Calum Franklin: Reinventing The British Pie and Putting British Food on the Map

0:00Stupid articles saying chefs will be replaced with robots. I wasn't going to be working with those people every day again. That was tough because there was lots of people in that kitchen who were there from day one. There needs to be a level of respect for each other and respect for each other's religions and cultures. It's part of the city's history and we should be proud of it and we should have people coming to London and going, I really want to go to a pymouse shop. Hello there and welcome to Hungry. Hungry is the podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands looking to pour gasoline all over their growth.

0:31Each week we'll interview successful founders, thought leaders, unpack their lessons and provide you with a toolkit to scale super fast. I am Dan Pope, I am your host and without further ado, let's get started. Hello there people and listeners of The Hungry Podcast. Today I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Callum Franklin onto the podcast. Callum is the pie man in many respects. he was the head or the executive chef at the rosewood hotel in london where he created the pie room um which is now kind of put british pies and british food on the map in my opinion back on the map i should say was one of the first chefs to really pioneer using instagram as a as a marketing tool and channel um very recently i think last year last june um has now left the rosewood left the pie room which is still actually going to move on to bigger uh more interesting wonderful things so look callum super excited to have you on mate um yeah super excited thank you no i'm excited to chat yeah i love any conversation i can have about pies i'm in my happy zone so yeah okay so we should touch upon so last night i got a collection well i i like sent to me was about 12 six pork pies with your collaboration with dixon and um and morris and this christmas pie and oh my god because i ended up stuffing my i ended up having half the the pork pie yeah like with a bit of mustard and then obviously i've listened to a couple of podcasts you've done about having them hot as like a hot pork pie is like an absolute game changer so whacked it i don't know if this is heinous thing to say to a chef but i whacked into it well it's in a microwave heat it up it was like a different thing like i always think curry curry is delicious warm but it's also banging the next day when it's cold it's like a completely different tapestry of eating i've never thought about having a proper pork pie hot um so yeah thanks for the uh the delivery i think the first time i had one was in a pub uh in the Cotswolds about I think it was like 12 years ago something like that and it was in it and they served a little hot pulled pie in the bar of the pub and I remember just thinking oh is it like a game changer right it's that like the fats just loosen a little bit and get unctuous and yeah I'm not gonna have one after this there yeah it was it was that and it's still yeah it just it changed it to a different different level i was well yeah as i said i almost basically smashed the whole one last night um where i want to start though mate is i want to kind of start at this this crossroads this changing period because i think everyone in life has to go through change change is hard but it's interesting it's scary but it's exciting i want to talk you what you built at in at the rosewood in the pyro room was was really kind of it put what as wind in the sales of British kind of cookery, I think, in terms of putting pies back on the map.

3:40You said in an article I read, letting go of something you have cared for deeply is never going to be easy. But after almost nine years, it's time for a big change. Last week marked the end of my time at Holborn Dining Room as I made the decision to move on to focus on new projects, to push myself further towards my goals and dreams. I'd love to know what that feeling was in here, like when you walked into the doors um of the rose or the whole bandone room for like the last time what did that feel like yeah it was difficult um it it i think mentally i'd i'd prepared myself it's gonna sound wild because it's just a restaurant right but it's a restaurant that i was at almost you know probably six days a week for for coming up to a decade so and and i i'd built with the team as well so that was tough it was more I think genuinely the knowing that I wasn't going to be working with those people every day again that was tough because there was lots of people in that kitchen who were there from day one and were still there right at the end and they're still there now to be fair and and you know they're for friends you know they were at my wedding we spent life moments together we cooked all over the world um so that felt difficult but uh it was just the right time for that to happen it was you know those people that were there um it was time for them to shine in that restaurant as well so um all of it was kind of some serendipity to it it was kind of yeah the right time and you said it was the right time how did you know it was the right time because as you said it's your it's your baby it's your souls in that game it's hard i just think it's interesting for making change and how to how to know it's the right time yeah i mean i think i had uh over that period of time kind of built uh not i hate when people have like 10 year plans and stuff like that you know uh is the worst thing in the world when i see like dating shows on tv where guys are like tell me what your five-year plan is i want to know and like oh my days shut yeah shut the fuck up i do have a sort of uh a structure in my mind of what i want to do with pie making in the uk and and in the world as well right so part of that was you know it was a natural step that i'd have to i'd have to leave the restaurant because there my time was 100 dedicated located in either in the pie room making pies of the team or on the pass in the main kitchen and it gave me very little space to open up those new plants so for me to be able to do that I had to step away that was a natural step and it was probably the first step of this big plant so

6:43yeah and I would just like to introduce British pie and I know there's a demand I would like to introduce british pie making on a larger scale around the world um which is kind of what we're doing now so the and then and then so then you leave you walk out the hotel or the restaurant for the first time like what are the kind of the voices in your in your head and like what's the first thing you do i'm just trying to set the scene i suppose well um i luckily straight off you know i didn't want to go from 100 miles an hour to zero like because i knew as a chef who's worked for 20 years kind of non-stop i didn't want to crash so um i yeah i've worked with dickinson and morris who you know the pies you ate last night i've worked with them since 2021

7:41and that is a constant evolution of work so we're always sort of developing together so actually that was the first thing was being able to go deeper in with with Dickinson and Morris on development and right but also yeah I mean there were sort of other plans in place that were unfolding and yeah I'm you know we're sort of looking I can't talk too much about it just now but you know possibly opening uh the pies up around europe a little bit more and which is very exciting and sort of will appear at the beginning of next year if everything goes to hi there guys super super quick one um i write a weekly newsletter called hungry friday feast it goes live at 8am every friday i'm pouring my soul into this bad boy it's probably my favorite creative endeavor i've ever done i basically pick apart all the biggest lessons all the biggest learnings from all the wonderful guests and throw it into a feast or a newsletter we've got over a thousand two hundred subscribers come and join the party i'm going to put a link in the show notes it's right at the top and subscribe and if you are already a subscriber please just forward it onto a friend do the amount of favor it would mean the world to me anyway back to the old episode boys and girls so the pie is is almost the what is your kind of your why i'd love to i know you worked in a few like probably like kind of michelin restaurants i think one was like chapter two down in kent if i've read that right where did this fascination with pies and and british cooking come from like where did that how did that bubble in you do you know i mean yeah i mean so if you look at that sort of that timeline of cooking was like you said you know was french fine dining uh i mean it goes way back to chapter one was the first place actually which was under andrew mcleish um it was michelin sort of you know heavy heavy french influenced fine dining and i kind of carried on that style of cooking right up until really around the age of 30 i would say and then there I I kind of just started to embrace British cooking more um and that was around the time I kind of started working at Roast in Borough Market um and helping Marcus Verburn run the kitchen there whilst he did a cookbook and there it was all about embracing British ingredients right and we had a pie on there and so we and we're very lucky we had the keys to all of the sort of stalls in borough markets at nighttime you go and just grab ingredients and even iou and then write a menu for the next day so there my passion for british cooking start was stoked again and then when we opened holborn dining room back in 2014 uh february 2014 and we started with a pie on the menu i was like i want to have a pie on the menu i just want to see how it goes and straight away the guests just i realized we were very lacking the the demographics of the guests so you know surrounded by loads of old law firms around there it very much sat with that crowd having a british pie and so it did more and more and then um what really sort of kicked it off was that building was a hundred and a hundred and now 115 116 years old i'm gonna say it's been lots of different things over the years and they had this basement which we called a laden's cave and down there we would find all of these um pieces of equipment where it's like silver service trolleys these incredible hundred year old trolleys and we'd send them off to get refurbed and then use them in the restaurant and one day i found a pie tin and uh i knew it was a pie tin but i didn't know the technique for using it it's a it's a pie tin that's most called a corset a corset mold right so this is a victorian pie tin looks like the the corset that you put around the waist and uh two two sides to it and a base and a set of keys that holds it together and i i knew what it was but i didn't know the technique so i was like ah we should work out to use this and i took it up to the kitchen to my and my number two at the time was a chef david burke who had opened lots and lots of very well-known restaurants over the last sort of 30 years in London, super experienced guy.

