Slice of Life

By Peter Gordon - August 2008

Celebrity Golf BBQ and new menu format at The Providores

July was a busy month again, as I headed off to New Zealand to implement a menu change at dine and Bellota. However the biggest menu change came about at The Providores in London where we completely changed the format of our menu.

Like most restaurants we’ve always had the standard starter, main course and dessert menu running. However, after eating so many delicious tasting menus in Japan in April, I decided that we should bring a similar concept to The Providores. Whenever I’d eaten in my own restaurant I’d always liked sharing main courses with my friends, as in fact do most of our staff. I always thought that smaller portions, but more courses, was the way to go. So on July 9th we brought it into play. Now we offer smaller courses and the customer chooses whether they’d like 2, 3, 4 or maybe even 5 courses. The feedback from customers has been overwhelmingly positive – in fact we asked 300 random diners to complete a survey to get their opinion on it before we implemented it and over 80% of them said they liked the idea of smaller plates of food. Not tapas, but smaller starters. So if you come to dine with us in London you’ll be in for a tasting menu that can be as long or short as you like.

On July 14th I cooked a Celebrity BBQ for the Leuka Mini Masters, to raise money for Leuka, the leukaemia research charity I am a patron of (http://www.leuka.org.uk/). One of my other patrons, the actor Dougray Scott, had organised a group of his friends to come along to play and help raise funds heading teams of eager golfers who’d all paid to compete, amongst them the singer Ronan Keating, model Jodi Kidd and actors such as James Nesbitt. You can see some of the photos from the event, including my sous-chef from The Providores Cristian Hossack helping me turning the ‘meat’ at: http://rsimages.smugmug.com/gallery/5462944_v6mkA#334008828_huwdZ

The most popular thing we cooked was New Zealand lamb. We proudly grilled many kgs of NZ lamb legs (boned and opened out, then marinated in smoked paprika and rosemary) and rack of NZ lamb (marinated in miso and ginger), alongside Scottish salmon, English beef and plenty of salads. If I’d been able to easily get my hands on some NZ beef that would have been on the bbq too – but we made do with the local stuff. I have to say that after a sunny day playing golf, and downing a few too many glasses of champagne on the greens, even ‘celebrities’ love nothing more than a tasty piece of NZ lamb!

The next day I flew off to Auckland to focus on to our 14th menu cycle at dine by Peter Gordon. This was my third menu change with head chef Ben Mills, and it went really well, with a lot of help from my sous chef Nancye Pirini. Together we introduced many new changes and created a lovely buzz amongst the rest of the kitchen team. I also managed a four day break up in the Bay of Islands to celebrate my mother’s 70th birthday. We feasted on Firstlight Wagyu sirloin – and I promise you, it was the most delicious meat ever to come off a bbq. Just wish I’d had a few hundred kgs to feed the golfers a week earlier! They’d all have headed off to NZ to stock up.

I also caught up with Porsha Fraser, the 2007 winner of the LINK Culinary Fellowship (http://www.nzuklinkfoundation.org/fellowships/nz-uk-link-foundation-culinary-challenge.php ), at the restaurant she is sous-chef at in Paihia - 35 Degrees South Aquarium Restaurant & Bar. Porsha sold me some of the most amazing oysters I’ve ever seen – huge, but incredibly tasty, that they sources from a bit further north. I thought an oyster as big as these (around 3 - 4 times normal size) would be bland or off-putting, but Mum made a simple tempura style batter and deep-fried them. They were incredible.

So that was my July – lots of bbq, lots of food, and lots of eating! Nothing new then really…

This month’s photo is of Tapeka Point – where I stayed in the Bay of Islands.