Mike Davies, The Camberwell Arms & Franks Bar: Surviving a Mental Breakdown and Anxiety Hallucinations, Defining Identity by Business vs. Life Prisms, Staying in Business for 10 Years

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2:01hey guys this one is super super special with mike davies the owner operator of the camberwell arms and frank's in peckham mike is just such a warm affable kind amazing human being and he has built an institution in the camberwell arms i mean the food is fucking banging i mean i sat there with my mate on the countertop stuffing my face all tornadoes of gluttony it's so delicious um mike's been in business for 10 years like so many restaurants can't even get past one two three years he's been in business for 10 years frank's in peckham has been voted europe's number one bar there is so much in this we go into his leadership uh principles and how you almost create these sort of breadcrumbs and omnipresence of leadership to really galvanize as a team and how they can act and think and feel a bit like you not like you when you're not in the room um in 2019 just before covid mike had a mental breakdown whereby he was having kind of trippy anxiety hallucinations uh was literally at rock bottom and he just slowly built himself back up and this you know this helped me massively with my own mental health and i think if anyone's kind of struggling on the journey and it's hard this this story is just so beautiful and bouncing back We talk about business versus life prisms and I think he's got a really interesting point in how we all define ourselves by our business prism.

3:25When actually it's like you can do that to a point, but eventually you need to derive your identity from your life prism. We go deep into kind of how he got kind of in deep with partners and how to get out of the partnerships, which is really interesting. his food philosophy his old man his old man was a immunologist who is responsible for the code of acting there's just tons in it you're gonna love it just sit back relax enjoy it it's super fun relaxing conversation and as always please do share the podcast please subscribe to the newsletter i spend our 15 hours on each week it's literally in the show notes right there at the top click it subscribe you'll get a whole um a download of wisdom from the biggest food and drink founders anyway thank you so much enjoy the episode that's one thing so obviously we sat at the bar on the weekend and uh one thing i was like it's not the only sort of open kitchen i've been to but i was thinking like well one it's the kind of the silence of the service there's no like i know that's very old school and archaic in terms of like the you know having a having a strop kind of thing but there was none of that it was super it was like marble smooth how do you think like were you specifically as well like being able to see people being so close to there's like no boundary between you and the kitchen like how's that changed like how do you think that's responsible for the success of this place because I think um or is it responsible for the success of this place I mean it's definitely something that people enjoy I think it's quite like raw here to be honest because the building is is a bit fucked I mean it's a big old building that you know we do our best to maintain but obviously comes with its own like inbuilt structural limitations um and that's like a really diplomatic way of like saying that there are definitely things that i'd like to be different but i think that such as well like the kitchen for example i mean i designed the kitchen when i was 25 like kind of with my partners at the time there was no like professional involvement in anything other than like deciding no i mean apart from like the people that built the steel for example were like the steel is like custom made you know from a fabricator and it's the only kind of difference with that is that it's a little bit higher because I'm quite tall right but but like the actual kitchen space itself was just so basic so like so kind of rudimentary because like I was 25 I had very limited experience and what I wanted was to recreate the kitchen shape and equipment that I knew how to operate in from working in other jobs so even so like the whole shape and all of it was like designed around how I knew to work at that point interesting with like extremely limited experience so and then the openness of it just to touch on that because obviously that was the question although we kind of pivoted but like so my I don't know if you know the like origin story but basically with the Camberwell Arms I was working at the Canton Arms in Stockwell and Charlie and Trish who operate and own that pub have two other partners who are called Jonathan and Rob and Jonathan and Rob are part owners of the Canton they're also part owners of the Anchor and Hope in Waterloo and they used to be part owners of Great Queen Street but now the Clarence Tavern up in Hackney and also the Magdalen Arms in Oxford so they basically they were the owner operators in the Anchor and Hope and then they have like a structure where they have like four partners and two of them are working partners in the new business do you see what I mean so Rob and Jonathan like sit back on most of the businesses and then yeah anyway so those guys were like my original partners and I was working with them at the Canton Arms and then we started looking for somewhere to they were like they wanted to go into business with me um originally to do like a restaurant nearby the Canton Arms which I kind of was less up for but I really fancied doing a pub in the lines of where i'd worked which was the anchor and hope in the canton arms right and that's what i knew um but rob at the time when we started looking at this place and not started looking when we were like designing it in and i used that term so loosely because it was so basic the approach to it like i there was no professional designer nothing budget wise there was nothing like that it was just like how do we want it to look and we'll just aim for that and like get people to do those things so in the most basic sense of like designing it um but rob was like because there's a kitchen up here you know and that was the pre-existing there was no kitchen downstairs um in fact where the kitchen is now is where the old bar was um and so rob was like the thing is if you're going to be the landlord because originally like i would be i was going to be the working partner with charlie from the canton being like support but like i was going to be the only kind of properly working partner um well no you would have been here cooking yeah yeah that's what i mean charlie was charlie did work here for maybe a year or something like that um but i think his the idea was he was going to be more involved and actually that didn't work out that well for me so we kind of changed that eventually but um that's no disrespect to charlie i love charlie yeah yeah but like so rob um rob was like yeah but if you're going to be the landlord you can't be upstairs in the kitchen like invisible and you know i was listening to your podcast with ash the other day and he was talking about how he feels like it's important in a pub to feel the presence of the landlord yeah and it's something that maybe is lost a little bit and it's kind of interesting because like the idea of the pub landlord is quite arcane but it is quite relatable in terms of you know an owner operator being present right pub landlord is just another way of saying owner operator yeah yeah yeah but yeah so that's why the kitchen was built downstairs so you'd be in the open yeah so i'd be in the restaurant and pub yeah i love this so like one of the common themes of this people i speak to is like i really believe your constraint yeah is your like creativity comes from constraint right and like you're like yeah necessity is the mother of invention yeah exactly yeah yeah so it's like because i because it palpably punched me i think what you said there i think that's the best way to describe it and it was a word i couldn't you know hang hang my my um vernacular on was raw when it was like it was just that was what i like the fact it's a bit it's got just wax you on the face with character as soon as you're in here i can't describe describe i think like i'm not i'm not ashamed of the fact that it's a bit rough and ready i love it yeah right and and i think that like i don't think people are that concerned about it i mean i feel like some people are but they probably don't come to a place like this and actually like I think that the product speaks louder than that so for me that comes first the quality of the offering the service the atmosphere all of those things come above the like aesthetic and the aesthetic's important but it's kind of the sideshow really to like because it's because it's like a vehicle for hospitality right and what you're experiencing is the warmth of hospitality and the generosity of an offering and that's that's like a really authentic and genuine thing in the right place yeah but it often isn't achieved because it comes secondary to financial goals or the design or whatever about and i loved it like one thing you've talked about is like the real reason of hospitality it's like i think ultimately you know make people happy i've in lots of podcasts and stuff i've read by you and you said there's this danger of the cult of the chef is somewhere where you said that was like the chef is the megalomaniac like which it's almost like you get so bamboozled by the stature of this as a consumer because of because of that kind of line of thinking i think and it can be misconstrued i feel like i have obviously i'm a chef and i've been working as a chef for a very long time i work less in the kitchen these days but i'm still like you know i i bleed chef in that way but i'm completely disinterested in the idea of like the restaurant scene and in a way because it sort of it creates a homogenous culture that I don't often think is that good um so I feel like especially because I think you know what if we're talking about like genuine hospitality and authenticity right that has to come from quite a personal place for me anyway that's how I operate like there's a bit of me in this business and I feel like you can feel it when you come here and I feel like by the same token when you go somewhere where you don't have that kind of genuine connection you just you can feel it kind of fairly quickly because it's not cared for in the same way and when I say cared for I don't necessarily mean like it's the cleanest or it's the most organized or any of those things which at times it is those things and at times it isn't but what I mean is that there's a palpable personal connection with the offering right yeah so in terms of like the cult of the chef I think this there's a few things there because I think part of that is also something to do with how I feel about working practices in kitchens and like the idea that there's a sort of um badge of honor almost for working too hard at times which is kind of dying out thankfully um but something that I definitely suffered with and from and and feel very differently about now and I I kind of feel like um you I feel like people need to be happy to make things nice chefs need to be happy but also like well this is what i'm trying to get to because i walk as i said walked in on saturday and obviously you didn't know i was coming that's like like um and so we'd there was i feel almost like this is like little breadcrumbs they're spring i'm from a leading perspective i want to get into this like breadcrumbs of mike if that's what i'm saying are sprinkled on the staff they all like they were so warm and affable and uh like nothing was it was just very like light and like you know punchy but light if that's the right way of describing it and you know we had there was a bit of a delay on our stars this guy long hair i don't know what his name is smooth smooth smooth as fuck was like okay we'll take we'll take that we'll take the um what working on the bar will yeah uh yeah yeah i think his name was like um serving us but he okay oh maybe john yeah yeah he looked like a bit like arctic monkeys kind of vibe okay yeah long hair was he scouse i don't think he was scouse i mean i've had quite a few beers but okay fine but either way he was like look the starters off they're off that's fine yeah it just felt really that so i suppose how do you um obviously you being literally at the stove in the open area is is that whole thing of like the publican or the owner operated has to be there to fit that for that omnipresence to kind of spread but how did you how do you get your team to like from a leadership perspective to do that when you're not there do you know what I mean I mean it's a continuous process rather than some kind of like singular magic bullet I'd say but like I think that the first thing to say is that we have been open for 10 years um and like during that time I have I mean I was the head chef here in a very direct way for the first five years then I employed my first head chef and worked here in fact well that kind of coincided with me having a breakdown and taking some time off work and then kind of rebuilding my confidence to come back into the business and then last year sam left and he's gone to open the waterman's arms in barns um oh yeah i haven't i still haven't been it's supposed to be incredible yeah yeah yeah so but he's a guy who's patty and bun as well no so the owner is patty and bun but sam is employed as the head chef there but yeah but he's i mean he's smashing it he's a terrific chef um but then he left um at the end of last year and then i had a sort of interim management period of myself being here and then we got mike who's the new head chef who started in january at the beginning of this year but so like from a chef perspective there's been not that much movement at the top that's one thing to say so from an like overall ethos and like attitude perspective what's happened is that the offering has grown into itself and it feels very comfortable now partly because i am much more comfortable with what I want this place to be and that comes with seniority and longevity more than anything else because I was 25 when I started which is young and really I didn't know I the idea what I wanted to do was just recreate what I had where I had been working because I didn't know any different and I thought that that was the best thing and actually you can't create something brilliant that way you can create something good copying something else but you can't create something authentic and singular and brilliant and the way that you do that is by kind of being confident and comfortable with yourself i think that like the best food that you will eat is food that's made to be eaten so like i make food that i want to eat yes yes which is like a kind of maybe that's i don't know how many i suppose that's probably something that a lot of chefs would say i don't know maybe not but i think that nothing for the sake of it in that way food wise is the kind of baseline because the question is how do you get the team as a whole to operate without you in a way that you want them to and so for me as a chef my focus is food right so the offering initially focused around food yeah the food is part of the equation but that's where I start so my baseline is like nothing for the sake of it brilliant ingredients like the best possible you know as much possible made in house highly seasonal you know all of these kinds of buzzwords that get thrown about all the time like this is our credo we live by this right but that's the starting point and then you build out from there so because that's a very genuine position to take when you start to radiate that philosophy the other aspects of the business start to kind of pick up on that but it takes time and also you have it's an active process so like where that's a good starting point it will only take you so far and so I think that I'm very lucky at the moment to have one of the best teams we've ever had like in the history of the Camberwell Arms it's such a joy to come into work with everyone that works here because it just it's just a like people love working here and they're excited to be here you know yeah like i know you i think it comes from what you were saying is when i think you said when you become kind of confident and calm in yourself and it your philosophy radio so that's exactly what you said that's such a beautiful way of putting it um how would you say you've another thing which is hugely honorable is to be in business for 10 years like that's fucking insane thanks and like how would you say you've because i love the evolutionary point so i think people go into business like one to like obviously like baseline to stay stay in the game one yeah let's do like super passionate things but i think on an actual more deeper level is there's a there's an evolution in in yourself as your business grows like in parallel how would you say you've changed from like mike you know 10 years ago in terms of getting that conference in terms of getting that uh ability to kind of just to to it to to get to where we are as an on saturday where it just is just moving like that do you know what i mean i mean it's a long process man and because it's like that's like asking a person you're you're asking it in a through the business prism but the reality is that you're asking me how i've changed personally over 10 years i mean yeah between 25 and 35 i think there's probably common experience in the sense that I well I felt like my 20s were just concentrated entirely on work so because I started Frank's when I was 20 right and then I started this when I was 25 that's really young and I was proper like nose to the grindstone like when I started Frank's I was working full-time at the Anchor and Hope and Frank's so I did like 45 48 hours a week at the Anchor they kindly grouped all my doubles together so I could do like Monday to Thursday doubles and then I would do Friday, Saturday, Sunday at Frank's because we were only open Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

