Steve Crane, Head Chef Ockenden Manor

Steve, thank you very much for your time today, great to see your brand new kitchen, with the wide screen TV!!!! I want to talk with you today about your menus and perhaps we can start with understanding how many menus you run here at Ockenden Manor? We run three menus - a lunch menu, an A la Carte and a tasting menu So three menus; how often do they change? Do they interlink? Is lunch and dinner similar? Lunch is very different, it's very cost effective. We offer two courses for £15.95, going up to £22.00 with dessert. We look to use some of the less fashionable cuts, confits, braises"¦.. Yes, I noticed some Guinea Fowl confit when I walked in... Yes, and lunch is really about offering great food but also very good value for money. Is lunch difficult? You are quite isolated here, by that I mean there is not a large town close by and no natural passing foot traffic, I guess whilst picturesque, you are off the beaten track a little. No, lunch is very successful for us. We are averaging around thirty five covers a lunch service, in fact we are full most lunch times. Weekends we can do sixty covers. Wow that's fantastic"¦.. Steve, what would you say is currently your best selling item and how long has it featured on the menu? Well, we change the menus quite frequently, they are continually evolving, and we perhaps change a dish each week. I tend not to follow the structured route of changing the menu four times a year. We are always looking to seasons, when they start; when they end. We are currently waiting for the game to start. We have a fantastic farm just up in Balcombe, which is where I come from. I've developed a relationship with them - I'll get a call to say this is ready and will change the menu to accommodate that. It's a similar situation with vegetables, we have three main suppliers with one of them being Secrets"¦ Is that the farm shop? Yes, it is. So our menus really are driven by what's around; what works well; and what we like to cook, we've been doing it a long time now - there are certain things that I like to cook, and things that I don't. Steve, do you have tried and tested dishes, I guess a repertoire that you refer to, looking at what worked really well and perhaps adjust or tweak each year? You know I don't. I'm actually very bad at that, some of the boys in the team do and they actually remind me of dishes that we've done in the past, I like to try and come up with something that is different. I guess that keeps you motivated. Yes it does, but sometimes I'll do a dish and the boys will come back to me and say, "We did that dish back in 2000"¦.." "Oh did we"¦" (Laughter). But that is very much the way that we do the menus - lots of input, lots of eating, lots of tasting. Steve, I guess that was really going to be my next question, how do you go about changing the menus, do you encourage feedback from the team, what is the process? It will often start with me, and having an idea that might be eating away at me, which in turn makes me think that I need to do something about this. I'll then share it with my Sous Chef Vincent and then perhaps the boys will throw in ideas and we may then have ten/ twelve or more items around perhaps a piece of venison, and we'll start to then break it down. I guess that's how we create our dishes, there is probably less tasting now than before, as I mentioned previously, we've been doing this a long time, so we tend to know what will and won't work. For me, what really excites me is the vegetables and the range of things that you can do with them. Venison is venison, we know the quality of what we cook is outstanding and it hardly varies, so what we can put with it excites me. So, Steve do you, therefore, look more at the peripherals that surround it? Yes, we do. And what about the restaurant Steve, do you look to involve them in how you structure your menus, feed back from the clients as to what does and doesn't work? Yes, of course, as the dishes go William Spalla will ask customers what their thoughts are and comments on the dishes. William and I have worked together for a number of years. I guess the food that we do is quite classical, we are classically trained, and nothing is too far out, though of course the boys watch what Heston (Blumenthal) does with great interest, and where we can work something into the menu, then will try something. An example of that is - we currently have a beetroot Tortellini on the menu, and traditionally I would always add a little gelatine to it just to stabilise it, but the boys have been reading up and we are using Xantham gum, and it's holding up much better We are still dicing up the beetroot, but using the Xanthan gum and that comes from the feedback of the team and getting them involved. Steve, I guess that must motivate them, to see their idea or their addition to a dish actually make the menu? Yes, of course, that is exactly how this whole beetroot Tortellini came about. So are you looking to embrace modern technology in your menus? It's not something that scares me and we look to use it where we think we can improve what we do. Heston, Chef Daniel (Clifford) - these guys are hugely talented and this is something that they do very well. Where we have to be very careful is we don't lose the skills. Cooking in water baths is great, but we must not lose the skills where chefs can cook a piece of meat or fish through the oven, that is very important. I think I have a responsibility to pass those skills on, it's then up to the team to decide how they want to embrace them and where they want to take those skills in their career. Steve, you've already mentioned a number of your suppliers, are they a large factor in how you drive and structure your menus? Yes, that's the way that we work. So you're speaking to the suppliers regularly, and is there the flexibility in your menus to accommodate something that your suppliers recommend? Yes, lunch is a great opportunity for us to do that because we are so busy we can take a range of vegetables that have come into season and use them, and then look at ways that we can further incorporate this into other areas of the menu. We work with the suppliers, we have crop lists, seasons lists that we work to also. It's slightly different for the lamb, we use a local company and I'm still using his lamb currently (September/October) because his lambs don't start lambing until June and early July, whereas most start on or around