did you think of the brief?
It was good. It was a bit hard to start with, trying to put food to music.
Did you already have your dishes in mind and link them to music?
No. I wish I’d done that, I went the other way and I think that’s what stitched me up. When you start cooking that’s when you realise that you’ve gone about things the wrong way.
Each of my dishes was a decade – the sixties was one of them, the nineties was another – I tried to keep it as general as possible to appeal to the mass audiences but at the end of the day I wish I’d just chosen my dishes first and fit the brief around that.
What were you trying to showcase with your dishes? Was it about Jersey produce or the food you serve at Samphire or something else completely?
The first one wasn’t me at all, but the rest of the menu was my style of cooking, what we like to do at the restaurant. It was a bit weird because the brief said you didn’t have to worry about seasonality. It’s one of the first years it’s not been about that, which is why I had strawberries on there, somebody else had plums and raspberries on there so it was a bit of a mix and match.
We tried to get across what we do at the restaurant more than anything and I think you can see that in the menu.
Joe did use a lot more Jersey stuff than I did, but then again I use suppliers that we use at the restaurant anyway and they’re based in England. I didn’t want to risk changing the beef supplier when I’ve got a good one already.
Do you think being on GBM will affect your business in a big way?
I hope it does. When I was at Bohemia with Shaun, when he did it we were flat out for six months, even though we are a little island, people were still coming over so it’s only going to be beneficial for us and for Joe.
Which of your dishes did you want to take to the banquet when you entered the competition?
I though my main course was the best, it had the most props, it was quite a punchy, flavourful dish. It was about me, it was about the nineties, Oasis and Blur.
Image: Veteran judge Daniel Clifford. Credit: BBC Pictures
Would you do it again if they asked you?
I would. I’d go into it with a totally new approach. I’d get four solid dishes first and fit the brief around that. I think you can overthink things, like the props and stuff like that, you can get away with doing a lot less on the prop side and just concentrate on the cooking.
And with your dishes, there’s no point going in there and using sweet breads or stuff like that, you’ve got to choose a menu that is going to be appealing to sixty or seventy people at a banquet. If you’ve got some really weird stuff on there it can go against you I think.
whirlwind for you.
