Lunch Poem

Following on from my recent thoughts on menus, I thought I should introduce the new workday lunch card. We have switched from offering a full A La Carte during the week to a set Three Course Set. This, as with every decision we make, is designed to improve our guests’ dining experience, specifically to offer them greater convenience and value. Allow me to explain…

Around a year ago a young cook came to join the team as Head Chef. It has long been my preference to employ a Head Chef at Brunswick House; though I adore cooking and spend as much time in the kitchen as possible, the demands of manning the pass in addition to overseeing the rest of the operation here long ago went beyond my organizational abilities, and, with the arrival of Charles Woodward, my technical skills too. 

Charles is an excellent chef. His CV was most impressive, encompassing senior positions at Fera, Viajante and The Corner Rooms, among many other places I also admired. He was young, serious and friendly. He heard I was looking for someone to head up the kitchen, came for dinner, really enjoyed the place, and got in touch out of the blue to see if I wanted to meet for coffee.  We met on a Monday evening at 4pm at Quo Vadis, rather like a blind date, all stiff smiles and reserved manly handshakes. Eight hours later it was midnight, coffee had turned into tea, snacks, aperitifs, a three course dinner, three bottles of excellent Burgundy, Fernet Branca, Vieille Prune and… well, memory gets a little foggy, but we spent the whole evening talking incessantly about food, restaurants, and the kind of place we’d both like to see Brunswick House become if we were to work together. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

Charles making friends on his first day

It’s basically the only qualification required for getting a job here – to love food deeply, enjoy talking about it incessantly, and be able to work unceasingly in its production. Charles has been wonderful to work with on all counts. I’ve also learnt a huge amount about cuisine from working alongside him. A highly technical and exacting cook, he is also a very considered person, and as such has almost as many opinions on what I propose we do here as I. He has a tremendous amount of energy and ambition, and has helped me continue to drive this place ever upwards.

Under his influence, the menu has become increasingly involved. Under my guidance, the general principle was a happy union of three complimentary components on a plate, with a unifying sauce or dressing. Charles has, like a fractal regression, taken that model and constructed each of those component parts out of three parts in turn, and those parts from three further components. The food is on another level, and I think this is magnificent.

Chef Charles at work

It is, of course, a lot harder to make. We now have more kitchen staff to realize this, and the plates take significantly longer to produce, both in preparation, and service.  While this is manageable in the evening, when guests generally don’t have work to rush back to, we’ve found that the 40 minutes it takes to prepare some of these dishes from the check printing is too long for many of our diners. It’s also the case that the elaboration has made the dishes more expensive to produce, and has pushed up the prices somewhat. Not by much, maybe a pound here and there, but perhaps too much for lunch.

Our new weekday lunch menu

We have therefore decided, in recognition of feedback from our many loyal regulars that the pace of lunch had become inconveniently slow for them, to switch from an A La Carte to a Two or Three Course Set, with three choices for each course. We are simplifying the dishes to make them quicker to produce, and also less costly, so a guest opting for three courses at £19 should be able to get through lunch in an hour should they wish, even when we’re very busy. As the whole three course menu is only slightly more expensive than a single main from the A La Carte, we hope our guests do not feel we’re forcing them to order more than they’d like, though should they just wish for something small and simple, our Bar menu is always at hand.

Me and some pals cracking into luncheon on the terrace, come join!

It may be that there is an uproar and we’re quickly beaten into submission, returning to the A La Carte across the board. I suspect however that this will be welcomed by all our visitors who maybe do not have all the time in the world to while away the afternoon eating and drinking, as dreamy as that sounds. Weekends, such as today, will retain the full offering.

I leave you with this, one of my favourite poems

Frank O'Hara: Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean-Paul

https://youtu.be/VbcCZx0x90k

On Menus

This is one of my most treasured possessions. It is a folio called London À La Carte by Caroline Conran, published in 1967 by Habitat. Essentially it is a sheaf of A3 facsimile reproductions of the most interesting and influential restaurants in the capital at the time, with a couple of signature recipes on the back. The design ranges from the gorgeously illustrative (I think only Bibendum still echoes this currently, and Quo Vadis in monochrome) to the naïve (the mimeographed typewritten chinese list on yellow sugar paper), though all are utterly transporting – I imagine the 60s restaurant scene, so vividly captured in The Spaghetti Tree: La Terraza, Alvaro, for example. I paid an absolutely monstrous amount of money for it, however there is presently a copy on ABE available for £18, and I recommend it hugely to anyone interested in London restaurant history.

