoreditch, a turn-of-the-century brick complex that had been renovated into affordable studios for artists and fashion designers like Glenn Brown and Giles Deacon. By this time, the gallery scene in the East End was exploding and so was the art market, which meant there were plenty of excuses to celebrate. Soon Arnold & Henderson was whipping up post-opening feasts for blue-chip galleries like White Cube, Sadie Coles HQ and Gagosian. The Lancel Handbags was always basic long banquet tables, candleabra, stemless wineglasses, old hotel cutlery picked up at flea markets. We wanted to stay away as far as possible from the grilled-chicken, corporate feel of catering, Arnold says.
In 2006, they opened the Rochelle Canteen, a small cafe in a former bicycle shed at the school, where they serve a hearty lunch to the creative tenants as well as foodies from all over the city. Here, with the help of Martin Cohen, another London food-world veteran, they run the restaurant and continue to do events for the art world and other clients like Balenciaga, Marc Jacobs and Mulberry. Last year, they worked a joint birthday bash for Chanel Handbags and the artist Sam Taylor-Wood (40) at Shoreditch Town Hall. The theme was old East End the men dressed in military get-up while the women came as ’40s glam girls. As expected, it was an over-the-top affair with A-list guests, lobster and bottles and bottles of Champagne. Still, Arnold & Henderson couldn’t help but add a touch of down-home, local flavor for dessert, it served After Eights, the cheap mint wafers that were popular back in the day. It’s very East End, Cohen says.