19:19So I literally worked seven days a week right and I'm not advocating for that at all in fact quite the opposite but at that time I had no other strategy for getting through that start that that part of my life that was the only way I could approach it because I was like if I'm gonna if I if I'm actually gonna like make anything happen here I have to put myself into this fully without any thought towards my well-being or anything like that it's crazy to think now but I was sufficiently young and pliable to like get away with it a little bit like you can just about get by doing like 100 hour weeks and not sleeping that much you know at that age not that you should but you can when you're 30 yeah yeah when you're 30 you can't right so like in terms of how it's changed I think my attitude to work has become less self-sacrificial that's one thing i feel totally confident as a person in who i am where before i felt defined by my work that's another thing these all these things selfishly right so i've hit 30 right same thing when i did this left comfort peanut butter business right when i was like moved home my parents i was like i'm going in like i'm just gonna fucking send it and make this make this thing a full-time thing now i hit 30 and uh not like yeah because i think you talk somewhere about like um anxiety hallucinations at some point in your yeah like i've definitely had experiences of that where it's like and you know i'm still trying to sort of pinpoint what the fuck it is is it like is it just working too much i think when it's your passion it's it can become very muddled area because you're like you love it so much that but then you're like mate if you actually you step back, you're working so much.

21:06Yeah, but the point is that you're more than your work. Exactly, yeah. But I don't, I'm struggling to kind of, I think what you said there, there's two prisms to look through. The business and personal, he goes, you are defining yourself, you're personal by your business prism. Yeah. I 100 % relate to that. Because it's actually not enough. I think that's the point, is that like a business is great and you can throw loads at it, but it's not life. Yeah, 100%. And that's a huge, it's a massively important distinction because the fact is there's this classic like aphorism, you know, like we work to live as opposed to living to work.

21:46Right. And the fact is that it can often the balance there skews because quite often it can feel like you are just working, you're living to work. If you get trapped in that cycle of ambition, where you're like, I need to give everything to this in order for it to go forward, there may be some truth in that, but I think it's not about the hours. It's actually more to do with how much you concentrate on it and how much you're able to focus on it. And I'm saying that from a position of someone who's given everything to the point of burnout and now feels like it's not the only way to achieve the same end result.

22:21In fact, I would advocate for a different approach in order to create a better business. the so talk to me about the anxiety and like yeah because i just think 100 i think i think uh yeah like one it's helping me but i know it'll help loads of people who listen to this but if you could describe almost like um maybe a song that would describe like the way your brain was thinking or like i think well this is the thing so we can we could maybe cut this bit out but But only because I think the easiest comparison is actually if you take psychedelics. Right. But like, because the experience of being trapped in a thought loop that you can't escape from is like terrifying and maddening.

23:04And that can happen if you have a bad experience with psychedelics. Yeah. But I will try to think of a song. But yeah, I think. No, no, we can go with that. And I think, so then you wake up like, what are the first in this period of time? So let me just, can I just give you some context first? Because I think it's important because I feel like otherwise we just drop into the apex of it. And actually there was a build up to it. And that's significant. So I think that like, so what we're talking about here is something that I've been open talking about, which is that I had a breakdown in 2020, right?

23:35Pre-COVID and which is weird because I think a lot of people had a breakdown during or just at the beginning of COVID. And mine happened separately to it, really. It was completely irrespective of that. and then COVID happened and it kind of compounded it in some ways but also made it easier because the business changed and I wasn't dealing with that but also if I'd been here I don't know how I would have dealt with it right so but I in 2019 I I lost 80 % of my chefs at the beginning of the year coincidentally like a group of people who had been here for a long time all kind of handed in their notice with different lengths of time and the only solution at that point was for me to come back into the fold and I had been trying to step away from it unsuccessfully to give myself a little bit more breathing room and what that actually looked like was just working everyday doubles you know but like I said to you before it's not quite as easy to do that when you're 30 or over 30 like your body for one isn't the same and your mind certainly isn't the same and I started to kind of like degrade mentally at that point then I managed to hire an amazing head chef called Sam and a sous chef called Ben who are both lovely people and they kind of took it on and the way what it feels like in my head is that the relief of having these guys who are able to do the job that I had wanted to give up for quite a while was so palpable that my brain sort of imploded and what happened was very gradually towards the end of the year I started to get physically unwell um various other like for example I've got gout which is like a sort of comedic thing for a lot of people but like I had you know that's partly to do with family history and partly to do with like a life of excess right but also it's to do with the stress building up in my body like triggering something that shouldn't really have happened to me for another like 10 or 20 years right and then I had a long-standing like sickness like a sort of flu style thing that I literally couldn't shake for like eight or nine weeks um like regularly spiking with fever and I was working at this point like doing shifts in the kitchen trying to support the team so it was all kind of building and this is after like I mean so 2019 was that five years ago so yes we're talking about 12 years into the industry at this point um the pub is uh five and kind of doing okay but like not out of the woods yet um and it just all kind of built after that long of being an owner operator a head chef and a director it was just too much and my brain couldn't take it and what happened was that like over the christmas periods my anxiety started to build about opening franks the following year and i had like in my mind i had created a new system of operating for franks that i wanted to launch the following year because i was like oh this is going to revolutionize the way we do it blah blah blah and what happened was that I started well basically at the beginning of January I started having stress dreams in the daytime which I've described as anxiety hallucinations if you like but the reason for that is that that's how it felt to me at the time I was awake it was during the day and I was trapped in a visual loop of doing mise en place out of that kitchen here with a chef from frank's who i was going to hire and we were just looping over these processes and i was like but this is wrong like this isn't the way to do it like when you have a stressful dream that you can't get out of right but it was completely terrifying because i thought that i was going mad i literally thought that i wouldn't be able to communicate with a human again so i just in my mind i was like becoming a lunatic yeah that's how i felt i thought that i was going insane and that is quite that is terrifying you can see it now you can feel it coming off me right there's a a very real um sense of fear at that point that i'm lost forever and uh yeah so it was it was very intense you know but remediable over time and it took and it did take time but like there was and then I kind of reached there was a point where I reached I did try to go into work after the break and Vicky who's our ops director um and a great support to me um over the years and friend also she just it's that classic thing of just like she just asked me if I was okay and I was like no and I started trying to explain it to her and she was like Mike you you have to go home like now and so I did do that I went home and then it got worse a little bit and my wife Benita was like there was a point where like I couldn't talk and or do I was just it's hard to describe I'm gonna tell you though what it looked like I guess was just me sort of like hysterically crying, covering my face and like sat in the corner.

28:39That's what it physically looked like. Yeah, physically looked like. So, and then, so she was like, fuck, what am I going to do about this? Yeah. Like, he can't even fucking go outside. Like, what the fuck are we doing? Yeah. And so she called my parents. Is this too much? Are we all right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So my parents came round and they were like, the three of them worked to like stop me from going to work and so what we did was we managed a conversation at that point about like the main concerns that i was having which were to do with various things that just it seems so insanely ridiculous now that i was really fixated on um yeah but there's a so i've got obsessive obsessive like i've got seriously addictive personality right okay i can get i can ruminate on something like this is not not a big thing yeah but i'll ruminate on it for like so the point it is a bit sort of maybe not the same degree or same texture as what you had but i've definitely had those you know my my life is sadly like punctuated with occasionally these big blotches of fucking anxiety and i'm just like sorry to hear that yeah but it is it's just like it is what it is i think if you've got a brain that's sharp like they're like not sharp but like always thinking it just comes with the probably comes with the comes with the mo mate unfortunately but the um but yeah what you're describing there what one thing i wanted to ask you is when you've got that addictive or like not necessarily addictive, but like when you're like, I have to be at work, otherwise my ship's going to sink.