Over the last five years I’ve rewritten the menus daily, every day. Often changes will be small – on Friday none of the expected peas arrived from Italy, but the first broad beans did, and so they went on the menu instead. On Tuesday we sold the last of the beautiful organic Lincolnshire quail, with their rich flesh, dark as partridge, and so portioned up the generous, fatty loin of one of Mary Holbrook’s fabulous English Lop. Jorge sent from Swaledale a few more quail yesterday, just as the pork finished. Weekend saved.

Along the way there have been more major revisions. My first menu was as follows:

It took me a little while to find on an old hard drive, probably longer than it took me to clumsily layout on MS Word in the first place.  Coffee has not changed price since we opened, possibly due to the tenacity of our house roaster, Jack Coleman, who has barely raised his prices for this wildly fluctuating commodity since we switched from Monmouth a couple of months in. Prices are very low, especially recalling the generosity of the portion sizes. This is in large part because no one had explained to me the concept of VAT, nor that I had to pay it. Luckily I was still in the VAT free opening window offered to small businesses when I found out, and all was rectified in time. When looking over the early days in retrospect I’m far more likely to laugh at my huge mistakes, and reserve my cringing embarrassment for anything which at the time I celebrated as a great success – these were the far more profound examples of my naivety. Perhaps I’ll return to these later.

The current dinner menu looks like this:

I’m very fond of this menu. I’ve worked with a couple of designers I really admire on it. Initially I approached Inventory Studio, then headed up by founders David Lane and Rob Boon. David has since left to found his beautiful art & food journal, The Gourmand, to which I’m an avid subscriber. They put together some lovely A5 format menus, which were bound to pretty enamelled plates of steel with hair bands. Initially these felt and looked magnificent, but as is often the way the place grew around them, and they started to feel somewhat dwarfed by the new scale of the room, which had by that point been gutted, re-floored, paneled, and re-furnished. I often wonder whether I’m not just terribly fickle and easily bored, but in the new surroundings they no longer felt appropriate. I therefore re-designed the menu with the help of Peter Karageorgevich, an amazing designer and an old friend, who’d produced our pretty chandelier-referencing logo. We worked up something on A4 card, dishes on the front, wine list on the back. This was important to me as I hated presenting one list for the table to share. For many of our guests, especially those working for the profusion of wine merchants in the neighbourhood, picking an interesting bottle together was as important as selecting what they were going to eat, and only offering one list seemed undemocratic, and not companionable. I also liked how the new menu format removed puddings to a separate card, with all the brandies, sweet wines and other treats listed alongside. This I picked up from Quo Vadis – whenever I think I’m full, I’m presented with a menu of delicious things I haven’t yet seen, and consequently always find room for one of Jeremy’s fabulous puds. Some guests note that they like to know what’s for pudding while constructing their first and second courses, however they only have to ask, and desert cards are immediately presented.

Menu writing is my greatest preoccupation. I want the dishes that we conceive, cook, plate and serve to be considered, delicious & inspiring. I don’t place food on the level of fine art in my mental taxonomy, but I do believe that cooking has the capacity for artistry, and can withstand a certain amount of determined and determining investment of thought before collapsing into pretension. I believe the more I put into my menus, the more our guests will get out. Sometimes I get emails from guests, or comments on Opentable, suggesting that our food is too esoteric, and that what they’d love to see on our menu is steak and chips. I think I’d probably love to see steak and chips on any menu, but can’t for the life of me remember the last time I actually ate it. In fact I can only recall two occasions on which I’ve eaten steak and chips – once at St John, when I was about 13 (it was actually forerib, roast potatoes & horseradish), and once again at 32 Great Queen Street, when I was about 21 (this time the forerib with triple cooked chips and Tom N-D’s ethereal Béarnaise). Both times it was entirely related to the quality of Tom Jones’ wonderful Hereford beef, not the happy but pedestrian marriage of savoury meat with crispy spuds and sauce. I know I’ve eaten it many more times that that, but cannot recall a single one. In the same way, I vividly recall my first oyster, but not my last. It is our job to cook food people want to eat; however it is also our job to create the possibility of memorable experiences, and it is for this reason we wage quiet war against cliché, and focus on giving our guests what we believe they will love, not what we second-guess they might like.

We have just updated our breakfast menu for summer. Breakfast is one of our hardest services as a restaurant. To put this into the context of Brunswick House, we have a small kitchen, with 2 or 3 chefs working at any one time. During a busy evening shift, a full dining room and a large private dinner in the house, we’re serving around 200 guests dinner, with many more ordering informally from the bar menu. Preparation for this starts at 7am. By 11.30am we pause to set up for lunch. From 3pm we have a two and a half hour prep window before pre-service briefing at 5.30pm, then dinner. Alongside this, we open from 9.30am for breakfast. This is partly because Lascco opens then, and since we share the building, we feel we should be open too, to offer Lassco’s clients a coffee, and the rest of Vauxhall a marvelous space in which to escape the traffic and noise. Our goal is therefore to offer the most delicious food we are able to, under circumstances, those being a small kitchen, and a huge workload. We are also cognizant of the fact that most guests don’t want to wait more than 10 minutes for an order of toast that they know would only take them a few minutes at home.

