Sinning On Sunday...

...among the chandeliers

Restaurant work is hard. It is demanding not only physically, requiring you to be on your feet for 18 hours straight, but emotionally too – a successful service, whether on the bar, floor or kitchen, requires constantly doing several complex jobs at once, as quickly as possible, while also maintaining an air of composure and, most importantly, gracious civility. We do not shout at each other. We do not throw things. I hate histrionics, and won’t stand for them. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t numerous occasions when I don’t want to kick an offending object, dropped in careless haste, across the room at the culprit, hard. Yet somehow, in spite of working in such an environment, at once both charged and draining, we all manage to get along pretty well; in fact, we all rather like each other.

an evocative portrait of our miserable lot

The main reason for this is, of course, inherent to the above, in that the complexity of the work requires us all to support each other, and the sense of heady camaraderie at the end of a particularly hard shift in which everyone has pulled together is near-intoxicating. We are open 7 days a week, we do not have time for away days to affect team-building, and nor do we need to, for we live that. However not every service is a perfect example of the graceful interplay of the telepathic hive-mind, and for this we retain the family meal.

An hour before every service, with the restaurant set up, places laid, mis en place primed, powder charged, we sit together and eat. I don’t let my team carry phones in the restaurant, and this rule applies to the family meal. We sit and talk. Conversation is light, humorous, flirtatious and amusing. The three teams – bar, floor, and kitchen, who during service exchange little more than curt inquiry and terse response, all sit, joke, laugh and eat.

two cooks, one floor, one bar, tucking in together and not stabbing each other, the dream

The kitchen take great pride in the family meal. Since we do much of our own butchery we end up with a lot of choice off-cuts, which go into exactly the kind of rich, hearty braises and stews which, bubbling away on the back of the flat-top, mirror in opposition the kind of clean, precise cooking we aspire to on our menu. Often the bar will make up a jug of something delicious, freshly squeezed and effervescent, the floor team laying and clearing, to make it a team production.

I’m a great fan of Adam Hyman, and his Code App. Along with many other fine independent London institutions, we have paid to subscribe to a scheme whereby those employed in any capacity within the hospitality industry can download the app, apply for accreditation (a very simple process), and use it get a significant discount on their meal at Brunswick House. I have encouraged all my staff to sign up. It’s free for them, the administrative cost of the scheme being financed by the participating restaurants. We currently offer the following to Code members:

Monday - Friday | Special Offer 

25% off the Food, Wines by the glass/carafe, Negronis & Fernet Branca

Monday to Friday Lunch

Monday & Tuesday Dinner

Maximum of 4 people per CODE ID

Reservation preferred

We get a couple of tables in a week. Previously we’d always attempt to identify our colleagues from other establishments by subtle indications, such as unusual interest in natural wine, a tendency to start lunch with two Negronis, and a marked predilection for Fernet Branca. Tables we’d marked would often then get a couple of treats thrown at them – some complimentary snacks for instance, or an extra pudding, or perhaps a digestif of some sort – but this was an arbitrary process. The fact is we love this industry, and the people who work so hard to make London the fabulous city to eat in that it is, and the Code app is a much more efficient way to identify targets of our appreciation and largesse.

A couple of months ago Charles, Sofi and I decided to fuse the two above ideas. After service on Sunday, deep clean, stock take, ordering and weekly housekeeping complete, we often repair to Silk Road in Camberwell, or in high summer, to Frank’s in Peckham, where not only can we enjoy our one guaranteed evening off a week, but also run into a host of refugees from other London establishments. An informal celebration of our hard work the week passed, and a girding of the loins for the seven days forthcoming, we decided to found a monthly supper club at Brunswick House, where anyone who’d worked that day, or indeed anyone from the industry granted a blessed day off, could come to ours for a cheap, convivial dinner. Four courses, cocktails, £22. I approached Adam Hyman with the idea, who said Code would be delighted to offer support, and the wine merchants Fields, Morris & Verdin, our wonderful neighbours, who said they’d  release a few special bottles for us to offer at knock-down prices. Mr Hyman even gave it a name in his allusion to the commendable US institution of Service Industry Nights, and thus SINning On Sunday was born.

the best neighbours one could wish for

We had originally planned to launch in April, however we had a rather unsavoury infra-structural collapse just before Easter, whereby some of our Georgian plumbing decided to go on strike, and for the last six weeks every Sunday evening has been a plumbers paradise of angle grinders, plungers, welders and really fucking long flexible rods. As such we are now pushing ahead and inaugurating on Sunday May 17^th.

We have already sold around half the tickets, and look forward to welcoming parties from The Clove Club, The Dairy (whose Bloodshot was a great inspiration), Spring, to name but three of our favourite restaurants who are going to be represented. We’re very excited and deeply honoured. Another 20 tickets are still available to the first dinner next Sunday, and while we’d ask that applicants show up with Code membership numbers primed, we will accept a limited number of civilian guests at the non-discounted but still exceptionally good value price of £30.

Charles and I are cooking the first dinner, for which the menu will be:

Snacks

Cockscombs, Purslane, Egg

Salt-Baked Swaledale Brisket, Carrots & Mustard Leaf

Rhubarb, Tapioca & Almonds

FMV are making a small quantity of the following amazing wines available at deep discount:

Bourgogne Blanc, Henri Prudhon 2013 - £15

VdPays Côtes Catalanes, Les Calcinaires Blanc, Domaine Gauby 2013 £25

‘Vendimia’, Palacios Remondo, Rioja 2013 - £18

Bourgueil, Lame Delisle Boucard 2008 MAGNUM £28

Gauby. No more need be said.

Please email RSVP@brunswickhouse.co with SINNING ON SUNDAY YES PLEASE as the subject to apply for a place in our hearts

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