30:02So you've got that on one side. Which by the way, isn't true. But it's important to say it. So with this, I can't, I can't take time off. I feel sick if I take time off, which I'm asking this, but I need to. And also what I think you said there is that you, I may not be, I could be on a beach in Barbados, but my brain is still worrying about this. You could put me in like, then that's one thing I'm trying to work through. Is that how you. So, but that's where I was. Yeah. but I've let go of that. So how? So one of the ways is having a breakdown. Yeah. Which I wouldn't recommend, but like certainly as a way to rewire yourself because it forces you to make a change.

30:38So I basically reached the point where like, so after that, when I was off work, that was where there was a period of appraisal for myself about whether I wanted to be alive or not. Right? Sorry, appraisal. So like for me, that's the narrative internally. It's like, do I actually want to live? right so I'm talking about being suicidal but what I'm talking about is like trying to imagine whether or not my life has value and so on and so on and that kind of like depth of sadness and depression and anxiety that had built up to that level that's kind of that's kind of where I was with it right but the thing is that if you feel like that then you are close to doing something that is permanent that is unchangeable and so through a process of taking time off work and complete detachment from it and medication yeah and therapy and some investigative psychedelic experiences which I'm not talking about like recreational drug use there I'm talking about like seeking out something other yeah right the combination of those things and time allowed me to consider the fact that i actually did want to be alive yeah and like i wanted to live because i have i like life i like being alive and it's like it's that fundamental at that point you know because it's like what are we doing here are we just gonna work ourselves into an early grave so there's nothing left to enjoy or are we going to actually realize that life is more than work and so that time yeah and then i mean there's there's yeah there's more to it but that's basically i think that's my experience i can't tell you how to remedy it but what i can do is say to you that if you feel like that now you need to be careful about the way that you're working because it doesn't result well in my opinion yeah i think you can it's i think what you've said there is so well right at the beginning is the two prisons yeah your personal prison versus your your business prison and i think so many of us we derive sort of status identity um and this is where it gets quite a confusing connection through our work like with all the neoliberalism shit in the 80s where people are making money on wall street and market tax all that you start defining yourself by your work like it wasn't always like that you know and now it's getting especially with social media as we're defining ourselves by literally adding up what our worth is by a number of fucking followers which i think like on a macro level is fucked um then so you're in that sort of dark um dark period how did you um i think you said you were in search for others i think what you said not necessarily what were those other things that you'd did to kind of detach the two prisms the business and the like well so it's interesting because i think that like um for me internally there's like an inherent um crossover uh between like hospitality and who i am as a person and this is not just a soundbite this is just like as a person i actually love looking after people not love it's like built into me it's like how i like to I care for people in a way that like I don't know that's just part of who I am right so so like hospitality is a kind of natural arena for that but it's also really difficult because it's it's something that's so deeply personal to me so like the two things are like intrinsically linked so it's quite difficult to unmesh something like that and actually I don't think I did unmesh it but what I did was I thought a lot about if I like my job at all and then I was like but if I like it why do I like it and the conclusion I came up with was that I like it because on a very simple level I quite like making people happy yeah with food specifically but more than that I like like the idea of being hospitable and like welcoming someone into your house and giving them a good time that to me is like I like feel that in my core as something that I want to do and enjoy and that's so then it's like okay but that makes sense then it's like that's why I do my job because that's an amazing thing to want to do that's like a beautiful goal and like beyond money or time or anything like that that's actually like really wholesome and like really sustainable and kind of benign you know and so so like that kind of moment was quite a big moment for me because I was like okay well this that's like I can I can get into that because like before that it was like I hate my job it's killing me and it's like because I've lost sight of all of that because instead I have ambition and work only this drive this overriding drive to like achieve something I don't know what like a limitless goal of just like never good enough kind of achievement and actually like at that point it's changes because it's like well if I really just want to do that then I know how to do that yeah because I'm a that's what I'm a professional at that and I can just be on a very basic level I can reconnect with the things that actually allow me to do that in fact and I'm sorry to just put this in here but like there is that's one of the reasons for writing my book is actually to do with this if you're happy for me to just because so the book's called cooking for people I'm gonna say that it's out in August on the 15th just in case get this to go live on that day um and you know you can pre-order it and so on so on but like the fact is that the book two things the first thing is that the book for me represented an opportunity to use my skill set in a different way to opening or running businesses which I don't know if you're aware of but it's fucking stressful and like it felt to me like writing a book might be slightly less stressful way of using my skill set um I think that is partially true but it comes with its own stresses um but more than that when I was thinking about the idea for the book the idea of like dinner parties and entertaining at home it felt to me like there is quite like a lot of stress associated with like hosting people um in your house in your own personal space and so there's this idea what the idea for the book is just that you can use how I organize myself as a chef to help you to like not feel that stressed about cooking a three-course meal for you know any number of guests in your house and like trying to get to the point where you can actually enjoy it so this thing of like on a fundamental level for me post breakdown reconnecting with the like deep philosophy of hospitality is something that I've tried to like imbue the book with a little bit you know the idea that actually like it's not that fun to fucking like stress about cooking loads of different dishes from loads of different cookbooks and go to the shops multiple times and then by the time you get to the end of the fucking week and you like got people coming around do you even fucking want them to be there anymore you know are you gonna actually enjoy yourself you're just gonna be cooking the whole time it's like that's bullshit yeah i love that i love the fact that you've rediscovered your kind of inner burning fire or drive and realizing that it's it got kind of pulled into this myopic like burnout burnout burnout work work work and then now like re-challenging channeling that skill set into cooking for people.

38:05I listened to a podcast with, not a podcast, a video with Trevor, his name's, you know, from St. John. Right. Second name's escaped me, but the, Gulliver. Gulliver, that's it. He was saying your appetite is your, is your happiness. Yeah. And obviously that, I mean, I'm not going to go fucking pharmaceutical here, but on the gut, you know, everyone's wanking over their gut to help. Sure. Yeah, like they're definitely linked to your positivity. Then I was thinking that's so true. And they were saying like the kind of the, your i think one of the ways we're kind of passing happy on a deep level like passing happiness is through like cooking for people or doing something for people um and one of the things i was thinking i was like well it's mad like and i'm so listening to you um you talk about your kind of hallucinations and then i was thinking there is definitely a theme with poor mental health in chefs yeah and providing lots of amazing hospital warm hospitality for people obviously um who was the guy was it Norman, who's just passed away, lost you, yeah, obviously Bourdain, he's my biggest fucking hero in the world.

39:06There's a common theme, and I think it's like you're trying to, there's maybe like trying to solve for happy, or there's like some happiness equation going on, and I think you can, the food is the vehicle to kind of pass it on to someone and then get it back, reciprocate it back, and I think it's, yeah, it's something I've been thinking about a lot recently in terms of, yeah, why would someone as a chef go and put those hours in you know grind work their tits off like and i think there is something in that um let's talk about like what would what is in your opinion from the book like some what is the art of like a glorious let's talk about the happy side now uh a glorious dinner party or cooking for people like what's the the everything you've learned from doing the book like what's also like i think that for me it is just about like being happy whilst it's going on if you're the host right right so like I think I think the point is that like I'd say being organized on in a small way and a very basic way is the key to success with cooking like on a professional level it's the same thing like I don't go into a Friday night service with nothing prepared you know if I'm gonna get really busy I need to have mise en place I need to have prep done right and in the same way you can totally approach things at home like that without being really chefy about it so I think that like it's quite complex a dinner party because like inviting people into your home is intrinsically slightly fraught because like although like obviously they could be your friends or whatever it might also be like your parents-in-law or it might be some people that you feel like you need to have around for whatever reason and for a lot of people people I think people think about dinner parties in different ways like some people want to impress people some people just want to have a nice time and now chill about it and so on and so on so there's there's there's loads of different approaches i think overall what makes something good is if the host is relaxed right because the host is is where everything is is coming from or the host people you know in the same same philosophy you've got with exactly that like i radiate what i radiate here when you became more yourself yeah connected with yourself it radiates through here so same thing in at home yeah so let me put it a different way which is something that we use in the camboil arms quite a lot in terms of management it's like if you can't look after yourself how can you look after someone else and we're talking about hospitality here so when we talk about looking after that's what I'm talking about so if you're not okay no one else is going to be okay your food's not going to be okay the people aren't going to have a good time and so if you're like I mean I'm assuming that you haven't got like everyone's got other shit going on all the time right I'm not really talking about that we're just talking about a basic level about a dinner party so if you're cooking a dinner party like first of all having a menu that you're confident with which is something that I've tried to help with right so because I love writing menus and I feel like I'm good at it so like I've written a book of amazing menus that people can actually feel are kind of curated for them so they don't have to like build something too okay sure with you so you'll do like the so everything's three courses so it's like yeah right so it's like it's all pre-built in that way and then there's like the the kind of uniqueness of it is that there's like a literal like a shopping list like I would write an ordering list so it tells you like for all of the recipes together what you need in total of all of the ingredients so you can just go out and get everything all at once for to make that menu and then there's like a prep list so you can see how far in advance certain things can be made if you do make them in advance how you store them and like so on and so on so it's just like taking this thing out of it no no i love that and uh i think the two philosophies link over yeah 100 it's the same philosophy yeah and that's exactly it yeah the um what would you say uh what what kind of menu on in that book are you kind of most proud of i know there's there's a gazillion in there right but like what's the one that kind of would really shot um kind of epitomize everything we've been talking about this morning so uh and why right so i'll just i think the one is actually the one i put in my original proposal right which is a menu from the autumn season and it's kind of late autumn in a way because it still features tomatoes but i think a lot of summer produce is almost at its best in the zenith of the season because you're getting to the point where they've had like a full summer of sun and then like tomatoes and peaches are kind of like at their absolute fullest and ripest in september right sure um and so the menu is is a tomato salad and then the main course is beef shin braised like ossobucco with saffron puntaletti puntaletti is like orzo so it's like a rice shaped pasta and the dessert is peaches with zabaglioni and flaked almonds so it's like baked peaches with a kind of uh zabaglioni is like a sort of whipped italian custard um and yeah so that it's so good man the fucking this it's just like it's just ridiculously delicious those things are so so nice and like they're very simple i mean so the idea that if we're going to follow through with the kind of like happy chef yeah yeah yeah yeah no a tomato salad obviously you're going to make a tomato salad last minute but it's super easy to do and there's something that i like to do which is just macerating red onions in the base of the salad you know it's not a new thing like but the fact is it's kind of creating a dressing so that's part of the recipe but it's very very basic and partly it's because you're going to have quite an intense main course so i just thought it was nice to have a bit of levity and then with your main course with something like beef shin like that obviously it's it's a slow cooked piece of meat it's got very tolerant you know lots of sinew and cartilage in there that's kind of broken down slowly so it's got this kind of amazing unctuous texture that it can hold for quite a while you would have cooked it you could this is what i mean but you could have cooked it you know three four days before and left it in the fridge and it's just going to be absorbing slowly its surroundings and you can warm it up you know later on and the pasta equally that comes with it you know in a restaurant we would blanch the pasta ahead of service so the dry pasta would already be cooked and we'd be finishing it in sauce to order which is what i've suggested in the book so you're taking some stock from your beef braise some cream some saffron cheese and butter and you're just basically heating up the pasta in those things so we're talking about like a two three minute process five minute process maybe at home right so your tomato salad is going to take you all of 10 to 15 minutes to prepare even if you're going slowly right maybe slightly longer if you have spent the morning prepping some onions but you know your beef shin is already done the pasta is blanched the sauce is already made in the beef shin right there's a gremolata that goes with it which is chopped parsley and orange zest and garlic anyone can manage that we're talking about a very short lead time the peaches in sabalioni peaches are cooked ahead sabalioni can be made in the day and hold and so it's an assembly job essentially so what you've done is you've removed all the variables so that by the time you get to actually perform or put the food out you don't have to worry yeah i love i just love how like the link of this all kind of links the book links i'm so pleased that you've actually understood that because it's something that i've struggled to communicate and obviously it's like a usp for the book but like you're you're right that's exactly the point is it does link yeah the links are almost like the breakdown of like this is this this is no way to kind of be, to live.

