Good morning, and welcome to Vittles Restaurants. In today’s special dispatch from Issue 1 of our magazine, Adam Coghlan interviews London’s most influential restaurant critic Fay Maschler about a seminal year in dining in the capital: 1987.

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Fay Maschler is a phenomenon. For forty-eight years, she documented the London restaurant industry as the critic for the Evening Standard, having won a competition to write a column for just three months in 1972. Soon she became, according to the Guardian, ‘the only woman who makes Michelin-starred chefs tremble.’ Her longevity and dedication to uncovering good restaurants has meant she is one of the very few British critics remaining who has wielded extraordinary influence over both their profession and the industry about which they write.

In 1987, when Fay was fifteen years into the job, the London restaurant scene changed in profound ways. Some of the most celebrated and important venues in the history of the city opened over the course of twelve remarkable months – the River Cafe, Kensington Place, Bibendum, and Harveys – all run by chefs who would later be celebrated as the progenitors of the ‘modern British’ movement. ‘The hard edges and shiny surfaces of Kensington Place … were reverberating last Monday as inveterate restaurant goers were checking out what a young British chef does these days when left to write his own card,’ she wrote in the review of Rowley Leigh’s buzzy new Kensington Place. ‘There is a movement, supported by the likes of Alastair Little…back towards stalwart food, brawny thick-set food to counteract the niminy-piminy of nouvelle cuisine’ she continued. These were restaurants that displayed a new dedication to ingredients, provenance, European regionality, designed rooms, atmosphere, service, technique and, perhaps above all, a set of principles from which the chefs would seldom deviate. All were serious (and less formal) in ways that marked them from the chefs and restaurants that came before. Even today, in gastropubs across the city, small plate restaurants, natural wine bars and places like St. John, the legacy of 1987 can still be felt.

Fay and I met this year, on a crisp, sunny January lunchtime at her home in Fitzrovia, to discuss 1987, a year which began just 35 days after I was born. Over boxes of takeaway sushi and freezer-chilled sake, we discussed the impact of those chefs, what made them different, where they came from, and what it was like to live through such a transformational era.

Adam Coghlan: We know that a lot happened, or rather a lot opened, restaurant-wise, in London in 1987: Harveys, the River Cafe, Bibendum, Kensington Place. Plus, Alastair Little was at his peak and Fergus Henderson was doing pop-ups around that time, I think. Looking back now, what do you remember about that year?

Fay Maschler: I don’t suppose it seemed as phenomenal as it does in retrospect, although in terms of the restaurants that opened it was extraordinary. Marco1 was an extraordinary talent and I’d never eaten food cooked by an English chef that was as good as that. He quickly became known for his temper, and there was a tension to eating there which I quite enjoyed. He never threw me out or anything, but he did say at a later date that I wouldn’t give him five stars because he refused to sleep with me. Which is a slur, but the more you try to get out of that, the deeper you dig yourself in.

But equally exciting was Kensington Place, because it had that floor-to-ceiling frontage of glass; you could watch everybody eating and they could watch you. It was also deliberately hard-edged – I remember, after a few years, Rowley2 presented me with a cushion to sit on because the chairs were uncomfortable. Rowley’s cooking was excellent and the dish that goes on being famous to this day, was the Parmesan custard with anchovy toast. It was up the road from the Evening Standard’s office, and in those days we were allowed to go and hang out in restaurants – people would go for lunch and never come back.

And then the River Café. As everyone now knows, it started out as a canteen for Ruthie[’s]3 husband’s4 architectural practice. But I knew her then: she was a neighbour in Belsize Park when I lived there; I would go down there with Alan Crompton-Batt5 often to try and help them because they hadn’t a clue – neither Rose6 nor Ruthie – about the mechanics of running a restaurant. I remember one day they ran out of, I think, sea bass, and Rose said, ‘I’ll ring Harrods and get some delivered.’ I said, ‘I think you’ll find that isn’t a way to run a restaurant business.’ They were keen and they were sweet and they were lovely, but not living on the same planet as the average restaurant owner.

And Bibendum! Simon7 is probably the best cook I know. I wouldn’t necessarily say the best chef, but the best cook – his food is perfect, and he’s obsessive. I’ve eaten quite often in his flat. Once, he invited Albert Finney8, who was my schoolgirl crush. When I was at school, I went to see Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and fell in love with him. In those days, you thought if you fell in love with somebody, you’d probably marry them, so I would practice writing ‘Yours Fay Finney’ in my rough book at school in order to put that at the end of my letters. Albert was a great drinker and I’d taken … I think it was bigger than a magnum, what’s next … a jeroboam of red wine, which I’d got from Bill Baker9. And we managed to get through the whole thing. Albert said from time to time, ‘Pass Albert’s teapot.’ And then he kissed me.

Adam: Wow. What a moment.

Fay: It was a good kiss.

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Welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today, we have a special issue in which Jonathan Nunn sits down with Chitra Ramaswamy, Scotland restaurant critic for the Times.

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In conversation with The Times’ Chitra Ramaswamy

Chitra Ramaswamy’s name doesn’t always come up when people talk about our national restaurant critics. Though she is a celebrated journalist and author in her own right, she is rarely, if ever, included in lists of review roundups. This isn’t to chastise anyone: even as someone whose job it is to know these things, I only found out that Chitra was reviewing in 2022 after a friend recommended her work to me; at this point, she was already two years into her stint as the restaurant critic for Alba, the Scotland-only supplement of The Times.

Her absence from these circles may have something to do with the marginal position of Scotland in a London-centric media ecosystem. But it may also be because Chitra has a triply-unique role. First of all, she is the only critic whose remit is a single country, rather than London, or the UK. Secondly, her reviews do not sell themselves on bombast, or her personal story, but veer closer to the tradition of informed service journalism, perfected in London by Fay Maschler, or by Jonathan Gold in Los Angeles – restaurant writing for people who might actually go to the restaurant. Thirdly, and I believe this is significant, she is, to the best of my knowledge, the only woman of colour to have ever worked in a British restaurant critic role at a national newspaper.

Over the last few years, I have learnt more from reading Chitra’s work than I have from any other British restaurant writer. Though she has lived in Scotland half her life, she is also an outsider, and her writing is marked by a sense of curiosity and care that I often find missing in our review culture. Though her remit is small, it includes two of the country’s most progressive dining scenes – in Edinburgh and Glasgow – as well as the increasing number of destination restaurants in the countryside and the accompanying revolution in Scottish produce. There is no better time to have this role: I am sure that, in a few decades, Chitra’s backlog of reviews will be one of the most comprehensive primary sources on how the country’s food and restaurant culture has transformed.

I sat down with Chitra last month at Thenga, a vegan café in King’s Cross to talk about how Scottish food has changed in the last 30 years, Glasgow’s and Edinburgh’s differing restaurant scenes, the pitfalls of gentrified bakery discourse, the experience of being a woman of colour in a critic’s position and why you should never make blanket assumptions about anywhere in Scotland. Plus, all the restaurant recommendations you need to scratch the surface of one of the best places in the country to eat.

Jonathan: What is it like to be a restaurant critic in a country that has been routinely insulted, mainly by outsiders, for its food?

Chitra: The interesting thing now is that I don't think Scottish cuisine is derided like that anymore. There's been a huge sea change – I was going to say ‘particularly in the cities’, but actually I don't think it is. I've officially lived in Scotland for more than half my life now, more or less evenly split between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and in that time Scotland has managed to come out from under that image: those very tired old tropes of people steaming on the streets and eating deep-fried Mars bars. I think Scotland now, quite rightly, regards itself as a country with an unparalleled larder, fantastic chefs and a distinct and evolving modern national cuisine.

In Scotland, we don't go in for that lazy criticism, not even in an ironic way. I don't write like that, and nor do I read other writers writing like that. Scottish food writers tend to be focused on Scottish produce, place, questions around land ownership and privatisation, whatever window you're looking through to talk about food. But when English writers come to Scotland, I do notice – without naming any names – that those lazy clichés and stereotypes are quickly fallen back upon.

Jonathan: Do you think that the revolution that’s happened in modern British food has manifested in a different way in Scotland to, say, London, or is it just a slower way?

Chitra: I think that's really interesting – it's almost a question about national identity in Scotland, but in London it's a question about London identity, which is obviously completely separate from a sense of English identity. I was thinking about this on the train down: there was a time when Scotland was in the grip of a dialogue about the indy ref and it felt like independence was on the horizon. That has obviously changed now, but for a certain period of time Scotland was almost preparing to see itself as independent. And it was gaining a greater sense of a national food identity as well.

I've noticed that this has manifested in mid-range to fine dining restaurants in Scotland through a real identification with the Nordic countries and Scotland becoming almost Scandi in its approach. It liked to think of itself in that way politically as well, so it's no surprise to me that it also started to look that way, both in terms of interior design and also the food on the plate.

Jonathan: There’s this passage in the introduction of Florence White's book, Good Things in England, which was written in the 1930s, where she’s talking about English cooking and saying we should stop comparing England to France and that ‘the Scots kitchen owes more to France than does our English kitchen’. But she mentions that we should learn from the Scandinavian countries instead, which I think has been borne out since in London, with the influence of New Nordic cuisine. But of course this makes more sense with Scotland because it is much more geographically aligned.

Chitra: Exactly. You do see quite a lot of Nordic influences in modern Scottish cuisine – particularly around ways of preservation, even ways of plating. And I welcome it. I think it's made Scotland inhabit the best of itself and I feel like it has a progressive, small-but-outward-looking, slightly more internationalist vibe to its food and politics, even as England has felt like it’s becoming more reactionary and insular. That's the happiest interpretation of it – I'm sure there are millions of ways in which that doesn't show.

Jonathan: Pam Brunton’s Inver in Argyll is one of my favourite restaurants in the country, and the relationship it has to produce feels like a Scottish response to something like Fäviken, where it’s not just about a meal on the plate, but the surroundings, and the time you spend in the place where that meal was produced. And maybe that wouldn't have been possible without rediscovering that, actually, when you go back to the produce, it ranks with the best in the world; you can do something new with the cuisine if you return to the ingredient.

Chitra: Exactly. And using a lot of those techniques around preservation and fermentation and pickling and canning and things that have become sexy in recent years, but of course are some of the oldest cooking techniques in the world. I feel like Scotland's very on it with all of that. Inver is a brilliant example, but there are loads now. I recently reviewed a cafe in Marchmont, Edinburgh, called Mara’s Picklery, which is committed to using these techniques to preserve and enhance local produce, mainly vegetables. The Little Chartroom in Leith, where I live, Fallachan Kitchen in Glasgow, and Fhior, Timberyard and Montrose in Edinburgh are other examples. Scotland feels like a very exciting place to live in terms of food, and there are a lot of people engaged in the politics of it. Just look at the well-documented travesty of salmon farming; now you go into a lot of restaurants in the mid-end [price range], not just the high-end, where you won't see salmon on menus, it’s all chalk stream trout. That's a huge sea change.

When I first arrived in Glasgow in 1997, most of Scotland's produce wasn't staying in Scotland. It all felt like it was all going to Paris, Spain and so on. I interviewed Roberta Hall-McCarron, who runs The Little Chartroom, recently: she's got three restaurants in Edinburgh and is at the forefront of modern Scottish cuisine. She was saying that after she finished catering college in Glasgow, she did a stint at the Burj Al Arab and the first thing she saw when she walked in was Scottish langoustines.

Jonathan: This is a cheap question, but I'm going to ask anyway. If you had a visitor and they were interested in experiencing the best of what Scotland has to offer in terms of food, what would you advise them to do? It could be a restaurant, it could be an area, it could be an itinerary, it could be just a way of looking at food.

Behind the paywall: Recommendations for Scotland’s best restaurants, the role of class in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Two Eight Seven, Lannan and bakery discourse, Glasgow’s diaspora restaurants, and what it’s like to be a woman of colour as a restaurant critic

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The first I heard of Catalyst was a rumour rumbling around the coffee world of a slick new cafe that had opened on Gray’s Inn Road that was also serving excellent brunch and roasting their own coffee. I remember checking out their Instagram, scrolling through pictures of oozing egg yolks in a thick cut bacon sandwich, and deep fried halloumi katsu sandos. I noted that whoever was behind it seemed to be on trend, and was probably from Australia.

I didn’t realise Catalyst was Greek until I first met its owner, Alex Gkikas, and its chef Vasilis Chamam. By that point I had eaten their sandwiches, and had a bottle of their coffee sriracha (a gamechanging hot sauce), but it was their bar snacks on Friday evenings they seemed to be most proud of: things like monkfish with trahanas pasta and dill oil, ox tongue and soaked almonds, chargrilled octopus glazed with rum, and many dishes involving white beans. It was here you could finally see the outline of something that resembles Greek cuisine, albeit somewhat blurred at the edges.

It was on the strength of these dishes that I updated my Best Value list for Eater London by putting Catalyst in there. At the time I wrote:

Alex Gkikas and Vasilis Chamam are creating something special at Catalyst, with their version of Greek/definitely-not-Greek food that isn’t straitjacketed by moussaka and someone’s memory of what they had somewhere in the Cyclades in the 1990s.

It was a revelation to me how tired a lot of London’s Greek food looked in comparison. I had been brought up on Palmers Green’s Greek-Cypriot tavernas, but outside of this (and even inside of this) London is stuck in somewhat of a time warp ─ questionable gyros and souvlaki, dry spanakopitas, the food equivalent of an extended bouzouki solo. It seemed there was such a huge space for someone to do something different, and that space was not being contested.

In the next few months, there will be a changing of the guard at Catalyst. After four years, Chamam is leaving for (literal) new pastures, and the incoming chef, Dimitris Blachouras, has been given more license to colonise that space. Perhaps the reason it has taken so long for someone to do this is the tension between tradition and modernity that lies at the heart of every cuisine, but Greek cuisine in particular, one where my flippant line about moussaka and holiday memories is far more pertinent than I had realised.

On a weekday afternoon, in the searing heat, I cycled up to Palmers Green to Paneri, the best Greek-Cypriot taverna in London, to buy some souvla and sheftalia, bringing it back down to Clerkenwell to eat with Alex, Vasilis and Dimitris ─ tradition meeting modernity, in a feast of grilled meat.

The reason I brought this over is because this is what Greek food was to me when I was growing up. I grew up in Palmers Green, so if I was having Greek food we would go to our local taverna ─ either Vrisaki or Paneri ─ and we would buy this, take it away and eat it in front of the TV. 

Alex: Woah, sheftalia! 

But the thing I learned later on about Greek food in London is that so much of it is actually Greek-Cypriot food. So first of all, what is it about Cypriot food that is different to Greek food?

Dimitris: I think, in Cyprus, they’re big meat eaters. They eat a lot of meat. So they have great experience making souvla and how to properly roast it. And how to make nice bread also. And the cheese! 

Alex: They have halloumi that we don’t make in Greece, right?

Dimitris: Yes. I think most of their culinary history comes from the bread and cheese from the farmers, as they were taking the herds and moving them around, etc etc. And there’s a very strong influence both from the Mediterranean and the Middle East in Cyprus. 

Alex: I think Cyprus is a bit more limited in that it’s an island. Even though it has the mountains and it has the sea. Cypriot cuisine is very small but very distinctive: they do Cypriot potatoes, kolokasi (taro root)

Everyone: Kolokasi!

Alex: They use coriander more than the Greeks use. They do halloumi cheese that the Greeks don’t do, which is really, really distinctive. And even sheftalia ─ although we have a version that we do in Greece, they are really known for this. If we see sheftalia on a menu then we know it’s Cypriot.

Vasilis: Also they have hummus, we don’t.

Where did you all grow up?

Vasilis: Thessaloniki. I was there until I was 19.

Alex: Me too, but my parents are from the mainland of Greece, and we used to spend every summer there for three weeks. In Lamia and Thessalia, known for their shepherds and farmers. 

Dimitris: I grew up in Patra. It’s a big port city in Greece, in the Peloponnese. My family is from Agrinio on the mainland. They have an extremely strong tradition over there of fire. So souvla! They’re big meat lovers, I don’t even know if they eat salad over there. They also have pies: filo, macaroni with feta, butter and milk, they do spanakopita, meat pies. They have whatever you want in pie form basically. 

Even though you come from different parts of Greece and have had very different experiences of Greek cooking, do you think growing up Greek has given you all a shared perspective on food, and particularly what the function of good food should be?

Vasilis: Yeah, all the regions have their own food, but the modern, urban family cuisine is more or less 30 to 40 dishes, done with slight variations across Greece. And you eat these on a weekly basis. The type of dining as well: you have taverna type of dining, meze type of dining. This is something you grew up with regardless of where you grew up. 

In a way you get trained in how to do it. When you visit a taverna for the first time, you start your training. In the taverna the mezes are quite monolithic dishes of one ingredient, and there is a bit of an education you need to go through in order to know which one goes with which, and the succession of how you eat them: from octopus to this salad, and from that to there. And then when the dish is halfway finished, you know when to eat the bread. So it’s a bit of a training, but once you grow up there comes a point of adulthood when it’s time for you to order what everyone is going to have.

Alex: Also we are from a generation where our mothers and fathers were born one or two decades after the Second World War. Their parents lived through famine. Because in the 40s there was famine. For all of us, when we were with our parents growing up, they always wanted the table to be full. Even if they didn’t eat all of it, at least the table was full. As Vasilis said, you were trained as a child to start with the salads, then the octopus and then the mains, etc etc.

Vasilis: The thing is, this type of dining is not really controlled by the chef, in the sense that they don’t build a plate with a beginning, middle and end. They build monolithic plates that will be combined through your own skill as a diner. 

Is that something you ever bear in mind with your own cooking

Vasilis: Yeah, I mean, I have to do this on an actual plate so I need to be controlling all these sequences of flavours and textures that I’ve come to love over the years in meze, but all in a single dish. 

Alex: *interrupting* God, this souvla is really good by the way.1 This is the first time I’ve seen souvla over here with the bone in, which is how my grandfather would do it.

This is what they’re known for. You can go in there any time of day, and they have so much chicken, pork and lamb souvla going on their spits you can just pick it up and be in and out. I’m interested in what you said about the table always having to be abundant. Does this also extend to how meat is valued as well? Because all the takeaways in Palmers Green are heavily meat based. Like there’s some fish, but it is almost entirely meat. So when I was growing up, my idea of Greek-Cypriot cuisine, and by extension, my idea of Greek cuisine, was not one where vegetables were involved too much. And yet there is such a rich tradition of vegetable and vegetarian cooking in Greece.

Alex: I met these people from the islands, they were about 60, and they told me they’re sick of fish. Because everything they had was fish. Their father was a fisherman. They say it was almost a trauma that “they would bring us so much fish”. 

Dimitris: Everyday fish!

Alex: However my mother was from a shepherd family. So when they had guests over they would have a lamb on a spit and everything. When my dad gave her fish as a first date meal, she thought “oh that’s a poor thing” because they only knew meat. 

Vasilis: In my case it wasn’t very meat based. It was mostly vegetables, I guess. With a little bit of meat and a little bit of fish. 

Dimitris: Mine was very balanced. My grandmother was always very specific about how we would eat: so meat, fish, soup, beans.

Alex: Also, it’s significant that most Greeks are Christian Orthodox so they would practise fasting which is almost a balance in itself. Wednesday and Friday you don’t eat meat or dairy, so you would normally eat pulses and what is called lathera, which basically means vegetables [Lathi means ‘oil’ and lathera is a genre of vegetable dish that uses olive oil to sautée them in, often with some tomato]. Monday, Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday they would do meat. Plus also it was expensive in the 70s to eat meat every day! 

Vasilis: I wasn’t in a religious household but it just happened that we wouldn’t eat much meat. Maybe because my dad was a doctor and we wouldn’t have much meat around. Lots of veg and pulses though. 

Isn’t there a big separation between restaurant cooking and home cooking?

Dimitris: Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Because you’d never get many of these vegetarian dishes in a taverna, right? 

Alex: No one would pay!

Dimitris: If you’re in Greece and you’re staying with your family, you go to a taverna because you want to escape the hassle of having a spit fire in your house, or lamb chops, or a big steak, or whatever. So that’s why you would go there. 

Alex: No one would have, say, fassolakia (green beans) in a taverna. 

Vasilis: Also, there’s something about the quality of the olive oil. At home, half the dish is vegetables and the other half is olive oil. When you go out you have no idea what kind of olive oil they’re using. Normally the places that do stews are cheap, working-mens places, you might go there if you don’t have much time for lunch. But it’s not a going out scenario. You wouldn’t have these homely dishes.

Dimitris: In my case, when our family went out to eat we would be very selective. We knew where we were going, what meat they were using, what oil they were using. Their wine was their wine. We ate at two tavernas in Agrinio, but we knew that their whole family would eat the same food that we were eating. It was very familiar to us, and that’s why we respected them. But as Vasilis said, over the years a lot more tavernas opened and you lost that quality. 

Alex: There’s also a very big difference in Greek, because it’s a touristic country, between the tavernas that are for tourists which the locals would never go to, and there are the hidden gems where the locals go on a regular basis. This is very, very very common.

Well, it’s the same in London as well.

Alex: *laughs*

There are all the Greek and Cypriot restaurants that are famous, and which no Greek person goes to2. Which is most of them. And then there are tavernas in north London where you still have a Greek and Greek-Cypriot community frequenting them. How would you characterise the state of Greek food in London from what you’ve experienced?

Vasilis: I’ve been here 23 years and yet I haven’t really eaten Greek food. I’m not interested in that reproduction of what I have eaten over in Greece. I don’t believe it’s a type of food that travels easily or travels well, because it is based on the ingredients and how they are handled. Even so, even if you have the ingredients and you recreate the dishes, it isn’t really about the dishes but about the spirit around the table. Not only the table, but the spirit of the dish itself. I find it very difficult to recreate. With my cooking at Catalyst, I wanted to put that in glimpses in my dishes. And also, I think it’s been achieved in the social situation which we have here at Catalyst with me and Alex. This scenario of two people creating a dining situation and a whole atmosphere. 

But no, I’ve never really eaten much Greek food here and I have never really felt the need to. When I’m cooking, for myself or for others, I try to put some elements of it as a recreation, but with other elements I try to push it forward. Some of it might be a bit abstract, to kind of pin point something down and amplify it. But very rarely do I miss the food enough to want to reproduce it. Besides, I go back fairly often

Alex, when you started Catalyst, did you have in mind what Vas just said, that you want ‘glimpses’ of Greekness on the menu?

Alex: No, no. When we started I actually had some guys from Scandinavia and the chef we had was from Kaffeine. He was Australian. But immediately, from the first day even, I felt I didn’t want to serve this. It was stuff like salmon with midori, rainbow cakes, nothing to do with my taste. I remember Vasilis came once and he was very shy. He didn’t tell me “Alex, what is going on here?” But it took me one or two months to say “this is not me”. Then I asked Vasilis to come and do something together. But we didn’t have that vision from the start, because I didn’t know London and I didn’t know if Greek food could be a thing here. Or that they might only think Greek food was a certain type of thing. Like I didn’t know if we could serve stews, or to serve lathera. But Vas had experience and he made me believe that this is something that could work.

Vas, what was your conception of how the food should be when Alex asked you to be head chef?

Vasilis: I left Greece when I was very young. I left as a teenager, before I had a chance to explore a lot of Greek food. My food was based on very early memories of home food or village food, or other situations. All these bits, in a way, by revisiting them and working on them, somehow I’m recreating them. Not in a disrespectful way, but using bits and recreating them in ways where I believe this elusive character and value of Greek food can be carried in a different dish. In an altogether different dish. It’s in the way that herbs sit together, in how high the umami is or how low, in the brightness of a dish, or if it reminds me of the landscape. Or something like that. I didn’t really have the knowledge of travelling around in restaurants, so it was mostly memory based and a means for me to mirror these feelings I had about Greek food and what I value in it in dishes that would not even seem relevant to a specific recipe.

Even the dishes I had at home were a bit mixed, because of my dad’s background [Vasilis’s father is Palestinian]. When I emigrated here, it was a case of ‘how do I make this new place feel like home?’ With different ingredients and a different food culture. So it was never the case of authentic food, or straightforward replication, but of recreating these things I found value in.

Do you think that your mixed heritage gave you more licence, even if just mentally, to play around with the borders of those cuisines?

Vasilis: Yes, in a sense, because even from a very early age when my dad would spike my mother’s Greek food with Arabic influences, it was almost like a bit of a game between me and my dad. Like a naughty game, because he wasn’t very fluent in Greek or confident in his language. So there was a bit of a mix up to begin with anyway that felt natural. And when I came here, it was my turn to do that. Different ingredients, different foods, but the same scenario. 

In terms of flavour, I thought these two countries are very close to each other, either because of immigration or ingredients or commerce. Some recipes and ingredients travelled there and then were forgotten, and then came back, and then were forgotten again, and so on. For me, it happens in a natural way because what I’m going towards is not a specific dish to recreate, but the feeling that a flavour gives me. I don’t want to sound like I’m over-theorising, but it’s mostly about whether something has enough of this spark, or certain aromas, and then if I can do it with different ingredients. It is also fun for me, because it does remind me of how I grew up with food in relation to my dad. Some of the stuff my dad was doing, my mum would find ridiculous. So I’m kind of used to that as well!

Alex: It’s true that some Greeks find it ridiculous. 

Vasilis: For me, I’m trying to carry what I consider to be Greek but this is more to do with balances and sensations, as to whether it carries that Greekness. For me, the aim is to be able to carry it in an eloquent way. Sometimes if you’re doing a spanakopita and you give that to someone, there might be an underwhelming feeling of not getting it. Even I can have that food and not get it. We grew up with this kind of food, and the accumulation of all these dishes and memories make up how we think about them. But when you have the food, especially outside of Greece, it might not carry the feeling you want. When I’m making food that has some elements of that ─ some dill, some spring onion, some lemon ─ I might push this to a degree and combine it with something else where it reaches a level that achieves a nostalgia, just before it collapses and becomes something else. It’s a bit like adding salt, you reach a ceiling and then beyond that…

What you’re saying about nostalgia, that has historically been the weakness of Greek cuisine in the UK. Because most British people encounter Greek food on holiday, they have a wonderful memory of some calamari or a salad or some grilled meat, and then they have it in London and it doesn’t live up to that memory. And the problem for anyone wanting to cook Greek cuisine in London is how do you capture that memory without that atmosphere, without the weather, without the ingredients? 

