Smashed special: Chef Adam Byatt on a Plate

A culinary life in five dishes

About Adam

Michelin-starred chef Adam Byatt first nade his name in 2001 with the ground breaking small plates only restaurant Thyme in Clapham in 2001. He returned to Clapham Old Town with Trinity in 2006. Following from the success of Trinity, Adam opened Bistro Union in 2011 followed by in 2015 Upstairs at Trinity which holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand Award. Adam is Chef Director of Food and Beverage at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair, where he oversees Charlie’s. In 2025, he opened Brasserie Constance in the new Fulham Pier development, a British brasserie inspired by 20th century food writer and florist Constance Spry.

Trinity now holds a coveted Michelin Star as well as three AA rosettes and numerous other accolades. Voted in the top ten restaurants in London by both Hardens and Zagat, it has also been included in The Times’ Top 100 Restaurants in the UK, and voted by Opentable diners as one of the top ten restaurants in the UK. Adam was named Imbibe’s Restaurant Personality of The Year 2017 in recognition of his impact on the London dining scene as well as his commitment to passing on his culinary knowledge to future generations of young chefs.

He has worked for many charities including DEBRA and Action Against Hunger and travels to numerous culinary schools and colleges to give talks on careers in the hospitality industry. Adam is the Chairman of the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts.

The Dishes

Timbale de sole ton sur ton, Claridge's, London (1988)

I was at Claridge's for five years. It was challenging working for head chef John Williams. When I walked into that kitchen, I was 15 years old and I left that kitchen when I was 21, so I kind of grew up there. I went from being a young boy to a grown up man. There were 85 chefs in that kitchen, and they were big grownup humans that were paying a mortgage. It was a serious place and times were different so it was hard. The limitation on what people could do and say and how discipline could work was not like it is now. I watched a program recently called Carême on Apple TV, about the 19th century chef, it's brilliant. I was thinking, bloody hell, Claridge's wasn't a million miles from that really. I arrived six months after the coal-fired stoves were removed and the new gas stoves were put in.

So it was a difficult place to work, but I loved every minute of it. I now look back with feelings of utter privilege that I worked in a place that had a bakery, a butchery, a fishmongery, a cheese kitchen and a chocolate kitchen. Over five years I worked in every single section of that kitchen. How are you going to get a better apprenticeship than that? You learn how to pick spinach all the way through to tempering chocolate and baking the finest baguette. It was amazing. I feel privileged to have had that apprenticeship and it's a real shame that you can't find that anymore.

There's so many dishes but I'm going to pick the timbale de sole ‘ton sur ton’ - sole with two sauces. This is a fillet of Dover sole folded around the inside of a buttered ramakin dish. You then pipe in a sole mousse, a little bit of lobster ragu with ginger and cover with more sole mousse. You cover that with a little piece of cartouche and tin foil and steam for seven minutes. It was served in an eared Pyrex dish with a cloche on the top with américaine sauce (a sort of lobster bisque) on one side, a creamed champagne fish veloute sauce on the other, a big piece of lobster, a bit of caviar and boom. An absolutely world class dish and very hard to replicate. You'd now need to charge about £200 a portion for that. But it was a spectacular plate of food. That was guided by chefs John Williams and Mario Lesnik at the time but it’s a dish that came all the way down from Escoffier and has just been adapted.

It was mainly a banqueting dish, but we used to do it in the restaurant as well. I remember the first time I was allowed to make it, I was running the fish section and we would be doing it for banquets of 150 to 200 people. That's 50 dover sole to skin, fillet and trim. Then you've got to make sole mousse, then you've got to poach lobster, then you've got to make an américaine sauce, then you've got to make a veloute. That's a whole day's work, minimum. I remember feeling privileged when I was allowed to then make it myself. I probably served a few thousand of those dishes over the course of my tenure there. I just thought it was so clever; when you're 20 years old, that's mind blowing.

