Clive Dixon, Chef/Patron, The White Oak, Berkshire

Clive Dixon is the Chef Patron of The White Oak, a country pub restaurant in Cookham, near Maidenhead in Berkshire. Clive’s menu changes daily according to the markets and seasons and Clive concentrates on producing dishes to match what’s best at the time. Few chefs can say that they were in a Head Chef position at age 23 and were working in a Michelin star restaurant before 30, but Clive can. Clive started his career in 1985 as a Commis Chef at The Stanneylands Hotel. By 1991 he was Head Chef at The Old Swan and Minster Mill in The Cotswolds. He was awarded his Michelin star during his time as Head Chef at the Lords Of The Manor Hotel from 1993-1997 and moved between a variety of Head Chef jobs before joining Heston Blumenthal’s Hinds Head pub in 2008. He has also been Head Chef at Koffman’s, Pierre Koffman’s restaurant located in The Berkeley Hotel, London and worked with David Everitt-Matthias at his two-star restaurant Le Champignon Sauvage. Clive also runs his own consulting business, travelling worldwide to advise five star hotels such as the Waldorf Astoria in Utah.   Clive first and foremost thanks for inviting me in. Absolute pleasure. Please give us an overview of your current role here at the White Oak, number of covers, food style, how long you've been here, that type of thing? I've been here officially since January, unofficially since November. That was mainly because we were going to launch the fact that I was here but then Christmas was looming of course. Menu style is I always like to say it’s led by the market I'm really into my produce and we use great suppliers and they’re my kind of eyes and ears of the market. I use the word a lot, the mercy of the market. So I'm at the mercy of the market. Obviously then seasonality falls into place naturally without me bragging about what is seasonal, produce is the main thing. It’s not me and me being clever with the food, it’s about the produce standing out and me trying to get it to be the best it can be. So number of covers you can do? Up to 100, 100 plus, yeah. Seven days a week? Seven days…well it’s seven days a week, we do Sunday lunch an extended lunch service, we’ll go to 2:30, we’ll go 3:30 and that's our night off, our time to deep clean the kitchen. How many boys in the team? Between five and six, I’m comfortable with six. We're happy to run on five. Currently I’m working six days a week, sometimes volume of bodies doesn’t compare to the quality of guys so it’s often getting that balance right. So you've talked about seasonally led menus and very much driven by produce, give us a dish that's on the menu at the moment that typifies that. We've got a cottage pie on which isn’t led sole seasonally of course, but it’s made up of oxtail, it takes several days in the preparation, ox cheek, ox tongue all cooked separately and then brought together. Perhaps that doesn’t really typify what I'm all about other than getting excited about the great things which are coming through the door such as the great fish, soles lemon soles I’m more driven by the products. Clive as someone that has done both sides of the kitchen, pastry and main kitchen would you advocate that for chefs today that they must do both sides or they should just specialise in one area? It depends on how far you want to go. I saw a lot of chefs and they knew they had pastry cooks and when you looked at their food it was like a world apart. That was quite apparent to me at a young age and I didn’t want to become a head chef that wasn't involved in all areas of the kitchen. I was at Tylney Hall I actually went in cooking in the main kitchen and then the opportunity came up and I was hoping for a little promotion, it was a fairly small brigade and the first opportunity that did come up was head pastry chef. So stupidly at my age I jumped in and took it and paid the price, did the training with John Huber at Slough, I wanted to know how to do the pastry and I probably took it a bit further than