Alex: I need to show you this. Today we had a salad and we had a guy who just sent this to me *holds up phone*

“That salad was beautiful, reminds me of trips to Greece.”

Alex: That was perfect, because that was our intention.

What was the salad?

Alex: It was melon, with some manouri

Vasilis: Raw courgette, lots of celery. For me the idea of the Greek spring, where you have all that grass and those herbs. I don’t know if I can carry that in a single recipe, but I can carry it in many little bits, whether it’s a soup or a stew or a salad. The acidity can come from tomato but it could also come from rhubarb. 

Dimitris: It’s not very easy. When someone is on vacation in Greece, and you go somewhere to eat in a good taverna, you don’t have stress, you don’t have anything that troubles you. You’re going to go there, you’re going to have some small fried fishes, you’re going to have a salad ─ maybe the vegetables will be good but maybe they’re not so good. But that not having stress. And being hungry from the beach. You know that feeling? Of being on the beach all day and feeling hungry, and being hungry until you reach that restaurant or that taverna? Your stomach is screaming ‘eat!’ So when you don’t have stress, and you’re hungry from the heat, and you’re having a nice time, and you’re together with your family, even a mediocre meal can be great. So if you have a good meal, that can be extraordinary.

When you come back here and you’re looking for that memory, it will never happen. It can never be the same way. So you have to free your mind when you go to eat somewhere, you have to have a different approach as to what you’re going to experience. If you have that memory of that island, of that taverna, and you want to go to a Greek restaurant in London to have the same experience and the same memory, it’s never going to happen. Something will not be the same. So you need to change your perspective about food, and that depends on the chef. If the chef is very good he might be able to give you something of that memory, and, of course, the opposite is also true. 

Alex: Now, even though it’s half a year after Brexit and things have drastically changed in how you can bring ingredients here, it is still easier to import goods than it was a few years ago. For example, we source one of the best feta I think there is. Like even in Greek restaurants you can’t find it.

Dimitris: It’s fucking amazing

Alex: And we can find this feta here in London.3 So it’s not the surprise of “ahhhhh that olive oil” any more, you can have anything you want here. The only thing that is difficult is the vegetables. Like this tomato here *points towards a tomato in the Paneri salad* this wouldn’t be found in the cheapest taverna. But the pork here is better, I could do a better souvla than I could do in Greece. You could do wonders. But no one is pushing to experiment, to say “lets creatively source ingredients to achieve something even better than what you might find in Greece.”

You were one of the first to use the halloumi from Kupros up in north London, right?

Alex: Yes, because what we have here in Catalyst and which I’m proud of ─  and Vas has helped me with this─ is that we respect what we can find here in the UK. If it’s really good then we will source it from here. The halloumi from Kupros, even though it was a bit more expensive, because we knew it tasted better we used it. We don’t import our meat because here you have amazing lamb, you have amazing pork. You can make Greek cuisine without Greek ingredients. 

I haven’t had your food yet Dimitris, but Alex has told me you’re a bit more traditional than Vasilis in how you approach Greek food. How do you go about creating food that pushes the idea of Greek cuisine forward and evolves but still retains that core element of Greekness?

Dimitris: Like Vasilis, I grew up with lots of memories but I was in Greece for longer. When I was 19, when Vasilis left, I could still have an amazing meal from my grandmother in Patra when we visited. So before I came here, I could still experience that food, that hospitality of your grandmother in her house. What I’m trying to do is use my experience of restaurants to hone in on that flavour, to maybe close my eyes and remember what it was my grandmother was doing, but with a more professional touch, and more professional technique which might give you a better result in terms of body or texture. That’s all. I can cook lettuce without it losing its colour, my grandma couldn’t. But that’s just a chef thing. 

Alex: The other day Vasilis was having his vaccine so he came in later. Dimitris brought over some breakfast. It was something that my grandfather, who died at 80 years old, was eating every day, and every grandfather in Greece ate every day. It was hot milk ─ you would get it fresh from a domestic goat ─ with dried sourdough that they would make in-house, with just a bit of salt. And when he made me this I was like, “oh my god”. When I posted it on Instagram some Greeks said “Wow! Papara!4 Who does that?” And when I gave it to a British person he was like “Oh, I love it because I love bread and butter pudding!”

Dimitris: You have the sourness from the sourdough, and the salt with the milk. You bring the milk to a boil. But the sourdough needs to be dry. It needs to be old ─ the more stale, the better. Like five, six days. You just pop it inside, let it cool and become soft, and you just eat it. That sourness with the milk, it’s just amazing. It’s the best breakfast and the best memories I’ve had. 

So I’m just trying to recreate the flavours and the food I was eating when I was happy. That smile. I want to have that smile when I eat the food that I’m cooking. It’s very minimal, it’s very simple. When I used to play soccer in my neighbourhood, I used to go round to my grandmother. She was 90 years old. She had a big loaf of sourdough bread that she had made and I would say ‘I’m hungry!’. She would grab the bread, cut me a slice, put it on the stove, tomato, feta, and bake it. I would have a slice of bread like that.

Alex: This is also very important in the Greek meal. People needed bread and pita. It was the main meal because meat and vegetables were expensive.

Dimitris: Don’t forget, they survived with bread during the world wars. So bread was something divine. My grandmother was eating potatoes...with bread! 

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Dimitris: If there wasn’t bread on the table she wouldn’t like the food! It was something that was very necessary for her. I grew up with bread. Bread and olive oil. Bread on the stove with hot olive oil and sugar? Man, do that. You’re gonna love it.

Yeah, but are you going to put it on the menu though?6

Dimitris: *laughs* I can do that but it needs some sort of extra touch so you can sell it. We can do minimal, but if you go so minimal…. For me, if I had my own place I would probably do that. 

Is it you who has been making this avgolemono that everyone has been talking about?

Dimitris: No it’s Vasilis.

Vasilis: This avgolemono, the difference is that at home we would boil the chicken for an hour. But here we do the stock all day, so the result is very intense and gelatinous. We kind of do a congee method. For Greeks, when you are sick you would do it this way! But I push it a bit further so it becomes even more about how I remember it, in a way. 

Alex: He does it a little bit different to how a domestic housewife might do it. 

Dimitris: Our grandmothers were doing congee, but they didn’t know it!

Vasilis: The chicken is sauteed and it’s cooked a little differently, but it’s essentially the same thing.

I find it very funny how there’s suddenly a lot of hype about this dish which you would have when you’re sick. Because my mum cooked avgolemono for me when I was sick as well.7

Alex: But it’s just so nice though. I would love for us to be known as the place for avgolemono.

Vasilis: It’s my favourite thing.

Alex: And you can use it for many, many dishes.

Vasilis: For me, it’s chasing after this idea of nostalgia. I kind of forgot about it as well, and then I’ve been revisiting it in my quest of recreating this idea for myself and others. It’s just something that can carry this idea as a message for other people. 

It’s interesting how outside of you, and outside of the traditional places to get Greek food in London, there are many more non-Greek chefs getting interested in food in London. I mean look at avgolemono, just up the road you have Nick8 doing his dolmades and his giouvarlakia.

Vasilis: There is a little bit of connection between Greek food and what you call ‘Modern British’ because they have a similar simplicity and reliance on good ingredients, and without overcomplicating things. There are some flavours, which, in the last few years at least, have been overlooked or perceived as a bit more difficult, because they’ve been overshadowed by souvlaki. These more fine tuned flavours, or more herbal and comforting ones. Somehow I think a lot of people now are having a second look at them.

Alex: Everyone does taramasalata now, from Michelin starred restaurants to hipsters. 

Dimitris: I also think there is a connection to younger people right now because the previous generation, guys who are like 50-55 now, when they were in Greece, they didn’t have the experience or the knowledge to understand what Greek cuisine is. But now with us here, and other Greek people with friends from different parts of the world, they’re helping people understand what Greek food is. It’s something that has a bigger connection between people right now, they can understand that it isn’t just souvlaki and moussaka and pita, it’s more than that. It’s not easy, but it’s very minimal food.

Alex: However, there’s no place that does a proper moussaka. Maybe we will be the ones. Because I think it’s time. I have British friends who say ‘Alex, do a moussaka but maybe don’t call it moussaka’. Because maybe people won’t come because they have an idea of what moussaka is. This is a challenge.

Vasilis: Definitely call it moussaka

Dimitris: *banging the table* No, you need to respect it. When you go to Greece now, you will even see that some people don’t respect their own roots. They love something that comes from outside. If you speak to an Italian about how you made spaghetti and that you added this or that, they will say “What did you add to that spaghetti?”9 They keep that tradition and have a line they will not cross. So we don’t do that ─ we want to make something but we want to use ponzu in our tzatziki or something exotic. I mean, come on guys. You have something, you have it right here. It’s here and it’s a treasure, so please use it.

Alex: Also the other thing which no one realises, is that Greece was under occupation from the Ottoman Empire for 400 years. So you can imagine how many mixes there have been in that time. We have many, many commonalities with Turkish cuisine. Even the names ─ imam bayildi ─ things like that, they’re basically Turkish. Our grandmothers would do baklava, phyllo baklava, but this is something that people brought over from Turkey. Also those who came from Russia, they brought their own traditions. So this thing is already so big. And all the different areas. You have some islands which were basically completely independent and they have crazy food.

Vasilis: Totally unexplored 

Alex: Even Greeks don’t know.

Vasilis: Greeks don’t know anything about the food they do on the islands. They all have different produce, different cheeses, other milk products, and they’ve never been included in the general urban family cuisine and definitely not in the tavernas which is a kind of umbrella cuisine.

This for me is the big difference between Italian and Greek cuisine, in that Italy has managed to advertise a coherent version of its cuisine around the world, and yet Greek cuisine, from what you’re saying, is something that not even the Greeks fully understand.

Alex: 100 percent. The majority of Greeks do not know the traditional dishes served in the how many thousand of islands there are. You follow these people and you’re like “wow!” Vasilis went to Tinos last year and he came back with handmade pasta with greens ─ normally you would have it with a sauce ─ greens and lamb. And grapes, and special kinds of cheese. These combinations which you wouldn’t normally have. Or Crete. In Crete they have many things ─ snails for instance ─ that we wouldn’t eat in the rest of Greece. Cretans have amazing recipes for snails. Frygadelia, lamb liver with caul fat ─ things like that. No one would do this here, but we want to do it.

Vasilis: Well we have done some things here. We did tripe with horta [Literally “weeds”. Horta refers to any wild greens which are usually boiled and dressed with good olive oil]. That could have been from an island!

What is next for Catalyst? 

Alex: Vasilis, after four years with us, he’s turning his page and will go back to Greece. And we were lucky enough to have Dimitris. Vasilis is more like an artist, he can play around with many things. With Dimitris I think we can go even more hardcore with the Greek direction. The dish of the day that we do here really gives us unlimited scope. But we won’t mess around with the classics, I will never change something for the British barristers opposite who come here for a sandwich.

Ahh, but you did put tartare in the bacon sandwich which I think is quite controversial

Alex: I don’t know if Vasilis took it from there, but the thing that reminded me of, as a Greek, was one of the biggest Greek chains, Goody’s. Their cheeseburger had exactly that tartare sauce. And it was a massive hit in Greece. All of us have that same flavour in our memory: the taste of a Goody’s cheeseburger. Do you remember Goody’s?

Dimitris: Yeah, even now they’re a big chain. In Patra, where I grew up, McDonald’s failed because they opened next to Goody’s. No chance! 

Alex: They were probably not good burgers, but they were a massive success. The owners made millions. But when Vas made me that tartare, it hit me: Goody’s!

Well it reminded me of a Big Mac.

Vasilis: *reluctantly* Well yes, they are similar. 

And what are you doing, Vasilis?

Vasilis: Well I’m going home and I’m going to live my life as an adult for the first time in Greece. It will be the first time after 23 years of London being my home. It’s very weird emotionally. But I’m looking forward to how I’ll respond to that change in terms of what food I produce. I’ll definitely have a different relationship with the ingredients, and also with the audience. Here I was trying to make a point to people, for people to hear what I had in my mind when I was talking about a particular dish or memory. Now there, it will be a different scenario because everyone will know what the reference is. I just want to open up to ingredients and dishes I’ve never learned because I left very early, and see how that goes.

Alex: I was having a conversation with Vas about Greeks. You know, we went to Thessaloniki and we did a pop-up and cooked for them. They loved the food, they said it was good, but they couldn’t eat all of it because “it was spicy”. All we did was put coffee sriracha on there! But Greeks, even if you put a little bit of hot sauce on there they will tell you it’s too spicy. After six years in London, I’ll put hot sauce on things because it’s part of the culture here, but everyone is like “Alex, please!” I think Vasilis will find it very interesting to be back.

Vasilis: I want to be connected more to the sourcing, going fishing, going hunting, picking stuff, seeing what you can do with this root, that root. Because there’s always something that even Greeks haven’t used, because they haven’t got into this playful approach to ingredients that they don’t know what to do with. I’m going to go in a bit like a foreigner. I know I’ll have a bit of a strange presence at the beginning because of my ignorance of things and my enthusiasm for being back.

Alex: What would you like to see from us?

Well you’ve anticipated my last question. I personally love offal so I would like to see someone do a great version of kokoretsi [Lamb or goat intestines stuffed with chopped offal and grilled]. But my simple question to you would be: if you could transport one ingredient, or one dish, or one cooking technique or concept, and make it a part of London culture and appreciated by Londoners, what would it be?

Alex: For me it would be moussaka. Because if you have proper moussaka, it is one of the best things ever. Heaviest thing ever also, but best.

Dimitris: Right now ─ maybe in five minutes it will be something else ─ but right now what I have in my mind is just chargrilled fish, sprinkled with salt, lemon and oregano. Nicely cooked.

Vasilis: I would do horta. All these different horta which people don’t know about.

Dimitris: That’s the hard part for me here: I love horta, I love all these wild greens. So I just need to find some. That would be a nice thing to bring here, because the nature here has everything. Everything you have in Greece, you also have here. 

Alex: Jonathan, what they just said are the most typical things in Greece: amazing fish on charcoal, with an amazing plate of horta next to it with tons of lemon.

Dimitris: And oregano! Dried oregano, good wine and sourdough bread to dip in all the liquids after. And that’s all. You know, you’re just building up to your last dip. Because that’s your last memory, your last dip. 

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How to sum up Vaughn Tan for those who don’t know Vaughn Tan? While discussing this writer’s dilemma with Vaughn himself, I brought up that I consider him to be the perfect example of the Gladwellian archetype of the ‘connector’, which Malcolm Gladwell described in his book ‘The Tipping Point’ as the nexuses in our social networks, ie. those who are in the habit of making introductions. Vaughn then immediately corrected me by reeling off the names of the two sociologists who had made this point prior to Gladwell, and the titles of their research. This, perhaps, sums up Vaughn Tan more than anything else I could say.

The power of connectors has never been lost on me. In my own job Postcard Teas I’ve witnessed the most unlikely introductions, and then traced the network of friendships, collaborators and co-conspirators which have flourished because of them. Vaughn, however, is a one man nexus. I’ve been in bars in Japan, or with people who I have never met before, and suddenly something they say will push me to ask ‘Do you know Vaughn Tan?’ Often the answer is ‘of course, but how did you know?’ I often suspect he is capable of bilocation.

What makes Vaughn’s reputation even stranger is that he doesn’t even work in the food and drink industry. As a professor of strategy at UCL (a job no one has ever really got to the bottom of) he has been fully ensconced in academia, and yet it was no surprise that his first major book, The Uncertainty Mindset, revolved around food and restaurants ─ specifically the Research and Development (R&D) teams of high end kitchens. What I love about the book is its ability to connect disparate areas that no-one else would have thought of putting together, much like Vaughn himself.

I’ve wanted to interview Vaughn for a while, so it was a pleasure to finally sit down last week (me in London, him in the Auvergne) to talk about the book and the new relevance it gained during the pandemic. Over the last year Vaughn has expanded the book’s lessons through his own Substack page (what making pizza can teach you about uncertainty, for instance) and became the voice of reasonably phrased and empirically verified doom due to his (extremely prescient) article for Eater London on how restaurants will change due to the pandemic. We also talked about our mutual love (London restaurants) and our pet hate (also, London restaurants), and what our hopes are for them post-pandemic. 

To buy Vaughn’s book, The Uncertainty Mindset, please click here http://www.uncertaintymindset.org/

Vaughn has also recently set up a website for his new project ‘idk’, which is basically tarot cards for people who used to work at Google. You can now pre-order them here: https://productivediscomfort.org/

When I read the The Uncertainty Mindset, I was struck by how it connects two fields which are seemingly unrelated to each other: how high end restaurants innovate and adapt their menus and the more broader field of business strategy and self-improvement. How did this project get started so you could link these two things? I take it that you would have been observing these kitchens not under the impression you were going to write a book about them, or if you were, having no idea what that book was going to be about?

Yeah, what you just said is absolutely true. The kind of research method I used for this is inductive research, where you go into a field ─ in this case restaurant kitchens ─ and you don’t really have an idea of what you’re there to look for, you just have an idea that the setting is an interesting place to look. I think I started doing this research mostly because ─ as you know ─ if you’re Singaporean you have almost a cultural or national interest in food. When I was working on my PhD, because I was interested in innovation there were obviously the possibilities of going to a tech company, like a semiconductor plant and figuring out how they do things. But I was opportunistic and lucky at the same time. 

At around the time I had to pick a site, I was at Harvard and it was the first year in which what eventually became a very famous course was run. It was the ‘Science of Cooking’ course for which the instructors brought over Ferran Adrià and a whole bunch of mostly Spanish chefs to give weekly public lectures about cooking techniques which would then be explained in a much more detailed scientific way in the course.

So José Andrés, who used to work with Ferran, was one of the people involved in this. José did a session of his own; I went to his office hours, and I just asked him if he would be interested in having someone looking at how his organisation did stuff, because he had mentioned during his talk that he had an ‘R&D’ team. And he said ‘yeah sure, come for breakfast the next day’. During breakfast I said ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for but I’m quite curious about an R&D team in restaurants’.. I asked him if he would be OK with me coming down to just watch what they did, and bizarrely he said yes. I wasn’t expecting him to say yes, but when he said ‘yes come on down’, he kind of called my bluff. 

So I went down and the first time I went I spent a week with them and that week I didn’t destroy anything or cause anything to catch fire, so they let me join them when they were opening three restaurants at the same time in Las Vegas. Once you’ve gone to one restaurant and shown you’re not a complete disaster, it became a way of getting into all the other restaurants that I ended up going to. The first one is always the hardest and I was very lucky that José was, and still is, the kind of person who would take a risk like this on someone he doesn’t know. 

For those who aren’t familiar with the distinction, what is it about an R&D chef that is different to the role of a regular chef?

As a regular chef, if you’re in the service kitchen, you are basically cooking from a list of dishes that you know about already and you know how to cook. So every service someone orders this dish, you know how to cook it, the ingredients don’t change very much. The whole point of being a service chef, is that you know what you’re doing and you know how to do it, and you’re expected to do it the same way every time. So it’s about consistency, but also efficiency as well. 

Now if you’re an R&D chef things are different. You’re supposed to be creating new things, whether it’s a new dish, or a new experience of dining, or a new ingredient or a new way of cooking. What that means, by definition, is that you as the R&D chef cannot yet know what that thing will be, nor can you know how to achieve that thing. So not only is the outcome unknown, but the way of getting to that outcome is also unknown. So R&D chefs are different from service kitchen chefs, not just because they cannot be expected to do things consistently and efficiently ─ the bigger difference is that R&D chefs have to be really, really good at failing all the time. 

If you think about any situation where you’re doing something for the first time, you will not succeed at doing that thing. The way you don’t succeed at doing that thing will be different until you find out how to do it right. I think that is something we don’t talk about enough. There is a deep emotional obstacle that most people face ─ in fact I would say everybody faces ─ a deep emotional obstacle to failing and not knowing what success will look like. And R&D chefs are different from service kitchen chefs primarily because they are either more OK with failing and not knowing what a successful outcome looks like, or they’re able to get over the fact that they’re afraid of not-knowing. And that’s a really clear distinction between the chefs who try to work on innovation all the time, and those who thrive in a service kitchen. It’s not to say that one is better than the other, just that they are different.

When did this role of the R&D chef become more important? Because obviously restaurants have created new dishes since their inception, but at some point the role of R&D became specific and distinct.

One of the things which I try to do in the book ─ which I always try to do ─  is to say that things don’t happen at a single, clear point in time. What is actually going on is that things are always happening but only at some point does it become obvious enough and enough people pay attention to it. And so it seems like it has just appeared at that point. A better way to ask the question would be: when did the trends begin that eventually led to the creation of an R&D team in restaurants and therefore people whose job was solely R&D? 

The restaurant as we understand it to be in the Western tradition showed up in France hundreds of years ago. And you’re right, along the way there have always been people who have accidentally created a flavour combination and then suddenly there’s a new dish. But I think what you’re talking about is: “When did restaurants decide that they needed to have specific people working on creating new dishes?” And I would say that was probably a few decades ago. You can think of a few restaurants that were the first places where there was a specific R&D capacity. El Bulli was one of them, you had El Taller which was their workshop. They shut down the restaurant for a part of the year and moved in to El Taller, so the leaders of the restaurant were cooking for half the year and for the other half they were in their lab coming up with new things. At The Fat Duck, what eventually became the FDEK ─  (the Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen) ─  was, for a long time, a separate unit that was running while The Fat Duck was running year round. So those two to me are the first two clear places where there is an R&D team and there are R&D chefs.

In your book you talk about how this happened in reaction to innovation becoming the main metric a restaurant should be judged by. And one of your theories is that this was in itself an unexpected byproduct of who was writing about these restaurants, and also where these restaurants were being written about ─ which was not newspapers but primarily on the internet and on food blogs.

Until the late 90s, the real arbiters of taste in the restaurant world were probably the very powerful newspaper and magazine critics, and also the people who reviewed for Michelin. What this meant is that you had professional arbiters of taste. If you were a professional critic, either for one of the guides or for a newspaper, you were paid to know a lot about food. There was a fairly high standard for the review itself ─ you would almost never see a review of a restaurant where the critic had not been to that restaurant several times. What you had was this very trained set of critics looking at restaurants, and a part of training is that you understand nuanced things more than people who are not trained. So that generation of critics probably were better able to detect refinement in execution and talk about that. 

But then with the internet, there was a progression. You had internet forums, bulletin boards, which are beginning to become back. Then you had blogs, then things like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And I think what was happening, first with the bulletin boards, then the blogs, then social media, is that you’re gradually increasing the set of people who get to talk about whether food is good or not. So at first it was literally a handful of people, who were the critics at the papers and the guides, who could say whether a restaurant was good and why. Then with the bulletin boards, you could get ten times more. Those people were, almost definitionally, not as well trained. They didn’t go to the same restaurants again and again. Once you add food blogs, you further increase the number of people who could say stuff about food and restaurants. Once you add social media, even more than that again. So you’re increasing the pool of people who are allowed to say something about whether a restaurant is good, while decreasing the likelihood that they’re highly trained assessing quality in restaurants.

So my theory about this is: as this happens, the question of whether a restaurant is good or not starts to become based on whether or not it is different. And that’s why innovation suddenly becomes more and more powerful as a reason why a restaurant should be thought of as good.

When I read this the theory made a lot of sense to me, because when you look at old reviews, even stretching back to writers like A.J. Liebling, what they talk about is execution, and whether this is a correct execution of a dish already in the culinary repertoire, that a ‘refined’ person would know about if they eat very well. If you look at reviews today, that kind of idea of whether a dish is ‘correct’ in execution is never talked about, it’s almost untrendy to do so.

Yes, exactly!

One thing you don’t mention in the book is whether you think this focus on innovation over execution has been to the detriment of restaurants or not. Because I’ve eaten with you, and I know how much you value execution.

I want to make sure I’m clear when I say this: I think if you go to one of the great innovation restaurants ─ I’m not going to name them but there are not that many of them ─ you get a combination of innovation with really good execution. This is incredibly difficult. The problem with innovation becoming the definition of quality for restaurants is that a lot of restaurants which try to innovate are not very good at executing even if they weren’t innovating, and the fact that they’re now innovating as well means their ability to execute goes down even further. So, I think my very nuanced response to your question is that I don’t think innovation is bad, but I think this focus on innovation combined with an increasing lack of awareness from critics of what good execution looks like, is leading to a situation where a lot of restaurants can only succeed if they innovate. And yet they don’t have the capacity to execute those innovative dishes to make them delicious. 

What this means is you go to a restaurant and they’re trying to do something new and they don’t do it particularly well, but it’s “innovative”. And if you’ve got a critic pool that doesn’t even understand what good execution looks like, all they can do is evaluate it on the basis of innovation. So this has led to the situation that we’re in where restaurants get lauded for doing something new, even if that thing which they’re doing that’s new actually isn’t very good at all. 

When people think of innovation they have this idea that it’s always something that might ‘wow’ you when you see it. But there’s another type of innovation which is hidden to the customer, and there’s a great passage in your book about this on the construction of a Welsh rarebit which the FDEK was doing for their pub The Hind’s Head. The problem was that as rarebit cools, it congeals and becomes unpleasant to eat. Most restaurants would have saw this and thought ‘well, this is just how rarebit works’ and that either you eat it quickly, or maybe you could make the portion a bit smaller so there’s less time for it to congeal. Could you explain the difference in mindset between the R&D team and a regular kitchen which meant they couldn’t let this problem go?

