Category Archives: Cooking & Food

HFW asks ‘where does your food come from and do you care?’

Leave a reply

By Alex Meehan. First published in The Sunday Business Post, February 17th, 2013.

“We don’t question the provenance of our food enough and how meat, chicken and fish find their way into the food chain has become no more controversial than how, say, a tin of beans or a loaf of sliced bread is made and that’s not right.”

026Sitting down to chat with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is never boring. A fervent believer in the role of good food in the lives of healthy people, he’s just at home talking about lightweight projects like his Three Good Things book as he is talking about complex food politics.

With over 21 cookbooks, multiple TV series, two restaurants and a cookery school to his name, the predominantly self-taught cook has pulled off one of the most difficult transitions in television – from light entertainment to current affairs.

His campaigning efforts to engage the public in the politics of food have forced supermarket chains to sit up and take notice and in the process, he’s become the poster boy for food with a social conscience. His efforts have focussed the public’s awareness on the importance of traceability, ethics and sustainability in the food chain.

With the horse meat scandal fresh in the memories of Irish consumers, it seems his ideas are as timely as ever.

“The big problem with our relationship with our food is that it’s changed so much. The industrialisation of meat production and the commodification of meat has turned it from something that is precious into processed product that we take for granted when really we shouldn’t,” he says.

The uneasy relationships that exist where big business and consumer interests collide has been a rich source of inspiration for Fearnley-Whittingstall. His campaigns have seen him take on the poultry industry in his Chicken Out TV series, while his Fish Fight series looked at the EU-driven directive that obliged fishermen to discard huge amounts of fish.

These efforts have brought the TV cook to a new kind of audience. But at the same time, it’s opened him up to a barrage of criticism.

HFW“There are some questions that just asking can make you very unpopular,” he says. “But there’s a huge ethical dimension to eating meat, and that’s something I’ve tried to confront head on.

The Chicken Out programme focussed on the plight of intensively farmed chickens and ultimately resulted in modest but significant changes in the percentage of free range chickens offered for sale in Ireland and the UK.

“That campaign certainly annoyed some people and they’ve had a fairly easy comeback — ‘who’s he to tell us what to eat? He’s a posh boy who’s made lots of money from his TV shows and books — he can afford to eat what he likes.’.”

“There are a couple of ways to answer that argument. The first is that I don’t think I’ve ever told people what to eat. All I’ve really tried to do is tell people how their food is being produced and then they can make the decision about whether they want to eat it or not,” he says.

“People will also sometimes say that factory farming is here to stay because we need cheap meat. Well, I’m afraid we patently don’t — vegetarianism is an option.”

Critics of the cook say that arguing that meat production should be exclusively free range is an elitist point of view. Not everyone can afford to pay for a free range chicken, and with many families on seriously reduced budgets, intensively farmed meat is an unavoidable consequence of recessionary times.

1344951110-hffw_tourBut Fearnley-Whittingstall feels this is a kind of straw man argument because eating ethically produced meat isn’t necessarily a matter of cost.

“You can’t duck the ethical question by defaulting to the economic argument,” he says.

“Of course, you can be accused of elitism if you can afford good meat, but meat is something I think we should only really be eating occasionally. It’s perfectly possible to eat a healthy and interesting diet that features meat occasionally rather than every day at every meal.”

“Also, it’s important to remember that it doesn’t make it okay to cause animals pain and suffering that their meat is then very cheap.”

Extrapolating out the line of thinking, he says that there may be a demand for lots of cheap meat and people willing to fulfil that demand might be able to run profitable businesses on a large scale but that doesn’t make it okay.

“In the end I guess what bothers me is that the poultry business has been a fairly secret industry. If it’s an open industry and consumers make their decisions in the full knowledge of the facts, then I’m not going to argue with them. “

“The poultry industry in particular has traditionally been very closed to scrutiny. There was barbed wire around the farms that was meant to keep people out rather than chickens in. It was very hard to get access to film – next to impossible. Luckily we were able to find some more enlightened people in the industry who were willing to let us in.”

The resulting TV show had a concrete effect on consumption patterns, proving that it’s not when it comes to food politics, things aren’t as set in stone as they might seem.

“The statistics are different now. Before the campaign less than 5 per cent of poultry purchased in supermarkets in the UK was in any meaningful sense higher welfare. Now that’s pushing 15 per cent. Not all of that is free range but there has been a particularly big jump in the amount of indoor-produced RSPCA freedom foods poultry. Also, the whole industry has been looking more at breed selection in an effort to reduce mortality.”

“What happened with that campaign is that we made a significant number of life-long converts to either free range or higher welfare forms of chicken, and maybe a few fair weather converts as well. I’m pleased with that. I’d like it to have gone a lot further – we’re still looking at 85 per cent of poultry production being intensive in nature, but we made a difference.”

Fearnley-Whittingstall’s current TV project is a follow up to his 2011 Fish Fight series, entitled Fish Fight: Save Our Seas. That series succeeded in having the wasteful discard system banned by MEPs but this time he is attempting to tackle the issue of over fishing, the lofty ambition behind the campaign is to have new areas of marine protection declared around the world in order to protect fish stocks.

