The Fat Duck & The Devonshire Head Chef - The MOST Creative Podcast I’ve EVER Recorded

44:10And I think he said, oh, you know, we're actually quite different, but actually he's more Heston than I am. And I'm like, whoa. Wait, wait, sorry, sorry. He was saying this to the interview bloke. Yeah, so we're sitting there and he's like, well, he's probably more Heston than I am. By himself. But we're different but similar. It's a very, I think you call it an oxymoron, don't you, or something like that. It's like, I was like, oh, hold on a minute. I think we're actually quite different. But if you put us in two different, completely different rooms with the same stuff and say, try and create something from this, I don't think we'd be a million miles away.

44:42We might go about it a slightly different way. Yeah, how so? I mean, I'll probably be thinking more on this sort of practicality side of how I'm going to deliver it because I don't want to go down a garden path. and like, yeah, it's amazing, but it's completely irrelevantly expensive that makes no commercial sense. But also, how are we going to make 100 a day? So I think everyone's different, right? Not two people on the planet are the same. Exactly, yeah. But you can have this lovely, diverse approach, but it's in a similar sort of collective way forward. So it's hard to say. I mean, at the end of the day, whether it's any of the restaurants I've worked at or been part of launching or here, I just want people to have a great time and come in and go, that was really, really brilliant.

45:40In the case of here, anything that people enjoy, some people love the sticky toffee pudding. Some people love the lamb chops with the green sauce. some people think it's the best steak and chips they've ever had they love our chips they're not they're how we want our chips to be there's no do you see what i mean it's yeah different things do different things to different people i met a lady yesterday on the way out and um sujan the the the gm said oh this is ashley's you know it's one of the the co-founders and the chef part i said oh it's absolutely amazing i've wanted to come here for so long I had sticky toffee pudding.

46:21I brought my mum. She's going back to Norway tomorrow. And, you know, we ended up sitting next to some people from my favourite band. And I'm like, I wouldn't even know who these people are. Her experience is going to be very different than the next person that comes through the door for a completely different reason. You know, I just love it. I love the simplicity of it. But everything tastes great. It's simple stuff. Three lamb chops on a plate, cooked over embers that we make in the kiln. You know, there's a lot of detail in there. Lamb chops, for example, will take the lamb fat, render it down, and then cold-infused mint leaves into the lamb fat overnight, literally just before serving after they've been on the grill.

47:04A little lick of this sort of lamb fat and mint oil on top, a little bit of seasoning, job done. And then you have this multi, you have this quite complex, it's almost like mint sauce but without being overly minty, but there's no mint sauce anywhere. it's just like oh my god it's just a lamb chop on a plate do you see what i mean it's yeah i love this it's it's linking back to this it's like that i think from what i'm picking up from you yeah um your instead of like question everything yours is this emotional residue thing i think really focusing on that that end experience whether it's someone in norway or you know and what i love is the sticky toffee pudding is this this one thing yeah that you've created with your soul but you know as i say today i don't know how many covers you do a day but like there'll be 160 different people going with a slightly different flavor and texture of emotional residue and i think that is just as an experience as an experience is a stunning thing um i want to talk about race cars and your son ballet oh yeah i love that sort of uh beautiful juxtaposition because your son's in the role role ballet school yeah school yeah and i'd love to know what he's actually like his is obviously for this that's like the hardest thing to get into right this extraordinary um uh like high standards is what's he taught you do you think that's made you a better chef or a better leader or a better person um i think i think it's been a a real eye-opener watching someone so young you know like he he started off just a local dance school after school then he went and auditioned to be a junior associate at the royal ballet to come up every saturday what's a junior so so so it's like you don't live or board there you're not full time right it was like eight or nine ten years old right yeah yeah yeah so emma my wife she she's really he's 15 okay sick yeah so um every weekend emma would bring him up to the class on saturday morning, a good three hours, at the highest level training for young kids.

49:09And that's like your football academy. You can kind of see who's got it, who's going to physically make it, who's got the work ethic and the right mentality. I guess they are born with it to a certain extent, but they see what they're shown a lot of the time by their parents, I guess. We both really work really hard, and I think that's a really nice quality that both Max and Sophia, my daughter, who's two years younger, she's really super academic, very neat and tidy, is incredible with animals and is just the nicest little human being. She's just so lovely. How old is she? She's 13. And then Max is highly strung, obsessive about anything which can be a very dangerous thing right if he loves something that's it he's all in i'm i'm similar emma my wife is similar yeah you know anything i do i'm 100 can't do 99 yeah yeah and he's had to work really really hard um there are things that are beyond your control when it comes to that sort of elite training how so i mean i'm no ballet dancer obviously yeah yeah neither am i mate and they look at your the physicality of your parents his grandparents height build like the whole thing and i'm thinking christ they don't like why would they look at that like because they need to know what your potential is as a as a physical human like how your bones going to grow have your parents had problems with knees or and anything it's wild yeah yeah so that's out of everyone's control really yeah and then you've got the work ethic and the mentality and you know for him in particular now he's at boarding school at the Royal Ballet and it's 9 ,000 applicants down to 12 for the year in boys and he managed to get in 9 ,000 to 12 yeah from around the world yeah what yeah and this was during Covid as well yeah yeah yeah it's a bit of a nightmare yeah and um so he got in and you get three years the first three years in school and then in that third year they spend the whole time worrying about getting assessed out so if I say you're going to get assessed out and you're worrying about that it's quite a negative thing so when you say assessed out as in So your year 10 and 11, which is in year 10 now, last two years, they basically cull the weaker.

52:01Okay, sorry, I'm with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with you. Now, physically, you might be not quite right. Not very PC these days, but that's just the reality of it. You might not be growing right. You might have injury-prone things that your body cannot take it. And then you're living in that third year of school, thinking I might fail getting through to the next one and when you're when you're 12 years old 13 years old you don't have the ability to pressure to deal with that so Emma has worked massively hard and she she's actually retrading as counsellor now she was in tv production for years and years then we had the children now she's going back as a counsellor so she's worked really hard on his mental ability to deal with stuff at very, very young.

52:52Most adults couldn't deal with it, right? Yeah, so what are some of those? Because this is probably what he's teaching. So if I tell you, you know, you might fail at the end of this year, you're going to be thinking, shit, I'm going to fail. That's horrible. The whole mentality of this was, well, actually, I'm going to get in. There's two different ways you can approach this mentally. You can be scared of failure or you're going to go, I'm going to go for it because I'm going to get in. I'm going to get there. And I'm quite into my cars and I love driving. I love racing and watching car racing, Formula One.

53:26Tried to get him into it for years. Just not bothered whatsoever. Then the magical year where Lewis controversially lost the title to some bigger things at play with race control. And you had, what was he called? Drive to Survive. he switched on to now he's obsessed with it and he said to me the other day I don't want to be a principal dancer but when I'm retired from that I want to be a Formula 1 team boss and he's like that's how his mind works I want to be that so that's what I'm going to go and do What are the parallels you think between ballet and racing cars and service would you say? I would say the two elements you've got this micro the ability to look at things in macro like is this coming from the from from a chef the way a chef's mind would work not all of them obviously yeah some more than others well i'm going to break this down i'm going to really look absolutely everything so i'm going to get everything out of this to create the best experience at the final end right of a dish formula one how can i I'm going to get every little minute percent performance consistency because there's no point having the fastest car that breaks down all the time.

54:50Sure. There's no point having something that only works one out of three. Do you see what I mean? There's the similarity there. You need that race car to make it through the race, be the fastest one, with the best driver that's tuned into it. Yeah. We need the best recipes that are going to be able to be done by your team every time. We'll have 550 people in today for food upstairs in the restaurant over three and a half floors. I need everyone's experience to be as consistently brilliant as we intend every single time. And you've got to minimalise the times where we get it wrong or we don't meet the expectation.

55:29But then when you come to service... you make things right in every single way that you can so that when someone leaves, they've had the best experience or you've recovered it or you've made it even better than it was going to be or and so from a ballet not being a ballet dancer but a performer you've got to give that emotional you've got to draw people into what they're seeing whether you're a ballet dancer on a stage you're a you're a singer songwriter you're an artist you're a All of those things, you've really got to bring them in with all of that detail and connection to what you do. There's a lot of parallel things.