So the problem with rarebit is that it’s cooked cheese and some liquid like beer or something. It’s delicious when it’s hot because it’s molten and unctuous and all those other good things, but as it cools it congeals and becomes claggy and gross. So if you want the experience of eating the rarebit to be good right from the point where it lands on the table all the way to potentially an hour or more later, what you need to do is have an innovation mindset. You have to look at the dish and think ‘how do I solve this problem?’ 

The difference in mindset is that I think, and this goes back to what is the difference between a R&D chef and a service chef, that the ability and willingness to fail is very closely connected to the ability and willingness to look at a problem like this and reframe it. Not to solve it in the easy way, but to say instead ‘how do we find an elegant way to solve all of the problems?’ So the other solutions ─ which I’d call obvious solutions, like making the rarebit smaller ─ are easy solutions that don’t actually solve the problem itself. The elegant solution would be to come with a way where this dish would be delicious at any point where the diner chooses to eat it. 

How do you create that mindset in a restaurant? First of all, it sounds clichéd but you need leadership that wants this kind of thing. There’s going to be tons and tons of head chefs and owners who would say “don’t bother rejigging the recipe”, or “if it doesn’t work, take it off the menu”. And this is a completely legitimate thing to say. But it takes a particular kind of leader to say ‘yes, let’s invest 3-4 days of time by one person to change the way the recipe works so that the result works in the way that we want’. The other thing is that you have to hire people who are willing to do this, because lots and lots of people would look at this problem and think ‘why is it worth spending 3-4 days revising a recipe so you can achieve this outcome? Why not just use another recipe?’ It’s not like either of these is good or bad, it’s just one is different from the other one and you need people who are interested in both of them to run a restaurant of either type.

The book is already a bit of a chimera in that it makes the leap from restaurant research to showing how completely unrelated businesses can harness this idea of uncertainty whilst innovating. But then when you released it, the pandemic happened, and it took on this unexpected lease of life as a way of showing how other restaurants can use this mindset to navigate them through the pandemic. Could you talk a bit about how that happened?

I think one thing that I’ve noticed about all the places that I’ve been to during researching that book, is the uncertainty mindset ─ which is basically just acknowledging that you don’t know what the future will be and taking action based on knowing that you don’t know what the future will be. Those restaurants also tended to be the ones that looked at this changing situation, and decided to do something different, they weren’t stuck in or bound by the idea they had to do the same thing, because they were so used to doing something different. That, I think, was maybe the new relevance that you were pointing to. 

This isn’t just a problem for restaurants, it’s a general problem for people and organisations. I’m speaking for myself in this context as well. We, as people and organisations, love stability, we love knowing that the future will be like the past, even when we claim we don’t. We love thinking that the future will be predictable, we love knowing how to do things, we love knowing what to do. Having that certainty is very viscerally comforting. The people who are at organisations who are OK being confronted with the reality that the future is not knowable, that it is changing all the time (like what’s happening during Covid) that they don’t know what to do next and they don’t know how to do it: those are the ones that tend to be much more effective when the situation is very uncertain. There were some restaurants and businesses during the pandemic which said ‘holy shit, everything is changing, we’re going to stop everything and panic.’ And then there are other restaurants which said ‘let’s try to experiment about doing a new type of business that works now, if that doesn’t work we’ll try something else, if that doesn’t work we’ll try something else until that does work.’

A restaurant that we both love a lot, which we don’t have to name, you know has been doing things just like that. I know it’s not easy, but they’ve been very successful doing that, even though they’re not one of the types of restaurant in my book, because they’re embracing uncertainty. Not in the sense they love it and want more of it, but in the sense that they’re simply not trying to pretend it’s not there. 

Do you think this rethinking and reshaping of restaurants will last just for the duration of the pandemic, or do you think there will be a longer term shift? Because the restaurant you’re talking about, which I’ll just name ─ 40 Maltby St right?

Yes.

Well, I think I spent more money there during the pandemic than I would have done in normal times. Because, when they were normally open, maybe I would go once a fortnight and have a meal and glass of wine. It would be a treat and it would cost me £30-40 for a meal. But then during lockdown, it became more justifiable for me to go more often, because maybe I was getting food for the week, or getting wine to drink at a later date, or a meal to put in the freezer, or a sandwich, or a vegetable box, or some pastry to use in my cooking. So even though these were smaller things per spend, they actually added up into something bigger. Given some restaurants are thinking about what they should keep, do you think that the pandemic has actually been a way for restaurants to find business models that are perhaps more resilient than they were before?

Yes, absolutely I think so. I think there are three ways of answering your question. The first way is looking at those restaurants that experimented with different business models, and by different business models I mean they’re selling different services and products that they would normally have sold, possibly to different people. What you mention with 40 Maltby St is they did so many things over the last 12 months and each one of those things was differentially successful. I would imagine they may keep some of them if they were successful enough when they reopen if they worked well enough. So that’s one way: if they found a new customer, or developed a new service and found that it works, then there’s no reason why you wouldn’t keep that thing, right?

The second way is that there is a bigger question above this idea of just offering a different service. Before March 2020, an ambitious restaurant would be trying to attract customers that came from, maybe not even within London, but across the world. You were trying to be a destination restaurant for people coming from far away. And suddenly, with Covid, everyone had to focus on people who were close enough to go there without flying in or taking a train.

So I would hope that the restaurants that experimented with building products and services for nearby people, and who might eventually become regulars, I hope those restaurants realise that this is actually a really good thing. Regular custom tends to be more favourable custom, they cut you some slack when you’re having a bad service day, it’s fun to serve them because you like them, and the fact that they come again and again means you know them better and you can give them better stuff that they want more. So I hope that there’s a transition away from ‘ambitious’ meaning ‘being a destination and attracting a destination customer’, towards ‘ambitious’ meaning ‘I want to focus on a nearby customer and really serve them what they want’. I hope that sticks.

And then the third way is if you have a team of people who have gone through this long series of experiments with changing the business to adapt. If you have a team who has gone through it, and has made it out the other side, and knows how to do it well, I think that’s really powerful for the team. Because maybe the next source of uncertainty ─ maybe not a pandemic, maybe something we don’t even know about yet ─ will mean you’ll have to change your business model again. But now you’ll have a team that is able to do that because they know how to stop doing what they got good at, and start doing something new and learn how to get good at that. And that’s a powerful thing, not just for restaurants, but for individual people and for any company. Building the personal capacity and team capacity to do something different and get good at that, is incredibly powerful and I hope that sticks around.

It was really interesting for me as someone whose area of specialism before the pandemic started was diaspora restaurants, that what you are saying with that second point, almost exactly, is not how high end and innovative restaurants operate ─ they tend to be how diaspora restaurants operate. Which I found funny because there was a lot of talk about this ‘new type’ of restaurant and whether the concept of the restaurant was changing, which I guess it was, but it also looked very familiar because these are the type of restaurants I love and usually eat at. It also made me rethink all my preconceived distinctions that I made between these two types of restaurant, and that actually, why not say that a restaurant like 40 Maltby St is closer to a restaurant like Singburi, for instance

Yes!

Than it is something like...Gordon Ramsay at Claridges. No wait, that restaurant doesn’t even exist anymore, but you know what I mean.

I absolutely agree. I love Singburi, as you know, and I would say that both of those restaurants have invested a lot in making sure that the offering they provide is one that encourages people to come back, and encourages people to become regulars.

Definitely. I think the sense of familiarity and comfortableness I feel when I’m at either is the same, and they serve the same function for me. It’s made me reassess whether I should be separating these types of restaurants simply because one is run by first or second generation immigrants and serves a vernacular cuisine. That kind of distinction doesn’t really make any sense to me now.

I’ve always believed that anything can be categorised in an infinity of ways, and some of them are more salient to a particular time than others. At a time when ethnicity and race are very salient, we tend to look at things and categorise them in these very salient categories. And I’ve never bought into that, as you know. 

If we want to take a look at these restaurants that we all know and love, and how they feel to us, I would put three very unlikely restaurants together: 40 Maltby St, Quality Wines, and Singburi. And I’d also put The Winemakers Club into that cluster because they operate from a fundamentally different way of thinking about who their customer base is and how they want to appeal to that customer base. It doesn’t matter if the person who runs it is from a minority background, or is an immigrant, or whatever. Genuinely to me I think it’s irrelevant because they’re offering something more than where they came from or what their ethnicity is. 

You mention those four places. I’d say those are the four places that I would categorise as ‘Vaughn Tan restaurants’ in the sense that if I walked into any of them and saw you propping up the bar I would not be surprised. For you … sorry I’m carefully trying not to provoke an answer which I think will get you cancelled by everyone in the London restaurant industry, but … how would you categorise those very few restaurants that you love, and then how would you categorise where the rest of London restaurants are at the moment?

Those places that you mention do something very specific which I care about a lot: each one has a very clear idea of what ‘quality’ means for them. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something that everyone else agrees with, it just happens that I agree with their idea of what makes something ‘high quality.’ For each one of those four locations, you’re not going there for the same thing. You can’t mistake 40 Maltby Street’s food for the experience of going to The Winemaker’s Club. They’re all trying to do something distinctive, and in a way, what’s really cool about all of those places is they don’t pander to the customer. If the customer doesn’t like what they’re providing then the customer can go somewhere else. Many people actually do go somewhere else, because they don’t like what’s being provided or they don’t like how it’s being provided, but what each of these places is doing happens to be something I like a lot. 

This also links to where I think the London restaurant scene is or is going. What I really would love is for more restaurants to say ‘this is what I’m about, this is my unique idea of quality, and I’m going to try to find the people, the customers, who want this kind of quality and I’m going to give them this in as pure a form as I can. And for anyone who doesn’t want that, I’m going to be OK with them not coming to eat at my restaurant or drink at my bar instead of trying to dilute my offering so that I get more people to come who don’t necessarily want the core of what I’m offering.’ I’m definitely not going to name names, but a lot of London restaurants are not doing that. They’re thinking ‘my rent is so high, my space is so big, I need to fill it up. In order to fill it up, I need to do not only the thing that I really want to do that appeals to what I believe is a small population of customers, I need to dilute.’ In the course of diluting, what inevitably ends up happening is that you get mediocre food.

I can’t see this changing until the economics of running a restaurant changes in London. Even with the pandemic, it’s difficult to see it happening. Ambitious restaurants still run on this idea that their restaurant has to be in central London, and that the way to make money is to scale up, to have this clever, recognisable brand or concept, and then to rapidly expand it. 

Yeah, I agree. When I said this is what I hope it’s not a prediction. I’m not expecting to come back and see, in four or five years, a massive flowering of places that are doing what I want them to do. Because, exactly as you point out, in London rent is very high. The cost of labour is also high, and yet the pay is not enough for the people who are working in those positions. And realistically, it may be the case that there are not enough people who care enough about unique ideas of quality, or loyal enough or frequent enough customers to make these restaurants succeed. 

What would have to happen? I think if there was a real estate price collapse in London then … maybe that would help. And it is plausible that that might happen. Another interesting thing would be if ambitious chefs thought about what an ambitious restaurant could look like in different ways. As you point out, if the idea of what an ambitious restaurant is is a big restaurant in central London, or a group of restaurants, that is beautifully kitted out, then it seems almost impossible to see how that could work. On the other hand, it’s possible to think about an ambitious restaurant as … which Zone is Singburi in? 3? 4?

3 I think. Leytonstone isn’t actually that far, everyone just likes to pretend it is. 

Yeah it just feels like it’s very far away! But it’s possible to think of a restaurant as ambitious and not be in Zone 1 or Zone 2, and actually treat it seriously as an ambitious restaurant as a chef, as a critic and as a customer.You’ve been to Tokyo, you’ve seen places in Japan, and this is exactly what happens ─ you can have a serious restaurant that is very ambitious in what they’re trying to do and they’re in a 150 sq ft location on the 9th floor of a 35 year old building. And people take it seriously. The food is serious, and it works as a restaurant. Why can’t we have that in London? I mean, there’s many many reasons why we can’t have that in London. But it’s not an impossibility, because it happens in other places.

Is there a distinction there for you between ambition and innovation? I’d say that the restaurants you’ve mentioned are ambitious restaurants without necessarily being that innovative or new in what they cook. Again I’m not going to name names, but there have been a few examples of restaurants in London which have changed their business models during the pandemic from something which focuses on innovation to a repetitive, more limited in scope product, where I would actually say I prefer this repetitive product to the innovative menu that it was pursuing before that. But is that ambitious? I wonder if there has to be a mindset shift around ‘what does an ambitious chef do?’ Is it someone who innovates the menu every single week, or is it someone who does a similar thing week in week out and innovates within those parameters? 

I think your question brings up a couple of things I want to say a few things about.

The first thing is that opening up the idea of what innovation can be in food is important. When you think of innovation you think of innovation on the plate, because that’s what we’re conditioned to think of innovation in food as ─ here’s a new dish, a new flavour combination. But actually there are so many ways of innovating. I can talk about five ways of innovating which are not about a product. You could innovate on a service model. You can innovate on a process ─ the rarebit example is partly a recipe innovation but also a process innovation, how you actually make the thing. You can innovate on a business model. You can innovate in terms of how you organise. You can innovate on what quality is. None of those kinds of innovation necessarily require you to make a new dish every week or every month, but they still make businesses more successful. 

If you think about the people who do process innovation, they’re the ones who tend to reduce the cost of doing business and become more profitable. If you think about service innovation, I mean Postcard Teas I would say, has been a service innovator for a long time, because of it’s way of choosing how to sell tea and how it does the in store experience. That’s a service innovation! In terms of business model innovation, I think we see this all the time in London. I think the JKS group has a very interesting business model innovation going on. Even if I don’t agree with everything they do, they’re certainly successful at doing it. And the way you organise, I’d say 40 Maltby St has a very unusual way of organising its own team. And then we’ve talked about quality innovation. Why aren’t we talking about those kinds of innovation in food? Why are we only thinking about being ambitiously innovative in terms of making a new dish every week or every two weeks? It just seems to me like an unnecessary focus on something which, to me, isn’t even that interesting as an innovation. Do I really want a new type of sandwich every week, or would I prefer, by far, a really really well-made sandwich? I’d prefer the well-made sandwich.

No absolutely, I think you’ve made a really important point there to bring these things under the umbrella of innovation. Even thinking of Singburi’s current model, of essentially operating as a dark kitchen despite being a restaurant with a physical presence, and yet still taking bookings and not offering delivery or dining in: this is an innovation. He’s found a way of existing as a restaurant that alleviates the stress for front of house, keeps his customer base, and avoids delivery commissions. Very few people have done that.

One final thing: you’ve been in the Auvergne now for seven months and I take it you haven’t eaten at a restaurant in that time?

Not once.

How has your relationship to restaurants changed in that time? Over here people, and certainly critics, are saying ‘right, I’m fed up, I want to go back to restaurants now’ but has it changed your...I wouldn’t say you had a reliance on them before, but you were fairly regular at certain places...I guess your relationship to eating out, and really, whether you think you’ll eat out in the same way again?

I think my approach to restaurants at the moment is quite fraught. I have no desire to go to generic restaurants just to have food cooked for me. But there are certain restaurants that I desperately want to go back to ─ and you know which restaurants those are in London. After cooking everything that I’ve eaten for the last seven months myself, I’m not tired of cooking. What I would love to experience again is someone else’s idea of what good food is. Maybe how I would categorise it is that most restaurants in the world are ‘commodity restaurants’, they’re just producing food and I’m personally capable of producing food myself. I want to go to the non-commodity restaurants, where the restaurant is in the business of producing an idea of quality, implementing it in food or service, which is distinctive to the person doing it. But I’m not yearning to go out just so someone else can do the dishes, I don’t care about that. I don’t mind doing the dishes, or cooking or prepping. But it would be nice to go to a place where there is a unique and distinctive idea of what it means to serve good food and serve it well. And I want that again, as soon as I can. 

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Editing is the invisible art. There are exceptions of course ─ Gordon Lish infamously edited Raymond Carver into or out of existence, depending on whose version of events you want to believe. But Lish was a rare editor who wanted people to know exactly what he had done. Otherwise the role of editor is an eminence grise, orchestrating behind the scenes. Like a spin doctor, they only become visible if they’ve done their job badly.

2020 has been the year in food media where the editor has become visible. In what seems like years ago, but was actually just a few months back, Bon Appetit imploded due to the actions of its editorial team but particular those of the editor in chief Adam Rapaport, which were exposed by the writer Tammie Teclemariam (now immortalised via Wikipedia!). And a month later, again prompted by Teclemariam’s probings, Peter Meehan resigned as the editor of the LA Times food section a year after his high profile announcement. And as the role of editor becomes more visible, so too does the machinations of the job, and what is and isn’t possible to change. Bon Appetit may have made all the requisite editorial changes people demanded from it, yet it still has the capacity to implode when it feels like it.

As new ventures emerge from the ashes of the pandemic prompted by an adversarial relationship with certain editors or even with the act of editing itself, I thought it was high time to do an interview focused on the role of the editor. I’ve been lucky enough to have received amazing editing on all the articles I’ve written, and James Hansen has probably been responsible for most of those edits (even if a lot of the time, he’s just removing my more unacceptable jokes). Although I first got to know James as a writer, since 2018 he’s mainly worked as an editor ─ at Eater London and lately on his own food newsletter In Digestion, which surveys the week’s best food writing and teases out connections between them.

On a bitterly cold afternoon, we wrapped up and sat down at Flor in Borough Market to talk about UK food writing and editing, the limits of prestige, the differences in the US and UK model, and why unnecessary beef is just more cows to breed.

How has the last few months been for you and your work?

I'd characterise the last few months as less intense than the previous few, but therefore, ironically, more tiring. I started In Digestion right when the pandemic was at its most intense in terms of its impact on my work at Eater London, and some kind of food writing adrenaline and a sequence of significant events in the food writing world carried me through summer and early autumn. Since then, as London restaurants have been nominally allowed to open but with trade heavily restricted and without proportionate financial support, things have felt calmer, and with that has come this awesome wave of tiredness that has I think knocked me out for the rest of the year. I'll be resuming In Digestion in 2021, with the weekly round up and weekly interviews with who, I think anyway, are the most exciting writers and other figures of the moment. I guess, most recently on Eater, I've mainly been covering the government's inability to transform abstract policy decisions into reality, perhaps best reflected in the both funny and utterly tedious debate around the ontology of Scotch eggs.

You started In Digestion in March, pretty much the same time as Vittles and Alicia Kennedy going full time with her newsletter. And although they all do different things, I'd say one thing they all do (or in my case, try to do) is start conversations between forms of food writing that maybe previously weren't speaking to each other, and connecting ideas which before may have felt disparate, whether it's between the UK and US or academia and the mainstream. Is that something you consciously try to do when you choose which articles you want to promote, and who you choose to interview?

That's absolutely conscious and thank you for characterising it so thoughtfully. I think it's true that one of the effects of this year in the food media space is in making these dialogues feel easier to establish. Spaces for them have long existed but they tend to be events with high levels of either cost, exclusivity, inaccessibility, or all of those things attached, and the growth in dialogically oriented newsletters has only hastened them I think. I, personally, have long thought about and tried to enact the principle that food writing and food media and their various genres should be analysed interconnectively; the precursor to In Digestion was The Gannet Digest, which I started with Killian Fox and Adam Park at The Gannet five years or so ago and proved to be something that people liked to read. 

I think discourses in food and the restaurant world can only, in the additive sense not the unique sense, grow more complex and mature if their frames of reference are more readily allowed to interact and be more porous, between like you say various disciplines, various genres, various medias. I think Alicia Kennedy, Korsha Wilson on a Hungry Society, Osayi Endolyn, Tunde Wey, Stephen Satterfield, Anna Sulan Masing and Chloe Rose-Crabtree at Sourced, Charlotte Druckman, Soleil Ho, Vittles itself, Rebecca May Johnson, Nicola Miller, Ruby Tandoh, Mayukh Sen — these are all writers and thinkers who are able to harness and complicate these interactions to build a more complete picture of how food and food media relate to the cultural world at large. I think that's when food writing is at its most impactful and its most alive. I think the "food writer" label increasingly feels like a misnomer for the ways in which restaurant writing, recipe writing, ecology writing, labour writing, tech writing, are all intersecting around food. This doesn't mean it's a bad label, or that people who call themselves food writers are "less"; it means that its richness and granularity is finally being addressed, whereas in the past I think it's felt the opposite. 

To what extent do you think the “newsletter boom” has been a reaction to dissatisfaction with legacy media, and particularly editors ─ I’m thinking here about anything from “editors won’t publish me” all the way up to Glenn Greenwald’s “I keep being published but I don’t want to be edited”?

I think Substack's prevalence as a platform and its prevalence as a platform for a certain type of "whomst dares to edit me, A Great Writer" white, male, high-salaried figure has led to overstatements about its position within media, about its opportunity to save media, about it ever being possible for it to be oppositional to media's many institutional biases, aggressions, and disparities. A really prominent line of critique seems to be that about 5 percent of Glenn Greenwald clones are Fucking Smashing It and the other 95 percent of Substack people are absolutely loathing their lack of success, or Not Succeeding and feeling downtrodden. I think that critique needs some serious work, particularly in a food media year that has seen Peter Meehan, who was deified for building THE great alternative food magazine, Lucky Peach, shown to be utterly morally repugnant and harmful while the publication he edited, which was billed as having the next great food section, has been systemically underpaying Patricia Escarcega because her colleague has a James Beard Award. Is it any wonder people are looking elsewhere, for space to work and to think and to provide an alternative? Substack's been around longer than it feels like, newsletters have been around even longer than that, and terms like "newsletter boom," "success," and the metrics of those rarely get defined. Lots of food newsletters are excellent and are free! Does that mean they aren't successful? 

*a single oyster arrives at the table*

Just for the record, Jonathan is being presented with single oyster

Look at this! On ice as well.

Anyway, I think, connected to the granulation of what constitutes food writing, is an increased attention to identifying not just with an individual, but with their value systems. I think plenty of people prefer individual U.K. restaurant critics for their opinions, but I think few could identify what they and even their food sections stand for — other than the correctness of their own opinions. What I see in newsletters in food is the harnessing of subjectivity in order to create focus and complexity and compulsion in arguments, instead of running away from it and toward false omniscience. I also see confidence in one’s own opinions being couched in value systems, in tradition, in context. It’s telling to me that a lot of great recipe writing is very much situated like this, revelling in the tension between subjectivity and authority, and has been for aeons. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the most prominent brilliant food writers championing new writing ─ Nigella Lawson, Dan Lepard, Nigel Slater ─ are a part of that space.

But I think it's actually difficult, if not rare, to be given the space, time, and capital to achieve that as a staff writer at a publication, let alone as a freelancer, and it's something I very consciously try to achieve in all of my writing and editorial for Eater London — being able to offer answers for why is this being published, what is it valuing, what is it identifying with, even with my silliest or most frivolous work. By contrast newsletters feel  like a natural outlet for that kind of thinking and that's what I see flourishing. Even if they are not as new or as booming as some might say.

How have you seen the editorial remit of Eater London change in the last three years, and where do you see that going in the future?

For those who may not have timelines, Eater launched in Summer 2017, I wrote my first piece for them in July. Like you I was baited into writing by George Reynolds, the great connector of London food writing.  I worked in various editorial capacities up into June 2018, then worked full time, then got formally hired six months ago. That’s fairly boring but just to give you context that Eater London is three and a half years old, and Eater as a brand has been around in the States since the early-mid 2000s. I think the main change would be this shift in, I wouldn’t say tone, but confidence and in going from being the new entrant to a relatively established group of food writers and food writing publications to being considered as part of an authority figure, I think the changes in perception and decision making, they come with that. I think that a good bellwether for this would be what happened with Som Saa in summer 2018, I think that was maybe the first time in my view anyway, that it felt like Eater was genuinely taking a stand on something in food media I feel like other publications didn’t or wouldn’t. I don't particularly want to ascribe “don't or won’t” to individual publications but it was striking to me that the Evening Standard, which is the only paper in the UK with a specifically London restaurant remit, chose not to cover it. 

I think that was defining because it represented a sort of shifting. In that story, and ensuing stories about, you know, the review of Kaki by Giles Coren in the Times, they became stories for us not because we necessarily decided independently that they were a big deal. They were, but it wasn't a case of us being like “we need to make this an issue”. It was multiple people in the East and Southeast Asian communities in London, either directly to us, or on social media, made it very plain that both of those were extremely big deals. And that is the guiding principle for us in covering these kinds of things. That is why it is a big deal. It's because people in the community have been caused harm by these things which they are saying is a serious problem. That this makes them feel unsafe in restaurants that they would otherwise want to patronise. That this makes them feel the broader spectrum of London and UK food writing doesn't care about harm done to them, or about the pain they feel seeing these things play out in either restaurant kitchens or in food publications.

Yeah I find this idea very amusing, that Eater London, which is part of a media conglomerate owned by Vox, is some kind of second coming of Robespierre. Because what you’re proposing, and what Soleil says and what I’ve been saying, seem like fairly basic courtesies and should not feel ‘radical’ in any sense of that word

I think what was telling about Som Saa and Kaki situations was that even if to us covering those things felt necessary and the complete opposite of radical, the response in other publications and from other writers, was very much like it was radical. And I think that kind of illustrates how, in my view, behind the times UK food writing as a discipline is. I certainly don't think it’s radical to address what was very plainly racism coming from a chef in one of the most widely acclaimed new Thai restaurants in London. I don’t think it’s radical to address people's concerns about the representation of Chinese in a national restaurant critics column which has immense reach and power. Even if, as you noted in your essay on restaurant criticism, he and many other critics don't seem to take their roles seriously while feeling that they themselves should be taken seriously. 

