When Yianni Papoutsis and Scott Collins were first in discussions about the book that would become The MEATliquor Chronicles, their publisher pointed out that Faber & Faber, the distinguished house that brought the world TS Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon and Sylvia Plath, didn't really do cookbooks. "Neither do we," they replied and so, Papoutsis tells me in the half-light of a booth in east London's MEATmission: "It kind of works out quite well, really."
They are also, as Collins points out, great delegators: "Yianni doesn't claim to be a head chef, I don't claim to be a bar manager, but we like getting people involved and pooling talent." That approach, which Papoutsis likens to "herding very drunk cats", extends from the designers and graffiti artists who give a distinctive look to each of their six restaurants, to the 20-odd contributors they have marshalled to create a book worlds away from the aspirational pretension of many restaurant spin-offs.
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