Food as Expression - Mr Alex Rushmer, Chef

hi my name is alex rushma i'm a chef and food writer based here in cambridge and this evening i'm going to be talking about food as expression and i'm going to be talking about food's expression in relation to what i do as a chef and how it relates to the history the present and the future of the restaurant good evening everybody and welcome back to another darwin college lecture in our series on food as you know this year we're exploring the interdisciplinary and multifaceted nature of food and the past four lectures have covered a whole series of interesting topics around that from pet food to x-rays from farmers to supermarkets and from climate change to nutrition this week however we've invited an award-winning chef alex rashma to give today's lecture on a rather different topic food as an expression of the human condition alex as i'm sure you all know is a cambridge based chef he's a food writer he's a restaurateur and he's dedicated the last 15 years of his life to working in the food and hospitality industry he reached the finalist of the bbc one master chef program in 2010 and he opened soon after that an award-winning restaurant hole in the wall in the village of little wilbrahan here in cambridgeshire restaurant was named one of the top uk 100 restaurants by the sunday times that wasn't good enough for him so he moved on um and became a co-owner and founder of vandalise a restaurant based in mill lane in cambridge sorry mill road and already it's a critically acclaimed michelin rated restaurant which focuses on creating vegetable lead locally sourced tasting menus with a strong emphasis on sustainability and responsibility ultimately i gather alex believes in creating food which is light-hearted delicious accessible and sympathetic to the ingredients that he works with and i know that to be true having been lucky enough to eat there myself he writes regularly continues to write regularly for a whole range of newspapers and magazines including the guardian restaurant magazine olive magazine and cambridge edition and he continues to feature regularly as a guest judge for masterchef and in 2021 i think it was was invited back as a guest chef on the celebrity version of the show where he was able to showcase some of the vegetable-focused dishes um that feature at his restaurant vandalise alice alex's roots in cambridge run beyond restaurants however and into the university he studied social and political sciences here at trinity hall and today he returns to his university topics in some ways to give this week's lecture which focuses as i've said on food as an expression of human condition and how that relates to his work now as a professional chef so please join me in welcoming alex to give his lecture on food as expression thank you alex good evening how are you all um thank you for that very kind introduction thank you to the master and fellows of darwin college for inviting me here to speak to you this evening i do know what a prestigious lecture series this is and the caliber of speakers that have been here in the past so i assure you this is not a task that i have taken on lightly i would also like to pass on my thanks to my wonderful wife charlotte for helping me in so many different ways with this uh listening to every single version every single draft of this lecture that i've that i've written so far and making this incredible slideshow as well that goes along with it what would you like to eat it sounds like a simple question it's one we probably ask at least three times a day and rarely do we stop to think about what the answers we give might mean beyond expressing a desire for a slice of toast or a bowl of soup but it's a question that's fundamental to our existence and one that we've been asking each other for the longest time imaginable it's a question that allows us to express ourselves as individuals as communities as civilizations and even as a species this isn't a usual environment for me on a friday evening i'm a professional cook and restaurant owner and if there's one thing that people know about the hospitality industry it's that friday night is usually work night but tonight instead of talking to sen to 26 people about food and cooking at vandalise i'm talking to a few hundred about this idea of food as expression but an expression of what exactly in the grandest and most epic sense food is an expression of our shared experience as a species we are what we eat but also we are because we cook food can also be an expression of our politics it can be an expression of our culture our background our upbringing our economic circumstances through food we can express our wants our needs desires emotions it can for some in my case be an expression of a vocation becoming hook wasn't a natural career progression for me and i definitely took an unconventional route into the kitchen i did my a levels came up to cambridge initially to read archaeology and anthropology and then social and political sciences and after graduating like many of us i'm sure it took me a couple of years to figure out what it was that i wanted to do but i had always had an underlying interest in foods and so i took a leap that many other passionate home cooks have also taken and that was to be a contestant on masterchef thankfully things turned out okay although i'm not sure you'd know it from my face in that bottom picture what followed was a quite intense and very public education into the inner workings of professional kitchens i had some truly incredible experiences i created part of a banquet for royalty in rajasthan i cooked in italy alongside the the youngest ever chef to win three michelin stars i even cooked for one of the most celebrated chefs in history alan ducasse in the kitchens of his restaurant at the dorchester in london the whole experience was genuinely life-changing and it gave me enough of