Empty Plates
Empty Plates is a podcast about food + memory created & hosted by Chef and Researcher Anjli Vyas.
In each episode, Anjli is joined by a diverse array of change makers, leaders and thinkers. Together, they will reflect on 3 plates of food that have shaped and impacted their life.
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Empty Plates
29. Missy Flynn - From Dive Bars To Soho: Building A Restaurant With Soul
This week on Empty Plates, I’m joined by Missy Flynn co-founder of Rita’s and a deeply thoughtful voice in London’s hospitality scene. We talk about Rita’s as a homage to the American dive bar a place rooted in welcome, memory, and belonging and why dining doesn’t need to look like anything other than what feels true.
We also explore identity in the food industry, the pressure to perform authenticity, and the reality of being a restaurant owner in an increasingly politicised landscape. Missy reflects on growing up in pubs, the communities built through service, and how those early experiences shaped her approach to food and culture.
So I'm not like a Sunday roast seeker, but I grew up above pubs. And Sunday roast is integral to pub culture, of course. Growing up in a pub environment, it was the only time that we actually did all eat together as a family and in the pub. I would really see what the pub meant to the people that went there. Because what is seemingly a private family moment was having your Sunday dinner. I didn't realise that it was a cultural event, the Sunday Rose.
SPEAKER_02:Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Empty Plates Podcast with me, your host, Anjali VS. Now, when I think about restaurants, think about chefs. I always think about a lot of male energy. Not sure about you guys. You know, does it feel like a bit of a trend? Maybe it does. And there are lots and lots of strong female voices in the food landscape. And today's guest is one of those voices. We are speaking to Missy Flynn, the co-founder of Reachers, one of the most quietly powerful voices in London dining. Now, when I moved back to London in 2018, I spent months scanning the food scene. In London, outside of London, across Europe. I was trying to kind of find where I slotted in, having lived for so many years in India. And I was looking for people that were building something real, not just hype, not just noise, but integrity, vision, and values that were finer, a little bit more defined from a culture and a personal ethos perspective. Missy stood out immediately. There is a clarity and honesty in her work that you feel before you even taste the food inside Readers. It's just the culture she's built. Now, Missy grew up in Pump around service, around the chaos and the community of hospitality. And it shows she understands the industry not as performance, but as a lived experience. And in our conversation, we talk about so much more than food, obviously. We talk about identity, the pressure to be authentic when everybody's trying to take something away from you. And the reality of being a person of colour in hospitality when also when everybody expects you to have an opinion while you're already carrying so much of the industry's emotional and political load with every pound that you're asking consumers to spend. And then there is Reeters. At its core, it's a homage to the American Dive Bar, a place where everyone is welcome, where culture is made in the everyday. But under Missy's eye, Reeters become something deeply London, deeply personal. I mean, it's in Soho. What started up as a pop-up rooted in Friends, Fun and Americana has become a Soho institution with real depth, real flavour, and real soul. What I love most about Missy is the way she builds spaces that feel lived in and rooted. Places where the story isn't just a marketing angle, it's the truth. She wants you to come into the spaces and make it your own. Isn't that what most people try to do with restaurants? But what's missing? What's the extra ingredient that Missy adds there? Well, listen to this episode and we'll find out. This episode is sharp and honest, and it's the kind of conversation that reminds you what dining can be when it's built with emotional intention, surrounded in memory. I'm so excited for you guys to listen to this episode and to have Missy on the show today. How are you, Missy?
SPEAKER_00:I'm good. That was so generous and such a kind intro. Thank you. It got me blushing. Well, you can't see because I'm tanned, but you know, I am blushing. Where are you right now? I'm in the south of France. I'm on a working vacation with my partner Gabe, just outside of Marseille.
SPEAKER_02:Very nice. Yeah. I assume you're enjoying the produce.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the produce is the thing that gets me back here every year. I mean, it's just the difference between walking into a grocery store and like smelling the food before you kind of get to the aisle, which is a thing that can happen. And I don't think we kind of get to experience that in the UK so much. It's two things actually. It's the walking into a grocery store and being like, I think I can tell exactly where the peaches are and where the tomatoes are just by following my nose. The other thing is the spray on the lettuce, you know, like when they miss the lettuce, it just always looks so appealing. We've been here five days now. We bought one Batavia lettuce and it might have been like eight euros or something. But that lettuce, it just it's almost like it's multiplying in the fridge, like it's just doing every meal and getting ever so slightly smaller. But the head of it was like you know, twice the size of my head, and it's just I don't know, just acquainting yourself with produce in like that very simple way is a very nice departure from being at home. Although obviously I run a restaurant, so I'm around good produce all the time. Um, it's not often for me to eat, it's for others, so yeah.