I think that is one of the ways in which Eater has changed. In the treating of these things as a norm, it has maybe lessened a bit of the confrontational/beefy nature of 2017/2018. I think it's become a little bit more sober. I think that's happened because increasingly these conversations about food being political etc are being taken more seriously and normalised — that must be happening because people like Adam Rapoport were rightly lampooned for claiming it — and it doesn't feel necessary anymore to have to make the point that these things need talking about by being spiky about it. I think it’s more powerful, and I credit my editor, Adam Coghlan, with driving this home to me personally as a writer but also as a general editorial vision, to just let what people are saying speak for itself. People can see what is and isn’t okay to say and they don't need a spiky food writer telling them so. You need to keep pressing home that these things are important and addressing why they're important but I think it’s less necessary to couch it in a kind of, I guess, meta-narrative of factionalism within UK food writing, which I've always thought is overegged for the sake of keeping parts of the debate in the realm of interpersonal digs and beef and stuff like that, rather than having a serious structural conversation about what broadly needs to change.

I think ‘show not tell’ has also been the best advice I’ve been given editorially, and also personally. That’s very much been behind a lot of my thinking with starting Vittles in the first place.

But apart from those fairly large flashpoints, what smaller decisions do you make as an editor on a day to day basis, especially as acting editor for a lot of this year, that people who read Eater might be unaware of?

So first of all, I’d say that editing and being edited are good. I think anyone who says otherwise is truly out of their mind no matter what the Substack-erati of Yglesias and Greenwald might think. I think in terms of editing other people's work I think the most important thing to do is to kind of attempt as much as possible to remove your own personal biases as far as you can and focus on hearing what a writer wants to say, addressing the places in which what they have written is preventing them from being heard, and then ensuring the gap between what they want to say and what the reader hears is non-existent, that there is no gap. Something which Helen Rosner, whose writing I admire, said is that it's like learning to look into a camera viewfinder and accept that what you see is what there is, not everything extraneous around the scene. 

In terms of decision making, I would say that. I don't think that I am always consciously trying to write about places, which, for whatever reasons, are underrepresented. You do need to do that but I don't think that that's necessarily something which needs to be done at the cost of acclaiming places which are good, and people kind of know they are good. I want to say this because I think one of the most disingenuous arguments against broadening a publication’s remit is that it is somehow zero sum, that acclaiming one place means negging another; that a restaurant not being on a given guide or list ipso facto makes that restaurant shit. The world is bigger than restaurant guides and they need to acknowledge this, but also the world needs to acknowledge that they are never finished or set in stone.

I think what is more concerning is when you have such a homogeneity of perspective, like, again the only go-to example in the UK are restaurant reviews, where same restaurant is reviewed three or four times in a few weeks  by nominally different critics because they've all been given the same PR invite or they've all been to a new restaurant by someone who was already a big deal because they are a famous chef. So I think the guiding principle is very much a combination of what Eater London staff and contributors think is interesting, balanced with ensuring that the net of what's interesting is kind of cast as wide as possible. Whether that be geographic, whether it be financial in terms of cost, whether it be geographic in terms of where the food is coming from. Whether it be in terms of the age of a restaurant, so somewhere that might be very new that someone's been around for decades. I think what unifies it is just trying to represent London in a way which we don't see elsewhere in U.K. food media, even international food media.

Trying to represent London in a way we don’t usually see was pretty much the reason I started writing. Why don’t you think we see much of it?

I think a key part of this is that unlike in the States: one, there's not really an alt-weekly kind of media landscape. The US one has been quite badly decimated in the last couple of decades but there was one, and it not only allowed for very locally driven food writing but also provided an avenue for food writing talent that didn't either want to or have the connections necessary to come up through the usual way. The second thing is the big ticket broadsheets are still tied to a city. However much they may be internationally resonant and significant, The New York Times is a New York paper, The Washington Post is still a Washington paper. The LA Times is still an Los Angeles paper, and so on. Whereas the papers that dominate the scene in London food writing, with the exception of the Evening Standard, are all national papers before they’re London papers. And while London still has an outsized place in coverage because it's the capital and it’s the biggest city, there's not that kind of bedrock of locally interested, influential journalism from which to kind of orient oneself in terms of how you write about a given city because the papers take up so much real estate.. But also to then create avenues for other smaller or larger publications to kind of spring off. So in LA you might have the LA Times and Eater LA but also LA Taco. In the US at large you have The Village Voice. In New York you have The New York Times you have Eater NY or you have New York Magazine.

And I think there's more healthily interested competition, and also, that bedrock of locally oriented writing, which I think there hasn't been here, with the exception of maybe Guy Dimond’s editing of Time Out and the feted Zone 2-3 explorations of Charles Campion. So I think one of the issues is that, maybe that vacuum has made the arrival of Eater and its viewpoint feel more factional and confrontational or whatever word you want to use, than it is. Because there's not really a reference point. And there's not really a collection of similar publications to identify with and orient oneself against. So what that creates is a mismatch between the Eater ethos and the broadsheet ethos, even though because of the reasons I just described, they're often not really on similar territories. Like I don't really think the viewpoints are all that comparable. And I think that's one of the reasons that it feels like the head butting or whatever has been overstated. It's not really a kind of straightforward comparison. I think there's always going to be that weighting of quite different viewpoints when you know you're talking about a publication which is dedicated entirely to London, and a critic, because of the way national media works is definitely oriented towards London, But it's not their beat. 

What do you think the implications of this lack of beat is on the writing? And do you think there necessarily needs to be this disparity between UK and US restaurant writing?

In my view, the great majority of restaurant writing in the UK, currently, as in reviews, feels more closely tied to UK opinion writing than it does what you and I might just understand as food writing. If I were to sort of go through the arguments I've seen both from critics and their defenders, wait, not defenders ─ fans . So the first one is that critics sometimes believe that because of the tension between their national remit and their readership, that for many readers they are talking about restaurants they will never visit and therefore the review is almost incidental to the crafting of a fine opinion column, because ultimately they're never going to eat the food. And the second one is a kind of extension of that which is that entertaining writing, which is always posited as being opposite to informed writing - which is nonsense - will sell papers.  

So firstly I would ask them to look at the subscription figures for the New York Times food section which I believe is either the most subscribed section of that paper or the one with the highest growth this year. And secondly. I think this is kind of what you're hinting about, that there doesn't need to be this disparity. You can write in a way which is entertaining for someone who doesn't necessarily care about a restaurant, whether because they're not gonna visit it or it's not the style of food they’re into eating, or they're just more there for the writer than the review. 

And I think the success of Soleil for example in San Francisco is also a testament to that. I think that's quite a unique situation because her predecessor, Michael Bauer, was known for having exceptionally insidery and kind of chummy mode of reviewing and so maybe there's a sense of any change in that would have felt quite seismic regardless of who it was. But I think that would account for a very small proportion of why Soleil pulls in so many readers, because she's an exceptionally good writer and she writes about restaurants in a way which opens up the idea of the individual review to a plurality of experience and also opinion. Like in her review of a Burmese restaurant in San Francisco where she consulted MiMi Aye because she didn't know that much about Burmese food, or her review of La Colonial, the Vietnamese restaurant whose decor and vibe she very skillfully dissected. And these pieces generate a very large amount of online debate and discussion, and no doubt get an awful lot of traffic. So it seems very odd to me that the main argument against it is audience or readership numbers. 

I guess if you see the food writing world as factional, then Soleil is definitely the person who could be perceived as being from one faction moving into that legacy media space with huge success. But I’m increasingly skeptical of how much change an individual can affect, given what has happened this year. I mean, just look at the editorial and personnel change that has happened at Bon Appetit, and then they go fuck it up again. 

I think the piece of thinking I’d look to on this Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter On Prestige, which talks about how even when editorial change of personnel happens, the sort of overarching superstructure of acclaim, awards, adverting, money, and therefore I guess metrics like pageviews etc. is still both incredibly powerful and still seems to produce a very myopic perspective, I think, as we've seen with Bon Appetit it would be naive to think that tomorrow if five writers from, for the sake of the argument, the ‘Soleil faction’ assumed all the roles in prominent UK critical space that there would suddenly be a shift, because Soleil had had the backing of the SF Chronicle editor. And I think you only have to look at discussions that we had this summer ,like the Black Book talk on critics, which you took part in and Jimi from the Evening Standard took part in, that for individual writers even if you want to change the places you write about and the ways in which you write about them, you have to do that that in the context of a superstructure which still very much takes precedence over your own ideas a lot of the time. So I think that change that needs to happen is, one at least one level above, as in the editorial level. If not, higher than that. In terms of where publications are getting their funding from. 

But the part of that which I think is editorial is the act of taking the huge numbers of steps to decentre the assumption of who your default reader is. There are lots of micro ways in which that happens, whether it be deciding not to translate words, deciding not to italicise foreign words in whatever language you're writing. In, like how the LA Times and Javier Cabral’s LA Taco have done, translating articles into the language of the communities they are writing about when necessary. LA Taco did an obituary of a person in an Angelino community with a specific Mexican dialect, I think he was a chef or a restaurant owner, and translated into that dialect  So two versions are online. Recently Eater changed our fonts, so that different alphabet styles can be rendered properly without them jagging out when they’re published.

And then there's a larger thing which we talked about which is how you frame coverage of restaurants and cuisines and communities that aren’t yours as a writer or editor. I think basically the key guiding principle is ceding the floor. So either allowing someone from that community who is better placed to tell the story, to tell the story. Or including their voices as prominently as possible and ensuring that when conceiving of who an article is for, not kind of trying to subscribe to this false idea that any article must be for everyone. The way it’s always framed is “well, we don't want to write about this Black-owned restaurant because it's not for everyone” And it's like, well, who do you think all the articles about white-owned restaurants weren’t for?

Often you’re talking about restaurants here which are relevant to more people, that are more widely frequented than any restaurant in Mayfair. So the question for papers isn’t so much, “is this for everyone?” It’s “is this for everyone that we think reads our paper?”

But new people might want to read the paper if you expand out what you're writing about!

Leaving aside many of the not great reasons why editing has become more visible this year, do you think that increased visibility is a good thing?

I think one of the guiding arguments against various things Eater has covered, and one of the labels that has been attached to Eater is some variation of being ‘mean’ or ‘rude’. What’s most interesting about all of those criticisms, are the words chosen - mean, rude, unpleasant - are interpersonal words. People are rude to people, people are mean to people, individuals sre rude or mean individuals. But you're talking about a publication, which sure in London has two full time staff, but as part of Vox media has hundreds. I’ve been trying to figure out why so much of the backlash against some of the things that Eater has covered has been couched in these interpersonal terms. And I think the reason is that in the London restaurant space, for many different reasons, a lot of places, and people by extension, which are extremely influential may have power now but it all sort of originated in that crucible of 2008 recession, of late 2000s early 2010s, you know, kind of food trucks and residences and popups. Small, personally run, personally attached operations. So they weren't perceived as brands, they were perceived as individuals. I think what that forged is a very powerful, and, for those people, supportive, helpful, kind, encouraging, all these things, sense of camaraderie and interpersonal support. But many of these people then got positions of power and influence which are not interpersonal: like restaurateur, critic, public relations, writer, newspaper editor

I think what hasn't happened is that that sense of camaraderie and interpersonal support has matured in such a way that it takes account of the position of power it now inhabits. And therefore, when it is critiqued as a structure, ie. in existing as a collection of restaurants, a newspaper, or piece of writing, or even sometimes a discussion on social media, that critique which is meant as structural is taken interpersonally. And that's why I think a lot of the response is like: Eater London is mean, it’s being rude. And think what we've seen with editorial becoming, as I think you very accurately said, less invisible, certainly in the case of say Adam Rapoport or Peter Meehan, is that what's happened there, and has been, maybe more widely elucidated by reporting ─ for example, Megan McCarron’s piece about Peter Meehan’s tenure at Lucky Peach and the LA Times and the reporting in Business Insider by Rachel Premack on Bon Appetit, is that it’s illustrated that the interpersonal and the structural are intrinsically connected. Like it's true that structures and collectives and publications are often, if not always, more powerful than individuals. But they are nevertheless, composed of individuals who wield power, who decide who the ingroup is and who the outgroup is, who give people acclaim, prosperity, opportunity and deny those things to others. 

So I think that it was a good thing that this year has even more fully revealed that connection, even if huge numbers of people already saw it clearly.. And I think what needs to happen in the case of the UK is for that connection to be more fully acknowledged. I think still whenever people try to draw those structural arguments out and explain what the kind of broader impact of individual choices and decisions and acclaim and harm are, they get critiqued only on the interpersonal level. Whether that’s questioning the logic of giving an award for food writing for unpublished writers to a published food writer. Whether that’s elucidating the power dynamics between a Masterchef contestant and Masterchef, the institution. Or in your case, when you’re writing about the homogeneity of restaurants in Soho. It gets taken as saying that this individual restaurant is bad or this person is a bad person, this person is this. When that's not really the point. This also never really was what those pieces or arguments are saying., I think the American reporting and discussion on these issues is quite far ahead of here, in terms of framing them as part of cultural, structural criticism. I hope that changes that people are able to sort of see beyond the idea that their individual restaurant or business are being pilloried on the terms of them being an individual. It’s about the structural things which create the capacity for these situations to happen.

Where have you seen British food media change this year, and where do you see it going in 2021?

I can’t say I’ve seen it change all that much. Certainly not at a criticism level. I think there's been some encouraging increases in the plurality of voices that publications are referring to. I still feel as with our discussion about the double edged sword of calling something radical that those pluralities are still being treated as a kind of pleasing diversion from normality. Which I think goes kind of hand in hand with the boom and bust in interest of Black-owned restaurants and businesses in the summer, which seems to have largely tapered off at the mainstream level. I think it's been encouraging to see people have confidence and speed to create spaces which create their own definitions of interest and excellence. I think that was one of the guiding principles for me behind In Digestion, to try to offer slightly different parameters for what is considered good and interesting. I think Vittles does that. I think Black Book did that in its talks and events. I think Melissa Thompson's column in BBC Good Food, Alicia's newsletter, Kevin Vaughn's Matambre. I think the change I've seen, which hasn't really happened in the mainstream, is not being too precious about one's frames of reference, about them needing to be in the UK or needing to be immediately legible to whatever the UK reader is, if that reader even exists. 

But on the flipside I’ve just watched the lack of alternative ambition when it comes to, for example restaurant reviews when restaurants have been closed, which has been characterised by endless free meal kits and, you know, critics showing us their kitchens. Whereas I feel that was almost a free space for editors to try something different and offer a view on how difficult restaurants have been finding things for the past nine months - both at the ownership level and the worker level. It’s kind of puzzling to me that that didn’t eventuate.

So in terms of where I see it going, I think given by the swiftness with which critics returned to normal, as in doing restaurant reviews, after the first lockdown and in a couple of cases after the second one, I can't say I see a great deal of structural or individual change. I'm very interested in how, particularly the papers backed by Rupert Murdoch and Evgeny Lebedev, respond to Brexit, with its fast approaching with an impact on food supply chains and restaurant economics and restaurant labour, whether there will be any accounting for of that, or whether there'll be some sort of, you know, throwaway lines and reviews which are otherwise as they are now. Yeah, I wish I was more hopeful than I am, but I think that as Eater has been able to do that, I think that the alternative spaces which have found a growing readership this year are going to be able to continue to grow. And hopefully eventually to actually have a material impact on the general state of, not just UK food writing, but as we’ve been discussing, facilitating international conversation. And maybe they'll allow an influential network of publications which are more global, more dialogic than UK writing usually allows.

Utopically speaking then, how do you think things could improve?

Something in The Fence piece which was quite striking to me was I thought the most illuminating quote was actually Soleil’s when she said it should be fairly basic for people of colour and by extension, people from any given place or community or identity, to have a stake in conversations about those communities, identities, connected cultures, restaurants, foods etc, whatever it may be. And I think that when you present these things as essentially a microcosm or piece of source material of for petty argument between faction one and faction two of UK food writing, like that might be the case for some of the people cited in that piece, but the reality of it that these things are lived realities for the people who are either hurt or caused harm by them, and should be, in my opinion anyway, a baseline of thinking, like the most basic of baseline thinking, that these things are most important. The people who are caused harm should be able to lead that conversation, in terms of not just flashpoints like this but as a general rule of thumb. Lived reality is more important than abstract beef and I’m deeply concerned that this is still contentious to so many influential figures in the London restaurant world.

And that is the most interesting change, and most important change, I've seen in some publications, both here and abroad in the last four to five years. I just hope that drives people's decision making going forward. So I think once you have that, it becomes both easier and I guess genuine, to talk about food in a more frivolous and entertaining way, because you're coming from a baseline of respect. And then therefore I think there's then room to have your slightly more opinionated opinion columnist fun writing. As you observed in your article on British and American criticism, you don’t have to be super po-faced, you don't have to be super myopic and reverential and preachy. But I think one of the reasons that people lean that way is in a bid to really entrench that baseline of culinary respect which isn't yet there. The same conversations still happen the same way, over and over. When the respect is there, that is when you can have your fun. But you need to show the respect first.

James Hansen is a writer and editor based in London. He is an associate editor at Eater London and runs the newsletter In Digestion.

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If you’ve been paying attention to American news media this year you may have come across two startling statistics about the Navajo Nation, the Indigenous tribal reservation spread over state boundaries in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. The first is that it has the highest rate of Covid-19 in the country, a sad indictment of an absence of federal help, high rates of poverty and lack of infrastructure, an end point of decades of damaging government policies. The second, possibly related, is that if you look at voting patterns across Arizona, you will see that areas with high Indigenous populations, including the Navajo Nation, almost entirely coincide with counties that came out overwhelmingly against Trump. Given the margins involved, it may well be that the votes of people like the Navajo, so often disenfranchised and unvoiced, flipped the state of Arizona.

Today’s article, which happens to coincide with Thanksgiving, is an interview with Navajo chef Brian Yazzie, discussing his experience of the coronavirus pandemic, and the areas of commonality that Indigenous cuisines share across America. Indigenous cuisines have not historically been permitted to develop in parallel to other regional and global cuisines, which usually undergo a free-flowing borrowing of ingredients and influencing; rather they have undergone a rupture. As Zoe Heaps Tennant details in her brilliant piece in Granta on Native Canadian cuisine, to move forward necessitates omission, of going back to the past, to a pre-colonial methodology. This act, which is as much political as it is culinary, then poses some knotty questions on tradition and authenticity. To what extent are they straight-jackets? To what extent do these restrictions form the basis of creativity?

The following interview was conducted by Adrienne Katz Kennedy over two sessions in April and August, one in full flow of lockdown and one when restrictions had been lifted. Do make sure to read to the end where you will find Yazzie’s recipe for parched corn grits, and some more information on how to support his work.

An Interview With Brian Yazzie, by Adrienne Katz Kennedy

“Indigenous peoples have always been put on the back burners, especially during these trying times. As an Indigenous chef, I have to focus on my community and make moves” says Brian Yazzie; an activist, traveling chef, consultant and proud member of the Navajo Nation (Diné) in Arizona. The Diné are a culture whose present-day identity has partially been built upon the power of resilience, having undergone violent marginalisation and the displacement of the Long Walk during the 19th century. The Navajo Nation, an Indigenous tribal reservation and community that spans over four states, is a product of that resilience: the largest area retained by an Indigenous tribe in the US with over 173,000 members living within its borders. 

The first time Brian and I talk is in April 2020, a month into the shutdown across the US. Brian, now based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, describes the task force he’s helped put together named #FeedingOurElders. With work drying up and the city in lockdown, he and a team of local, mostly Indigenous chefs have set up inside the kitchens of the temporarily shuttered Gatherings Café, situated inside the Minneapolis Indian Cultural Center. Every day, Yazzie and his team work together to cook fresh meals for self-isolating Indigenous Elders within the South Minneapolis community. The dishes they make are largely based on the Indigenous ingredients that existed in the Americas pre-European contact. This means no dairy, wheat, pork, chicken, beef or sugar; instead, there are staples like corn, beans, squash, and manoomin, enlivened with wild berries, sumac, juniper, amaranth and other foraged plants.

As Yazzie threw himself into gathering resources and churning out heartfelt dishes to Minneapolis’s vulnerable population, he could have little idea of what was to come. A month later, the brutal killing of George Floyd set off a tsunami of protests throughout the city.  The team managed to keep the project afloat throughout, at one point boarding up windows of the Minneapolis Indian Cultural Center building to ensure they could keep going alongside the uprisings and civil unrest. Members of The American Indian Movement patrolled the South Minneapolis area at night to ensure everyone, both on the streets and in their homes, were kept safe. The community rallied around each other.

Brian and I chat again in late August. He has since served 25,000 meals and been named executive chef of Gatherings Café, his first non-traveling job in years, with hopeful plans to re-open the café to the public in January. As we talk, I hear the dinging of his car door as he shuttles around, running errands on his first ‘week off’ from the #FeedingOurElders project in months – although as our discussion progresses, I come to doubt whether or not Yazzie has ever actually taken a day ‘off’. 

Can you tell me a bit about your interests within both food and activism? Did one come before the other?

My interest in food came before my interest in activism. I started cooking at the age of 7, helping my mom out in the kitchen. It was out of curiosity. She was a single parent in a household with me and 8 siblings. I was the youngest and was always left behind at home. My older siblings were either out playing or had already moved out.

Just seeing my mom come home from work, and how instead of relaxing she would just go straight into the kitchen: that curiosity of the smell and the knife chopping away on the cutting board, and that unconditional love, I just wanted to be a part of that and to pay it back somehow. All throughout school I would do a lot of barbecues for family and friends. I did a couple restaurants in my late teens and early twenties, just a couple spots but it wasn’t really until 2014 when I attended St. Paul College of Culinary Arts and we had to do this assignment where we picked one dish from one cuisine. For me it was going to be either Japanese cuisine or Southern cuisine because I like cooking outside. I was looking at these different cookbooks and I realized that, over at least 50% of the ingredients I was seeing that were used across the world were ingredients that came from the Americas. So then I started looking at corn, at beans, squash, tomatoes and I started looking at how other cuisines like French and Italian wouldn’t be the way they are without corn, beans and squash. And then I started wondering what the cuisine might have been before these types of ingredients were introduced. I started by looking at my Navajo food culture, but then I started expanding more [to look at other Indigenous food cultures] because I was in Dakota land and Ojibwe land and I was far away from home. I just kept going down that path.

What brought you out to Minnesota from Arizona?

It was opportunities. I mean I went to four different high schools and I barely made it out with a high school diploma at the age of 25. I ended up doing the rest of the work at home. I always use the phrase ‘cooking saved my life’ especially when talking to the youth, but it’s because it did. It’s exactly what happened. I was in gang activities and a negative environment in my teen years, in and out of county jails. I mean I was blessed not to end up in prison or passed on. I’d be on the streets days at a time and then I’d have my sisters calling me to check in and asking if I would come home and cook for them, because they missed my cooking. Cooking was the thing that turned the negative to positive and so it’s what I use when talking with the youth today. 

Alongside talking about Indigenous cuisine I also make sure to talk about my own experience and background and how you can turn it around from a negative experience to a positive one, while identifying my food culture as part of the process on that path.

Can you talk a little bit more about some of your food practices growing up? 

My mom and her mom are both medicine women within my community and my Navajo culture. I can remember my mom and my grandma foraging for food and for medicine. I can remember her foraging for wild spinach now known as lambs quarters, or wild onions or carrots – those all grow in the Southwest. I can remember my mom and my aunties as well, just glimpses really, harvesting sumac and juniper berries or even piñon. Somehow a glimpse of this stuck with me. I was in diapers and running around the backwoods while my mom and aunties foraged these ingredients, me just digging in and eating what I wanted to as a kid… Now I try to learn as much as I can as a chef about the ethno-botany within my own landscape. My grandma, mom and aunties are also the last foragers that I know of within my family.

Do you think your past and the experience you’ve had have made you more passionate and driven to give back within your own work?

Definitely. A lot of the kids in tribal communities are without parents or a father so for me, I’m an example of that. I mean my household wasn’t a broken household, my father passed away when I was five from a heart attack. My brother passed away from a heart attack as well, so there’s that family heart disease. But I can use that now as a tool to better myself, and make sure I don’t have any type of heart condition or heart disease. I can also attach that to the path that I’m on by connecting with kids by letting them know about my life growing up without a father and what I went through.

Does that experience drive you to promote better health within those communities as well?

For sure. Recently in this situation I’m seeing lots of people of colour out on the front lines, doing what they needed to, but they’re suffering. The Indigenous community within the Twin Cities was also being overlooked. They were put on the backburner. And so with our project, that was also my way of staying connected to my culture and my roots. I wanted to light up a fire and start some type of project to help. I was trying to find a way to stay connected to the community through food. Finding this project, starting this project – it’s something beautiful that has come out of all of this and from going with the flow. It’s been a life changing experience. 

Can you tell me more about the logistics of the project, the size of the team, how it works etc.?

Sure. Back in March everything had been cancelled, all of my work had been cancelled and I had been home for a couple weeks just self-isolating to make sure I didn’t have anything… I wanted to reach out to the local communities to see if there was anything going on to help. I reached out to a friend of mine named Ben Shendo [former executive chef of Gatherings] to ask how I could help him serve the community or fundraise or network or anything. He told me the executive director of the Indian Center, Mary LaGarde, had received a grant from Blue Cross Blue Shield to start a project to feed the community and she was looking for a group of people to lead it. We started with what was in the pantry, what was in the freezer, the fridge… we emptied out everything before we started purchasing ingredients. 

I wanted to use the philosophy and the mission I was on as a chef to try and implement as many Indigenous ingredients as possible into the food, especially during the pandemic. We [Indigenous people] use the term ‘food is medicine’ so it was critical for Elders during this pandemic to have very nutritional meals to help them keep their immune systems strong. I started reaching out to local, regional and then national Native food producers and vendors. We received olive oil made by a tribe in California, blue corn from a tribe in the Southwest, this one specific type of bean that’s only grown in the Southwest. We started receiving these types of ingredients, and then implementing them in a way that at least 50% of the food in our daily meals was from Indigenous ingredients. We’re able to provide the Elders with Indigenous teas and other types of [plant-based] medicine bundles and hygiene products that we can include with the meal every other Friday. So as a community we’re all coming together and we’re trying to make it fun.