At a local level, he believes Irish consumers can do their bit to help manage our seas, starting with supporting local fishermen.

“One thing we can all do is this: we’ve got to stop hammering the same old species of fish over and over again. We need to diversify our tastes and spread our consumption over a range of sustainable fish, and not keep going for cod, farmed salmon, tinned tuna and prawns,” he says.

“Those four species make up over 80 per cent of all the fish we eat and you just know that’s not right when you hear that statistic. There is no easy answer here but if you live near the coast please support your local fishermen. Buy direct whenever you can and try to buy fish that’s landed near you and try to know where your fish comes from.”

Three Good Things – on a plate is published by Bloomsbury and is in the shops now, priced €36.50, while Fish Fight: Save Our Seas started February 14th and is broadcast on Channel 4 each Thursday evening at 9pm.

The Italian Job: Gennaro Contaldo

Leave a reply

By Alex Meehan. First published in The Sunday Business Post, February 17th, 2013.

IMG_2213Gennaro Contaldo is one of the most recognisable faces in the food world. A respected chef in his own right, he’s appeared in multiple TV series, written award winning food books and run successful restaurants but is still best known as mentor to TV’s reigning culinary giant Jamie Oliver.

In Dublin for a routine staff meeting at Jamie’s Italian in Dundrum, he’s taking the chefs through their paces, working on specials and making sure things are as they should be – this is his role in the chain and with more than 30 restaurants to look over, he spends a lot of time on the road.

On the morning I visit to interview him, it’s clear it’s a hands-on position – Trevor Oliver, Jamie’s Dad, and Contaldo address the floor staff together and work in the kitchen while Irish business partner Gerry Fitzpatrick looks on. The morning takes an immediate turn for the surreal when instead of a sit-down interview, he insists we need to get into the kitchen first.

He soon has me ricing potatoes to prepare potato gnocchi while he whips up two different sauces to go with our lunch. In five minutes flat, he’s prepared fresh gnocchi with smoked mozzarella, tomatoes, chilli, garlic and basil and a separate gnocchi dish with butternut squash, rosemary and garlic.

And just because the restaurant received an order of great looking giant Amalfi lemons that morning, he finishes with a linguine dish dressed with lemons and pecorino cheese.

“I started work in the kitchen at the age of about 10. My father was a linen dealer and I ended up in the kitchen by mistake. He had a good friend, Alfonzo, who had a restaurant in the next town to where we lived and one day he was called away and dropped me off there to be looked after,” he says.

“I was only meant to stay for the afternoon, but three years later I was still rushing there after school and on the holidays to learn as much as I could. I wanted to learn it all and the first thing I learned was to shut up and listen.”

IMG_2258
Contaldo comes across as a really genuine guy, and is exactly the same in person as he is on TV. He’s been living in the UK for over 40 years, yet he retains a charmingly dense Italian accent. However life wasn’t simple for the young chef when he arrived in the UK in the late 1960s.

With many years of professional cooking under his belt, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of regional Italian cuisine, he expected to hit the ground running, cooking the dishes he knew and loved from home. But there were problems when he got his first job as a chef in London.

“There were dishes on the menu that didn’t exist in Italy and there were also dishes that were completely different even though they had the same names,” he says.

“I worked in a restaurant bang in the middle of Mayfair and on my first day I was asked to make a spaghetti carbonara – ‘easy’ I thought, ‘I know this’. By then I’d been all over Italy and I knew my job upside down and inside out. But the head chef said ‘can I show you how we make it?’ I said ‘of course’ and I couldn’t believe my eyes when he started to make a béchamel sauce and then started adding cheese.”

Béchamel sauce is made with butter, flour and milk but proper spaghetti carbonara uses none of these – it’s made with raw beaten egg, using the residual heat in cooked pasta to cook the egg into a creamy silky sauce – no Italian worth their salt adds cream or uses a béchamel type of sauce in a proper carbonara.

“It was awful, just disgusting. But it got worse – after he’d made this gloopy thick sauce, he added it to spaghetti which was pre-boiled. They used to cook all the pasta for the restaurant in advance and then reheat it when the orders came in. I couldn’t believe it.”

“It was so far from authentic Italian cuisine I didn’t know what to say. I tried to argue with the guy but all he’d say was ‘this is how the customers want it’ but I couldn’t bring myself to cook such rubbish. They fired me on the spot.”

IMG_2263Contaldo says this approach to Italian cooking was common in the 1970s and the food served in many restaurants of the day bore little resemblance to that found in Italy.

“That was very common at the time. Many of the Italian people who turned up in the UK and decided to open restaurants weren’t necessarily great cooks. They improvised and made-up what they didn’t know,” says Contaldo.

Things have moved on enormously in Ireland and the UK, he believes, but even now it can be hard to find truly authentic Italian food.

“What’s changed since the 1970s is that now people travel a lot more. More and more Irish and English people have visited Italy and realise that what was being served at home isn’t the same as what was being served in Italy. Their tastes have changed.”

