64 The Times Magazinen a fashionable east London restaurant,
a fraught chef is on the verge of
unravelling on the busiest night of the
year. It is overbooked with demanding
guests and the pressure-cooker
environment is causing screaming
matches in the kitchen. This is the
plot of the nerve-jangling film Boiling
Point, starring Stephen Graham.
Just a ten-minute walk down the
road from the joint where it was filmed in
Dalston, a real chef was in a hell’s kitchen of
his own, about to buckle under the weight
of his addictions. Thirty-eight-year-old
restaurateur Adam Hardiman saw a disturbing
amount of himself in Graham’s spiralling head
chef. So much so that he became convinced
it was based on him.
His friend Andy Jones runs the restaurant
where Boiling Point was filmed, Jones & Sons.
As Hardiman watched it, he texted Jones
saying, “ ‘Was this based on me?’ For real.
I thought it was paranoia, but some of my
old chefs worked for him, and he didn’t reply
or answer me. So I still don’t know.”
The screen he watched the film on was
considerably smaller than he had originally
planned. Jones had invited him to the movie’s
premiere at the Rio Cinema in Dalston. But
instead, Hardiman watched it on a television
in rehab, sitting on a sofa with other patients.
“I watched it a week into rehab. If I had
watched it on day one or two, I probably
would have smashed the place up,” he says.
While he stayed in a rehab clinic, Step
by Step Recovery, the restaurant he owns,
Madame Pigg, closed. I live nearby and
have eaten there lots of times. I had no idea
that, just a few feet away from my table, the
chef was in meltdown. When you walk into
Madame Pigg from Dalston’s hectic Kingsland
Road, it feels like you have stumbled into
someone’s cool living room. The pink walls
are decorated with modern art; Swiss cheese
plants dangle from the shelves. The young,
fashionable crowd it attracts must raise their
voices to be heard above the funky jazz and
Nineties groove. “If you want a quiet, candlelit
dinner where you don’t want to hear another
person, then don’t eat here,” he says.
A whole fried sea bass will arrive at your
table complete with its head and tail, standing
up on a bed of spiralised vegetables. The
modern British menu changes daily, but that’s
one of his signature dishes, along with the
porchetta with burnt apple puree, green beans
and bone marrow gravy. Seasonal ingredients
are sourced at Billingsgate and local markets.
The food is inspired by his grandmother’s
cooking, the “Madame” after whom the
restaurant is named. Pictures of her are
hung on the walls next to portraits of David
Bowie and an image of the Virgin Mary.Rather than the traditional chef’s whites
that Graham’s character wears, Hardiman
cooks in a T-shirt, his tattooed arms on
display. The pressure to fulfil the orders in a
fully booked restaurant, as seen in Boiling
Point, feels very real to him. On a Sunday,
their busiest day of the week, “I probably
turn a full restaurant of people away,” he says.
They serve 160 roasts then, turning the tables
four times. The pressure lies squarely on him:
“I do everything. I’m the only chef. It’s my
own doing, because I wanted full control.
Can I do drugs with another person in the
kitchen? Probably not – not as comfortably
as I want to,” he says.
As things go wrong in the Boiling Point
restaurant – from allergic reactions to
irritating influencers – blistering spats break
out between Graham’s character and his
kitchen staff. Hardiman has done the same,
swearing and sniping at his team of ten. “I’ve
got so much guilt,” he says. “I haven’t been
nice to people. I have abused them verbally.
It was difficult for my staff to work for me.
It wasn’t a particularly nice environment.
I tell him that I had my birthday do, a roast
with friends, at his restaurant one Sunday in
October. He recognises my face but admits, “I
was probably off my nut.” It would have been
two months before he went into rehab. Did he
have the manner of someone who was highthat day? He certainly had a frantic, tornado-
like energy, then and all the other times I have
visited. He dashes manically around his small
restaurant, chatting to his customers, and always
has a compliment, delivered with a grin, for
the outlandish clothes my friends and I wear.
He still has that fidgety energy when we
speak, rolling the sleeves of his white hoodie
up and down and puffing on his vape. He
speaks confidently and quickly, his voice
breaking and catching occasionally as he
recounts the difficult details of the 20 years
he was “a functioning drug addict” working
18-hour days. Several times, he makes it clear
that, before rehab, this conversation would
have made him so uncomfortable that he
would have had to be high to do it, if at all.
He grew up in St Ives, Cambridgeshire,
a “fat kid” whose first addiction, he tells me,
was sweets and chocolates. After getting in
with his older sister’s crowd, he moved on to
alcohol at 11. “I remember starting secondary
school feeling really uncomfortable, thinking,
‘I hate this. I don’t like going to school.’ ” It was
then he started drinking more alcohol. If he
and his friends had £10, they would smoke
a bong, but that was “nothing out of the
ordinary”, he says. He got his first job in a
kitchen at the age of 13, making sandwiches
and buns at a local café. He was sacked for
giving away bacon baps.I
Hardiman at Madame Pigg.
Right: Stephen Graham as
the head chef in two scenes
from the film Boiling PointKATIE WILSON, ALAMY