FIVE STAR PARTIES
CHEF JAMES SHARMAN TELLS ADAM WHITE HOW TO BUILD A BRAND NEW RESTAURANT EVERY MONTH… ACROSS THE GLOBE
IN 2016, AFTER finishing at Noma, chef James Sharman founded One Star House Party: a travelling restaurant. Here he lists his most unforgettable behind-thescenes experiences: an epic journey of AirBnbs, make-and-mend fixes, surprise ingredients and unexpected inspiration. 1
JEJU, SOUTH KOREA What people eat themselves is often more interesting than what they’re trying to show us, I find. The haenyo are these incredible elderly women who live on Jeju Island, free-diving for sea urchin and things. They inspired our menu. They use really basic methods of cooking, but in ways we wouldn’t have ever considered. Like they would dry seaweed so they could burn it to cook an urchin: you don’t do that! They reshuffled the rules with whatever they had.
2
SAPA, VIETNAM Nobody got paid, but nobody had to pay for anything: that was the deal. In Vietnam, we pretty much ran out of money. We booked a sleeper train from Sapa to Hanoi, got to the station with about 70 quid (HK$700) left and bought a couple of gas camping stoves and some ingredients. It’s a 12-carriage train; each carriage has six rooms, with four beds in each room. We booked the bottom-right bunk of six consecutive rooms in one carriage, sweet-talked the other people in our rooms, and turned our carriage into a restaurant that ran all night. We made just enough cash to get the bikes we needed to set up on our road trip.
3
NHA TRANG, VIETNAM There’s a fishing port in Nha Trang where we got chatting to a captain who invited us fishing – we thought, for a couple of hours. Turns out, we were at sea for three days. We were required to pitch in with the work. It was honestly awful. But one piece of inspiration did strike: for dinner, the fishermen would each set aside one or two fish they liked, and then everyone had their own fish sauce made by their wives. It was amazing lining up all the sauces and seeing how different they were: like a wine tasting.