April 2012

Only three restaurants from the UK made it into The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list this year, with a further five making it into the ‘51-100′ list.

The number one spot remained with Rene Redzepi’s Copenhagen restaurant, Noma. Also unchanged were the number two and three spots, going to Spanish restaurants El  Celler de Can Roca and Mugaritz respectively.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal was the UK’s highest entry on the list at number 9. Head Chef Ashley Palmer-Watts collected the award on behalf of the restaurant at which he holds a Michelin star, awarded at the beginning of this year. Heston Blumenthal’s three Michelin starred Bray restaurant, The Fat Duck moved down from number 5 last year to number 13 this year.

The UK’s only other entry in the top 50 was Brett Graham’s restaurant The Ledbury at number 14 which was this year’s highest climber moving up from number 34 on last year’s list.

Of last years top 50 entries, Hibiscus dropped from the top 50 but remained in the list at number 94;  with Fergus Henderson’s St John disappearing from the list all together.

Other UK restaurants in the 51-100 list include Viajante (#80), La Gavroche (#88), Restaurant Sat Bains in Nottingham (#97) and Hakkasan in Mayfair (#100).

For the full worldwide list, please see The World’s 50 Best website.

Belfast chef Chris Fearon has been Head Chef at Deanes at Queens for four years. This year he’s making his second appearance on BBC2’s Great British Menu.

Your starter “season, shake and curry on” made it on to the banquet menu last year. How did that affect the restaurant – did it bring lots of people in?

Business after Great British Menu was shown on TV last year was very good – if we were on the mainland in Great Britain it would probably have been even better but I think being on an island across the water we loose out on it a bit. We did a couple of theme nights too and got lots of interest from the local media. We had a lot of people coming in and asking for the starter, one couple from New Zealand were in Belfast visiting relatives – they said it is a massive program over there. We had a huge banner across the front of the restaurant saying “Winner – Great British Menu” and all the props from the starter on a shelf in the middle of the restaurant. They were a bit upset because the show is delayed by a bit when it’s shown out there and they didn’t want to know who won the starter!

So how was the show this year?

It was a bigger challenge this year. They asked us to push boundaries and try things we have never done before and to make food that would wow people. I took from the brief that I should push myself to break boundaries in my own style of cooking, so I started from a blank canvas and said “where can I push myself”. I tried to do a bit of molecular – stuff I don’t do on a day to day, I do a couple of hundred covers every day and it just doesn’t suit. So I dabbled in a bit of that, and I also practised a more refined style of presentation – tried to make it as fancy as I possibly could. For last year’s brief, the street party thing, I went for a theatrical style of presentation with lots of props and gimmicks – a lot of fun factor… I wanted it to be the same this year and to stay close to my style of food – so there’s lots of crazy props again. I’ve very much stuck to the whole Olympic theme, in terms of the names of my dishes – so my stater was called “Clay pigeon shoot” and uses real clay pigeons and a plate made out of shotgun cartridges. I wanted to have the wow-factor.

It was a lot tougher than last year, but a lot more fun in the kitchen and a lot more banter in the kitchen than last year. Chris Bell was there last year and he is back along with Niall McKenna. Belfast is a small place so we all know each other anyway, and we get on well. People tell me the Northern Ireland heat was very funny to watch so I’m looking forward to it.

There does seem to be a real sense of camaraderie in the kitchen, and honesty when it comes to tasting each other’s dishes.

It is very much a team thing; people only get to see 30 minutes of what was a 12 or 14 hour day. You are in the kitchen all day long, you share a car back to the same hotel together of an evening and so you do tend to bond very quickly. It gets to the point where you forget the “I want to beat him” and it is very much “let’s all do our best and try and get the plate of food up on the pass at the right time”. If somebody needs a hand we help him out; you see it in the other heats too and that’s nice – it is nice to have that.

Tell us a little about Deanes at Queens.

