Quote Originally Posted by chris williams View Post
Hi Nick, I also met Keith but on a totally unexpected and informal occasion. It was a Monday noon in Melbourne autumn (drizzle..) also I think in 1990. I was meeting some shipping mates for an early lunch at my local, Station Hotel, Prahran. The 'Men's Bar' was a grand old Victorian pub with a railway track and model trains running round the side of the walls.

There was this very strange character wearing a full-length Drizabone and an Akubra hat sitting in the corner ordering triple whiskies every few minutes in this pukkah Pommie voice. I was drinking one on one but with pots' Sort of half-pint glass size' of VB for every one of his supersized whiskies. When he ordered a Four And Twenty pie and tomato sauce (the equivalent of a Pommie tourist ordering Mopane worms or a boerie roll over here..) I could not believe it...

He asked me what I was doing there and I said I was waiting for some friends. He told me he was doing a TV series in Aussie and he had just been for a tour round the MCG and the local Museum and he was bored sh'tless and he stumbled (probably literally..) upon this pub. Anyway my friends who weren't exactly slow in coming forward joined us and we had one of the funniest and longest lunches I can recall! for every time the train came past where we were sitting we had to have another round..He told us his name was Keith - we had never heard of him then! What a character!
Great story Chris, he was one of those guys who on meeting you for the first time would speak and welcome you like he had know you for years...
As i said i spent time with him after a meeting with one of his chefs at Hotel Olympia at Earls court,i asked if i could come down and brush up on a few classic dishes they where serving at the time,i stayed for 10 days of which 4 of them are a blur.......I asked him what the key to a succseful lunch was,he said
"a good lunch is one that overlaps into dinner",
so on 2 occasions the head chef and keith showed me what he mean't we even tested his second theory that a good dinner will run into breakfast.