12:17And he looked at me and he was like, I haven't got a clue. I was like, all right, okay. So I had a team of 35 chefs in that kitchen and I sort of opened it up to the team, just layer by layer through the sous chefs and it turned out no one knew. So my first thought was, wow, like this is a British pie making technique that is skipping generations here right we're not a lot here know how to do this and uh if we don't learn it maybe I don't know on a bigger scale not just us but if you know this is happening all over the country this skill gets lost so I went on a sort of little mission then to delve more and more into that style of traditional pie making and working these things out and then teaching that to the team so we started to do that then what happened with that was uh it became this dominant presence in the kitchen right at the time we just had the restaurant in the main kitchen and um all of the senior chefs were dedicating way too much time to very delicate pie making and it i saw it was affecting potentially the rest of the menu so i said look we either cut it here where we're at we keep it at this level or we need to build another kitchen right and separate this work off completely and dedicate a beautiful space to doing that and a separate team.

13:55And that will give us a chance to progress that. And I was very lucky that kind of the owners of the building shared that vision of mine. And they basically gave me a carte blanche to design that kitchen. And I went sort of all in with it. we went you know I wanted it to I wanted the design to reflect the detail of the work that would go in in that kitchen because you know you're very much affected by your environment when you work so um I spent a long time sort of drawing that kitchen by hand at first and and actually if you ever get a copy of the Pyram cookbook you can see my original sketches um of the of how i wanted that room to come out and yeah we built this room and uh and actually that was the first place i met and the team from dickinson and morris way back right when we first opened their room and they popped in one day for lunch and they said hey uh you know we're the development chefs at dickinson and morris and i said oh i would love to come up and see how you guys work because for me I worked on a tiny scale right I mean for chefs maybe it's a big scale we were doing sort of 200 covers but in the in this the world of pie making very much a small scale we were producing maybe I don't know 200 250 pies at a time um and I wanted to understand their process so that was how our relationship started way back um and and it was it's been amazing since then you know we've sort of developed um the the centerpiece one-off pies together um which is incredible sort of learning so the best thing about working with Dickinson and Morris is that I have the freedom to do like the wackiest sort of out there designs.

16:03And I spend a lot of time drawing those at home, sort of these crazy pie designs. And then I just give them to Dickinson and Morris and we say, right, let's find out how to get to there and do it on scale at retail level. And we do it, right? They're incredible.

16:25yeah the they are incredible as sort of i was been absolute glutton last night with them and i want to talk about that kind of i definitely think there's a movement with um high-end incredibly skilled chefs moving into retail like jim khan has just launched a curry spread that's going into going into whole foods um strake has just done the all things butter thing i definitely We think there's going to be a movement with more chefs releasing products for retail. But what you said, I want to go back slightly one step because obviously now it's very easy looking back to 2014 and saying, oh, this pie movement's huge.

17:03You're now going to be opening up restaurants, well, hopefully around Europe and spreading kind of the British food and pie making around the world. but if we go back to 2014 in that kitchen with this obsession with pies like that could have it's a big risk opening a pie room in like a super expensive like central london thing what was how did you deliver that message to the hotel say look yeah i think we're on something here and the team can't stop thinking about pies because all ideas retrospectively look great but at the time in that moment it's a big bold move that i don't think people understand or not understand but could understand more i totally get that and you know my view on it at the time was that if i was a look when i go on holiday if i go to portugal i want to you know eat a custard little custard tart you know if I go uh to Italy if I go to Milan I want to have a risotto milanese and I want to have via lo sabuco right I want to have the food of you know where I'm going and I had this sort of itch at the time about London that we were losing focus of that in terms of offerings we had this incredible restaurant scene a beautiful like multiculturalism and varied food which is like almost unbeatable in the world um but in terms of british food actually not that many places right they were doing good stuff so i felt you know from someone I travel a lot with my job and uh I felt okay did what can we do sort of um galvanize that a little bit right so for me pie making was was that path so we were looking at you know 600 years of written history of pie making and we were in a position at the time with that restaurant where one of London's most famous pie makers going back to sort of Victorian times was based 80 meters up the road from us with a pie room.

19:29So I don't know whether I got possessed by his ghost, but we were like, you know, if we take this as the center of what we do, we are rooted in in london food history but also british food history and for a tourist coming to london that's exciting right i don't know this is a part british food i didn't know right and um i certainly didn't know that there was this much history to it and this much variety to it you know i mean i'm looking at um the sort of the regional pies of the uk at the moment and and And finding we have 150 recipes down at the moment of regional mad pies that we have in this country.

20:13Are there any examples? Sorry, I'm just sorry. I mean, like the fidgety pie, right? It's based around Norfolk, it's seen. And different reasons for why it's called a fidgety pie. One is that some of the ingredients moved around in it when they were sort of putting it together. but um also that you know there was a a polecat called a fidget at the time and it smelled like that when he cooked it so those are well wacky stories like that but for you know super interesting so um for me i was like we were based in a hotel with largely american guests love british history that you know is an incredible story um and it's something that the team were passionate about so everything was there all the right ingredients for it to be successful and i think the others you know listening to me being a weirdo about it for half an hour they probably just gave up and said yeah okay you're doing hey guys absolutely pausing um that mckenzie jones were extending their partnership with hungry so gassed um in case you have been living under a rock who are mackenzie jones they are fmcg recruitment specialists they work with some amazing brands lucky saint real superfoods hunter and gather and purdy and fig also with some of the big poppers the big boys the big g's pepsico unilever campari i've known billy for yonks paul for the last year he's a top bro they're just super kind and lovely and they're just dedicated to our wonderful space our wonderful industry of buccaneering challenger brands and that there's so much more than recruitment business check out the podcast because you're doing them it's epic um i've even even introduced mckenzie jones some amazing brands and they've really helped them scale if you're looking to hire just reach out to them have a chinwear get in touch do yourself a favor thank you guys are you ready there is gonna be some absolutely totally brilliantly bonkers next level madness coming your way today are you ready to take your brand to a whole new stratosphere for free imagine connecting your product to a digital world through a simple smartphone scan you know the drill scan it bish bash boss you're away that ladies and gentlemen is the magic of the new gs1 powered qr codes these next generation barcodes act as a gateway to a world of endless possibilities they connect your product's unique identity to multiple online sources of enriched real-time content why why on planet earth should you be getting your mitts on these gs1 powered qr codes well look very very simple mate gs1 will help you drive revenue upsell and cross-sell your amazing products boost your bottom line boost your bottom line yes please where do i sign enhance customer engagement look delight your customers with dynamic content that captivates and keeps them coming back for more more more please sir can have some more yes you can comply with regulations that you want to be building your brand you don't want to be knee deep wading through a deep river of legislation agrovation these barcodes allow you to stay ahead of the curve look don't allow this beautiful boat of boundless opportunity to sail away into the malting sunset be on that boat join GS1 UK's free pilot program today yes it's completely free there will be a link in the show notes thank you so much I want to talk about um and we're we'll get onto it shortly, like obsession, because I think you've got to be obsessed.