a platform to open my own restaurant which i did in 2011. i took on a country pub called the hole in the wall just outside of cambridge by the time i left there in 2017 it had been named one of the top 100 restaurants in the uk by the sunday times it's an achievement that i'm still incredibly proud of but it wasn't an easy six years i've written previously about some of the challenges that i faced there the hours were punishingly long and i had to make big sacrifices in other aspects of my life financially it was far from successful despite the critical acclaim but i did however learn some very very very valuable lessons during my time there obviously about cooking and service and hospitality but about other things as well about people about being an employer about finding balance and setting aside time to look after myself and spend time with my loved ones these were lessons that were even more important than learning about cooking and these were at the forefront of my mind when thinking about what might come next and also how it might be possible to rethink the concept and definition of a restaurant and it's these lessons that i'd like to talk about this evening and hopefully explain just a little bit about why i think they're important what they mean for an industry that is going through significant stresses and growing pains and how they how these ideas fit into a broader context as part of a larger conversation about the history the current state and the future of restaurants but to know where we are it's helpful to know where we came from i said earlier we are because we cook and this is no exaggeration cooking and eating cooked food changed our evolutionary path in the most profound and significant ways we don't know precisely when this happened could be as long ago as 1.8 million years could be as recently as 800 000 years ago but we do know how impactful this change was both physically and symbolically we became not only the walking talking ape but also the one that cooked and we remain the only species on earth that uses the mastery of fire to alter the physical state of our food and in this sense food i suppose more specifically cooking is the ultimate expression of our species and of our difference with the rest of the animal kingdom the symbolic changes that i talked about are harder to find evidence of this is a more it's a more romantic notion and it's one that anthropologists have placed at the heart of the development of the first kinship groups and then societies and then cultures claude levi strauss said not only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture but through it and by means of it the human state can be defined with all of its attributes and the historian philippe fernandez armesto agrees culture he says began when the raw got cooked the enhanced value for cooking imparts to food elevates it above nourishment and opens up new and imaginative possibilities this is a crucial idea that messages and meaning can be conveyed through food that it can provide us with more than just calories it means that through food we're able to express our similarities to and our differences from each other we see this again and again throughout history and in contemporary culture whether through dinner parties or dietary preferences and from meal choices ranging from a beaker of fuel to the most elaborate tasting menu every meal that we have is loaded with symbolism definition meaning and expression through every bite we're telling ourselves something about how we view the world and we're also telling the world something about how we want it to view us as a chef and restaurateur i am acutely aware of this that's not to say that i analyze every single forkful that i eat or think about the deeper symbolism located in all of the dishes that we send out into the dining room sometimes and quite often the only thing that we consciously expressing is the fact that we're hungry and it's only when we stop to think that we can begin to see a few deeper layers of understanding and meaning and i believe that that symbolism or the possibility of expression extends to the restaurant itself i've been a chef for over 10 years now but at no point until very very recently had i stopped to wonder what a restaurant really is and also how i define it i've spent an extraordinary amount of time thinking about the physical elements that a restaurant is comprised of the tables the chairs the crockery the cutlery but i've never actually thought about what a strange concept is as a whole especially when you think about how different it is to the way we cook and eat food in the home so with that in mind i thought an interesting place to start would be to create a restaurant with you in order to try and figure out what this space represents and perhaps get closer to how consumers and cooks can use both the food and the way it is served as a means of expression so the first thing we need is a space more accurately we need a public space one of the defining features of a restaurant is that anybody who has the means or the desire can go there there is however a slight caveat here despite the outward suggestion of a restaurant being public we do expect a certain level of privacy when we dine out the table becomes this sort of strangely liminal space that sits between the private and the public realms i'm sure we've all had the experience when the behavior of a group of diners another table has negatively impacted on the enjoyment of our own meal and when this happens it's because we feel as if the semi-private space that we're effectively renting for the duration of our meal has been violated by people who aren't playing by the rules once we have our space we need some food a restaurant is somewhere where you go to eat that is its primary function to provide a meal all restaurants are eateries having said that the converse isn't always true we should point