Matt Gillan, Head Chef, The Pass, South Lodge, Sussex

Matt Gillan is head chef of The Pass restaurant at the South Lodge Hotel in Sussex. Matt has worked in Michelin-starred restaurants including Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, Midsummer House and The Vineyard at Stockcross, but his passion started when he was still in school and started a part time job preparing vegetables at a local restaurant. He has a real affection for produce which stemmed from when he was travelling in Australia, where he ended up picking fruit and vegetables on the east coast. Matt’s signature dish at The Pass is saddle of lamb with slow cooked belly and lamb fat gnocchi.   Matt Gillan wonderful to come and see you again. First and foremost congratulations on the star a great achievement for you and all the team. Thank you very much. It’s two years ago since we interviewed you so let’s talk about the process you went through, if any, with regards to change and why do you think you've achieved the star? What have you done differently on your menus? I don’t think we done anything different, there was pressure put on us originallyto gain a star for the pass, but once we realised actually let’s not go for the star let’s focus on what we do well, let’s find our style, let’s gel together to work on the basics and build up from there, the thought process was if we work on these areas and keep building then eventually a star will come. Are you more confident now with your food style? Yes definitely because we’ve taken that time to build on it and we didn’t put pressure on ourselves thinking, ‘Is this good enough for Michelin and the guide,’ it was more about is this good enough for us? Let’s get the feedback from our guests and it’s always been a journey for us. Brilliant. Talk us through the number of menus you run here? We run three menus for lunch, three course, five course, seven course. Are they interlinked? So for example is the seven course an extension of the five course? No, no. all completely separate. It’s a lot of items. Yes then at dinner it’s six and eight courses but we’re looking to put on maybe a 12 or ten course, maybe a surprise menu, these are things we are looking at. Matt you’re creating a lot of work aren’t you lots ingredients lots of mis en place? Yes but there's a lot of ideas that we have that don’t probably quite sit right on the six or eight course menu, of course we need to be sensible about the dishes we put on and the flavours we’re using but a 12 course would just be for those hard-core foodies, there's a lot of people that travel to London from Sussex for dinner and those kind of dining experiences, we’ve got a very kind of city-based environment so let’s try and get people out of the city as well and have them dine with us. Matt from memory you used to be quite heavy into your vegetarian dishes here at the pass is that still the case? Yeah it’s still the case, we’ve got vegetarian menus, or vegetarian dishes on the eight course menu, I think there's two, two out of the eight are veggie dishes. And how do you find it, is there a market for that vegetarian has become very fashionable? Obviously there is because you have it on the menu. We feel it’s important especially locally Brighton is very close, there are a number of vegaterian restaurants there, so to have that option as well it makes it more attractive to vegatarians. Lots of menus, lots of different items, lots of mise en place, you're part of a hotel group which like any hotel group will be expecting you to deliver commercially as well as accolade-wise, so how do you go about managing your food costs and how do you cost your menus? We’ve got a spreadsheet which is broken down in two separate ways. So we have a breakdown onto menu, so six courses we’ll have a price for six courses and then what the food costs should be and then within that each dish has its own separate food cost. So you’d cost each dish individually and then that goes into a menu which is then costed overall? Yes. So then we just tweak and so say we use fillet of beef which we don’t but say there's fillet of beef on that then we need to be smart about the other foods that we use around this high cost item. So you've got mackerel as a starter or something? Yes exactly or perhaps some pork belly something where we can off set the cost. What GP do you work to? 68%. That's supported as well a little bit by the whole hotel. So if banqueting are heaving then I’ll use that opportunity to get some addtional allowance for the Pass… And how many covers can you do in the Pass? We do 22 covers. Which