23:47In those early nascent periods to a movement, you've got to be obsessed. And obviously, again, now British food or British cooking is very in vogue, but back then it kind of was beginning on the precipice, but it wasn't as big as it is now. So it's that kind of obsession. But what is the history of these Pyrams, these Victorian Pyrams? What did you learn? Were you going to a library? Were you going on fucking Google? like what we how are you stoking your curiosity yeah i mean actually google there's not that much information you can sort of garner from google on on british pine making but uh actually the the game changer for me was working with polly russell from the british library um and getting access to these sort of very old books which you know we would have to sit in this room with security guards and white gloves on and sort of like leaf through these books very carefully, tweezers.

24:41That was where we sort of really, that was a changing moment in terms of getting into the history and the depths of it. And the pie rooms used to be above pubs all over the city, right? And it was just, I don't know, I guess it'd be the chicken shop of Victorian era, right? Yeah, that's mental. So very normal to see, you know, all over the city. And they've just disappeared. And they've disappeared, I guess, turning into flats, turning into all sorts of different things over the years. But it is part of our food history. So for me, that was an important part to cement again. Like, okay, let's have a space which is a pyro.

25:29And like much to my display, the same is happening with pyro mashups as well, right? there needs to be some sort of um well that's another thing down the line but it's another passion of my mashup so yeah trying to find um a solution to the disappearance of the pie mashup is another thing that keeps me up why do you think that why do you think they've they've yeah because on on paper it's good oh like fish and chips hasn't dissipated and that's british food why do you think pies why do you think that happened it seems to kind of yeah if you got to get fish and chips now it's more expensive right have you noticed that i mean i i definitely noticed from when i was a kid getting fish and chips to when i get fish and chips now i mean there's one down the road from me you know it it works out it's not a cheap meal anymore and it shouldn't be because it's a piece of fish right if you want to have good fish it's going to be expensive so fish and chip shops moved with the type somewhat right they they looked at prices you go there you don't pay you know 5p for mushy peas anymore you pay 50p or 75p or a pound or whatever yeah pie mashups didn't do that right and i and i i don't know if it was because they were nervous about losing their customer base um but i feel that they were scared of changing prices to the price that they needed to to stay profitable whilst rent and rates and electricity and gas all blew up in prices they that they're you know their profit margin just went through straight down the little floor but i do think that there's a there's a huge market waiting there for them but i just didn't they're nervous about losing their current one and that i might be wrong but i feel that that's the issue um because yeah i don't know i think again it's something that um it's part of the city's history and and we should be proud of it and we should have people coming to london and going i really want to go to a pymus shop because you look the protected buildings right incredible architecture to them and stuff um yeah anyway that's another they may yeah i know and it's i mean there's my brain's going like bubbling with curiosity there's so much i want to ask you um i think the first thing is like a pie is almost like what i'm picking up from here especially with the the rich kind of architecture you have i know you did a lot of drawings of the architecture then put them on the pies or like use them as inspiration i really believe like a pie is almost like a story like we talked about the figgety or fidgety pie up in um up in uh norfolk what would you if i know you were kind of from southeast london if we were to just make you a pie or you were a pie your child was a pie like what would be the ingredients to that pie do you think me if i was made of a pie yeah if you if we were to make a callum franklin pie like what would be the ingredients going into it yeah uh a large percentage of it would be nervous energy i think uh i'm not somebody who can sort of sit still i have to like same here same here doing something all the time i think um which is why i was not sort of super happy um in school i think because i'm just you know lots of kids are like that at school i think just need that outlet of like what you know something a little bit more energetic um yeah it's a slight obsession right um which definitely helps with pie making you need that um did I I do think in my work I am extremely disciplined um I and that's a part of pie making which fits in well with with that discipline and organized and not necessarily in my normal life though I'm a bit sketchy in normal life in terms of yeah my wife has to give me a lot of sort of like why is this like this was this like that and that i need that a little bit but in work i'm like 100 sort of this is how it's done you know we're very careful and very sort of well-planned stuff um yeah and then wrapped in hot water pastry probably

30:12the discipline's interesting really interesting and i'd love to know what is your definition personally of of of discipline uh yeah it's quite an easy one so it goes back to um thomas keller of the french laundry and per se fame in the in the us you know one of the best chefs the united states has ever produced um incredible sort of chef he wrote in the french shortry cook book way back i can't remember when that book came out but it was you know seen as by many as a sort of a bible in kitchens he wrote in that book um you know one of the most important things a chef can do is to always do the right thing even when no one is watching you and that is a mantra that i've always put into kitchens it's that thing of you know uh it's a total game changer in your career as a chef when you put that mantra into your head and you work off it which is you know using the the right equipment all the time you know doing things the way you've been shown all the time even when chef's not there in the background and you're worried about him seeing you you've just made the decision that you do it every time.

31:37And that's what the discipline is to me. It's a personal discipline. It's, you know, not having to be told to get into work on time. You just do it yourself. Being clean and tidy when you work, not being told to do that. You just do it yourself because you want to be like that. And that's, it's personal discipline rather than me going around the kitchen going, you know, that's not how I operate a kitchen. um i just want to encourage people to put it within themselves and then you have a really nice working team when you do it i went i interviewed tommy banks up in um up in yorkshire and he's he had a similar thing to you as he said his his like how he runs the kitchen is is empathy plus self-discipline i i i discipline within the team and that's what that's what creates like a frightening magical experience but it's this it's a combination of discipline and empathy which is getting the best that almost personal discipline yeah and it's it's fascinating uh the you talked about the french laundry and um per se i'm reading this book called unreasonable hospitality it's really interesting by this well yeah yeah did you know him he's uh yeah yeah so together in la last january we did a show together oh really yeah oh well i read his book it's unreal um but he talks a lot about some of his personal principles which i want to explore with you but he also talks a lot about um danny mayer's kind of principles so one of the things he says and i was like this is sick like i underlined it loads was uh services black and white hospitality is color yeah and he talks a lot about he talks a lot about the hospitality being the connection what in your definition is like black how how would you see services black and white at the Holborn dining room or pie room and then how do you add that color and connection through British pie making yeah so uh I mean black and white is serving a guest food in a timely manner well seasoned you know interesting cooking the color is serving them food which creates memory right so whether that's the the pie that they're sat with in front of them has a connection to the area that they're in you know whether it's a visual or something else and that will create a memory that later on in in life they'll be eating something they'll have that similar flavor and it will take them back to that moment when they were in Hoban and and that's the color for company is you know we talk about automation and um once in a while you get stupid articles saying chefs will be replaced with robots robots can't do that part right they could yeah you're like why they can't do the color which is the imagination and you know i was in uh paris yesterday and we were sort of looking at some architecture around there and and just it had to fight you can get it from the funniest places inspiration you know it could be you're in the most sort of amazing gilded hall and actually like you take inspiration from a little door handle on the way out actually that's the thing that sort of caught your eye um that's the color for me yeah that's mad and it's it's well it's true like it's i remember it vividly it was my brother's birthday when we went to your restaurant and like we all walked across the like the bridge the trains were bollocked and like so it is that that memory takes me back there how i want to talk about this architecture thing into the pie because i think pastry or wine well you know i've never been a chef right but like what i've read and listened a lot about it but pastry is a different type of kind of cookery what what is how does the architecture like go in into your creative process like she seems like you pull from different things yeah it's it's mad because so that steps behind the pie basically so that came about from um you hear a lot of chefs kind of talk about I mean, Tommy is probably a great example.

