Everyday the head chef running the shift at The River Cafe sits down at a table by the kitchen to write the menu for the coming service. They sit at 9:30 in the morning and 3:30 in the afternoon. The table is littered with folders of papers and lists; a list of the vegetables in house, what meat is in the fridge, how many langoustines or scallops they may have, what the team of preppers have already done or will need to do that day and of course, the rota showing which chefs are working that shift. Some chefs like to get going alone, with just this list of ingredients before them, others have their favourite muses sit alongside to help and inspire. Each service brings a new menu but the vocabulary has been firmly set after 35 years as a restaurant. Squid on the grill with red chillies, a dry pasta, a fresh pasta, a filled fresh pasta maybe a risotto if there is a chef working who makes them well, mozzarella with the best in season vegetables with plenty of olive oil, a whole fish in the wood oven, lamb on the grill. It is a menu written through social interaction and collaboration. The chef the night before may have been placing the meat and fish orders, the next chef that morning dictating what the prep team need to do, junior chefs asking for jobs chip in as the menu forms, Ruthie (Rogers) on the phone or in the restaurant saying she wants a particular dish to appear that service. It is a wonderful exercise in removing a chef's ego, an exercise in how to create to please many and also one’s self.
When I started at The River Cafe they were so used to the staid nature of the dolci menu that my small changes were often missed by the manager. I took to running down from the Dolci kitchen (across the car park and up the stairs) at 9:30 and 3:30 each day to sit and write the dessert menu but also to witness how the chefs that had been part of ‘the caf’ for 2,5,10,20 years talked about food, ingredients, described to young chefs how exactly to make that ragu. Sitting and listening whilst I wrote out Chocolate Nemesis, Lemon Tart, Almond Tart with… , Caramel Ice Cream, Stracciatella Ice Cream etc. day after day I learned what made something ‘River Cafe’ and what made it not. The subtle lines that they drew to define their cuisine. My small additions to the dolci menu began to read as if they had always been there, written using that vocabulary that generations before me had established.
At Lyle’s we wrote the menus for the next day between 11pm and 1am. After a very involved deep clean every night we all sat at table 33 or sometimes table 28 to write mise en place lists, handovers and the new menus. What shall we do with the mackerel? What fruit do we have from picking this week? What will the forager bring tomorrow? Mary is delivering kids in the afternoon, Tom will be dropping off some pigs heads overnight. As we wrote prep lists for the dishes that were staying on another day we talked through the culinary possibilities for the gaps in the menu. We talked about delicious things we’d eaten or read about and wondered if we could apply those ideas to our own menu. James (Lowe) directed us as we discussed, the culinary lines were often very clear, “No fruit with other fruit”, “too St John”. But as ever, it takes time to learn the vocabulary of a new restaurant. Again I listened carefully to these discussions. I eavesdropped to the conversations being had when dishes were tasted and seasoning refined. I learned what made a dish inexplicably “Lyle’s”.
Both of these formative restaurants took time to understand. There is an intimacy that is needed to get to the core of a menu's identity. For both these places you needed to spend at least a year to begin to know. To go through the seasons and understand how they treat a strawberry, how they work with a peach, when do they trust it's time to celebrate apricots or rhubarb. You have to spend time with the people that have created it.
After spending so many years learning how to cook, how to write a menu, how to lead a team, how to build a bakery, I began to learn how I wanted to cook. I wrote a cookbook, The Last Bite, and explored my own culinary identity. I did supper clubs and takeovers, I spent time moonlighting in others kitchens, I organised pop ups and wrote recipes. I learnt to trust my own palate and tastes. I began to understand the intimacies of my own kitchen identity.
I opened a bakery in February. It is called Quince bakery, named for my favourite fruit. A fruit that speaks to a certain femininity and an old fashioned British cuisine, it is beautiful in its lack of uniformity, a quince tree is overly generous, its perfume inviting, its beauty beguiling. I knew from the off that I wanted to focus on british baking. That I wanted to have a menu structure that would allow me to react to ingredients anew each week. A structure that would give me support when I wasn’t sure what to make but freedom to create when I felt inspired. My intention from the start was to create a new menu each week. Not for the sake of making something new but as a creative exercise to allow the bakeries culinary identity to be established. The goal is to use our first year to work out what makes a bake “Quince’. As with The River Cafe and Lyles I utilise the structure of a menu to channel my culinary creativity. The brown butter bun always stays then a sweet bun, a sweet pie, a savoury pie, a sweet scone, a savoury scone, a tart, a cookie, a cake. As time has gone on we have added 2 sandwiches (one always veggie friendly), we had 2 pizzas until the summer hit and they made our kitchen too hot, now a savoury galette. At weekends we try to make a pie or tart to share and now we always make a batch of rice pudding to sell in tubs then too.
Pam Brunton in her new book Between Two Waters grapples with the title she has given her own food of “Modern Scottish”. How do these terms define the kind of food that she produces in her small plot of land on Loch Fyne in the west coast of Scotland? Reading her words I see myself trying to work through the same issues. Are we a modern British bakery? When asked, we talk about British and Irish baking traditions. We make soda bread with buttermilk, biscuits that celebrate the mighty oat, iced buns, treacle tarts. But we make sourdough bread that is arguably more European or indeed Californian in origin. Our flavours speak of the international influences and experiences we have accumulated. Last week's seasonal bun saw 4 varieties of grapes pressed into the sweet dough before being baked and finished with a rosemary sugar. A nod to the Italian schiacciata all’uva. Our sweet scones have held blueberries and corn, a notably north american combination. As Pam says “Our menu is still deeply contoured by our own personal landscapes”
I want the menu at Quince to be familiar and yet exciting. I want it to celebrate all the baking that has happened across the British isles, to celebrate the ladies baking for church bake sales, the regional specialities, the forgotten recipes. But I want it to do all that whilst celebrating the produce on offer to me. I want to nurture the reciprocal relationships I have with the growers and producers we work with. I want it to be creatively challenging and engaging for myself and my team of bakers. I want authenticity but I want to learn what authenticity is to me. It needs to be achievable but still always ambitious. Accessible but intriguing. Many desires and contradictions to fit into one small chalkboard each week.
I love writing the menu each week with the help and input from the wonderful team around me. We talk about it as we sit down to lunch together on Friday afternoons. Having the freedom to decide to cook anything that I want and the freedom to say yes to ideas that my fellow bakers come up with feels euphoric. Writing our weekly menu feels completely joyful and I think I can say it always will. I write this in week 35 of opening. 35 weeks of new menus that have felt exciting and inspiring, 35 weeks of menus that make us excited to cook and most importantly excited to eat and to see our customers eat. Each week we think maybe this will be the week where it’s not as good as last week but then we start to cook and we see the customer reactions to our bakes and it feels like pure joy once again.
Having a kitchen of my own has brought all the stresses that go along with owning and running a business but ultimately the overwhelming emotion it has brought is joy. A deeply felt pleasure that I am finally cooking to please my own ideas and sensibilities combined with the wonder that each week our Quince community takes an equally deep pleasure in coming in and choosing from the counter. The alchemy of writing a menu that carries the weight of culinary ambition, farmer relationships, kitchen practicalities, environmental impact and an evolving sense of identity which somehow results in pleasure and joy as we pull pies from the oven and see regulars faces light up when they take a bite can only be described as magic. My kitchen has become a space full of tenderness, romance and community and I still can’t quite take in how wonderful that is.
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