out here that not everywhere you can buy a meal is a restaurant the availability of food does not necessarily create a restaurant and we'll see shortly how it's these sorts of establishments that have dominated the world of dining out for much of our history some element of choice in what you eat seems to be fairly central to the experience in addition further decisions have to be made when you're presented with a wine list or a drinks list fourthly is service one of the joys of eating in a restaurant is not having to worry about the concerns you have when you're dining at home doing the cooking clearing the plates pouring the wine washing the dishes all of these tasks are done by people whose job it is to make you feel welcomed and unencumbered by the chores usually associated with eating a meal sadly none of this comes for free there is a price to pay for this service and the final total will depend on many factors it should never however be a surprise you should have an accurate idea before the bill arrives what the experience is going to cost and depending on how much you're willing to pay that experience can range from being very basic and relatively cheap to even more basic and unbelievably expensive so there we have our five defining factors a public space in which to eat a meal chosen by you and then cooked and served to you for which you have to pay space food choice service and price and all of these all of these are a means of expression but as i said earlier restaurants haven't always existed historically most of the meals consumed were eaten in the home and this remains true even today but the advent of complex societies and increasingly large centres of urbanization created a necessity for commercial enterprises that could feed a hungry population for many people cooking facilities in the home tended to be rudimentary at best and sometimes non-existent ovens were often shared and independent outlets specializing in a single dish became an essential source of food for densely packed groups of people in the ruins of pompeii you can see the remains of around 130 of these specialist traders each with a counter that faced the street some of them were even equipped with large terracotta jars this is where hot foods could be kept warm and then served directly to patrons not unlike a modern buffet major routes of travel also presented themselves as locations in which commercial opportunities for the sale of food become a necessity enterprising cooks quickly set up businesses to offer food for hungry hungry travelers or traders or pilgrims but it would however be disingenuous to refer to any of these places as restaurants they were functional enterprises born out of necessity and this is the sort of food service establishment that we see throughout the world particularly in europe's growing cities they go by many different names cook shops taverns table dough trotters inns but they are all effectively the same thing the small businesses ready to capitalize on that most basic of human needs hunger for most of our existence to enjoy anything other than these simple meals would have necessitated a visit to a private house of someone either wealthy or powerful and more often than not both one of the main reasons that we don't see the development of complex restaurants is that this opportunity that's to say the consumption of a large variety of items specially prepared by professional and highly trained cooks this opportunity is solely accessible to the ruling classes in their own homes and it's only when we start to see traditional structures of power and authority beginning to crumble that we start to see the democratization of fine dining and its rapid transition from the private house into the public domain the more famous origin story of when this happened has been told many times restaurants emerged from the social quagmire of the french revolution this was a time when the cooks of the aristocratic houses found themselves without jobs at about the same time that their former employers found themselves without heads in this version of events the cooks took their skills to the streets to new centers of commercial opportunity and helped bring about a new more democratic friends through the medium of food and by creating something new the restaurant it's a tale that chefs love to tell but it isn't the whole story it is true that restaurants did emerge during a time when traditional social structures were being upturned and power was shifting from the hands of a hereditary elite into the hands of an emerging middle class but this took place first not in revolutionary paris but according to katie rorson and eliot shaw authors of dining out a global history of restaurants in song dynasty china in the middle of the 12th century the song dynasty had been ruled by an aristocracy for several hundred years access to power to wealth to authority and to find food was limited to birthright alone but an economic boom powered by flourishing trade upended this established social order two thriving cities emerged kaifeng in the north and hangzhou about 900 kilometers to the south both of these were located on a major trading route and their populations grew to over a million now for comparison at the same time london was smaller than modern-day cambridge it had a population of about a hundred thousand inhabitants this large transient and newly wealthy population they needed somewhere to eat they needed a place they could be seen somewhere to dine well conduct business and flaunt their wealth the existing taverns and tea houses weren't deemed suitable locations and so we see the emergence of a new kind of establishment and it's one that sounds very much like a restaurant we know about this from a contemporary account by a writer called mangywan lao his book is a reminiscence of the life that he left behind in the north and he provides a colorful and detailed