A Smashed special edition: An Interview with chef Sally Abé
Nottingham-born Sally Abé is one of the UK’s leading chefs. Currently Consultant Chef at Conrad London St James overseeing four food and drink destinations including The Pem restaurant (named after Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison whose family nickname was ‘Pem’), her career has included working for Gordon Ramsay at The Savoy and Claridge’s, The Ledbury in Notting Hill with Brett Graham and Elystan Street with Phil Howard. In 2017, she was appointed Head Chef at The Harwood Arms where she retained the pub’s Michelin star and also topped the Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs list. Her TV appearances include Great British Menu and Saturday Morning with James Martin.
She was named “Chef to Watch” at the National Restaurant Awards 2019 and nominated for the GQ Chef of the Year 2021. She was listed in CODE’s 100 Most Influential Women in Hospitality 2022 and named their Women of the Year 2023. She is an outspoken proponent of women in the hospitality industry and has recently published her first book, the warts-and-all memoir of the hospitality industry A Women’s Place is in the Kitchen.
In a recent interview with the Observer Food Monthly, you said that you'd had a week of panicking that everyone was going to hate you when your book was published. You certainly didn’t shy away from revealing the sometimes brutal reality of the professional kitchen and being a woman in a male-dominated industry. It’s been out for a few months now, what sort of feedback have you had?
It's been hugely positive. Some of the things that I've said are quite revealing and shocking, but if they weren't it wouldn't be a very interesting book. I've really tried to tell it in a way that shows both the good and the bad of the industry. The last thing I'd wanted to do was a witch hunt. Whether they are named in the book or not, it would be hard to read something about yourself, especially if it was in a negative way. They might feel slightly disgruntled, but all of those experiences are real and they happened so those people just need to deal with that - that's their cross the bear.
I've had maybe a hundred messages from people thanking me for writing the book and saying they've had similar experiences. I got an email from a girl last week that said she quit cooking because she'd been working in a two Michelin star restaurant and she hated it, but she's read the book and now she wants to come back into the kitchen and try again. That one email means everything to me, more than how many books I sell. I wrote it to try and make a change and give people hope, and if I've done that for a few people, then that's enough for me.
The book is at times quite shocking but equally it’s an inspirational story that demonstrates that you can achieve your goals if you work hard enough and would be of interest to readers even if they weren’t particualy interested in the professional kitchen.
That's what I want it to be, in the same way that you don't have to be interested in hospitals necessarily to read This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay. I wanted it to be a book that everybody could read not just chefs, and that's why I've gone into so much detail about how kitchens actually work and how they operate. I wouldn't imagine anyone grows up dreaming about writing a memoir, but when I got asked to do it, I was like, actually, yeah, you know what? I think it's important for people to read those stories and I think it's important for younger women to have role models.
It's unusual for a chef’s first book to be a memoir rather than a cookbook.
I was in the process of doing a cookbook proposal, and to be honest, I was finding it hard because if I was to do a cookbook, I wouldn't want to do a restaurant cookbook. I just think they can be a bit elitist because nobody uses carrageenan gum or whatever at home. I'd rather do a home cookbook, but the food that I cook is the same food that lots and lots of other chefs have already done cookbooks on. The feedback that I was getting was basically that it wasn't original enough, which was frustrating.
I was feeling a little bit despondent with that because I was just like, well, I can make delicious food, but I guess Tom Kerridge has got a million books like this, or there's a million Gary Rhodes books like this. It's not like I'm trying to break down the forefront of modernist cuisine, and it's not like I'm cooking a cuisine that's slightly less heard of or people haven't got much experience cooking. British food is British food, and I don't think it's boring, but obviously the publishers did. So then when this opportunity came along, I was like, oh my god, yeah, this makes so much more sense. I really enjoyed it and I'm already thinking about what to write about next.
I know a lot about the industry and I think that people are desperate for information about hospitality, front and back of house. There's definitely experiences that I've had, that I've seen and other people have experienced that could make quite a nice story. I like the idea of bringing comedic value into it as well, just to read about things that are so ridiculous that you can't help but laugh.
You put a lot in the first book, but is there stuff that you've left out that just was too much?
The lawyers made me take quite a lot of stuff out. I'm going to do an anonymous one in another 10 years and then I’ll tell all.
Your brigade at Conrad is predominantly female, but you’ve worked in mostly male-dominated kitchens throughout your career. Can you quantify why male dominated kitchens are the way they are and why female dominated kitchens might be better?
I think it just comes down to the person at the top more than anything really. I did a pop-up in a kitchen in Brighton a few weeks ago, and the atmosphere there was lovely, and everybody was getting on and friendly, and there was no toxicity at all. It stems from who that chef has worked for and has perpetuated that environment.