“It also started to become a lot easier to get quality ingredients. I remember when you could only buy olive oil in a pharmacy– it was used for cleaning out your ears,” he says. “Now you can get extra virgin olive oil everywhere.”

Recovering from his disastrous start, Contaldo went on to have a successful career in London, working with respected Italian chef Antonio Carluccio and later, co-owning his own influential restaurant Passione.

“I worked with Antonio for a long time – he’s a fantastic chef. We offered London customers much more authentic traditional dishes and pretty soon, we started to see these versions of our dishes appearing on other Italian restaurant menus. But for a long time, it was hard work,” he says.

In Ireland Contaldo is best known for his TV work with Carluccio and with his protégé Jamie Oliver. He’s been involved in the Jamie’s Italian chain since it launched in 2008. Oliver turned up on Contaldo’s doorstep as a teenager looking for work, having asked around and being told that Carluccio’s Neal Street restaurant was the best in London.

Contaldo is philosophical about the meeting – it wasn’t unusual for young chefs to appear at the back door looking for work but he would send them away to apply at the restaurant’s office. Something about the teenager’s sincerity impressed him however, and Contaldo took him on. Oliver did a stint as a pastry chef before moving on to the River Café as a sous chef.

“Jamie comes from a humble family. His dad Trevor was a chef with his own pub, and Jamie grew up in the kitchen with his dad. But when he was 14 or 15, he decided to go down to London, to improve his skills and to bring them back to the family pub. He went to catering college but at the time cooking training emphasised French food much more than Italian.”

“But Jamie decided he wanted to focus on Italy. It’s the simplicity that got him – it’s not so sauce based and there’s nowhere to hide if you make a mistake. It’s quick and it’s based around quality produce,” he says.

“So one morning at 7am he knocked on my door. I looked at him and to be honest I was pretty annoyed. I’d been in work until late the night before and was back in at the crack of dawn, so I was tired and a bit irritable. He had a mop of curly blonde hair and looked a quarter of his age.”

“He had a spark, something about him. I wanted to teach him because I thought he had something. He asked lots of questions, people liked him and he clicked. After two or three weeks, he was doing everything. He was the first in and last out every day and he worked hard.”

Twenty years later the pair are working together again. Contaldo works full time with the Jamie’s Italian chain  and the pair have perhaps the most unlikely friendship and partnership in the food industry. Contaldo says at 64 he’s twice Oliver’s age yet the two have never had a significant disagreement and that their business relationship hasn’t damaged their friendship — he works “with Jamie for us.”

Meanwhile, the Jamie’s Italian juggernaut shows no signs of slowing. There are already more than 30 restaurants in the chain with one in Ireland in Dundrum, and plans to open more in Perth in Australia, St Petersburg and VivoCity in Singapore, as well as more in the UK in 2013 alone.

“I have the freedom to do whatever I want. I travel to all the restaurants constantly, looking at the specials and helping each of the restaurants solve the problems that they need help and advice for. I cook a lot – I get behind the stove as often as possible,” he says.

“I get tired obviously – after two or three hours hard graft I’m done but the younger guys and girls, the 25 year olds, can go and go just like I did when I was their age.”

“We do sourcing all the time. It’s a matter of love and passion, searching for the best local produce for each restaurant. Here in Ireland, you have the most amazing meat, great beef and lamb. Sure, you don’t have lemons or olive oil, but as much as possible we used local ingredients and in Ireland you genuinely have some of the best produce in the world. The fish here is great, you have the best fish.”

“There are some things – prosciutto, mozzarella, olive oil, lemons – that have to come from Italy, but as much as possible we work locally.”

Catching up & soundbites . . .

Leave a reply

It’s been a busy couple of months, and as a result the blog has suffered. As a professional writer, blogging is something I only really do if I’m not busy – (the last thing I want to do after a long day writing is write more.) Anyway, with Christmas approaching, I’ve got some down time, so I’m going to post a bit more here.

To start with, here are some clips of interviews I’ve done recently that people might be interested in.

Nick Landers of the FT, on the rise of the celebrity chef

Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, on cutting his hair

Nigella Lawson, on her love of potatoes.

Like most journalists, I record as much as possible when interviewing people. This makes transcribing interview notes much easier, and also means that I can be sure I’ve represented my interview subjects properly. I’ve been doing this for years, and have enormous amounts of audio data on my main work PC. It only recently occured to me that people might be interested in hearing snippets from there. Most of these are tounge-in-cheek excerpts, but if people are interested then I will consider posting fuller versions of these interviews.

Let’s Go Disco – the launch

Leave a reply

So on Wednesday night we had the launch of Let’s Go Disco, with a party at the Cliff Townhouse on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. Excuse me in advance, but there will quite a few superlatives in this blog post – I don’t see a way around them, and if you can’t express pride at a book launch for a book your very proud of, then when can you?