56:14You've got to – why I came to the Formula One one was when he's had really hard times and you don't know how to take criticism, you don't go there and you're the best ballet dancer in the world. They want to know you're the best person to listen to what I'm saying so you become the best version of yourself. at such a young age mate taking that on man but you know what the brilliant thing is he would he would be really upset or disappointed or downed sometimes and he would got to the point where he would go what would Lewis Hamilton do wow and I was like that's amazing yes you know and I can't wait to tell Lewis one day yeah hopefully he'll come in I'd have cooked for him before what did you cook for him oh he well he did come to the Fat Dark originally yeah so I met him there then he came to our dinner by Heston that we had in Melbourne and he was going through his vegan stage I don't know what stage he's at at the moment we're not terribly it's mad all these vegans are now scoffing meat we're not terribly vegan here so by the way it's 12 we want to just yeah so we'll sort some food out yeah yeah yeah so yeah so we did a menu for him vegan menu and then he was like oh it's so good I'm going to come back tomorrow so it was the Formula One in Melbourne that week they came three nights in a row and we're like oh no it's so much work but we're actually you know what let's let's do it let's make sure he's not eating the same thing every night and how did you change it like what are the different dishes we just got together as six of us and went right what could we use we were quite good with vegetarian and vegan anyway to have an offer that you know you're not going to come three nights in a row so when you come three nights in a row you're like oh my god what are we going to do now so we'll use that that way we'll finish that that way we'll steer that into this dish that'll go with a broth of this and let's send someone out and go and pick this up from a friend up the road because we know they use that yeah so all of those things so you know a bit of a challenge but it was really good fun and people love that challenge sometimes and there was a tight deadline on that you know so it's not your conventional let's come up with this and it's ready when it's ready but i had to be ready for that night um deadlines actually do you rick rubin's a great um i'll get you a copy of this book he's got a book called the creative way or as he did red hot chili peppers adele music producer red hot chili peppers adele uh beastie boys he's done literally everyone mad mad guys got some huge beard um but he's got this beautiful book and um he one of the things he's all about creativity and one of the things he says is having a deadline's so important it goes back to that swimming and the creative it forces you to be like right lewis hamilton's coming tomorrow mate and we need a different menu so we better and there's something about the sort of it welds you together with this strength well how would you say um so service is like is is more like a dance how would you say it's like a dance in linking it to the ballet not necessarily like specifically ballet but like how is it like a dance from from here to then the dining room i would say you know people that are really great at service are people that can adapt very very quickly to who they're delivering service to making them feel really good because everyone's different right everyone comes in with a different expectation hopefully they think it's going going to be good.

59:50But actually, they've got different ways of measuring what's good. They like to be communicated to in different ways. Maybe it's the amount of time that you spend with them at the table. Some people probably can be quite rude sometimes and don't want to be fussed over and don't want to be disturbed all the time. And you've got to quickly work that out, that you're going to sort of tune into how they want to take their experience and then you've got a whole room full of them so they're not all the same we don't apply the same you know yeah everything's got to be like that you see what i mean there's this dexterity to it yeah the dance i suppose each customer is different each song you listen to is is different if you're at a nightclub or rave every song is different and the way you dance is slightly different yeah each song and i suppose each customer is i suppose that is the dance right is it's like you've got your plan yeah sometimes your plan doesn't go to plan and you've got to you've got to adapt and head things off before it gets even worse or how can i fix this without them even noticing so i'm not a dancer never have been probably never will be that's my one thing i'm just no good at whatsoever however i guess it would be the same as they have the precision of knowing where they should be but you never you never know some things happen they might not be in the exact same space so the other person has to it's been like water isn't it as we said yeah yeah i guess so i mean i'm not you know the um so i didn't realize how mad like how much of a pressure cooker the royal ballet was obviously three stars mad pressure cooker as well like what's your approach to dealing with mad pressure because you know i've we've just done a big deal and I'm in that sort of fight or flight.

1:01:43I always get a tongue twist on that. Which is, on the one hand, I'm super excited. We've just done a deal with Uber Eats, which is huge. But it's a trial. And it could go wrong. And I'm sort of, the pendulum's swinging in my nut between like, oh my God, this is amazing. Between, oh my God, this is so much pressure. What if I fuck this up? How am I going to? Yeah, so I'm asking this selfishly. How did you deal with that immense pressure because i've watched documentaries online who i think that's the french chef who killed himself because he couldn't deal with the pressure of three stars yeah bernard loise that was it yeah brilliant book actually oh really yeah yeah he um it is one of my favorite books i'm not a massive book reader i just i just fall asleep to be honest yeah um but um i read that very early on he closed his restaurant when he had two stars and they did a big refurb and he spent what year was this sorry oh this would have been like probably 90s i'd say yeah and it's called burgundy stars is the book you can still get it but they don't print it anymore is it like a biography or autobiography yes and it's someone else wrote it okay it's written by an american lady um i can't remember her name anyway it charted the six or eight months whatever it was or the year where he just looked at absolutely everything that was going to fit into the new um version of his restaurant.

1:03:02So he went to the snail farmer. He went to the Apoise cheese maker. He went to the man that reared the frogs for the frog leg dish. And he traveled around, sometimes with his sommelier, sometimes not. And it's a lovely story. It's absolutely brilliant. You know, it's really romantic. But actually, he did achieve his three stars. But then he just, he lived in fear of losing those three stars. And I think we had that at the fact that when we achieved three stars in 04, we always saw it as I mean I guess a lot of the listeners now we're in a modern day world you've got to think pre that's what I'm trying to understand pre-social media where we have access to all of these incredible people that give you the ability to understand things and make your own and use that to your benefit there wasn't that back then so you go well actually why don't we approach this as winning three stars every year rather than shit what happens if we lose it so you can only do your best and if everyone's on it and you you've got the right people around you delivering and innovating and you know looking after everything you do need finance people that look after stuff yeah they're going to be a pain in the ass sometimes but no point going out of business yeah because you're too busy looking over you know over here don't worry about it all you all you can do is you can do your best and if If you fail, you know, I used to think it was cheesy, you know, out of this failure became this thing.

1:04:35But it is true, life goes on and you will recover if you want it to. If you want to wither away and just feel sorry for yourself, which is hard sometimes, if you get a bad review or someone writes something really, really harsh about you, what's going on with this drilling? It may not actually come up. Yeah, yeah. That is brilliant. But, you know, it's interesting, though, the whole dance thing to here like I had to bring Max a couple of times to work and especially in the holidays and he just followed me around he's like right what are we doing next dad I've got to go and fix this I've got to go and see that person I need to go and speak George in the butchery I've got to go and do this and he was just like that was just brilliant I loved it there's this similarity between making people feel good see what I mean I think there is probably a lot of synergy there that he would any performer gets a buzz out of making people feel amazing and they all have the same things was it good enough was I on my you know they all have the same thing also what I love is the where I think it all links together and even links together with this is like the emotional residue and I think sometimes I listen to a podcast and it can actually change people's lives I'm not saying that I'm doing that but that's the pursuit I'm trying to go to sometimes it's like crawling through glass you know it's like fucking hell i've got like i look i can do this all day but like this is two hours out of my week the rest is like the business side like i'm gonna sit with my accountant for four hours this afternoon which is gonna drive me nuts you know but like it's worth doing it yeah but i think that the link between all of it whether it's ballet car even car racing to an extent like there's there's the emotional residue of making people feel good yeah it's like it's just that fit that's soul nourishing i think yeah yeah totally um do you want to cover something about the coffee now or coffee now mate yeah all right so um i think the first thing is like why you got why you got into the coffee um so tell me about that like uh i think there's a have you read the book there's a book called i know there's a book called caffeine by michael pollin which is just you can listen to it it's brilliant yeah and he talks about how how the enlightenment um the industrial revolution all wouldn't have happened because of coffee really that's always mate it's mad is it's like there's a all the insurance brokers or insurance brokerages they all started in coffee shops in london really and it's like he has this map of like timeline of like when coffee yeah came in into it so before we get into the brand like how has coffee been of use to you and then also like how have you like what pulled you to go into coffee do you mean like this is a big thing yes i mean for years at the fact that we i mean we're very tight on space so we used Nespresso when that really started to kick off in the country like early 2000s we had it when I was there in 99 what Nespresso was that old?