46:21It's like, well, actually, and I think in this process, I think you have to hit rock bottom to come back up. But like you rediscovered, and what you said, your kind of your soul was, the reason I do this is because I want to make people feel happy for food. You discover it, and then it's like, that energy's going into this cooking for people book. And it's like, and I really believe, I always think about these ideas live most of the time, but I really believe there's like, when there's a plate of food going from one person to another, it's like teleporting fucking happiness in my opinion it's an act of love yeah for sure how did you let's go because you went to i want to talk about well touch on your old your old mom was an immune immunologist my dad yeah yeah yeah and you went to go and do biology i did yeah yeah like so you've got that background and we'll talk about your old man yeah so i've read some he's like seem like a very interesting character yeah really super interesting guy and um but like so yeah you went to went to uni you're doing biology was it biology yeah like what in that formative period how we've talked about like rediscovering your your i hate the word why it's so wanky but it is kind of what it is rediscovering it say 35 36 when you're like at uni like where how was it beginning to gestate that why of like i want this what i want to do I don't fuck biology do you know what I mean uh well so so I think maybe I'll just tell you the true story like only because it's not so glamorous and I think that like I went to quite a good school um I'm not particularly academic but I've got a very powerfully strong memory like so I can if I want to I can remember something really clearly and I can regurgitate it so it means that I can get by in an academic setting generally speaking by just doing that but I don't always apply myself and didn't always apply myself during my educational period right and uni was no exception um I think I wanted to study biology because of my dad which is weird because he had never made any kind of there was no push towards that at all just context for listeners what your dad because i read some of that like the covid vaccine and stuff those links linked backs the science that was used in the covid vaccine is partially i mean yeah well because he i mean during the 60s his laboratory he worked for the institute of cancer research for like 40 years and he had a laboratory there which during the 60s was was responsible for the discovery of t cells a type of white blood cell there are other scientists working on the same thing at a similar time but like that lab is responsible for like a significant proportion of the research and discovery of t-cells t-cells are a type of white blood cell i mean they're like a fundamental part of humanity right and and and the way that we function as humans particularly in the immune response basically which is like which we don't necessarily need to get into but like yes he was in that way he i was gonna say he was a big deal but like it's so funny because he was so not a big deal like it's you know because he wasn't like he wasn't like a money guy he was a full science guy who's like obsessed in a brilliant way with like science and biology and humanity and so yeah he was he's a very special guy really special guy we unfortunately passed away in 22 yeah i i'm so sorry to hear that you see i was from the research did it seems like he had like a massive impact on on everything you've done and we'll talk about that so so you're at uni uh you've got photographic memory basically well kind of yeah and then what's what's going on to like where's the the food thing beginning to bubble so like the food thing comes before that the food thing is because my mom is an amazing cook and her mom was an amazing cook and i grew up in a house where like my mom made everything from scratch more or less and so we ate generally speaking we ate like delicious fresh food all the time right which is i was so lucky to have that but i didn't do that much cooking because she did all the cooking and i would i did a lot of eating right yeah my mom's insane right so like i got i got very good at eating and enjoying food but like which is a weird thing to say but i do think that not everyone enjoys eating and food in that way like a lot of people eat for functionality rather than pleasure um but not not me um but yeah and we would we would also go to restaurants and stuff like that and like if there were special occasions we would go and eat in nice places and that was kind of part of what we did and i was i'm very privileged to have had that kind of upbringing i make no bones about that but like it was an important and influential thing equally like watching cookery shows like jamie oliver people like that even delia that was something i really enjoyed and like i was very jamie i think started to make me think like oh maybe i could do that right but then so i went to uni and spent a lot of time not working like spent a lot of time enjoying myself um smoking quite a lot of weed as well at that time which um you know for me at that anyway was was probably like not that helpful it's probably the best way to put it when I smoked it for a bit of uni in it I think that's mainly fucking pathological like you've got like your tendencies to be anxious like for me that just didn't work at all no but also like it slowed me down a lot yeah and made me disinterested in at that point at that moment and I'm not I'm not there's there's no shade there at all it's just that I am the last person to like criticize someone for doing something like that but I think that at that time it wasn't good for me but anyway basically I was asked to write an essay about stem cells by my tutor and I didn't write it and then I got to the like day before and I was like right I'm just gonna copy something from the internet and just literally literally didn't like didn't even go down the google search just like wikipedia fucking like copied loads of shit out wrote an introduction and that was it right and i was so ashamed to be called in when they caught me out because i was thinking like there's no way they give a shit about some fucking idiot first year like plagiarizing something but of course they did you know because the fact is that like that is the antithesis of learning like you're completely undermining the process like what are you what are you even doing and of course i wasn't thinking about that because i wasn't really don't really give a shit about learning about biology at that point I just wasn't engaged with it it wasn't for me and so yeah so I got caught out and I was like fuck it was a real like it was a real moment for me where I was like I felt really ashamed and I knew that I could do better in fact I did then rewrite the essay and it was great right but I feel like at that moment I kind of like thought I got the shock was sufficient to make me question whether or not university was something that I actually wanted to do and I had this kind of dark moment where I went home and thought my parents would be very disappointed with me for thinking that and actually they just totally weren't they were just like oh and it was really weird because I was so upset and they were really worried about me but then when we actually got to the point where it was like I don't know if I want to be at university they were like that's fine like that's okay and I don't think all parents would have been like that but they certainly were yeah because I went to Manchester you went to Manchester as well I dropped out of Bournemouth uni long story but partying and then for some reason decided to reapply and went to manchester which was even like even crazier but like yeah i know that feeling of uh when i was just like sat in bournemouth uni and it was good job i went to manchester in the end because it's like there was just one module that made the whole thing worth it but the rest of the time it's long um but that feeling and actually if you're like having sound parents who are open is just such a fucking unfair advantage they were so supportive and then so but then we started to talk about options and i was like i think maybe i want to try and be a chef and my mum was kind of like yeah that makes sense to me that you would want that and then I basically but I had already signed a contract for a student house right so I was like well I'm going to just go back to Manchester the idea originally was to go to catering college I missed the enrollment date so I couldn't get on the course thank fuck I didn't do that I'm really happy I didn't do that and then basically went back up to Manchester with us and well actually before that I had been working in a fish and chip shop in Norberton um which is like in southwest London that's like next to a fishmonger yeah yeah yeah yeah I'm sorry yeah oh right and uh yeah so I've been working there as a waiter and then basically like that summer is that like posh fish and chip shop yeah yeah fish you know there's one in Borough Market as well yes yeah yeah yeah it's on the corner yeah yeah yeah it's good yeah yeah no it's really good and it's next to that fishmonger and the guy who bought it bought the fishmonger as well so it's quite like it's kind of nice yes yeah I know exactly where it is so I used to work there as a waiter when I was like 16 right and then at that point I basically stopped going to university right that was in the Easter holidays and I was like right I need to take a break from this so I left went back to London and then the manager was like and just started working to get some money the manager was like oh uh the head chef and the sous chef are going away we need a chef and you're the only other person on the team that has English as their first language so you can help me with the ordering do you want to do it and i was like yeah cool and like so then i just kind of like helped him to like run the place from a food perspective i mean he was a manager and i was the head chef but i was just covering for someone for like a couple of months during the summer and then yeah i was like okay this is good i like this and it was hard graft but like we didn't really do any prep there it was kind of just all about service because it was fucking busy like it was a tiny restaurant but like it was near a train station so you have two chefs working one on the fryer and one on the grill and till and if you're doing the grill and till you're also doing takeaway orders so you're like talking to people whilst you're cooking you can have all of the fish either fried or grilled so you're like wrapping takeaway orders using the till turning around grilling fish it's like hectic man it was it was so fun and I think about it now and I'm like that really helped me with like not worrying about being busy at all um when i then later went into work in like busy places that was where i excelled i was actually really shit at cooking but like i was like in terms of doing service i was like yeah this is fine yes how would you say this is a random question so with your dad's um kind of science background and your photographic memory like i mean you're you're saying that i'm not saying that sorry i'm saying that yeah that's that's a big caveat yeah but you've got this um memory that can well like could regurgitate things in exams and you're saying to get into a good school like it was it was important like would you say is there like I've asked this to a few people like I asked this to Paul Ainsworth I said is like is the food art magic or science and I've had various responses like what would you say like what would you say it is to you is it an art is it magic is it science like where is it so I don't think food is magic but I think how people react to food is magic that's the first thing i'd say about magic so i think that actually making food is not it is a combination of art and science because in a literal sense it is scientific like i need to heat something to x degree in order for it to be cooked and that's just in the way that we define it in it from on a semantic level we're talking about like the limitations of vocabulary here right so we have the words that we have to describe the processes that we have right and part of that is you know uh i need to like i said there are there are specific critical temperatures or there are like combination of ingredients that's going to yield this result and so on right and that's not like alchemical that's scientific it's not mysterious it's pretty finite right i mean at this level anyway i mean there are obviously dudes that are like off in the clouds doing their molecular shit which just has no i i mean fair enough but that's not where we are here um but so so that part of it is scientific but the creativity much like if you're curating an art space is the the rest of the process of like choosing the menu working with ingredients building up your knowledge as in you as an artist perhaps understands building materials or colors so if you're thinking about like an artist palette of colors to paint with right that's what I'm doing when I think about ingredients and work with suppliers and think about menus I'm like thinking about that using I'm using knowledge right and parts of a scientific understanding to curate an artistic experience or a creative experience right um and that so there is a crossover between all of those things the magic is for me the magic is like the response to hospitality because that's where like something happens that isn't that tangible and that's what so i have this a small non-sequitur about my dad my dad was a pure scientist right um but we recently had a baby girl she's 13 months old like when um i'm just trying to think well my wife actually got pregnant um just after he died but like i had had a conversation with him a few years ago about a friend of mine getting pregnant and he was like the thing is being pregnant is magic making a baby is actual magic so this is from like the hard line scientist and what he means by that is that there's a obviously like it's explainable like we could walk through the like cell replication and we could walk through reproduction on a cellular level and we could we could talk a lot about that but ultimately what it is is growing a human inside another human right it's completely bananas yeah and so like for him mr science to be like oh it's magic and i that's so for me like when i think about what magic is i always think about that story but also because there are things that are like in transient there are things that are like beyond explanation yeah i know and that's what i was trying to get to is like applying the science background of your dad with like what yeah because i thought they were actually different they were kind of opposing a lot of people think art and science are kind of opposing but i think there is a cross link between the two yeah and what your old man said about the you know having a baby like is the most technically scientific thing in the world but it's still magic do you know and i think and i think what you're saying applying this to the campbell arms and food is it's like the cooking is the science it's like you heat you know you make you cook something to this degree it's it's going to get repeated so hopefully unless yeah hopefully but then the magic is the reaction for each person so like when i was here on Saturday, you know, 15 people, probably more than that, like 50 people could all have the same either pork neck.