Around 130 people squashed into the dining room of the Townhouse, quaffed saffron-flavoured prosecco, Hendricks gin and tonics made with juniper-flavoured ice cubes and canapés drawn from the recipes in the book. Three large plasma screens showed off high definition pictures from the book, as well as the video clip Shane O’Neill made especially for the occasion, and the book was officially launched by guest of honour Derek Bulmer.

Adriaan Bartels, general manager of the Cliffhouse Hotel in Ardmore gave the introduction, Martijn gave a touching speech about the project and the importance of the team that lie at the heart of the House Restaurant and expressed sadness that James Rehill couldn’t be there to enjoy the evening with his colleagues.

The speeches were then finished off by the legendary Derek Bulmer. For people who don’t know who Derek is, he was the editor in chief of the Michelin Guide for the UK and Ireland for twelve years and worked as an inspector with the Guide for over 30 years. He’s the guy who decided on giving – and taking away – the much coveted stars that mean so much for the chefs and restaurants that have them. Think of any of the big names chefs in the UK or Ireland – the Hestons and Gordons of this world – he’s the guy who had the final say on awarding them their stars.

Michelin is an intriguing institution, and at a time when there seems to be a new restaurant awards taking place every month, the Guide still has a special place. I got a chance to chat to Derek for quite a while, and I could easily see how he was able to maintain his anonymity for so long – he’s a delightful, charming and totally unprepossessing guy. I would never have guessed who he was.

We are very grateful that Derek agreed to write the foreword to Let’s Go Disco, as it’s the first time he’s done that. Since he retired from the Guide two years ago, he’s been free to talk about his experiences and give interviews but amazingly he said nobody else had asked him to write a foreword.

In his speech he talked at length about his experiences in Ireland, as he came here three times a year for twenty years, racking up significant mileage driving around Ireland and dining incognito. He maintains a fondness for this country and had some very interesting things to say.

So that’s it, the book has been launched and is available to buy. I’ve updated the page on my website dedicated to the book with some photos and details on where it can be bought – for the record you can get it at receiption at the Townhouse in Dublin and the Cliffhouse in Ardmore or from the Cliffhouse website here.

Some preview copies of the book went out in digital form a few weeks ago so there will probably be some reviews or comment in the press about it. I’ll post these up as I find them and try to maintain a web presence for the book going forward. On Twitter, the hashtag #letsgodisco has seen a fair bit of activity in the last few days so if you’re interested, you can go check that out.

Otherwise, please buy a copy and enjoy it.

#cookbook2012

2 Replies

I’ve been working on a book project for the last year or so with Dutch-born chef Martijn Kajuiter of the Cliff House Hotel in Ardmore, County Waterford. Martijn is an exceptional chef, and his restaurant is one of the most innovative and significant in the country – it was awarded a Michelin star in 2009 and has kept it in successive years, as well as being awarded three AA Rosettes. His food is exciting and progressive as well as being firmly rooted in a very well established repoirtoire of classic methodology.

While not exactly a secret, we haven’t discussed the book publicly over the last year, because the immediate nature of social media would have meant the world was bored stupid by the idea of it, months before it came out. Instead we decided to keep quiet until it made sense to not keep quiet about it.

I still don’t want to say too much about it yet, because The Cliff House is preparing to launch the book and so it’s up to them to publicise it and release images and extracts to the public. However, now that the publication date is drawing near it’s nice to be able to start to acknowledge the book’s existence.

First of all, there are two editions of the book – a normal version and a special edition that has already sold out. (It was mentioned by Martijn casually on Twitter and within 24 hours, all 100 copies had sold out, and there is now a waiting list of over 30 people in case any more come up.)

But of the normal version, what can I say?

Well. the first and most significant thing is the price – €45.

The book is being self published and we’re quite proud to have been able to keep the cost relatively low, given the amount of work and the quality of the finish that’s gone into it. It might not seem low to someone used to buying mass-market food books, but it’s really not expensive for a book like this. It’s not uncommon for self published books of this kind to sell for €100 or €200 and it’s not hard to see why once you start making them.

In our case, there have been multiple photo shoots, spread out over the course of a year in order to shoot dishes in season and at their best. The photography has been presented on high quality paper in a hard back book wrapped in a truly gorgeous cover. The design work has been created from scratch by an excellent design agency and enormous attention to detail has gone into each detail of how the book has been created. Literally every aspect of it has been thought about, considered, explored and decided upon.

The book is currently scheduled to be available in the third week of October. I’ll post more information here as it’s appropriate, along with links to where you can buy the book and perhaps also some of the unused photography and behind-the-scenes material generated during the year we spent working on the project.

Star turn – A day in a michelin star kitchen

Leave a reply

This is one of the more interesting commissions I’ve had lately – in March, I spent a 14 hour day working in the kitchen at the Cliff House Hotel in Waterford with Martijn Kajuiter and his team. This piece was published this week as a result. Thanks to Shane O’Neill for allowing me to use his excellent photography. He’s also blogged about this job and you can read his thoughts, somewhat amusingly entitled ‘When Alex met Martijn,’ here.