1:07:31yeah Nespresso is actually quite old really? yeah yeah can't remember the exact date but I mean it's like a little while ago I'd say 80s somewhere around there I didn't realise that and yeah so we had that and then we went to We took the fat duck to Australia, to Melbourne in 2015 and opened dinner there in the same place. Well, we were opening dinner. We decided to take the fat duck there so we could renovate the one in Bray. And obviously Melbourne, the coffee scene in Melbourne is off the charts. We knew what we were doing could be so much better, right? But of course we didn't really know where to start.

1:08:14So I spent half of my time for nearly six years in Melbourne. so good 20 25 weeks a year awesome yeah just yeah yeah yeah thank you amazing um sorry yes we'll jump into this in a second looks delicious but just quickly to wrap up or not wrap up but just square the circle um on on the coffee so you're at fat doubt go to melbourne the coffee scene over there's wild insane why is it so good like i just i just think they started their interest that probably the mixture of people that inhabit Melbourne, the sort of cultural coming together of a very forward-thinking city, you know. But anyway, so met loads of different people through recommendations and then decided to go with one guy called Nolan from Proud Mary Coffee.

1:09:07And the whole world changed. You know, I went to his cafe and we sat down for a couple of hours and we tasted different coffees in different ways and filled coffee. I'd never tasted anything like it. Like it blew my mind. I was like, wow. And he put a barista into our restaurant for six months while we were there. So we had the best coffee program going, you know, at three-star level. And it just carried on. And I was like, I just, I love all the geekery around it. I love the precision. But I also love the trial and error of it as well. And how to try and get the best out of something to a flavor that you're trying to achieve.

1:09:44Fast forward, good five years. I left Fat Duck. A friend of mine who's a motoring journalist called Dickie Meaden was involved with a coffee project. He said, oh, could you taste some coffee? And I didn't know Dickie very well at the time. And I said, yeah, yeah, sure, just send it on down and I'll give it a taste. I spent three days with these six or seven different coffees, brewing them in different methods, and it was terrible. And I was like, I don't really know how honest to be. I'm always really honest, right? I don't really know them that well. I don't know who's really behind this coffee thing they're doing.

1:10:21I was like, I'm just going to be honest, constructive. So I gave them all my feedback charts of how I brewed it and measured everything. I marked some of them like half out of 10, one out of 10, two out of 10. I was like, you can't. It's all Dickie's coffees, right? Dickie wasn't behind the coffee. Right. A coffee expert, Q grader, was behind the coffee. Okay, sorry. So it wasn't like you were just slagging off his... No, no, no. but I didn't want to upset anyone at the same time I was like well I'll just be honest because if someone's asked me in my opinion what things taste like I'm going to tell you so anyway so I didn't hear from him for about three weeks and he said oh the main guy wants to speak to you I was like oh Christ and he said look you know absolutely brutal he said but you know why don't you join us and we look at this together so I was like you know what I was working on a restaurant at the time I wanted to open I was this is just pre-COVID so then the world went mad right so I was working on a restaurant I thought oh I could do this alongside it and kind of you know it fits in nicely so it should be great that restaurant concept had a cafe part of it as well and I thought oh this is bloody brilliant I get to co-found something be at the heart of the taste and flavour part of this brand I can bring a unique viewpoint I'm not a coffee shop owner I'm not a Q grader I worked with some of the best Q graders.

1:11:41So when you say Q grader, as in what's that? So a Q grader is like a master sommelier. So it's a qualified expert in coffee that can mark coffee out of 100 for how the quality of the coffee is. So you have up to 80 is commodity coffee, cheap coffee, right? High street. You don't change that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. above 80 is specialty coffee or speciality coffee so these q graders they have a set they have to be reassessed every i think it's every three or four years and i worked with a brilliant one called rob and um he actually was head of coffee it's all good yeah for julian metcoff when he set pret up wow yeah yeah yeah yeah anyway great guy and he said do you want to do you want to do a q grading course and I was like do you know what actually no because you're the Q grader I want to be I want to be me I want to be the chef that talks about taste and flavor I don't want to be that's almost like you know what we're talking about right at the beginning of that the military element yeah the craziness it's almost that same thing uh uh happening again right but why just have one dimension rather than two I've spent 30 years getting to where I am with taste and flavor and experience, actually, you're the best one I've ever met.

1:13:04So why don't we work together on this? Because you bring your thing, I bring my thing, right? Sure. And then so basically I met with the guys that were setting up Artisan and I said, look, give me a couple of weeks and if I can add something to this, I'd love to do it. If I can't, we'll just do what everyone else does. No offense to anyone, but that's not really what I wanted to do. let's source you know single origin beans roast it describe it sell it and off we go and open coffee shops and whatnot that's not what i wanted to do so i thought well actually this is about there's a massive gap between how speciality talks to normal people like people that are non-expert in coffee they don't really they don't really know the detail about coffee so when if I give you an analogy if you go to a restaurant and you get let's say a sommelier comes to your table and he starts talking about things that you don't understand great varieties tower altitude process that people just go it's hooty flutey linguistic I feel really uncomfortable yeah I feel really uncomfortable with what I feel stupid yeah so I'm going to close down and I'm just going to go to what I know and I'm looking on my list oh I know this one yeah I'll go for that one please but good sommelier will tap into you within 30 seconds and then he'll take you on a little journey left or right of you say oh I normally drink sort of I love chardonnay for example oh well what you should maybe you should try this one this is actually a little bit different than maybe where you were looking but the reason is this and it tastes like this really easy to understand.

1:14:53What I found was speciality coffee was talking to people. It's almost a foreign language. They can't process that to go, oh, I can imagine what that tastes like. You do get the odd flavor note down the bottom, you know, the three words, chocolate this and this, you know. But actually, there was a very big disconnect between the top and the mid market, which is where we were really interested in, right? So I set up six different coffee styles we call them characters if you're nerdy you call it a profile and i wanted to use blending the best speciality beans to how i bit like that thing over there the way you mix the music yeah treble bass middle bit of this bit of that so you're getting different types of beans so i'm getting different beans roasting them and then i'm blending them together so it's not one bean it's not no no no they're all blends they're all blends and the latest so i've got five different styles of caffeinated coffee so we've got and then we name them like fun things like the heroine so the everyday hero so everyone will love it no one will hate it it does exactly what it says on the tin the big shot which we have here for our milkies off my nut that's classic what most people you know that darker roast but not burnt and bitter it's it's rich it's chocolatey it's fudgy you know mate that word right fudgy so obviously i've i've ordered some right before we did this and so there's a couple of things just to tease out here is one i think it links back to what we're saying earlier about like the tiramisu and everyone's different and i think it's one of the things your sort of superpowers is like having that empathy to really make things um accessible to people and i think as you said you on the packaging it's like and i think only you could do this you've as you said you've engulfed yourself in all this all these different ways and textures and flavors but you've got like i think he says like tastes like cookie or like yeah it's just really like clear and not like oh i'm i've got higher status than you you know nothing you're dumb fuck do you know i mean it's understandable right it's so understandable but then what i would love to get understand is how you come up with words like fudgy and like i don't know do you jump set because i don't it's like one of those things that you you i don't you probably come so naturally to you probably like your son just going on doing that right But like, that's so hard.

1:17:10And I was like, when you drink it and you're like, the word fudgy is just like, I don't know. I don't know what I'm trying to pull out there. Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, we actually described how I wanted them to taste. And so I laid out in front of Grant, my partner, and Dickie and a few others, I said, look, these are the styles of coffee that I think we should be aiming to achieve because it allows people to tap into it, choose their style of coffee that they like because we're using a currency of words and language that you can understand. It's exactly what you just said. And there's no altitude on here.

1:17:47There's no varietal on here. There's no process how the coffee was processed from the fruit into taking the little bean out, the little seed out inside. All of those things don't mean anything unless you know what that means. That's like high-level coffee knowledge. Whereas this talks all about relatable stuff. So, you know, this one in particular is, you know, the Enigma. So that might tune into one person and think, that sounds like me, right? So we're humanizing these characters. The heroine, the big shot, the smart cookie, the genius, the Enigma, and the dreamer. The dreamer's the decaf. So that's one thing.

1:18:25Then you've got the numbers that we put with them. The development numbers were 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. And, well, people, this is where you start bridging into the marketing side. And you go, well, people think that two is not as good as one and four is definitely not as good as number one, right? Yeah. So why don't we put numbers as a little bit of curiosity and a thing to, so 720. If I ask you what, you don't know what 720 means. But if you want to go and find out what 720 means, 720 is the number of teeth on the three cogs of the machine that broke the Enigma code at Bletchley Park. wow so a cool little story yeah that means nothing in terms of taste of flavour but you're just sparking a little curiosity and the consumer can find that out yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the genius 161 that goes back to what we were saying after about like putting your soul in your work without like a lot of people won't look that up but you all know yeah when you give that to someone it's like the 720's got a beautiful story that you've got lovely opportunity to tell multiple layers of story within your within your marketing yeah right And so these are the espresso beans, right?