account of a thriving food scene this is him writing an 1147 ce each of the places had a courtyard with eastern and western corridors when the guests arrive a single person holding chopsticks and a menu questions all of the seated guests the men of the capital are extravagant and they demand a hundred different things some hot some cold some warm some regular some extremely cold and things like noodles laced with lean and fatty meat everyone orders something different the waiter takes the orders and draws near a counter where he stands in line and recites the orders off from the start in a little while the waiter sticks three bowls in his left hand then piles up about 20 dishes along his right arm from hand to shoulder distributing them in complete accordance with each person's order so clearly this wasn't a location to go just to be fed and it represents a massive shift in who had access to fine food for the first time we see people being able to eat something that previously would only have been available to them if they'd been born into the right family they're able to express their newfound wealth power simply by choosing to eat the right foods we do see a similar pattern of events in paris in the years immediately leading up to the revolution prior to the 1760s the only place where an ordinary citizen could eat outside of their own home was in somewhere like a tavern even in the late 18th century it remained true that the only place to get anything approaching an expression of the chef's art and craft was in the private houses of the aristocracy but 20 years prior to the tremendous upheaval of the political revolution a culinary one was also beginning to stir in the 1760s an enterprising caterer called mata in rose de chanteuzzo opened up a shop and started selling restorative broths to patrons who sat at individual tables this was a significant symbolic departure as well as being a culinary one in one of the first guidebooks to the city of paris published in 1769 seantuazzo's occupation is listed as restaurateur it's described as the creator of a business to serve exclusively those foods that maintain or restore health offering fine and delicate meals princely consummates for the weak hearted served at any hour of the day by the dish and at a fixed price so here we see a deliberate effort on the part of the world's first restaurateur to distance his establishment from those that had come before and he does so not only by offering choice and choice in what to eat and also and when it can be eaten unsurprisingly it was a huge success dozens of rival establishments opened up in the following decade each competing to offer a level of luxury and choice that surpassed its rivals the most notable and famous of these was called la grande van de landra it was opened by a former royal chef called antoine bovillier in 1782 it boasted a menu so impressive that an english journalist called francis william blagdon felt the need to write about it in his 1801 book paris as it was and as it is good heaven he says the bill of fare is a printed sheet of double folio of the size of an english newspaper it will require half an hour at least to con over this important catalogue let us see it's quite a long list soups 13 sorts hordurvra 22 species beef dressed in 11 different ways pastry containing fish flesh and fowl in 11 shapes poultry and game under 32 various forms veal amplified into 22 distinct articles mutton confined to 17 only fish 23 varieties roast meat game and poultry of 15 kinds entremets or side dishes to the number of 41 articles dessert 39. i cannot begin to imagine what that prep list would have looked like by 1804 by villier's restaurant was just one of over 2000 that had opened in paris confirming that the current culinary revolution was well and truly underway guidebooks also flourished alongside the emergence of the restaurant this helped reinforce the idea of the restaurant as a crucial aspect of post-revolutionary paris more stable supply chains and relative political calm meant that people began talking about food arguing about food and more importantly writing about food as adam gopnik puts in his book the table comes first the first need for those who want to reflect on the meaning of lunch is the certainty of having dinner our capacity to eat is finite but our capacity to discuss it that is infinite an early publisher of these guides was a lawyer and famous gastronome called alexandra balthazar de la reniere he fled paris during the terror but returned in the late 1790s and got stuck in to the new scene he published the first edition of his food magazine the almanac digamond in 1803 it contained reviews but also the results of blind tastings these are tastings that he conducted with an anonymous panel of self-appointed experts not only that he also encouraged new restaurants to give him free meals in return for a certificate that they could display in their window thereby setting the template that influencers would continue to follow for more than 200 years gastronomic literature it becomes a way to fill the space between meals and also provides a guide to the emerging bourgeoisie who may have been unaware of expected etiquette or table manners grammar de la renier's series of food guides were published to help bridge this gap and ease the passage of this change he wrote the upheaval that took place in the distribution of wealth as a necessary consequence of the revolution having placed that wealth in new hands we have thought it might do them a service to offer a sure guide to the most solid of their cherished affections we saw earlier how the emergence of a new social class led to the creation of the restaurant in 12th century china we see the pattern repeating itself in remarkably similar fashion in 18th and 19th century paris food historian amy trubeck points out that the biggest change that occurs with regards to the consumption