The Go To Food Podcast

After seven years of residencies and pop-ups, Whole Beast have finally found a permanent home on Coldharbour Lane — and Sam and Alicja join us to tell the gloriously chaotic story of how they got there. They reveal how working for other people eventually reached breaking point — from having menus rewritten around them to being asked to start making pastries — until they stood outside one day, said “fuck it”, and decided they were done letting anyone else dictate what they cooked. Now they’ve built one of London’s most exciting restaurants around fire, whole-animal cooking, nostalgia and a Champion of Champions cheeseburger.
We get deep into the food: the precise secrets behind that burger, a Sunday roast once described by Pete from the Canton Arms as the greatest he’d ever eaten, cheesy leeks loaded with six or seven cheeses, dripping hash browns with smoked eel and trotter liquor, and why Frazzles, Scampi Fries and Flaming Hot Cheetos have all found their way into serious restaurant cooking. We also hear how Alicja’s upbringing in Poland — cooking with whatever was growing on her grandmother’s allotment, and drinking her nan’s slightly mysterious homemade fruit wine — still shapes the way they think about seasonality and flavour today.
But underneath all the fun is a brutally candid conversation about what it actually takes to survive as an independent restaurant. They explain why they refuse to add service charge, why being prompted to tip for a takeaway coffee drives them mad, how the publicity surrounding a new opening can disappear after a few months, and why sometimes “money runs out” and you simply have to pivot — whether that means killing Sunday service, turning Wednesday into one of your busiest nights or ditching a complicated wine list for boxes of St John wine. Funny, opinionated, occasionally filthy and packed with brilliant stories — this is Whole Beast in all its glory.

You can book a virtual demonstration with Quooker to find the right setup for your kitchen and remember, until the end of August, if you use the code GO TO FOOD, you’ll get free installation and a free Quooker glassware set. Just head to www.Quooker.co.uk now!

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This week we’re inside Tavern, one of London’s most talked-about new openings, from the team behind Michelin-starred Restaurant St Barts. After almost a decade of Nest, they explain why they decided two tasting-menu restaurants no longer made sense, why restaurants increasingly seem to need to be either brand new or about to close to get people excited, and how they’ve tried to build something more affordable, energetic and accessible without compromising the cooking. We also hear how a previous Go To Food episode directly led them to a British quail supplier — who then drove from Suffolk to hand-deliver birds and eggs for them to test.
Over lunch we get deep into how dishes actually come together: from a pork and cuttlefish idea that was initially so bad it was described as “vile”, before being reinvented as a sausage, to Brendan’s extraordinary days at Silo cooking carrots overnight in compost, salt-baking vegetables in waste coffee grounds and turning leek tops into treacle. There’s also a brilliant conversation about whether British chefs have any business cooking with jerk or tandoori flavours, why modern British food should reflect the multicultural city around it, and whether the great tasting-menu boom is being killed not by price, but by diners simply no longer wanting to give up five hours of their evening.
And then come the stories. A customer who spent an entire tasting menu watching other people play computer games on his phone. Another who fell asleep at the table while out with his girlfriend. Diners tutting at chefs across the counter. Someone walking into the restaurant during prep and casually asking for a flat white. A guest arriving with a mushroom allergy so severe she said she’d be hospitalised despite the menu being built around mushrooms. A four-year-old calmly sitting through a three-hour tasting menu without an iPad. And, after all that serious restaurant cooking, we discover what chefs actually want when service ends: pasta, cheap ham, microwaved cheese on toast and the magnificent Welsh creation known simply as “cheese on a plate.”

You can book a virtual demonstration with Quooker to find the right setup for your kitchen and remember, until the end of August, if you use the code GO TO FOOD, you’ll get free installation and a free Quooker glassware set. Just head to www.Quooker.co.uk now!