36:04Tommy Banks, right? Grew up in the countryside surrounded by farming. I think his father is in farming, right? I think so. I mean, they're a farmer, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, Tommy probably, you know, genuinely grew up pulling vegetables out of the ground, right? And surrounded by that sort of wonderful agriculture. and that's something for him that's a deep-rooted connection in his food. And you can see it when you eat in his restaurants. It's amazing. I grew up in Southeast London.

36:43When I was young, we sort of – I look forward to, you know, McDonald's Happy Meals and sort of going out and sort of being naughty on buses and stuff. But being surrounded by that style of food wasn't there. That connection wasn't there. So when I hear about chefs talk about terroir and the connection to the land and stuff, I'm like envious of that. But I was like, how do I anchor my food where I live? And I do that through my other passion, which is architecture and design. So it was taking inspiration from the buildings around me, whether that would be you know the the british museum or you know whether it's you know the freemasons hall um and actually you know i worked on a really fun project a long time back where um i got in contact with a guy who's a mudlarker you know mudlarking amazing as a mudlarking is these these people that go out at sort of low tide onto the banks of rivers and they look for historical artifacts right and there's these like gangs of them that go out especially on the thames is pretty cool for it because you had they find all this incredible stuff from you know victoria london and roman times even um so this guy brought me a coin which was from the original covent garden when it was built and And on the coin, there was an unusual stamp through it.

38:22And that stamp was the stamp of a Freemason. Now, he was like, look, if you look at where you are and where Covent Garden is and where the Freemasons Hall is, it's kind of like a triangle. So I was like, OK, that's super cool. Let's do a pie where the design is based on this coin and we'll tell the story of that. and how that came about. And yeah, I don't know, like stuff like that, I just go nuts for, right? That's how we root stuff into things. Oh my God, I am so, so, so excited. It feels like Hungary is finally swimming in the big leagues. I can't believe this. It's absolutely mental, but delighted to announce that Big Fish, yes, Big Fish, are part of the podcast.

39:08Perry's been on the podcast three times. Listeners absolutely love it. Some of my most downloaded and cherished episodes of all time. But Big Fish are behind literally, so many brands in your cupboard in your weekly shop charlie biggum year valley tyrells clipper tea goo rana i mean make the list is longer than the river nile but they also share risk and invest in brands that they really believe are a force for good that brands that they believe are going to be the next big thing like how the snack that gives back but even more exciting news big fish want to speak to the next wave of small challenge of food and drink bad is that a destined for big things the raconteurs the movers shakers buccaneering visionaries so look if you want to speak to big fish and just have a chat get your plan in front of them then drop me a message my mate louis from local beer amazing beer was in their office aka la fishbowl uh last week chatting to perry freddie and the big fish crew so drop me a message if you would like to speak to what i love about that is like being unapologetically authentic do you know what i mean is it's like you can't you're not saying you were pulling turnips out in you know the yorkshire dales it's it's being who you are and i think it's it's a it's a brave bold thing and it links back to what you said what we're talking about at the beginning it's like obviously now retrospectively it's easy but yeah obviously british pies the tourists coming in but back then it's it was a bold move to lean into your like completely authentic self is there an example um of like say we take a pie and we we we reverse engineer the creative process of like say say you're walking around london or paris and how that goes through what the ingredients were i'd love to just know that seems super interesting yeah i mean if say for example uh we think

41:00yeah i mean that would that would probably be one of the strongest examples of that that you know that single little coin garden out on the banks yeah but um how i work now i mean definitely we would start off with flavor profile right so that's the beginning of the process uh it's whether you know we're looking at okay if we're going to launch a pie in say end of the year potentially game season in the uk so that's a nice little starting point we can work from that and then from there that's where I would open up to the team about design okay so something that at the pyrim was I try to encourage as much as possible is the creativity side of things so as a chef when I was young that creative side is very was very much stifled and and it is quite often in the industry at the beginning and I get it at the beginning you need to learn how to cook right um but if it's stifled too much i think it can knock it out of you and i would still try to encourage the team a little bit so i'd say to them i wanted to go and do some drawings you know go and find something that inspires you in the city go you know even if it's it could be music right it's something that's something you heard and it's say created an emotion in you i want you to come back and tell me about it and and to start bringing that into uh the pie room at the time and then from there that would be where the team would get together we'd start sketching together and then i would tend to sort of then push that up another level so i would find something whether it's in the design or in the pie making itself or in the cooking process which would challenge us right so it would it would take us out of our comfort zone and generally the reaction to that always was from the whole team how how the hell are we going to do that and then we would find a way to do it and by doing that process every time we created new styles and new techniques within pie making itself um which we were happy always to share with the rest of the the sort of pie making community in the world um because that was that fed into another um ethos of us which was very strong which was uh uh sharing all knowledge and all technique with anybody who asked ever and and lots of people disagree with that what why why why did you why yeah because a lot of chefs want to keep it closed book like this is it's our ip essentially what why because um there's a very strong example of this And it's if you look at the explosion of sort of the Nordic dining scene and then after that, the rest of Europe blowing up in terms of, you know, Michelin starred restaurants and skill and technique and it just exploding in Europe and France falling behind.

44:25right and the reason for that was there was a period of time where chefs were all across Europe doing collaboration dinners sharing knowledge inviting stagiers into their kitchen being very open and in France at the time there was still very no this is our recipes this is our knowledge this is a secret and what happened was Europe moved very quickly ahead uh the rest of Europe sorry moved very quickly ahead and and things have changed now France definitely caught up shit uh but I saw that happening and I knew there was something to that but also I the way I explained it to the team was look tell me what what's the worst that can happen if I invite a chef in here and say okay in the next three days I'm going to show you every single technique and skill and bit of knowledge that I have on this specific you know cooking style what is the worst thing that can happen and they'd all say well he'll go away and he'll do it better than you and I was like yeah but that's not a bad thing well it's not a bad thing because it means that I constantly have to evolve and push myself and do better and always strive to be on top.

45:57Otherwise, we just sit at this level. It's very comfortable, you know, and potentially the others just rise up above you anyway. So it's about creating competition and making sure that there's always this drive to be better, to learn and to create new things. And it makes people come and say, I want to know, I want to know, I want to know. So, yeah, it was this ethos that we put in and it worked really well for us. Yeah, so I love doing these conversations. You learn so much that you don't expect to learn. But like, yeah, almost creating your own competition to keep pushing you up is mad. Is there an example of that where someone came in and then they did their own pie and then that that forced you to push harder yeah i mean definitely i mean you know we we would invite so we started doing a an old school french style of pie called patin crits right which is uh it's really interesting sort of the rectangular cold pie um which has a jelly in it and traditionally originally uh you know a peasant dish it was made of pork foie gras that doesn't sound like peasant but it was back in the day uh and like the trimmings of pork and foie gras and then wrapped in pastry and then a pork jelly and over the years become extremely elaborate and extravagant and beautiful and detailed in terms of making it and there's a world championship and yeah we would um there was weird little world when we started doing it of a small handful of chefs around the globe who were all trying to learn this technique because in france they were very closed off about the technique it was very secretive so we were sort of learning from each other and and i think um in the pyram because we were making it every day at the pyram um we got quite far ahead and and that was when chefs would come and we would share that knowledge with them and it would be you know kind of unusual things that I learned sometimes I would feel like okay everyone's caught up with us what can I do to push things forward again right to not to show everyone but just to like me put myself mentally in a place where I'm sort of like, no, we're okay.