of oak cuisine is its transfer from the private realm into the public one she says the labor of cooks and chefs ceases to be funded by patronage and begins to be paid for by the public this new social hierarchy could be legitimized through adopting the eating habits of the aristocracy albeit in a public setting by the early years of the 19th century the meal suggests trebek has become a commodity or an experience that can be purchased in the same way a ticket to the theater can be purchased the consumer is now able to convey complex messages about their status power authority and wealth simply by choosing to eat a meal in a particular restaurant and then selecting dishes from one of the increasingly complex menus one of the reasons restaurant kitchens were able to deliver such vast menus was because much of the food on offer was served what we call banquet style it was often served at room temperature or even cold diners could indeed pick from a vast range of dishes but none of them would have been particularly fresh and they certainly wouldn't have been hot however changing trends regarding service style were quickly having an impact on how a kitchen could operate and the extent to which a chef was able to deliver the ultimate expression of their work from the 1860s the chef augusta scoffier started to show us what it was possible to achieve in the kitchen escoffier was a pioneer he had boundless ambition for him food was about more than just variety each dish needed to showcase a particular ingredient and it needed to be served at its peak this means its peak in terms of seasonality cooking style texture and crucially temperature this is the ultimate expression of choice and luxury having not just a range of things on offer but being able to enjoy each one at its absolute best for escoffier the emerging trend for russian style service which is where each diner was presented with an individually plated dish this opened up a world of possibilities the diner needed to be at the heart of the gastronomic experience they needed to feel as if they were the most important person in the room each person at the table should be able to order any combination of items from the menu and everyone needed to be served their dishes their chosen dishes at the same time but in a progression of courses rather than all at once and for this to work scoffia knew that the kitchen would have to change he drew on his seven years experience in the french military and instituted a rigid hierarchy in the kitchen he divided into distinct sections each of these sections was then responsible for separate elements rather than expecting individual cooks to be responsible for complete dishes this is revolutionary and it meant that each cook could focus on much more specialized tasks rather than having to be a generalist a large kitchen such as the one that he ran at the savoy alongside cesar ritz as general manager could have as many as 20 separate sections each one with its own rigid command structure with the chef de cuisine right at the top as a result escoffier was able to run his kitchens with a far greater degree of precision and in turn creates the elaborate individual dishes that he's rightly become famous for what we see here is a form of expression that becomes more refined and more direct by the turn of the 20th century the scoffey had not only found a way to bring individually prepared cooked and plated dishes to diners but he'd also developed a structure a methodology and a mechanism or a series of mechanisms to allow each person at the table to choose what they wanted to express their desires at a particular point in time to put it another way it took us just 800 years in europe to achieve what they've been doing in china since the 12th century escoffee's legacy can be found written in menus and seen in kitchens throughout the last 150 years and it even echoes through the restaurant business today within a few years of opening in 1889 the savoy had become the archetype of the grand hotel a place where you could experience ultimate luxury for a few hours or days in fact such was the opulence such as the extent of the opulence on offer that attracted even those who could afford their own households and private chefs whilst he was still the prince of wales edward the seventh dined regularly at the savoy and escoffier had the honor of designing the menu for his coronation dinner in 1902 even well into the 20th century we see escoffier's influence on menus such as this one from the savoy in 1971. it's strangely reminiscent to that which we saw earlier when francis william blagdon struggled to find enough adjectives to fully describe the extent of what was on offer at bavillier's restaurant in paris so at the very highest level a menu becomes a singular expression becomes a singular expression of the vision of the chef no matter how many people might be working in the kitchen there was a scoffie that made this possible there was no room for deviation or hesitation but repetition was very much encouraged what goes on to the plate is often the result of months of research and work and it has to be the same every single time the dish is cooked and plated in fact one of the unofficial and unconfirmed criteria of the michelin guide is that a restaurant should be consistent with each plate identical to the last in a sense this sort of experience can be seen as a dialogue between the chef and the diner but there is another sort of menu one that is less of a dialogue and there's actually more of a manifesto the scoffie was no stranger to the tasting menu especially for formal dinners and banquets when even the most well-drilled brigade would have been impossible to cook a la carte but removing the element of choice for a diner wanting to eat in a restaurant that would almost certainly have undermined one of escoffier's fundamental principles however the last 20 years have