It gives me anxiety. You can feel that sort of tension in it because I think in those kitchens, people are working under fear rather than empowerment. They're going into work scared they're going to make a mistake rather than believing that they can do it. That's what creates that atmosphere and that tension. Inevitably, someone will do something wrong throughout the day, and inevitably the head chef will go crazy and start screaming and shouting and then everybody's scared. I'm sure there are women that perpetuate those kitchens as well, there just aren’t as many women head chefs.
You've never worked for a female head chef, have you?
I don't think the male/female thing really occurred to me until much, much later because I sort of saw myself as one of the boys because that's what I had to be to fit in. And I didn't know what else was out there. I suppose I just didn't really look, I wanted to work at the best restaurants. I didn't really care about who the person at the helm was necessarily.
You run a WhatsApp group for female chefs. Are there any names you'd like to highlight as perhaps up and coming chefs or chefs that haven't had as much exposure as you think they should do?
There's April Partridge who won the Roux Scholarship last year, so she’s definitely one to watch. Hannah Hall is head chef of a restaurant in Sheffield. I met her at an event last year and I thought she was absolutely amazing. Dara Klein from Tiella at The Compton Arms in Islington. Laetizia Madsen is the head chef at Bibendum. There's an amazing chef called Mursal Saiq who runs an Afghan barbecue joint called Cue Point. We've got chefs in Scotland and Ireland as well now, which is nice.
I would absolutely love to do something formalized, but I've just no idea where to start. I feel like a lot of these sort of groups and initiatives get set up and then they maybe do a couple of events and then they run out of steam, and it's really difficult to get funding because in the hospitality industry, nobody's got any money really. So it's hard. I wouldn't set something like that up to make lots of money, but if I was going to start putting on events, then the money needs to come from somewhere and they'd always need to be subsidized in order to encourage people to come. I do want to do something, but I just don't know what yet.
From reading A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen, it was obvious that being head chef at The Harwood Arms was demanding but even so I imagine it was a big leap moving to your current position at the Conrad London St James with four spaces to look after (The Pem restaurant, The Blue Boar pub, The Hedgerow cocktail bar and Orchard Room for afternoon tea)?
Yeah, definitely. I think in most things that I've done in my life so far, I don't really know what I'm getting myself into and it's probably a good thing that I don't. I just say, yeah, then I'll figure the rest out as I go along. I am quite an adaptable person and so far it's worked out all right.
Writing the menus for all of the outlets in the hotel was a huge challenge, but an incredibly rewarding and fun one because it meant you got to flex different parts of your creative brain that you maybe wouldn't normally get to use. It's been amazing to do an opening and see it from the very start. Most of the restaurants that I've worked in apart from Elystan Street were already very established restaurants so to go through the stress of an opening is actually very useful. It sets you in good stead for the future, but it also gives you the opportunity to make all of those decisions from the get go and put in good systems from the very start.
You were a very hands-on head chef at The Hardwood. With the broader remit at Conrad, has that changed?
My role here is more of a consultant chef/patron. In terms of the day-to-day running of the kitchen, I have a head chef and I've got a sous chef so doing the orders and all of that kind of stuff, they look after all of that. It's not as much physical work, but it means that then I get the time to do the strategy and say, what's coming up? What should we do? Let's look at the next menu. We are doing a photo shoot for the Christmas menu next week and all of that kind of stuff. I would never have had time to do any of that at The Harwood. It's a different role and it is one I enjoy.
I do miss just happily chopping carrots or whatever in the kitchen sometimes, but I think it's a lot more mental load and mental stress, although being a head chef is very stressful as well. It's just using different parts of my brain and dealing with budgets and all that kind of stuff, which is not something that I was necessarily as involved in as a head chef. This hotel is part of Hilton, which is a huge corporation so there's an awful lot of other paperwork that you have to get involved in. It's good to learn those systems because in independent restaurants, most of the time you just shoot from the hip.
You have a distinctive culinary style with dishes and combinations I haven’t really encountered elsewhere before. Are you conscious of having a particular approach to cooking, or does it just happen?
The way I approach food is I cook food that I would want to eat. I'm not really very interested in challenging people's palates. A lot of chefs fall down these traps trying to use all these weird and wonderful ingredients. I would rather have the classic ingredients but maybe presented in a slightly different way. I think there's a lot to be said for nostalgia and I draw a lot of inspiration from either dishes I ate as a child or popular British dishes. If you can make that connection to somebody's memory, then you are already halfway there.
