Simon Hulstone, The Elephant Bar & Restaurant, Torquay

Simon first and foremost great to see you again thanks for inviting us down. Let's start by talking about the number of menus you run here at the Elephant Restaurant, which I know is slightly different because you've got a fine dining and a brasserie and I know the brasserie is 365 days a year whereas the fine dining isn't. So how does that work and how do you structure that? Basically what we do is the brasserie runs throughout the year, we just close for two weeks in January every year. So the brasserie is a normal set up it's 8:8:8 style menu. Fine dining (The Room) closes from April to October so what we actually do, is we bring a tasting menu downstairs during that closure because we still have people who want to have a little bit more of a fine dining experience but we don't class it as our Michelin starred restaurant we just have it as a trial and error menu that we use ready for the opening of the room. When the room opens we have that á la carte menu which is normally a 4:4:4 plus a tasting menu and we have a vegetarian menu that runs through the whole building. That's the easiest way to explain it. Is there simply not a market between October and I guess what would be the traditional closed season April? Is there just not a market to keep the room open? It's not so much there's not a market there's just not the footfall. There's no one around and obviously having a Michelin starred restaurant everything needs to be fresh, consistency-wise, we don't want anyone slacking off. We don't want anyone keeping the fine beans for an extra day than they should. It's all about consistency and freshness. So it's easier to run the one menu downstairs where we can use much cheaper cuts of meat, it's more accessible option to everybody all year round. When The Room is closed we do bring an element of the fine dining downstairs so it lifts the brassiere. In some ways the brasserie's a bit of a bargain when The Room is closed because we're still using the better dishes but mixed in with brasserie style dishes that everyday people want to eat. We like to have people eating once or twice a month, we'd like it to be every week but that's never going to happen. And in terms of staffing then do you have to staff that differently? What happens normally is if we lose anybody after the summer we don't replace them until Easter. We just keep the numbers down, the costs down but we've been very fortunate we haven't lost anybody and I don't want to lose anybody. All we do is we keep the staffing costs down by limiting the hours of the hourly paid staff, the kitchen porters, the guys'll do the kitchen work themselves, do all the floors, the pots and pans. They understand that they've got to do the work to keep them in a job, so it's easier to get a kitchen porter than it is to get a trained chef, sometimes. Okay then so the brasserie's open 50 weeks of the year basically. How often do you change that menu? We can change it every day. We print in house. Okay. But what we tend to do it on a fortnightly basis but we will offer word of mouth specials, and if those work, then we'll lose the bad selling dish and replace it. The problem is with that you could end up with five beef dishes because everybody wants beef and that's quite hard to get round at times. We can put a steak on, we could have put a burger on, we can put a pie on, we can put a braise on, but it all ends up being from the same bloody animal"¦from beef. Trying to get people round that or even through using menu descriptions you start going on to things like ox cheek, even though it is still beef it's got a different description to beef itself. We use steak puddings, we use the liver, calf's liver, so again you're moving away from the word beef. It's quite hard for us to get the customers on to pork, we don't really like having chicken on the menu, it's just a bit dull and boring and you can go to a Harvester and get that. Lamb works very well but again it's the cost, we're still in a brasserie menu and we've got to be careful of the costs. Do you have a repertoire of dishes then that you use and maybe tweak or do you"¦ Yeah I think so yeah. We have the base dishes that we know work. We have dishes that are easy to serve. It's all about ease of service. The brasserie obviously we're banging the food out quicker than we would in the fine dining. We're not messing around with amuse bouches and things like that. Is that one thing you take into consideration when you're putting a dish together do you look at ease of service, speed of service"¦ Yes. "¦and the ability to physically get the dish out? Definitely yes. It's more the fact of less moves on the plate. We very much try to keep away from over-complicating things. I've really learnt the hard way, being told off by Michelin that my food was too complicated,we thought we were moving forward we were actually being slapped on the wrist and saying, "You're not going in the direction we want you to," which is important to know because it was good to have that feedback, but it was also good for us