SPEAKER_02:When you're traveling in, let's say France, French people and French cuisine are always like, no, our cuisine is the best. But when you're in France, you really understand like why they talk about the produce being like creme de la crème.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so this part of France that I'm in, there's a lot of people who have holiday homes, lots of Brits, lots of Americans. And I was at a dinner party yesterday evening, hosted by Americans, a Parisian lady was there who lives here now in this region, an Austrian guy, and we kind of got onto the topic of identity of area, and the debate was being had that this sort of part of France that doesn't really have uh the provençal identity anymore. And we got onto the topic of food, and it's something that we always talk about because obviously French cuisine is you know the global haute cuisine, everything was aspirational to French cuisine, and the produce is amazing, undoubtedly. But I have to say that when you kind of go outside of the major cities, I think that sometimes that the food is lacking in some way, and we couldn't work out whether it's because they are too tied to tradition and therefore reluctant to observe ways that other cuisines and other people might be using amazing produce and do the same. Like, for example, Italy. There isn't really a culture here of taking what I think Italians do really well, which is taking something fresh and salting it slightly or oil, dressing it with oil and some fresh herbs and letting it be its thing. It feels that there's a lot more overthinking or overworking being done. You know, I'm lucky because I'm here with a chef. We're in a nice house, and I have a chef in the house with me. So we know what to do when we go to the shops. But even when you try to eat out in these areas and not just here, but other parts of France I've been to, sometimes you're like, this restaurant would really do so much better if it did so much less. I don't know if you've experienced that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, no, actually, you're just taking me back to the polarity of the menus in the similar region that you're in, is that lovely moment, sort of like a Prussian moment you've just mentioned there of like smelling the apricots. That moment smelling the apricots early morning when you're maybe slightly hungover. If, like me, you've been at a festival the night before and you're like searching for sustenance. If you're you and you're like having this moment, but then fast forward six hours, and you're like, right, we've got breakfast out of the way, let's go for lunch. Lunch experience is not giving me the diversity of what the produce is giving. There is a disconnect. You're always experiencing the produce in the same way outside of the big cities, and it's very, very basic. And I don't eat much meat, so I've only recently started to eat chicken and fish, largely just because I need more protein. We don't need to argue that topic. I'm sure people will shout at me because I used to be vegan, but it's fine. But I do agree with you. But then I think at the same time, I looked at this similarly from a London perspective and a UK perspective. In my view, it largely comes down to diversity and population diversity and ethnic diversity. Yeah. France is becoming more ethnically diverse, therefore, there is a merging of cultures still largely French, whereas like you compare it to its neighbor, like the UK, and because of the immigration we've had and the migration we've had over the last 200 years, that our cuisine, even up to like the smallest parts, less of in all the places now, you've got diversity of food, you know, you've always got something different.
SPEAKER_00:Totally. I think it's incredible. You know, I think the diversity of the food that we can eat in the UK is mind-blowing, actually, to me, especially when you do come somewhere like France, and you know, they still have this kind of model where like each village or each place will have the Chinese restaurant and, you know, maybe an Indian restaurant. And like that's charming in itself. And also the communities are smaller, and the needs of those communities are far smaller, and perhaps the diversity is evidently smaller. But then, even you know, like in New York, there's a lot of cuisines that seem to be underrepresented, like Pakistani food or Indian food in a kind of elevated or in like a kind of taking serious kind of way, not so much elevated. I don't think things need to be elevated to be taken seriously. I feel like they just need to be recognized for what they are, yeah. Actually, not the opposite, which is dumbed down or bastardized in order to gain a seat at the table. They they should just be able to exist as what they are. But I think the diversity of the food in the UK is crazy. To the point where I was thinking about this recently, I worked with a nutritionist for a short while who was amazing. Her name's Kat Chan, and we're doing an event together at my restaurant in a couple weeks. But what we were talking about a lot of the time with sort of like genetic diet and understanding your biome and who you are, you know, from the gut out, which is something I'm really interested in learning about. And I think as I get older, particularly like trying to understand my own identity, like on a somatic level and also on a physiological level, you know, however much you shape your identity with your outward choices, I'm very much interested in like what is already existing within me. She actually came and did a workshop with my restaurant team about how to maintain you know good nutrition whilst working in a restaurant industry where the paradox is that you spend all day giving people good, well-sourced food and well-cooked and nourishing them, but you run around on your feet all day, you snatch a meal where you can. Oftentimes the restaurant will serve you whatever they can rustle up. I mean, not in my restaurant, obviously, but it is a fact that you know the restaurant day is very busy, and sometimes the nutrition of the people who are serving others is sort of put on the back foot. So Kat came and did a very interesting talk with the team about it. And one thing that stuck with me that she said is about until the age of 20, your gut biome is shared almost exactly or significantly with your mother. On the female side of every person's lineage, the biome is within your gut, you know, which I thought was an amazing thing to think about. But off the back of that, I was thinking about this omnivorous way of eating and like actually wondering is it normal to eat like a Western breakfast and then like a Vietnamese ban me for lunch, and then maybe go out for like Indian food, and then maybe have like a state, and just this kind of crazy way of eating that has become to be. I struggle with it a little bit nowadays mentally. I'm like, this is too much. And what does it feel like to eat one cuisine consistently and how does the body react to that? And I guess that's one advantage or disadvantage of living somewhere that isn't globalized in that way, is actually the local thing, is what you do, and it becomes part of your body's rhythm. I don't know, I don't know what it feels like to eat the same cuisine over and over again.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think that's the thing when we grow up in the UK, because my mum learned how to cook from her mum, and she learned how to make a three-course meal like a curry and a dal and rice and raw cheese in like 45 minutes, which is like speedy timing for a family of five. Yeah, we ate that every single day. But that actually still to this day digests in my body, even though I've eaten quite a lot of wheat. Whereas if I eat actually like certain types of bread or western breads or western grains, it doesn't digest in my body. And I remember one of my friends similarly who's a nutritionist, she's saying, I have a lot of people who are on these diets and they're having a lot of grains that don't work with them. So she said, uh, quinoa is a classic example of like quinoa is quite a strong grain for your gut to digest, and it's not built within our biome, it's not European, so our guts aren't made to digest that. So we should be actually having European grains that are cultivated with European soil, European irrigation, it's an alignment with what our bodies are in alignment with from our childhood. And I found that really interesting because I'm like, there's so much data around what's actually healthy, but what's actually healthy to your body is very, very different. That's very intuitive, right?
SPEAKER_00:Completely.
SPEAKER_02:You actually need to become a little bit quieter with yourself and do the inner work and the listening.