Get 2 Months of Blinq For Free - With Code - GOTOBLINQ - https://blinqme.com/

Watch and Subscribe To Our Youtube Videos Here - https://www.youtube.com/@gotofood
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In Part Two of our extraordinary conversation with Marcus Wareing, we pick up his story as his career begins to explode. Marcus takes us inside the chaos of 1998, when he was suddenly fired despite holding a Michelin star, before Gordon Ramsay led a walkout that left the restaurants reportedly losing £15,000 a day and ended in a £1 million lawsuit. He also reveals how a chance walk into a near-empty restaurant led to the creation of Pétrus, and recalls the infamous £44,000 dinner that became one of the most talked-about restaurant bills of its era.
Marcus then charts the extraordinary rise that followed, from Pétrus and the Berkeley to taking over the Savoy Grill and helping breathe new life into some of London’s grandest dining rooms. But behind the Michelin stars, the relationship with Gordon was beginning to fracture. Marcus opens up about becoming the “black sheep” of the business, the bitter split that followed and a feud that would ultimately last around 15 years, before an unexpected signed book from Gordon finally began to bring the two old friends back together.
Finally, Marcus explains why, despite all the accolades, he has always considered himself a businessman before a chef and why he believes that mindset may have stopped him ever winning three Michelin stars. He reveals why the flame eventually went out at his own restaurant, his frustration with the silence and “fucking tweezers” of modern fine dining, why he never wanted to die at the stove, and why walking away at the top felt like the right way to end one of British cooking’s great restaurant careers.

You can book a virtual demonstration with Quooker to find the right setup for your kitchen and remember, until the end of August, if you use the code GO TO FOOD, you’ll get free installation and a free Quooker glassware set. Just head to www.Quooker.co.uk now!

Get 2 Months of Blinq For Free - With Code - GOTOBLINQ - https://blinqme.com/

Watch and Subscribe To Our Youtube Videos Here - https://www.youtube.com/@gotofood
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Part One of our exclusive two-part interview with Marcus Wareing, we sit down with one of the most influential chefs of his generation to trace the extraordinary story of how a shy teenager from Southport became one of the defining figures of modern British cooking. Marcus takes us from working in his father’s fruit and veg warehouse as a boy to leaving home at 18 for The Savoy, before literally knocking on the door of Le Gavroche and asking for a job in one of the greatest kitchens in the world.
Marcus then takes us inside the brutal, exhilarating kitchens that forged an extraordinary generation of British chefs, and recalls the first time he encountered a young Gordon Ramsay, describing him as a “f***ing machine” who nobody else in the kitchen could come close to. He reveals what it was really like becoming Gordon’s right-hand man at Aubergine, why they gave a young Angela Hartnett just two weeks to survive, and how the relentless intensity eventually pushed Marcus towards burnout.
It’s a remarkable insight into a lost era of cooking: kitchens with no recipe books, where everything was done by eye, touch and feel, and where careers were forged through obsession, instinct and sheer endurance. Part One takes us all the way to Marcus winning his first Michelin star alongside Gordon, setting the stage perfectly for Part Two, where Marcus finally opens up about the explosive breakdown of their relationship and the 15-year feud that followed.

You can book a virtual demonstration with Quooker to find the right setup for your kitchen and remember, until the end of August, if you use the code GO TO FOOD, you’ll get free installation and a free Quooker glassware set. Just head to www.Quooker.co.uk now!

Get 2 Months of Blinq For Free - With Code - GOTOBLINQ - https://blinqme.com/

Watch and Subscribe To Our Youtube Videos Here - https://www.youtube.com/@gotofood
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we’re joined by Naz Hassan, the chef behind two of London’s most talked-about Italian restaurants, Lupa and Ornella, alongside co-founders Ed Templeton and Theo James. Naz tells us how a drunken conversation at a Christmas party somehow turned into opening restaurants with one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, why Lupa being fully booked for its first three months became both a blessing and a curse, and what it really takes to survive the hype surrounding a major London opening.

Born in Bangladesh and raised in Milan, Naz also opens up about rejecting his Bengali identity as a teenager, experiencing racism in Italy and eventually finding his place in London’s restaurant world. We hear about his years in some of the city’s toughest kitchens, the infamous chef’s kitchen where he considered quitting almost every day, and how working with Chet Sharma helped him reconnect with his South Asian heritage. Plus, we get into chef egos, restaurant culture, the Bengali restaurant he still dreams of opening and the greatest dishes he’s ever eaten.

You can book a virtual demonstration with Quooker to find the right setup for your kitchen and remember, until the end of August, if you use the code GO TO FOOD, you’ll get free installation and a free Quooker glassware set. Just head to www.Quooker.co.uk now!

Get 2 Months of Blinq For Free - With Code - GOTOBLINQ - https://blinqme.com/

Watch and Subscribe To Our Youtube Videos Here - https://www.youtube.com/@gotofood
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.