This story has generated a lot of interest on Twitter, and I’ve picked up a lot of foodie followers as a result. Hopefully you find it interesting – Alex

Star Turn
Published in The Sunday Business Post on May 15th, 2011, by Alex Meehan

How hard could it be? I’ve just persuaded Martijn Kajuiter, the Michelin-starred chef at the Cliff House Hotel in Ardmore, Co Waterford, to let me do a stint in his kitchen.

Now I’m wondering exactly what I’ve let myself in for.

It won’t be a case of dropping in for a couple of hours – Kajuiter has made it clear that he expects me to do a full shift and that I won’t be getting any special treatment. It’s a little more than I bargained for, but it’s an opportunity that’s just too good to miss.

Kajuiter is one of the very few – six to be exact – chefs in Ireland who hold a Michelin star, and is the only one of that small group who is based outside Dublin. Born in the

Netherlands, the 35-year-old came to the Cliff House in 2008 at the invitation of owner Barry O’Callaghan, having worked with some of the biggest names in the culinary world, including Pierre Koffmann, Marco Pierre White and Henk Savelberg.

A physically imposing man – he is 6 feet 8 inches tall – Kajuiter has established himself as one of the most innovative chefs working in Ireland. Winning a Michelin star in 2010 and keeping it in 2011 has put his restaurant on the map, and made the Cliff House a place that people go out of their way to visit.

While it’s hard to put an exact value on winning a star, at a time when many Irish hotels are struggling to stay open let alone turn a profit, the Cliff House enjoys enviable occupancy rates.

‘‘When we opened, everyone said, ‘oh he’s aiming for a star’ because of what we were serving, but I really wasn’t,” says Kajuiter.

‘‘I was looking for happiness in life, believe it or not. I wanted to work with a great team, be creative and cook in an amazing place. I wanted to do that with my wife and kids alongside me.

‘‘Of course I’m proud of our achievement – I am a chef after all – but the star came because of our approach and our commitment to quality, not because we set out to get one.”

What makes a Michelin-starred kitchen special? Obviously to the diner and the Michelin inspector, it’s the food on the plate – the quality of the ingredients, their seasonality, the design of the dish, the presentation and the taste. But that’s only one part of the picture.

Consistency is the real challenge. It’s one thing to be able to put together a plate of food to Michelin standard, but it’s quite another to do it on a busy Saturday night in a full restaurant, executing each and every plate to the same standard, and making sure that every dish gets to each diner at the right temperature, and at the right time.

Achieving this means starting early.

When I arrive in Kajuiter’s kitchen at 11am on a Saturday morning, the place is already buzzing. It’s relatively small for an operation of this size, but it’s functional. The main kitchen area is constructed around a central island of stoves and ovens, with each station operating in its own distinct area.

Meat and fish are in one corner, as are pastry and desserts, stocks, baking and garnishing.

At the front is the pass, the place where garnishes are finished and assembled dishes pause under the heat lamps for the few critical seconds it takes to get the chef’s approval before they are sent to the dining room.

Kajuiter shows me around, introducing me to a succession of slightly harassed looking junior chefs who are busy making stocks for sauce bases, preparing garnishes, making fresh pasta and ravioli, and otherwise prepping for lunch service in the bar and dinner in the main restaurant that night.

All of the ingredients are sourced locally – on the menu tonight are scallops from west Cork, organic salmon from Bantry Bay, Waterford spring chicken, Helvick monkfish, Black Angus beef, lamb from Lismore and duck from Skeaghanore.

For the kitchen staff, service starts in earnest at around 6.30pm, and once the first guests are seated, there is no longer time to tidy up loose ends.

One mistake can derail the whole effort, and making sure that doesn’t happen takes an enormous amount of advance preparation.

For the senior staff, the working day starts with the daily morning meeting, which is held in the dining room over freshly brewed coffee.

Kajuiter and his second in command, sous chef Dirk Mooren, sit down with Paul and Nick (the meat and fish chefs), and Gareth and Patrick (pastry, desserts, baking and petit fours) to dissect the previous night’s service and discuss their plans for the evening ahead.

Kitchens are notoriously rough and ready places to work, and while Kajuiter is soft spoken and respectful with his staff, there’s no question about who’s in charge. He is ruthless in identifying where things could have been tighter the night before, and when a suggestion is made for a potential special, he quickly points out that it’s not seasonal enough.

‘‘We have a journalist with us today, but I don’t care about that,” he says. ‘‘Everyone is to do things exactly as you otherwise would. He should see things as they are. No pretty faces just for today.”

With that, we’re up and off. The others head back to prep, and Kajuiter brings me out to one of his newly-built greenhouses in the grounds of the hotel, where he grows some of the more delicate and perishable herbs and edible flowers which he uses in his dishes.

There’s cress, marjoram, pea shoots, chervil, beetroot, rocket, fennel, sweet woodruff and edible viola, or Irish molly flowers, as well as a vast array of other unusual herbs he’s grown from seed.

Seasonality and the use of local produce are at the heart of Kajuiter’s food, but that creates its own problems.

‘‘This isn’t Dublin – if we run short of something or sell out of something, we can’t just nip out to get more,” he says. ‘‘We’re in Waterford, and that means careful planning and working with the seasons.”

