Smashed Special: Chef Isaac McHale on a Plate
A Culinary Life in Five Dishes
Isaac McHale on a Plate: A Culinary Life in Five Dishes
Isaac McHale is the chef patron of the two Michelin-starred restaurant and bar The Clove Club in Shoreditch, London. The Michelin Guide says that, ‘The roll-call of prime British ingredients includes Orkney scallops, Wiltshire trout, Torbay prawns, Herdwick lamb and Middle White pork – all starring in seasonally pertinent dishes where their natural flavours are allowed to shine through’. The Good Food Guide commented on McHale’s ‘forthright innovative confidence’ and the ‘explosive bursts of flavour’ in his multi-course tasting menus and Time Out called The Clove Club ‘one of London’s most prestigious restaurants’. McHale opened the more casual Bar Valette in January 2025.
thecloveclub.com
barvalette.com
Formative years
I was born in 1980. At age seven I wanted to know how to make chicken pakora, the famous takeaway food of Glasgow. I started going to the Indian cash and carry instead of going to play football with other kids after school. I would memorise the names of all the spices and cook and experiment. Then I tried to go on Junior Masterschef but they wouldn’t have me. I wanted to do a Tom Yam soup and they didn’t think that was a suitable main course.
Oxfam opened a bookshop in the West End of Glasgow and because Glasgow is a university town, lots of amazing books streamed into the shop and I just bought all the best cookbooks; it was an amazing collection for pennies. Around that time in the early 90s I got Ken Hom’s Taste of China. For my ninth birthday, all I wanted was money to go and buy ingredients to cook a multi-course meal for my friends. I bought Chinese ingredients and cooked a congee and wood pigeon stir-fried with celery and all kinds of different things. British supermarkets were bringing in ingredients from all around the world, the amount of things you could access just exploded. I was stunned that I could get kaffir lime leaves and galangal in the local supermarket, fresh.
When I was 14, I worked Saturdays and school holidays in a fishmonger’s for six months or so. Then I got a job at Stravaigin in Glasgow, which had the same owner as The Ubiquitous Chip. I was underage to work, so he paid me £2.50 an hour, cash-in-hand. I had to come straight from school and wash dishes and cook bar food. Luckily, they didn’t have metal detectors in school back then because I went to school with the sharpest cook’s knife.
I went on to other Glasgow restaurants, including Rococo with chef Martin Tamburrini (brother of Paul who worked for Martin Wishart in Edinburgh) and John Quigley at Mojo, who did fusion food and had been Bryan Adams’ personal chef. Marina O’Loughlin used to work there too. Then he opened a place called the Art House Hotel just across the road and I worked there.
Turbot new style sashimi, Art House Hotel, Glasgow (1999)
The Background
At the Art House Hotel, they had a fine dining restaurant and a bistro restaurant where I worked and ended up, at age 20, being stupidly promoted to junior sous chef. At that time, I was the one young chef who was interested in reading about food and cooking and making bread at home. By this time, I’d got really interested in Japanese food. There’s a book called Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. It’s now 30 years old, an amazing, very encyclopedic book from a cookery school over there. I loved that it was quite technical. I was also reading books by Peter Barham, who wrote scientific cookbooks around the time Heston Blumenthal came to prominence. I went to university in 97, doing food chemistry. I dropped out after one year to carry on cooking full-time.
They wanted to open a teppanyaki bar at the hotel, the first one in Scotland. They brought in a chef who had been head sushi chef at Nobu. It was a big deal at the time. He was about 65 and he clearly thought that teppanyaki was like a burger van. The teppanyaki bar was being made in Chicago and it was endlessly delayed. He was just there being paid, so he said, ‘Okay, let’s get you doing some specials.’ He would do a turbot new style sashimi, Nobu’s famous Peruvian-style tiradito with chillies and coriander and a hot sesame oil around it, and I used to make that with him.