This isn’t your first time working directly with feeding people, and specifically Indigenous people in the midst of crisis. Can you tell me about your experience at Standing Rock in 2016, protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline and trying to protect the water sources and sacred land?

My wife and I were still in college and the idea actually came from her. We were on a break from school and we didn’t know what to do, and we always talk about ‘how can we help?’ – back then it was at Standing Rock. She said, ‘let’s just pack up our stuff and go find out what’s going on’. We spent about a week out there checking out the area and the kitchen. And then about a month later, just as winter was coming up, we took a 27-foot U-Haul truck with blankets, camping supplies and clothing but most of it was filled up with food so we could supply the main kitchen. I wanted to supply as much fresh and hot food as possible and not use a lot of canned foods or highly processed foods. I never actually stepped on the front line physically. My front line was just in the kitchen. I wanted to make sure those in the front lines who were fighting for Indigenous rights were being fed well. My own empowerment was coming from the food as well. That was my way of contributing to the cause. 

I remember my first trip out to see what it was like, see what the kitchen was like. I remember stepping into the pantry area and having some type of ancestral memory that came through me – just looking at the products in this army tent. On the left side there were just rows of Crisco oil and on the right side there were just rows of flour and with my tribe, Navajo, that’s how fry bread specifically came about. It came out of struggle. It came out of survival [of Navajo internment camps, following the Long Walk]. So that came to mind, and thinking about what they went through – that is an experience I will never forget. And I promised to myself, ‘while I’m here cooking I’m going to put out as much fresh ingredients as possible.’ 

Could you explain the history of fry bread, within your experience?

Sure, within the Southwest tribe is what I can speak for. So, with my tribe, the majority of the Navajo in Arizona around the 1850s and 1860s surrendered to the US Army and were put into internment camps in New Mexico. The only reason why the tribe members surrendered was because the US Army burnt their food supplies and their livestock and killed their wild game. The tribe had to surrender to Hwéeldi, which is what we call The Long Walk. My ancestors walked at least 350 miles on foot, and a lot of people died along the way. When they got to the internment camp, it was foreign and whatever rations they were given were foreign to them too. They were given wheat flour, pork fat or shortening, and coffee as well. They didn’t know what to do with these ingredients, but by mixing salt, water and flour that’s how fry bread came about. That’s the survival of it and the story behind it.

Traveling around to countless tribal communities I realised that majority of the communities are still on a third world poverty status and fry bread is still one of the main staples on reservations… I have never made fry bread and I stopped eating fry bread about five years ago to try to set an example and a reflection of the work that I do creating healthy alternative foods.

Where do you see the #FeedingOurElders program going in the future?

I’m trying to build a safe space where there aren’t boundaries around gender or culture – one that also doesn’t include tossing a pot around if I’m mad, or verbally abusing a cook or an intern if they didn’t cook something right. Indigenous people believe that whatever vibe you have when you’re cooking is what you share with your customers or your family or whomever you serve. That’s one thing that my mom has always taught me. If you’re mad, you’re sad or you’re depressed, don’t be in the kitchen. I thought it was a joke or just a saying but actually it’s the reality, and it’s different from the western mentality. If I’m not feeling good and I say that I can’t come in, well, that’s unheard of in the western culinary perspective. But for the team and me, if you’re not feeling good on that day, if you’re going through something, you can stay home. The sharing of the kitchen, that humility, that’s what I’m aiming for – dismantling all of the patriarchy in the kitchen. 

I mean, it all comes from my mom, whatever I do. Even if I’m thousands of miles away, what I do is a reflection of my community and my mom, and my actions will be reflected back to them so I’ve got to remember that too!

Intertribal Food Ways Parched Corn Grits 

Corn mush, similar to grits, is a traditional and celebrated Indigenous food across much of the Americas. The addition of Juniper ash or hardwood ash from trees like Birch or Cedar, when available, is also traditional to the preparation of corn. It is a process now known as nixtamalization and can also be achieved by soaking the maize/hominy in an alkaline solution like limewater. This process helps to break down the maize in such a way it releases nutrients and simultaneously increases its digestibility. This significant process is one that has sustained Native populations since time immemorial, yet was notably, mistakenly left out during the importation of corn by Europeans, thus changing the significance of the ingredient entirely.

• 7 cups (1.6l) water

• 1 tbsp juniper ash (if accessible)

• 1 ½ cup (385g) Pima corn grits*, polenta or cornmeal (corn flour)

• 3-4 tbsp duck or any game fat

• ¼ cup (85g) honey

• 1-2 tbsp chilli flakes

*Sourced from Ramona Farms, a Native American (Akimel O’Odham) owned business in Sacaton, Arizona. 

In a medium-sized saucepan, bring the water to a boil over a medium-high heat. Add juniper ash and whisk constantly for 30 seconds. Then, gradually add corn grits, continuing to whisk until it is all incorporated. Reduce heat and simmer for 10–15 minutes, whisking occasionally. Add more water if needed for desired texture. 

Remove grits from heat and add duck or game fat, honey and chilli flakes. Whisk thoroughly, taste for seasoning and serve with your favorite toppings. Yazzie’s favourites include toasted pumpkin and sunflower seeds, dried cranberries or cherries, bison or wild game jerk crumbles, maple syrup or honey, berry sauce or a fruit compote.

Leave a comment

Brian Yazzie is a chef based in Minneapolis - you can find him on Instagram and Twitter as @yazzie_thechef. Brian is also part of a small team of three working to bring relief and support to members of his community in Arizona through the Dennehotso Families Covid-19 Relief Fund. You can help support this grassroots project by visiting their GoFundMe page: http://www.gofundme.com/dennehotso-families-covid19-relief-fundor donate funds to #FeedingOurElders through paypal.me/yazziethecook 

Adrienne Katz Kennedy is a food and culture writer based in London. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter as @akatzkennedy.

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The first message I got from Joké was in March, soon after the creation of Vittles. It was a long message about yaji and dawadawa, ostensibly offering to send me some, but with the subtext of “Jonathan, I suspect the stuff you’ve been getting is not that great ─ here is the real deal”. A week later, a palm oil stained envelope arrived with two types of yaji, some kuli kuli, a bag of fonio, some shito and a jar of yassa. From this you can deduce a few things: Joké loves to feed people, she loves to educate people about her culture, but also that her culture stretches beyond the borders of one country.

At this point, I still thought Joké was a very eager amateur with a fledgling pop-up. But as soon as I posted the pictures on Instagram, I got another message, this time from Jackson Boxer: “If you are getting food from Joké, you are in for a treat. She’s a marvel. One of my favourite cooks and favourite people”. He was correct on all counts: during the premature summer of May, everything that got barbecued ─ chicken, lamb, kidneys ─ got showered in yaji or marinated with sunshine brightness of Joké’s yassa. She then wrote a newsletter on yaji, one of my favourite things I published in season 1. And finally, earlier this summer, Adejoké Bakare opened Chishuru in Brixton Market, a restaurant so comfortable and confident in its own skin it feels like London has never been without it.

I had the idea for this interview during the first time I was in Chishuru, with Joké manically encouraging me to stick my nose into various forms of iru, Calabash nutmeg, Grains of Selim and Grains of Paradise. These are all extraordinary ingredients barely known in the West; it’s no surprise, for instance, that Ikoyi have based their own cuisine using the structure of these ingredients, and that chef/artist Tunde Wey’s only foray into sourcing has been with iru, in an attempt to educate both about indigenous food processes and their erosion by neo-colonialism.

This weekend, I sat down with Joké at Bake St to talk about West African ingredients, how they both construct and undermine nation states, the role of West African restaurants and shops in educating people, and a long-predicted visit from the least incognito critic alive.

Jonathan: Without naming names, I’m assuming you're going to have a critical rave review very soon…

Joké: *laughs for inordinately long amount of time*

I mean, I did say he was going to come! I told you to look out for him!

My GM Rafa wanted to post “*redacted* came check us out” and I was like “no no we can’t do that”. But he was like, “no, people must know”

With Melissa’s article for Vittles, there’s been a lot of talk recently about critics not reviewing certain restaurants ─ obviously Black-owned restaurants being a big part of that. Do you think that kind of stuff is important? And if it is, what would it mean for you personally to get a positive review?

Representation is important, very, very important. And just like I was saying to Ana (Gonçalves, from TATA) there's this thing of ─ okay, I grew up in a country where we were colonised, and always felt what was ours was not good. You know, we had always wanted to import rather than export. So, if somebody from outside decides to come and look at your things and go, “oh, this is quite good” in many ways, it turns us back into looking at ourselves and thinking “oh we can produce good things”. If others can look at it and appreciate it, I can allow myself to go into it and give you my absolute best. So there is this representation aspect.

The other thing...okay, I'm not trying to make excuses for people but if you've not been outside your circle, you think...there's this saying where I come from, where they go “If you've not been to somebody else's farm, you always think your father's farm is the largest”. And you always want to stay in there, it will take something else to push you out to think, “oh there is a bigger thing out there”. So that's the good thing with what's happening now, it's pushing people out of their boundaries to go, “oh there's something else and that other thing on offer can be as fantastic as what I'm used to”.

It’s interesting you say that about others giving you validation. I wrote about a Bolivian restaurant recently. And I think when I first approached them about writing they were very skeptical about me. They didn't know who was writing for. And then when it came out, I was actually walking down the street and they hailed me down and they were said “we got like such a boost from you writing about us, can you write about us again?”. And what they said was, before they used to put up reviews on Facebook in Spanish on from Latin American papers about them and people didn’t really care. And as soon as it was an English publication, people were like, “Wow, congratulations!”. Obviously I felt good that my review had made a difference, but I also felt like: why is it like that? Why should my opinion count for more? But I get it ,because when an outsider can see something really good in what you're doing, somehow that approval does mean a little bit more.

It's funny. It's funny, and it's sad but it is what it is. We were talking before about Jeremy (Chan) being, to me anyway, instrumental in the way that people think differently about our region. And most of the top chefs in Nigeria, I know for sure don't use our produce that much. They prefer to import, because they believe that those things, French cuisines and whatever, are the top notch and make you different from everybody else. Not just make you different, it makes you... elevated. Yeah, you’re elevated above the crowd and you move in different circles. So I think what he's done is he's made people think differently about the food and instilled a sense of pride in them as well, because now they're playing with the food in their own individual ways.

I actually wanted to talk about Ikoyi because I know you did work there for a bit. It's such an interesting restaurant that has been constantly misunderstood by almost everyone who has written about it. It’s's not this “elevated” West African cuisine, it's fundamentally different. So how would you personally characterise the food being produced there, if you even need to characterise it at all?

I don’t think it has one. I think it when he first started, because we ─ me and my family that is ─ have always been going there right from the get go, there was that thing of, and it’s the same thing as writing, “oh somebody is doing our kind of food”. And let's be honest because Jeremy is Jeremy he's not Black, and a non-Black person is doing our food, so he's looked at it there’s that stamp of approval that he feels that he can do our food. So we all rushed there and we supported him. A lot of people came expecting the same old same old, and he did try in the beginning to give them something familiar in his own way. But then I think he just went, “No, I'm just going to cook with the ingredients and cook my way” which is what he's doing right now. When people come and ask me, “oh, West African food - there’s Ikoyi that's doing it” I’m like, “no, even if you ask him, he will say it's not West African food”. He's doing his food - maybe using West African products but doing the kind of food that he wants. We don't have a Michelin starred West African restaurant anywhere yet.

Has Ikoyi made you think differently about the ingredients that you know very intimately.

Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. The one ingredient that they use is ogbono, which is wild mango seeds. And the way he's used it, I think they used it in a drink offering at one time, and it just opened my mind. It was like “Oh yes”. It wasn't that it gave me permission to think differently about it but it's just like, “Oh, it doesn't have to be this way” which is usually only soup. It has different applications as well. So for me personally, yes, it's opened my thinking to other uses for the ingredient that I grew up eating.

Like Ikoyi, your own restaurant is led by West African ingredients. How has the process of sourcing those ingredients and finding them been in London? Because I would imagine that the supply chains are very different from what other restaurants are used to.

Oh yeah, absolutely. So if you go to any market where there are lots of West Africans in the area, you will get those ingredients. But the quality is what you won’t get. Most of the spices have resin in them, and if it travels and is stored improperly it loses its pungency. So, most of the time I get things brought to me from back home. Say for example the yaji I use, I get it from the same person we’ve been using for years. I get my cousins back in Lagos to go to the village to get stuff for me. That's what I'm doing now, but I don't know. With everything happening in Nigeria with End SARS, that's affected our supply chain as it is. But if you want to just cook bog standard foods, you can get the ingredients, but the thing is it's the quality that you won’t get.

How do you get round that? Obviously you've got round it with very personal supply chains but of course there are other ways. Like in terms of how you cook, in terms of substitutes, in terms of finding farms here that actually produce those ingredients?

With the fresh produce, if we can’t get it then we try and substitute for stuff here. And I've just been introduced to a couple that farms, I think in the Midlands or something, and they’re growing West African vegetables. In the case of fermented fish products that we use in food, like the crayfish or whatever, the quality is up and down. You go to a place and get really good quality ones, or sometimes it’s bad. So the way I've gone around that is we've started using things like fish sauce instead of crayfish. There was a time when we even tried using fermented shrimp paste in my ayamase. And it's come out well. It's not as pungent as the crayfish, but it's similar in the flavour profile. And sometimes if I don't get it, I just omit it!

There’s this really good essay, I don't think it's in her book but it's online, by Yemisi Aribisala about the idea of ‘pepper’ and ‘pepperish’. I mean Nigerian cuisine is often characterised as this sort of bruiser cuisine; extremely spicy….

*laughs* Nooooo. It’s the Yorubas, the Yorubas are crazy about pepper.

But she talks about peppers, not as in chilli, but the subtleties of false peppers and their irreplaceableness. So we're talking about Grains of Paradise, Grains of Selim and so on.

She’s right, there's no substitute for that. If you're talking about chilli yes, you can do chilli peppers from all around. And there's this pepper that we use called Cameroonian pepper which is quite similar to actual chillies, I think. When it comes to Grains of Selim, when it comes to uziza, no, there's no replacing that

How would you describe them to someone who was new to them?

It's a building block. It's a pillar. It’s a pillar in the dish. If the ingredient itself is not done very well, it will definitely affect the structure of the dish itself, but it won't completely kill it. Do you understand? If what you're looking for is authenticity and everything, then it has to have all of that. But if you are not too worried about the quality of what it is, you’re fine to go with the not so good quality stuff that you can get here.

Yes, but you couldn't completely substitute with non-West African ingredients, like use nutmeg instead of Calabash nutmeg?

*outraged* Oh GOSH no. You have smelled Calabash nutmeg. There's no substitute. I used to love cookbooks, I used to love buying cookbooks and whatever, but the cookbooks about West African food in the 60s, they were really crazy. They’d say if you want to make suya spice you can put in oregano. Like, WHERE? Where did you find this??? Or like, those books for people living abroad: “if you don't have this don't worry, you can put sage or whatever in and then it will come out fine. Like NOOO. Why are you telling people this?

Do you think that's maybe one of the reasons why West African cuisines have gone under the radar for people in the West? Because it's difficult for people to get these ingredients. I think it took until Yewande Komolafe writing in the New York Times, with those 10 Nigerian recipes ─ I think that was maybe the first time the New York Times had published Nigerian recipes. And she's talked before about how when she came to America she didn't even think that she could even get these ingredients. It was only when she went to a Nigerian restaurant that she was shocked they had some of them. I guess what I want to ask is, is this the main barrier to people engaging with these cuisines or is it something else?

The reason why I feel the engagement for other types of cuisines have been so different is because people have traveled there, they’ve eaten it and they've tried something else. They have been able to push themselves out of their comfort zone and go, “oh, this is kind of nice”. But not a lot of people have gone to West Africa, it's not like Nigeria is really a touristy place. So if you've not had even that little connection, how would you even think, you know, to be able to push yourself to try something? Like somebody came into the restaurant the other day, I think the second week after we opened. And he went “Oh I live in Peckham and I've always wanted to try West African food but there's no place”. Like, REALLY? Really truly? Is it that you've never looked? If you don't know what you're looking for, you can't see it. It will be right under your nose but if you don't know what you're looking for, you can't find it.

So that's, that's one problem. And the other thing is having the courage to go into one of the shops and go, “Oh, what is that? What can I do with that?”. It's just, there's no information out there and most information you get online has been...what's the word... it's just been people who don't really know much about the culture. Some of the information is false or half-hatched. Like I'm looking at them and thinking “who's been teaching you?”. Yeah, there’s just that lack of information, and the courage to be able to push and find out what is just right under your nose.

There have been many cuisines that have got prominence within Anglophone media because they’ve had a translator who kind of bridges that gap ─ whether it's someone from that country or someone like, say, Fuchsia Dunlop who's done it with Sichuan cuisine. Do you see your role at Chishuru as the role of a translator?

It wasn't my intention, but I think that's what it's becoming now. I'm getting a lot of “Oh I’ve wanted to try West African food but this has been, you know, my first taste of it, and I really enjoy it”. And I'm telling people well this dish is modern West African food and this dish is much more traditional. Most of the things that we do, we try to stick to tradition as much as possible, but this is modern West African food. It’s a lot to take on

The problem is, like what Ikoyi was having to deal with, both of you in your different ways are iterating on something which you know very intimately, but your audience might not know. And then they start thinking “this is traditional” or “this is what it should be like”. Whereas actually it's a very personal thing.

Yeah, yeah. For me it's very personal, because it's how we've specifically eaten in my house. I've always said we have a mix of cultures in my household. So you take a thing like a soup which is eaten in one part of the country. And it's part of my heritage, but because we've lived in another part, how we've eaten it there has affected how I cook it.

I want to talk about this, because you call yourself a West African restaurant. Not a Nigerian restaurant. So can you explain a bit more about the food that you're cooking and how your heritage and life experiences have influenced it?

When I say “West African”, the thing is, I wanted to move away from that thing of countries. Because we were not countries until a couple of hundred years ago, even decades ago. We were regions that had similar cultures across those regions, who ate the same, farmed the same. Our languages are variations of each other’s. And just afterwards, when we were put in nation states, that affected how we thought. We had this strong lesson of nationalism, but forgot the fact that if you cross the border, just on the other side, the people on that side; they’re family and you cook the same way as them. So recently I was talking about fonio with someone. And he went, “oh, this is what we eat“. I said “but this is what we eat as well, have you forgotten?”. And then we started talking about the old Mali Empire, we talked about how that affected things. And the thing is this same grain, that is not known in the south of Nigeria or parts of West Africa but known all over the northern part, is what connected us.

One thing I wanted people to understand is the connection across the regions that we have, and we should stop compartmentalising and seeing ourselves only as nation states. Just think outside that ─ look, we were all regions before and we all worshipped the same before, we were all the same before. So this guy, he was Ivorian - northern Ivorian - talking about fonio with me, someone that is, I would say, northern Nigerian, and with somebody that was Senegalese. They were Francophones, I was the only Anglophone, but that thing that connected us was fonio and how it's cooked it the same way. So for me it's just stop thinking about yourself as from Benin, or from Togo, think of yourself as “oh I'm from this kingdom, I'm from that kingdom” or “I'm from this region or that region.”

That’s really interesting, because a shared food culture is often a key theme in the construction of nation states.

Yessss.

And I guess that has happened in some way in Nigeria, and this construction of a thing called ‘Nigerian cuisine’. But also what you're talking about here actually undermines the idea of a nation state, that there are these much more broad connections across regions which are not necessarily part of the same nation.

I'm a pan-Africanist. I'm a pan-Africanist. When I was growing up, I was of the era of Sankara. And, you know: “we're gonna do a revolution in the youth of West Africa!”. So, I still have that. Maybe because of the way my family is: my family married across nation states. I grew up in a time in Nigeria when other nations were in my street; my street was a mini West Africa. We had Malians. We had Chadians. We had Nigeriens. We had Ghanaians, loads of Ghanaians. On this long street, we had different people. I went to school with different people. Not now, things have changed. There's this nationalism flowing through the whole of West Africa itself, where everybody wanted to identify where they are from. There was such a connection amongst us. Even though the language is different, we felt we were one, you know. We went into each other's houses, you could eat with the children, you know, we had our uncles there who were Ghanaians. So it was like that growing up for me. So this concept now is, I'm still trying to get my head around it, going “oh, I'm different from this” or “this jollof is better than that”.

Perhaps what’s more important than whose jollof is better is that you’re all eating jollof right?

*laughs* Absolutely. Absolutely.

In your piece that you wrote for Vittles, I'm trying to remember, you have a Hausa heritage because you lived in the north. You have heritage in east Nigeria and in Ghana?

Yeah, yeah, my, my dad is from the west. My mom is from the east. My uncle is Ghanaian. And on my mom's side, a number of them lived in Ghana and the Congo before that. So, yeah, there was all of that mix-match in my family. And that is evident in the food. We've eaten it growing up. I've had it. I might be doing it my own way, the way I like it done now but it's not been that strange ─ they've been familiar things on the table.

What I loved when I came over just before you opened, and I imagine it’s the same way now, that you had lots of people working for Brixton Market ─ generally Francophone African ─ who had never seen the food of their home in that setting before. And they were all suddenly very interested in what you were doing. Is that still happening?

Yeah it still is. Like we even got to talking about netoutou and soumbara, so iru which is called different names by different Francophone nations. And fonio still. Funnily enough this Burkinabe lady, she was much more northern than the others, and she was like “oh so you cook like this?” “Yessss. Don't you remember?”. So there’s that thing that I truly love, the connection, the things that bring collectiveness through food.

What has been the general reaction from them to what you’re cooking?

The guy from Ivory Coast, he looked at it and went “Oh it’s really nice but not as nice as my wife’s”. And I was like “Yes you have to say that. You have to say that so that I don't tell her”

When me and Feroz came over we were talking about Brixton and areas with strong diasporas, and it was Feroz who made a really good point about this idea that in diaspora things get amplified a lot because most of the time you might all be from the same place or same town or village, and that gives you this sense of comfort, to be how you want to be. And that's Brixton essentially. And you felt that Brixton and Peckham were very, very different to what you were used to. You brought up that Peckham for you is very specifically Lagos, which is not your home city, and your upbringing is very different to that.

Yes.

With your food are you trying to get away from this Lagos-centred idea of Nigeria? I love it when I make some evidently very stupid blanket statement about Nigerian food and you’re like “no no no, that’s just Lagos”.

It’s because that’s what people are used to. When I tell people I'm Nigerian they say “oh are you from Lagos”. No?. It's what people know. I want to push people to think that there's other things to Nigeria than just Lagos. Lagos is a world of its own. Just like you said, everything in Lagos gets seriously amplified. You go to Peckham, and yeah, you're in Lagos, that's it. But there's another part. And one of the reasons why I wanted to push back on that and say there's other parts, there's that thing about the North: the north of Nigeria is looked at and the only thing people think of is “bring back our girls” and Boko Haram. But there's so much more to it. Some of these people that I have grown up with and lived with, their thinking is much different. You can't put everybody in one box.

I'm gonna do a very simplistic kind of parlour game. A very easy way of thinking about a cuisine is to work out the cooking fat of choice and then three basic ingredients. So Sicilian food might be olive oil, with tomato, garlic, maybe capers. But then in the north, it might be butter and sofrito and parmesan. Or in Sichuan it would be peanut oil and chillies, Sichuan peppercorn and vinegar. So if you were trying to characterise the cuisines within Nigeria itself, how would you divide them in terms of ingredients?

Ooooh. In the north, you will get maishanu which is that fermented butter. You will get ginger, yaji, and dawadawa. In the east you will get the trifecta of peppers which is uziza, the uda and the ehuru. Some palm oil but they don't use palm oil that much. In the West...actually that's the thing. When I go to the East they characterise Yoruba soup, as ofe manu which means “palm, not soup”. They feel we drench everything in palm oil. *laughs* We love oil. So when we cook the palm oil has to be swimming on top of it. It's delicious” If you have freshly made palm oil, like cold press not a commercial one, you could just sit down and just like good quality olive oil, you could just sit down and have boiled yam and salt and that's it. That’s a meal. But, I digress. In the West, it is... palm oil! Palm oil, iru, onions and chillies.

And there is a distinction there with dawadawa?

Yes. And there is a difference within iru was well. There is iru pete which is much more smooth. Still coarse, but smoother. Then, and it depends on what you want to cook it with. With iru woro the beans have been fermented but quick. So you still get that salty sweetness of the beans itself. And it's all single. So those you can put in rice or something. But if you're making soup you want to use iru pete, where it dissolves in the soup itself. But the dawadawa is different. If you go to northern Ghana, most of the dawadawa is powder. So it's all similar, because they're similar beans, but there is a slight variation on how it’s done.

Another interesting parlour game was this one which Ash Sarkar did on Twitter.She asked if you could pick three spices for the rest of your life, and the rest you had to discard, what would you choose.

Oh gosh. Arrrrrrgh. What would I be cooking though?

This is the interesting point. I personally thought what people should be thinking about is, not what are my favourite spices, but what do I want to cook everyday? And what cuisine? Because you couldn't do Indian cuisine with three spices. It would be ridiculous. Maybe I should give you five. Five spices.

Even in Nigeria, you can't ask me to just choose three. Let's say for example, the baobab leaves soup which is called kuka. In the north, traditionally, it's cooked with bone broth. So you cook the bone broth for a while, and then put the leaves in with pepper, if you want, and then yaji and the dawadawa. And at the end just put maishanu it and then you've got a soup. But for us, if we want to cook kuka in my house, yes, we could use the bone broth, but then you use meat, THEN you use dried fish, THEN you use crayfish, THEN you use palm oil It’s different.

Maybe an easier question would just be what spice could you not live without in your everyday cooking?

Spices, not like fermented stuff?

Yeah let's include fermented stuff in it.