1:00:56Yeah. And my mate had the skate. there's loads of those dishes going out right but each and every person because of all unique experiences was experienced a different kind of magic i think that's really interesting yeah it's like um i interviewed tom straker and he was saying to me that uh you can get every every like so we just get line up 15 20 chefs yeah give them all the same ingredients like because each chef has a very unique different experience of the world they're going to create something different if they can put their authenticity yeah and take mark on it and i think that's the same with the reaction of people when they're having restaurants it's like sorry eating at restaurants is I came in after a couple of pints you know someone who may have come in with kids so their version of magic is so unique and I think that's what makes it so interesting what's the so you've talked a lot about kind of I think you worked at St.

1:01:47John, Rochelle Canteen so yeah so I did stages at St. John and Rochelle Canteen I did work there but very briefly but yeah yeah those are like the bulk of it yeah So then how did you get all those ideas and then begin to find your unique, we've talked about like why you're doing it in terms of that authentic why, but then you need an authentic kind of, this is the way we do things at the Canberra Arms. Like this has been over 10 years now. Right. There is a unique way of doing things. I've grown into that though, but yes. How did you initially begin to find it? Because I think lots of people, I really believe originality is what you're doing is I mean I say this quote all the time David Bowie's got a quote that says who's the most original fucker around?

1:02:36David Bowie right? The only art I'll ever study is the art I can steal from and what he means by that is he listens to like in the muse and then when you combine it to your own unique thing then you have something unique how did you get that? Well yeah I guess that's interesting because he's kind of talking about like building up but he's like you need some reference and you need some some context and you need it yeah so but my context was the places that worked really I mean and and my personal history with food which is a family history right so my grandmother used to host dinner parties she cooked she kept a kosher household but she was very up on like the latest food things and she was kind of constantly trying to like make delicious and interesting food for you know groups of people in her house in in stockholm where they lived um in an apartment and then my mom similarly like made fresh food and all of that so i had this kind of these influences going into it and then like when i started working um well i mean i worked in a restaurant in manchester called uh simply heathcoats which was kind of like quite off deans gate basically so it's between albert square and there's like roads that go down to deans gate shit the food used to be oh so shit it's now getting like a revival yeah yeah there's stuff happening there yeah for sure but like it was it was a sort of and then but really it happened when i went to london because i basically that place closed for refurbishment um and then they were going to reopen and like push for a michelin star that so it's going to like become fine dining and so i was like oh fuck i need to go and like work in some fine dining places so i basically at that point started doing stages like um and like some like the manoir um and like texture I went to and I went to the Leadbury and the vineyard which was an old two Michelin star place in Newbury and so I did like Michelin stuff and then I also at that point starved at Bread and Wine and like when I did that at St John Bread and Wine I'm talking about um I was like immediately like no this is my shit this is like exactly the kind of stuff that I like right yeah yes so like literally like I got there and like at the time James Lowe was the head chef obviously now Lyle's and Floor for a bit and Lee Tin and Black Axe Mangale was the sous chef so it's quite like a fucking all-star crew right and my literally my first job on my first day was um like butchering pig's heads with Lee I'd never seen a pig's head before and I was and he was like showing me how to take basically so that you can make a bath chaps like take the face off the skull is the but is the that's that's what it is right so we started doing that and I was like wow this is fucking cool this is like completely different to what I've experienced at the man well what was the feeling you were getting when you're ripping the skin off a pig which you didn't get which you weren't getting at the other places I think it was because I so I think there's a for me there's a definite appeal to the like the manual aspect of being a chef right and I think that like the directness and the contact with the ingredient is important to me but also like being able to see a building block like that from the beginning onwards is exciting to me like how are we going to make this into something and being allowed at that inexperienced point to be a part of that was quite a privilege yeah the and what was so it was james low and lead i can never say black axe man girl right but what was as you said it's all-star team what was why were those chefs like specifically and so as I'm trying to get how they kind of imprinted on you so but they sorry because I think yes sorry you're gonna say like what I was gonna say like why what was you those as you said all-star team why were they all-stars as opposed to me well I think because I first of all so first of all it was my first introduction to like very seasonal cookery um which I related to straight away because I was like this just makes sense to me like the fact is that you're using things that are out there best now james at the time was very into like the beginning it's the beginning of like foraging becoming a thing he was a kind of proto forage forager type guy and i had done a lot of that with my dad because his first degree was botany his he'd had a phd in botany so yeah so like we did a lot of like flower picking mushroom picking and so on so on as children and so it's just like for me it was just really weird that people in restaurants like to do it because i was like well this is something we do at home but like anyway so that was the seasonality the butchery side of it i immediately took to and like also the kind of simplicity and austerity of the saint john aesthetic was something that like made a lot of sense to me because it was like really you're you're what you're doing here is you're like distilling uh quality and you're saying to you're basically saying oh well i want this ingredient to be really good and i don't really want to adorn it that much i kind of just want to have you know i want a cold mutton salad with bread and green sauce because i've got leftover roast mutton and i need a pecan dressing and i'm going to use watercress because it's peppery as fuck and it grows in the uk right so it's like i don't need to dress this up any more than that because it's perfect as it is and that kind of thing which started for me there that is how i feel now right and that's so bringing it back to the cambo alarms and the confidence and all of that it's like that's why this place in my opinion is good because it's not the best restaurant all the time but there's this conviction total conviction for me that like simplicity is a good thing and keeping things basic maybe but like quality oriented and un undiluted like allowing the intrinsic quality of something to shine through is like how you make really delicious food yeah the undiluted thing is really interesting i know this is again something I picked up but I think there's another reason this the high ceilings in this place yeah kind of um a bit like what I was saying to Osh about the bodyguards have you seen yes yeah yeah I know what you mean yeah yes like fuck I was like this is mad like yeah but there's little things like that I picked up on but I was like there's the kind of the oomph of rawness you get I think the high ceilings here add huge grab to that kind of uh it just looks it looks at things and kind of shines a magnifying glass on kind of the brutal beautiful simplicity of the whole thing um the but then how did you said that those gave you the kind of the the um if we're applying this back to david bowie like the only art art i'll ever study is the art i can steal from right so that you you're with lee you're at saint john yeah you're kind of picking up on that simplicity and this one thing i asked margot is like how did you make rochelle different from saint john right because obviously she's her husband's first person right um how did you then and say right we want this to be similar to that but it's it's going to be mike and campbell arms it's going to be its own okay so it's on its own do you know what i mean yeah yeah so there's a middle step though which is that you know i went fromst john to the anchor and hope and like after some time and i worked at the anchor and hope and which is you know jonathan and rob used to work atst john so when they opened the anchor and hope which was like one of the earliest kind of proper gastropubs and i use that only in the sense of like a literal sense i eat a pub with actually nice food rather than like your chrome tapped managed bullshit which you get from all homogenous brewery offerings basically um so but they were seasonal butchery focused you know like really lovely ingredients and all of that right so the anchor and hope was a continuation of the saint john aesthetic but for me the pub setting was really appealing as well because it was like there are people drinking pints here and there are people kind of enjoying their space in a different way to the kind of rarefied hall of a restaurant you know it's more it seems more informal I like that you know that's an appeal that's appealing to me so that that continues for quite a few years because I worked there for three-ish years and um the canton for about the same maybe slightly longer at both I don't know and then in terms of defining the camp well arms I mean honestly at that point I was like well I just want to apply myself all these principles of seasonality and simplicity i want to take that but i i kind of also feel like there are other processes that i'm going to use so at that point it was really it was really like no it's just going to be like the same but i'm going to be slightly more detail focused so that was literally it so it's very simple so like i was like okay i'm gonna brine my own um bacon and i'm gonna smoke it in-house for example or i'll smoke my own so we were doing brining and smoking and we were doing curing of meats and stuff like that which is something i'd started to do at the canton it's not something that happened at the anchor so these are like small things and it's so absurd because I say these to you now knowing full well that's not how you define something but at that point in time I was like those are the kinds of things that will distinguish us and I think my cookery is just ever so slightly different in a way that like I do get kind of fixated on things being at that point I definitely did not so much now but then I did I was interested in the idea of like doing the best version of something according to my own recollection of what something is so what i mean by that is that in saint john and in the credo of saint john you would make a mayonnaise with extra virgin olive oil right which i hate like because to me that is not mayonnaise like when i think of mayonnaise i'm thinking about hellman's mayonnaise i'm thinking about white color and sort of sweet and acidic and like fatty but like when you make it with extra virgin olive oil which is like but that's a traditional way of making mayonnaise that's the original way of making mayonnaise is with extra virgin olive oil and so what you end up with is an emulsion that's like quite intensely bitter with the flavor of extra virgin olive oil and it's like this is so far removed from me for like what I think of as mayonnaise and I love mayonnaise like in a really shitty way I love like processed shit mayonnaise so but then I was like but if I like that then when I start my own business I should start making stuff that like emulates that in a way so I would like so my this is a small thing but like my mayonnaise recipe started to use a neutral oil and a different type of mustard and a different type of vinegar and something like that so that was an example of something where i was like okay well my personal experience it's like that's what i enjoy um some other things like for example we've got a rotisserie which we still use for chickens because i used to love getting rotisserie chickens from the supermarket and like buying a baguette and a salad and mayonnaise right exactly life's greatest simple pleasures that is right so exactly so i was like all right so i want to put that on the menu and we're going to leave it on the menu and it's still on the menu the whole every week you can get chicken and chips there with salad which is the least sophisticated thing on the menu but it's there for that reason and because for me it's like immediately pleasurable when I think about it but it's also something that's very accessible like people can so I think there was there's a few of these things coming together basically at that moment where I was sort of I don't know like I was I was open to the idea of like things being less uh restauranty and more kind of home style um but also quite like detail focus so i would take that approach but i would be a chef about it more than i wouldn't be now 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 perry'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 t goo rana i mean make the listers 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 brothers that are 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 brand in front of them then drop me a message my mate louis from local beer amazing beer 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absolutely insane And it will categorically Change your life It's just the sickest platform I use it all the time At Ireland That definitely links To the book Like the people Like cooking for people Like those Those kind of abilities To As you say That right kind of Level of chefiness Exactly but with the warmth of like, you know, going, one of life's greatest pleasures is a rotisserie stick and fucking hot sauce mayo.