With this in mind, a few years ago he came to an agreement with the managers of St Raphael’s residential and daycare centre In Youghal to bring its organic nursery back to life.

We spend part of the afternoon in the two large poly tunnels there, picking out fresh produce from the evening service.

Back in the kitchen, as the afternoon wears on things start to heat up, both literally and figuratively. Junior chefs are shouted at when it looks like standards might slip; a fire alarm goes off when someone overloads a tumble dryer, but the kitchen staff barely stop to acknowledge it; and when the staff meal is served at around 5pm, it’s eaten standing up.

It’s an intense working environment, so it’s natural that emotions run high.

The staff are all extremely skilled in their own right – most of them could easily get a head chef job somewhere else if they wanted it – but they stay because they know they’re getting the kind of experience that will stand to them for life.

At one point during the evening service, what seems like a full-scale riot breaks out in the kitchen as Kajuiter picks up on a mistake.

One of the line chefs has got his timing wrong, resulting in three main courses being ready to go at the pass, while one more is late.

The chef is not a beginner, but this is a rookie mistake.

To make matters worse, when he’s asked about his timing, he tries to cover for his error, something which riles Kajuiter more than the initial mistake. He gets a severe dressing down, while around him, his colleagues avert their gaze and keep working.

The atmosphere is extremely tense, but five minutes later things are back to normal and all seems to be forgiven.

‘‘There might be shouting or harsh words, but it’s forgotten about quickly,” Kajuiter says. ‘‘If I’m out of line I’ll apologise. I don’t believe in a culture of fear in the kitchen. It doesn’t get the best out of people, and you don’t keep staff.

‘‘People who work here do it for more than just a pay cheque.

Every single person has a function in the kitchen, and they all make it work. If the kitchen porter doesn’t deliver the goods, we’re all screwed.”

Kajuiter is acutely aware that a Michelin star can be a double-edged sword. While it has sent the profile of the Cliff House sky high, it has also probably led some people to presume that it is out of their price range.

‘‘A Michelin star puts you in a box,” he says. ‘‘It makes people think you are expensive and exclusive, but that’s the wrong way to look at it.

‘‘Having one star means that you are an exceptionally good restaurant in your own category. It’s about what’s on the plate – your restaurant could be in a shed in the middle of the mountains, but if you are cooking fantastic food, you could get a star.

It has nothing to do with being expensive, or Having Wedgwood plates, or what the room is like.”

Prices haven’t gone up in the restaurant since the star was awarded – a three-course meal costs €65,while an eight-course tasting menu costs €85.Matched wines cost €25 or €40 per person with the tasting menu.

If Kajuiter could ask one thing of his customers, it’s that they don’t pre-judge the experience of eating in his restaurant.

‘‘Sometimes people have such high expectations that if one little thing isn’t how they think it should be, then the whole experience is ruined for them,” he says. ‘‘If something isn’t right, it isn’t right – and please tell us if that’s the case – but this isn’t a competition between the kitchen and the guest. It’s a celebration.

We want you to be thrilled.”

It’s 8.30pm, and service is in full flow. The restaurant is packed; 72 guests are eating dinner tonight, and 14 of them are having the tasting menu.

Earlier in the day I’d prepared garnishes and helped with prep, but for the last hour or so I’d been watching from the sidelines, as service started in earnest.

Suddenly Kajuiter is explaining tome what he wants done and how to do it.

The dish is a salmon starter I saw prepared earlier – the organic fish from Bantry Bay is served as a ballotine, as an ice cream and also marinated, along with preserved cucumber and beetroot textures.

It has to be plated up with herbs and leaves in just the right place, and with sauces added dot by dot, in the right order and quantity.

At the pass, it’s topped with a glass dome, and a special gadget is used to ignite oak sawdust, which is then pumped under the dome.

The plate is then whisked away to the dining room, where the server presents it to the diner by lifting off the dome and releasing the smoke. It’s a clever take on smoked salmon – or maybe smoking salmon would be a more accurate description.

By now I’ve watched quite a few of these plates make it to the pass and enjoyed the theatre of the final preparation.

Now, Kajuiter is beside me. ‘‘So you’ve seen how to do it, yes? Okay, time to get those pristine whites dirty.”

He has me plate up with him, watching each step to see if I’ve got it right.

The atmosphere is suddenly tense, and I’m aware that he’s not treating me like a guest in his kitchen any more – we’re working on food that is going out to the dining room.

‘‘Okay, that’s good. Do four more.”

He moves away, leaving a plate for me to copy and I’m on my own, concentrating as hard as I ever have.

The noise and bustle behind me fade away while I hunch over the plate.

A minute later he’s back, examining my work.

‘‘Yes, that’s it. Good. Okay, take them to the pass.”

At the front of the kitchen, the restaurant manager and two servers are waiting.

Kajuiter is beside me, telling me to hurry up.

I load up the smoke burner, switch on the pump and get ready to light the wood. It’s a fiddly job, and Kajuiter is getting impatient with the delay – there are paying guests waiting for this food, and the salmon must go to the table at exactly the same time as other dishes, which have just arrived on the pass.