I distinctly remember him getting shouted at by the general manager of the hotel. He used to age the turbot, which 27 years later, is all the rage, but even more than that, he used to age the carcasses in the lift shafts. He had these turbot frames with the fillets taken hanging in the old lift shaft to dry in winter. Then he cut them all down and preserved the engawa, or frill, in soy sauce for a year and then served them to these Japanese pop stars that came to eat in the restaurant.
He really didn’t want to tell anybody anything. He was very much of that era of chefs. But I was 19, I think his son was the same age, so he took a shine to me. I was the only person who was interested and asked him questions and wanted to know and really cared about what he was doing and wanted to know about it. So I learned little things from him, the things that he would tell. At that time, Japanese ingredients were such a exotic thing; there was sushi ginger, soy sauce and maybe frozen yuzu juice or zest, but that was it. There wasn’t different levels of an ingredient or different varieties of it. But I saw with this guy different types of sushi ginger, buying fresh ginger and pickling his own fresh young ginger, light and dark soy sauce bought in 20-kilo boxes and preserving sea urchins in them.
I learned a lot from that guy in a very small amount of time - how to cook rice for sushi, how to make the sushi vinegar with sugar, making huge batches of it and infuse with kobu. I’ve never seen anyone else cook prawns like this: skewer and then cook them from cold in cold water. They’d have just enough water to cover a single layer of 10 prawns flat in a wide pan on sticks, and then he’d bring it all up from cold until it just started to boil and then he’d take them off into ice so they’d be perfectly cooked. They weren’t shocked by going into boiling water. I’ve still never seen anyone else do it in my life.
The engawa or turbo frill, I remember distinctly cutting off and saving, and then I used to sit with the Japanese guy and the Japanese waitress and have family meal, which was turbo heads by ourselves and rice, and we soup on the side and we’d have all these amazing things. It was quite an education, many little things that I saw there.
The Dish
It’s a dish that I knew from Nobu cookbook. It’s one of his famous dishes, making sashimi less scary for Westerners and introducing that Peruvian element to the food. The reason the fish is aged is because turbot is a very muscular and tight fish. That can be an amazing texture for Japanese people who appreciate a chew, but I don’t think people want that in a sashimi. They want something that’s tenderised, so it’s necessary to age it so when it’s served raw, it has a softness, not a crunch.
The fish was aged on the bone for four or five days, and depending on the size, up to a week, and then was taken off and skinned. He would just take one fillet off and then leave the rest on the bone. I’d never seen this anywhere else. Usually, if you’re starting to fillet a fish you finish it, but he’d just take one fillet off and keep the rest on the bones so it would keep better for the next service. He was creating more work for himself, but keeping things better, and I learned that standard there.
He’d take sheets of kombu brushed with saki and press the skinned turbot between them overnight. The next day, he’d carve the turbot and lay it out on a very simple white hotel plate with a border of thin slices of green chilli all the way around, and a little salad of carrot and coriander in the middle. He’d brush soy onto each piece of fish and then heat up a tiny pan of sesame oil till it was smoking when the dish was called away and pour that around the fish. Seeing it made by somebody who’d served it in Nobu restaurant was quite amazing. see.
Mille-feuille of figs and potato chantilly, The Four in Hand, Sydney (2002/2003)
The Background
I went to work at Gordon Ramsay’s Glasgow restaurant Amaryllis. I was there three weeks. Ramsay was there, he was nice. He was there for some off the opening days. There were lots of people in that kitchen: Angela Hartnett was there, David Dempsey, Simone Zanoni, who’s now at the Four Seasons in Paris, Neil Borthwick started just after me, and Colin Buchan, who’s somewhere in Singapore now. It wasn’t that pleasant, only because of the young chef being dicks to each other. Some other chef who had started two days before me thought he could boss me around and was shouting at me, so it was just all these little idiots just trying to be mean to each other. It wasn’t for me.