Because our food has to have fermented stuff. I can't live without all of the forms of, iru, ogiri, dawadawa, I can't live without it.

Is it just because you cannot substitute them?.

There's nothing like them. I've tried, I've tried doing something with Chinese fermented black beans but it tastes different. I would say yaji, and

Hold on, that's...cheating.

*cackles” Because of the combination?

I mean, that could be dozens of things.

Okay. Let's see. Wow, and it's just Nigerian food yeah?

It doesn't have to be.

No no no no you can’t box me into a corner. Because there will be times I want to eat, like our staff food the other day. I wanted to call Omar (Shah) to come down and try my adobo. So it depends on what you want to cook.

This is the infuriating thing that no one really talked about. You can't just name your favourite spices and construct your own cuisine around nutmeg, paprika, and ginger.

Ginger! Ginger! You can't cook without ginger. Onions! Gosh, like onions lemongrass, ginger, garlic. No, come on. And the thing is for us because we are quite liberal with anything that we put on food. When people tell me “oh it's so delicious” like we've not done anything. That cauliflower, I promise you, we’ve not done anything special to it. We’ve just marinated it with loads of seasoning, like ginger, garlic, turmeric, pepper and lemon juice. We've just not been scared about the amounts that we put. And I'm waiting for somebody to go, “oh, you put too much seasoning or you’ve put too much whatever”. Because I'm thinking “that's just how we eat”.

Do you see, in terms of traditional restaurants and in terms of new restaurants, this being an exciting time for West African food in London?

I think so. I think much more in terms of representation. It will inspire more people who had always thought that the restaurant industry was not something for them. There's also validation, in that I can try something new. And another thing. If there's so many out there, it can be fine for you to be a rubbish African restaurant and go “okay, I own my space”. Because you get Thai restaurants and yeah there are great ones, there are middling ones and there are rubbish ones. And there's space for everybody. This is good. There'll be much more and then you can have the really good with the middling and the rubbish. When we get to that point, then we’ll go “yes, West African food has arrived!”. When there’s space for us to be rubbish as well.

There are couple more days to try Joké’s food at Chishuru before Lockdown 2, and right before a certain critic blows her up. I wholeheartedly recommend you go.

Photos credited to Feroz Gajia

For an ex-British colony, the food of Guyana is still relatively little known within the UK, even in its former imperial capital. Formed through the movement of various peoples, both voluntary and involuntary, the harmony of the cuisine elides a history of slavery, indentured labour, and hierarchical racism, much of which still plays out today in present day Guyana. Food though is perhaps the one thing that everyone can claim for themselves as completely Guyanese ─ no matter your race, the knowledge to make curries and roti that labourers from Uttar Pradesh brought over with them are Guyanese, so too are the variants on West African stews and Chinese chow mein, no more so or less so than the indigenous Amerindian food traditions which they augmented and supplanted. 

To get the background on Faye’s cooking you can start with this profile I did of her last year, which explains how she came to cook her version of Guyanese food at Kaieteur Kitchen in Elephant and Castle, her years spent at the Commonwealth Secretariat, and her unshakeable faith that the best is yet to come. When the shopping centre closed in September, she moved to the new Castle Square complex where she now has the indoor space she has always dreamed of.

I sat down with her last week to talk about the positive aspects of the move, about how Elephant and Castle is changing, about food as communion, food as nourishment, food as medicine and food as an act of love.

How have you been since the pandemic?

It was a bit hard, because it was something we didn't expect to come and it came. You know, we weren't prepared for it. So during that time. I found it very hard, financially, because my only source of income is this shop. 

You weren't allowed to open, right?

No and I didn't get much from the government either. So after a few weeks, actually after a month or so, people started to call in to find out if I was back at the shop. I still wasn't there because we weren't allowed to come. So I started doing a bit of catering from home, which was very successful. And we came back in June and it wasn't really good at all out there. I mean the customers were coming but not in a big capacity. And they wanted us to pay rent. We actually fought against it, the traders I mean, with the help of Southwark Council. There were a few who came around to ask us questions. I remember one, her name is Sophia. She really helped us; me I mean, I don't know about others. But she really fought for me not to pay rent. Even my arrears from last year, because I had to travel away ─ there was this arrears outstanding, and and she actually fought and she helped me not to pay that arrears. 

So that was from June, July, August, until we came over here in September. But during that time it got really bad because they were breaking into our shops regularly. My shop was broken into twice, And it's made me feel very depressed, like I don’t want to go out anymore. So things were hard during that time, but we closed down with the shopping centre on the 24th and we came to new premises here. The new shop opened on the 26th. And from the 26th to now, it's a really, it's, it's really been building up actually, the clientele is really getting bigger and bigger each day.

Have you noticed a change in clientele.

Yes. A really big change. I mean, a few nights ago we had five young guys and they were from Germany. We have people coming all the way from Basildon. People who have heard about it who worked in Guyana. This English person who worked in Guyana, he heard about it on Instagram, he came in and he was very excited because you know everything brought back Guyana memories to him. Even on Saturday evening, there was a group of people who came from different parts and they all met here. I don't know if you were there?

Yeah I think I saw them.

And they all wanted pepper pot! And the garlic pork! So I said at the end of the month, on the Friday and Saturday, because I need time to do these traditional Guyanese dishes. 

After a few weeks, what have you learned so far about operating a restaurant compared to a stall?

It’s challenging. It’s almost the same hours open but there’s so much more work you have to put into it because you have to make sure your customers are being well taken care of outside, while trying to cook inside. So it's hard and challenging but it's great. It makes you know that you can really push yourself. It makes you know that you can be what you want to be, as a business or a manager or owner of a restaurant. And at my age, I've done well.

I remember when I first interviewed you, you were talking about how it was your dream to run a restaurant and I think you told me specifically about having one in Guyana. You've been cooking all your life in various forms, so what does it mean for you to have a restaurant like this rather than just a takeaway or a stall?

For me it's about comfort. Firstly, it makes me feel more healthy. I can sit. I can meet people. I can interact with them, you know. I can come out and say to them “well this was cooked like this”, “are you enjoying your dinner?”, “are you enjoying what you’re eating”. Because when I was in the shopping centre, they would take food away, it's only in the summer that they sit down. So I don’t know if they're enjoying it or not; some come back, some probably will not ─  I don't know the reason why. Here I have the time to come to them and say “thank you for coming”. “What do you think about it?”. “Don't be shy to tell me if it doesn't taste well, because if you will tell me, I would make it even better”. And people always want to feel welcome, homely, wherever they sit and they have a meal. So if you make them feel happy and make them at home, they will come back. People look at the way you treat them, the way you welcome them when they come into your place. And if the treatment is wonderful, something will stick. They might say, “oh I didn’t like that dish so much but the service was beautiful”. And they would come back because of that. So that is a reason why I always wanted somewhere that people can sit and have a proper meal, a hot proper meal.

During lockdown I collected food at your flat at the Aylesbury Estate, so you live and work in the area. How long have you been there?

Oh about nine years now.

How have you noticed the area change over the last decade?

Oh the area is changing. It's a big difference. Yeah, it's a very big difference. And what I say to some of the customers who ask questions like that, I always say to them “we're looking at another five years, this is going to be such an expensive area to live in”. A really expensive area to live in. I don't know how long it’s going to take to build everything and to build another shopping centre but it's going to be a very beautiful place. But it’s going to be expensive!  So, I don't know what they will do with us after five years here, but if I don’t have anywhere here it won’t really bother me that much because I really want to get back home to do what I want to do at home. So if in five years I do very well here, which I know I will, I am so grateful and thankful to God for that. Because I will be going home to explore my beautiful country Guyana, and do my beautiful restaurant in Guyana. 

Have you hired more people since you opened here? I see you’re now selling some shito made by Ivy, one of your Ghanaian staff members!

I have yes, we do shift work now. Ivy has actually been a very good help to me. She helps with my accounts and bookkeeping and everything. So I just wanted her to feel welcome too. So I said to her just bring in whatever you make, and I’ll display it and sell it. At least you have a taste of another country. So she brings it in, and I just presented it for people to taste it, because people know about my pepper sauce and it's nice when they taste something else similar but different. And I wouldn't give that to a vegetarian! Because it's made out of fish and shrimp I mostly give it to people eating fish. And they love it! People actually love it.

I’ve been using it at home in pastas and it’s delicious! And there’s a nice synergy with your food because of course there’s a very big West African influence on Guyanese cuisine. I think a lot of people, even people who may have had your food, might not know what Guyanese cuisine is and the influences on it. So how would you describe it to someone unfamiliar with it?

Sometimes people say, “okay why do you say you’re from South America, and your food is Caribbean”. For me, our food is like everybody else's food. Because a person from Sierra Leone can come and taste our food and say “Oh! This tastes like our food”. Someone from Ghana might say your rice and peas is like our rice, with a little bit of difference. I’ll do oxtail and people will say “oh, but you’re doing oxtail and this is a Jamaican dish”.  But the thing is, the Guyanese create so many other dishes. And we have six races of people in Guyana: we have curries spiced like an Indian dish. Pepperpot; an Amerindian dish. Then we have chow mein. That's a Chinese dish. You know, cook up rice, is what we would say is a Black people dish. Our dish. 

Obviously there’s a huge Indian influence. I remember being really surprised when you used the word ‘mithai’ to describe your sweets.

Sometimes I want to know if mithai is the same thing in India as it is in Guyana?

So it refers to a whole spectrum of Indian sweets, which are often made with milk or condensed milk or ghee. But I think Guyanese mithai is much more specific? 

There are a few Indian things I actually saw here in London that you make back in Guyana. So many of them, but some of them are named differently. They are named differently but it just means the same thing. For example, pakora; pakora is something we call pholourie, or almost something that we call pholourie. But it's a different name. Dal puri, roti, they're all Indian stuff. But because Guyana is made up of more Indian than Black, I mean, the majority of people in Guyana are Indian. And because of that, we have so many beautiful Indian dishes that we can cook

Given that there is a lot of ethnic tension in Guyana - especially recently with the presidential election - do you think food hides some of these tensions or do you think it actually does bring people together in a way?

It brings people together. No matter what is going on in Guyana, Indians would go to Black restaurants and still eat. We would go to Indian restaurants and still eat. You know, people still mix. Indian neighbours will plant vegetables and would give it to their Black neighbours. They would share things. So I don’t know if food always brings people together, but it brings Guyanese people together! 

I guess it's also one of the things which you will have a shared ownership of. Like you don't necessarily see your dal puri as separate from your pepperpot: it’s all Guyanese.

It’s all Guyanese, it’s all Guyanese, it’s all Guyanese! And there's so much more you can do that I haven't even done here yet, because I don't want to, you know, push myself into all these big cooking. For example, aubergine. We don't even call it aubergine, we call it balanjay. It can be done in a beautiful curry. It can be done with beef and prawns together, it can be done with salted cod fish and prawns. You can fry them just like that with tomatoes, and they put a nice piece of fried fish on the side with some rice. Okra. You know, the long old beans that they ‘long beans’, we call it ‘bora’ in Guyana. Dal. You cook a nice dal with some jeera inside and you bunjal it. You cook the split peas and spices in oil, and right at the end you fry the garlic in hot oil and it makes this big noise, like psshhhhh and then pour it over. 

What dishes do you want to bring here, because I remember you said when you have more cooking space you want to expand your repertoire. 

That is one of them! The dal and rice. Actually I have some things in my head that I didn't even write down. Because it's I'm actually inventing it myself. It's just like the ground provision, we call it metemgee in Guyana. The boiled provision in rich coconut sauce; we call that metemgee but to make it more….posh….I call it brown vegetables in a rich coconut sauce. That's supposed to be served with a nice steamed fish or fried saltfish on top of it. That's something people don’t know because they didn't have the chance to try it over there at the stall. So that's one thing I'll bring it over here. Also fish tea.

Fish tea! Like a stew or a soup?

It’s a soup, like a tea. You’ve got a beautiful piece of salmon. And you boil it until it is melted. You put different types of vegetables inside. And you boil everything up together, and you sit with a nice bowl of it during the time this time where it's getting cold. And it's really healthy during the winter. Also I really want to introduce breakfast in the morning.

What is Guyanese breakfast like?

Okay ─ fried bakes and salt fish. Fried cassava, with a nice piece of fried fish on the side. We can have some salted cod fish and homemade bread with some mackerel in the middle. And actually, I’m going in search of shark. Fried shark. A bit of fried shark in the morning with some breadfruit. Porridge, different types of porridge. If you want a really hearty Caribbean breakfast, especially on a Saturday and Sunday morning, you can have a steamed fish with homemade bread or pepperpot. That's a proper breakfast.

Oh wow. I was going to ask you about the Amerindian influence on Guyanese cuisine but you’ve got a bottle of cassareep out on the table here, almost in anticipation.

Pepperpot! Which is made with cassareep. It’s a Guyanese Amerindian invention and it’s made from cassava root. It’s the bitter cassava, not just the ordinary cassava, and it goes through a long process. 

You have to boil it to stop it from being poisonous right?

You have to boil it and then there's some sort of ferment. But it's important, it is very important. It’s not only fundamental to pepperpot but it makes a beautiful chicken stew. It can go into a beef stew. You can even make fried rice. It can do so many other things. 

It’s got such a distinctive taste. How would you describe it?

If there’s anything better than cassareep, I don't know. I've tasted different types of food flavourings and all sorts of things, but there is nothing better than cassareep. It’s bitter and sweet and adds a beautiful taste to anything you do ─ all you have to know is how to prepare it. For example, if I'm cooking a fish stew with cassareep I wouldn’t cook it with just thyme and water. No, I would use coconut cream, coconut milk, onion, thyme and cloves. 

Where can you get it from?

I order from a person who actually brings it from Guyana, to distribute it to places in London. So straight from Guyana to his company here. And then he brings it to the shop. So you can find it in a few shops, like in Brixton, in Tooting in Peckham. Coming up to Christmas you will hardly ever see cassareep on the shelf. People buy it because this is what is used for pepperpot and people get before it's finished. So most of the time it runs out before the Christmas season.

It’s almost like the Guyanese version of the Christmas turkey.

Exactly! 

I always feel that food for you is about nourishment, — you often say the word ‘healthy’ or call a piece of fish or vegetables “beautiful” like there is value in that food beyond taste. I always come away from your food feeling nourished and feeling healthy, whether I’m just eating vegetables, or even your fried fish and fried chicken. I feel comfortable afterwards. Is that important for you in the way you cook?

It is important. It is important that you know what people eat, and what you wouldn’t like for yourself you wouldn't give it to somebody. So you always make sure that when people finish eating that they have something that helps with some parts of their body. Some nutrients in the food, or when the food is so nutritious that they enjoy the experience and the aftermath of eating that food. It’s not that you come and have a piece of fish; the fish must first have taste and then it must go with something else. If you look at my plate most of the time, you have protein, you have something starchy, you have vegetables at the side. So your whole plate is a nutritious plate.

That's the beautiful thing about eating, it’s not that you just eat a plate of food. You have to get something into that plate of food that helps your body, you know, if you're feeling weak. I know one morning one lady came shivering and she said she was so cold and not feeling well. So I said let me give you a warm glass of ginger beer. She said “would that help?” and I said, “of course, yes it would help.” So I took one of those deep polystyrene cups with some ginger beer in and warmed it, and I gave it to her. And she drank it. She was like “is this is a medicine”. I laughed and said no, it's my own way of thinking about how somebody can feel warm; not just having a cup of coffee or having a cup of tea or whatever. And because it carries that heat from the ginger inside, it will make you feel better. And now she will never come and ask for a cup of cold ginger beer. She always comes for a cup of warm ginger beer. 

It is medicine. There’s no border between food and medicine.

It is, it is. You know, so these are the things that makes me feel that cooking is so much more than cooking. You present a plate of food to somebody and you can say “oh I feel good eating this myself”. It must be presentable. Colourful. That’s the next thing about food, it must always be colourful. You must always see the beauty in the food when you’re eating. You don’t just eat with your mouth but you eat with your eyes. 

Let’s go back to your time at the Commonwealth Secretariat. How did the experience of that prepare you for going out and doing your own cuisine?

Very well, very very well. Because at the Commonwealth there was such a huge variety of different kinds of people. It really widened my horizons because there were so many people from different countries. So I had to cater for people from all around the world who would come there to have a meeting or to have lunch.

I would have to hire chefs to come in. For example, at one time we had a diplomat from India, and what he wanted on the menu, I could not have cooked it. Because I had never heard of the dish! So I had to go to an Indian restaurant and hire a chef to come in to cook some of the dishes. And I actually learnt those dishes from that one day that he was there. Fish kofta. That was one of the things I remember that he did. Fish kofta is what we call fish cake, but he had put nuts into it to make it a fish kofta, but otherwise it was exactly the way that we cook fish cake. So it really made my mind and my cooking intelligence just broaden.

One time they had a Nigerian diplomat, he wanted this to have this big loud Nigerian dish I'd never heard about! So I had to get a Nigerian chef to come in to do that. And that's how I learned to cook so many other Nigerian dishes. Because when they come in, I would look at what they were doing, write bits of notes and things like that and that’s actually how I learned to cook a lot of dishes from other countries: Mauritius, Sierra Leone and so on. 

Did it also shape the way you approach the chef/customer relationship? Because in a normal restaurant, the customer has to adapt to the chef ─ the menu is set and the customer comes in with that knowledge. But in a canteen, you have to adapt ─ you’re adapting to what the customer wants. 

Yes, it actually even changed the way I speak to people. Some people might come into the canteen for lunch, and because they feel they’re in this high position they talk to you in this patronising way. And it was a problem, because for some of them you cannot talk back. 

We had this diplomat, his name...well, he was very high at the Commonwealth. And he would treat us like if we are nobody, really nobody. So when I started working there, everybody would tell me about this particular person. And I was like, so why are you afraid of him? “Oh you don’t know him, he insults us, he brings us down”. I said you know what, I came into this place with a blessing, I didn't come here to serve no man. I came here to serve God and to serve this food. So I said “show me who this person is”. 

And he came, because they had just emailed everyone to say that there’s a new chef at the Commonwealth. When he came over he picked his plate from the end because it was a long range of dishes. He picked his plate from the end. And I had said to the staff “do not allow anybody to pick their plate” You take the plate first, and then you ask them what they want, hold it and then serve them. Because that was something I was trying to change.

So he picked the plate. And then he came to the food and he was like, “I want that, I want that. What is it that?” So I looked at him and I said “Good afternoon, sir. My name is Faye, and I'm the new chef. And your’s?”

He looked at me. 

I said, “Can we start all over again sir? I'm saying to you. Good afternoon. My name is Faye, and I am the new chef. And I'm saying, what is your name sir.”

And he mentioned his name.

And I said “Good afternoon. So can we all start all over again?” So I took the plate from him and I said, “What would you like to eat today sir?”.

And he looked at me, he was just standing there looking. He said “oh, I’d like this please. I told him how much it cost, I handed him his plate of food. And he went to sit down.

At the time I was just trying to bring customers in because the food was going really downhill. So I said to the girls in the canteen “make sure everyone gets a jug of water and a jug of homemade drink to welcome back the customers”. Because he had just come in I said, “let me take it to him, you leave him to me”. So I took the jug of water and whatever punch I had made that day. I said “Excuse me, sir. Would you like a glass of water, and the glass of the punch. It’s just to welcome everybody back into the canteen.” When people were finished I went to all the customers to say “thank you”, “did you enjoy the cooking?” and introduced myself to them. So I went to him and said “so how was my lunch today sir. Did you enjoy it”. And he looked up at me and said “very nice”. I said “Thank you, sir and you have a good day”. And I went back.

Now, when he went off to his office he called his secretary to the room. And he said to his secretary, “call down to that canteen and find out who that young lady is who shook me today. She shook me today.” He said, “Wow, whoever she is, she really made me feel small today.”

So eventually, she called down to the canteen and my boss was so afraid. She was like “Faye what did you do?”. And the girl said “no no no, calm down, calm down. He didn't mean anything. He said he actually was so happy to know that just one time they had somebody who actually stood up to him”

So, the next day he came back and he looked at me and smiled. And I said “Hello sir, good afternoon, how are you today? And I'm all yours today, you know, so let's go”. So I took his plate. And believe me, it happened that at one stage when they wanted to close the canteen and take it away from us, he stood up and fought for us to maintain that canteen. And at the end of the day, he has become my very good friend. And that is what I talk about respect. Because whatever you give you receive. 

Is that something you bring into your cooking here ─ that your first job is to please your customers?

Yes, when I came here and I bought the place out there in the shopping centre, I maintained that same standard of meeting people, not being rude to anybody, even if sometimes people try to insult you because you’re in a little shed selling food, you’re nobody. You have to stand up and let them know that you are not uneducated, you are educated, but it’s just because you choose to do this. Most of my certificates are in catering, are in cooking. So I choose it because I like it. 

When I’m cooking, I cook with happiness and I cook with love. It doesn’t tell just on you but it tells on the food. People would come eat this food and say “my god, this was cooked with a lot of love you know”. And then other people will say “how do they know this food was cooked with love?” But you will know. No matter what problem you have, no matter what you're going through, if you forget about it, and you come to your kitchen and you make other people happy, you cook the food with a nice heart, people would know. And they will leave with that food tasting nice in their mouth. Those are the things you have to maintain in your business to let it grow. You don’t cook because you want money, you cook because you enjoy doing what you're doing. And that's the beauty of me and my cooking. I enjoy my cooking. I enjoy cooking. I enjoy creating my dishes. I enjoy presenting my food to people. And I enjoy people. I do enjoy people.

You can find Faye Gomes at Kaieteur Kitchen at the new Castle Square complex just off Elephant Road. She is open from Tuesday-Saturday, 12-8pm. To order her special dishes like pepperpot, please check with her in advance!

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If you’re wondering why you’re receiving this on a Sunday and you haven’t got a paid subscription, don’t worry, it’s not a mistake. This one’s a freebie. My own interview with Faye Gomes of Kaieteur Kitchen was delayed but will be coming next week, and rather than conjure up an instant hot take for you about why something you love is bad, I thought I’d give this slot over to Penny Andrews.

Penny - keeping in with Vittles’s cities remit - has interviewed Manjit Kaur in Leeds, a city not given much attention by the food press. Not to say I’m any better. In my day job I supply a Leeds cafe ─ every time I speak to them I say ‘I’m going to have to come up and see you this year’ and every time they say ‘sure, you’ll love it’ and every time I end up not going. And I’ve been doing this non-stop for eight years. But this year, surely, will be the year I say ─ with nowhere on the continent to escape to instead. Plus I’ve been inbibing the Leeds scene through osmosis, talking to and reading Leeds food writer Thom Archer, listening to Penny (the only time I met Penny we went to Ananthapuram in East Ham to have chicken fry and they immediately started talking about Manjit’s Kitchen), plus of course the fact that one of Partition’s stranger legacies is Yorkshire’s rich Punjabi Indian and Pakistani restaurant ecosystem, started to satiate the appetites of those lured to Blake’s Satanic mills in search of work, and continued by their sons and daughters.

This hasn’t been without its own tensions. A few years ago, a homeless woman asked Manjit for some hot water only for it to be flung back in her face and told to go back to her own country, an incident which led Manjit to raise £7000 for rough sleepers - which I think tells you all you need to know about her character. Meanwhile Bradford in West Yorkshire has one of the biggest British-Pakistani communities in the country, yet that community’s public face ─ it’s restaurants ─ are barely given space in the UK’s media (this Vice piece is a welcome exception). Instead the narrative is one of silos, of ‘no go areas’ where the far right can film a street of people going about their lives to convince people of an invasion, where Morrissey can say “I don’t hate Pakistanis, I just dislike them immensely” and not face any consequences for another 20-30 years.

I’m not saying food writing has the ability to solve this, but what might we learn if some of those stories were told without this false narrative? Which is to say, if anyone from Bradford wishes to write it ─ pitches are open to you at vittleslondon@gmail.com

To fund the payment of contributors like Penny, please subscribe through Patreon https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32064286 which also grants you access to all paywalled articles.

An Interview with Manjit Kaur, by Penny Andrews

Manjit Kaur is a Leeds legend without a filter. I don’t mean that she’s rude, overly loud or full on (that’s me you’re thinking of, or Ira Silverman of Ira B’s, another fabulous local character with great food). I mean every so often she tweets rueing the fact that she’s meant to be keeping the social media for her vegetarian Punjabi streetfood business, Manjit’s Kitchen, “professional”. She’s only meant to be promoting the opening hours and the menu, and then goes off on one about football, the government, or anything else that’s on her mind in her own inimitable style. Everyone knows Manjit. Everyone follows Manjit. Nobody minds the swearing, because she’s lovely and her food is great. And whether it’s her Kirkstall restaurant, her Kirkgate Market stall or her horsebox, she makes you feel like home. I’ve got a pair of pink camo trousers stained yellow from one of her thalis. Her house dal tastes like the most perfect umami expression of home, comfort with oomph, and her onion bhajis remind me of the stamens of stargazer lilies.

Manjit is the spirit of the real Leeds, wonky and daft and full of heart – and always grafting. Because she wants to look after me, I want to look after her. I wanted her to tell her own story, because she’s a unique part of this weird city, so often seen as retail and finance heavy, that’s always had a fierce independent streak and been much more than the city centre, the students and the goths. I want her, and Leeds, to survive this pandemic.

Editors note: The Leeds-ness of this interview has been partially, but not totally, edited for clarity.

Tell us about how you got started, right from the beginning

Yeah, there was five kids plus Granny, Mum and Dad. Mum or Dad used to go to work, Granny used to look after all the kids and do all the heavy cooking. And what we used to do is mess around! There was eight mouths to feed, and I’m like ‘grandma’s left on her own’. So I got into helping Granny all the time. That's how it all started. I was probably about five, six, maybe seven, when I started, rolling out chapatis. And then obviously we've come from a big community and family. We used to go to the temple every Sunday where everyone gets together, and we'd cook for hundreds and hundreds!