SPEAKER_00:Completely. I mean, it's so interesting you say that because when I was working with Kat on Nutrition, one of the things that I'd done is based on things I'd read, you know, standard stuff. You're like, what's the best way to stay tricked? You know, just stupid diets, not like diet stuff, but like nutrition stuff, basic nutrition stuff. It's not tailored to anyone person. This is generic information that may or may not suit any of us. And I had cut out chickpeas and lentils from my diet, and that's what I ate a lot of. It's very much my comfort food. That's what my Pakistani grandmother would make for me. That is my comfort world. And I cut them out and I realized that the feelings that I had were twofold. One, I was definitely feeling a sadness about not having those things in my diet, but I wasn't feeling better for them, and the things I was replacing them with um didn't seem to be sitting well with me at all. And it wasn't until I started speaking to Kat about this kind of thing about genetic biome, which I think a lot of people debunk or whatever, whether it's that I want to find some kind of truth to it or some kind of emotional reading into it, or whether, you know, I think it's just science, but you know, those are the things that I should be eating. I don't know why I'm cutting out those things. My body can digest, and my body has digested for the many years I've been alive and an adult unable to choose my food. Why then am I being like, no, I've decided that that's not what I it's just funny that you would privilege generic nutritional advice from the internet over what your body already knows and tells you. It's just yeah, I really learned a lot from that. And safe to say now chickpeas and lentils are back on my plate, which is good in all forms. And also, you know, lentils come up in lots of different cuisine and chickpeas also. And I think that that's the thing that that particular ingredient was not just cutting me away from my memories and food that I can digest well, but also other cuisines that I also really enjoy.
SPEAKER_02:So let's go back to where it started for you, because I think we should give listeners a point of view of your journey into food and where it began for you. Because having a restaurant in central London isn't an easy feat. You know, it didn't happen overnight. No, also the vision didn't happen overnight. Vision is something that you've built very, very specifically, and it's very different to what a lot of your neighbours might be doing. It's got a different edge to it, if you don't mind, just sharing sort of the journey of how Retus came about and how that food vision came alive.
SPEAKER_00:So myself and my partner Gabriel run Rita's together now, and he's the exec chef. We've got an amazing kitchen team and an amazing front of house team. And we started it when we were in our 20s, like early 20s, maybe I think I was 23, 24, and Gabriel's 24, and we had two other partners, friends at the time, and we really just did it because we were all obsessed with American bars, like, and I grew up above clubs. Then I invariably went to work in bars and restaurants, and I actually then had what I now realize is a very short amount of time working for other people. I really only worked very hard, but I worked from 17 until 24 in restaurants and bars, and then was my own boss. So even at that time, I think I was really able to solidify my position in the industry. I felt like I was kind of one to watch, I was doing interesting stuff. I was thinking outside of the box even then, within my restaurant jobs. I always had a cultural interest in the food and like a broader political, sociological interest in what the restaurants meant because my love of restaurants came from New York, basically, to just narrow it down. And as a student, went on my first trip to New York with my first instalment of my student loan, which I know is not what you're supposed to do, but we did it. And I just could not believe the world that I found. I'd been bartending in London, and so when I went to New York, I just could not believe that I found this world where bartending was a legitimate job. People were considered cool for doing it, they made really good money. Um, like the bartender was like the neighborhood hero. Like being in New York and like in Brooklyn, that's just like this is mental to me that at home it feels very much like the shittest job you can do. Yeah. But something about me loves it. Why do I love it? How come I've been drawn to this job that everyone else thinks is shit? And at the same time, all my friends were like in art school or didn't have jobs, and it felt like a real struggle for me to be like, no, I really want to do this. I don't think people understood it. But when I went to America, I was like, this is amazing. And then from there, I went into understanding restaurant culture from an American perspective. And I just came back to London with that feeling of like, oh, there's something esteemed about this, and there's a career that can be made out of this, and also there's something very important about restaurants and bars and these kind of social spaces geared around convivial dining and drinking, and you know, that I just didn't realize that I was part of at home. Obviously, growing up at a pub, I knew that. So it's not that I was completely blind to it, but I went to America and I was like, oh, the pub is like the dive bar, like the dive bar is like the pub. Yeah. And then from a culinary perspective, I think Gabriel and and I and the other founders of the restaurant at the time, we just felt like there was nowhere that young people would be like, I'm into food. Because you're thinking, this is 2012 when we opened Rita's. There was really not like a young dining scene at all. People of our age, we used to go cosplay adults in adult restaurants. Like my girlfriends and I used to go to Andrew Edmonds, actually, or like I worked at Hawkesmore, so my friends would come to Hawkesmore and use my discount. They were grown-up spaces that we were gonna go and eat food at. Maybe we'd go to Stockpot, which was an old kind of small chain in central London, which my parents used to take me to, and they just used to do like very basic kind of English classics, and we always have like jelly and ice cream for dessert or whatever. But I never felt the restaurant was for us. The restaurants were always grown-up places, and we would be like, haha, we're gonna come and pretend to be grown up. What I saw in America, and what we all felt in America, is that when you walk into a bar or restaurant, particularly places like Diner in Brooklyn or Ace Grote's place, Cafe Moto, which is under the J train in Brooklyn, it felt like the restaurant was for you and that it wasn't a joke that you were there, or like you weren't invading some kind of grown-up space. You're a discerning young adult and you want to go out to eat, cool, come hang out here. I think we all just felt that there was places to party for sure. It was like the best time to be in London for partying for sure. And there were places to just drink, but there weren't places that kind of did the whole thing. Yeah. So that's where Retus came from. And then from a food perspective, it's kind of morphed a little bit because it's modern American in some way. And we started out doing all these homage dishes to quite classic diner food. And then over time, we understood the gravity and the weight and the possibility of the stories that we can tell with those dishes. So you think about a diner, a diner tells you everything you need to know about America through the menu, you know. A diner is Jewish food, it's Italian American food, it's Greek food, it's Mexican food, obviously, and more. And it tells you everything you need to know about America. And like we just kind of use that as our jumping off point. And as we kind of grew the business and got older and more educated ourselves, we used it as a chance to purely from an outsider perspective just share our interests in those things. And Gabriel had a slightly different experience because he actually did grow up back and forth from the States. His food journey definitely started in America too. So it was a kind of happy coincidence that we both felt the same way. The weight of that storytelling has become greater as our business becomes more established, partly through outside pressure. I think people feel like if you're going to dive into cuisine and rightfully so, you should be telling the stories. But at the same time, we would never want to shift into that realm where you're telling stories that are on your own to tell. I like that we treat every exploration of the food that we do as like a research project, and we involve our team in it so much and the guests in as much as they want. But also, just on a side note, you know, having a restaurant that's been around for that many years that is a somewhat tribute to American culture, which to me is heavily skewed actually towards like the culture of movies, music, kind of culture, like as a broad thing, and where America is now, you know, it's not a tribute to like current day America.
