Steve Drake, Drake's, Ripley, Surrey

to show people your style, your way of doing things and sometimes people maybe won't understand, or people will even talk themselves out of a dish, we use vegetables on desserts and some of the older guests might go, "Oh my God that sounds terrible I don't want to go for that," where other people are saying, "Wow that sounds amazing," and some people will taste something who maybe aren't as open minded and won't be able to get their head around using parsnip as a dessert, but it's important that we persevere with what we want to do and be individuals. So I mean it's never happened but if we get that many negative comments about a dish I think it would be foolish not to look at it again and even if we decide yes we're going to keep it on. Now here we are at Drakes in Ripley lots of development, lots of changes, lots of investment, it's a business at the end of the day, how important is it to you to cost your menus, understand your GP and know that you're making money? My God I mean again that's incredibly important and it frustrates me when I hear people say that Michelin star restaurants don't make any money. All my building work that I've done here I've done it through profit. Fantastic. Because the last few years no one's been able to borrow any money, banks are a bit of a nightmare when it comes to that and we've done it through profit. It's taken me eight years to do the restaurant. It's cost me a lot of money but it looks amazing now. But it also proves as well doesn't it that you don't have to have chandeliers and chintzy this and chintzy that to have a star. Exactly. Absolutely it's all about individual style but just going back to the thing about costing is that what we all have to remember is that the only way I achieve any income is through the food that we serve and I've got a huge building here with maintenance costs which are astronomical and so if we get our figures wrong for one month we can't just say, "Oh sod that," as you say we are running a business so there's no difference, you can produce fantastic food and you can produce great figures as well and you need to. I think you have to. So what do you do? Do you cost each dish individually or do you look at a balance? Say if it's a tasting menu do you cost the tasting menu? I generally cost it across the board. To be honest I do a very unorthodox way of doing this and what I'll do is I'll look at what we spend for a month, I look at what my income was for a month and I'll take off what I need to take off, make allowances here and there and I'll basically work a GP out on the month and perhaps last month I spent a little bit too much, this month I just need to tweak it a little bit and so I'm generally always on track. I think from a creative point of view it can be stifling to say, "We can only spend £2.57," and if I say, "I want to use butternut squash rather than Jerusalem artichokes," and I say, "Well do you know what it's cost 10p more I can't do that," so I don't think that's the way forward. I think the way really to look at it is on an average and an overall. Because our menus aren't individually priced either, the dishes aren't individually priced so we can do that. You mentioned creativity there we're in autumn, lots of things happening now, game, mushrooms, all sorts of things but as a season and as a chef what's your favourite season and why? Well it is autumn. I think that summer season is great, I mean spring and autumn are the best seasons for me. Spring because after the winter things are coming alive again and every week you're getting something new coming through the door. Summer I find a bit tedious with the ingredients. It's just everything's peaking and there's so much going on and I think sometimes I don't know it's not a favourite time of year for me. You get to autumn and it kind of slows down a bit. You get the lovely autumnal colours, the autumnal flavours and the earthy flavours, things like Jerusalem artichoke, things like truffles of course, the mushrooms, as you say you've got your game. This is a fantastic time. Are you a feathered or a hoof man or both? Oh hoof really, well no I like both. I mean we use a lot of mallard at the moment, venison, I've got some lovely cured venison as a canapé at the moment which is fantastic, Douglas Fir and we're thinking about a partridge dish next week, pheasant and I think it's something you really need to exploit while it's in season because as we all know it's only around for a few more weeks literally. Does that make it more exciting though that the seasons are shorter so it makes you focus on what's seasonal? Oh it can be frustrating as well of course because dishes are always being tweaked and I think just the nature of creativity is you're probably never satisfied you're just thinking, "˜I don't know we can change that, we can do this,' or something's different and you have a new idea or we take something off the plate just to simplify it, to emphasise the other ingredients more and you're constantly doing that with the dishes and so the game season can be very frustrating because of that shortness but then in a way it's quite intense as well and that's why you log it and next year comes along, look up what did I do? Yeah that didn't work I remember that, that was rubbish. Absolutely well listen it's great to come and see you, great to see that there's reinvestment going into the business which obviously means that you're doing well and once again thank you very, very much for your time. Thank you.