That's how I grew into cooking. I don't know it was just a thing about helping out and feeding the community, but yeah that's how I got my passion for it. Then later on, I got into work. Just a normal nine to five job. And then, I think ‘this is not for me’. I got made redundant. I'm thinking ‘why don't I just start cooking again?’ You know, this is what I love doing and it's like a passion, so I thought ‘okay let's try this’. Let's try home cooking! That's what I've always been taught - and vegetarian because growing up my mum and dad and us were all strict vegetarians. 

I started home cooking in 2009, in my own small kitchen ─  it was probably about, I don't know, maybe half the size of this little space. And I did that with no money, and nothing whatsoever, no advertisements except emails and social media. It used to be a couple of curries. a couple of starters, and desserts. So it was just like house dal, aloo gobi, chana masala. With rice, homemade chapatis, onion bhajis, samosas. It was 3 to 4 months into home deliveries, I think we got contacted by our local Oakwood farmers market. I was absolutely amazed that I got this response, asking if I'd like to bring my home cooking to on the street at the Oakwood farmers market, and it was, I was like, oh my lord Jesus it's absolutely amazing to have actually have somebody ask me to actually bring this out onto the street. That's how it grew into Indian street food - from home cooking to Indian street food. It was mad.

What did your parents do?

Oh my mum was a machinist. And then she used to work at Leeds Kirkgate market, a clothes shop. My dad used to be a pipe inspector in a big pipe company. It was nothing to do with my parents being in a restaurant trade, nothing. Yeah, I think it was a passion of growing up with my granny and helping out and it made me how I am who I am today, because of growing up with granny and, you know, the whole Sikh community.

Did the food start to change when you went out?

No, it was the same home cooking. We did the dal bowls we did the chana bowls, we did the chilli paneer. We did the bhajis and the samosas - so nothing. Nothing changed at that point. Obviously I've been to India a few times and I bring a few different dishes in because my granny didn't used to cook South Indian food. And I wanted  South Indian dishes like dosas – though not at the moment because we haven’t got the staff and they’re a lot of work. And then it slowly grew bigger and bigger and better and I was thinking about maybe wanting to get myself a bigger kitchen. 

When I started the festivals in 2010 all I had was a gazebo and you know the British weather, we used to hold down the gazebo with one hand and cook with the other hand! It must have been about three years in when I got contacted by Land Securities about going to Trinity (a big shopping centre with a rotating lineup of street food vans in a food court) and I'm like, no way, how am I going to do Trinity, how am I going to cook seven days a week in the shopping centre? It was kind of  scary and exciting at the same time that I was asked to do my food, but I thought yeah let's just, just do it. 

I called my family, my sisters, my family and friends just to join in, just to help out for the first couple of weeks and it was absolutely crazy because we did it for six weeks, non-stop. Six whole weeks and then when I came out of it I was broken. But I’d achieved the feeling I had that if I can do this, I can do anything. That's the feeling that I got because I'd been cooking all my life but only doing food on weekends for big, big groups or crowds for festivals. I had never thought of myself cooking for seven days a week non-stop. 

You’ve made the steps from home cooking to a street food pitch, to a food truck, to market stall to restaurant. At what point did you decide you needed a permanent base?

I think after when we came out of Trinity it was a time that I decided to get myself something solid. So we got a food truck. We managed to put a few pennies together and got a food truck and within the first week of trying to get up and running, we got vandalised. I think from social media and my network of friends someone had the idea and tweeted out why don't you do Kickstarter? It was amazing the response we got that we managed to fund some money to get a new food truck ─  we decided to get a yellow horsebox because Michael is like six foot tall!

And then the workload was getting too much and we decided we need somewhere where we can actually have a base because when we were out in Manchester, or in Halifax or in Sheffield people wanted to know where we were so they can come and enjoy our food. And then I'm thinking, well, why don't we have, because I'm born and bred here in Leeds, why don't we just bring ourselves to the market because the market was renovating at the time with the new food hall, and our thinking was ‘why not the market?’.

Everybody would say ‘why do you want to go to the market, it’s a bit rough and ready?’. I mean, well, we've been born and bred here in Yorkshire and our parents have been taking us small kids to the market since forever. So why not bring our, our, you know, Indian vegetarian food into the market? We bring people together so why not make our Leeds market bigger and better? I think we decided to go in there for our reasons, thinking ‘yes we want to bring people to the market’ because everybody's just avoiding it. Our generation now just want to go into town. 

And then recently you made the step up to a restaurant, how had the pandemic affected that?

It’s nice to have a unit so people know that we are central rather than sending me messages “so where are you next?” “We're in Sheffield, we're in Halifax” It's kind of nice to have that centre. But then I think I wanted to do something in the evening. We stop at the market at 5pm and it's just lunchtime trade there for a couple of hours. So we thought we'd have a nice small little place and found one place here in Kirkstall. My dream was finally here! And then obviously, the whole pandemic started and it's just gone downhill. I think that's when it really hit me that my dream is gonna get crushed and I was actually tearful, I'm tearful now, because it was at the point where I had to close. 

We didn't know what we was gonna do, you know, because we only opened up in October. So you just have to have your thinking cap on. We closed the Leeds Kirkgate market because we couldn't open that and then we had to close Kirkstall for a couple of weeks and then we decided to do home deliveries just to keep our landlords happy. To actually pay for the space that we've closed down, we decided to do home delivery. In a way it’s been a big circle ─ that we started off with home deliveries and we came back to home deliveries here at Kirkstall. We decided to do chilled food for people to pick up and collect or we deliver and it's just been brilliant just to keep us on our toes and just to keep us out of so much debt that we got ourselves into because we had to stop both places. We've just opened Kirkstall, only Thursday Fridays and Saturdays, and we're thinking we should make it more, so that we can make a few extra pennies to keep paying our landlords - because obviously it's been tough working with landlords where they're not putting down the rent. They're not giving out a rent reduction so it's been tough for us to keep afloat, we're just taking day by day. 

What has it been like since lockdown lifted?

Kirkstall market is back up and running since the end of July. People are slowly back but we had a lot of trade from the offices, and there's no one in the offices. It's dropped by 50%. With the hit to our incomes and also with all the staff being furloughed it's been tough for me and Michael that we've been juggling both places and since you have to go back to doing it on your own we have to get up at half six in the morning, doing a big cook for the market. Michael’s been at the market, I'm running here, I do the chilled food here so it's been kind of tougher as with all the staff being furloughed because they've got young children and the kids were not going to go back until September. Now we're in September, I can't believe that we're in September. Finally, slowly we are getting staff back.

You’re particular about who you hire, aren’t you?

Because of our backgrounds it has always been Indian, Asian women. I think we're always being left in the back! Rather, we can't voice ourselves growing up so it's nice to bring Indian ladies in who haven't been working since they've been in the UK ─ and we're talking about 10 or 15 years they've been in the UK, that they've never worked ─ and their husbands feel safe that their wives are going to an Indian lady who's given them work! It's kind of nice to have that feeling that they feel comfortable coming to work here.

Restaurants were just all dominated with men in the kitchens and I'd always thought ‘oh we need to change this’. So we turned it around and invited those ladies in. The main thing is we just all get along, they're all comfortable working within Manjit’s Kitchen so it's absolutely a godsend. 

And then we work with Cafe Leep (a charity that employs people with learning disabilities), where we get one member of staff a week. Michael's been with us like since we've opened the Kirkgate market so that's 2015. He's been with us for years and he helps out every Thursday, but with the pandemic he’s vulnerable so he can't come to work just yet. I think he's ready to come back now but we will go through all the COVID measures before we get him back in.

So Leeds…

I think everybody can tell with my strong, well you can’t tell now because I’ve got mask on, but I think you can tell by my accent she’s a Yorkshire lass. Born and bred here at St James'. Leeds United has always been like down there down there (in the Championship) but never, ever getting above. But when they actually won the, you know, when they got into the Premier League, it was just like…come on! Bielsa is the best, he is so down to earth and it's just made our city even better. I'd like to say we needed that, I think with the pandemic. With the pandemic going on around us, I think we need some kind of normality, something good coming out of it for our city basically that is, huge, it's been huge for us. That leap right into the top division.

Yeah, and you decided to be based here not just because, like, you live here but because you're from here. Right?

I just, I think I never can be anywhere else.

Because obviously Manchester's got the big street food scene or whatever but you never thought you'd be happy there.

I've never been out of my comfort zone and Leeds is always been a part of me and I think that's where I want it to be and I think, Leeds needed that little kick really because the big places have already got it like London Manchester, Liverpool, they've already got big street food places and big, you know, places to be and eat. Leeds is in there now, you know.

Yeah, and you've got bits from other businesses who are independents as well. 

We use small businesses in Leeds ─ we get our bread from a bakery in Harrogate, Balterzens. You know, we get coffee from local, you know, independent places (e.g. Kulture Coffee) and it's kind of nice we use the beers from our local Kirkstall brewery as well we've got our local beers from there (Horsforth Brewery), we got beer on tap from Kirkstall Brewery so we all use all the independents. The community help each other and that's how it should be. It’s nice to have that support from people. That's who we are, we get that support and we give the support but we help each other. And we get through it. It’s back to everyone cooking for everyone else.

Tell me about the chapasty (a favourite, I miss it)

That was back in the day 2010, I think that was. It was basically a chapati, filled with either chickpeas or paneer and folded up and made into a pasty.

When will it come back?

It will be hopefully very soon.  We've done quite a few different things but it's just so hard because of the COVID measures and the pandemic. We've only got a limited menu.

Your food is often dictated by what there’s a lot of in the market that day, so what’s the most difficult thing to make when there’s a huge surplus of something?

A lot of people, a LOT of people don't like mushrooms. And every time I used to make mushrooms, I often made a korma of it with coconut milk. I think, mushrooms are one of the hardest sells. Once, I think ,there was some rhubarb, fried rhubarb and I just put it on top of my salad. Just bringing things and throwing things in, in whatever we can use because it's such a real local good that we have the outdoor market on our doorstep so we just use all this fresh produce whatever we can. Sometimes we have aubergines, and sometimes we have cauliflower. We just use and make whatever we do, what we have outside from our fresh produce at the market so it's kind of fabulous to have.

Like you are convinced you can make me like okra when I think it's horrible. How do you get around people’s weird dislikes?

Yeah, so after what we tend to do because it gets all sticky we make okra fries, and they are good. For people who don’t like coriander, that’s easy, we can cook without coriander. It’s harder when people don’t enjoy onions, it’s tough to make things without onions, but they can have our cauliflower butter masala because that’s just made with tomatoes and butter. Chilli paneer without the paneer! Or chilli paneer without chilli! We cook everything medium, mild to medium ─ I prefer it not too hot so people can enjoy their food and not be overpowered with too much heat. I’ve had a baby loving the food, I think the mum wasn’t expecting him to like it before he came and then six, seven months old he comes in and dal and rice, onion bhaji – fantastic.

Another thing because of us being strictly vegetarian when I was growing up, we used to go out to eat and there wasn't much choice there. This is when we were younger, where and our parents were taking us out. I think there were two or three dishes for vegetarians, and then we stopped going out for that reason because there wasn't much on the menu. That informs my cooking.

So what would have happened next. If it hadn't been COVID, if you'd got to October and you've had the full year what would have been without this?

It would have been a proper party. Our first year anniversary in October's coming up so it'd be absolutely brilliant. It would have been absolutely great. I would have had that sense for me that: Yeah, I've done what I wanted to do.

Would you have expanded after that?

I think what we did realise in October, we did start to think the place did seem a bit small. 

Me: What happens if we get locked down again?

Oh God, I’ll break down and probably won’t open till at least we get the go ahead again. We’ll just have to give our shot to delivering and collection, if we're allowed to do that. We still do that, Thursdays Fridays and Saturdays collection and deliveries. Deliveries we do less and less because obviously we are opening here on a night. It's kind of tough for us to juggle because Mike is at the market. And then he comes here straight after the market to help me out on a night time. It’s been kind of tough for us both.

Who’s your food hero? Other than your grandma

Romy Gill in Liverpool. She just does what I do, I think that's what it is. It’s just really nice that she's come from that same upbringing and same background that she's brought it within her community and within her city. And I think that's what I love about it, because those ladies we just, you can see it's been done.

Lastly, if you could cook for anyone, who would it be?

*instantly* Bielsa! 

Penny Andrews is a writer and researcher based in Bramley, Leeds. They enjoy drag performance, zines and lifting heavy weights. They live with their partner, NHS waiting lists, and a strong desire for a pencil moustache. You can find their writing at http://pennybphd.wordpress.com. Penny was paid for this newsletter.

“The mistake you’re making Jonathan” academic and part-time pizza whisperer Vaughn Tan tells me, over a the remnants of a mortadella and red pesto pie “is that you see pizza as the product of cities, when actually you should see it as the product of the person making it”

I’ve always seen pizza as the pre-eminent food of cities; when we talk about pizza we must amend and prefix it with Roman pizza, Neapolitan pizza, New York, Detroit, St Louis, New Haven pizza, Chicago deep-pan. More recently you can talk about Tokyo pizza, Sao Paolo pizza, Buenos Aires pizza. I have often wondered if there is a London pizza, although I have found most attempts to define this unsatisfactory.

Maybe the closest someone came to pinning London pizza down was writer (and Vittles contributor) Claire Finney, who wrote an article for Foodism in which she profiled 3 or 4 pizzerias using unconventional toppings, severing the link with Italy and arguably creating - if not a city style - then certainly pizzas that could only exist in London. My only problem with the piece is that I didn’t think any of the pizzas were that great.

I’ve found this an unfortunate flaw in the London food scene, compared to, say, New York, where something great is immediately identified, iterated on and adopted by the market. Here we are too slow at identifying greatness; we’re content to laud pizzerias that are shadows of Naples, promoting wrongheaded ideas about authenticity (fuck your imported seawater) and not allowing anything new to flourish. So it’s worth saying: the pizzas that Pamela Yung is currently making at Flor under the guise of ASAP Pizza are maybe the first truly great pizzas in London. And you have one more week left to try them.

ASAP has been one of the few new restaurant brands created during lockdown, taking up the space of James Lowe and John Ogier's second restaurant Flor in Borough Market. When ASAP was announced with Pam at the helm, even though she has a lot of pizza pedigree (staging at Pizzarium in Rome, holding pizza parties at her former 1* restaurant Semilla) I think the reaction of most people was to see it simply as a pivot to bring in some much needed income. The press release promised ‘London-centric’ pizzas although the menu seemed fairly Italian; some people almost certainly wrote it off as a posh restaurant putting posh stuff on bread.

The first pizzas I had at ASAP were good. I think there was a general feeling among people I know that it wasn’t quite ready yet. Since then, Pam and Flor’s baker Helen have tinkered and tinkered with the dough, honing a mixture of heritage flours, prolonging that cook time so the base looks something like the dark side of the moon, with crusts that blur the boundary between ben cotto and burnt. Holding up a slice, I’m reminded of that apocryphal story that the BBFC’s test for determining explicit male nudity was to measure the angle against the Kintyre peninsula ─ the pizzas at ASAP would fail this every time, maintaining a 90 degree stiffness despite the weight of toppings. For those now used to soupy Neapolitan as a neutral style, ASAP almost seems radical.

ASAP’s pizzas are not virtuous, but they are pizzas for people who like to eat their crusts. As Pam says, in today’s interview, making pizza is both baking and cooking. The pizzas are now at a point where they’re immediately identifiable even without toppings - that bronzed tubular crust, slightly blistered and shiny, as if it’s been rubbed with baby oil. The cooking part, the toppings, vary between higher end takes on low pizzas (“Natoora trash”) and pizzas which are not city pizzas but rather country ones, made with produce from named dairy or vegetable farmers. Some pizzas have been neither red nor white, but positively green.

ASAP closes next week as Flor prepares for reopening, and the future of ASAP is yet to be decided. But for a few months, London had great pizza. Time will tell if what Pam has done is replicable, either by her in a new space, or by other chefs across the city. I like the idea of a new London pizza style, but it will only be formed if chefs really get behind the idea as something to pursue creatively ─ otherwise it will only be seen as something many people saw ASAP as, just a pivot.

Still, when Vaughn is right he’s right, even if I would add this amendment. Good pizzas are the product of cities, great pizzas are the product of a person. It doesn’t matter if ASAP pizza is a London pizza or not ─ leave that to Pizza2Go or Oregano ─ for the time being, it’s Pam’s pizza.

When James (Lowe) brought you over did you have any indication that you would end up making pizzas?

I mean, no, not really. My background is in bread and pastry, but I wanted to break out from being a pastry chef and I was thinking ‘well why do I have to be one thing?’. And pizza for me is a bit of both, it is both baking and cooking to some extent. And while me and James were talking, pizza came up and he said “oh maybe you can do pizza”, but at that point we didn’t know what it was going to be yet. So there was this initial planting of a seed but when I saw the space I was like, “oh yeah, this is too small for pizza”. 

But as soon as I saw what was happening with Covid I thought we really needed to pivot to doing something with less staff, because people were bound to get sick and we needed to minimise the number of people in the restaurant. So James said “ok, come up with a menu” and I proposed pizza to go. Funnily enough, the first week of March I went to Sicily for a weekend and when I got back I had to quarantine, so I was in quarantine getting really scared and sitting at home, so I put together a rough menu and literally three or four days later we closed. And then nothing happened for months, and then one day he called me and said he was thinking of revisiting the idea, and that’s how it all happened.

How different is it writing a menu for pizzas in New York compared to writing a pizza menu with London as the context? What new things did you have to bear in mind? 

I haven’t visited many London pizzerias so I was quite nervous, because I wasn’t sure what the palate was like for pizzas. It seemed to me people didn’t really go out for pizza in the same way they do in New York. Like everyone goes out for pizza in New York. Whether it’s a restaurant or a slice, it can be multiple times a week. The few that I knew here were Neapolitan style places, which we are not set up for, certainly not in terms of the oven we have. And while I like Neapolitan pizzas, I also like crisp bases and a good colour. And some Neapolitans are just too doughy for me. At first it seemed like we were going to do something more Italian, but I thought even though I love Italy I’m just too American! I just like to put lots of shit on a pizza. I thought, well there’s not a lot of New York style pizza here - although I’m not sure if what we do is even a New York pizza, or even a California style pizza.

Could you define New York style?

I think it’s the type of cheese and maybe even the texture of the dough. Your typical slice joint in New York will cook the whole pie, slice it up, put it back in the oven to warm it up for you, maybe put on some toppings, but it means when it comes out the bottom is warm and crispy. And a lot of American style pizzas have dry mozzarella - they call it low-moisture mozz - every pizza person I know in the States uses it. It’s kind of akin to the supermarket mozzarella you get here but it stretches in a certain way and those New York style pies get light caramelisation on the mozz with longer bake times and lower temperatures. Everyone who wants to do Italian style pizzas use these wet mozzarellas, which is great when warm but once it isn’t it can be a rubbery blob. And I just do not like that. But I do think that’s the signature thing - that dry shredded mozz on top of a pie.

But when you say you were thinking about bringing New York style pizza here, are you referring more to the new-wave pizzerias in New York rather than the traditional New York pizzas?

Yeah, definitely places like Ops, Robertas, Razza, Leo. They have more creative toppings alongside traditional ones, a slightly higher price point. And they’re more restaurants than take out. And that was a struggle because we were thinking if we are going to be a take out/delivery joint then can we put the really good stuff on a pizza?  How is it going to travel? Will people pay more? That was something we were really concerned about - we needed to reach as many people as possible, on a platform that a typical ‘foodie’ might not use, so we had to have mass appeal. At the same time I didn’t just want to do margheritas or ‘sausage pizza’. So I played it a bit safe in the beginning: we had a vegan option, a vegetarian option, a margherita, I love potato pizza so I had to put on a potato pizza. And I put on a Hawaiian because that’s a very American thing, even though it was invented in Canada. I wasn’t sure if people here were familiar with it.

*meanwhile a pizza box appears*

We are very familiar with it. Possibly too familiar. OK, so I wanted to show you something which for me, is a typical ‘London’ pizza, which isn’t Neapolitan style but something you can just get on any high street. I’m very proud to say no-one Italian has been near the making of this pizza.

Has this got french fries on it? Or do those just look like french fries?

No, those are strips of tandoori chicken.

This is a proper London pizza base. Just look at the underside. 

Ahh not that dark? Kinda doughy. 

*long silence*

Very weird. But I did eat a lot of American pizzas growing up and it’s not that different. Although it is quite...hot for the English palate. 

They mean it when they put those chilli signs next to the description. So yeah, the deep pan here is always very soft, the rim tastes slightly of oil, and often the cheese is melted over the toppings.

I feel English people love a lot of cheese.

I guess that’s maybe a big difference between London and New York pizzas in that people feel short changed if there’s not enough cheese on their pizza over here. 

I mean the weather lends itself to stuffing yourself with cheese in the winter, that kind of comfort food. You know, this isn’t as bad as I thought I would be. 

*looks at pizza menu* Is it always this fusion of Indian, Chinese, Mexican.

Yeah those are three big influences in that they are recognisable cuisines to an average British person, but most of the time these shops are run by recent immigrants - maybe Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Turkish - and it’s a purely functional thing. They have a deep-pan pizza conveyor belt, you just set it up and pump them out fairly easily.

I grew up on Dominos, Papa Johns, Pizza Hut in suburban Ohio, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had them so I can’t quite remember what they’re like. I do remember Pizza Hut because they had a really crispy bottom and a deep pan, and I really loved the crust as a kid. You know there’s butter in it? That’s what I’ve heard - one of my friends is a pizza consultant and he tries to recreate the butter crust because it’s something that’s really comforting to a lot of Americans.

It’s the same with the British but Pizza Hut has gone completely out of fashion, partially because restaurants have closed, partially because they definitely do not taste the same anymore.

Actually I’ve had Papa Johns recently. I remember eating Papa Johns as a child and getting the garlic dip. Right before ASAP, James ordered a couple of pizzas off Deliveroo to see what the local offering was like, and one of them was Papa Johns so I said ‘hey get the garlic dip’ and it was gross. 

So was going to New York the first time you tasted a pizza that was completely different to these mass-market, chain pizzas?

To be completely honest, I wasn’t that into pizza growing up. My parents both worked, and we had piano lessons, ballet lessons, violin lessons, so they grabbed fast food. McDonalds, Pizza Hut or one of these other pizza places I mentioned. And I really resented it. I was pretty picky as a kid and I didn’t like it. Growing up, whenever they said ‘we’re going to have pizza for dinner’ I did not think it was a legitimate thing to have for dinner. I would always complain. So ironically I really did not like pizza as a child. Then at school we had that kind of French-bread style pizza, and it wasn’t great, so I didn’t have a good impression of it in general. When I went to college in Ann Arbor in Michigan, I was eating at a couple of different pizzas places I thought were good. One of them was underneath my apartment, it was called ‘I Love New York Pizza’ - it was New York style in that they sold by the slice. They would put chicken parmigiana on the pizza, or baked ziti, all those Italian-American classics. And we would always get pizza from there. I guess in my memory that is the first type of pizza that I liked.

I moved to New York in 2006 and I didn’t really eat pizza to be honest unless I was going out to a restaurant with friends, but it wasn’t a fanatical thing for me. I actually worked in Roberta’s in 2010 and it was one of my favourites; it was definitely something different, they had nice toppings, but I wasn’t working on the pizza. I was the pastry chef so I wasn’t really thinking about pizza, but I did enjoy eating it. It wasn’t sourdough or anything, back then it was standard, yeasted, Caputo white flour. I think my real pizza revelation, again somewhat ironically, actually came from Italy. Before we opened Semilla I decided to stay in Italy a bit longer because we were waiting for the restaurant to be fitted out, and I was looking for a bakery to stage in. Panificio Bonci happened to be doing the same event, so I asked them if I could stage with them and the pastry chef was a bitch to me! She wouldn’t let me touch or do anything. So I was there for about a week, and then the guy who was in charge of making the Roman style pizzas told me ‘hey, come over here’ and I started to help him make the pizzas, and they were so good. And then I moved over to Pizzarium and that blew my mind. That was the first thing that got me addicted to pizza.

What is it about Bonci’s pizzas that were so striking?

The ingredients first of all were really high quality. He was a chef before being a pizzaiolo and a baker so he definitely had a cheffy take on the toppings. But it was the dough. It was so light and crisp and the texture was amazing. I hadn’t eaten a lot of pizza around Rome at that time, I’d just been to some al taglio spots, but I was just blown away. Even the Rosso which was just red sauce and wild oregano was amazing. I was just like ‘whoa’ - pizza can be this other thing. 

So at Semilla, every Saturday for the staff meal I would make pizzas while I was doing the sourdough. Bonci would do the pizza dough with three day fermentation, in the fridge with a little bit of yeast, so cold fermentation, and I wanted to challenge myself to do it with sourdough. So I just fiddled around a lot. Sometimes we would put up pictures of the staff meal on Instagram and it became a thing with people in the industry saying ‘hey when are you going to make us pizza’. So one day we decided to have a pizza party and it ended up being an insane turn out, it was our biggest revenue night. At that point we considered looking for another spot and doing a pizza place as well, but it never took off. I never considered making pizza as a job, it was just something I did for fun, but I suddenly thought this could actually be a thing, and a contrast to the other thing we had which was much more fine dining. Then when I left the restaurant I went travelling and just did lots of different things - I worked at a bakery in Peru and made wood-fired pizzas there, I staged at a couple of places that specifically made pizza just to figure out different styles, and then I staged with a woman called Sarah Minnick in Portland at Lovely’s Fifty Fifty. It was really product driven pizza, sourdough, wood-fired, all those things ─ she was a huge inspiration. And then I became friends with Massimo at L’Industrie Pizzeria and worked for him for a bit. He’s self taught, he didn’t use sourdough then and does now, but he makes one of the best slices in New York. And then this all kinda led to this.