48:21We're sort of cracking on. So I did a dinner with Tom Kerridge. And Tom said to me, look, it's going to be 12 guests. It's very sort of small private dinner. Is there any chance you could do something kind of fun for the evening? Something a bit unusual. So I said, yeah, leave it with me. I'm going to do something. I had seen this technique done maybe in the 70s where that style of rectangular pie, they would slice it. And I was sure I'll let draw this because it makes more sense to draw it in the center of the pie. She had a slice would be a sausage. Right. So be a slice of sausage there. And literally there would be a clock face on it.

49:13right which they were like wait by you know this amazing sausage making technique and i was like well i'm gonna do that but this is a big but the when i've seen it done what the chefs used to do was after they slice it they used to with a little paintbrush with some squid ink they used to draw the hands of the clock on right and i was like that's cheating so what i want to have is the the hands of the clock are on there and as you slice the pie the time changes right so it's mental i spent i genuinely spent a month working it out and i think i didn't sleep properly for a month because i was trying to sort of work out how i would do it with this sausage making technique my wife thought we were in financial trouble or something because I was just waking up looking like I'm haggard.

50:12And I didn't want to explain to it. It's because I'm trying to work out how to put a clock into a pie. Into sausage. Yeah. That's jokes. But on the evening, we had, you know, I sort of presented this en croute. And on the side of it, it had written in black pastry, you know, the watch company, Patek Philippe. So I put Pate Philippe down the side. and I said to the guests, look, this is a working clock made of pie, right? And I'm going to slice it and it's going to show you what the time is in the room tonight. And I sliced it knowing that it was the wrong time, right? And I kind of turned it around and showed it to everyone.

50:59And all the guests were like, didn't work. And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah. Sometimes with these things, you know, they need a bit of a shake. So I shook it and I sliced it and it was the right time that was in the room. And it kind of just like blew it front to my eyes. But learning that technique, I felt kind of pushed me a little bit further forward. And then again, you know, since then, I've probably explained that technique in detail to chefs countless times so they can do it. And I'm not going to fall back on it. It's something that I've done and now I have to learn other things. So, yeah.

51:37yeah it's what i'm getting from you may is this almost this this and i i kind of i kind of relate to you in this kind of upset anxious obsession with learning i i just channel it into a podcast i love speaking to people but you can apply it to anything um and it's like once you learn something it's the next thing i've got this kind of constant what's the next fucking thing i'm gonna learn yeah what um what so so going back to will's book they he has a lot of principles in that book which he's picked kind of from Danny and from his own um learnings what would you say are the the we talked about like um do the right thing even when no one's looking which is like discipline what are some other of your Callum principles that you you live by and you want your team teams to to live by yeah I mean we I think working in London for I mean it's close to sort of 22 years one thing that sort of excited me about working in the city aside from just having like the most amazing communities within kitchens especially big kitchens you know just very very different nationalities and cultures and I felt that the city was a place where people could come and be themselves right and and and sort of enjoy life and and and and focus on what they want to do and the kitchen very much that opportunity as well so you know uh there's that is a meritocracy where you it's based on skill i expect on the how much work you put in there and but with that you know they're in in a multicultural kitchen there needs to be a level of respect for each other and respect for each other's religions and cultures and putting a big emphasis on that allowed us to have very happy large kitchens and it was something I was really proud of at Holborn Dining Room was that we had a very low staff turnover and actually you know the senior team probably largely didn't change for the entire time I was there but um treating each other with with dignity and respect is a big thing um and it yeah should be a bare minimum in the workplace really right but in a lot of kitchens it's not um yeah I mean aside from that it's really those sort of like those key things it's the you know self-discipline um allowing people to be creative um encouraging that in people um and also yeah like it took me a while to learn this thing you know that uh you really have to understand that everybody reacts differently to pressure um certainly when I started cooking there was this very lateral view on that which was look this is the level of pressure if you are not able to cope with it then get out right you just don't belong here and it was not um that level of pressure was not an environment where different lifestyles and different views and people's different personalities uh they wouldn't necessarily fit into there and firstly like i just saw we lost lots of people in the industry who just went this isn't for me right where a slight attitude change by the person at the top would have meant that that person could have been successful in this industry and potentially would be doing wonderful things right so that annoyed me at the beginning but also i've worked of people who just with me I was one French kid in London who said to me one day chef is it possible I know like this is the level of discipline in the kitchen but is it possible you give me more shit and I was like what you little freak and he was like yeah yeah no he's like I love it like I want you to like like give it to me in circles right they have a masochist yeah if you want yeah I can yeah for him that was the right thing right that's what he wanted uh and for other people you have to be slightly more soft in your approach and sort of more gentle and you'll you'll bring out that sort of amazing efficiency out of them that way um so yeah understanding that yeah it's just that it's understanding especially in a big kitchen that it's um you really have to to work at people's personalities to get the best out of them i have to work with people's personalities to get the best out of them i love that and then another thing you said was encourage people to be creative that's fascinating to me i i one of my fascinations is like creative cultures in in any realm how do you do that how do you encourage say that french chef who wants to get more bollocked more how do you encourage that person to to be bringing there to not to to not to be bold in their creativity is what i'm trying to get to the biggest barrier that you face with that is people and without fail people say yeah i don't but i'm not really like i i'm not and i i'm not into art i'm not creative right people and i don't know why that is whether it was people were told that at school or they've been they just don't believe in themselves enough but I absolutely promise you every human being has a creative side and sometimes it just needs to be coaxed out and it can present itself in many different ways whether it's you know actually turns out people are amazing at painting or it turns out they're amazing at carving wood or music or all these things but um somewhere down the line they've made a decision that they're not good at it right and i i get that i think i was the same i felt like i'm not good at drawing i'm not good at these things and i realized over time actually it's just practice and consistency and you know especially with doing designs of pies and stuff it was working out how to get sketches to look realistic and use you know i buy books based on you know how to draw 3d and stuff like that and i would study those things and then all of a sudden yeah actually i'm not bad at this i can do it and so that was when i started to really push people to do it as well and uh yeah and and and i think is it can put people into a happy place i think it's a nice thing to have in your life i think um completely agree it's like even not to say all accountants on creative right but like even accountants when you're a little kid play with lego or run around the fucking field and play right so everyone at as as is creative and i think eventually through school and just the education system you kind of gets bludgeoned out of you and i think you're so right if you can find that creative output um it's it can be a place of like complete bliss and and um serenity hi there guys thank you so much for listening as always means the absolute world to me before we jump into this episode i need a really big big big big favor i have pitched some massive guests humongous guests and unfortunately they've said no because my subscriber count isn't big enough please please please just hit the subscribe button on apple or spotify or follow So ultimately it helps all of us bigger guests equals better conversations equals hopefully better insights for you, which means you can scale hopefully faster with a little less stress as well.

59:51So please hit that subscribe button and enjoy this episode. What I do want to talk about is the gym. I know you go to the gym twice a day. I heard that on a podcast. Yeah. What does your routine look like now? Like, yeah, what does your gym routine look like? And how does that help you be more creative? I think. It's slightly more complex now. I'm sort of working between France and the UK, but I still, I do try and go every day. I was in the gym this morning and actually that's a thing where when I left working, you know, every day in the kitchen, I was like, okay, I, my body still needs some like strong physical exercise.

