single person. We try to instil a certain mentality with regards the importance of consistency and attention to detail. The recipes we have are also extremely accurate and constantly updated so they have all the information they need to complete the task every day, plus there’s senior guys around all the time constantly checking and training and working alongside the younger guys just checking they’ve got everything they need to do their jobs properly.
Likewise what about discipline?
We try to address every single person the way we’d like to be addressed. We treat everyone with respect; we try to be as polite as possible, but it’s a bit more than that as well; it’s about keeping calm especially in a really high pressure situation like in service perhaps. We don’t want to get to into a situation where we lose our cool because if we get to that stage it probably means we’ve failed somewhere down the line beforehand – maybe we haven’t trained them properly or given the support they need.
Is the four-day week system part of that? We do work hard and they’re not short days; we start at eight and finish at 12 or 12.30 but we do insist that everyone gets their three days off so you get time to recuperate fully and also we’re super strict that everyone has to take two 30-minute breaks each day to get some food and have a sit down.
Allan Herrick, senior sous chef
What first attracted you to The Fat Duck group? I did a stage at The Fat Duck in 2003/ 2004 when Ashley was head chef and of course, Heston. I remember the first time I went in and Ash was showing me round. We went into the kitchen for a staff meal. This was back in the day when chefs just didn’t eat. I remember some of the meals we used to do where I was working before would just be bones from the chicken stock with cheese over it and gratinated or we’d just drink milk because we didn’t have time to eat. It’s still like that in some modern kitchens. It blows my mind because it’s like saying you’re too busy to breathe. 
But at The Fat Duck everybody stopped for the staff meal. I remember Ash getting up because the juice drink the sommeliers had made, wasn’t good enough, and he said, “guys, this has to be better; there’s no fresh juice in here and not enough ice.” It just shocked me. I didn’t realise that people actually cared about their staff in this industry. Before that all I’d seen was shouting and things like someone getting a red cabbage thrown at them so hard it broke their rib. What was it like working with Heston? When I was there he used to always work every Sunday without fail and run service, which was pretty full on for me. He’s a guy with so much presence. Even if you were in the kitchen – if he walked into the front of the restaurant, you’d just know he was there without even seeing him, just by the way everyone straightened up a little bit. In my opinion he’s a genius at what he does. He used to taste things and say things like, with the snail porridge for example, “it needs to taste like the smell of a freshly cut lawn.” But to this day I’ve never met anyone so approachable. He’d never look down on anybody and he’d sit down with us at staff meals and eat ribs and chicken wings with the rest of us. How do you guys go about maintaining that special atmosphere at a much bigger operation like Dinner? 
At The Fat Duck we had 45 staff cooking 42 covers in a small kitchen; at Dinner we’ve got up to 48 chefs cooking for 170 covers and that’s over lots of kitchens – a prep kitchen, the main show kitchen, the fish prep kitchen and meat prep area so it’s a very different set up. I just try and recreate everything I’ve seen Ash do over the years; everything I’ve learnt from Jorge [Arango Herrera], from Tom [Allen] and Heston and try to recreate that. I’m lucky in that it comes across so easily because I totally believe in what we do; I could talk to you for hours about it purely because I believe in it so much.