seen a marked change in how we interact with the menu what it represents and how it alters the relationship between chef and customer many restaurants have entirely removed the element of choice from their menus guests are still presented with a list of dishes but instead of picking two or three they're given all of them and that's not so unusual these days of the restaurants that currently make up the list of the world's 50 best just 10 of them provide an a la carte offering and of the rest some even refuse to alter their menus for dietary restrictions or preferences this level of steadfastness is becoming increasingly common in fine dining one of the reasons for that i think is that the restaurant as it approaches its 250th birthday is an institution under increasing signs of stress it's trying desperately to operate in a way that was acceptable at the beginning of the 20th but in many ways is no longer suitable for the 21st it's no surprise that kitchen life can be tough historically some chefs have even reveled in the more sadistic aspects of a life spent toiling in pursuit of culinary greatness one of the most famous cooks of the 19th century and someone who is often regarded as the world's first celebrity chef antonin karem famously said of the ovens that powered his kitchen the charcoal kills us but what does it matter the shorter our lives the greater our glory and orwell's famous account of kitchen life at hotel x from down and out in paris and london remains a legendary document about what life was like below stairs more contemporary accounts for late great anthony bourdain's kitchen confidential for example often focus on the negative aspects associated with restaurant work long unsociable hours poor pay the mental and sometimes physical abuse meted out by those in charge in an effort to maintain the chain of command it's no secret that the restaurant trade has its fair share of demons this isn't a world that i grew up in my late arrival on my own terms into a professional kitchen in a sense insulated me from some of the more negative aspects of restaurant life not entirely there were still the punishingly long hours the stressful moments the unhealthy lifestyle working through injury and illness because that was what was expected in fact that was often what was required in order to keep the business afloat my old restaurant we were open six days a week for ten services with five different menus a team of 22 people was needed in order to ensure that it could operate at that level and it was only when i stepped away from it that i realized how easily i'd fallen into some of those bad habits how much sacrifice had been needed to keep the business going and the lessons that were learned that could be built upon and taken forward these were lessons that i put into practice in 2019 which is when we myself and my business partner lawrence butler along with a truly incredible team open vandalise vanderlaal was built to answer a very simple question can we do things differently what we wanted to know was whether it was possible to create a restaurant in which we could express our vision of good food and cooking without it dominating our lives in a way that we felt was unacceptable could we run a restaurant without falling into many of the same negative patterns of behavior that had been seen in the past we love to cook we adore everything that hospitality means and encompasses it is a genuine pleasure to open our doors and share our enthusiasm with people every single week but we also know that we wouldn't be able to deliver our best version of hospitality if it required us to work beyond our capabilities putting that into practice was a huge challenge it necessitated shedding many of the underlying assumptions at the heart of what underpins the concept of a restaurant and also required a radical new definition of how a restaurant can function to benefit both those that dine there and those that work there writing this lecture has really made me consider what it is that we're trying to say beyond the wish to cook people an excellent meal and there are several ways that we try to do this when you enter our restaurant you'll notice that it's a fully open space there's no wall there isn't even a door between the kitchen and the dining room this is important for two reasons firstly we wanted to remove some of the traditional divisions between front and back of house both literal and metaphorical and the easiest way to do so was by not building any in the first place that openness is something we've found guests respond to very positively there is a level of interest now more so than ever about how kitchens function diners are increasingly curious about the practice of cooking and how we bring together the many elements that we need to create the dishes that form our menu they want to know not only how we come up with our ideas but also how we navigate an evening during which we will plate nearly 400 separate dishes and make sure they go to the right tables at the right time in the correct order for those guests who want a real front row seat we even have four places at the pass on either side of the hot lights so they can look into and be served directly from the kitchen from here you can see everything every element of every dish what we call the matrix which is the map that guides us through service so the space is the first thing that makes vandal different the second is how often we're open we're incredibly fortunate that the restaurant is fully booked for every service usually for around two months in advance we often have a waiting list for tables particularly at weekends that can run to well over 100 people one of the main reasons that it's actually very tricky to secure a table at vandal is that we only open four days a week and we cook for just 104 people during that time mostly in the evening occasionally at lunch time opening four