SPEAKER_02:I can't buy my MAGA hat, so I'm aware.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's not like a love letter to America, you know, but like it's just a journey through stories and history that I find fascinating. And I think that we can't take those cultural things I mentioned, the film and the music and the arts and ever and everything else for granted without trying to understand how they came to be.
SPEAKER_02:My experience of Rita's is that it feels quite migrational. I feel like the fact that you designed it all yourself, you didn't um overbake it, you're in a location where there's loads of places that are like blitz, glam. You've shaped it in a way which makes it feel like it's telling its own story. It feels very scaled back, very minimalistic, but also like very inviting. And the food just the same thing. There's curiosity, right? So even when you're looking at the ingredients in the menu, you're like, not many restaurants in London have grits on their menu. And do people even know the history of grits and the story of grits and how they relate to like slavery and how they go back many, many years in American history? But so what I like about what you guys have done is like you're telling stories without having to actually put words to them. And we're living in a culture or in a time, I would say, because of different youth culture and also social media for sure. But like people feel a need to overly share their story of identity. And one person that I spoke to shared it really well. She said, there's appropriation and there's appreciation. Yeah. She was like, and it's okay to appreciate, but not appreciating is the gap that we have, and taking ownership without the appreciation is a general problem that we have. So I was like, that makes a lot of sense to me. That's very clear because I guess that we could all do that in our day-to-day. I want to jump into appreciating one of your plates of food. Yeah. So the UK's national favorite dish at the moment is currently chicken tika masala.
SPEAKER_00:Is it? Wow, did not know that.
SPEAKER_02:There's like four or five different countries that want to own the narrative and the history of chicken tikka masala. A lot of people will be upset that this isn't the national favorite dish. So Sunday roasts at my dad's pub.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So the thing about the Sunday roast, I'd like not like a let's all go for a roast, you know. Actually, find a roast really annoying because Sunday roast means, generally speaking, you don't have breakfast and you don't really have a dinner. And it just I feel robbed. If I have a Sunday roast that is unexpectedly large or too delicious to not finish, I really don't like wasting food. I'm very much like a I'll eat as much as I can of my food. I just think that's from being a kid. Yeah, I find a Sunday roast actually really messes up the rest of the day, personally, and also like eat massive meal at three o'clock, you're tired, you know, it ruins the day. Um, so I'm not like a Sunday roast seeker, but I grew up above pubs, and Sunday roast is integral to pub culture, of course. And I think I really came of age from a food perspective alongside the Sunday roast because we moved to lots of different pubs and they changed. But what was funny is that my most vivid memories of growing up in a pub environment were first going into the kitchen, and when they make a Sunday roast in a in a busy pub, you have all the mise en place. So there's like the Chef got Tower of Yorkshire puddings, you know, trays of potatoes. And as a kid, it's like it's like sweet factory, you're like, you can build your own. You're like, I'll have a bit of that, bit of that. And I um kind of didn't understand that that was like not really how it's meant to work in a kitchen. I just was like, this is my I have free run of this Sunday roast. So I'd come up with all these really crazy things, like combinations and stuff, and the chefs would very kindly just do that. But more so the Sunday roast thing is that it was the only time that we actually did all eat together as a family and in the pub. And sitting with my dad in the pub that he was the landlord of, or any of the pubs that he was the landlord of, I would really see what the pub meant to the people that went there. Because what is seemingly a private family moment, you're having your dinner, your Sunday dinner. I didn't realize that it was a cultural event, the Sunday roast. And then you're there, but there's also all these other families having their private family dinner, but they're all doing it together. It just was a very interesting thing. I just feel like I learned a lot about pub culture, but also community culture and like communal eating, because actually you're not all there together, but you have all come to the same place at the same time to eat the same thing for the same purpose, seeking the same fulfillment. The other thing being when we moved around, obviously the pub chefs would change. So the Sunday roast morph and would adapt. And what I always found interesting was that, particularly, you know, then in that era of kind of group pubs, staff that would come and work there and oftentimes live with us. We would usually have one or two people living in the accommodation above the pub with us, and they were always kind of younger and kind of became like proxy cousins or older siblings for myself and my siblings. But the chefs would change, and you would then get like a Portuguese chef who would interpret the Sunday roast in a slightly different way, and then a Polish chef who might favour the cabbage or something. The components that spoke most to each person would always shift slightly. You know, someone would be like, I do spicy carrots, and it just was interesting to me that that Sunday roast, which is very basic of meals in layman's terms, made up of so many components, just drew something out of each of those cooks. And it was just always interesting for me to see. And like the northern ones, obviously, were always like all about the Yorkshire pudding.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that would make sense in the name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's this amazing book by Rene Red Zeppy, and it's called You and I Eat the Same. And he goes through multiple different types of basic cuisines where every culture has, but they have their own version of it. So it's a very simple book, but it's all about, I guess, showing how connected we are with our food, but also with the roots, the spice roots, the trade roots in which our cuisine has been formed. But comparing this memory to the start of our conversation when we're talking about the south of France and we're talking about London, where actually you can eat so many different things, there aren't actually many environments in the United Kingdom where at the same time, same place, everybody is eating the same, unless it is a family luncheon, right? But on Sundays, the Sunday pub roast is something. If you called a friend, they're gonna maybe have a roast the same time with you just somewhere else. Yeah, very ritualistic in some ways.