I wanted to learn Japanese food and to move to Japan, but at that time, that wasn’t possible. The only visas you could get were for English teachers. You could get a job at Hilton and ask for a transfer to Hilton Japan, and then somewhere down the line, you might be able to break out of that hotel system, but I didn’t want to work in Glasgow to hope that I’d get transferred to Japan, it seemed too far-fetched, so I went to Australia. I wanted to work at Tetsuya because of my love of Japanese foods. I got there and realised I couldn’t because of my visa. You had to move every three months. They wanted you to see four different states, so they didn’t want people to be employed for more than three months by one employer and Tetsuya didn’t want people for just three months. I did actually manage to work for Tetsuya at his restaurant in the Millennium Hotel in Knightsbridge in London. I spent two weeks in the kitchen there.
When I moved to Australia, I went and worked in a sushi restaurant for two weeks for free. The head chef had come from Murata of Kikunoi Honten, a venerable 400 year old Kyoto restaurant. He used to get hit on the head with a ladle; it was a very tough kitchen when he was there. I saw an amazing thing that I’m still dreaming of putting on a menu - warabimochi, a bracken starch stirred into a stock and ladled into little bowls with cling film. It went thick, like wallpaper paste. With chopsticks, they pushed an interior garnish into the middle, then tied it up, threw them into ice water and they’d firm up. You could then uncling film them and steam them, but they wouldn’t melt, it would be a clear dashi egg white with clams, braised kobu and sun-dried tomatoes pushed into the middle. It was served in a French-style potage soup of edamame beans and peas; an amazing dish and quite futuristic 25 years ago. I just saw Albert Adria from Enigma doing something very similar using potato starch, piped from a bag into ice water to make little clear dumplings. He didn’t have salt, he had a pot of salt water and a ladle he used to adjust soups with so he’d always know how much salt water he’s adding to the stock rather than using fingers and a pinch of salt in a less accurate way; quite amazing.
I then went to work for Mark Best, who had the restaurant Marque, which had a ‘three hats’ rating in the Australian Good Food Guide, the equivalent of a two or three-Michelin-star restaurant. Mark was doing really interesting stuff and had a great young team of people who’ve gone on to big things since then. At the time I was there, the head chef was Tony Gibson who worked as head chef at Gordon Ramay’s Vere in Dubai. Pasi Petänen, who is famous now in Australia, a Finnish chef who trained with Nico Ladenis back in the day and runs Cafe Paci in Sydney. Another guy who’s now famous, called Dan Hong, who was a first-year apprentice under me. He’s now gone on to open lots of restaurants for the Merivale company. Lots of people came through Mark’s kitchen.
Mark Best had staged for Alain Passard for six months and had lots of interesting things on the menu that came from there. I remember a brown bread veloute that was served with this huge cos lettuce, fried in brown butter for ages. It was a really rich sauce with brown bread and three-quarters veal stock, a quarter chicken stock and cream, a pretty dense thing. Mark then opened up a bistro in a pub called The Four in Hand in Woollahra in Sydney. Pasi, Juan Bochenski, Brett Redmond (now of Elliot’s in Borough Market), and me were all part of the team there.
The dish
I had the Michel Bras cookbook at that time. It still is a revolutionary, amazing cookbook, inspiring to look at. I was just baffled and fascinated by one dish, which had potato mousse. I made a dessert for the The Four in Hand bistro menu inspired by it, a mille-feuille of figs and potato Chantilly with three layers of arlette, which is a rolled puff pastry. I made the best puff pastry I’ve ever made there; I’ve never seen it anywhere else. It was an Alain Passard recipe and it was a cream puff. Instead of water in the détrempe, there was cream, which made it much richer and softer.
It was very hard to work with, in hot Australia. We dusted a bench with icing sugar, rolled a sheet of puff pastry onto the icing sugar, dusted more icing sugar and rolled it up to make a Swiss roll, and set that in the fridge for a couple of hours. We then cut thin slices from the roll, dusted with icing sugar again, and rolled those discs out wider and thinner. Then you’d leave them on the side on a tray with baking paper to dry out and lose some of their moisture before baking between two trays. When they came out, you would have a hot pan and you’d press them down flat on a marble bench. They’d go shiny and then you’d punch out disks. In fact, we’ve got them on The Clove Club menu right now in a strawberry dessert.