1:15:51Yeah, yeah. Bang that in. So good. This may sound like a really stupid question, but I think some of the best questions are stupid, but like how important is being in Camberwell to this place? So I know we talked about at the beginning the scotch, the pork fat and scotch bonnet on toast. And you, I think you were saying like everywhere you go down here, like there's, there's some sort of, there's. There's a prevalence of scotch bonnets. But I think, you know, some places can't... So, for example, say we were to open your pub, this is called X pub, in like Chelsea, for example, or somewhere like, or even like, say, Islington.

1:16:31Yeah. Like, how are you kind of putting your tentacles into this area as a place and bringing it into the pub? Do you know what I mean? Sorry, I'm just laughing at the use of the word tentacles, but I'm into it. um so it's an interesting question because I'm an interloper here you know I didn't grow up in Camberwell um but I think that I had already opened Frank's um you know in 2008 um and so like I'd started working in Peckham then and living in Peckham um and kind of being around in the area and camberwell for me felt like i don't know there's an interesting like a lot of london there's like quite a diverse array of people and classes uh readily on show uh so for example like if you go behind the camberwell arms you'll get into like big estates but if you go across the street you're on camberwell grove which is like probably one of the fanciest uh georgian streets in london yeah right and this is like a lot of london right partially it's to do with the bombing in the second world war and partially it's to do with the natural growth of the city well wait what so what about the second world war bombings well because i think like patches of london were blown out weren't they they were destroyed they put the estates in right so they put new builds that's a real interesting um like say in ireland you've got the north and south divide right in dublin sorry uh where it's like literally i don't know which i think the south rich but like there's a quite clear fucking divide right um i was doing some work over there for a brand like you literally walk over this bridge and like the accent's different right yeah whereas like in London what's why it's unique is it's little it's all smattered into one yeah it's like it's like loads of uh towns that have grown into one another right and so London as a whole is a 2 ,000 year old metropolis okay it's been trading and living and breathing for a very long time surrounding the river you know the the portal of trade and so on right but in terms of like how we talk about London we talk about where things are from like Camberwell, Peckham, New Cross right and they're all different towns right along this street along the a2 going out to dover but like they are just like i mean it's geographically we're talking about like five ten minutes you know further along and so there isn't necessarily like very clear identities but often there is kind of slightly separate feeling that you can kind of pick up on yeah because it's like like the old palpable obvious example is somewhere like like the obvious would be because it's just such a juxtaposition would be like chelsea versus camberwell do you know what i mean like do you do but that is like a clear like there's a wealth difference there for sure but like and that creates a different vibe but like i think also camberwell for me feels like it and has always felt like this that it has like a very clear sense of identity and so like whether or not i was feeding into that directly by like pulling things from the identity of camberwell or whether it was resonating with me and felt like something that I had to pay heed to, you know, that's maybe more realistic.

1:19:29Because the fact is, if I was going to be a neighborhood operator here, I had to like fit into Camberwell. And I don't know that at the beginning, I don't know that I aimed for that in any other way than kind of bringing part of my own authenticity to it, which I kind of already touched on. And I think that was my armor in a way. That was my strategy was like, well, if I just try hard to make delicious food in this spot eventually i'll be part of the you know i'll be accepted yeah and also i think osh talked about that as he said like same person but he talked about the difference between mayfair and soho he said like two different countries yeah and now he kind of oozed and grooved his kind of what he was wet literally what he's wearing and stuff changed and i think that that is you can still be your authentic self but kind of ply or mold into the area that's all about franks i read somewhere that you said like you were a precocious twat which i love that because so bold you've left uni um sat like not sacked off but i decided to park biology and go into food i think it would be 20 or 25 20 that is mad yeah like like talk to me about the genesis of frank so you got europe's best bar didn't it last year yeah which is sick um also i mean yeah it's stupid it's open more days now it's open wednesday to sunday 11 till 11 yeah okay so then you're yeah talk to me about the sort of of of frank's right and then i think i read somewhere that you know you hadn't even like didn't know what tax was and stuff like that like sure but i can't talk about that anymore because the last time i talked about that i got in trouble for talking about it so we won't talk about that but i can i can i can allude to it so yeah yeah but i suppose my question is is why was being a precocious that's funny I mean I think because I was more confident than I deserved to be and probably a bit entitled because of a relatively privileged upbringing which is something that is not a good characteristic that I've tried hard to like move away from but at the time was useful to me in terms of believing that I could do something which I definitely didn't know how to do but I was willing to kind of blag it in a way trying to just like fucking well we're gonna we're gonna do it we're gonna we're gonna see what happens and that approach is completely insane like it's suicide if you're like unless you're willing to put the hours in and you've got enough conviction at the time to carry it off and I did I think at the time and I also put the fucking hours in I mean like like I said I was working every single day from morning till night um but how did you get people to like what was the vision when you like so okay so just to be clear about this so frank's uh it's it's not like the the overall idea doesn't come from me right but i mean i'm a partner in it from the beginning but i i was focused on the food and like frank and i built the bar together but the spec and the idea came from our other partners so at the time hannah barry who uh owns the hannah barry gallery in peckham and is a very important figure in art in London now um and he's our landlord at Frank's still um she had a sculpture exhibition on the roof of the car park in Peckham which had pre-existed so it was it was there I think for at least one maybe two years ahead of Frank's and then she met Frank and or knew Frank and was asking Frank about Frank was also working at the Anchor and Hope with me at that time and sometimes working for his dad in his deli in Vauxhall and what's the deli?