I’m suddenly painfully conscious of the audience of servers, management and other chefs watching me from the corner of their eye.

‘‘Okay, go! Add the smoke. Like that. No, add more. Okay, and the next plate. Hurry up. Get it right. Too slow! Okay, there. It’s done. SERVICE! Go go go!” The plates are taken away, and I’m struggling to turn the blowtorch off. I’m sweating and my heart is racing. Kajuiter is smiling.

‘‘How did that feel? Scary, huh? That’s how Marco made me feel my first service with him. It’s a buzz, isn’t it?”

Fourteen hours after I arrived, I’m sitting in Kajuiter’s office having a coffee. In the dining room, the last guest is nibbling on petits fours, while in the kitchen, the staff are starting the clean-down process, scrubbing the room until it gleams and is ready for it all to happen again tomorrow.

Including amuses bouches, sorbets, starters, main courses and desserts,430 plates of food have left the kitchen this evening. It has been an exhausting and exhilarating experience.

But, most importantly, it didn’t kill me.

Recipe: fillet steak with bearnaise sauce and French fried potatoes

6 Replies

Okay, I’ve been getting lots of pressure from friends to post this, so here it is, my method for cooking fillet steak with bernaise sauce and French fried potatoes. It’s not particularly revolutionary, but it is awesome and pretty dependable. Try it out and let me know how it goes.

I’ll start with the béarnaise. This method is not the classical method, but it works fantastically and I’m rather partial to it, since learning it from my sister (cheers Alacoque!) who in turn learned it from Maureen O’Brien, the now deceased wife of my also now deceased godfather Mahon O’Brien. The O’Briens ran the well regarded Vale View hotel in Avoca for many many years, and were truly ahead of their time with regards to the food served in the restaurant there. Anyway, this is Mo O’Brien’s method, and it’s a corker.

First, here are the ingredients: Tarragon, unsalted butter, a shallot, salt, pepper, an egg yolk and lemon juice.

Bearnaise is one of the classic ‘-aise’ sauces, along with mayonnaise and hollandaise, all of which are emulsified sauces — made in a way that allows normally immiscible fats and acids to mix, usually by using egg yolk as a binding medium.

In this method, you finely dice a shallot, along with a generous handful of tarragon herb, before adding them to a small saucepan, and covering them with a splash of water. To this you add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice, and some decent quality salt and pepper.


Taste the water at this point, to check the acidity – it should be quite sharp because you’re going to add a lot of butter later — and set it to simmer gently until the water is cooked off. This creates a flavour base, gently cooking out the rawness of the shallots to create what at this stage should be a slightly harsh, lemon-flavoured herby sludge. Leave this mixture to cool, before adding an egg yolk. This is the crucial stage –if the mixture is hot when you add the egg yolk, it will start to cook and you’ll end up with scrambled egg rather than a sauce. Basically, you want your sauce base to be warm enough to slowly melt butter, but not actually hot.
Take a generous quantity of unsalted butter and dice it into inch-sized cubes. Place your small pan into a larger saucepan containing boiling water, but make sure the bottom of the smaller pan isn’t actually touching the water. The idea here is that you gently heat your sauce base, while whisking in butter one bit at a time. If you do this carefully, using enough heat to warm the sauce but not get it too hot – which is what the water bath is about – then as the egg yolk gently cooks, it will incorporate the lemon acid in the sauce with the unsalted butter. Once it starts to take, you’re away. You can whisk in more butter to get the consistency you like, all the way from thin to thick and mayonnaise like.  Taste it to adjust the seasoning. Your sauce is done and will keep for a couple of hours happily at this stage.

Next, to the chips. This isn’t rocket science really – you want the basic twice fried chips. The key to really good chips is the kind of potato you use – not all spuds are suited to all uses, and for great chips you really want something like a Maris Piper potato – these have a high enough starch content that you can get chips that are lovely and crisp on the outside and soft and fluffy inside. It’s really worth tracking these down if you’re going to have a go at this.


I basically just hand cut mine to a uniform size, rinse them thoroughly to get as much starch off them as possible and then dry them using paper towels, to get as much water off them as I can. Next, they go into the deep fat fryer (in batches, if they won’t all fit in one go) so that they basically stew in hot oil for a while. When they are cooked through, but not crisp, I take them out, drain them off and let them cool down. They can hold at this stage for a couple of hours. Just before serving, whack up the heat on the fryer and put the chips back in to crisp up. The effect is totally worth it. Try it out.

Finally to the main event, the meat. In these pictures, I used a couple of 8oz fillet steak sourced from a local butcher near where I live who really knows his stuff when it comes to meat. It’s aged for 28 days and is really fantastic quality. For a long time, I didn’t eat meat, and now I tend not to be interested in eating it unless it’s of very high quality. Cooking fillet steak isn’t hard – the basic principal is that less is more. I heat a non-stick pan until it’s pretty hot, and then add some rapeseed oil – it’s a good quality oil that can take a high heat without burning, unlike, say, olive oil which doesn’t like high temperatures. Once the oil is smoking, I add my fillets, and leave them be for around a minute. Before I turn them over, I add a generous knob or two of unsalted butter to the pan, along with a couple of cloves of garlic which haven’t been peeled, but have been lightly crushed to break them open. 

