The Times Magazine 65His life changed at 19 when he became
severely ill and ended up in intensive care
with a perforated bowel. He was fitted with
an ileostomy bag given to Crohn’s patients,
an external waste bag which sits on his
stomach. “They gave me every drug under
the sun,” he says.
Until then, he’d smoked marijuana but
never tried Class A drugs. His disease gave him
access to a steady supply of free prescription
drugs. “I ruined a year of an ex-girlfriend’s life,
because I just trawled her around trying to
find walk-in centres where I could get any
drug possible,” he says. “All I had to do was
lift up my top and go, ‘I’ve got 68 staples
in my stomach. Give me another box of
tramadol. Give me another box of codeine.’ ”
He was high on codeine and tramadol
when he went to Caffè Nero in Cambridge for
his interview to work in Jamie’s Italian, after
spotting an advert on Gumtree that said,
“Jamie Needs You”. They were short of chefs
and hired him despite his main culinary
experience being running a small pizza
restaurant. “I worked my bollocks off and
there was a lot of bullying, but I didn’t take
any of it,” he says. In the year he worked
there, he was “abusing the f*** out of
prescription drugs”. Spiralling, he even, briefly,
sold cocaine to a kitchen porter, but when he
found out that one of the chefs regularly did
cocaine, he was taken aback. “I was like, what
the f***? He’s working on cocaine? How can
he do a line of cocaine and serve? Even
though I was selling it.” But, soon, “Boom,
I was taking coke every single day.”
He moved to London with £30 and
nowhere to live, and began working in pub
kitchens, where the drugs culture was even
more rife. In one early job, by which time
Hardiman was taking 30 tramadol a day, the
head chef had “weird tics” from cocaine. On
his first day, a member of the team came over
to him holding a chart and asked, “What’s
your name again? Adam?” When Hardiman
asked why, he replied, “Just write your name
and how many lines you do.” Again, he was
shocked. “Even me, a user, somebody that
abused drugs, thought that was weird.”
The kind of substance abuse in kitchens he
describes is no secret. Neither is the punishing
working culture of restaurants that fuels it- 51 per cent of people who worked in London
kitchens confessed to debilitating stress and
depression in a 2017 survey. Several celebrity
chefs have spoken out about their struggles
with addiction. Phil Howard has said he used
crack cocaine as a coping mechanism at his
restaurant the Square, while Michelin-starred
and now teetotal chef Tom Kerridge has
spoken about his addiction to alcohol.
Hardiman went out on his own and
founded Madame Pigg in November 2018.
It was there that he met his girlfriend, Alessia
Farnesi. He spotted her eating one of his
dishes, followed her on Instagram and sent
her a message saying he’d booked a table for
them at his restaurant at 9.30pm.
When Farnesi is not working as a fashion
stylist, she is his maître d’. Her mother, Myra
Williams-Heffernan, also helps three days
a week in the kitchen. Every night before
service, the staff sit down together to have
“family dinner”, where Hardiman feeds them
the new dishes on the menu. It’s a ritual he
picked up working in some of the capital’s
leading restaurants.
His business was booming for 18 months,
then the pandemic hit. He could no longer
afford to pay six of his staff and downsized
the team when they reopened. Disaster struck
again in July last year, when he burnt his
hand in the kitchen and developed a serious
infection. After three operations, he was told
he could lose a finger.
The injury stopped him from cooking and
Madame Pigg was forced to close for weeks.
He posted a desperate funding appeal on
Instagram to “Save Madame Pigg”. It read,
“After having the most amazing first years
in business and bringing my dream and now
many others to life, the pandemic hits. I don’t
have a bankroll of cash to fall back on as I’m
the sole director... I need money to pay my
team, to pay my rent and literally keep the
lights on... ” The initial fundraising campaign
raised £4,000, plus £20,000 from one donor,
enough to keep the doors open.
That summer, on an average working day he
would be slugging Jameson whiskey, snorting
cocaine and swallowing Valium. He thought,
“How am I getting away with this? Like, how
the f*** am I getting away with turning over
half a million pounds, being a drug-riddled
addict, going through Covid? That’s obviously
because of how hard I worked.”
When even his butcher was telling him
to stop putting the “sherbet” up his nose,
he knew he needed help. But he wouldn’t
accept it “because of what I thought a man
should be, not seeking help”, he says. There
were two voices in his head. One said, “I can
cope on my own. I’ve built Madame Pigg
on my own. I used to run nine pubs on my
own. I don’t need a counsellor.” But the other
voice said, “I need help. I’ve lost to drugs.”
In December, when he reached his own
“boiling point”, the second voice won out.
He checked into rehab.
Since posting about his sobriety on
Instagram, he has received thousands of
messages from people asking for help. He
sends them the administrator of Step by Step’s
phone number, but it’s the young chefs who
are struggling in silence that he worries about.
“A lot of people will have watched Boiling
Point in denial. I don’t know what percentage
of chefs are addicts, but it’s high.”
While he was lucky enough to be able
to “pay shitloads of money” to go to rehab,
he realises that many young people in the
industry won’t have the means to do the same.
Now sober, he is back at the helm of
Madame Pigg. “If I take another drug or
drink, I’m going to die. It really is that simple
for me. That doesn’t mean I don’t get cold
sweats thinking about it now.” He has to
return to work – it’s his livelihood and he
wants the restaurant to survive – but it’s a
daily struggle to fight against his muscle
memory. “I walk past a fridge and I go to pick
up a bottle of wine. Wrappers on cigarette
packets remind me of gear. I go to the toilet
without wanting to go to the toilet and I go to
do a line, even though I’m not going to do a
line. It’s my brain. I can’t go to the toilet on
my own; Alessia has to come with me. It’s
really that sad. But for me to save my life,
I’m going to do everything.”
What does life after addiction look like
for Hardiman? First on his to-do list is to
remove Elton John’s I’m Still Standing from
his restaurant playlist, after the song played
on repeat in rehab. Aside from that, “All
I can do is cook, keep my nose clean –
which I will do – and repay people in my
beautiful restaurant.” n‘IF I TAKE ANOTHER DRUG
OR DRINK, I’M GOING TO
DIE. IT’S THAT SIMPLE’