1:19:38So I've used multiple origins, so 13, 14 different origins from around the world that bring intrinsic characteristics with where they're grown, the varietal, the process. That's our knowledge behind the kitchen door, so to speak. For filter, I've got the same characters, styles of coffee that I'm trying to achieve, but I might use different beans to get there because they brew differently with immersion compared to espresso through the machine. So I can finely tune them how exactly I want them to taste. And then again, when we do the little pods, there'll be different recipes again. And so my partner was like, oh, my God, we can't have like 32 recipes of coffee.

1:20:19I'm like, well, if we want to do the best example I believe we can do, this is what we need to do. And we went, you know what, we're going to do it because it's how a chef would think rather than the other way around. And yeah, it's it's it's let's just think conscious of this. Food like let's talk. And what you just said there's teeters up lovely ash in terms of how a chef would think. Talk me through the creative process with these dishes. And I think, as I said, I wanted to really get into how you've evolved from your time at the Fat Duck. But like, yeah, talk us through these. I mean, everything appears to be really, really simple.

1:20:55at the very beginning when I met Osh and Charlie they explained that they wanted to open this big pub great food, cooking over embers there'd be a butcher, we'd dry age all the meat down we're literally on top of the butchery here we'd dry age everything the whole way here we'd make the bread, we'd have a baker we'd make the butter and where traditional English pub meets the chop house with this wood ember grill I was like this sounds brilliant and I was sort of working on another project coming out of COVID and I was like the old me would have been like oh I'm not going to do two things at once but I knew one would be late and so I went do you know what I'm going to go for it because I I didn't know Osh from we only followed each other on Instagram Charlie and I we crossed paths in 2005 when he did a stage at Fat Duck but it wasn't like that was fresh in my memory for we had 20 people sometimes every month that would come in for a month yeah and work with us and um they were really passionate about describing something that i know we're sitting in the in the devonshire now but we never thought it'd be quite like this um but it sounded great what were they describing to you like what was it how are they describing what they were trying there were two things that the one the two that stuck in my thing was really wanted to be egalitarian and about that you mean accessible and for everybody.

1:22:23Okay. Right? So the best ingredients, treated in the best way, and do things that the spreadsheet might not make sense of. Right? Three full-time butchers downstairs. Does it make sense? There's probably not a lot in it, but actually, that's not normal. Right? We make a thousand bread rolls a day. We've got a tiny little prep kitchen and pastry where they roll a thousand. We've got the most amazing baker. So best ingredients, treated and cooked with sympathy, but it was all about flavor. And we've got paper tablecloths and simple white plates. There's no frippery. We've got nice little silver salt and pepper things and beautiful wine glasses made by Jancis Robinson.

1:23:11So it's all about the experience, all about the food. And then we spent literally three days talking about the menu that you see in the restaurant. Maybe one or two things came off the menu and one or two things came on. But pretty much what you see, we spoke about this dish for probably two and a half hours. Let's try it. So scallops with homemade Iberica bacon with malt vinegar butter and then a little crumb fried in pork fat with some herbs through, a little bit of lemon zest. Where would we get scallops from? What do we like? What don't we like? The malt vinegar came out. this is beautiful um malt vinegar made in cornwall that's aged in oak barrels for three months so it softens it from your chip shop malt vinegar but as in in this country we love malt vinegar it's quite nostalgic right it really is yeah actually if we can incorporate that in a way that is just delicious what can go wrong great scallops hand dived bacon made downstairs with brett graham's iberico that he rears in shropshire cured for 10 days um lightly roasted then we take all the pork fat render it fry the breadcrumbs i mean this is not health food obviously oh yeah and um it'd just be delicious and can we do it at a really egalitarian price you know like and the other thing was they wanted a bin man to be able to sit next to a chairman right she said that on the first party and i so good got it like straight away yeah you put you're Putting the vision out there.

1:24:47I get it. Someone might save up, you know, six months to come and spend£50 a head or£40 a head. We've got a£29 menu. Prawn and langoustine cocktails. It's got a whole langoustine on it. Steak and chips and mayonnaise, sticky toffee pudding, 29 quid. That might be a lot of money for some people. Or you're sitting next to someone that can probably buy the whole block of this building, you know. It should be available for everybody. it's a great leveller and the great thing is everyone starts talking to the table next to them up in the thing it's like almost like a little social club and it's just the barriers come down and there's everyone's just here for a good time you know that's what I said to Osh as well I think on the pod is that like you don't really see people on their phones here it's like a I think I said it's like a weird little sort of utopia yeah especially when you're getting boozed up like it's just I mean I fucking love it out there before Christmas right let's let's jump in on these right so you've got scallops with bacon and malt vinegar butter you've got um crab salad with apple citrus and bitter leaves and then this is brawn on toast so we've got cheeks and hock and larded colonnata sweet mustard pickled onions cornichons um a little bit of fried bread in in pork fat there as well so yeah i'll get in on the scallop just dive in whatever you want yeah just a little a little taster what were the changes you made to To be honest, it was more about the crumb wasn't there at the beginning of the plan, but we were just working on the balance of the butter.

1:26:24And then this is where you have that thing of like butter and water liquid, for example, will split over time unless you put something in there to emulsify it, which you don't really want to do. You keep things really pure. So it's about making an emulsion that then we could warm, reshake, re-emulsify, so that every time we source the dish, you've got the right amount of vinegar, the right amount. See, all of the intrinsic are in the right balance when it goes in there. But we're not doing 40 covers. We're doing 550, 600 covers a day. This is the most popular dish. We'll go through at least 3 ,000 scallops a week.

1:27:06Wow. But we shuck them all by hand downstairs. They're all in shell diver, you know, direct from the guy that catches them up in Scotland or Devon. And so all of those little details, and we're not reinventing the wheel. This is just paying attention to all the important parts. No different than we did at Fat Duck at dinner, whatever the restaurant. It's the same ethos. It's caring about what this is. It's the most underrated, like, senses when you're eating food. because obviously you've worked with all those sort of mad neuroscientists and stuff. Is it texture? Is it like what do most people not think about?

1:27:42What's the hardest to get right? I think over time it's changed. You know, like there would almost be diversions or distractions in things. So people are concentrating too much on texture. They actually forget to taste it about seasoning and balance. So acidity, richness, balance, fat. We're using lardo de colonnata to mix in with this as a mixture, but it's porky and it's just pork. And all the other bits really support that pork flavor. It's got texture from the bread at the bottom. You need to pay attention to all of these things. I find sometimes things just don't taste good. You need acidity.

1:28:31You need richness. You need salt. There are different ways to bring different stuff in. You do need texture sometimes. You can go to some restaurants and it'll be very wet food, if you know what I mean, like very wet and lacking texture that becomes very monotonous. You need change through a tasting menu, things that are familiar, things that are less familiar, things that are crispy, things that are not. you know so i think one of the most overlooked in things is people just don't chefs don't young chefs don't taste their food yeah and i know i'm generalizing which is not not great but that's the reality of it they concentrate on too many other things they forget to taste it it boils back to that you know when i said like heston's thing is question everything yeah yours is like just make it delicious and and like the the emotional residue it's like you can you can get so bogged down in this kind of convoluted crap of like it may look amazing may have steam coming out of it if it doesn't taste delicious you have no memorable experience yeah um no i think what what did osha is like we're here to we're in the retail business but our product is actually a feeling an experience which is then traded as a story yeah yeah it's exactly the same exactly the same thing um that is insane uh and this is that's the crab salad with bitter leaves apple and citrus so again find the best crab yeah that we can get um and so yeah crab from portland portland shellfish when you're tasting something talk me through like when you put some food in your mouth or a dish before we started you had that soup the soup came down and you're just got to quickly taste this when you put a spoon or a fork of food in your mouth yeah how are you computing like what's the ash machine doing to work out whether it's good or what it needs like talk me through that i think you've got when when a customer eats a dish they're eating a dish as a whole right so when when there's a start and a finish sometimes depends how you play there's no start and finish here because it's sort of three things that are the same but sometimes you'll have naturally what's in front of you you'll start there and you'll eat through a dish so you can you can change that experience as you eat through from start to finish for example that doesn't apply to that that doesn't apply to that because it's the same all the way through so i want so you see here for example we put blobs of mustard on here so that each mouthful is slightly different and you get a little bit more of that a little bit more of that so it becomes multi-dimensional in its flavor delivery acidity from the onion the little pops of the cornichons for example if we cut this really really small on top it becomes a very flat experience in terms of the pickled onion and cornichon right yeah and i spread the same amount of mustard over the whole thing i've homogenized everything to a small thing when you have bigger bursts and chunkier things you get more of these things so when you fireworks yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah so you know truffle can be amazing when it's really really thin if that's what you're trying to achieve with something as a as a as a flatter experience that's more consistent but if you really want impact you leave it really chunky so that you bite into it sometimes.