For the potato Chantilly, I took Bras’s base potato jam recipe. You make mashed potatoes dry with no butter or anything in it, then you make a sugar syrup with vanilla. You add the dry mash, whisk it in and cook that up to 105°C - 107°C, tip it out and let it set. You have this sweetened mashed potato, which sounds disgusting and weird. It’s not when it’s made into a dish, but it would be if it was with your sausages.
I added the jam to some lightly whipped whipping cream then added a tiny pinch more sugar, a pinch of salt, a tiny bit of a fig vinegar and then a little bit of prune kernel oil. That would be piped in between the five pieces of fig, standing cut side outward on an arlette, and then another layer, and more cream and three more figs and another arlette on top. We still buy the prune kernel oil from the same farm in Agen for The Clove Club. It’s still one of my favourite flavours. We use it on a smoked trout and almond dish.
Grouse sausage, Young Turks at Frank’s Campari Bar, Peckham (2011)
The Background
I had a great time in Australia. It was a great lifestyle and I got offered sponsorship to stay, but I missed the UK too much. I was too far away from my friends, so I came back in March 2003. Anyone who was anyone in Australia had worked in London, so I realised I had to come back to London to get the qualifications I should have got before going to Australia in the first place. It was between The Square or Tom Aikens at the time in terms of the places I wanted to work. For whatever reason, I hadn’t contacted The Square; maybe I couldn’t find the email address or something, or they’d picked up the phone first at Tom Aikens.
My mum had left Glasgow to do art teaching and moved to London. She was three stops from Heathrow in Hounslow. I lived with her for a bit when I started the job at Tom Aikens. It was my first Michelin-starred kitchen. That was the SAS of kitchens for sure. You learned how to move fast and get things done because there wasn’t any other way. The food was amazing. It was the most exciting kitchen to be in.
It sounded like the dream job - French hours, Monday to Friday - but starting at 6:00am on a Monday morning and running till 1:00am a Friday night was very hard. It was the longest hours I’ve ever done in my life. I got home most nights about 1.30am, drank milk straight from the carton, took my clothes off, got into bed, set my alarm and got up three and a half hours later to go back to work. I’d sleep on the tube on the way there and sleep on the tube on the way back. Friday, we did a deep clean, so if you missed the last tube you had to get on the night bus. I fell asleep on that bus and ended up in Hatton Cross, which is the cargo bit of Heathrow where the bus would stop for 45 minutes to have a break before driving back. My phone would be dead. There would be no taxis around, the only option was to stay on the bus. Sometimes I wouldn’t get home until 4am or 5am. Tough times, but he was doing really amazing, exciting food. Aikens is hugely talented, so many ideas and so creative, so many recipes I still use now.
I did snacks and canapes, then moved on to a meat garnish section. Tom was away a bit doing some launch things for Soho House, New York. It was a tough kitchen, but it was when Tom was away, and the little guys started fighting with each other that it became toxic, and it wasn’t for me. Life was hard enough in that kitchen without people taking your hard work, throwing it on the floor and stamping on it in the fridge to screw you over, or turning up the oven to twice the temperature so something you were making would burn and you’d have to do it again. I wouldn’t take any shit, but it meant that it was either spend my life having fights every day with people, knock people out or just say, this isn’t for me.
Brett Graham had done a stage for one day in the kitchen at Tom Aikens, waiting for The Ledbury to open. I knew that Nathan Thomas was leaving Tom Aikens to be Brett’s sous chef, so I went and joined them as part of the opening team. That was a tough kitchen, but it was just fast and hard with high standards; it wasn’t people being dicks to each other. The longest I’d worked anywhere was two years by that stage, but I did five years at The Ledbury. I left and then came back and did another year as development chef. I loved it.