1:23:05Italo i know yeah yeah yeah yeah oh nice yeah yeah yeah so charlie boxer uh that's his daily that's frank's dad basically right so anyway they were like hannah was like oh well we want uh we want like a museum cafe right that was the idea so as in you know what i'm talking about like if you go to like the tate or something like that and there is a refectory style cafe where you're getting probably quite shit food and you know some it's usually it's usually operated by like some huge corporation like compass or something like that which is like some you know a global catering company that has like an offering that fits into that that can be managed from a distance right exactly so but hannah was like no i don't want that but i want i want that but i want it done properly right so the idea was like refreshments for people visiting the sculpture exhibition and um frank at the time you know was working at the anchor but kind of was interested in the idea of like we i think so we were we wanted sponsorship from campari for one so we wanted to get our sponsorship we want to get sponsorship that's like so bold that's what i'm trying to get it's like that's so fucking bold at that age but i suppose that's that's the power but like also we worked so because the anchor is is saint john adjacent like the negroni for example was like part of the zeitgeist in that place of work as was fernet branca right and those things is that the anchor link to saint john well so as in yeah jonathan and rob worked at saint john for years jonathan was the head chef of saint john for quite a few years right right so they're not partners there but yes that yeah yeah yeah okay yeah because that's why earlier when i was talking about the extension of it is like that it's like a pub version of saint john right that's what it was at that time anyway um so yeah so like the kind of like negronis for example like now obviously completely ubiquitous but like it sort of felt like at the time that it was something that we enjoyed that wasn't that cool i guess or known about um and so when and frank i think was interested i mean you have to talk to him about this but i feel like he was he liked the idea of like riviera style chic and so like he his drinks offering was kind of along those lines and then the the the space the like building was designed by paloma gormley and lettuce drake to fledgling architects in training at that point they were slightly older than me but only by like they would say like i don't know exactly how old they were maybe like 21 22 as in that they would in training literally so they weren't fully uh you know qualified or anything like that far from it yeah um but they designed this mad structure that was built out of scaff boards that could be like put up like a tent and then disassembled at the end of the year so like that added to it and then frank's drinks offering and then my food offering which was basically a product of what i could do that i knew that i could make that would fit into a saint john sort of aesthetic because i was very influenced by that but like work around a barbecue so like we had sardines coming off the barbecue and I had like grilled corn with smoked paprika and butter and I had like lamb leg that was just barbecued and served sliced as it was tomatoes and sea salt I mean it was really basic like in the first year but that kind of stripped back aesthetic kind of fitted in with the slightly arty uh kind of part to it as well you know yeah it's like the hodgepodge of like like all those different people you've yeah that's what I feel like when I'm um my mate lives in in Peck and when I come through here is it feels like there's the hodgepodge is the word right lots of different things melting in together yeah and the kind of the summation of that is with Frank's of like you've got you know you yourself Frank this um yeah the architect architect the two younger architects mix it all together and like that can create kind of right kind of constraint breeds yeah well kind of constraint breeds it was constraint like certainly because I think also it was like what can we actually do that we know that we can do so that's constraint because it's like we only have a certain amount of knowledge and experience at this point right so how can I actually pull this off I have to make something that so I don't have any chefs working for me everyone in my kitchen was an art student on summer holidays so there was no like I was the only chef and I'd only been a chef for like a year right working in kitchens so you know whether you would call me a chef at that point I don't know I don't know if I would have called myself a chef I mean in some ways yeah but like direction wise yes experience wise no but so I know we kind of none of this goes in any sort of chronological order but we talked about like the kind of the refining redefining yourself when you had the breakdown and I think at ultimate there's levels there is a point in time where you do need to focus on the work prism if you're trying to get somewhere like if you want to be a hippie dippy and you know like live in a camper van maybe not but if you're trying to get somewhere you need that you need to fucking look for that work prism for a period of time you're 20 you've left uni you've got you've had a bit of experience what are you like you're working at the anchor and hope you're like working basically double shifts doing the saturday sunday friday yeah like what are you saying to yourself at that what's mike's like what's the vision you had when you're like no vision just work that's it no vision no just like this is a good idea keep doing it that was it now when i think about it it's so mental because like someone once told me that you shouldn't go into a business without knowing how to get out of it and like they told me that like in the last sort of two or three years right and I was like that makes loads of sense but like I I didn't think about any of that stuff we didn't have a company you know and we didn't the way that it was organized was I mean it was like spit and sawdust man there was like there was nothing holding it together apart from like the will of like six people who thought it was a good idea that that is the genius of it yeah right it's so fucking genius it's like just i know retrospectively like retrospects you know you can post rationalize things but i think retrospects yeah you can do all that was meant to work but there is something about uh you know i think a lot of people say kind of like pirates as as like a food drink startup or like a brand brand like there's a there's this mentality of like just six people really believing in something yeah like you can't like i think grit and determination will trump any level of intelligence well and like frank's is a really good example of that because like certainly from my perspective i did not know how to do that job like on paper if you had described it to someone they would have been like well no like i'm not hiring him to be the head chef of a new rooftop bar in peckham and giving him a creative remit yeah like he's been a chef for a year he's an idiot like he's just a precocious knobhead right and like i think that that the whole of franks is like that like if you explain what it is to a bank manager at the beginning they're like laughing you out of the bank you know it doesn't make any sense but like from a business perspective over the years you know it's been a it's been a great business it's been super busy at times and it like to like yeah i think i've told this story before but like the original business plan was very simple you know frank wrote something along the lines of like if 30 people come on the weekend you know we'll break even and only one person kind of said but what are you going to do if you're busy and i think it was just like well we're not going to be busy because we're in a car park in peckham and like you have to get a lift that stinks of piss and like there's crackheads everywhere and stuff like that it's like no one is going to come to this and like the first weekend there was a heat wave and we had like two or three hundred people there on the first day and it was like whoa this is crazy and now the capacity is a thousand you know which is mental and there's a queue on a hot day so but that comes from that original authenticity what you've described as like grit but like this thing of having six people who like are out of their depth but like really believe in something just pushing towards making it work and then and that's to me when I go to Frank's now I still feel that like to me it still feels like that and that's because there is this kind of authentic thing you couldn't create Frank's artificially you can't just pick up bits of it bottle it and take it somewhere else it's not Frank's then it's something else and there are so many rooftop bars in London and so many of them are just homogenous bullshit you know yeah it's so interesting it's almost like that is what we know we started the question of like how does how important is the camp is camberwell in the camberwell arms or peckham i know they're both kind of they're not the same but they're similar but also i suppose frank's is a kind of the darling example of that in terms of like the hodgepodge of different people working together and as you say you can't you can't put it in a bit you can't read frank's in a business book so like as in at the time you wouldn't be okay that's going to work it's a car park you said fucking crackheads on smack everywhere like stinks of piss but like you can make it work um a few more things then we'll wrap this up mate but um would love to go back to your old man and this botanist botany botany um that seems really interesting and it's kind of sparks my curiosity like talk to me about that that and what were you picking and yeah because obviously now foraging is now like so like not even in vogue like i think it's not not good it's maybe post we're in a post foraging era yeah like it's weird i interviewed um tommy banks up in yorkshire yeah he's got a guy he's like full-time as a forager yeah so they can get access to all these weird ingredients and i'm like then he showed me like his labs like not labs so they're basically yeah labs makes it sound like it's some natural shit it's not that it's like a shed basically yeah yeah but um like all these crazy fucking ingredients that i've just never seen before i was like and they've done all sorts of weird things to it um but i'd love to kind of go back to way before that with your old man like how was he well so like like mushrooms are the best example like because we just used to i mean he he we just it was a thing like autumn came around and we'd be out in the woods picking mushrooms and he had his spots because you know with mushrooms when you like cut them rather than pick them they regrow in the same spot every year um so you know if you've got your spot where like something is growing like there used to be this beech tree that had fallen I think they have to be on the ground for like three to five years before they'll start producing mushrooms but we used to go and pick these oyster mushrooms in the same spot like pretty much like clockwork like every year where is this on Wimbledon Common so like I grew up in Wimbledon and so we'd go on Wimbledon Common and pick these oyster mushrooms but then also like we would be wandering around and constantly he would be like like going off path and like looking for uh penny buns it's like you know seps um but also chanterelles and girolles and various other things like this and we were and also we would talk about mushrooms that you can't eat and so on so we would like have this kind of ongoing narrative of like species in the woods that you'd be discussing whilst you were walking because that was what he was fascinated by yeah that's mad also i think what there's definitely something in there about kind of having the path and going going off the path if you were to like let's link your dad to your book and then we can wrap this up but like so cooking for people like if you're if you're to cook something for your dad tonight from that book like what would you what do you think you'd go with out of all those well it's a good yeah it's a good question i mean there is a menu in the book where i talk a bit about him teaching me to fish um and i think there's a the recipe is like a crab salad basically with soda bread um and i'll probably make that so it's essentially like a it's like there's potatoes white and brown crab meat mayonnaise lots of herbs and lettuce and that's the salad and then we it's served with soda bread um which is like spread very thickly with butter like my dad used to have a lot of butter uh sort of teeth mark level thickness um so yeah probably something like that i think was what i would say because he loved i mean he he loved crap you know what's interesting about my dad though is that he was in the air force and he when he was like 20 because he was alive when conscription was still a thing so this was post second world war but he you know he did his military service and he went running at night and he hit a barrier um at the front of the base because the lights went on and he fell backwards and cracked his skull and actually he had quite a poor sense of smell and therefore quite a poor sense of taste and so like but he loved giving feedback about food and we all just accepted the fact that like we knew that he couldn't really taste or smell things but like he would always want his fucking two pence um but yeah so something something's like because crab's quite sweet and it has a relatively like strong and like intrinsically uh it's it's it flavor is very well defined as crab so that's something that he would have been able to pick up on and the textures of a salad like that would have been enjoyable to him so yeah do you think the palate can be like how scientific do you think that is or like is it just is it a like yeah you is it something you just train or is it do you know what i don't know i feel like because i only have my own experience palate wise so i don't know what your palate's like and i don't know what anyone else's is like so for me like i i know that i've got a very sensitive sense of smell in terms of like smell is really important to me and like if something smells good it's probably gonna taste good um and i think beyond that i think because people i'm very interested in it because i think the idea of like people enjoying flavors in a different way you know i think there is science to it in as much as like there are certain like genetic combinations that lead people to taste in a specific way for example coriander is coriander is a great example where like there are a certain set of people that have a gene that makes coriander taste like soap whereas for other people it's this kind of like fragrant herb and similarly I think bitterness there are people that can taste bitterness and people that can't genetically um and so what is it like to be on the other side of that you know like if you can't taste bitterness how do bitter things taste I think it links back to you know what we're saying each so we could create say you've um 15 of those pork neck things go out because of each palate that that creates the unique moment of magic right um one thing i realized i just got i wanted to ask you about and um it could be delicate so tell me to fuck off right but i remember you saying that there was quite a lot of partners involved at the early some of the early stages um and i think people listening to this have partners and it can go like i think i don't know what you specifically said but it can go quite pear-shaped to say the least um what's your relationship been like with with partners over the years and it was any like how's that worked well so like i am a partner and owner in two businesses and in both of those businesses i've been involved in buying out the original partners with new partners so that's a kind of unique uh position in a way because not everybody would go through a buyout in their lifetime whereas i've done two wait so yeah so how does that actually work so like so you basically like what we want to keep this yeah so like well i'm gonna go and find two other people to get the money uh yeah kind of yeah kind of yeah so i think basically like um the mechanic is like or the mechanism is like uh a share purchase and sale um so there's money involved and so on with that but and there's there's a there's yeah there's a lot of kind of legal aspect to it but like the big thing about it is that you know there's a distinct emotional involvement at this level of business and especially for someone like me so it was quite quite tricky both times some of my most intense like business experience has been like during those moments where we were going through a buyout because it really feels like a sort of super emotional relationship breakup where like you're kind of separating from someone that there's been good parts of the relationship with, but that in the main, you know it's wrong and you have to stop it.