Herb Crusted Saddle of Lamb, The Square, London (early 1990s)

I started at The Square in 1991, at the original King Street restaurant which had one Michelin star. That was particularly rock and roll. The menu would change about 10 minutes before every service. It was absolutely mental. You never ever knew what you were serving for lunch when you walked in that day. It was like the wild west. It got a bit more controlled once we moved to the new Square in Bruton Street, things got serious.

It became a two star restaurant, quite rightly. The relentlessness went up a level. The brigade got bigger, the covers got bigger, but the relentlessness got greater. That became a powerhouse of a restaurant. If you wanted to learn how to cook food and be quick at what you did and do food properly, that was a place to work. I was there with Jun Tanaka (chef/patron The Ninth, London, 1 Michelin star), Brett Graham (chef patron The Ledbury, 3 Michelin stars) Anthony Boyd (Deputy Head of Cuisine, Le Coredon Bleu), Shane Osborne (chef patron, Arcane, Hong Kong,1 Michelin star), Rob Weston (Executive Chef, Director of Food Developments and Restaurant, Aussie Catering, London) and Gary Foulks (head chef Cornus, 1 Michelin star). The sheer talent that came out of that restaurant at that time is incredible. I feel really privileged to have been a part of that.

It was at a point where London was exploding restaurant wise, there was a scene. We'd go out after work and you'd meet the boys from La Tante Claire, from Aubergine, from The Restaurant Marco Pierre White and from Pied a Terret. You'd be drinking with these people and you're at The Square, so you've got kudos. You're like the SAS. You’re doing a hundred for lunch and a hundred for dinner at two Michelin star level. No one else is doing that level of revenue or those covers at the level we were doing. You were clearly hardcore. Those other restaurants might be destined to get three stars, but they're cooking for 40 people. It was really cool. A couple of beers and four hours sleep and you're back at it. Staff food was a Mars Bar and a double espresso twice a day, it was quite bizarre. I lost weight and got very good at cooking real quick.

Hotels are about being part of the process. So you might pick the spinach, you might turn the potatoes, you might seal off the tournodoes for the Rossini, but you are very unlikely to be doing all of those things, whereas in a restaurant like The Square, you are literally doing everything for that plate of food. It was the first time I felt that connection with the guest. It was a real eyeopener for me. The pace and the momentum and the relentlessness of that restaurant was quite overwhelming in the beginning. It was open seven days a week and was fully booked for lunch and dinner. The volume of food we got through was just outrageous, but I loved every minute of it, it was infectious.

I was there when the Herb Crusted Saddle of Lamb was developed. I'd spent five years at Claridge's learning how to bone and roll saddles of lamb ‘belle epoque’ and then you go to The Square and it's boned out completely differently. Phil developed a flat saddle of lamb with the herb crust that goes over the top. It was genius and it stood the test of time. It worked for a fast paced restaurant like that. You could prep the saddles in under 10 minutes rather than an hour, and you could cook them in 45 minutes rather than two hours.

Classically, you are taking the saddle, taking the bone out of the middle of the lamb whilst leaving the saddle intact. You leave the breast on, skim the breast down and bat the fat out. You then line the inside of that lamb with spinach and chicken mousse and put the fillets back in the middle. Then you roll the whole thing up, you debark it, you wrap it in crépinette and string it. Then you render the fat gently, roast it very gently and then you rest it. You take it out of the oven, take the string off, roll it in cling film, and then you cut it.

That whole process is a lot, whereas at The Square, you de-boned the saddle and got rid of the breasts immediately, so that's a half-job gone. You’d make a mousse from the trimmings from the breast and one of the fillets. You’d pipe that down the middle of the gap in the middle of two loins and put the fillet back in the middle. You’d render that flat in a pan, baste it, then you put a sheeted herb crust over the top of the whole thing and put it in the oven. It just means it's much quicker, much more efficient. You get five portions out of a saddle and we would doing ten of those a day.

