At his Port Isaac base, the chef discusses his far-flung restaurant empire and introduces foolproof dishes from his new Home Kitchen cookbook – including sticky toffee pudding and pork chops with broad beans
Nathan Outlaw admits that he only really has three passions in life: his restaurants, cookery books (he has a library of many hundreds) and music (likewise, mostly vinyl). So when he started to put together his latest cookbook, which, unusually for a chef, he writes, styles and recipe-tests all himself, he was nervous. “By the fourth book, most chefs are just banging it out,” he says. “I don’t want it to be that fourth album, which is basically the shit one, mainly instrumental, because you couldn’t think of any words.”
The 39-year-old Outlaw, though, had an advantage most cookbook authors don’t have. At his five restaurants– two in the Cornish village of Port Isaac, a pub along the coast in Rock, one in London and one at the ultra-luxe Burj Al Arab in Dubai – he focuses on the superb, deceptively simple presentation of fish. Similarly, his first three books have been essentially pescatarian. This left a few ingredients he’d never got round to featuring: not least meat, poultry and vegetables.
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