1:39:24What did you know was wrong? Like what was the calling to say, fuck, I need to take this into my own hands? So I think like with Frank's, I think it was the fact that Frank and I felt like as the operators, the hospitality operators, like we should be allowed to like operate in a way that was like practical and uh i think that at that moment it felt like the original six people were kind of not aligned in like their goal for what the space should be um and so it kind of came to a head where it felt like frank and i wanted to continue running it and because we were doing the day-to-day that was it felt like we could move for that and we ended up in a sort of emotional but not totally acrimonious split and we ended up bringing another partner in um are you looking at to turbo charge your brand to take it to another level save money save energy save stress save time well i've got the perfect thing for you i am delighted to announce that hc brands formerly hc consulting my boy harry clark has just launched a commercial growth accelerator program designed specifically for challenger food and drink brands and you can upskill your commercial team they've got so many modules you can hand pick them we can do the full shebang you're going to save hours of research you're going to get the tools to turbocharge your growth get better clarity on your brand's objectives and directions and look harry's worked with some amazing brands holy moly islands savile and rooted drinks he's really helped me with a strategy for hungry yeah if you're looking turbocharger brand link in the show notes and you're going to be able to do that easy peasy lemon squeezy but i suppose for other people is like how do you is there anything you could speak to about how to navigate those really like tumultuous um as you say sometimes acrimonious kind of business as you say it's a fucking breakup really and truly i don't know if i'm the best person to ask man because i took it pretty hard i mean like the breakup here was really difficult like so I think the Campbell Arms you know so my original partners there were four others and I felt unsupported by them in the way that I was used to being supported by Frank specifically at Frank's and so I think to them they weren't expecting to give me the level of support that I was expecting and that created an issue and so when they came to me and suggested that you know maybe you'd be happier if we like didn't work here um i was like yeah actually that's something i've been thinking about the whole time and so it felt like really right but then through the process they were very they were a lot older than us and i think a lot more savvy and what ended up happening was james and frank my partners from frank and i you know used money from frank's to buy this business and i think at the time by candlewell yeah at the time overpaid for it um But because we didn't really know what we were doing, I felt afterwards like the other guys took advantage of me a little bit because I was so involved in it and I was so young.

1:42:32And I expected them to be nicer about it. But the reality is that they just... How old were you at this point? So it was in 2016. So yes, I was 27. Yeah. And that was my second buyout because Franks had happened before that. so um but yeah so it was it was really difficult because also these guys were my mentors I'd worked in their restaurants and like worked with them and so I felt let down by them but also they were just doing something they were just being business guys about it and I was being an emotional young person attached to a business and that's really difficult so I think the best advice I could give is remembering that like business is business and life is separate and so like although your emotions are intrinsically attached sometimes to things that you're close to the reality is that like business is just going to happen around you and the structures of business exist for a reason which is kind of to make these sorts of things unemotional you know yeah i think one of the key kind of things to bubble out of today is the kind of the two prisms the personal prism and the business prism i think when you're young the two are and i think i think that's a good thing you need that fucking right i'm i'm gonna find my identity yeah i interviewed a guy who wrote a book called the status game fucking interesting guy and he goes you you get what you derive you've derived identity from status so like go and do the thing that's going to give you the status to a point but then obviously you need to kind of backtrack on that but then the um yeah how you can separate those two so just the final thing because i think one thing we haven't really touched upon is how you've been and this has been going for 10 years which in today's climate is just like that's mad.

1:44:09That's such a fucking achievement. Thank you. Especially when you've got, well, you've got, as we've detailed today, you've got Franks, you've had a mental breakdown, you've got a kid, you've lost your old man, like all sorts. What is, those 10 years have been tumultuous. What are you trying to take into, say, the next 10, 20 years? So this becomes like a St. John, if we want to really link it all together. I mean, I think that St. John has a brilliant clarity of aesthetic and that's what makes it appealing. It's that and the consistency. so I think and I don't actually necessarily mean the consistency of the quality and that's not meant as a dig but what I mean is the consistency of the aesthetic right it's like they have stuck to their guns it's like that's how they operate and that's what's appealing to a lot of people around the world right the Camberwell Arms will never achieve that kind of like global status but what it can do is it can be considered as somewhere that will be consistently good where you will have a good time.

1:45:04And I think knowing that that's something that I know how to do, makes me feel confident about the next 10 years because I don't need to struggle to get to that point anymore because I'm already there. So I think like being confident about that makes my life so much easier because up till this point, it was a struggle to get to that point. So you're now confident that you kind of know how to keep this being as good as it is. I know what I know and I know that I'm doing it now. and I know that I like what it is now and those things all together make me feel confident about continuing to do that into the future and I think the other thing is like being less driven by growth like I for years wanted to open loads of sites and do loads of new shit which is like the perennial thing for people in London but the reality is that I don't think I would care if I'd never opened something else.

1:45:54That's another fucking interesting point because there's a kind of maniacal obsession with with growth didn't you try and do a pizza place yes we did yeah we opened with that it was i mean it was great but it was just it just didn't work like we opened it was that when you were like in the growth mindset yeah yeah definitely well so actually that was post breakdown but like so you said you'd had taken a load of antidepressants i was like i was like taking a really high dose of antidepressants and i was like really overly optimistic about everything in a kind of unreasonable way bouncy castle what does that feel it just feels like everything's fine all the time and like that's you need that if you're really depressed suicidal anxious you know you need to start to stabilize in that way right but like then when you're not that it's like well life isn't like that you know there's ups and downs man like you've got to and you've got to be able to like tolerate the flex you know so and that's like that's that's like curing depression it's like how you tolerating the flex yeah love that's such a great way of putting it yeah um you know because there are it's okay to be stressed but like just how much stress and so on right so anyway suffering as well like the stress and the suffering right the yeah they're two separate things but i think people think they're the same thing yeah right so anyway so um where are we we were talking about mike so mike's was a pizza shop and it was a really great idea to do something which is interesting because now pizza's having this massive resurgence in london where there's like lots of different styles of pizza and like blah blah blah and actually at the time it was a very much like sourdough dictated like it was all kind of franco manca influenced like neapolitan style pizza has to be authentic and like we actually wanted to make roman style pizza uh you know square pizzas cooked in a tray very light and crispy lots of toppings very different the thing is i'm not a pizza chef and as an idea it was great but it wasn't really i don't think it really was thought through in the same way that we had thought through this for example and i think like i was less tolerant of the idea of carrying on through the hardship because the cambo alarms certainly went through um loss making periods and um hasn't been like the most profitable business ever like for for you know a long swathe of its existence and it isn't that it's super profitable now but it's like certainly you know it's a reasonable business um but like i think with mike's it was just an example of like imagining that you can just apply your skill set to a different problem and like that may it could it can work and like they're asked like we smashed it we opened we got a fucking like 10 out of like nine out of 10 review in the guardian like in week one we won the national best pizza at the national pizza awards like we like we smashed it right and and we but what actually happened was that we had big staffing issues that were like partly to do with the like cultural aspects of like employing pizza chefs and partly to do with what do you mean the cultural aspect well like the first guy that we hired was a bit older and culturally i think he well i mean the reason that he left so basically he left after um sort of a few months right and he was like a core aspect of it because i didn't have any understanding of like the pizza dough itself which is the critical thing so i needed this person and that kind of dependency is not the way to operate a restaurant right for me anyway because because then because if they leave you're fucked right with you yeah of course so like and the staff you've got have know what they know from learning from that person but like unless they you know they're not the same as that person that has that knowledge which is what i am here do you know what i mean so okay so yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so but he was making really inappropriate comments uh like some kind of racially inappropriate some kind of sexually inappropriate and I was informed of this and did decided to do something about it talk to him about it and was like you know we need to remedy this you can't be talking like that slash you need to apologize for the things that you've said and in the phone call he was like yeah okay fine and then that night he sent me a really long aggressive email that was like fuck you I'm not doing what you say you're an idiot blah blah blah and I'm not coming to work, you know, from tomorrow.

1:50:05And I was like, oh, fuck, this is mental. The stress level is just fucking skyrocketing. And then we went through this period of instability where the product suffered and like we started to get less busy. And then we hired someone else who was really good. But then by the time that happened, the COVID staffing situation was happening. And as people were leaving, we couldn't rehire people to the point where we had two people in the team, a full-time restaurant with two chefs and we couldn't hire anyone else. and it just and we were losing money and i just kind of got to the point where i was just like please make it stop like and i was so relieved when we did but yeah that was an example of like feeling like it's not that growth is inherently bad it's just not necessary always well and also there's other ways to grow in terms of like not necessarily it's getting more people to this one site or like exactly or doing more events in this exactly and that's exactly yeah or writing a book you know these are all things that are like new aspects of professional life yeah or in other ways having a baby spending more time at home you know enjoying my actual life you know that's growth as well what with in terms of the stress like you feel like i feel like now you've got these things in place where it's like bubbling up and you can like release the tap it just what are some of those things you put in place now that like say mateys being really abusive in your pizza joint like instead of going kind of a cataclysmic nightmare in your head like Like, how do you kind of open the valve?

1:51:31Well, I think, so there's like a bigger structure, which is kind of more to do with like exercising regularly, deadlifting, you know, to bring it back to that. But like, yeah, so I'd say like regular exercise is really important for me. I still take antidepressants, although a different one to that point, I went cold turkey, which by the way, was a terrible thing to do on a specific kind of antidepressant. You're not meant to do that. No, you're not. and the withdrawal was like awful and really extensive because there's a bounce back period oh really okay interesting i didn't know that yeah so but then i so i do still take an antidepressant i take a very low dose of like a really commonly available antidepressant which is for me is like almost a placebo and as far as it's stabilizing but helpful um so there's those kinds of and i do therapy once a week as well and these are like ongoing so these are like ongoing structural things i've built into my life that help me to try and keep an even keel and help me to compartmentalize things right but I think the other thing is just like real and this was a realization that came post breakdown but something that I certainly live by which is that you know these things just aren't that important like the fact is that those major stresses at work like if you've lost a parent or you've had a child like that's perspective right because at that point you're like okay what's important to me because actually work doesn't come that high up on that And this is from a serial work guy who loves his businesses and so on and so on.

1:52:59And like that allows me to be like to float across difficulty in a way that I never used to be. I'm not saying I don't get stressed and I don't get, you know, really involved in stuff that I don't need to anymore. But in general, that kind of perspective has been super helpful for me in trying to like keep separate from the small stuff. Well, that's it. And I think it's a perfect place to end. but like what you said two things handle the flex yeah in and then also float over difficulty and i think the two prisms of like so many people listening to this are listening to this to get their business prism better yeah and what i've taken this is kind of i feel like i'm in the fucking therapy chair mate so i appreciate you helping me with this but it's actually like well when are you going to turn around and focus on that because that's if you as you said if you're not feeling good how can that feel good yeah if you can't look after yourself how can you look after someone else.

1:53:52Mike, thank you so much, mate. I fucking love that. It's been a pleasure. Wicked. Thank you so, so much for listening to the podcast. I really, really do appreciate it. If you liked that episode, only if you liked it, please do give it five stars, subscribe, tell all your friends, families, foes, next door, but one, cat, dog, whatever. Please tell everyone about this podcast. It means the world to me. And I really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of challenger food and drink brands please do hit me up on linkedin search dan pope and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands thank you so much