1:32:07Yes. See what I mean? Yes. So with the soup, for example, I was just checking that, it's really boring actually, the package that broke and we're testing another machine as well that does the same job. Turns out it does a better job, it looks like. And checking texture, temperature, seasoning. I said to him, a little bit more seasoning in there and we're back on track. So the salt and the seasoning brings it alive? Talk me through that. It just gives you a fuller flavour, just maximises flavour. But if you're too much, it's just going to be salty and you're going to be like, oh, it's not pleasant.

1:32:45So it's a very hard thing teaching people to season.

1:32:52But that's the joy of cooking, really. It's about the most rewarding thing is being able to pass this on to other people to do it as well as you. or if not better, then you can do. That's the ultimate thing for me as a chef in the kitchen. Yeah, go for it. Steak's just coming back. So we can talk about this. This is what I think Osh said on the first one, the suet pudding. I think he was saying to what he said, me and Charlie sat down. I'm like, what are we going to get to the food? And he goes, this suet pudding was kind of like, had burned into their heads. It was so memorable. Talk me through this.

1:33:34Yeah, so, well, I met with Osh the first time and he said, oh, you know, we love the oxtail and kidney pudding at the Heinz head. You know, would we be able to, you know, put this on the menu? I said, well, why don't we approach it slightly differently and say, well, we're not reinventing the wheel here. You know, I'm sure everyone's going to be like, well, you didn't invent this. Why don't we make something synonymous for here? you know so beef is a massive part of the dna of this this restaurant so beef cheek and guinness or beef cheek and red wine but make it our own you know and really all of the development from here they were like well this that could work actually that'd be really good and then i ended up joining as co-founder we set about the menu development and i could have turned up six weeks before opened the recipe book and just made everything but actually we invested a year of time and money in the development kitchen i had another guy working with me called ev and every single recipe from bernet sauce to gravy to the peas with this the way we do our duck fat chips the pastry the filling the sauce everything was from scratch now that is quite a commitment you know so we did spend probably two months planning and about ten months in the kitchen so you've got a year of development for what is quite simple looking food so in here we've got beef cheeks we've also got the little we call them beef fingers which are in between the beef ribs of the aged beef from downstairs braised, gravy, onion and carrot and then literally traditional sort of style gravy nothing poncy just all about flavour a nice fatty pastry well isn't these like famous in um northern not this specific but the suet pudding is like a northern chippy thing isn't it yeah i mean they're very sort of common yeah amazing thanks sash amazing thank you so much um you know it's it's it's food for the people it's you know this on a cold day is oh my god it's like the ultimate like yeah get in there and it's uh the texture of the pastry and of course you steam these in the oven and what's the actual what's in the actual pastry then what's the because it's not so it's flour and beef suet and seasoning essentially right so it is beef fat oh wow so you end up with this lovely sort of soft oh my god slightly um slightly fluffy layered pastry you know you can see it sort of As you cook it, it just sort of puffs, but it's not puff pastry, you know.

1:36:17That's absolutely insane. Rich and there's a little dice of bone marrow in there. Yeah, rich and delicious. So rich. So delicious. And we've got the duck fat chips. We peel and hand cut all the lees. And then we, you know, literally we make these overnight now. We have a night shift. and then the beef downstairs we've got George and Stan we take the beef in on day five to eight from slaughter as the primal so is your five bone four rib of beef which is your rib eyes and your beef chops and then whole loins where you get your T-bones and your wing ribs from so we use wing rib for Sunday roast then we have T-bones cut into T-bone steaks so downstairs is five to six weeks worth of beef wow there's a lot of beef down there have you seen it?

1:37:10no I don't think I've seen it we'll go after it you should you should cut that into the thing because it is I can get rich to yeah to do it this is just insane and do you like what's how's this sort of this style of cooking sort of changed your

1:37:29oh my god oh yeah just appreciate that for a sec fucking hell that's so good Make sure you get some bayonets.

1:37:43I might just have to munch this and then we can pat it back on. Oh, my God. And this is all coming from, where do the cows come from? So all from Scotland. Mostly Anglis. But Charlie's founder of Flatiron Restaurants. And so his beef connections are incredible. are incredible his knowledge on beef is is amazing is that similar is beef sort of um the same approach to coffee in that sort of level of detail yeah it's about building relationships with people that have enough um volume and throughput to make that natural selection so just rewind back to the ballet thing right yeah 9 000 down to 12 that 12 maybe five might make it through to the last two years of school this many cattle going through the abattoir this many have the marbling that we want into muscular marbling that you see in the meat yeah the right size and the right genetic it's all about genetics with beef but it's until you start cutting the animal open you really see what that speck is so if you don't have the volume you can't get pick of the crop do you know what i mean and charlie's got the access to the it's amazing relationships with people that see where it goes, see the care that we take.

1:39:09And, you know, people love being part of something that, you know, commercially it's nothing to the big, big beef suppliers in the world. But actually it's a bit of a passion project and they're really proud that their beef is here. Yeah. We had one of the guys from the abattoir down that runs it and he said, I've never seen it before ever where you've got like 65 people on the cutting room floor going, nah, yeah, that one's good for Devonshire. No. Really? And this is where social media is really important because they've probably not been down here for dinner. They've not been in here, but they can see the traction and the appreciation and the whole hype, if you want to call it hype, or, you know, the popularity.

1:39:55So even people on the cutting room floor are really proud that they're picking stuff for here. and we're just like, this is amazing. Yeah. And he'd never seen this before, the guy from the Abattoir. One of the things, Osh, is that the hype can be sometimes a burden. Talk to me about that from your perspective. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm probably a little bit more accustomed to it, having been at the Fat Duck and then dinner. When people come through the door, they are incredibly excited most of the time. they have expectations from whatever media they've been looking at printed, social media, TV and you have to deliver against that and everyone's expectation is slightly different at different levels, some people are really easily pleased others are bloody hard to please, you know, some people you can never please occasionally so I'm very used to it you can only do what you can do and I think we're very honest, we look at everything like every great restaurateur or chef like you look at look at everything how can I do this better how can I how can I make this more consistent how can I make this have more impact how can I minimalise the opportunity for a mistake to be made whether it's in the cooking or the preparation or or anything you know so if you think like that you can only do what you can do you know what I mean what are the changes you've made um the dishes look the same but it's like stuff you put we wouldn't even notice as the consumer but like from your side what have you changed sometimes ingredients supply chain is everything you know when you're when you're dealing in volume you know cooking 550 600 people a day you've really got to work hard on your supply you know it's no good me working with a guy that you know can supply me carrots for 20 covers a week there's no point yeah I need the best tasting carrot, the kilos and kilos and kilos that we use for the buttered carrots or, you know, the bacon here, you know, Brett Graham's Iberico reared in Shropshire.

1:42:09How can we – we could just buy bacon, but it's not our bacon. Bacon sandwich for the bar menu actually is here on the back of the beer mat. We make the bread. We make the butter. We make the bacon. you choose red or brown sauce amazing you know a simple bacon sandwich what do you think is the difference so um sorry to interrupt but the so Rory Southern I know you like he I think you've seen some of his videos so he came on the podcast and obviously we only talk about food for like three hours yeah stuff so it's just like we and I love food and um he was saying he wants to open a well he said he wants listening to coffee actually he says if I was to open a coffee shop yeah in Paddington Station, I would create one called Flat White's or Fuck Off.