SPEAKER_00:It's sort of like when you call up somebody and you're like, Oh, have you had your tea kind of thing? And they're like, you know, you're kind of you're kind of referring to the same thing, but across a distance, you know. Exactly. Especially in the height of winter, it's like, oh, see somebody on a Monday. It's like you can almost be like, How was your roast yesterday? Because you can guarantee that most people weren't born.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. The helm of like growing Indian pubs in London now. Yeah, they're doing their own spin on uh Sunday roast. Yeah, it's everything, like you said, like the chef coming in and going, Well, actually, how do we do a Sunday roast? So we're gonna spice up our chicken, spice up the lamb, and it's served in a tali format, instead of having everything on one plate with gravy, we're gonna have small bowls and with a big piece of meat in the middle. And it's kind of like interpretation, right? That's um that's what London does well.
SPEAKER_00:Sounds great. And London allows that, and people adopt it, and people are happy to have that. You know, I'm sure that pub is heaving, and you know, I know like Tamil Prince, I don't know if they do a Sunday roast, but I think all those places that do these things that we understand, I think for the large part open to seeing a different version of it because yeah, like you say, the roast is everyone eats potatoes, everyone eats carrots. Let's just see how they interpret them.
SPEAKER_02:It's like interesting to see what Clarkson's gonna do when he's building his new restaurant on just British produce.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the British produce thing is very interesting. We work with a few farms, and I think a lot of great London restaurants now are working almost exclusively with British farms, which is incredible. And the stuff that's being grown is incredible. I think that there are things that do better in the UK now than they will in a few years because of I guess global warming. But it's also interesting. Same thing as France, though, when you go outside of London, I remember being somewhere in like a Suffolk region and having this idea that I'm just going to enter this land of abundance, and it was quite disappointing. I couldn't find a farm that would sell produce like as a shop, and there was a lot of sugar beet farming and a lot of land given over to kind of these high yield crops. And I really wish that there was more ways that people could consider growing amazing produce for local consumption. I know there's been a lot of debate about the farmers' tax and the farm tax and stuff, but I really would love to see more of our restaurants in the UK able to sustain themselves with British produce.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It would be amazing to see.
SPEAKER_02:I wonder what he'll do. I had a conversation with a friend yesterday. He spent a lot of money on black pepper very recently, and tomatoes have been his biggest challenge. So uh Okay, I believe that. Yes, black pepper. Yeah, British made black pepper, very, very expensive.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. Commitment. I'm amazed that that can grow. I guess everything can grow if you find a way.
SPEAKER_02:If you've got the right environment set up for it, right? Yeah. And you can afford it as a restaurateur, his methodology is not accessible. Cost is a huge challenge for everybody, it really is. Part of your third memory, just for dovetail into it, is you end on a note of you're talking about luxury. You've gone from being on May Street and building an environment for, I guess, like sort of young professionals. I guess that would be the category that we were there. Definitely. Yeah, pushing. And that's evolved as you've evolved. And now you're in central London in Soho, which is to me not considered the height of luxury, but it's culture. You know, I remember my mum's brother running away from home because he didn't want to get married for three years. And my mum was like, he was living in Soho for three years. And when I first of all discovered Soho, I was like, oh my God, he must have had the best three years. Tell us what you think luxury is and what it means to you, because Soho is a mix of different things, it's a culture of its own.
SPEAKER_00:I think Soho has the perfect example, I think, of luxury and you know, non-luxury in the sense that it's inherently rough around the edges. I don't think it's rough as in like it's a bad place to be. I just think it's rough around the edges, it's imperfect, it has character. I think in terms of luxury, I don't know anymore what I think is luxury because I feel like, and whether this is my changing taste or my changing priorities, I think previously I found it very easy to convince myself that I'm doing or being luxurious or spending money on luxury, and that could be like, you know, for example, from a food perspective, these neo bistros, like Rita's, I want it to have a feeling of luxury because I know it's not the cheapest restaurant in town, but it's also not the most expensive. By and by, of the aside of the cost, it's just experience. The experience, I want it to feel special, was I think that those kind of bistro restaurants that we reference do feel special, but also some of the less fancy restaurants that we love, they do feel special. And that comes down to details. Like details to me are ultimate luxury. Like as a restaurateur, I think the luxury comes not in um big, rich dishes and expensive ingredients. And obviously, I think I've mentioned that I am very partial to like a bit of lobster, you know, the shellfish is my like personal luxury, but I don't think it comes down to that. I think what feels luxurious in a restaurant space is space, and if you don't have that, it's environment. And I think for us it's little touches like the crockery, the little cards that you get at your birthday. I don't think Rita's is luxurious. There's things about the building that make it impossible to be the luxury restaurant that I would like it to be. But I also think that's why people like it. I like you said before, it's very Soho in the sense that it's rough around the edges, it's very functional and very enjoyable, but it's imperfect. And I think that's what's characteristic about Rita's in terms of a context of how it relates to Soho. That's why I think it makes sense in Soho. I'd like to rewrite my understanding of luxury because I think it used to be whatever's expensive, to be honest with you, and going somewhere like the Dover or any of those kind of fancy bistro places where you're like, oh, this is luxurious because the silverware is nice and they've got this heavy silver pepper shaker, and like I think that's not luxury, that's just stuff. Like that's just stuff off a list that someone ordered. Like it's not luxury, and it's quite superficial in that sense. I think luxury is felt, it's not necessarily held, like it's felt internally. I don't think it's touch luxury. If you're buying a coat, you know, I think if you touch the wool of a coat, you're touching luxury. But I think in my world, it's more about the feeling.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think that's why just gonna go backwards into your memory. So you eating shellfish is so simple in so many areas of the world, but in so many other areas it's really high luxury. So just talk to us about eating shellfish.
