The salmon I had for lunch at was the best thing I've ever eaten. No joke. Every mouthful was eye-closingly good. You know when you see a really good film and it ends and you just want to hold that feeling in your heart for a little bit longer? That's the feeling I had eating Donovan Cooke's food. Not bad for a lad from Hull who wanted to be a bricklayer.
Donovan, I have to say, I feel nervous talking to you because you’re pretty famous.
I’m not famous, I’m just a lad from Hull.
And also you have been in the game for a long time and you are very well known.
In September this year, 35 years. I actually didn’t want to be a chef, I wanted to be a bricklayer. But there were 4.5 million unemployed at the time and I couldn’t get a job so my dad got me a job in a chemical factory in a YTS. Margaret Thatcher basically shut the whole of my town down. My town was a big fishing industry town and the whole fishing industry went to shit. She introduced to the whole of England, the YTS which was the Youth Training Scheme. You were guaranteed one year you’d do some form of training and you would get paid £27.50. So my Dad got me a YTS in a chemical factory canteen.
The training was pretty basic, peeling spuds and all that. There were three different areas, a blast chilling area for the shift workers, a private house for the executives as well as a sports and social club. So I cooked in a few different places. The positive thing out of all of that was that I went to school on day release. The second year I paid myself to go to school and I was casual kitchen handing in the same place. After the second lesson, he asked everyone what we were doing and I said I was washing dishes and the teacher said I wouldn’t be able to keep up. I told him I paid for it myself: worse case scenario, I’ll fail, but just let me do it. I passed with three distinctions.
When I got my qualifications, they gave me a book and it had all the five star hotel in Great Britain. I wrote to all the ones I recognised and I managed to get a job at the Savoy in London. I lied there. I told them I was a chef, but I wasn’t. They knew I wasn’t but they gave me the job anyway because I wouldn’t leave. I just stayed there.
A lot of it is persistence and showing that you are willing to put in the hard yards, I guess.
This day and age is a little bit different because of the legal working hours for staff. I don’t endorse people working long hours but back in my day, your pay was the knowledge. From BP Chemicals Industrial Chemical canteen at 15 to Head Chef at Marco Pierre White’s Harveys restaurant by the age of 23. That didn’t come by a 38 hour week.
It is certainly a different scene these days. Interestingly a lot of chefs I speak to lament the likes of MasterChef and the ideas it creates around what being a chef means and yet now I’m talking to a chef who has been involved with MasterChef.
My view of MasterChef? It’s actually good because it puts the industry out there. It outs the restaurants out there. It encourages people to get involved with hospitality. The downside is that some of those people who have got involved with hospitality after the show, get a bit of a rude awakening. While they are under a certain pressure on the show, it’s a controlled pressure and is nothing like working in an environment like here where there are people coming in tonight at 6pm, 6.30pm, 7pm and 8pm. They come in when they like some days and sometimes they’re all late and sometimes they’re all early. The pressure to produce food like you had on a simple lunch menu is intense. A lot of them buckle.
There is the idea out there that there is something very glamorous about being a chef and we have seen the rock star chefs…
I think Marco started the rock star chef idea. He’s six foot five and extremely handsome, he smoked in the kitchen and so on. At the end of the day he can cook. He was an amazing cook and a very gifted man and he managed to get to the top of his game at a very early age. He basically set the benchmark. I was the youngest chef de partie at the Waterside and I was 21. He is five years older than me and he had a three star Michelin by the age of 30. He’s an anomaly. When he made me head chef, he opened the door for people in my age group, people in their twenties, a choice. Back in the day, you weren’t given a choice. If you went to the big hotels, you were in your thirties before you were promoted to chef de partie. That was an intense job.
I bet it was. That was in the days of the brigades and the shouting chefs.
It certainly was and I’m not going to deny it, I had a temper on me when I was in my twenties. But again, it’s due to inexperience and you feel as though life depends on that plate. Someone said to me before that I was an amazing chef. I told them that I became a chef when I moved to Hong Kong. I was an amazing cook before I moved to Hong Kong and it was there that I became an amazing chef. When I had my own restaurants and in London, I was a brilliant cook, but when you’re the head chef, you have to be a brilliant manager. You can’t do it all on your own. You can’t keep everything stored in your head, you have to be able to give that to other people and teach them and you’re really a quality controller at the end of it.
At Est, I used to do everything myself. Ondine was the same and at Marco’s. But when I went to Hong Kong I had 12 people in my brigade who spoke very little English. They needed to follow recipes and all my recipes were originally 35 kilos of recipes. I came back with a memory stick with 20 000 recipes on it. I remember giving a lad the hard copy of a recipe for smoked salmon mousse. It had fingerprints and bits of salmon all over it and he made it and I tested it and I asked him what it was. He said it was the smoked salmon mousse, but I couldn’t taste salt or pepper lemon juice and I asked him where they were. He pointed at the recipe and asked me where they were. From that point onwards, every recipe I did I amended and instead of putting a piece of shallot, I’d put the grams. Same with the salt and pepper.
A young lad came in here from Cordon Bleu. He wants a job here. He finishes his course in October. He wasn’t meant to be in today, his first service is tomorrow. But he’s shitting himself. I told him he’d be doing the amuse bouche: tomato, tomato and tomato. Step one, tomato consommé jelly, tomato number 2 is tartare of compressed tomato with olives, preserved lemon, shallots and basil. Tomato number three is smoked tomato sorbet. I told him the first thing to do is the jelly. Tomorrow I’ll give him the recipes and tell him how to do it and he’ll be in charge of the amuse bouche so he’ll have to think. He can do it. I’ve done all the prep but it’s about passing on information.