We’re an upmarket brasserie in the university area serving big numbers both at lunch and dinner. The food is honest, rustic and modern – it’s big flavours and big happy portions. There is quite a big menu, about eight starters, twelve mains and five dessert – and we do Sunday lunches too. There’s a south facing terrace at the front that is always nice and sunny.

Finally, where else is good to eat in and around Belfast?

I’m a big fan of The Barking Dog which is a little pub/brasserie – it has astroturf at the front of it with picnic tables, very quirky. It’s a cool pub and good food. There is The Old School House in Comber, just outside Belfast that has only been open for a couple of weeks. It’s a guy that worked with Phil Howard at The Square and Marco Pierre White. He’s cooking for about 30 covers per night; he’s doing really good high end food.  There’s also a chain called Mourne Seafood; they just do local seafood. They’re very good; they keep it simple and very fresh and it’s cheap. Quite rustic. It’s nothing fancy.

Full details of the Northern Ireland heats of Great British Menu are here.

Stephanie Moon is consultant chef working with producers and restaurants including Rudding Park in Harrogate, she also tutors at Leeds College and presents at numerous food festivals across the country. We spoke to her about her second appearance on Great British menu, foraging and Yorkshire food.

How was it taking part in The Great British Menu this year?

The calibre of chefs that are in the competition this year is amazing and it is an honour to be on that list. There are some weird, wonderful ways of cooking and some very different ingredients this year.

I think this year’s brief has been very tough. It’s difficult when you do something like Great British Menu – it is about how you read the brief and how other people read it. It is something you do on your own, and although you ask other people’s advice it is very much your own opinion. It is a big thing to do. I do take a few wacky twists and turns and tonight’s main course is very much like that!

There are three very different styles of cooking and interpretations of the brief this week.

Yes, Colin’s food is very molecular – precise and controlled. His fish course was my favourite dish of his, I thought it was stunning and I’m surprised he didn’t get a 10 for it, it looked so elegant. Charlie is more bold with his flavours, his monkfish with beetroot was a very nice dish too.

Your starter was certainly unusual, what gave you the idea of making goats cheese in 90 minutes?

They asked us to push boundaries and do things that have never been done before, and I thought it would be a good idea to try making a fresh cheese in the hour and a half. I think it’s something different and it is also something close to my heart – I’m a farmers daughter and the farm I visited to do the filming is 7-8 miles from where my parents live. I’ve used their cheese and milk before, they also make something called a crowdie [a soft, spreadable goats cheese] which is wonderful stuff.

You are a big fan of Yorkshire produce in general aren’t you?

Yes definitely and I’ve used it in all this year’s dishes for Great British Menu – Yorkshire food makes up the main bulk of my menu.

Yorkshire is a real garden of food for chefs, we’re amazingly lucky. We’ve got fish over at Whitby, game from the Moors then in the Dales there is fantastic Lamb and beef. Then over in East Yorkshire there is lots of arable farming, things like rapeseed oil – there are so many different people producing that now and it is a great product. Then there’s all the milled flours and fantastic beer. There are more microbreweries in in Yorkshire than in any other county – I’m using stout from Ilkley Brewery in my main course and something called Boozy Infusion from a restaurant called Beatson House in my dessert – that’s a different product, a really unique thing!

There are a lot of foraged ingredients on this year’s show – perhaps a reflection of the trend in the UK, but you’ve been doing it for a while haven’t you?

At Rudding Park we do a lot of foraging and we’ve been blogging about foraging for 4-5 years now. The blog is getting lots of visitors at the moment which is really good because it means there is interest there and people want to know about these things.

Is there a really simple recipe using foraged ingredients you could recommend for people looking to dip their toe in the water?

There is, a really food one to get people started is wild garlic soup; wild garlic is absolutely around and about at the moment – it’s everywhere. I think for people who haven’t done any foraging before it’s a good one. Wild garlic is easy to find, it tends to grow in woodlands and near to streams or rivers and all you need to do is rub a leaf and you know you’re on to the right thing. Also, there is so much of it about you aren’t going to cause a problem by taking a few handfuls.