SPEAKER_00:I would love to, it's my favorite thing to do. You know, I think I guess it contradicts what I was saying because the act of eating shellfish is very tactical, like you really have to touch your food. And I think that I eat with my hands as much as I can, and that is definitely going to be having grown up eating with your hands, right? So I'll eat salad with my hands, I'll eat anything I can with my hands. So I like shellfish meals because there's sort of that's the design. The design is hey, like get your hands involved, and I think you know, the the luxury inherent to it is this thing of like it's expensive, and you know, this creature did not want to be plucked out of the sea and eaten, but that's that's what we're doing, and we're dominant humans, and you know, we have power over this creature. Look at the armor that it's built to tell us that it doesn't want to be eaten, and yet we can a lot of people see that's the luxury. I think that's why they come with that kind of luxury tag and its dominance and power and like you know, success over this creature. I lived in Hong Kong for about six months. I went to open an Indonesian restaurant in 2016, and all of my solo meals, of which there were many, were just going to like tank restaurants and like picking a crab and eating and eating that, or like eating clams, and they were always open very late at night. So I'd be eating that stuff like you know almost at midnight, or if not later. And then experiences of traveling in Southeast Asia and particularly in Vietnam, where we would just go to all these amazing seafood restaurants and kind of they were just big and communal and messy, and the same in the US, like crab shack kind of stuff, and it's that thing of like the shells are on the floor and they've got stuff all over them, a claw cracks and a bit pink like flies across the room somewhere. It just is messy and quite barbaric. Like, I don't think that's luxurious. I mean, trying to watch someone classily crack open a crab at a restaurant is like hilarious. I just find the contradiction really fun.
SPEAKER_02:I'm just getting flashbacks of Julia Robertson Pretty Woman when she's trying to get a snail out of a cell and it just slips. I mean, I guess that's what it is. It's like the dichotomy of it completely.
SPEAKER_00:I'm like, this is not like sexy, it feels luxurious to me because I love it and I love the experience, but the luxury is not in the price tag.
SPEAKER_02:No, you talked about Vietnam in the memories, and I went to Vietnam last year for three and a half weeks, traveled around quite a lot. And like most places in Asia, I would say, it's women that are serving the food. But for some reason, there was just a prominence for it. Maybe scenario, sometimes in life you can just see things a lot more. Your brain is just veering towards certain imaging. But I noticed across all restaurants, just saw women from first thing in the morning and last thing at night. And this is largely connected to the Vietnamese resistance movement. And during the war, women were the ones that were farming. That culture has continued with them still paving the way largely and doing a lot of the heavy lifting around food identity. How does it feel being a woman in food and doing what you're doing, a female restaurateur? How does that feel for you? What does that feel like? What does it look like? I guess environmentally, if you were to be brutally honest, what is it like?
SPEAKER_00:It's interesting. I've been thinking about this recently because there's been like a lot of male restaurateurs giving lots of opinions about things, kicking off about guests' attitude, complaining about the industry, and you know, rightfully raising some genuine concerns, but really a lot of the time just throwing their toys out of the pram in protest to what we all knew was going to be a hard job when we took it on. And I've been thinking a little bit about why I don't really um tell them to pack it in and get on for the job. I mean, obviously, my partner Gabriel is also a reghrateur, but he's less front-facing than I am in terms of he's not on the front of house. And I think there's more pressure to conform to feminine values and traits, which is generosity, empathy, a willingness and an openness to understanding the needs of the guests, the needs of the team. And I think a lot of male resurteurs kind of shy away from those things and really center their own needs, which is why I think a lot of them are able to be kicking off so much about people not spending enough money. Like I think if I complained about people not spending enough money, I would feel really weird about doing that. But yeah, there are lots of men in the industry who are like being quite rude to people actually. I understand their frustrations, but I'm just like, wow, you're so privileged to be in hospitality, but also not need to be hospitable at all. And then on the female side, I think there are some amazing restaurateurs. I think what's interesting for me is that my restaurant is not about my personal identity and it's not cuisine. I, you know, I'm you know it's not a Pakistani restaurant, it's not really about me. So I don't have the option or necessity to lean into that as my restaurateur identity. And in some ways, I feel like that plays against me a little bit because I'm just simply a person with a business and it has a concept and an idea. And no, it's not inextricably bound to me. Obviously, the restaurant has a lot of my personality in it, but it doesn't have my identity in it. And I think that sometimes it's easier when your business is an extension of your identity for people to champion what you do, to kind of understand your message, but also conversely to put a lot of pressure on you to stick with that. And I think that's a burden that I don't have on the positive side. I don't have to represent anything other than what I want my business to represent. And I can choose what that is at any given time of day. And I'm enjoying that. I enjoy that I can say, you know what, Rita's really needs to lean a bit more this way, or we want to talk more about this. And me and my personal life really has very little to do with it. And I don't have to embody it in that way. Ultimately, Rita's is a really fun, slightly silly, but also very good restaurant. And that way, I think like walking into Rita's, you feel like you're walking into mine and Gabe's place because there's some little quirks that like people like only you guys could come up with this stupid idea. But do you know what I mean? It's not like I'm not on the plate at Rita's. Like me, I'm not for sale at Rita's. And I do find that that means that from a female perspective, because a lot of female chef owners and restaurateurs are required to do that or do have restaurants that do that. I think it's confusing when a female restaurateur is just doing business. I don't really feel like I'm just seen as someone else who does business.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's exactly what I'm relating to. And I guess when we talk about food and identity, you reference your Pakistani roots, but you don't overly identify it and connect it to your work, which is something that I really admire because connecting to that labeling narrative, who we are, what our background and history is can be separate to what we do. It doesn't always need to connect, but obviously it shapes what we do.
