Circa 1995. 6am. April. North coast. Stress levels – defcon 5. The Season is just starting…………. It takes exactly 27 minutes for the Kitchen to warm up if I crank on all 12 oven burners now, that’s enough time. I need to change, smoke, get caffeinated, smoke, run the order list, oversee deliveries and start prep…and… Read More The perfect Spatchcocked, Oven-BBQ’d Chicken
Chef was a 5ft 1inch thunder-storm. She was electric, caustic, irreverent, foul-mouthed and harder than a bent coffin nail. She kept her hair shaved tight back and sides and sported a jet-black 2 inch tall ‘full-hawk’ on top. She was insanely beautiful and ran The Kitchen like a rock-star, she was one of only a… Read More Rock & Roll Chicken, Jalepenos, lime & lager
“Chicken is a blank canvas, it’s there to be interfered with…….it needs to be…it needs to be brutalised and scandalised……I need to brutalise and scandalise my chicken Rory – lets go to work” Tony slid off the bags of flour stacked 4 tall in the dry store above the Kitchen, stubbed his Marbolo Red on… Read More The Scandalised Chicken Shred
“Jump you fucker” “Shut the fuck up you bunch of twats” “Jump, do it…do it now…the waters gonna drop” “Arrrgghh Jesus…why am I here……..you bastards” ‘Fat’ Eddie McKeown stood 25 feet above the North Atlantic on a out-cropping of cliff in a borrowed day-glow yellow wet suit staring directly down into the Devil’s Pot. The… Read More Eddies ‘Big Deal’ pasta
I learned curry at the hands of an Indian master named Shivani – a stunningly beautiful women from New Delhi who was instrumental in guiding me into the alchemy and storm that is cooking. I walked into her kitchen during the summer break of my 2nd year at University looking for a job washing pots,… Read More Chicken Vindaloo, the reason I cook and how she made it happen….
The Bicycle Thief 