1:42:57And it's basically like, you do one thing well, you don't have the big menu, it's super, super simple, kind of not, do one thing really well. Then he said, the other restaurant he wanted to, we were talking about how would you create a Polish Nando's, which got a bit weird. And then we also started talking about, he goes, I want to open a restaurant called Bacon Sandwich, which only does, and he goes, I think he called it gratuitous perversity, which is like, I don't know what that actually means, but and they'd only do brown sauce and champagne. So the only thing you get is champagne. Really?

1:43:32Yeah. And he goes into, I can't remember it all, but he goes into the sort of the marketing genius of why this would work. What do you think is like, when you're putting brown sauce on a bacon sarnie versus red sauce, like how's that affecting the way you eat, taste things and enjoy things? And which one do you go with? It's what you like. I mean, to be honest, I was always ketchup only. But then when we did a restaurant for the airport called Perfectionist Cafe, Perfectionist Cafe, so it was all based on fast food, but actually benefited from being cooked really fast and served really fast. So we did breakfast, we did wood-fired pizza, nitro ice cream parlor and a deli type thing, and burgers and fish and chips.

1:44:14and I can't remember what I was going to say brown sauce or red sauce oh yeah brown sauce so we had ketchup and mayonnaise back bacon unsmoked smoked streaky crispy so we built this multi-textual sort of bacon sandwich but here so what did you have on the bacon side of things you had two types of bacon yeah so we had unsmoked back bacon smoked streaky that was cooked crispy oh yeah textures yeah mayo and ketchup interesting mayo yeah what about butter as well oh yeah butter obviously yeah but here what I tend to do now as I say no sauce but I'll put it in myself and I'll have red and brown either side yeah because it just works that way you know I start with the red sauce and then let it in with the brown sauce yeah but I mean that's just because probably weird I don't know yeah I sometimes put a bit of sriracha in a bacon sarnie which is probably blasphemous but you know what if that's how you like it that's how you like it and if you know if people want to put milk and god knows what else in the coffee if that's how you want it to be that's your favorite way i'm just gonna give this to rich what what's your yes sorry the best way to eat a to drink a coffee is is well my how i drink coffee it's not the best way yeah i'm a purist yeah i think a lot of the time and i like espresso or i like black filter i'm not really a milky coffee kind of guy but 90 of the population drink it with milk and that's absolutely fine yeah you know we're not we're not preaching and say you can't be putting milk in this and this and this how you like it's how you like it yeah you want to put ice in your rose crack on yeah that's how you like it i don't yeah i just serve it chilled enough this goes back to the empathy that we were talking about right at the beginning yeah we're going to get on to onto these two things one thing i'll do i'm just like i'm just obsessed with history and I think it would be remiss of me not to talk about your time at dinner and not necessarily like what you were creating, but I just want to go into the history side of things.

1:46:17I just think that's just so fucking fascinating. I really believe, like, I think, who was saying to me, I was watching my mate's podcast actually the other day with the All Saints founder. Oh, yeah. Which is super interesting. Actually, links to Forgotten. His son used to work here, actually. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. so he's using um all he's now set up a new brand that is sustainable does actually have forgotten this um and he was saying the future lives in the past yeah and which i just love that's a great little kind of nugget of you know deliciousness and i'd love to go back to you you did this whole thing where you just read loads about the whole history of food if we were to walk out of here in say the 1300s in Soho, like what would it look like?

1:46:59What were people eating? Like how's, what were we doing as human beings? Well, I think first and foremost, how you ate and how you shared eating was a form of entertainment and also showing off your wealth and your status. This is in the 300s, 1300s. 13, 14, 1500s. I mean, to be honest, even to the modern day, yeah I'm going to go to a three star tonight because I'm I'm loaded and I know what I'm talking about or you know do you see what I mean or I'm going to go and eat in that super expensive restaurant because because I can um I think how people ate you had this rich and this poor thing so the earlier you go back to a certain extent chefs were using ways of using up food because There was no refrigeration apart from the way that they used to put food in the ground and have rooms underneath and keep food cold.

1:47:57But you basically had a lot of off flavors and things. So like wine, for example, it might be white wine one day. It's completely oxidized. It doesn't really taste very good. So you start adding other stuff to it and it becomes red wine that's sort of flavored with other stuff so that it becomes palatable again. and I think food was very much your chef would go to, you would go to another household, and then you'd come back and you'd describe to your chef what you had, and he'd write down what we now know as recipes, but if you open my computer and look at a recipe, it's got weights and measures and stuff.

1:48:36Theirs is like a small handful into three buckets of this. There's no precision or anything. These were just reminders on how people just reminded themselves or pass on to the next cook how these people like to eat in their own home. And this is the high status, high wealthy people. Yeah, exactly. And then you've got travel. So exotic ingredients coming back. And if I've got a big country house, I can have a greenhouse with little walls that were beds where I can put hot embers in underneath to warm the soil up so I can grow things that would grow in a hot country in England. yeah so if i got if you go to a large stately home you see pineapples on the gateposts you know like stone pineapples pineapples were they used to rent them out in the victorian times oh my god it's mad how much food how into intertwined with status um food is and i think there's a great book because i've actually been on the podcast called the status game and it's like how everything in life we're trying to do is to have some form of status three weeks and stars is status.

1:49:45And again, this is sort of another Rory thing, but I think he was saying like food, like I think in the olden days, if we're talking about them, apparently lobster was a really like a porpoise food. Same as oysters. And oysters. And that just shows that if they suddenly get status, then suddenly, like I always think is caviar actually nice? Or do people think it's nice because it's high status food? What's your take on status and food? I love caviar, for example, but I don't love all caviar. It's got to taste nice. It can't just be salty texture. It's got to have some sort of flavor. But I think food played a massive part in people's social standing and status and showing off.

1:50:29So sugar, the use of sugar in savory dishes, if I used sugar all the time, it was incredibly rare back then. So I would be incredibly wealthy if I was, you know, sugar sandwich, for example. I mean, we don't eat those anymore. I'm sure some people do. But sugar now, you know, in its baddest form, is refined beyond its original state and is not that great for you, you know. So things change and evolve over many, many years. but we spent, Hester, myself, a couple of others, we spent years reading at the National Library, working with historians such as Polly Russell or Ivan Day. What did they teach you about that?

1:51:12So they are food historians, and they are unbelievable encyclopedias of storytelling and making it relevant. I can understand what people were doing. the you know around the 15 1600s the amount of labor that was going into these these massive banquets for the you know the lord and lady the king queen they would have maybe the biggest one i saw was about 185 courses what types of dish right yeah but one of those 185 would be

1:51:5212 geese roasted and stuffed that's one of the 185 they'd have three swans they would have a whole pig they'd have so much food you could not believe they would sit at the top table and they would be paraded through there'd be massive tables with all their dignitaries and And, you know, getting further away from the table is less important. And then all of this food would come by. They can't eat everything. But they would pick and choose because they were the ones at the top table. Then everything else got put down. Wow. But, I mean, the amount of work in these things. I mean, 1500s, you'd have courtyards full of chefs that, you know, I'm sure people were dying and, you know, they'd just carry on.

1:52:42But they were more lavish than you could ever imagine it being today. So was food back then almost like the status of having a Ferrari? Yeah, it was entertainment. Then you'd have your other entertainment, your jesters, your musicians, your probably dancers, interest in stuff like that. So there was nothing else. This was the best thing that you could do. Wow. What are some other crazy stories or underrated learnings from that time of immersing yourself in that period? I mean, there were some horrendous ones. Like there was a couple where I think it was a goose where they would pluck the goose alive, right?

1:53:22And then they'd brush it with a mixture of sort of almost like a molasses kind of mixture and then put the head underneath the wing of the bird and rock it to sleep, put it in the middle of the table and then put two cooked birds with it. And when the person that was entertaining went to cut the bird that was actually asleep, it would get up and run down the table knocking all the wine goblets over and everything. Wow. Pretty barbaric kind of stuff, you know. So, yeah, I mean, it wouldn't survive in today's world. Did you ever have a lonely period on this whole maiden journey of yours? yeah I mean a lot of the time sometimes when you're when you don't have many people above you sometimes it is hard and you have really bad times I know when there was a certain period where I didn't feel like I was particularly creative and I know it's going to sound really stupid telling you this and I actually worked with a guy on something closer mate yeah put in my making my putting myself in the right frame of mind to be creative because i was thinking that i wasn't creative and that was damaging my performance in creating stuff and doing stuff right because all i could think about was i don't feel like i'm creative creative as in like what the dishes you were coming up with all the ideas weren't as good as the other sometimes yeah you know like i'm sure it's the same for anyone who creates stuff like a singer songwriter you can't I just go, right, tomorrow I want three songs.