The difference between the two kitchens was that there’d be eleven elements on a plate in Tom Aikens, and it would be hard, coming from disparate parts of the kitchen, for them all to be perfect at once, in amongst all the chaos, and that damaged how good things could be on the plate. Brett would have four or five things on the plate, and he would really focus every day on making sure those four or five things were perfect, and he’d refine it. A new dish would come on, and he’d make it every day himself, and he’d really work on every little bit of it until he was really happy with it and then make sure it kept to that standard. Doing much less, I found, gave you much more control and the ability to focus on the minor details of that thing to get the main elements perfect. I’m not saying that what Tom was doing was wrong, but just that Brett’s style made sense to me.
I loved the kitchen there; there was so much to learn, lots of pushing, lots of hard work. I became partly Australian because everyone fresh off the boat from Australia wanted to be there. I worked around the whole kitchen. I could run the pass, do the orders - I could do the whole kitchen after those five years. I wanted to do my own thing and was starting to think about what was possible. I was going to do Elliot’s in Borough Market. After a long period of waiting, we did pop-ups in the Pavilion in Victoria Park, waiting for them to get permissions on their site in Borough. They got the site and then said, ‘Oh, we don’t want you to do this anymore.’ I went back to Brett as a development chef. I was living in East London, and it was too hard commuting to Notting Hill. It was also too hard to do development during the day with everyone because there’d always be somebody who had something for service that took precedence over me. I tried working through the night for a few months so I had space, but it didn’t work out.
It was the time of young chefs doing supper clubs. There was me, and Ben Greeno was doing one. He’d worked at Sat Bains, in France and then at Noma and then for Paul Cunningham when he was in Copenhagen. Me, Ben and James Lowe were all at the stage where we’d all worked in places and we were all looking for our own restaurants, so we came together and did events as Young Turks. Ben only did the first one, then he got a call from David Chang to do Momofuku in Sydney. Me and James carried on doing events at Nuno Mendes’s Loft pop-up place, Frank’s Campari Bar in Peckham and the 10 Bells Pub in Shoreditch.
We used to do a completely new menu every week at the 10 Bells. We were open Tuesday to Saturday, so Sunday, you think of a new dish, Monday you’d do the orders for it, Tuesday you’d come in and have to get this dish that you thought of ready to serve that night. It wouldn’t be quite right, so you’d change it on Wednesday. Maybe Friday or Saturday, it’d finally be right, and then it was gone forever. We never served a dish that was absolutely perfect to anyone because we didn’t have the time. Novelty for novelty’s sake isn’t always the best thing. If your customers are not coming every week, then they don’t know you’ve got an entirely new menu, they just know your dish isn’t quite right.
Our final service at the 10 Bells was Sunday 29th of April in 2012. It was World’s 50 Best in London and we got 25 of the chefs to come. We had this checkboard that just had one-word names: Rene, Chang, Kinch, Atala, Gilmore - just an amazing who’s who of the world of food. That was quite a way to go out. I learned so much from James, but we both have our own visions and we were stylistically different, so we were never going to open a place together. There was no schism. Young Turks was a lot of fun, but I found a site and opened up The Clove Club a year later.
The Dish
At the Young Turks event at Frank’s Campari Bar Peckham, I made grouse sausages and grouse sausage rolls with greengage ketchup. I made a recipe which I had adapted from a Square recipe that we’d used at The Lebury. We didn’t have a sausage-making machine, we didn’t have a restaurant or anything, so we didn’t have any equipment. We had to get our butcher/game dealer to make the sausages for us. He thought we were idiots - why would you cut up a ‘royal’ grouse to make sausages - but actually it’s an amazing recipe. Grouse flavour is so strong and it’s a gateway to tasting and enjoying it. If you can’t handle the whole bird aged long and really high, it’s a beautiful way to eat them. Plus, we were cooking on a rooftop for 150 people and so we needed something that we could cook fast and easy. But it was a bloody hard service nevertheless, we were very slow, but the grouse sausages were a big hit. At the time, I was imagining a Young Turks grill doing Turkish foods and British foods inspired by our locale of East London and Green Lanes. We did a grilled onion and parsley salad by James inspired by Fergus Henderson’s bone marrow and parsley salads.