It was served with two little Roseval potato fondants, one either side of the saddle. The way we cooked fondants at The Square was different to everywhere else. It was a hundred percent butter, no stock, and that's the way I've always cooked fondants since. Then there would be a roasted shallot puree, which would be made by putting a whole bag of shallots in the oven in their skins, and you’d pop them all out when they were soft. You’d also melt down a load of shallots in a pan, add the roasted shallots, cream and sherry vinegar and blend. The lamb sauce that was split with olive oil and finished with tomato, chopped rosemary and sometimes chopped olive. That was it. It was a finished dish. It could not get any better and to eat it was just remarkable. That dish was magical. It epitomized Phil really growing up, really showcasing himself as a master of his craft. The way he could put ingredients together and make harmony on a plate was extraordinary.

Terrine of foie gras and confit cod with black trompette mushrooms, Thyme, London (2001)

Thyme was my first restaurant, arguably my ‘breakthrough album’. That was rock and roll. That was quite ‘First Square-ish’. We opened Thyme on a shoe string in the arse end of Clapham in 2001, the day after 9/11. I just cooked my socks off and tried to do the best I could. I was very influenced by The Square, very naive to the fact that I didn't have 20 chefs and couldn't buy lobsters and langoustines anymore. I was quite influenced in those very early days by The French Laundry and I also took influence from a dish from Charlie Trotter. I made a terrine of foie gras and confit cod with black trompette mushrooms. It was actually bloody incredible, way ahead of it’s time and probably technically beyond what I understood. I was doing it more because I could than because I knew what I was doing. I was 26; in terms of your palate, you haven't even started.

I would confit whole lumps of back loin of cod in duck fat. Then I would cook foie gras as for a terrine, so I would open it out, devein it, season it, cook it in a low oven and then pack it into the terrine mould. Then there would be a centimeter-thick layer of trompette de la mort mushrooms cooked in shallots, garlic and duck fat so that it would set. Then I would press and set the whole thing. Then I would drop in the confit cod and press the whole thing again gently overnight. I would cut a slice of that and you’d have the white, black and beige. We'd serve that with a banyuls reduction and a lemon reduction that would nowadays be a gel.

This is on a starter size plate, and that terrine’s costing you nine quid. I remember Matthew Fort coming to the restaurant. He came to the kitchen and said, ‘Most outrageous plate of food I've ever eaten, but absolutely incredible. How the fuck do you make that?’ It got to the point where I was trying to just kind of peacock my craft, but I don’t know if I was doing it because I wanted guests to have an absolutely delicious meal, which is where I'm at now. In those days, for me it was more about impressing and showcasing because I could and not because I should, but that's what a 26-year-old with the keys to a restaurant does.

It was sort of avant-garde in a way, but equally, we also sold bowls of bouillabaisse soup, parfaits and a rump of lamb with piperade - simple food too. It was part of my experimental thing, but definitely it all had lineage from The Square and from Claridge's. This was not me cooking what's now become my food. But we were busy, we were full every single day and so I could basically just do what I want. It'd been reviewed by everyone with five stars, even though it wasn't that good, but it was just different. It was in a center of nowhere and I was a no one, so therefore it made good copy.

It was only starter plates. There were 19 dishes on the menu and they were grouped into £6, £8, £10 and £12 plates. It was so cheap a table of four would come in and say, ‘We’'ll just have everything’ which was an absolute fucking nightmare. Obviously that doesn't work because if I just put one terrine in the middle of a table and there's four of you, that's horrible. But they were doing that because no one had grasped the concept of sharing. If they’d said, ‘We'll have three of those and three of those’, that would have been fine. It wasn't sharing, actually. It happened, because I ran out of money to buy the crockery, and all I could do was buy the starter plates from Ikea. That was genuinely the reason that I only opened with staters. There was no sense behind it. I wish I could say it was strategic. Nowadays it would take a panel of marketeers to come up with something like that. This was some little street urchin with no money. We did that and then Maze opened about eight months later and did the same sort of thing.

