Village Raw - ISSUE 1

VILLAGE RAW
FEATURE
a lot closer to its roots. We’re letting the food speak for itself
while still having those beautiful combinations of flavours.
There is just as much skill and craft in this food that has gone
into Michelin star food, and in fact it’s probably harder to do this
and make it look amazing with less resources than a big hotel or
fine dining restaurant.
A packet of crisps
When you have a packet of crisps and you hear it crunch you’re
eating with sound. And then the next thing you get when it
breaks up is little spikes on your tongue and roof of your mouth
- so you’re eating with touch now. And then you start to eat with
flavour - then you kind of think “yeah, that’s salt and vinegar”.
It’s touch, it’s noise - even before you taste these things are
going on in your head and we don’t realise that.
Taste/texture/colour
Our salads look relatively simple, but there is quite some craft
that goes into them. If you imagine a scale where there is acid to
alkaline, we try to make sure that we hit the high notes in each
dish. We try to hit the sweet, the acid, something spicy - it might
have a chilly or black pepper. We try to hit something that has
texture - we might add toasted nuts to get that crunch. Flavour
matches in varying combinations are coming together but to
excite the palette and emotions and senses we try to touch as
many as we can. Visually it looks beautiful, feel with the lips and
the tongue, we try to hit the smell, hearing – when we’re creating
a dish we’re constructing for that. There is an undertone of
harmony and that’s a skill and craft you don’t learn at college -
that comes from years and years of cooking.
Food fashion
We’ve got to be on trend, if not ahead of trends. There’s many
ways we try to identify what food trends are – fashion dictates
a lot and clothing is going a bit more to the 70s so we’ll look
at food that was a big hit then. We’ll buy a few vintage magazines,
look at certain flavour combinations and trends, styles,
presentation, plates. Also, if you look at book sales - the top
cookbooks, what are they? It’s health, and travel cookbooks are
massive so we look at doing certain themes where there’s a little
more influence of Spanish food or Middle Eastern food, for
example. So there are a few things that dictate the trends of
food and what people are after.
Hoxton
It was a tough decision to say enough’s enough but we’re not
going to operate in Hoxton any more. We wanted to have a little
business with the family where everyone’s involved and we
kind of had that balance and when we opened in Hoxton that all
went out the window adding extra stress and levels of unhappiness.
You want to be happy in life and to do something that
you love and you’re passionate about, and spend time with the
ones you love, and that wasn’t happening - that’s my fault. I lost
focus and slipped back into that executive chef mode, wanting
to conquer the world, but it doesn’t happen like that. Bigger is
not always better, is what I learned.
Evolution
If you do something you really love, you grow naturally and
evolve naturally. When it becomes work and you know you get
the blinkers on, you stop growing. And when you stop growing
that’s when you stop evolving. My style has changed from very
articulate fine food to what we are doing now simply because I’d
rather sit down and eat a beautiful gorgeous salad than a fine
dining dish.
Community and magic
We do a lot. it happens by default most of the time like Walk
and Talk Club (see page 22) - what a great thing. What an amazing
journey to be a part of. And to finish with a community table
where people are sharing and talking, and all these barriers are
somehow broken down over a coffee or salad. Something magical
happens over a table laden with food… When I was working
in Egypt, my name being Christian – they’re Muslim – caused a
little bit of tension – it’s natural. I’m not saying if it’s wrong or
right – it is what it is. But over a table when you are eating olives,
hummus, and bread, and you’re sharing and you’re passing
and you’re giving - all that strips away and we’re just exactly the
same enjoying the same thing. It’s something magic to break
down barriers, strip away classes, and strip away who you are,
and it brings us back to just being humans.
Stories
The joy of having a café is the stories that come out. We had an
old couple and they’d been married 50-60 years – forever – to
the point where everything was so familiar in their life and there
was no excitement. They used to come on Wednesdays, eat and
then the next day cook together at home to try to reproduce
what they had here. I remember after a couple of months saying:
“Hi, how are you? Good to see you again.” They said that I gave
them a new lease of life, they could communicate again and they
had something to talk about which was exciting and fun. That’s
pretty cool. You get people that come here to celebrate and you
get people here to cheer themselves up because of something
bad that happened in their lives. If these tables and chairs could
talk they’d tell you some nice stories, that’s for sure.•
Find out more at: www.chriskitch.com
PHOTO BY DAVID REEVE
Clockwise from top left:
Inspired by vintage,
Chris outside the café,
salads presented at
the entrance, Chris
preparing a breakfast.
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