For the sausages, we took grouse breast and wood pigeon because we didn’t want it to be too expensive or too strong. They also had pork belly, finely diced back fat lardo, softened onion, dried marjoram, dried savoury, nutmeg and Jamaica Pepper (also known as pimenton or allspice). They were quite ‘haggis-ish’ spices, so they made sense to me. We took out foie gras and a few other things that went into The Square recipe but there were duck livers in the mix. We didn’t want to wrap them in caul fat as we had done with the venison faggots at The Ledbury, so we made them in chipolata skins so that they cooked quickly and would still have snap and juice and be delicious to eat and easy to cook on a dark rooftop barbecue. We then made grouse sausage rolls from the same recipe, but blending to emulsify, sometimes we added a handful of breadcrumbs if we needed, and made a greengage ketchup to go with that. I served that on the bar menu at The Clove Club when we opened. They’re amazing, delicious; one of the best recipes I’ve ever made.
Sardine Sashimi with Chrysanthemum Vinegar Glaze and a Whisky and Sarine Broth, The Clove Club, London (2017)
The background
When we opened up The Clove Club, we had an amazing run with a Michelin Star the year after we opened, number five in the UK six months after we opened, number one in the UK from the Sunday Times a few years later, and highest new entry in the World’s 50 Best. We had a lot of restaurant of the year awards, London Restaurant Awards, all these different things. We won our second star in 2022. We’ve just been here doing our thing.
The Dish
I got invited with chef Endo Kazutoshi to go to Japan by the Japan External Trade Organisation. We stopped in Tokyo. Friends had organised for us to go to an amazing Kappo cuisine place called Goryu Kubo, but then we went to a sushi restaurant, Sushi Iwase. I sat next to Endo and they knew he was a sushi chef. They were serving us all their best pieces of sushi and looking at our reaction. When they served sardine, I thought, oh my God, sorry, I’m not going to like this. It’s going to be too strong. Endo is sitting right next to me, what am I going to do? I’m going to have to pretend that I like it. I needn’t have worried because it was the best thing I had on that whole trip. It had a little belt of scraped kombu on top that had been marinated in vinegar. That was the best thing I ate that year. It was really stunning, and I still think of it.
We came back, and I knew we had amazing sardines here. There’s a 500-year history of the Cornish trading sardines. The Venetians were coming here for tin from the Cornish tin mines and taking sardines back. They were renowned around the world for the quality of the sardines (or pilchards as they were called before they were rebranded as Cornish sardines). I knew I could do something amazing with them. We got them in and started to work with them every day, inspired by he famous Ferran Adria line that a great sardine is better than a bad lobster. We had to buy them in three-kilo cases. We wouldn’t need that many so we said, ‘We’re going to have family meal of sardines, we’re going to use the rest to make stock.’ We developed our methods and kept practising and practising and learned how to store them, how to fillet them, how to make a white soup stock.
I wanted to serve the raw fish, but I didn’t want to do it on rice. I was going through my brain trying to figure out how to make it ours. Sardines reminded me of family holidays on the Costa Brava as a kid - plastic white chairs outside cafes, having plates of crisps and grilled fish and seafood. The idea of potato crisps made sense to me, so our dish is sardine sashimi served on a warm potato crisp with ice-cold sardine. I had been to Hong Kong to a restaurant called Ronin, which was the second restaurant of Matt Abigail, a Canadian chef who had Yardbird, a yakitori restaurant. He worked for three-star Masa in New York, and he had a sardine tartare on the menu. I knew from the books I’d read when I was 15, and from Matt’s thing, that on those strong, oily fish, you serve chopped raw onion and chives to take away some of the strong taste. And then we wanted to serve ours with English mustard and Worcester sauce that are both beloved of the Japanese, so we made a Worcester sauce emulsion with lots of English mustard, chopped chives and chopped onion.