Where is good to eat in Yorkshire at the moment?

The Pipe and Glass in South Dalton is fantastic, James McKenzie is doing a fantastic job. I’m looking forward to a new place opening, Iris in Wakefield, that’s going to be interesting – the chef Liam Duffy used to work with Steve Smith at the Devonshire Arms and for Aiden Byrne so I think he’s going to be one to watch. I also ate at The Black Swan at Oldstead recently, that was a fantastic meal. There are lots of places in and around Yorkshire.

Full details of the North East heats of Great British Menu are here.

Mark Greenaway is making his first appearance on BBC2’s Great British Menu in this weeks Scotland heats. We spoke to him ahead of this weeks show about the competition, his own award-winning restaurant and where else is good to eat in Edinburgh.

So, how was Great British Menu? We’re hearing this years is even better than last year.

Yes, I think this year’s series is going to be amazing.

I think this year’s brief suits a lot of the chefs better because we aren’t being squeezed into doing something so far outside our comfort zones. It is back to restaurant food, and every one of the chefs taking part is a restaurant chef. This is a real chance to fly the flag for what we do.

The brief of pushing boundaries and being innovative – it’s what we all do anyway, perhaps some to a lesser extremes than others, but at the end of the day we all push ourselves and we all push our food regardless of style.

You took a lot of ingredients you used in the Great British Menu kitchen with you from Scotland, why was that?

When you devise your menu you devise it with what’s in season when the show goes to air. I know all my suppliers and I know how good they are and the quality of the stuff I can get I really didn’t want to take a chance of getting there and ending up with something I wasn’t 100% happy with. Also, the boys that I’m up against are based in that neck of the woods and I didn’t know what they were going to cook or where they were going to get their ingredients from – so you’ve got to do the best you can do because you believe that they’ll do the same – and if having a great bit of produce is the key, then good!

Your restaurant (Mark Greenaway at No. 12 Picardy Place) has only been open for just over a year, but you’ve already picked up a number of awards. Tell us a bit about your restaurant, what is the style of cooking?

The style of cooking is very modern and produce lead. We use some very old techniques on the same plate as some very new ones. For example, we might do a beef dish of a roasted sirloin, with duck fat confit potatoes, and braised short rib – so you’ve got sous-vide then roasted sirloin which is very modern and then you’ve got the braised beef which is an old classic technique with the duck fat confit potatoes which isn’t very new either – it’s all about how it is brought together.

As for being produce lead, everybody bangs on about food miles and how they only use seasonal produce. At the moment, we have a lot of rhubarb on the menu – that rhubarb comes from Yorkshire. Are we using local produce? I think we are – we use the best of British ingredients, so if the asparagus that comes from down south is better than the one that comes from Fife up here in Scotland – I’ll buy it from down south. To me that is still local – it’s not like flying it in from Peru in the middle of December – that is something I would not do.

The great thing about Edinburgh and the restaurant that we’ve opened is that we’re not in competition with anyone here and nobody in Edinburgh is in competition with us. All of the – for want of a better expression – fine dining restaurants, are so different in style. Tom Kitchin for example has his from nature to plate approach – very rustic, it’s great flavours but very simple cooking, whereas Martin Wishart is the total opposite end of the spectrum to Tom – very French, very classical, very precise. Which is great because it means there is so much choice for the customer.

So where else is good to eat in Edinburgh?

There are loads. There are six Michelin starred restaurants in Edinburgh in total – that’s the biggest concentration outside London. There is an new restaurant opened up at a place called Stockbridge called Purslane – it’s very small, just 20 covers, but Paul Gunning the head chef there is doing great food. There’s Wedgewood on the Royal Mile, Paul Wedgewood’s place – again great food. Then you’ve got Tom Kitchin’s place, Martin Wishart, Plumed Horse, Number 1 at The Balmoral, Angels with Bagpipes – there are loads. There are some great Asian restaurants too. You’d be very hard pushed to go out in Edinburgh and have a bad meal to be honest, you really would.