1:54:59Well, I know I need three songs because I've got an album that I need to write. Actually, I haven't got it. I don't have it. I don't see what it is I'm trying to imagine. And so I worked with this performance coach, and he put me onto this very mathematically precise, I think it was Mozart, and said, right, what I want you to do is I want you to listen to this music. I want you to go out for a walk. And there's studies done between people being asked to come up with ideas by looking at a subject straight ahead, right, or fixed on that. When they're asked certain things, find the solution. And then others that had to follow a subject from left to right, like it was a moving thing.

1:55:47And the one that was moving and more sort of visually stimulated, because you're doing other things. This is a bit above my pay grade in terms of what's happening in here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They became better at ideas, imagining other things. They said, right, I want you to listen to this music. I want you to go outside at lunchtime or whenever, 20 minutes. I just wanted to walk and just take in what it is. We know now this is like meditation or mindfulness and things, but that really wasn't in our psyche back then so much, right? So I went out for a walk, and I'm like, right, I'm listening to music.

1:56:24I'm looking around. I'm walking through a field and making sure I don't get run over on the road. I'm not coming up with anything else. So I'm like, well, this is not working. And then after about a week, I consciously go out of the development kitchen. I do my walk, and I come back, and I go, Christ, I didn't even really concentrate on crossing the road. I wasn't even thinking about anything. But I've actually thought about it a lot, but I've not concentrated on thinking. It's about putting your mind in the right frame of mind to allow yourself to be creative. If I'm stood in the kitchen on the pass or on any section trying to think of ideas while we're delivering, probably not the best thing.

1:57:08So you know what we were talking about at the beginning about the antenna to God? And God to me is creativity, right? In what Quentin Tarantino is saying. But I think it was almost like that walk and that Mozart was almost like shining or lengthening your antenna, right? And I think, you know, you do, they call it writer's block. You can get sort of muffled and you don't have that sort of, that reaching to that creative force. And funny enough, the walk thing is so, like, just so true. um i think was it darwin every every single day would have this exactly the same walk he would do yeah down to his thing and he'd like go past the exact same trees and so when he got there he was in this creative mindset yeah and um and rick rubin i'll send you the audio but you'll love it he says uh distraction is not procrastination i think a lot of people like if you're standing at the kitchen thinking well i can't go on a fucking walk like i've got to get these two dishes together it's like actually going on a walk and distracting yourself is not procrastinating yeah and it's just like that is the creative and then so what you listen to Mozart you're going on these walks and when you got back into the kitchen like was it like a flood of ideas or how did it how did you get it back no it's just you just I think it's just about being mindful that you need to put yourself in the right frame of mind and then then I started cycling and um to get fit predominantly and I just found that when you're on a bike you can't do anything else right you've got to concentrate on staying alive on the bike because you're on the road but also you there's so much you're thinking about you're thinking about the pedals like you just get immersed in it and before you know it i do 45 minutes i used to go the long way to work from i lived three miles from the development kitchen but i do 25 miles on the way to work and um by the time you got there you feel amazing you you've got everything in order that you need to do during the day and you just go right this is really easy today yes off I go and you've not really set out to get on the bike to think about those things it just happens because you're I don't know it's just something magical happens it's amazing I can't obviously ride to Soho every day but some days like today I'll drive him because I'm in my own little space I'm not sat on the train listening to someone else's conversation that's why I drive everywhere so I do I'm actually trying to do more walks now because I became a fat fuck over Christmas but in January at least but yeah Yeah, the distraction is not procrastination.

1:59:42It's beautiful. Let's talk about this and then we'll wrap this up, mate. But this has been, obviously, love this. So this is really cool. So I've worked with this guy called Simon for many years on different projects. He makes cocktails for people, pre-batch cocktails. Fresh, they're amazing. Where you've got maybe labor constraints or personnel constraints, pre-batching cocktails, even at the highest level bars like three sheets up here they will spec they will prepare like a chef so you can deliver drinks fast but actually the precision in your liquid yeah and drinks is going to be really consistent and you can do things that you can't just mix together in a jigger and pop in a glass right so you're making your own style of mixtures so we sort of like pre-made so that when when it gets busy a bit like the mise en place but like yeah exactly yeah And you can get something much better and consistent by preparing yourself to deliver those things.

2:00:35So anyway, he uses five tons of citrus a week in his factory for juicing orange, lemon, lime. We were looking at loads of brands. We'd worked on a coffee liqueur for Artisan. So because I'd made cocktails with him before for an airport restaurant, I went to him for like an espresso martini mix. So we'd been working on that. We won some awards and great taste and stuff. and then we were looking at all these amazing brands on the shelf of alcohol and spirits some of them are really bad to drink they're not great quality great branding great the whole thing's amazing really successful as well but actually when you taste them you just go it's not that great is it and so we thought well actually in parallel can we use these peels because they were going to anaerobic digestion and not really wasted but But peel is a great thing.

2:01:27So aerobic digestion. It's for like, you know, food waste that gets turned into energy. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. For electric. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we do a double extraction on lemon, lime, and orange separately in sugar first. That creates a syrup. Then it goes into alcohol and we treat that with ultrasonic in an ultrasonic bath. So you do a double extraction. One into sugar, one into alcohol. Then we have little raspberry bits that don't make it into punnets from English farms. We use that juice. We extract botanicals, your traditional bitters in an Amaro style. So this is an aperitivo. So I'll give you a commercial.

2:02:06What does an aperitivo mean? Aperitivo means sunset or something like that. It's like what you would have. It's like an Aperol spritz in a style of aperitivo. Yeah. Right? There's lots of aperitivos out there. Do you know Betivo, the brand Betivo? I do, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's good. Have you met Sam, actually? No, never met. You'd get on really well with him because he's obsessed with all this stuff as well. Yeah. So this is a commercial one, right? Yeah. Just have a little... When you say commercial one. I say rather large, quite cheap, and lots of, let's say, lots of fake stuff in there, right?

2:02:41And e-numbers and preservatives and stuff like that. I'm not actually going to taste it because I've tasted it so many times. So, sorry, this is the... What brand is this? We'll take it out. It's the big one. Yeah. It begins with an A. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't put that in. No, no, no. I'm joking. So we've created a brand called Forgotten, and it's all very sustainable. So we launched this here. We actually make the ultrasonic aperitivo, and we make a high-fidelity triple sec. So we're taking on brands that are old and dusty, like Cointreau, for example. Yeah. Cointreau is dried peel, sugar, and alcohol.

2:03:22Yeah. Whereas this is about extracting oils and real things from the orange, right? And we launched this here. We are in... recycled or re-collected Bordeaux bottles from Devonshire because we launched here. So we took these back to the factory, sterilized them. We've got our brand here. It's built with designers from cosmetic and perfume space. So we want to be very visually different to most things that are on the shelf. Mate, because I'd seen this on Instagram before I even knew it was linked to you. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, cool. And I was like, that's fucking sick. Because I love just the way it's typed out without the four F-O-D-O-R in it.

2:04:07So that becomes our word mark when, you know, Nike didn't mean anything back in the day, right? Yeah, yeah. I know I'm using probably one of the world's famous brands. So, yeah, we spend a lot of time working with the right people developing the brand. But this is designed not only to be just a spritz. This can be in tonic. It can be, my partner says, bartender's ketchup. You know, because what it brings into a recipe, you can't get from this. So this, you'll only use for its primary use, put it in a spritz. this becomes something else so smell smell this so this has got rhubarb root gentian um you've got a little bit of raspberry you've got all that citrus that gives you your bitters so your good bit you know like um like a negroni yeah campari based that's good bitterness you can have really burnt coffee that's bad bitterness yeah you can have really well roasted coffee it's bitter but it's a good bitter it's smooth bitterness not rough so this one will taste completely different to this one so it's all about low weight bottles 450 grams instead of 750 grams so you say four kilos on a case to move it from a to b reclaimed cork for our corks that are in here there's no cap there's nothing extra in this brand that doesn't need to be there same as the food same as the restaurant flavor first liquid wait it's like a it's like a sort of carousel of flavor in your in your gob but yeah how are you doing that it's like that's it you know what i said beginning fireworks yeah it's like a like a phonetic sort of firework that's going on in your gob that's the best way to describe it you've got natural oils in there it's all natural there's no preservatives no additives no nothing it's it's about real ingredients that are extracted with technology and imagination and thought to do something that others haven't done yeah um and everything that stands for it's about inspiring a bit of creativity so we lead when we take it to people to try you know great barmen restaurants hotels to say look let's taste it in this format but actually this is going to inspire your creativity i think we actually put it on here somewhere how will that inspire creativity do you think what that does to you when you drink it when someone is a mixologist or drinks person they think i want to bring what this brings for example into a drink oh i know what i can use i can use forgotten aperitivo yeah it's not just a spritz yeah i'm going to use a bit of that because that's going to give me those oils it's going to give me that it's that acidity and that difference between i'm going to ask some really stupid questions here but what's the difference between approach to making drinks versus food none there's no difference none really it's the same same textures flavors yeah multi multi-dimensional the the more multi-dimensional and and what's the word um more complex you can make things how they change through drinking a drink it will dilute out slightly um it might have something i saw a clever drink the other day that max did at um three sheets and his bramble is in a in a little tumbler square piece of glass it's got a sort of crater out of the middle of it and the bramble is clear and the fruit part of the bramble is in this little crater so every time you take a drink a sip of the drink a little bit more of it comes that into the drink.