We worked with an amazing Japanese vegetable supplier called Namayasai in Lewes in Sussex. We used to buy chrysanthemum flowers from them. We used the petals on a raw mackerel dish we used to do, and various other things. I kept all the buds and sometimes we used to sprinkle a stamen on things. We loved elderflower vinegar and we decided to infuse the stamen of chrysanthemum into a vinegar; it was an amazing flavour that we carried on making to this day. We made a glaze of chrysanthemum flower vinegar and brushed it on top of the sardine and then finished it with a little bit of ginger. There’s a 5 to 10 second window that you’ve got to eat the dish in; you have to have the very hot potato crisp with the cold fish to really make it work. On the side, we serve a broth made with whole sardines poached to make a really full-flavored rich stock, but it was a quite clean and ‘white’ flavor. Then we took some extra sardines that we would dry and then smoke, so we had smoked sardine ‘katsuobushi’, but we only used one or two of them just as an accent to the white stock, I didn’t want the smoke to dominate.
I got married later that year, 2017. We went to El Cellar de Can Roca a few weeks after our wedding and we were served a sardine dish there. They did a thing where they had a bowl of hot stones with a metal steamer basket balanced over the stones. They poured sherry over the sardines on to the hot stones underneath. They put on a glass lid and the steam from the sherry cooked the sardine, and the smell of it was amazing.
I wanted to make the dish Scottish. At first, I wanted to serve a clear white broth, but decided, no, we should add some cream and milk and a tiny square of butter to make it like cullen skink, a Scottish soup. Inspired by the sherry at Can Roca, I decided to add a tiny splash of whiskey to the broth. A whole cup would get 10ml, it’s just an accent of it. All these different memories of travels and stories have all formed parts of the way that we’ve made the dish.
We have to get sardines every day and take more than we need so we can use the best ones. It’s hard to get sardines that are good enough and fresh enough to be able to cut them and show the bloodline. Part of the reason for cutting them is not to crisscross them like you do a duck breast, but to cut all the way through the flesh so that you break any feather bones that are left in the fish, so that it’s very tender to eat.
Winter onwards becomes the time for sardines to show their face and be where we want them to be, with the right fat content to use them. It’s one of our strongest dishes. It looks so simple but there’s so much work that’s gone into it, and goes into it every day. It’s a very time-intensive to fillet the fish perfectly, pin-bone them and peel off the paper skin to maintain freshness in the fridge ready to be cut to order in service. I served Massimo Battura that dish. He slapped the table, jumped up, ran over and said, ‘One more right now please.’ If I needed any encouragement, then there it was.
Fabada Asturiana, Bar Valette, London (2025)
The background
We opened Bar Valette at the end of January 2025. It’s difficult times for people right now, and I thought it was a chance to do something that wasn’t a tasting menu restaurant, but somewhere a la carte and interesting and inspired by my love of travels to the south of France and the north of Spain; that axis of Nice to San Sebastian and beyond.
It’s nice to get all the amazing produce we have and cook it in a simple way that I can’t at The Clove Club. We get squid at The Clove Club and we cut different, delicate bits to use raw and whatever, but then it would also be beautiful just cooked on a plancha and just lightly grilled, but we can’t do that at The Clove Club.
For a long time, I’ve lived in East London surrounded by Turkish restaurants. I’ve wanted to do a grill restaurant using whole cuts and some minced things inspired by kebabs, but with our own seasoning. So Bar Valette was a challenge to do that, but with a bit more French and Spanish elements, making it something easy for people to understand what it was.
I’ve got partridges on the menu at the moment, which are very common all over Spain, but are cooked in different styles in different parts of Spain. Partridge en escabeche is not something we do at The Clove Club, but something that’d be nice to explore at Bar Velette. It’s just another avenue for exploring love of foods and books like Elizabeth Luard’s European Peasant Cookery and the cooking of La Marenda and Chez Davia restaurants in Nice, where they’ve got chickpea panisse and socca (the pasta pesto version they do there), and pan bagnat and barbajuan, the little fritters from Monaco. It’s been a really fun project.