SPEAKER_00:Of course, yeah. It's all our memory bank. It's very interesting. You mentioned that again because when I did my MA at SOAS, I did the Anthropology of Food MA, and I think part of me was like, oh, it would be so much easier if I lean into this kind of story of my ethnicity. And actually, what I would say on that point is like not everyone's ethnic backstory is comfortable or for sale or something that they really want to talk about. Like in my example, there's lots of different people in my life that come and go, and actually that makes food memories quite difficult because some of them are very tense, or some of them are experiences that I don't keep in my life any longer. But the thing about the food memory and the curse of the food memory is that it never leaves you. And so those tensions for a lot of people exist. And I think the industry has this kind of blanket approach in some ways to like trying to coax these stories out of people on the assumption that they're gonna get some kind of like fantastic grandmother story out of it. And actually, for a lot of, you know, for some people I know because I speak to them, it's we don't want to give, give, give and open up to the point where those tensions and those like internal struggles are public property, they're ours and mine in my family to deal with. But the food memories, they stick and you can't fight them. And that is what's really special about food is that when those memories come up, they can be tense and they can be really sad, and you could be like, I wish I wasn't imagining this dish right now, I wish I wasn't tasting this thing right now. So there are two sides to it. And when I went to SOAS to do my MA, I read a lot and understood the broad, you know. I think I'd seen restaurants and food and kind of identity and culture purely from a restaurant perspective, and I was bored of that. I was really dying for some other perspective, which is why I signed up to that MA, which is the Anthropology of Food programme at SOAS, and it really opened up my way of thinking. And to your point about not channeling everything through the restaurant, there's a lot that I learned in that course, which was a lot more to do about storytelling and research and kind of linking up of theories and kind of understanding food on a deeper level, but not all of it needs to end up in my restaurant. A lot of it just ended up with me, and it ended up helping me understand my food journey, you know. And one of the things, for example, is like a theory that I kind of had for a little while. But when I was young, I also got very obsessed with Mexican food, like obsessed, you know, and I worked in Mexican restaurants and bars because I was that interested in it. You know, it wasn't just a passing interest, like, oh, I love burritos, you know, it was like I really am interested in this culture. I need to go and work with these restaurants. And again, this is pre-Rita's, so this is like 2009. I was young and I sought out the best Mexican restaurants in London. I went to work there. We don't have a Mexican restaurant, you know. I'm not the person that people come to for an authority on Mexican food, and I'm certainly not one, but I definitely put in the time to learn a bit about it. And I think something I came to realize is that at the time I found that cuisine, I was feeling a lot of tension around my identity, but I love food, and I was in restaurants and always been in food environments, at latched onto Mexican food because it made a lot of sense to the way that I'm used to eating. The ingredients really crossed over, yeah. Like the use of raw onion, the use of raw chilies on the side, the use of breads like roties, the use of your hands, the motion of it and the physical interaction with that cuisine satisfied something in me, but didn't challenge me or hurt me. Which I don't know, I think that's very interesting. And I really like learned that through my study of myself when I was doing the MA. I mean, yeah, I was questioning the world of food, but really I was going through that MA thinking, what's going on with me?
SPEAKER_02:I think everything isn't to be shared. I think when we live in the generation of food that we live in, that's surrounded by too much content, is that there's a very fine line between public and private. So you almost have to make an internal statement to yourself if you work in food, to be like, there's some stuff that I'm just going to do for myself because I protect that for myself. And then other stuff is to be shared, and that boundary is really important. Otherwise, everybody's looking for a story, and everyone's looking for the over-identification piece or the hook. And it's not always necessary. What I like about your second-ish is that you're connecting all of this to something that is largely English and that is largely Indian. So, like any South Asian kid growing up in the UK will get this.
SPEAKER_00:I hope so. Yeah, they all get this. My number one thing. And this is like if I'm sad, if I'm hungover, and I've got period pains or whatever, or if I'm just, you know, when you have like a piss-off day, you're just like everyone piss off. Cheese on toast, very basic cheese on toast, but with lime pickle. It's amazing. It's so good. I mean, because cheese on toast is the most basic, comforting food, you know, standard, the most boring as well. And I do mine with like nice cheddar and stuff. But it's the pickle, and it's just like it's obviously just a great flavor, but I think like it's more the motion. It's the jar of pickle is in the fridge. I don't have it with every meal, I don't have it very often, it lasts forever. So it's like a loyal totem, like it's just in the fridge at the back, usually, and it's just that thing of like it's a very personal thing to me. It's like, I'm here, I'm having this cheese on toast, I'm doing, I'm going through a motion, but I need this to feel like mine, and I need it to do something for me. And it's like getting in the jar, digging out a nice bit, and just you know, smushing it on the top. And I don't eat that in front of other people, not because I'm ashamed of it, it's just my thing. I wouldn't have it, you know. It's interesting, I wouldn't really have it if we were at home chilling, you know, on the you know, one evening. It's purposefully my thing, and I kind of go for it quite a lot, actually. Also, lime pickle is just the best, it's just such an evocative flavour. Was it sweet lime pickle that's like grated, or was it the chunky pieces? Chunky one, which actually is quite difficult on cheese on toast. You've got to get the knife in the jar and kind of break it up a little bit, and it's always a bit frantic as well, because the thing is the cheese on toast, you want to eat at the optimum time, you know. That's just what cheese on toast does to you. But it's kind of this frantic thing of like I've got to get the pickle on it at the right time, and also it's the cold pickle from the fridge and the kind of hot melting cheese. And I think that's the duality thing. The comfort in that is not necessarily just the pickle of a taste that I have known or nostalgia. It's the two of them. The comfort is the two of them. That's the grounding, it's the berry bog standard, cheese on toast. Everyone eats that, and then my thing, and then as a whole, they make the comfort, it's not one or the other.
SPEAKER_02:We had a very similar one. So before the days of sourbread, warbitons, extra thick, toasted. So we're from a Gujarati family. So mum would make. I think the the great thing is that we grew up with condiment central. There was always a condiment for everything, right?
SPEAKER_00:Well, that's what I was gonna say. It's all about condiments.
