Master Chef Goes Prime Time

Master Chef Goes Large is back on our TV screens larger than ever!

With its now familiar format and its new prime time slot, this series promises to be even more exciting, and for the contestants at least, more emotional than the other brilliant predecessors.

The only thing missing of course is me.

I took a slightly unconventional route into restaurant ownership, by entering this popular television competition; celebrity judge Greg Wallace had in the previous series promised that winning “would change someone’s life”. Weary of the nine to five rat-race and keen to live out a long held dream of mine, I thought it was worth a shot, but disappointingly I never made it as far as the televised stages and exited the competition following an un-glamorous damp day filming at a Birmingham Travel Lodge.

I thought my Thai Chicken Samosas were little triangular pockets of culinary delight, but evidently the judge did not concur. I’ve met Greg Wallace before, as I have Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay, and thought maybe that would have gone someway towards securing my television debut, but obviously I was just placing too much importance on that Saturday morning book signing event at WH Smiths.

Undaunted by this minor setback, my wife and I took the more traditional route and secured the lease on The Riverside, a small, quaint 32 covers establishment in the Lake District, and so without any help from Greg we changed our lives ourselves, although whether this was for the better or not still remains open for lively debate.

Good luck to all the contestants – I just hope you know what you are letting yourselves in for.

Recipe: Thai Chicken Samosas

Serve these hot as a starter, perhaps with a cucumber, spring onion and coriander salad with a lemongrass dressing, as I presented to Master Chef, or cold as a lunchtime snack or a perfect picnic item. Either way delicious, despite the misguided opinion of them at the BBC.

Ingredients

For the Thai curry paste:

4-6 medium hot green chillies, de-seeded and roughly chopped
2 shallots, roughly chopped
5cm/2in piece of fresh ginger, peeled and grated
2 garlic cloves, crushed
small bunch of fresh coriander, stalks and all
2 lemongrass stalks, chopped
1 lime, grated zest and juice
1 tbsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp Thai fish sauce
3 tbsp olive oil

The rest:

2 large chicken breast chopped into small bite sized pieces
Tin of coconut milk
¼ pint of chicken stock
Handful of boiled rice (Thai Jasmine rice is perfect but long grain will suffice)
6 sheets of filo pastry
Butter

Method

Preheat the oven to 200°c

Throw all the paste ingredients into a food blender and blitz into a paste. You will have more than you need, but the rest will keep in the fridge for up to 3 weeks.

Heat some oil in a pan add a quantity of paste, according to taste. Once it begins to start sizzling, throw in the chicken pieces and stir fry for a few minutes. Add the coconut milk and stock and reduce until you have a thick sauce. Stir in the cooked rice and allow to cool.

Take 1 sheet of filo and brush it with melted butter. Lay another sheet on top and coat it with butter and then repeat with the third sheet. Turn it over so the buttered side is down, and vertically slice 5cm strips.

Place a spoonful of the Thai chicken at the bottom of each strip. Starting from the left, fold the filo sheets across the mixture into a triangle, then across again to the other side and so on until you form a tightly closed triangular parcel.

Place on a baking tray and cook in the centre of the oven for around 15 to 20 minutes, or until golden brown and crispy.

Happy New Year

2008 was seen in with just a few very good friends. Over dinner the conversation, as so often does, turned to the restaurant. My friends wondered if over the Christmas period we missed the huge amount of money that we used to make at this time of year.

Christmas. A time of Goodwill, giving, loving, snow, Cliff Richard, Slade, frankincense, myrrh, and if you are in the restaurant business: Gold. Well not exactly. Of course Christmas was an exciting time; the continuous stream of office parties and family get-togethers were pretty much guaranteed to keep the Christmas till bells ringing, culminating with the Big Day itself, when we basically got to charge a small fortune for what is in effect a roast dinner. But what I think people fail to understand is that the Christmas period is just a small slot in the restaurant calendar. The week between Christmas and New Year is historically very quiet, and no one ever really spends money in January on eating out; what little, if any, funds people do have left after the expensive Christmas period is ear-marked for the sales. So what you take one week is loss the next. And this is the pattern throughout the restaurant year; you make money when you can to see you through the times when you can’t. What you have to understand is that it costs a fortune to run a restaurant whether there are customers or not. The fixed overheads: rent, insurances, wages etc still have to be met regardless if anyone walks through the doors or not, and it really doesn’t take many quiet night to get you sweating, despite how busy you may have been the week previous.

Christmas day we did take a lot of money, but we were a restaurant that opened in the evenings – not lunch times. So for us to prepare for a busy, fully booked, paying well over the odds, Christmas day lunchtime service we shut the evening before, Christmas Eve. So any profit we were making on Christmas day was offset on what we lost Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve is a ‘normal’ day as far as employment is concerned, but of course Christmas day is the biggest public holiday of the year, so we had to pay a premium in wages. So there’s yet another massive offset on that fabulous profit. Oh, and did I mention that the year we opened for Christmas day, it just so happened to fall on a Saturday? Normally a busy evening anyway, and when you subtract what we would have normally taken on a Saturday evening, I start getting a little depressed about the whole thing.