The Dish
Writing the menu for Bar Valette was a really fun and exciting time for me to cook in a different way. Some people came to cooking because they didn’t fit in another place and then love the discipline of the kitchen. I was the opposite. I came to cooking from a love of cooking at home and a love of wanting to make things and find out how to make things rather than a love of a discipline of the order of a kitchen and the rules and hierarchy. I love good food and I love what we do here at The Clove Club, but also I’ve loved the chance to re-interpret or re-examine those ingredients and and cook them in a simpler way. There’s still lots of things we haven’t done at Bar Valette. I want to get squat lobsters from Scotland and do things with them, queenies.
A dish that was most popular when we opened is fabada Asturiana, a bean stew from Asturius. It’s a big, rich hearty stew with blood sausage, salt pork and chorizo. We’ve loved making our own blood sausage at The Clove Club for a long time, so it’s a chance to use that in the dish. I learned to make the blood sausage from Mark Best in The Four in Hand. It was Mark’s version of a French recipe. We used to get blood in a 2l milk carton once a week. French recipes always have no or very little starch and lots of sweet onion, a kind of sweet blood sausage that’s soft and fudgy, whereas a British/ Scottish one would have rusk, be much drier and be heavily spiced compared to a French one. At The Clove Club, I wanted to make everything Scottish so we added oats, and coriander. We made them in smaller skins than they used to at The Four in Hand. We steam ours; we used to boil them at The Four in Hand, but it’s still inspired by lots of things I learned very early in my career.
We make the base of the stew with flageolet beans which come from the south of France. They’re generally used as a bean for seafood dishes because they’re smaller and lighter, but we got a sample of them and thought they were amazing when we made them in a fabada and decided to carry on using them, even though maybe a lot larger, heartier white bean might be more authentic. It’s a rich tomato-y stew with vegetables, chorizo, bay leaf, a little bit of white wine, blood sausage and pork belly. You can’t really go wrong.
The recipe
Buttermilk chicken in pine salt
This has been on the menu since before we even opened, having been a dish I made when doing Young Turks dinners with James Lowe. It comes and goes, it was banished from the menu for a long time but it’s back at the moment. It’s fun to make at home, but it pays to have an instant-read insert thermometer.
This recipe shows off the citrus aroma of pine. You will need to use fresh pine needles – we get ours from various parks in east London. It’s something you can do with some pine from your Christmas tree, but I would suggest nicking a branch in the week before Xmas and making the chicken then, rather than making in the aftermath of Xmas when the pine is a bit drier.
Serves 4
pine needles 40g, plus more for decoration
fine salt 5g
instant polenta 400g
tapioca starch 150g
rice flour 50g
free-range chicken thighs 6
buttermilk a 300g tub
fine salt
garlic 1 clove, crushed
sunflower oil 3 litres
Make the pine salt five days before making the dish. Grind the pine needles in a spice grinder. When reduced to small fibres, add 5g salt and pulse to combine. Store in tupperware in the fridge.
To make the polenta crust, mix the polenta, tapioca starch and rice flour in a bowl. Whisk to combine.
To make the buttermilk chicken, remove the skin and debone the thighs, removing any gristle. Cut into bite-sized pieces, about 8 to 10 per thigh. Weigh the chicken – for every 100g of chicken, weigh 50g of buttermilk and 1g of salt into a bowl. Add garlic, whisk to combine, then put chicken into the marinade. Leave for 24 hours in the fridge, then bring to room temperature for 1 hour before frying.
Heat oil to 170°C, dredge chicken in the flour mix, shake off excess, then fry, 10 at a time, for 2 minutes. Drain on kitchen paper and season liberally with the pine salt, shaking so it sticks to the chicken. Serve in a bowl on a branch of pine needles.
We probe each piece of chicken to check it is above 70°C and cooked, but you could preheat the oven and just pass all the fried chicken through the oven for 3 mins at 150°C, to let the cooking finish off.
I think this is my favourite "on a plate" so far! Extraordinary.