2:07:44Ah, yes. So it becomes more of a bramble as you go down. So it starts as one thing, the experience in flavor changes the more you drink the drink to the end. How important is temperature in food, like the hot and cold and stuff? Yeah, hot and cold, how you, I mean, we did a drink at the Fat Duck that was essentially two fluid gels made with iced tea. One was super hot low acidity one was super cold high acidity so you you're using acidity and temperature but they have the same viscous texture put a little divider down in the glass pour the hot and cold one at the same time take the thing out the middle and then you'd have hot one side cold the other and it blew people's mind that's crazy and then you turn it that way and it's hot you turn it that way and it's cold go back to the thing it's in the middle same drink in the middle same flavor that's crazy high acidity low acidity hot cold balances out and that dishes like that that you oh i mean temperature once well you've got the nitro poached green tea uh sour which came in a tall glass it was just a foam out of an espuma but it was you know lime and green tea and the right acids that we put in there to create saliva which stimulates your appetite so it's the first thing you have a bit like aperitivo this has got similar properties right so you've got the acidity you've got good saliva in there now and you're like your body is now wanting more it wants the next thing so we took the foam from the glass you see with a spoon and then when we got the first liquid nitrogen in Heston started putting everything in it like anything that you can imagine went in this thing to try and you know break things you know what what were the limits there were no limits because you're not afraid to fail you give it a go we then pour a little dome out onto a spoon knock it into the liquid nitrogen which is 100 minus 196 celsius you you're kind of poaching it but you're freezing it from the outside the inside still foam you pick it up you put it in it's insanely cold but it just just evaporates and the delivery of that acidity that you normally got from eating through the glass just came in one.

2:10:00So your impact was way more. Plus you get a bit of nitrogen out of the nose like a dragon. How important is colour and, well, firstly colouring food? Massively important. If we didn't make this red, for example, with natural things, I'll just put more. Another one of those, mate. I'm going to show you what I mean. I have to do a few more of these colour experiments. We'll get nice and squiffy. If I just use water for this, right?

2:10:34so that now see i don't want it really really fake in color but what i want is a really nice blush so that now to me looks really inviting as a color if i've got something like that that's telling me that is not it's too fake for me where's that is that a psychological like is Is that literally red as, because red is the fear of colour of danger? Like, on a psychological basis, like, where's this coming from? This looks friendly to me and delicious, and it's going to be sweet and round and just like a pleasure. This, I'm thinking, that's still pretty vibrant, that. It looks pretty fake. Yeah. But if this is too, like, for example, if I really dilute it down, my perception now is that's not going to be as sweet and as round as i think yours is going to be yes and it's color tone it's i think it's called um how can you use synesthesia i think it is so if i say to you what is um hester did loads of stuff on this what what color is acid well i'm going to think of like lime greens or yellows there you go what is um you know what is sweet I think more of the fruity colours so red to be honest there you go so people see shapes and colours as taste and flavour so if you said describe there's a thing called it was called kiki and booba so it's does a word sound kiki or booba booba is sweet and round and round in shape and the kiki is really jagged like a spark or a firework.

2:12:22As in the word in terms of how you describe the food or like as in... Yeah, so you say booba, like round and friendly. Kiki, sharp and spiky. So if you said, I don't know, strawberry, it's probably more over the booba for me. But all of our perception is slightly different the way you are on the scale. Rory talks about a bloke at Oxford University who will basically get a lemon. He probably wanted a job at the fat dog, to be honest. We probably work with this guy, I think. Yeah, yeah. He'd get a lemon and he'd make a lemon sorbet, but it would taste like strawberries. And it was like that. He told me to get him on the podcast.

2:13:00I haven't actually gone around to it yet, but it's fascinating. One thing, what about spice? Like why humans are obsessed with spice? Like, because it's quite a masochistic thing to be like. Yeah. I've always wondered that. So I'm asking him some really dumb questions. Yeah, well, there's a specific part of the brain that is your, funny enough, on one of the perfection series i actually ended up because i didn't have any series was just heston's yeah it was a tv series it was something to do with um chili right yeah because i was the only one that didn't have like metal plates or some sort of replaced body part i ended up in an mri scanner being tube fed three tubes in the like proper head inverse all the way dead still had three small tubes and they were all connected to syringes.

2:13:52And what they did over 15 minutes, it's actually quite funny, is put a mixture of five seconds of water, five seconds of sugar syrup, and then five seconds of chili oil. Hot. Through your nozzle? So I've got three, imagine three wires going into the, wherever they sit to do the MRI. I'm in there, strapped. Tubes in my mouth. Three tubes, right? They do five seconds of water, five seconds of sweet syrup, and then five seconds of chili oil. And they were monitoring the parts of my brain that lit up when each one was pushed in separately. But what was really interesting was that the chili just got hotter and hotter and hotter.

2:14:37And I'm thinking, well, they've loaded the thing with sort of mild, little bit hotter, little bit hotter, little bit hotter. It was all the same. but the the cumulative effect of this chili in my brain and little parts of the brain will heat up and that's your pain and pleasure part of the brain so it's bloody hot but you keep going don't you because you bloody love it but god christ it's hot and you only want to stop once there's also there's a kind of bit of pleasure in in the pain of yeah yeah i mean yeah i mean people take that to extremes right but in terms of food you you don't stop eating that really amazing food like David Thompson or if you go to uh kiln up the road the the Thai way of using peppers and spices it's amazing you've been to um speedboat no mate that's insane I need to go there it's like really fruity yeah it's like it's so fucking spicy but it's fruity I don't know how that works yeah like you're just eating it you're like I went there I took two massive investment guys there for um to potentially talk about sputters in the podcast but it was stupid because like I was trying to eat but I was having a sweat attack we were like mate what are you up to this week no it was awful but the food's absolutely delicious yeah final thing what about plates like I know we've got like a really simple plate what we're doing at the Devonshire yeah but yeah like go to some restaurants and the plate is just kind of what role does that play in the dish I mean it can have a lot of a role or it can have none of a roll like ours but you know it's all depends what you like but i do think it's like when you go to a really trendy cafe or a restaurant and they've got really like rough the texture of things or the weight of stuff will have an effect on how you perceive things to be so if i gave you some really light cutlery it's gonna feel pretty cheap right but if i gave you good three-quarter weight cutlery that's a lovely assured quality feel it does transpond to what you're eating as long as the food is good it can't be great cutlery crap food you're not going to go oh this is amazing but actually when all of these things all line up together it becomes greater than the sum of its parts so you don't want really rough plates well i don't personally some some might i don't want that awkward scrapey you know like you get with really textured stuff but then you might want i don't know i'm just throwing it out there you might want texture on half the half of a bowl or a plate and smooth on the other depends what you're doing yes ash let's wrap that up we've gone way over but like i've absolutely i could go on for hours talking about this stuff mate um but i've got an accountant to see and you've got people to see but It's been an absolute pleasure.

2:17:24Yeah, and just so much in that. The main thing is the creativity and the discipline, and it's just the constant ebbing and flowing between those two states, but then it's all lynched around this thing of just empathy, making people happy, this sort of residual emotional experience. It's just insane. Amazing. Thank you very much. Cheers. That was sick.

2:17:50thank 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