As the butter melts and foams up as it hits the hot oil, I turn the fillets over and baste them with a spoon as they cook. After a minute or so on the other side, I flip them onto their side and cook them for a further minute or two on the sides, trying to get them evenly browned. This gives a good medium rare temperature, and so I take them out of the pan to rest for a few minutes. And basically, that’s it.

Recipe: Salsiccia e Lenticchie (Sausage and lentils)

Leave a reply

So here’s the first of my recipes – a variation of the Italian class Salsiccia e Lenticchie, otherwise known as Sausage and lentils.

The first thing to say about this is that it tastes much better than it looks! This is a recipe that is traditionally served on New Year’s Eve at midnight as the New Year is rung in. I first had it in Rome on New Year’s Eve in maybe 2002 or 2003. Can’t quite remember now, but that’s not important. Myself and my wife enjoyed a nine or ten course meal in a low key restaurant, complete with wines and champagne. At the end of the night, as the count down to midnight was sounded around Trastevere, and long after desert was served, the kitchen produced steaming bowls of Salsiccia e Lenticchie.

This recipe is my adaption for the original. It’s pretty authentic, but the big differentiator will be the quality of sausage you use, whether it’s Italian or not – I don’t think it matters massively as long as they are good quality properly made sausages. The dish will be as good as the sausages you use. It’s well worth a try- it’s one of those recipes that’s extremely simple and yet tastes absolutely amazing. It doesn’t look terribly pretty in the bowl, but you have to taste it to get it. It’s cheap as chips and makes a great mid-week treat. Enjoy!

First off, the ingredients.

Mise in Place

I don’t have measurements for this, as I don’t use any. You sort of have to judge quanities as you go. Above, you can see all the ingredients laid out. I use a basic Italian soffrito, or equal parts celery, onion and carrot diced relatively finely. In addition, I use garlic, sage, pork and leek sausages, and finally equal parts brown and puy lentils.

I’ve mentioned the importance of the quality of the sausages, so now a word on lentils. Some lentils require pre-soaking but neither puy nor brown lentils do, so you can make this straight away, pretty much from store cupboard ingredients. Brown lentils cook right down to give a lovely gravy-like, thickened consistency to the finished dish but puy lentils retain their shape as they’re cooked so that’s why I’m combining them.

With both kinds of lentils, it’s really important to sort through them to try to find any small stones – I’ve nearly chipped my teeth in the past, but it’s just part of the peril of using a natural ingredient. It’s a pain, but you have to do it. Should only take five minutes really.

Method

We’ll start with the sausages. You don’t have to fry them first, but it does give them better colour and flavour, so start by adding some decent quality extra virgin olive oil to a good sized pot and then add your finely chopped sage leaves. Leave these to sizzle and crackle for two or three seconds while you chop your sausages into chunks and then add them to the pot. They’ll cook out properly later on, so now you just want to give them some colour. After a minute or two, add your garlic – you don’t want it to burn but you do want to flavour the oil the sausages and sage are in. Toss the sausage chunks in the flavoured oil and don’t worry too much if it starts to stick. It’s fine as long as it doesn’t burn so you just need to keep the mixture moving.

I use a classic soffrito to make the flavour base for this dish, so next, I add carrot, celery and onion to the pot and give it a good mix around.

You should have something like this.

Next, add some neat stock – I use Knorr vegetable stock pots – and then then your lentils. Mix this thoroughly to combine all the flavours with the undiluted stock.

(You could also add alcohol here in the form of some white wine if you wanted, but I tend not to, and it’s not traditional to the best of my knowledge.)

All you need to do now is bring this up to a simmer and cook it for around 40 minutes. Keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t cook dry. If it gets too thick, just add more water and give it a good stir. You’re looking for a finished consistency which is a bit like a risotto in texture. Be careful to taste the liquid before you season it during cooking – some stocks are very salty and some sausages are also quite salty – it’s easy to ruin it by adding seasoning without tasting it first.

To serve

To finish, dress with some good quality extra virgin olive oil, some Maldon salt and and several twists of fresh cracked black pepper.

Food blogging . . .

Leave a reply

So one thing that doesn’t get blogged about much here is my love of cooking. Lately I’ve found myself discussing food, recipes and cooking techniques with friends who have independently told me ” you should blog about that!”

So I am. At least, that’s the plan. I’m going to start uploading recipes, book reviews and observations to this blog, and the more observant of you will notice that there is now a new tag above marked “Cooking & Food”

Time will tell how this works out, but basically I’m going to start logging and photographing recipes I cook as I cook them. Starting tonight. I’m making an Italian regional dish made with sausage and lentils. It’s really good, very simple and delivers a bang for its buck which is astonishing. So, I’ll snap that tonight and upload it at some point over the next few days.