It's about using familiar flavors and English produce, but just trying to turn it on its head. You might not recognize it if you looked at it or if you read it on the menu, but then when you eat it you think, oh, I know that flavor. I love it when I taste something and I'm like, oh my God, that takes exactly like that or takes you back to, you can remember a certain packet of crisps that you used to get from the tuck shop at school. That really excites me being able to make those connections.
Is there a dish on your current menu at The Pem that illustrates that approach?
The lamb with cockles is my favourite dish. We pickle the cockles before we fry them to make the cockle popcorn and that gives me memories of crisps in the schoolyard. The mint gel is a real kick-you-in-the-face mint sauce, but it's clear so you wouldn't know what you're about to taste until you taste it. It's a really super zingy vinegar minty sauce. It's really full of flavor and I think it kind brings the whole dish together. We've been trying to think of ways to stop using heavy red wine-based sauces on every dish, especially in summer so we make a buerre blanc, but instead of using butter we use lamb fat and then instead of using wine we use the liquor that we cooked the cockles in so we're using all parts of it. All of the flavours of the dish are reinforced by the sauce.
Your originally from the Midlands. Did the food from the region inspire any dishes?One of the dishes we opened with was pea and cockles. When I was growing up, there was a market in Mansfield town square and they always had shellfish and mushy pea stands. You'd get these little polystyrene cups with mushy peas and then little polystyrene cups with cockles so I created a dish with cod that was an ode to that. It's tricky with the Midlands. You've got Stilton and Bramly apples and not a great deal else. We do pork scratching with Bramley apple sauce in the pub and we did a really lovely apple parfait a couple of years ago with Bramley apples.
One of the amazing things from Nottingham I wanted to put it in everything was Berkswell cheese but they've unfortunately gone out of business now which is sad. There are some cool older dishes that I've found in recipe books, but the problem is that they all tend to be very stodgy cakes and puddings and stuff that get boiled in a pot or a cauldron for 24 hours so it's hard to get them on the menu.
Reading the book, it does seem like you jump in with both feet to any sort of situation. Was there ever a time when you thought I'm in too deep here?
Some people are more predisposed to thinking, ‘this isn't working’ or ‘it's not right’ but I think ‘okay, well how do we make it right?’. I don't want to just give up on something unless I know when it's time to give up on something. I'm a very persistent and quite stubborn person, if I've committed to something, then I want to make it work. I'll definitely exhaust every avenue before giving up.
Life is about compromise, I've learned that a lot working with the hotel. When I was at The Harwood I could do whatever I wanted within reason. Whereas here, there's a lot more hoops to jump through. It's about being the kind of person that's like, okay, well let's do it like this and taking a collaborative approach to everything I do, rather than just being like, ‘I'm right and you are wrong’.
Your career took a surprising turn when you took time out of the kitchen and worked as a writer at greatbritishchefs.com.
It was a bit of a curveball. When I left The Ledbury, I was just knackered. I was exhausted. I'd done five years of 16 hour days and I didn't know what to do. Because The Ledbury was such a renowned restaurant, I felt as though going anywhere else would be a step down for me. I got that job accidentally, and then I think it was good for me to have that time of reflection a little bit and get to enjoy at least some of my twenties, have the weekends off and see my friends. But ultimately I did just really, really miss the kitchen. I think once you get it kitchen mentality instilled in you in terms of the way you work and the pride in your work and the speed in which you work, you can't lose that. And it's very frustrating when other people don't work at that same pace.
How important was your win on Great British Menu (Abé served canapes and pre-desserts at the 2022 banquet) for your career?
It was an amazing thing to do and it was great for my profile, but I am not necessarily chasing that stardom. It was a great confidence boost for me to do it and to get as far as I did and obviously it's great for business.
I'd love to do more TV. One of the things that I find the most rewarding about my job is getting to teach other people - getting to teach young chefs how to do things perfectly and when they do it, that's also a lot of joy. I'd love to have a cooking show, but I'm well aware that for every one of me, there's a hundred thousand other people. Nowadays it's all about how many Instagram followers you've got. I feel like a lot of the people that are influencers in the food and social media and TV space, I am certainly a more accomplished cook than them. But that doesn't matter for TV so I've just had to accept that. But if anybody out there would like me to make a lovely TV show teaching them how to cook, then I would be more than happy to do it.
What are your future plans?
I'd love to have my own place but it’s hard because it costs a lot of money to open a restaurant. I think probably now is the first time in my life that I've got to actually make a plan. I can't keep getting older and expect things to just magically appear. At the start of this year, I set out some goals for myself to achieve by June, and I did achieve most of them, so I think I'm going to do that again soon. The last couple of years have been a bit of a whirlwind, opening The Pem, getting divorced, writing the book. There's been so much going on. I think I've just needed this year to come up for air a little bit.
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