Most popular breakfast dishes are short order, cooked from scratch. These are oddly enough the hardest dishes for a restaurant kitchen like ours to produce. We have a decent amount of workspace, but most of it is just gleaming stainless steel counter-top. We have a relatively small amount of cooking space – a flat top range and a 6-burner, which is sufficient, but realistically gives us room to fry two eggs at a time. You can imagine how fraught a Saturday morning, with 20 orders for fried eggs on toast on the rail, guests waiting 40 minutes as a result, and the kitchen thoroughly in the weeds before we’ve even started getting ready for lunch, feels.

On top of this I have a slight financial discomfort with breakfast menus. Waitrose, across the road, now sell Clarence Court Burford Brown eggs, and have for a while been stocking Gail’s excellent (by supermarket standards) sourdough. For 6 pounds you can by enough eggs and bread to feed a large family fried eggs on toast. Taking into account the addition of VAT, our enormous fixed costs such as the rent of this beautiful old space, and the wages of the many staff involved in their preparation and service, there’s no way I can serve Clarence Court eggs on sourdough toast and feel like I’m providing value. Nor do I feel like such an apparently simple dish, but one that nevertheless also requires total attention to get right, is something that we as a restaurant could ever do better than a home cook.

The solution to my mind was to complicate rather than simplify. If my dilemma came from the fact that I felt uncomfortable charging high prices for speedy simple dishes, perhaps the solution was to invest more time in the preparation? Charles and I sat down a month ago with all this weighing on us, and wrote up a menu of dishes we’d love to eat first thing, but that we wouldn’t be bothered, or able to prepare at home. The result is as follows:

Some dishes seem obvious. Toasted Brickhouse sourdough, butter and marmalade are elevated by the fact we culture and churn our own butter, and make are own marmalade, and both are the most delicious I’ve ever tasted. Our Bircher Muesli is steeped in cultured yogurt, apple and juice overnight, to give it perfect consistency, and served with gingery poached rhubarb on top. My favourite is the Lardy Cake. This was somewhat inspired by James Lowe’s wonderful honey and smoked bacon canelé at Lyle’s, and also by something unmentionable involving toasted Lardy Cake, melted cheese and spiced plums that Jeremy Lee once did to me one Christmas after we’d over-indulged somewhat. Charles and I developed the recipe using Elizabeth David’s peerless English Bread And Yeast Cookery, which contains many variations of traditional yeast-leavened fruit breads, using lard we’d rendered and smoked from one of Mary Holbrook’s magnificent English Lop. The slice of baked Lardy Cake, folded through with fat, sultanas, apricots, prunes, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon & brown sugar is toasted to order, then dolloped with soured cream and drizzled with golden syrup. It has the crispy, crunchy, fluffy, chewy, salty, sweet, syrupy & savoury quality of that magnificent American monolith Pancakes, Maple & Bacon, but with a bit of added English oomph.

Grilled Lardy Cake, Syrup & Soured Cream

Many guests were disappointed to come in over the weekend and find we had replaced the excellent fried eggs on toast that were formerly on the menu. I write this as an apology, and explanation, and a reassurance that we are reconsidering, and you may soon see their return, though perhaps in a different guise. This re-conception was very much done with our guests in mind. We wanted to offer them something quicker, more delicious, more considered, more unusual, and a list which offered better value, as we do with all menu development. I’m delighted to see how popular some plates have already been; the buttery breakfast muffin, stuffed full of pressed Old Spot ham hock and molten Coolea cheese, has been particularly successful, so much so that it now features on the bar menu, to enable guests to keep ordering through the afternoon, should their day start at a more relaxed pace.

As always, I welcome feedback on our development and changes. I write this to reassure that it isn’t mere caprice, and that there's a methodology behind the apparent inconsistency. Do let me know what you think.

Toasted Ginger Bread & Poached Plum

The Story So Far...

After four years of neglect, and five years from its establishment, I've decided to resurrect the blog, as a vehicle to disseminate news, information and development at Brunswick House. I founded this place with my brother Frank, in the year following the first iteration of his eponymous cocktail bar on the roof of a car park in Peckham. We'd had so much fun working on it that attempts to find a venue in which we could build something fit for all seasons, and not just limited to summer, seemed advisable. We were young, foolish and optimistic: all the necessary ingredients for calamity.

