Everyone’s for the
You can now recreate the food of famed London restaurant The Quality Chop House at home. ELLA WALKER finds out more
YOU think you know potatoes, and then you discover what The Quality Chop House does to them. Chef Shaun Searley began putting confit potatoes on the London restaurant’s menu in 2013 but they weren’t a guarantee to begin with – you might have struck lucky, or not.
Then punters cottoned on to these crisp, boxy, deep-fried layered potato inventions, striped with mustard dressing, and refused to give them up, meaning the Chop House kitchen is now utterly “held to ransom” by them. If Shaun takes them off the menu, or heaven forbid runs out, “it causes mayhem,” he says wryly.
But at least you can now make them at home, thanks to the restaurant’s new, eponymous cookbook.
Ostensibly a recipe collection, the book also tells the story of The Quality Chop House, which has been a restaurant in various guises for 150 years. It’s all vintage crockery, woodpanelled church pew booths, original ceilings and black and white chequered tiles you want to tap your feet on.
Will Lander and business partner Daniel Morgenthau took over the Grade-II listed Victorian building in 2012 and wrote the book together, alongside Shaun. It’s mostly a restaurant but it also has what Will calls “tentacles”, including a wine bar, shop and butchers.
“We’re trying to translate what a team of eight chefs can do with six hours,
into what a parent with two screaming kids can do in 40 minutes, and make it work for them,” Will explains. “What we really didn’t want to do was a slightly self-reverential book – ‘Look at all these great recipes, exactly from our menu!’ I’m not sure that’s useful, or interesting.”
Instead, they’ve tried to rethink them for a domestic setting, and woven in the importance of their suppliers (“Anyone who says British produce isn’t good is mad”).
While some of the dishes are a little more “cheffy and more ornate”, Shaun’s cooking is “not about over complexity” says Will. And Shaun agrees, saying the Chop House’s food is about “simple but not simplistic” cooking.
They take something simple and everyday, like a potato or a chop, and elevate it. So the book might detail nine or so steps for cooking a pork chop, rather than the one step you might think there is, but, says Will: “We like to think that if you follow that, you’re rewarded.”
And their chops are really
Honeycomb Journey’s End Chardonnay