There comes a point where purity teeters towards Puritanism
Chefs have attracted groupies since the days when Marco Pierre White and his visionary ex-band manager agent, Alan Crompton-Batt, made a previously unglamorous career look rock’n’roll. The soon-to-be filmed book Food Whore, for instance, pants breathily over tattooed kitchen bad boys (side note: it’s a long time since I’ve wanted to fling a book across the room with such force), but I just don’t get the love for chef’s tables, tours of kitchens and fawning over “the talent” at the end of dinner.
Still, there are names I’ll perk up at hearing: genuine talents I’ll follow wherever they show up. Matthew Young is one of these. I first came across him at Wapping Food (very sadly RIP) and then Mayfields, a short-lived but brightly burning little restaurant in Hackney, now the excellent Pidgin. His cooking was a distillation of bright modernity, sensitivity with ingredients, the ability to enchant and surprise. That he has now opened his own place, in partnership with sommelier Jack Lewens, is cause for celebration in my hermetic little world.
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