Displaying posts tagged with 'mark greenaway'

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.