1:00:35So I'd never been to a gym. like not properly since I was probably 17 because in the kitchen you're running every day right like you're 16 hours straight you are gassing in the kitchen so you burn calories so I was like I need I need to do I'm 41 I want to start going and uh at first I got PT and just to kind of help me through sort of getting programs and getting you know used to using all the machinery and stuff and now it's just that again that sort of personal discipline of like i go there i know exactly what i want to do i've written down the sort of plan uh i'm not trying to get like you know massive like that i just yeah healthy and to to feel good about myself and and i do and and it's a real joy that I've brought into my life.

1:01:31I enjoy going to the gym, as weird as that sounds. And it also gives me a time where, again, I'm sort of alone. I just focus on what I'm doing, and I can think about lots of other things whilst I do it, whether that's work or whether it's new projects that I'm planning or how I'm going to have a conversation with someone later in the day, whatever. it just gives me a little bit of sort of focused time to do those things uh i guess in the same way you know when when people do things like i don't know whether they're like painting warhammer miniatures in games workshop that's probably why that shop's lasted so long right you do that and you can just like focus in on something and and in the background you're you've got all of those things going on it's um yeah there's something about having a stop switch and we were talking about when you get on the train the euro style that isn't another kind of there's something about doing something that's in motion that allows this to switch off and that's where the creativity comes from i think yeah the um you talked about chapter one or chapter two um that kitchen being like really tough or or like old bit old school i think if i'm right in saying yeah it was do you think of an era yeah so so i interviewed paul ainsworth on this podcast he talked about a time when um gordon like obviously they're pretty good mates now but gordon had threw him down the stairs at royal hospital road because he'd fucked up and um asked him to clean clean the uh fridge and obviously that's not okay these days like the the culture's changed what do you do you think there is something in these like these really hot tough like pressure cooker environments where it was just so intense do you think now that it's eased off a bit we've potentially lost something or what's your take on that no i mean i think the at that very high level say for example yeah um core by claire smith right three mission star restaurant um the food that they cook there is immaculate and it is consistently immaculate and you don't achieve that without that level of discipline in the kitchen but there's not that physical abuse that used to happen it's more what i think has changed is though the chefs who really want to be at the top level right so we're talking like you know sports athletes that want to be in the olympics in in cooking it's the people that want to work at that three-star level the highest level they have a different level of self-discipline than people used to back in those days somewhat i think and i see it i see young chefs now who don't drink who don't really like go out and party and it's because they're like they have this mental goal they're like no i'm gonna i need to obviously there were people like that back then but not on such a scale i think and i'm just saying yeah so i think we haven't lost anything it's just changed the style of those kitchens and look my view on it is because i i do believe in sort of you know for me i like a a work environment where everyone's happy i'm having a good time right but i understand utterly that at that level of cooking that doesn't work necessarily right like if everyone comes in they're able to sort of have a bit of a chat and stuff like that it doesn't really work and and what people need to understand is i think that it is this very elite level and if you don't want to be in that environment you don't have to be right you don't necessarily have to be or you know if you feel strongly about it then change the system yourself and find a way to open that level of kitchen and do it with that sort of like bad you're not banter but like very fun environment i just think that's a lot i don't cook at that level so for me if i said i don't know why they're not just like nicer to people and fun and whatever like can you imagine if they like using that um example of the olympics and stuff like that if you're training say for example 100 meter sprint to be you want to win gold and you just told your coach one day like stop stop being so like stop putting pressure on me do you know i mean like actually today i just i'm gonna go out and like have a fun day instead today stop giving me shit like will that person reach that level probably not right because it's the person next to them who's just like head in the game and i think it's that personal choice of people want to go and do that and i get it and i met a guy the other day in dubai who was working in a very good kitchen and he said that to me flat out he was like look like i thrive in these environments this is what i want i want to work at the highest level in the most disciplined kitchens it's where i'm at my best and i was like okay yeah these are the guys that guys and girls that like that and and that's that's fair enough i'm yeah i hadn't i hadn't thought of it like that what would you because claire smith's coming on this podcast in a couple of weeks i think what would you say is the difference i was nice saying yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i will do what what would you say is the difference between walking to a three-star um restaurant 2023 versus say 93 20 years ago like how because it's still as you said it the approach that the wider cultural approach has changed i.e people aren't partying and people are you know going to the gym they're being more personally disciplined when you actually walk into the kitchen what would you is it different or is there's no shouting nowadays right yeah it's very rare you know shouting is a loss of discipline right it's that losing your control so nowadays those kitchens are very much just like serene and sort of very calm and every it's just laser focus and you can see it on the faces of all the chefs and there's you know there's a guy Daniel Calvert who cooks in Tokyo um and I worked with him when he was 15 years old he came as an apprentice to have us and you know he got voted best restaurant in Asia last uh this year right little British kid cooking in Tokyo best restaurant in Asia you're mad that one but his cooking is immaculate right and I think when you see that style of kitchen you go in there and it's just he said to me when he was cooking in paris he was cooking at epicure which is three mission star restaurant and he said the way i got ahead quickly in that kitchen was when i was on the fish section every piece of fish that i cooked i cooked it like it was going to be the last piece of fish i ever cook for the chef like I wanted it to be the best piece of fish I've ever cooked in my life and then the next one the same so it has to be better than that one and he was like I never ever wavered on that and I remember him telling me that and I was like it's just this mad level of discipline this incredible laser focus and it's gotten to where he has now um so I think you see that quite often in those kitchens on everybody's faces and if people don't have that then they probably won't be able to cut it in those places like you wouldn't in a football team right if you're in the best team in the premiership if you're the one on the team it's just like somehow just to get other side and you're like go out and have a bit of razzmatazz the night before and then have some pies and then you know you get shown up very quickly when it comes to the match and you'll be quite quick but what i like about it is not every team has to or wants to be real madrid or barcelone like it's that there are those people who want to win the champions league but they're also other if you put it playing it through football lens like there are other clubs like a bournemouth who who their their values and their why are very different but they still get the same satisfaction and i think that's interesting what are some of the as you say you travel a lot with with your job what are some of the countries you've eaten in or just absorbed that have changed the way you approach your life in the uk uh yeah i mean probably i'm gonna say this is a separate country because they very much feel like they're a separate country but Quebec right like don't say yeah it's like the Quebecois do not like to be called Canadians right um I had a wonderful time cooking there just before um the dreaded lockdowns appeared actually I was in Toronto no I was in I was in Montreal when I remember watching the news in the hotel and I called my sous chef who was in another room and I said have you seen this thing it's like it's in Toronto we need to get back to London pretty quick and that was when everything went hair shape then but that period of time cooking in Montreal we got invited out there to cook for a food festival and I saw a community within especially within Montreal where people I think genuinely they don't waste a meal right like almost every meal is like it's there for enjoyment not just nourishment and it made me realize things about my career like say for example when we did breakfast at Holborn dining room it was the the hardest service of the day actually and then for different reasons like partly you know because most people that are coming into the restaurant in the morning they just want to be eating quickly and getting out people are a bit grumpy because it's early in the morning and and the chefs it was hard to get them to be enthusiastic about cooking breakfast because it's breakfast right but I think at that time in Montreal made me feel like well if you do it you can still write a menu in a way which makes people enthusiastic about cooking it and get people excited about doing breakfast and look at it in a different way so yeah i think that montreal is probably the most recent one that sort of changed my mind on things a little bit um

