TWO COOKS.(Fergus Henderson )(Alain Passard)

On an overcast, gray-to-white London summer morning, the British chef Fergus Henderson is standing and staring reverently at the edge of Smithfield, the great meat market in the East End. If it is still reasonably early by restaurant standards, it is late in the day by those of a wholesale market; though Smithfield, an arcaded nineteenth-century affair of bright-painted cast-iron arches and venders' stalls, is beginning to close for the day, it still hums with a sense of sociable business ritual. Wholesalers in straw hats pack up their bacon and chops and trotters, some in Cryovac, some in shiny brown butcher paper.

Henderson's relationship to Smithfield these days is largely spiritual--he gets most of the meat for his nearby restaurant, St. John, from private country suppliers and small boutique slaughterhouses--but it is still an enchanted place for him. "It's a bit of a closed society, with its own customs and traditions," he says. "And it represents a certain tradition that began before pink-in-plastic." ("Pink-in-plastic" is Henderson's dismissive name for supermarket meat.) "For centuries, using the whole beast was the common sense of the market. Embrace your carcass and you'll be richer and happier."

Fergus Henderson is a man in love with meat. He even looks like an English butcher. His face is florid, with the raspberry blush that one associates with the kind of all-right-then-dearie butcher who might appear in a Boulting Brothers comedy of the fifties. Since he opened St. John, in 1995, he has become famous for his devotion to the odd bits of ordinary animals. Ox tongue and tripe, lambs' brains and pigs' heads, stuffed lambs' hearts and rolled pigs' spleen: St. John has returned them to the repertory of the world's "high" cooking, while Henderson's book "Nose to Tail Eating"--which for a long time had to be bought in the United States on a gray market of second-hand copies, where prices could sometimes reach a hundred dollars--has become the "Ulysses" of the whole food-Slow Food movement, a plea for the fullness of life that begins with a man eating innards. (It has at last been published in America, under the slightly cosmeticized name of "The Whole Beast.")

Henderson starts walking the block and a half back to his restaurant. "The squirrels, I suppose," he says, after a moment's pause. He has been asked if any particular adventures in heterodoxy caused comment in London. "Squirrel is delicious--like an oily wild rabbit. We had some that had been trapped by keepers in the country, and I decided to do a whole plate of them. Re-create the forest floor: wilted greens, to suggest the bosky woods they come from. Rather poetic, the whole thing. But somehow serving squirrels created quite a stir."

St. John, a converted nineteenth-century smokehouse, has two rooms: a twenty-foot-high sky-lit, cathedral-ceilinged front room, where the bar and bakery are, and the dining room, just beyond. The dining room is large and whitewashed; a row of knobs and hooks for coats goes around the room, giving it the air of an eighteenth-century eating house or tavern, though the open space is unlike any actual eighteenth-century tavern--it's more Saatchi collection than Cheshire Cheese, a hint, perhaps, that archaism and modernism are in more complicated relation here than is evident at first glimpse, or smell. The kitchen seems to be visible from the dining room, but, as Henderson says, "It's a very tricky kind of openness. You can't actually see inside. It's the Mt. Fuji principle borrowed from Japanese prints. You should never see the whole of Mt. Fuji, you know." Henderson shows off the restaurant's tiny, cool larder. Inside a steel drawer, a suckling piglet lies waiting to be eaten, its feet curled up comfortably, its eyes closed, its face smiling. It has been specially ordered, and will be roasted and served later that week, nose to tail.

Over Hobbit-like elevenses (seed cake and Madeira), Henderson begins to talk about the ascent that has turned him, at forty-two, into a public figure widely viewed in his homeland as a cross between Jamie Oliver and Sweeney Todd--an image that he sustains with a complex and comic irony. "Isn't the ...