We look at restaurants around the country and the same seems to be true in a lot of places; do you think the restaurant industry as a whole is improving in Scotland and the rest of the UK?

I think because of the financial climate that we’re in the people that aren’t quite up to the grade fade away, they don’t last. The ones that dodge the bills – or the general cowboys, just like with that kind of plumber or electrician, those people don’t get the business because the work that is out there is so slack as it is.

In the restaurant scene if you aren’t giving your customers something that they want to go back for, they won’t come back and it won’t last – so everyone is just trying that little bit harder to get the food offering right, the pricing right and the service right for the level that they are pitching themselves at. I’m the first one to go out for a £5 burger, because I know exactly what I’m going to get… but if I go out for the same burger and somebody tries to charge me £12.50, I’ll be asking myself “why – that is a £5 burger”. It is the same at any level, people come in with an expectation of what they should be getting when they walk through the door and if you don’t deliver that then you are dealing with a complaint, or the very British thing to do is not to complain and not come back. So I think everyone is just getting a little bit smarter about their business now, which is great for the industry.

The Great British Menu is on BBC2 at 19:30 each weekday starting on Monday 9th April. Details of the Scottish heat are here.

The Great British Menu returns for its seventh series, “The Olympic Feast” next week. The series will follow the same format as last year with three chefs from each region competing weekly to get their starter, fish course, main course or dessert selected to appear on the menu at an end of series banquet.

We spoke to judge Oliver Peyton to find out a little more about this years competition.

What do you think makes the Great British menu such a popular show?

What is brilliant about Great British Menu is that it is not about chefs who used to be on TV, chefs cooking Turbot in a classical way or terrines of foie gras; we are so far away from that.

It brings a lot of things to the fore – restaurants, chefs, suppliers, customers – and it all sort of gels. I think this competition has really helped define British cooking and a new generation of chefs.

How do you think this year’s show compares to last year?

I think it’s getting better and better. This year in particular I really felt that the chefs had lost the shackles of foreign influence. Genuinely for the first time I felt a sense of true independent thinking from the chefs in the competition. I think that it is a big turning point in British cookery because it means we can say there is now a modern indigenous cooking culture in the country which I didn’t see in previous competitions.

Something else that is really prevalent is healthy gastronomy – that is to say food that is not just based on butter and cream, or heavy eating. You can eat the food in this year’s competition without feeling you need to bring along your donor card.

Also, the type of ingredients chefs are choosing this year are perhaps not the kind of ingredients you’d expect to see – they are choosing the right ingredients rather than just choosing them because of the expense.

Do you think the show is representative of restaurants in the UK at the moment?

It is the tip of the iceberg. I feel over the next few years we have chefs in their early 20’s coming through and you are going to see a whole plethora of very interesting restaurants opening up. We’re the most creative country in the world – and when that translates in to food that’s great.

There is a generation of people becoming chefs who are doing it because they feel a genuine need and urge to be a chef – to express themselves through their cooking.

I think you have to go an awful long way to eat better than you do in Britain now, and I think that’s why this year’s show has been so great.

Some of last years chefs seemed to struggle a bit with the brief, did the looser brief this year help?

I got really excited by the sense of freedom I was getting from the chefs. For example, Phil Howard’s cooking in this competition – Philip you would describe as one of the old masters of classical British cooking in this country, and in this show you get a real sense of freedom from him. He was invigorated by working with the younger chefs, as if he’d thought “hang on I might have to get out of bed to win this”. I’m being facetious – but he did get out of bed and the results were amazing.

Do any dishes from last years show still stick in your mind?

Yes they do – but I’m not going to tell you which ones… But there are three dishes in this years competition which were moments in time where I thought ‘wow’ – those dishes were close to religious experiences.