I think at the start at least, even with me, people weren’t quite sure how to react to your pizzas because they were so different. Almost like Anna (Higham)’s pastries. I think, for instance, some people would struggle with there not being that much cheese on your pizzas, or how different the base is.

Well it’s there, it’s just hidden. It’s that dry mozz. You can’t see it in the same way in the same way you do with fresh mozz with those big white blobs. Some people say ‘oh you didn’t put the cheese on the pizza’ but we did! It’s on there! But I feel that if the base isn’t good it won’t be a good pizza. I think the base is equally important - as someone who cares about grain and bread and fermentation, it had to be really good. But of course, most people think if it has cheese on then they’ll like it. I guess most people feel if you put nice things on it then they’ll like it regardless. But I wanted to make sure we put as much focus on the dough because that will make us different from other people. 

I’m fascinated by the constant tinkering you’re doing with the dough; as a customer I can see there’s been an attritional evolution, day by day, week by week, to the point it’s at now. How has it changed from your point of view?

Well the dough is made by Helen (Evans), our baker, she comes in and makes it early in the morning. We work with a lot of small farmers who maybe only have this much of this grain, so we run through a bunch of different grains and keep having to change the mix. But they all perform a bit differently. In the beginning we had to tinker around with the fermentation, plus training people to learn when the dough is at the right point is hard. It’s definitely going to continue to change because we’re not going to use the same stuff. The recipe, the levain and everything, is the same, but the types of flours are constantly changing. At the moment we’re using Cann Mills Stoates - that’s the base as you need something quite strong in it, but the other flour is a mixture of smaller batch, heritage stuff. So the current one now is Miller’s Choice, a population of heritage wheat which was put together by this guy called Andy Forbes and was grown by a few farmers across the UK. We have some spelt from Hodmedods but they contract different farmers to grow it, and there’s April bearded, which is from Gothelney grown by Fred Price. But remember these are such small batches - it’s always changing.

Is that lack of consistency, or at least having to find consistency through constantly changing and blending, a source of irritation for you? Or do you enjoy the challenge of it?

No, if you’re an observant and sensitive baker you adapt and read the flour, just like you would if you’re a good cook. And so many people are used to using dead flour that always behaves the same, even if it’s more consistent for me it doesn’t have any character. I know the people who grow most of our grain now, and for me that’s really important. I’d rather have less consistency and support the agricultural systems I believe in, and have transparency over where stuff is coming from. I see people say they’re using all UK grain, but if they’re using one of the five companies that everyone uses then I can tell you that they are all blending their flour. And I think we can get to the point where we can say that, but it will take a bit more work.

How much of your toppings are determined by the producers you’re working with?

Pretty much all of it. Obviously there’s the margherita and some non-seasonal basics which we have to have and can’t leave the menu. But I really wanted to support the producers, especially now when they had less people buying, I would literally make pizzas based on what they needed to move. Like Neal’s Yard would tell me ‘we have a lot of this and need to sell it’ so that’s when the St Jude pizza came on. Keats had all the swiss chard and kale, so thats where the greens pizza came from. I came from working on Oli’s farm (Mora Farm) and he had all this spring onion and green garlic, so that’s where the onion pizza came from. So a lot of it was trying to support and highlight producers who I really liked. I also think British cheeses are quite interesting, and I thought it would be fun to match the Italian cheeses with their British counterpart. Usually I’d finish a pizza with some Pecorino Romano, or Parmesan, but we chose Spenwood instead because it has a similar profile. So that’s been fun - I get to learn about cheeses and play with things, and I don’t need to buy everything through an Italian importer! 

(Palourde clam pizza special at Flor last Saturday)

Recently you put on a mortadella and pesto pizza, and this was about a week after we went on an ill-fated pizza crawl of south London. But we had that mortadella and pesto pizza at Bravi Ragazzi, and I was wondering how you developed the riff on that so quickly?

I had wanted to do a mortadella pizza since we opened, but it never happened But after we had all those pizzas together I thought ‘I wanna put it on’. I had a look at how people were doing it and everyone puts the same stuff on it: pistachios, green pesto. But I don’t want to do the same thing, so I was doing a bit of research and talking to my Italian supplier, Alfonso (La Sovrana) asking if he has stracciatella and somehow we got talking about pesto. And I’ve been to Sicily a lot and of course there’s pesto trapanese and he mentioned ‘yeah my mum makes this pesto with sun dried tomatoes’ and I said ‘really, that’s cool. Send me your mum’s recipe’. So I adapted his mum’s recipe. I do really like the way the green looks with the mortadella and I thought ‘this won't look as cool’ but I tried it and it was great. 

ASAP’s coming into its last week, and I tentatively feel it could be the start of a genuine London pizza style if chefs see what you’re doing and think it’s worth replicating and putting their skills into making something that they can be proud of. Have you noticed any influence you’re having? 

It’s hard to say! I hope it gets chefs out of that attitude which says ‘I’m too good to make pizza’ - that pisses me off. Chefs had a lot of time at home, they were making pizzas in their back yard. Some of the best chefs in New York are pizza fanatics - like Sean Grey at Momofuku Ko, who has put on a $28 pizza on their Ko to Go menu. He’s a pizza fanatic like I am. I think there’s enough respect among chefs in New York that pizza is a legitimate thing, and it would be nice to see that here. Hopefully it will spark something, although I don’t know if it has. 

I guess the romantic notion of pizza is that it is this blank canvas to communicate things easily, whether it’s culture, or a specific mixture of immigration patterns. Do you feel there’s something you want to communicate with your pizzas?

From what I gather, pizza is still viewed as cheap here and shouldn’t be above a certain price point. And I think that’s a shame because it could be more. I’m not saying cheap pizza isn’t good - in New York where you can have a nice pizza or a “shitty” pizza and still enjoy it - but I think there’s an opportunity to show people that it can be more. There’s sometimes even an assumption that we’re doing this to make loads of money -  that’s absolutely not true. My motivation in pursuing doing a pizza place is I’ve worked in a lot of places which are expensive, as any young cook does, and pizza seems in many ways to be more democratic. I’d prefer to serve my friends, my family, my parents on a regular basis with something of high quality, but not necessarily pricey. My parents love pizza and they came to my pizza pop ups, but they only came to my restaurant once. I don’t have an ego about fine dining, I can take the same level of expertise, of attention to detail, respect for ingredients, to a food which has universal appeal. I don’t want people to say ‘oh you’re making really posh pizzas’. I want them at their heart to be appealing to as many types of people as possible. Of course there are those who won’t like it, and I have cheffy tendencies in terms of choosing flavour profiles, but pizza is an equaliser. And that might be what we need right now. A lot of the clientele in Borough Market were tourists but what about serving the local community? I think it’s really important. 

The way I view paying £16 for a pizza, which isn’t really that much more than all those mediocre Neapolitan pizzas we had, is that this is £16 for maybe the best expression of a genre or style of food you can get in this city. And it doesn’t have to be pizza, it could be pastry or a sandwich or whatever. To get the analogue of that in a dinner and I would be paying 10 times the price, for something as filling. So for me, it feels like something which is great value. 

That’s the way I see it too. In the States I’d pay $27 for a pizza no problem. It’s an affordable luxury. If people are making less money it’s still something nice they can treat themselves to. I know they’re planning that ASAP will continue in some way, although that’s still to be determined. But for that moment it was the right chord to strike, and it’s been fun to see people react to it.

You can find Pamela Yung on Instagram, as well as at ASAP pizza. ASAP will be open this week from Wednesday to Saturday.

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I am officially banned from writing about Feroz Gajia. Or at least at any publication that has any rules on conflict of interest (luckily Vittles is not one of them). 

I met Feroz in the aftermath of the Boring Thai/Som Saa debacle in 2018, soon after I started writing and not too soon before Feroz started writing himself, both of us for Eater London. I think we initially bonded over a shared understanding of how food media had created the conditions for the appropriation of Thai food in London to be such an emotional issue, as well as bizarrely similar eating habits. Since then we have marauded around London like food media’s Wario and Waluigi (you can decide who is who) ─ I’m not sure I’ve eaten with any single person more except my mum, and even then it’s running it close. 

Feroz also co-owns a cafe in Hackney in east London called Bake Street, where he has pioneered his own style of Halal brunch; a worldwide phenomenon of a genre but also something that has unique influences within London and the rest of the UK. While based on American and Antipodean styles of brunch, Halal brunch, and particularly Feroz’s take on it, is an expansive, transnational genre taking in influences from the Middle East, south east Asia, Latin America and pretty much anywhere Feroz has eaten at in the past week (past specials have included lamb birria with tortillas given wings of crispy melted cheese, a version of murgh makhani turned into a fried chicken burger, the noodles from Parasite, and a choice of unadorned single cultivar mangoes, including his beloved Rajapuris). 

Feroz does not really have an analogue in the London food scene, and to find someone similar you would have to go to New York and look at how Kenny Shopsin managed to refract the entirety of a city through the lens of line cooking, creating food which was in no way fine dining but made delicious through small but ingenious touches of care. The food leans heavily on nostalgia ─ his burger for instance has been described as “what you think a McDonald’s double cheeseburger will taste like just before you have it, but it actually does taste that good” ─ but it is also forward looking, particularly on weekends where Feroz has an opportunity to push the limitations of what a Halal brunch menu can be.

I sat down with Feroz to talk about the history of the Halal brunch genre, where it’s currently at, plus the recent food media discussions about naming and appropriation, and why being respectful is never a barrier to creativity. 

Could you tell me about the history of Halal brunch, and how it uniquely manifests in the UK?

I feel like the Halal market in general, or at least this generation of the Halal market, always looks to the US for its food inspiration. It’s not just this country, it’s also a big thing in Muslim heavy countries in the Middle East. They’ll bring every chain and type of restaurant from the US and make a Halal version with the licenses, just because it’s what people want. Now here it was never a proven thing because the market was never deemed that strong until the last 10 years, so you’d have knockoffs. Instead of Nandos you’d have Five Lads, instead of KFC you’d have every fried chicken shop in the city. Those were not brunch things but they were the basis of a new Halal dining.

Now the new generation has more disposable income, they’re forward looking and they want something different. They want a type of food they can call their own, but which their parents and grandparents wouldn’t eat. It’s the third place - like Howard Schultz said of the coffee shop in the US. In the UK the third place would be the pub, but because of the alcohol restriction the closest thing to it for Muslims would be a cafe where you can have brunch or food, but also just hang out. 

So with the US influence, originally you had the Halal burger market, and then, as a by product of that, the Halal diner market. In 2009/10 the idea of US-style brunch, which was just percolating into the UK, seemed to catch on because there was less meat, there were more eggs, there were more things they could eat than on a normal menu. Obviously when there’s a possibility of making money then restaurateurs will take it ─ so Halal brunch became a thing because they saw an opportunity to make money or something that was very easy and cheap to do. There are now plenty of places which are incidentally Halal, or accidentally Halal, or Halal by necessity just to make money, so it means the quality of ingredients drops, the care and attention drops, and there maybe less than a handful of Halal brunch places doing it properly. They are just doing it to do it, or they’ve given up and moved onto the easy likes of a flower wall aesthetic.

Lots of people think that to be a Halal restaurant or cafe you would just not have to have any pork products. But obviously it’s a lot more complicated than that.

For Halal restaurants or anything Halal, just like with Kosher, there’s various schools of thought and there’s various levels. This is something most people won’t see: they’ll know it’s no pork and they will maybe know that it’s no alcohol. Those are the base things and the most simplistic things. But just like in Christianity where there’s multiple sects, there’s the same thing in Islam, where certain sects will not eat the majority of seafood, or based on how religious someone is they will not want to eat at anywhere that has pork on the premises (in the same way Orthodox Jews would not eat at a place where there’s any dairy where there’s meat). But it varies from person to person. Certain people will be more accepting of a mainstream restaurant where there are two Halal dishes, whereas someone might only eat at a Halal-only restaurant serving meat that has been hand-slaughtered by a Muslim, which some would say in this country is the highest standard. There’s a monitoring board called HMC which is policed by clerics to make sure that animals have been hand slaughtered rather than stunned ─ which is a big issue when you look into it, there’s a lot of blowback about this not being humane and there’s arguments on both sides ─ but people will make up their minds and then only go to restaurants based on these factors. Most people who aren’t Muslim wouldn’t even think about this.

Also your sourcing options are extremely different from a non-Muslim restaurateur. Like you’re not going to get Halal cull yaw.

No, you can’t get the quality or if you are getting the quality you’re going to have multiple issues. You’re going to be paying 50% minimum more for all your meat, you’re going to have issues with the quality of butchering and ageing. You’re going to have issues finding the right type of animal, keeping up a supply chain, because the system is not in place in this country to keep up with the demand. People are demanding better and better quality Halal meat because the current Muslim market is heavily meat-eating and they want better perceived meat for their money. So traditionally, we would have gone to small farms who had slaughterhouses and who had one person on site who had the right to slaughter animals in small numbers; now it’s become a big machine. So a lot of meat from Brazil, Australia and the US comes over here with external Halal bodies monitoring the quality, solely because there is demand for better ─ or perceived to be better ─ meat, or brand name meat. So wagyu and things like that are coveted.

Actually where is all this wagyu coming from? Even Salt Bae has wagyu on his Nusr-Et menu.

Mostly Australia and some from Chile. And it’s because they decided that nearly all of the meat that is mass butchered in farms based in Australia will be Halal, so it’s easy to source from there. It is very expensive and it’s not amazing quality, but it’s easy. And obviously Brazil is the largest slaughterhouse in the world for poultry and beef, so it was obvious that they would be tapped to produce vast quantities of Halal meat. And it’s not just here, in Saudi Arabia or other Muslim countries they’re sourcing all their meat from abroad with very little control over quality or religious rituals or anything like that. 

Talking about Australia, there’s still a very strong Antipodean influence on the Halal brunch scene here that has nothing to do with the US. 

Definitely. It’s a bad thing to say but Halal dining is always 4-5 years minimum behind the mainstream. So when Antipodean brunches became a thing over here, it was only a matter of time before it became a thing for Halal. What’s interesting is that it originally started out solely looking towards the US, but as it absorbed London’s Antipodean brunch scene, and because of where Australia and New Zealand are in the world, it also started picking up influences from east Asia and south-east Asia in particular, whilst marrying it to European sensibilities. So all those things are influencing the next variant of Halal brunch. But until we succeed that influence, there’s no guiding light for the Halal market as to what’s coming next apart from plastic flowers and coloured coffees.

I see Bake St as unique in the Halal brunch scene, not just because of you but also because of where it is in London. Could it exist in the same way somewhere else?

Hackney has obviously changed a lot but it’s kind of righted itself in that it’s now too expensive for more people to move in, so you do have that balance between the older communities ─ people from west Africa, the Caribbean, south Asia, Latin America, and of course the Orthodox Jewish community. So I originally wanted to ground the place in the Levantine region, somewhere familiar to Muslims and Jews and Christians, and where most of the meat eaten is very much in line with Halal sensibilities. But as soon as we opened I found that people wanted flavours from elsewhere - like the oldest thing I have on the menu is literally a version of an Egg and Bacon McMuffin, but made from lamb instead of pork!

I don’t think it could exist somewhere else in the way it does now. Or at least, I think it would be possible to exist somewhere else but it just wouldn’t last in the same way or be able to be under the radar. It would have to have a much larger marketing push or some kind of co-opting, or in my mind a feeling of desperation that I have to make this a success. But because where it is, by a small railway station, plus the reasonable rates the council give us for rent, we can be a local place and exist under the radar and only pop up when something interesting happens. 

By under the radar do you mean under the radar from the mainstream food media?

Yeah, but also the kind of people who sort of food hunt.

Like us?

*laughs* Yeah sort of. But people who are led by what they see from others ─ I don’t want to use that terrible word ‘foodies’. I’ll freely admit it, sometimes I feel like I purposely make ugly food or food that isn’t plated like a restaurant or cafe should just because I want people to not think about taking a picture and just eat it. For example, at the moment we have tacos on. Every restaurant sets out their tacos nice and neat so you can see all the ingredients and the little bit of greenery on top. It looks lovely but you’re going to spend time getting a nice picture and that’s a minute that the taco has been sitting there, and it’s dead. It’s not what it was a minute ago. But I’ll put something underneath so you can’t see it, and there will be texture under that, and the main ugly thing will be on top. It means people eat it straight away, hopefully find it delicious, and maybe order more. 

If not foodies then who would you say is your bread and butter clientele?

I feel like initially I went to get maximum impact from our original clientele, which I would say are Muslims who are second generation who had nowhere interesting to eat, or were tired of being fed the same kinds of foods. But as soon as we opened and we realised the diversity of our regulars then it became the ‘word of mouth place’. So we lived and died on regulars recommending us to friends living a few streets away or boroughs away or cities away, and a few in other countries. And I think that still sticks ─ we’re a word of mouth restaurant. It’s just that the word of mouth has changed since I started writing. So even though I don’t like to talk about the work, I end up talking to people like you or friends of people we meet, there’s always a bit where you say ‘well I do this’. But the local regulars who come 4-5 times a week, or the days we’re open at the moment, are still the most important part. And they continue to make the place run, or we would be closed.

Halal brunch is transnational by definition. You could not walk into Bake St, look at the menu, and have any idea where the chef is from. Could you talk me through the process of how you research and develop a dish and put it on the menu?

I try to do one of two things. Either I’ll try to create something that is very much of a culture, something people from a culture will recognise. So I’ll slavishly look through multiple recipes and test everything. But if it’s not close then it will be something different and I’ll give it a name or make up a name or a link. To give you an example there are plenty of Middle Eastern dishes with chickpeas in, but I didn’t want to do any of the specific dishes because I don’t feel like I could do it any better than all the Middle Eastern restaurants that are already here. Because if you’re dedicated to a particularly kind of food then most of the time you’re going to do it way better. So I took the ingredients and made a different dish, called it something that doesn’t exist, and didn’t try to tie it to a country or a people or a place, because that would be disrespectful to them. It wouldn’t feel right. But when I have friends or customers who come in who are from a place and find some commonality with it, then that’s the best compliment. It doesn’t need to taste like your favourite restaurant or your mum’s cooking, but if it’s enjoyable in some way then I’ve done my job and I’m happy I’ve fed you.

There’s been a lot of discourse about naming things in the last couple of years. Whether it’s people unhappy that names like mohinga are being attached to dishes that are not recognisably mohinga, or in the case of Alison Roman, the exact opposite where something familiar is not being called by its proper name. Do you think what we call things matters?

It’s important because like any person of any background who isn’t based in their home country, you want some sort of connection or understanding to be felt by other people. So when something is called by its actual name, you want it to resonate with you. And as an extension, if you’re someone else and you want to do justice to someone’s culture, then you want to name it exactly so the other person can feel a sense of ownership of it. For example, with Alison Roman and Christina Tosi, they were both making malawah, which is a Yemeni flaky bread. It was very clearly a recipe for malawah, which as the name describes is a bread which is flaky, it’s a flatbread and it’s from a very particular tradition.

If you’re taking something like that bread, where it’s either been heavily inspired or you’re just taking that recipe explicitly, why not educate your audience and let them have a connection with a culture they might not know? Because as soon as you know the name for something, it might still be alien to you but it becomes normal. And normalising it is the first step towards people understanding other people. The moment you know a dish from another culture, you have a touchstone when you meet someone from that culture. Knowing the word ‘egusi’ and then meeting someone of Nigerian descent, even though it’s such a minor thing and it might be cringy, it’s a starting point of a conversation. And it’s also something you can then research yourself. 

So when do you feel comfortable putting a named dish on the menu?

If I had a friend who grew up with that dish and I could comfortably put it in front of them and have them enjoy it. Now they might not say it’s the best version, but if they can enjoy what it is and recognise it and not question it, then in my mind that’s right. Then I would use the name. 

But it’s difficult. I have a dish on the menu which most people would call a shakshuka, but I didn’t feel comfortable using that term because there’s too many allowances I’ve made to make it closer to a Turkish breakfast dish. But it’s not menemen either. Menemen has a very strict set of rules about how it’s made, and there’s a big argument over whether you should have onions or no onions in it (you can check this on the Internet, it’s very heated!). So what I did is looked into other versions of what you could call “soupy tomato dishes” so I could find a central point and then could then connect it to something else. It was actually funnily enough via Peter Gordon who had gone to a Turkish restaurant known for something called a Chaka Breakfast. Now I didn’t take that same dish - I used the same name and source but interpreted it differently and tried to find some commonality between all three things. It was a long process and in the end I named it after something almost no one has heard of. We ended up taking away the word Breakfast and just calling it Chaka, because in that restaurant it would be served with dishes on the side, like a Turkish breakfast would be, but that’s not realistic for us. 

And then while researching all this I found a way to do a shakshuka which would be very close to a Palestinian one, and I did a version of that. I could have done it the way everyone else does it, in a pan, exactly how it would be served in Palestine, but that’s too risky. I’d never be accepted for that. My Palestinian friends would just be like ‘What is this? This isn’t good enough?’ So I made a variant, I put it on toast, I gave it different textures, and I got the thumbs up. I was so nervous before putting it on, I was scared to give it to the Palestinian people I know. One guy I know was really happy with it and came back for it multiple times. So I felt I wasn’t a fraud. Half of it is intent ─ if you’re  feeling worried that you’re going to be found out or someone will be aggrieved by the dish you’ve made, then usually you’re on the right path. Usually you’re halfway to creating something that people can actually be proud of.

You name the lamb birria which was on as your special last weekend. Is that because you know it’s closer to the original dish or is it because you know less Mexicans?

*laughs* No, I know a few Mexicans so it is a worry. And actually one friend just ate it this weekend and he was very complimentary. How much is him being nice is another question! I named it because over the years this is something I’ve done multiple, multiple times and I’ve refined my ability to shorthand it and hone in on the flavour of what I think birria is. Now I’ve never been to Mexico, but I’ve eaten food from people of Mexican descent here, and in the States I’ve had birria from proper birria stalls. But even if I hadn’t, I would have done the research. Birria is in some sense very simple because it’s just about the cooking of the meat and a few ingredients, but there’s so much complexity because behind it you have the complexity of the Mexican pantry. And a Mexican pantry will have dried chiles, it will have avocado leaf, it will have epazote, which is a dried herb, and even stuff like oregano would be very different from the oregano you have in Greece. So all this means if you have to be in tune with these flavours to find a clear shorthand to reproduce them.

So my own pantry was stocked with 10 different dried chiles from Mexico, I had been nursing a mole paste in the same way they do at Pujol, where they use a technique for making mole where you always keep some back and refresh into your new mole and build up your background notes. So on the face of it, birria is just lamb, oregano, salt, pepper, epazote, onions, garlic, jalapenos (although you’re not supposed to use jalapenos but I do because I’ve got some really nice fresh ones) some dried chiles, orange (in Mexico they would have sour orange so I cut it with lime) and you just cook it slowly so the fat renders, and you cook it a second time like you would with any stew so the meat becomes really soft. But having that extra mole and doing simple things like rehydrating the chiles, charring your vegetables like you would in Mexico, means that I can feel confident that if someone ate this, even if it wasn’t the birria they know, they would be happy to identify this as birria. 

So much of the tedious cultural appropriation discourse last year was people saying, well if you start policing what people call stuff - mohinga, or jerk rice or whatever - then it stymies creativity. Yet you’re as sensitive to the conversations surrounding appropriation as much as anyone and you’ve seemed to find a way of being creative within this framework.

The funny thing is these chefs know, throughout their careers, that the more restrictions you have, the better your creativity is. When you have an open book it’s far too easy to get carried away and create something unfocused, but the moment you have some restrictions and a very clear path of what you need to do, your creativity goes up and you create something better. So they should be viewing this idea of creating something based on respecting the original as the ultimate version of this, where they are being restricted by a set understanding - not a recipe because recipes are different - a set understanding of what something should be. And if they can understand that, then they might be able to iterate on it and define that dish in a different way, but still have the heart and soul of the dish. If you can’t do that they shouldn’t touch the dish in the first place. Call it something else. Rename it. You can use all the herbs of Vietnam without saying it’s a Vietnamese dish.

The only reason people do it - and I think this is true - is because they’re scared of alienating their customer, so they try to make it equivalent to something that already exists. Unless you’re a fine dining restaurant where you can just name the ingredients, they’re always worried about just making a dish and whether it stands on its own, so they try to associate it with something else. The amount of pho talk is ridiculous. Chefs will just name anything that has beef in it ‘pho’, when pho is not necessarily a beef based broth, that’s just one style. I’m saying this as someone who has a lot of affection but only an intermediate understanding of the complexity of Vietnamese food. Maybe a few years ago I would have been foolish enough to travel down that rabbit hole, but now I know better. I would only undertake it if I was willing to risk putting it in front of someone who eats the best Vietnamese food and them telling me it’s good, otherwise what’s the point? Anyone can make a subpar broth and call it ‘pho’.

Is Halal dining in itself an interesting barrier for a chef to spur creativity?

If it was just the rules of what makes something Halal, then yes it would be. Just like with the Jewish community using the rules of Kashrut to make things like salt beef and fish and chips, things which were born of trying to do something with the very basic things which they could consistently use. Halal would be the same to an extent if it wasn’t so shaped by what the people want: base products, meat done very simplistically. It hasn’t really developed in the same way. There’s a place I know that intends to do fine dining, run by a friend of mine. The chef  has almost solely cooked Halal food in his professional career but has done some time in French kitchens that have done Michelin-esque food. He’s taken dishes which I feel are from the 90s and just reinterpreted them to be Halal dishes. That’s not creativity, that’s just replicating badly. It’s not going to taste better than the original dish, it’s just going to feel like something’s missing. But in the right hands, maybe with the next generation where people are striving to work in better kitchens and have more exposure to different styles of cooking, maybe it will get better. 

Feroz Gajia is the chef/owner of Bake Street in Rectory Road, London. You can find Bake Street on Instagram. It is currently open for takeaway orders - get the burger, get the specials.