I’ve written five books and I’m actually dyslexic. I haven’t read any of my own books. The way I write recipes down is the kids give me the ingredients and I’ll bang it out and they weigh it all once I’ve done what I need and we document it. Everything I do now, from Hong Kong onwards is weigh, measure, and document the methods. The first cookbook I did for Marco was a nightmare because everything was in my head. The second one at Est Est Est was a nightmare. The third, fourth and fifth, which were one in Hong Kong and two at the Atlantic, all the database is there, they just have to add the method. There are no methods on any of my recipes.
I think when you have to teach or share your knowledge of anything, you really have to get to the heart of what it is you do and it forces you to know your subject inside out and, as you say, go from being a cook to a chef. I’m a French teacher and I studied, it, lived in France, but it wasn’t until I started teaching that it really clicked for me.
I learned French in France. I got kicked out of French class after two weeks. I didn’t think I’d need French as a bricklayer.
Necessity is an excellent teacher.
That’s right. If I wanted gas, electricity or a packet of Marlboros, there was no getting away from it. I lived in France for a year. The wake up call for me was when I went to the Savoy and all the orders were in broken French and at the Waterside, all the orders were in French. I had no idea. Even Mr Roux used to swear at me in French. I had to quickly learn why he was calling me a petit con.
It’s not rocket science. You don’t need me to reinvent the wheel. The French have got it right for the last however many centuries.
I’ve been reading about Ryne and a lot of the phrases people are using refer to you having been under the radar for a few years and now you’re back. What was behind your decision to open Ryne?
I’ll be 50 this year. I came home from Hong Kong with all the family and for the first time in my life I had to work in a place that paid me a very good salary but I did things I hadn’t learned how to do. I had to figure out how to do 500 covers every night but the attention to detail you had at lunch wasn’t there. My wife was sick and tired of me coming home…well, I used to drink heavily, I had a gut out to there and she told me I had to sort it out: go and find a restaurant, go to the gym, get fit and healthy and open a restaurant.
My business partner is Alex Law who was with me in Hong Kong as Commis 1. He got promoted to chef de partie then I got him promoted to sous chef and then head chef. When I told him I was going to leave and open my own place, he came on board.
Mid-life crisis? I don’t know. But I was sick of cooking without the love. That pork belly is on the menu here because the plums and cumquats are in season. I bought and preserved them and when they’re gone, I’ll change the dish. I put the salmon on the menu four weeks ago and I’m changing it on Wednesday.
What a shame. I loved it.
There’ll be a salmon dish but a different one. A lot of the reviews have referred to me as a comeback tour, or coming back with my classics. Back in the day, when I had Est, I wasn’t cooking salmon at 50°, I was cooking it at 80°, so is that a classic or a refined classic. If I did trout at Est Est Est, I’d be hot smoking it and you couldn’t calculate the temperatures properly and I’ve worked out how to do it so I fillet it, salt it vacuum pack it with olive oil and I cook it in a water bath at 58° for four minutes and it’s perfect. Is that a comeback tour or am I cooking what I like to cook. I spoke to Marco about it and he told me I’d be successful because I’d do all the things I’m good at. I cook from the heart and use the extensive knowledge of techniques I’ve learned and I cook real food. The trends will come and go.
North Fitzroy is an interesting choice for this style of restaurant.
I was looking for two years. I wanted a venue we could use and not think about changing next year or the year after. As the business evolves, there are so many things I can do. The landlord is my neighbour; a really nice Italian family. The kitchen…I can do better food than what you had today but I’d have to extend the kitchen and my private dining room would get smaller. I left Est Est Est because it was too small and I couldn’t do anything with it. That’s why I went to Ondine, Here, there’s potential. Alex and I have a plan to extend the kitchen so there’s more room and we can have better equipment and up the ante with the food. Then I can get in more staff and I want younger staff. My business partner has been with me 15 years, two have been with me for seven years and one for three years. I want some youth. That brings in enthusiasm and my team become better teachers.
I want this to be a place people come to as a destination; I want people to have dinner, have conversations, a bottle of wine and another bottle maybe and I won’t be kicking them out. If you look, we’ve put large spaces between the tables for comfort.
It’s not really old food, it’s new techniques with classic combinations. I did the salmon and sauce americaine at Est Est Est on my first menu in 1997. The salmon was a pavé, panfried, the gnocchi was kipfler potatoes crushed with marrons and the sauce was americaine. So all the ingredients from the first dish I did which got 5/5 by Stephen Downes, I think, or one of those reviewers, the poattoes are now gnocchi, the marrons are in the sauce, there’s no bullshit salad.
Chefs often talk about continually learning. You know it all…
I don’t know it all. Those who think they know it all will never change the menu. Mr Roux taught me how to make it, Marco taught me how to refine it and the rest of it are my own ideas using the same wheels; I’m just putting different tyres on it. That’s basically all the food is. I want to do quality protein, cooked properly with a good sauce and seasonal vegetables. It’s not rocket science. You don’t need me to reinvent the wheel. The French have got it right for the last however many centuries.
Whenever anyone asks me my philosophy, I always tell them I use flavours that are in season at the same time; obviously you’re going to put basil and tomato together because they’re there at the same time. One of our desserts is a raspberry tart with balsamic ice cream. balsamic and raspberries is one of the most classic combinations with mascarpone, so it’s tart, mascarpone mousse, raspberry gel, French raspberries, balsamic gel and a balsamic ice cream with freeze dried raspberries. Why? Because they’ve been doing it for centuries. That’s about as complicated as it gets for me.
203 St Georges Road, North Fitzroy