days a week with an extra half day or so to prepare the menu is our attempt to address the negative working practices that were until recently assumed to be inherent within the world of hospitality for this to work financially wouldn't have been possible had we not implemented another point of difference for how restaurants traditionally function instead of paying for your meal at the end of your evening we require that reservations are paid in full in advance at the time of booking this requires a real shift in how the restaurant experience is viewed and i think experience is probably the right word here because in a sense making a booking at vandalism is not unlike booking tickets to a concert or to the theater for us it eliminates immediately an incredibly pressing issue for restaurants which is people not turning up for their booking what we refer to as no-shows in the past i've worked in kitchens where the chefs have experienced the horror of ordering produce spending a full day preparing the menu doing all their mison plus asking staff to work and then opening the doors only to serve nobody the sense of certainty that we have is not only a huge a release not only a huge relief it also enables us to order efficiently and minimize food wastage which is an increasingly important factor to consider in the modern age no choice fixed tasting menu also helps us make sure that we only order and prepare exactly what we need for each service we do appreciate that we ask an awful lot of our guests they generally have to have fairly fast fingers when bookings go live on the first tuesday of every month and they have to be willing to pay a not inconsequential amount of money for a menu that they can't see in advance and then they have to wait for up to eight weeks before they can eat it there is one more aspect that i think helps define what we do since we opened in march 2019 almost three years ago we have never put any dishes on the menu that feature meat or fish we do use a small amount of dairy and eggs but the majority of the menu is about showcasing the incredible variety of the world of vegetables fruits nuts pulses and seeds for a lot of people this makes us a vegetarian restaurant but we try to avoid using that description if we can because we don't want that to be the defining factor of our intent to focus solely on the fact that we don't cook meat or fish word as far as we're concerned be disingenuous disingenuous to the rest of the experience as if what the menu leaves out is actually more important than what it is comprised of alain passad managed to put this far more succinctly when he was describing his restaurant la peg in paris passad was and still is a highly acclaimed chef his restaurant has had three michelin stars since 1996 but he's perhaps most famous for removing overnight all the meat and the fish from his menu back in 2001. i love this quote the real melody and unhappiness of vegetables has always been the vegetarian restaurant instead la page is a restaurant that cooks vegetables and that's what vandalism is as well a restaurant that cooks vegetables and tries in a few small ways to do things differently first and foremost we want to create a memorable enjoyable and relaxed experience one that is centred on great food and excellent service we want to do our bit for the environment by reducing food waste by showcasing the incredible depth of flavor it is possible to achieve without using meat we also want to enjoy it we wanted to be able to deliver the best version of ourselves every single service both through and beyond the food that is on the plate we are expressing our intent to cook and operate a business in a way that is responsible both socially and environmentally and by choosing to dine with us our customers are expressing their own intentions beliefs and behaviors and in part they're agreeing with what we're saying i know i've spent quite some time looking at the history of restaurants in an attempt to figure out how we ended up here but really this talk has been about the present and the future the conversations that needed to be had are starting the hospitality profession is changing in many ways for the better and the question that we began with what would you like to eat is one that always looks to the future to our next meal and the one after that the answers to that question are always changing and that's what that's what's exciting about food and cooking the fact that we can never truly understand what the implications of our answers might be what that means is the conversation will never be over it's a conversation that we look forward to continuing you continuing with you over dinner at the pass in our restaurant thank you [Applause] well thank you very much alex that was a wonderful personal story of why you became a chef and the fascinating history and role of restaurants and being a restaurateur so thank you it's given me a new understanding of the role of food not simply as sustenance which is what i tend to think about it most of the time um but also how much it tells us about ourselves each other and society more generally and i thought that was a real take-home message from this your lecture was for me so full of ideas new ways of thinking about food as expression and truly grateful for that um and thank you for your clarity your insights and sharing your knowledge and real passion uh for for food for being a restaurateur and and for looking at looking at food in a completely new way and the hospitality industry so you're an inspiration certainly to me and i suspect to all of us and a really transformative chef so thank you very much indeed [Applause] you

Channel: Darwin College Lecture Series

Views: 571

Keywords: Darwin College, Darwin Lecture Series, Food, Food Expression, Alex Rushmer, Masterchef

Id: vhRXHX9IbKQ

Length: 55min 14sec (3314 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2022