Salmon, Trinity, Clapham (2017)

I opened Thyme at The Hospital in Covent Garden in 2004. It was nine months of my life. It taught me a lot of stuff, but it didn't teach me anything cooking-wise. I don't look back on it with any form of joy or happiness in terms of the cookery end of it. I had to have a phone call with Charlie Trotter because I inherited the kitchen design from him. He’d signed the deal, built the kitchen, put the whole thing together with Paul Allen, who was the co-founder of Microsoft, and Dave Stewart from Eurythmics, and then he pulled out. They all fell out over something, I don’t know what, but that all fell apart. They went on the hunt for a new chef, and we were just making a lot of noise, I guess. Paul Allen came for dinner in Clapham with his entourage from America.

I was 31 years old, and we went from 12 members of staff at Thyme in Clapham to 140 staff at Covent Garden overnight. I remember opening that restaurant with such a small amount of money in my bank account. There's no way we could have even made the first month's payroll, let alone even bankrolled the whole thing. We were so under-capitalised it was ridiculous. Why no one picked that up, I've got no idea. I couldn't even pay the lawyer’s bill.

I think the food was all right, but every neighbourhood has to have a restaurant that fits that demographic of people. Just because it's successful in one place does not mean you can just lift it and put it into another. That is a big mistake. If you asked me to put Trinity into Mayfair tomorrow, I would tell you you're mad. I wouldn't do it. It would fall flat on his face. I should have come up with a completely new restaurant, a new style of food, but I didn't have the repertoire to do that. I was too young. I'd worked at Claridges and The Square, that was it. I’d done nothing really. I shouldn't have even had the keys to my own restaurant. It was Thyme for nine months. I liquidated it, and then I stayed on and opened a restaurant called Origin for Allen and Stewart because I needed a salary. And while I was doing that, I went and found Trinity.

Somebody told me that the Polygon Bar and Grill in Clapham was potentially up for sale. I sent a cold email to the restaurant saying if you're looking to sell, I'd love to buy it. The owner wrote back (who happened to be the landlord and who had recently set up Smiths of Smithfield with John Torode) and said, let's have a drink. He knew who I was because of Thyme. We met in Clapham and had a few beers. He'd just sold out his shares of Smiths of Smithfield, wanted to close out the Polygon Bar and Grill and move to South Africa, so we did a joint venture and the rest is history. He's still my landlord and still my business partner and we're still together 20 years later. He doesn't have anything to do with the operation or the restaurant per se, but he helps me with finances and insurance and bits and pieces. I don't see him that often, but he's a great business partner and a good mentor.

Trinity has consumed about as much as a human would want to give to anything. It’s a 20-year journey for me, all the way from a simple steak, cottage pie and prefix menus during the recession to what is now probably some of the best one-star food you can eat in London. I'm very confident in that. It's pretty impressive what we do now with the team and where we are. It's just well-oiled and well-honed, and we know who we are, we're confident in what we're about.

A dish that represents Trinity and links back to my earlier career is the warm semi-smoked salmon. It's served with a beurre blanc and pickled cucumber, and that's it. It's very clean. It delivers my dream of three things on the plate only. It’s a piece of very slow-cooked salmon, which takes me back to The Square. We would clean the stove and lay a whole side of wild salmon on the stove, colour it on both sides, then cover it in olive oil and leave it under the heat lamps on the pass. We’d do a salad at lunchtime and just pick the pieces of wild salmon off. It was just miraculous. Of course, you can't get a whole side of wild salmon anymore, which is a real shame.

The dish has been on the Trinity menu for eight years and I’m probably never going to take it off. It's one of the best I've ever come up with. The key to it is the smoked salmon. The owner of Moxon’s Fishmonger’s and Smokehouse is a very good friend. One day, he came to me and said, ‘Listen, we fucked up a load of smoked salmon and we just under-cured the whole thing and then we under-smoked it. Can you just use it for fishcakes?’It was utterly delicious. It was raw, so it meant that I could poach it, grill it, fry it - whatever I wanted to do with it. It just had that beautiful kind of umami smoke level. I said, ‘If you can cure that an hour more and smoke it for the same amount of time and keep it as undercooked as that, I'll take it.’ So for 10 years we’ve been selling it in every restaurant I work in.