because it's not really the way I wanted to go getting complicated. I like to keep my food, quite simple, a good piece of meat, cooked well, a very good sauce, and a simple garnish, but then if people come to eat and they come for a Michelin experience, they do tend to expect it to be overworked, and that's where we're between a rock and a hard place, because people want to be wowed but we're trying to wow with flavour.. You say you can change your menu every day what's your thought process behind a dish change? Is it a product from a supplier? Is it an idea from the team? A dish change is pretty much everything from customer feedback if something's been sent back we get a lot of problems a lot of the time with steaks, people not understanding what cooking degrees actually are. It's the biggest pain in the arse ever. So they wanted medium rare but they don't want no blood in it. Yeah medium rare, no blood. They want it blue but cooked. ((laughs)) It's, the rib eye's got gristle through it, it's not gristle it's natural marbling. We don't want to serve a fillet steak all the time because it's just a boring piece of meat"¦ It's bloody expensive as well. Yeah you stick a nice rib eye on the menu it's just hard work and you're just trying to educate people and in the end you just say, "Fuck it," you know, and stick a fillet on. And they win and at the end of the day they're not getting a better product for it they're just getting something that they can chew with false teeth and less flavour but saying that our butchers are fantastic and we get good meat but we always want to try and do something a bit different. Seasons obviously effect change, what's around of course. We struggle with quality suppliers down in Torquay in the fact that if we want to get something a bit specialist, for example Jerusalem artichokes we struggle to get it. We don't have a market near us. Everything goes to London then comes back to us. So Torquay being surrounded by big, big hotels which are coach orientated, blue rinse, everyone's on dinner, bed and breakfast, they don't want the ingredients that we use. So we have to use specialist suppliers which then costs us more.. We've had a Devon micro herb guy come to us yesterday which I never knew about, everyone's used Richard Vines, Richard Vines' got gazumped pretty much by Wow Herbs which was unfortunate and now people are jumping on this bandwagon of micro herbs but you think these guys are selling it for £2 a punnet it must cost a fortune to set up these poly tunnels, heaters, just to send a tray of herbs out but they're local and I don't know if it's going to taste any different if it's local but it just stops the middle man of driving up to London and bringing it back to Devon again. Yeah absolutely. I guess most of the fish goes past your door to London and then back down again doesn't it? Well we're very lucky to be honest with you. The story we always tell is when I lived in the Cotswolds we used to get our fish at six o'clock and when I moved here our fish turns up at one o'clock in the afternoon and I said to the supplier "Why if I'm 200 miles away?" and he said, "Well you get today's fish." And that's all right I can cope with that, they might be bullshitting or on their lunch break and they just say, "Oh all right we'll drop it off now and tell him it's today's fish." ((laughs)) But yeah it's quality. I mean obviously you're a business as well, two restaurants, one Michelin star, one a brasserie"¦ Yeah. "¦talk us through the costings of your menus for the brasserie. You mentioned items like fillet steak which we all know as a core item of very expensive. So how do you go about costing your menus? We're very lucky on the costs that we pretty much swallow anything that we need to. We're not a massive profit maker, we're more here to keep roofs on our heads, keep ourselves going, everyone's paid, all the suppliers are paid, so as long as we can keep that turning over we're happy. Obviously we want to make a profit but we also don't want to lose out on money. So our idea is we've got to offer quality food because there's so much shit in the bay but we've also got to keep it to a price range that people can afford. So we lose on some, gain on others. It's the normal way. So a fillet steak will go on and we might lose a couple of quid on that but we'll gain it on the beef cheek which we're selling just under a couple of quid of the fillet price or pigs' cheeks, pork belly, even, you know, it's residual stuff. When the fine dining's running we buy in our meat whole so it goes from upstairs to downstairs. So we'll buy a whole lamb in and then we use the primes and then take it down to the stuff downstairs. We make shepherd's pies and whatever. Would you avoid things like turbot, lobster and that type of stuff in the brasserie? No we don't we just charge accordingly. Really? Okay. Basically we'll charge a market price for lobster and it does sell. It sells yeah? Yeah no problem at all. In the summer we'll probably buy in three a day and they'll be sold normally by lunchtime. Fantastic And we can pretty much get