1:12:53yeah probably and what did you do with the breakfast menu how did you make it came back and i chopped it up a bit and sort of made it a bit more interesting ingredients and make it more exciting for other people to sort of jump on and do service rather than just being like you know bacon eggs omelet porridge right it's just it gets very repetitive and boring looking at seasonality and stuff like that and so we're trying to work all of that properly in and get the breakfast chefs excited about menu writing and things like that as well um yeah really looking at it just on the same level as uh breakfast lunch and dinner all on the same part and actually you know another person who's very good at that is paul ensworth like his if you ever go to um padstow and you stay at the padstow townhouse i don't know if they still do it but they used to do the breakfast at one of his other restaurants which was called uh rohanos in the square i think it's maybe changed names now but when they had a breakfast i was like oh my god this has got to be like top five in the uk i was saying that because i'm not eating breakfast everywhere in the uk so i can't say it but it's got top five it is so good and the sourcing of the ingredients just amazing and you can just genuinely see that like his normal chefs were cooking it it was plated so nicely and like you know not in Australia's no foams or anything but it was just beautifully done and i was like man if a tourist came here and had this breakfast they'd be like like a british breakfast is so good yeah he's using like these like you know uh there's that type of pudding from cornwall like a similar to white pudding uh things like that just like these like little local ingredients and stuff yeah very good uh so he was another parents have inspired a bit more change on breakfast bohemi our beloved sponsor are helping build the fastest growing challenger food and drink brands look if you're a small brand just starting out and need your first indie stockist your first hundred stockist to wholesale bohemi are the platform to categorically speed that up but if you're a big brand wanting to get bigger bohemi are also insane they make field sales marble smooth silky slick they're just epic Ollie's Ollie's been on this podcast twice actually They saw a 29 % uplift in sales When using Bowie Me to check Major malt listings availability Insane, 29 % uplift by downloading an app Insane Lucky's saying, my boy Aaron Duff Who's coming on this podcast in a couple of weeks He uses it to manage a team of 30 people And they've, lucky's saying, have unlocked 500 draft listings by using Bowie Me Look, you've got to get involved with this stuff It's absolutely insane And it will categorically change your life It's just the sickest platform.

1:15:51I use it all the time at Ireland. Hi, guys. Super, super quick one. So, so excited. Look, for years, I've been badgering on about Hungary, the podcast. You're probably bored to death. Thanks for putting up with me. But Hungary is also an agency. And we look after one amazing brand called Ireland's Chocolate. We've had a great time over the year. We've won listings at a load of wholesalers. We've won Milk and More. We've got our first grocery listing coming very soon, which is very, very sick. But what I'm thrilled to announce is Hungary is merging with HC Consulting. My boy Harry Clark and his wonderful team, he's an absolute G.

1:16:24They do brand strategy, new business, business and account management. But why I really love working with Harry and why we've got on so well over the last couple of months is Harry was actually the founder of the boozy, isolated brand Pops. He's been in the trenches, he's grafted his face off, he's had the sleepless nights, he's had the turmoil, he's had the triumph. He knows what it is to be a founder, he is a founder. And he's got a proven track record in grocery and out of home. holy moly dips the gut stuff savile drinks remio gelato so if your brand and you're you're stuck you're looking for like new business help you're looking to scale drop us a message we'd love to chat thank you so much back to the old episode what i loved and it's something that's really insane what i've learned is how you like encourage competition by sharing your pie knowledge right what are some of the chefs that you look to that are like they they you know they say you're the average of the five people you spend your time with whatever who do you hang out with that push you to that level who are some of your mates slash mentors yeah i mean sort of you know people that uh make me like drive and strive to be better um i mean across the world it's sort of uh in terms of career i look at someone like nancy in la um you know she has this uh restaurant empire out there she owns most you know this huge chain of uh italian restaurants and and she's become a friend over the years and i and she's you know i i will say this politely i think nancy is 70 i hope i got that right but she's at the she's at the top of this massive empire and still traveling all the time cooking in restaurants and yeah she inspires me she makes me push and made me realize what's achievable um within this industry and and and the also the team that she's built incredible um and yeah and then also uh i look at people i have friends who have just a singular restaurant as well right and and have done that incredibly well and and that sometimes centers me a bit more and and i go okay actually right now i have sort of a plan for 10 projects but what i'm going to do is i'm just going to do this one perfectly first and then And I'll focus on the other ones.

1:18:55And you need that sometimes. So, yeah, I mean, there's lots of chefs that do. Tommy, who's, you know, been on your podcast, Tommy Banks, inspires me in different ways as well. Apart from just being one of the nicest, nicest people in the industry. Him and his brother. Just absolutely lovely people. Tommy inspires me in the way that he's built his restaurants up and he's built it around what he enjoys doing. Right. So he's working with cricket a lot now because he's obsessive with cricket and he's just happy in what he does because of that. Yeah, he's not doing collaborations with things that don't really make sense to him.