Christmas day has to be special. I love Christmas and I’m of the persuasion that believes that Christmas lunch should be cooked and ate at home. So if anyone was going to pay us to eat our turkey at our place it had to be something extra special. So there I was, 6am Christmas day morning making fake snow and spreading it around the outside of the restaurant for the benefit of the customers, in particular the children. Another huge cost, and then would you believe it? It went and snowed for real!

So the short answer to my friend’s query was ‘No’. I was much happier spending Christmas and New Year with my family and friends fattening my belly rather than my wallet. Still a little askew from the true meaning of Christmas, but a step I feel in the right direction.

Happy New Year.

Restaurant Diners

During my black days as a Restaurant Owner, I quickly learned to categorise diners into one of five groups, perhaps you can spot which one you fall into:

Bernies
The biggest group of all, christened after the infamous eighties steak restaurant chain. Normally the parents of a thirty-something; everyone knows a Bernie. Their brief is big portions, cheap price and to hell with quality. They have a huge problem with change or experimentation and will turn their noses up at anything that does not come with chips. Nothing will see a Bernie exit a restaurant quicker than a menu which consists of anything remotely described as Thai Style.

They will seldom ever complain to the servers face; they are the a-typical English customer that will whine continuously to their fellow diners about everything from the firmness of the carrots to the thickness of the gravy, until their waiter inquires if their meal is okay, at which point they declare “ooh yes, absolutely wonderful, thank you”.

Clickers
A particularly sad bunch of diners, who, although they believe in their own self-importance, cause embarrassment for anyone at the same table as them. So called because of their annoying habit of clicking their fingers every time they want attention. What they fail to understand is that within the restaurant business, clicking of fingers is the universally acknowledged declaration of “hey everyone, look at me, I am an prick!”. Remember that next time you or someone nearby clicks their fingers at the waiter.

The most nauseating cross-section of diners of them all, generally they will spend the least amount of money but will brag incessantly about the expensive restaurants they have supposedly ate in before. Will complain just to try and look intelligent in front of their fellow diners.

Freeloaders
Will complain to either a) receive a discount, b) to get a free drink or meal, or most commonly, c) a combination of both. Their most common complaint is their meal was a little bland. Not cold or undercooked. Not burnt, raw, frozen, off, scorched. Not tasting awful. But bland. That word that doesn’t really mean much except that maybe they would have preferred a dozen birds-eye chillies thrown in with their green salad. Usually the complaint will come at the end of the meal when there is no longer any proof of the offending dish. Some Freeloaders have become some adept at all of this that they will actually tell the waiting staff what they expect in way of compensation.

Critics
Fairly harmless, these are the ones that have watched far too much Master Chef.
They will make stupid, meaningless comments, either positively or otherwise on each and every mouthful, such as “I’m getting a lovely aftertaste of chilli and lime coming through”. They will ask dumb questions of the waiting staff, such as the origin of the food on their plate, which is fine if they know what they are talking about, but they seldom do, and pass on pointless suggestions on how to improve the restaurant, the food or the service with no actual point of reference.

Advocates
The Restaurant Owner’s favourite group! Advocates seldom complain without just or reason, and when they do, it’s always in a polite, constructive manner, and they never make the waiting staff feel uncomfortable, the exact opposite in fact. They enjoy experimenting and are always keen to try the chefs’ specials. They appreciate the whole restaurant experience; the ambiance, the service and the food. Most people like to think they fall into this category; if only! It is in fact a very small, elite group consisting mainly of ex-restaurant owners.

The thing about these Customer Categories, not totally dissimilar to traditional star signs, is that you can be on the cusp of two. For example a Freeloader may show certain traits of a Critic. The most common is the cusp of Bernies and Clickers, and this is most evident when Bernies travel abroad. Suddenly this normally fairly reticent faction become temporary two week Clickers to anyone whose first language is not English and begin to talk down to them. I witnessed a fantastic example of this recently during a trip to Italy. The Bernie-Clicker at the table next to me was ordering coffee:

“I’ll have a cap-a-chee-no please, understand?”
“Si, a Cappuccino”
“Cof-feeee?”
“Si”
“you understand? Yes? cap-a-chee-no?”

This episode of embarrassing ignorance went on for a painfully long time. Bizarrely the Bernie-Clicker did in fact have an English-Italian phrase book with her. It was a shame really she didn’t use it then she would have discovered that the translation for Cappuccino is in fact Cappuccino, what with it being an Italian word and all.