Peter Joseph, head chef, Tamarind, London

very popular with clients at Tamarind. Is a new dish ultimately down to you or is it a team effort? Absolutely it’s a team effort; ultimately it comes to me when making decisions, but I always interact with the team as they have different ideas and perceptions as well. When I do a dish I give a product to two or three chefs in my team to try, then every chef makes a dish and we’ll come to a conclusion on what is best and what can we include. How many are there in the team? We have 14 in the kitchen, there are three sections: pantry and pastry together, who make the starters and desserts, then there’s the curry section, making the traditional curries, lentils, lamb, chicken and vegetables and lastly there is tandoor - using the live charcoal oven. Being only one of six Indian restaurants with a Michelin star did you feel that pressure when you took over from Alfred? Absolutely. This was my first experience in a Michelin star restaurant, as previously we were cooking in bulk numbers, diverse concepts but when I came here at Tamarind it’s known for its consistency and quality, so I felt the pressure when I joined. How often to you change the menus? We have different menus at Tamarind, lunch, weekend, a la carte, tasting, pre theatre and set menus. We change every three to four weeks but our a la carte menu we re-examine once in every six months. The signature dishes still remain the same, we maybe improvise but the names and ingredients remain the same. Where does your inspiration come from? Talented TV chefs, my family, my colleagues and my wife, who support’s me a lot. When we work with dishes that sell well in lunch menus, and that are well received by our clients, I then use those in the main menu. Is there a chef that inspires you? Angela Hartnett is next door with Murano, I am encouraged by her as I saw her three or four years ago when she was with Gordon Ramsay but she’s doing immensely well at Murano, on her own now. Is that something you like to do – see what type of restaurants are around you and try the food? Other than Indian, Chinese is my favourite. But it’s good to look around at what is happening around us. Is it right that you have a role within the events catering side? When I joined this was challenging as well, as not only was I running the restaurant I was in charge of the events catering too. We do the hospitality boxes at Lord’s cricket ground whenever there’s a match on, the last major one we did was when India played England last year and we did 2000 covers in four days. Is this something you enjoy - catering for that amount of people? It’s a different kind of pleasure working in the catering industry, we also go every year to Geneva for the food festival at the Hotel d’Angleterre to represent Tamarind. I headed the teams for six years until last year; absolutely diverse experience there, and people get to see what we cook and gain knowledge and the energy is awesome. With the tasting menu only launching this year have you got any other plans for Tamarind? We are planning to run a regional menus from each regions from India, going to be varying each month, and keep innovating and inventing the dishes; which satisfy our clients to keep them smiling.

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