We cook the salmon in a beurre monté made with butter, water, a little bit of smoked water and 3 per cent salt. We hold that at 55°C degrees on the stove in a pan, it's not a water bath or a circulator, and we just chuck the salmon in. For the the beurre blanc we make a reduction with white onion, not shallot, and we use Chardonnay vinegar and a nice wine, then we monté in very expensive French butter. It's heavier than the normal beurre blanc, it's got a bit more cream in it so it's more stabilised. We pass that off twice through muslin, and then we finish it with a pickled dulse, trout roe, salmon roe, raw chopped shallots, chopped dill and chopped chives. All of those things are from the garnish for the smoked salmon trolley at Claridge’s that I would set up every day, so that’s where that comes from.

Claypot Chicken, Brasserie Constance, Fulham 2025

I created this dish for Constance when we opened in July this year. I've been on this project for nearly two and a half years, there’s been lots of delays. In January and February this year, I began to develop the menu. We did a load of research on the area. I needed a North Star to hook the whole thing on. My creative manager came to me and said, ‘I found this lady, Constance Spry. She was a florist in Fulham. She developed this vase, which was an open, sprayed vase rather than a tall vase. She also wrote a cookbook and I think you'd be really interested.’ I'd never heard of her but she fitted perfectly with me because the flowers are a really big part of it for us. My wife's also a florist and she does the flowers at Constance now.

I wanted to do a British brasserie, and Spry also has a French classical gastronomic influence in her food. And then there's the ceramic thing as well. So I said, let's get a full-time ceramicist on site to develop all these beautiful little trinkets and bits and pieces for us. Then I started to write the menu and I thought, how can we incorporate the pottery? Why don't I try and look at chicken cooked in a brick?

I got the ceramicist to make me an individual clay pot so we could do a clay pot chicken. We've developed the recipe so you can order it and get it on the table within 50 minutes. We take a 1.2 - 1.3 kg chicken, we brine it, we seal it off and brown it to order. It's a Fosse Meadow chicken, so it's a really beautiful chicken, it's got something to it. This wouldn't work with a really lean Bresse chicken, it needs a slightly more bolstered English chicken. We then sweat off celery, carrot, onion and leek cut on the oblique and they go in the pot with soaked barley and our own beer - it's quite hoppy, but not crazy hoppy. We add one chilli and the chicken, the lid goes on and seals the whole thing. It goes in the oven for 20 minutes and then rests for 20 minutes. We break the legs down and serve them with a salad. The breasts, we put back over the barley and beer mix, chop the chilli through it and finish it with chopped parsley, chopped lovage and we serve the whole thing back in the pot at the table for two people. It's a little bit like Nigella's orzo chicken, I borrowed a little bit of inspiration from that.

Constance is not my restaurant, it’s a partnership but I've not dialled it in. I'm not like that. I came up with everything on the menu. Everything you see came from me. My wife does all the flowers. My son wrote the wine list here. We did it properly. This is a neighbourhood restaurant. This is not trying to be a restaurant that's making it’s mark on London or Instagram-friendly or trying to be somewhere that people travel from all around the country to come to. It's not supposed to be that. Which is a weird thing for me to say because I've always thought as a chef, my job is to make a restaurant as impactful on the restaurant scene as it can be.

But it's not about that, actually. It's about servicing a three or four-mile radius from around this location really well, embedding in the community, looking after the community, welcoming people. Come with your dog, get a loyalty card. We know your name, we know your children's names. We know what water you drink. We know you like to sit over there. It's supposed to be somewhere that the food's really familiar at a really good price point. I want that Wednesday seven o'clock decision of: ‘I don't want to cook. Should we just pop to Constance?’ I want those diners, and I want the date night, and I want the Saturday night special occasion thing as well. And I really think the menu delivers that.