We grew up in Stockwell, and knew Brunswick House well by sight, initially as a working men's club, which it had been since the turn of the century, and latterly as a squat, and the location of some quite legendary parties, all of which we were sadly to young and green to have attended. Lassco, the marvelous architectural salvage firm, had taken over the building in the early 2000s, probably at precisely the point of no return for the buildings slide into dereliction. It is to their great credit, and our collective good fortune as Londoners, that they set about methodically restoring the house, the roof, the foundations, to something capable of weathering the changes the next hundred years of Vauxhall madness will throw at it.

We initially approached them to rent us space in their storage annex, with the intention of opening a coffee and sandwich shop. They were regulars at my fathers beautiful deli, Italo, and saw how busy it was. They also saw the constant stream of office workers lining up at their next-door Tesco each lunchtime, and thought there could be some mileage in collaboration. They were perhaps a little puzzled to end up with the sons and not the father at that first exploratory meeting, but the fame and success of Frank's helped to assuage their graver doubts.

Brunswick House Coffee Rooms, May 2010

On the 3rd of May 2010 the Brunswick House Coffee Rooms, as it was initially known, opened its doors. Lassco had installed some linoleum flooring and wall tiles, and we'd found a second-hand coffee machine and some fridges, as well as cups and glasses and plates and so on, spending a total of 2k. With nothing left over for a kitchen, all the preparation was initially done in the kitchen of Italo. Every morning I’d arrive at 6am to bake scones, sausage rolls, take delivery of salad leaves, and get set up for the day ahead. I’d then load up a trailer, attach it to my bike, and pedal it across to Brunswick House. Fortified with an espresso made by my brother, I’d make up sandwiches for the slow trickle of bold souls who’d cross the threshold. At 5pm we’d shut up together, and I’d head back to the deli to roast vegetables, make terrines, and top up the pickle jars. It was hard, slow, and utterly magical.

It was also totally unsustainable. For one thing it was turning over less than a thousand pounds a week, which meant hiring staff or paying ourselves was impossible. And Frank was due to depart to commence work on the reopening of the roof at the beginning of July. By the end of May we determined that in order to make a go of it we had to rethink our approach – cooking and preparation should be moved onsite, and our menu should expand from just the artful sandwiches I was laboriously preparing which were unable to compete with Tesco for price, speed and convenience.

Brunswick House Café, June 2011

We quietly relaunched as the Brunswick House Café, with a second-hand convection oven and two induction hobs installed next to the coffee machine. We also blagged and alcohol license for the at-all-points-surprisingly-helpful Lambeth Council, and set about opening three evenings a week. Lunch became a medley of soup, salads and sandwiches, the evenings a selection of small plates, all prepared by me, and short list of strong cocktails and tumbler wine, initially prepared by my godfather Jamie Berger, now of Pitt Cue, then working with our former baker Bridget Hugo in the mornings, my father’s deli at lunch, and me in the evening. The first evening saw only two guests, a couple who, though now sadly separated, still visit regularly, however pace picked up, and quickly we found ourselves regularly feeding 50 or 60 guests a night. While I still shouldered all the cooking, we were able to recruit more staff, and though I was still working over 100 hours a week, after six months the steady growth of the business left me so buoyant I hardly noticed.

Brunswick House Café, October 2011

In the four years since we’ve continued to grow, re-arranging the building, dropping the ‘café’ suffix, building a kitchen, a bar, another bar. It’s been my great privilege to work with some wonderful people over the years. Some, like Nick Balfe, now running the excellent Salon in Brixton, and Jeremie Cometto-Lingeheim of Primeurs, have not only left us in a better state than they found us, but have gone on to open marvelous establishments of their own, and stayed in close touch. Others have drifted off to other countries, other careers, other lives, leaving but a shadow of their formidable influence on the growth and development of Brunswick House behind. I continue to rise early every day to watch the place open around me, willing each service to be an improvement on the last. Such a grand old building deserves a sterling effort to reflect its majesty in everything we create within it. The place has evolved rapidly, but with great effort, and it remains my very real ambition to continue its development, adding a little here, perhaps removing one embellishment too many there. It has never been my goal to be the best restaurant in the world, we are somehow too unique for that, over-determined by our history and architecture and background narrative, to be anything other than ourselves – the very best restaurant we can be.

Brunswick House, March 2014

My one regret is that I haven’t documented the evolution of Brunswick House more systematically. This diary of our many projects, plans, and plates should become some sort of compensation.

Brunswick House, March 2014