1:19:41And he's taken his time to do it. and actually if anyone's watching this that works in sort of television industry tommy needs to do much more tv because he's very good at it and he's just a nice person so um yeah he's definitely another person that sort of inspires me all the time he's he's a legend like he we actually recorded the interview at up in oldstead i drove up to the black swan and then at the end he like took me around all his farms and he's got these containers he's got like he hires someone to be like a forager he's got a guy called dicky he's like an actual forager and i think he showed me all these ingredients he's like this is just but it goes back to leaning into that you know leaning into that bold authenticness which is which is which is you um loving this mate a few more things and we'll um we'll we'll wrap this up if you've got a bit of time to keep going for a sec is that all right yeah go for a little bit more if we talk a little bit about the pie that we're doing with Dickinson and Morris if that's alright with you yeah of course and we need to talk about the Instagram stuff as well because I think that's super interesting so yeah so Dickinson Morris Pies so you said you met them in well whilst you're at Hoban Dining Room and then so what is the as I said like there's so many chefs now I really think the biggest movement is chefs creating products i think is going to be a huge movement tommy's got banks brothers wine as i said tom strake has just done the all things butter thing um jim karner has just gone into pastes angela harten has just done something with bella zoo the yeah source what's what's what's your goal with with this and in these guys so the reason i want to work well the reason i do work things rores and have worked with them for quite a while now is because uh we both have the same goal which is to raise the level of pie making in the uk right and to make it better and uh for me it was understanding how to do that on scale and for them was understanding the smaller skills and the more detailed stuff that i know so it was a nice partnership and i think that when you talk about those things like jim karner and tommy and angela um whilst it looks like chefs are all pushing themselves into these things it's actually the opposite it's consumer-led right it's the nowadays people are more careful about ingredients and they want to eat better and they want to eat better meat better fish better pasta sauces better wine right across the country and that's not just in the uk that's worldwide people have been going back to that um and because that demand is theirs retail is reaching out to chefs and asking for that collaboration work um otherwise it wouldn't exist right supermarkets wouldn't bother at all because it's too much of a financial risk but with Dickinson and Morris for me what was exciting about working with them was that whole thing of process it was okay look this is our end goal which is mad how can we possibly get this done but on mass how do we do it how do we work out the processes what do we build what do we you know what type of what small piece of equipment do we have to manufacture to get that little detail but to make a thousand a day how do we do it and by doing that we disrupt you know what is already a pretty sort of steady leveled out industry and we make it more interesting um and i work with this you know development chef katie curtis there who's amazing the whole team there is brilliant but that's a company that has you know if you think about it they've been making pies for 170 70 years largely as well with you know the pork pie at pgi status which is you know that sort of protected it has to be a certain way for it to have a pgi status but they're a very forward thinking company because they work with people like me and they're like okay but how can we push things forward as well and do different offerings so you know every year we've released different types of uh like these special celebration pies so we did well for the coronation um i remember having a conversation with the body where we did it and and we were talking about uh you know the price for that pie and i remember saying look i think we can sell it for what it is amazing sort of handmade beautiful large pie so we can push the price because i think people value food more and it's sold out like boom the moment we put it on sale so it's opened their eyes to what we can do with pie making in terms of pushing technique and stuff and yeah this Christmas one that we've done I think it's already it's already started to pick up awards already which is early in that sort of award season but um it's again something I wanted it to be doesn't look like and it because it hasn't it doesn't look like a machine made pie it's made by hand it's a freestanding domed pie um that looks beautiful it looks like a christmas present right gorgeous yeah again that was the sort of thing about how do we do a ribbon like that's a you know we do that do you make thousands of them how do we do that so we work that out together and then the filling itself that you know is pork uh smoked bacon chicken cranberry and i think there's a is a pork jelly we finished she's a poor jelly and uh katie and i were backwards and forwards for months on that you know she i would make a version i would send it to her she'd make a version send it to me and his pies going across on post for months before we were sort of both happy and then the team were happy and then that's when we started going okay now i can work on design right because it's the middle is always the most important thing so it's just an interesting process for me working with them and it's something that i'd love to sort of continue because uh together i think we can do some very exciting stuff it's what i find so interesting is a lot of businesses and brands have the issue whereby when you're small you've got quality like it's easy to have quality and and control over anything in food any brand right that's why a lot of these brands start in kitchen table in kitchen tables so like markets etc but then as you get as you scale how do you keep that magic i'd love to explore this so these dickinson morris been around for 130 years i think you said i thought you've been doing pies yeah 170 years what have been like the biggest the hardest things of keeping the magic whilst getting up to a thousand pies a day like what are the things you've had to go through do you see what i mean i mean one thing is that you know they they've core products are actually pretty sort of tight so it's like pulp pie right they're not doing a million products which is how like that's really difficult with sort of consistency and quality so they've always had that sort of level of consistency is already there the other stuff that we do is the slightly more experimental stuff with me and it's tough right and and the team work very very hard especially at this time of year when we launch like a Christmas product it's like all hands on deck to make these things and uh if we look at sort of um quality control in terms of how it looks right actually i want each pie to look very slightly different because i want i want you as a customer to open that box and to know that a human being has built it right i don't want you to open it and to think it's been pressed in a machine in a factory somewhere that's not the type of people i want to work with and i work with people who literally are hands-on and katie as well like and she's a development chef at christmas she's there in the bakery as well with the team and they are just cracking on making these pies and the reason why there's that level of consistency and quality is because it's just like teeming with experience in those in those bakeries people have worked in in pie making for 20 30 40 years plus um so this their life right they live for that affection and making it a high level of quality and with with the goal ever to go into like more retail into like a say a sainsbury's or a waitrose or where's your one thing i want to kind of talk about is we talked about you left for you let you left um pyro for your own goals and ambitions like is that ever something you've thought about dickinson and morris like yeah i mean look i i the future's very open in terms of what we do together i think i would love to yeah have i'd like to do uh maybe a different style of pie with them in the future in terms of a retail option um because i think that so if you look at history of pie making right it is peaks and troughs so it's there it's a constant it's 600 years of written history and further history beyond that but if you look at specifically that 600 years pie making has gone from as it goes across the sort of timeline it's like peasant food and then like peaks as like royal banquets you know and and sort of you imagine a game of thrones style like pies being served and weddings and stuff and then it goes back down to the next century and it's back down to peasant food again this happens all the way through that period of time and if you look at where we're at now i think it was sort of quite severely affected by two major factors one was you know two big world wars and rationing and you know how that affected the uk but also industrialization industrialization had a massive effect and i think that we are now sort of just back up on that scale of of pie making getting better again in this country and if i can improve on that with dickens and lauris which is what we're trying to do and whether that's in a bigger scale of retail then like we're living the dream right and that's me happy um and i will continue to do smaller scale stuff as well in restaurants and things like that but i want to be able to reach more people on a bigger scale with and make people passionate about british pie making again i think well it's a category that's crying for innovation um because i mean my background is i work for challenger brands in retail that's kind of what i do but the um james cochran's chili sauce have you had the chili jam yeah that i think that's a great example of it doing well um you said about the industrial revolution what happened with that um how did that affect the pie making well not just pie making but affected lots of food processing in this world which is where if you look at something like the you know the original walker's factory that are not walkers uh kennog's factory that was built in the uk right that i mean i watched a tv show about it It was essentially like a small town, right?

1:31:32This factory, a Willy Wonka style sort of, you know, and what it did was stuff like that. Whilst amazing, sort of get your head around how that was built back then in the, I think in the 80s, it took out any sort of passion about the actual ingredient itself. And it was all about manufacturing rather than cooking, rather than ingredients rather than nourishment it was all about manufacturing and processing and yeah that affected many things in this country and and pie making probably took a big hit off it as well and in doing so its reputation took a big hit as well so people kind of see pies as something it should be a cheap food which they really shouldn't right if you think about it like it's got meat in it generally in most pies is a meat product and so should actually be quite expensive but there is this view that needs to be challenged which is a pie should cost no more than two quid which is mad um so yeah those are the things that need to change and that were affected by that industrialization it's bad how yeah how that's happened um two two more things callum of yeah loving this mate and just yeah learning so much let's talk about instagram because i think now it's ubiquitous chefs kind of have to use it as a as a marketing channel i think as i said before we hit the record button you were one of the first chefs to do that like talk to me about the genesis of that i know you said your girlfriend oh sorry wife gave you a nudge on that yeah so So that was, you know, at the time, like I wasn't really using Instagram much when we opened the restaurant.

1:33:24And I think I'd sort of dabbled into it. And I kind of looked at the food that a lot of the chefs were putting up on Instagram. And most of the stuff I saw was kind of very vibrant, bright stuff, you know, lots of like classic like sort of, you know, sauce drags across places that you see sometimes a master chef nowadays um and i was doing something very different in my kitchen and that's fine right very separate my wife said to me look this food you're doing you should probably think about putting it on social media because i think people be interested and i just didn't click with me i was i know was to see brown food right it's not i don't think it's appealing i look at what was what was being successful on instagram and it wasn't that it was this sort of like very like in your face colorful food but then i thought i'll just give it a try so i opened up an instagram account and actually turned out i already had one and uh there was one picture of my ex-girlfriend on it so my wife was like well get delete that we'll start a new one up and we started this sort of you know uh instagram account and very quickly it built traction and i think the reason for it was was because it offered something different right it was complete to the opposite tied to what was going what was being successful at the moment and um yeah i i just think i caught a lucky break with that to some extent because what that did was it put what we did out there on an international level because it garnered a lot of interest from abroad people were like oh i didn't know this about british cooking but i didn't know that there was this subculture of british cooking and actually i talked about thomas keller earlier you know thomas keller's one of the first people that reached out and said look is it okay if i send some of my chefs to work with you and we have the thing you know So people that do very well in a month or whatever, or over a single hour period, we offer them a chance to go and stage somewhere.

1:35:37And all of a sudden we had his chefs coming over from the States, which was mad to me at the time because we were making pies. But he appreciated that craft and culture and history, and he wanted his chefs to be enriched by it. So he sent them to us. And yeah, I think that I've lost my train of thought. No, it's just this, your kind of ability to share, I think, is one of the most powerful things. Because I think one of the things that's really changed my perspective in this conversation is how I thought, and to be fair, Tommy was kind of showing me, when he was showing me around, his IP is all those things, all those weird ingredients he's got access to in those locked up things.