Looking to the future, my role now is about taking brilliant young talent between 28 and 35 years old with making sure they maximize their potential. My job is not to stand and chop the carrots, it's to take these young boys and girls, lead them and give them guidance to become best thing they can become. I cook at Trinity because that's my home, but I've got six restaurants. I'm not going to pretend that I'm standing here cooking your steak for you every day. Why would I do that? But equally, Steve Jobs didn't make your mobile phone either, did he?

We’ve just bought another restaurant. I've always wanted the site. It's the best proportioned restaurant site I've ever seen, and geographically it's perfect for me. The owner was retiring, so I had to take the opportunity to buy it. It's trading under the same name, but next May, I'm going to change it over to a new restaurant. I'm going to close it properly and redo the whole thing, and it might well be where I want my daughter to cook. That's restaurant number seven, and, if I'm honest, that's it. I'm done. They've all got incredible young talent at the helm and it's them that I really care about and focus on. And I'm not putting my name in front of all these restaurants. It's more about steerage for these young people. And that's the bit I love.

I'm going to continue to do the social media stuff - it works in terms of filling restaurants.

We're doing a cookbook for 20 years of Trinity, a really proper beautiful cookbook that I've put my heart and soul into. It's been a labour of love, but I've really enjoyed that. That comes out in summer next year. I'm going to continue to do the social media stuff because I like it and it works in terms of filling restaurants. I like writing about food. I like doing the cooking videos. YouTube's working for us, so I'll continue to do that because I feel like I've got a little space that's mine. I just wanted to do it in a way that was very true to me. I'm an older guy that's been doing this for a long time. I need to lean into that. I'm not going to try and cook the 10 best burgers. That's just not me.

We're hopefully going to do something with the Outside sandwich thing. I've really enjoyed doing that. Someone's asked to take that into a bricks and mortar site and do a licensed thing. I do a lot of work with the Royal Academy still, and that's consuming but important. And then do you know what? In all honesty, that's it. I'm done. I'm just going to then nurture, caress, look after that little stable of things and enjoy it. That's enough for me. I've accomplished a lot more than I really should have done with the cards I was dealt. I've loved the journey and I don't want it to spoil. I don't aspire to three stars or any of that stuff. In terms of a career, that's enough.

Recipe: Clay pot chicken, barley & beer by Adam Byatt

serves 2

Ingredients

1 litre 10 per cent brine
1.4kg Fosse Meadow Chicken
30g, onion, 1cm dice
50g carrot, 1cm dice
30g celery, 1cm dice
5 cloves garlic, sliced
1 lemon, juice only
1 Bouquet garni
200g soaked barley
1 bottle Constance beer
1 red chilli
300g white chicken stock
30g chopped parsley
1 head baby gem
50ml french dressing
1 shallot cut into rings

Method

Remove the wishbone, wingtips and parsons nose from the chicken. Place in the brine for 2 hours then wash off and dry.

Heat a large sized casserole pan over a medium heat, season the bird and brown the chicken all over.

Remove from the heat and add the diced vegetables, garlic, chilli and bouquet garni. Sweat for 5 minutes, add soaked barley, beer and chicken stock and bring to the boil.

Pour the barley mixture into the clay pot, then sit chicken on top. Cover with a lid and bake at 210°C for 25 minutes. Remove from the oven, allow to rest for 15 minutes.

Once rested, take the chicken and carve off the breast and the legs, being careful to remove as much meat from the bone as possible. Remove and chop down chilli without the seeds, add the chopped flat leaf parsley, chilli and and lemon juice to the barley and taste for seasoning. Slice the breast and lay on top of the barley.

Remove skin from the legs and shred the meat off the bone, dress in a bowl with the baby gem lettuce, sliced shallot rings and French dressing and serve alongside the chicken and barley.