SPEAKER_02:There was just like jars and jars of condiments, always something bubbling away or fermenting away that you're not gonna eat for another three months. So there's this garlic chutney, which is basically garlic, uh, red chili powder, cumin, fresh chilies, ground into a really thick paste with a bit of olive oil. And then what we did was got to a point it's like it's too spicy for us as kids. So we mixed it with butter to basically make it a spicy garlic butter, and then have that as separate. So you'd get toast, butter, red Lester, because obviously from Leicester, cucumber slices. Of course. Yeah, so we'd have like this toasted cucumber and cheese and garlic chutney sandwich with like some Walker's ready salted crisps, which doesn't make sense to anybody. And then you've got your friend that comes over and they're like, What are you having? I'm like, I'm having the spicy version. Do you want this one, or do you want just cucumber and cheese? And then you give them the option. What did they go for? I think the neighbors actually went for the spicy versions, but they'd have it with a glass of milk.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Maybe secretly they'd like to come over and have the Indian food that was there, you know. That was like a little bit different.
SPEAKER_00:I like the duality of it, and it's almost like the fusion cuisine, which I don't find anything wrong with. If you're British Asian, like you're allowed to enjoy and feel connection, you don't have to retreat. It's that's the same as saying somebody go back home, and you're like, but this is my home. You know, that's a stupid thing to say because it's my home, it's my parents' home, it's everybody's home. So, like, I don't personally feel that I often identify with the feeling of like retreating to a place of comfort through food because all my comforts have come together in this multitude of things, and I would rather embrace that than feel like I have to go somewhere to experience safety and comfort through through food. And I think that's something that's maybe less spoken about, but it's really okay to have a cheese sandwich with lime pickle. That's the most British. I mean, you can buy it all in Tesco, so that's the test, right? It's not some niche thing that you know you've got to seek out to like find your flavor of home. You can buy it all in any corner shop basically, and that to me is the most British thing. I mean, we have the World Food Isle now. World Food, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:The World Food Isle is like old El Paso or like they have five kilo bag rice, which obviously doesn't fit in the normal area, so there needs to be in the world food.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, it's a world thing.
SPEAKER_02:Building comfort at home for yourself and having these moments where you're able to go into your own fridge and buy cheese that's amazing for you and have your pickle and this taste of home and this comfort and joy, and then doing that for other people who don't have that is a very different feeling and being in that service. Yeah. When you work in food, you get a very clear understanding of how much we waste, you get a very clear understanding of how many people do not eat, you get a very stark understanding of the cost of everything, and so sometimes that divide in my head, anyway, it's even clearer of I must make sure that I'm doing something to fill the gap.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Talk us through your last memory. Like, what is volunteering as an act for you?
SPEAKER_00:So I'm not wanna be someone who's like, oh, I volunteer, you know, I definitely don't volunteer enough, and I don't think anybody volunteers enough. There are some people who are amazing community organizers, like Jenny Lau and people who do open door community kitchen, and these are like East London references. But as you mentioned, you're so aware of the other side of the food world. Like restaurants are not the food industry, the food industry is all food. Yes, and restaurants are the final frontier. Restaurants are the last shop window, I say. Like we do it really well. The restaurant chef is the most, you know, amazing, talented, skillful person. The work that the servers do is incredible. You know, we all do amazing work, but it's the final shop window of things that have been done for a long time before, when the food is in the land, when it's being picked, all that all the other work, but also then on an institutional level and on a sociological level, the restaurant does something very different with food than those places do. So the particular experience that I have a strong memory of is my first overnight volunteering shift, which I did at Crisis, which is a homelessness charity, and I volunteered for them over Christmas for a few years in a row, and I volunteered in the kitchen, and I just was so blown away. It's that thing of communal eating, people coming together, and it's I guess similar to Sunday roast, but it was a Christmas dinner. And I've never been in a kitchen in that way. I've been in lots of kitchens and I've been in a lot of services, and I've been in a lot of times where it's like, you know, the dish needs to go out. It just was really humbling and provided good perspective on the work that we do to be involved in a kitchen team that was without recipes and with kind of donated food, you know, decent food, working to make a Christmas meal for people overnight. I just remember we made this huge sticky toffee pudding, but everyone had a different idea of how to make a sticky toffee pudding. I had to really fight to keep my restaurant brain out of it because my logical brain was like, guys, stop for a second, let's decide on a recipe, stop chucking stuff in because then we're going to end up with some random thing. And I just had to let myself go with it, and it ended up like a really great meal. But it was just seeing that many people come together to cook for other people and then understanding separately, which is quite sad when the people were eating the food, we would sit in the dining room with them. And I just learned a lot about the autonomy, the thing about autonomy around what we eat. We're so lucky to choose what we want to eat at any given time, you know. And these meals that are prepared, that are prepared with care, and actually sometimes there's a lot of care, but there's also like not a begrudgingness, but like a it's an obligation, it just needs to get done. What was interesting, it's not lots of people being like, oh, we must go and volunteer and it's so special. It's just it comes down to these 150 people need to eat today, and we've just got to feed them. And it's not loaded in that emotional way that I think a lot of times volunteering is wrapped up in or these kind of services are. On a practical level, people just need to eat and somebody needs to go and cook the food and feed them. Yeah, and then we sat in the dining room and it was a Christmas meal, and it was just interesting to see what that meant for a lot of people. Again, you know, tension in food is something that I think people really don't like to talk about, but certainly for some people that meal actually was uncomfortable. Yeah. Because they may have lost their family at Christmas or they may have not had a family Christmas before. It's interesting when you kind of have to provide this meal en masse to people, and there's this assumption that it means something. And it's just we have to really check ourselves and be like, what does this actually mean for these people? And then the other thing being that I really learned is that people won't eat certain things if they are on the streets because of access to bathrooms. So some of the people were like avoiding certain things on their plate, and I just hadn't thought about food in this way as like a utter inconvenience, actually. Like they're like, Well, I'm not gonna eat that because I'm leaving here tomorrow, and I'm planning their day, like around what they're gonna put in their body and kind of linking back to, I guess, to our guts and everything. This kind of very unexpected connection to like the use of a toilet, it just really had an impact on me that I'd gone there as somebody who's like, oh, volunteer, you know, let me do my thing. And actually, it's functional, you've got to get the job done. Timings really matter. At the end of the day, it's a service that needs to be done, but you can't expect to be the hero. It's not like, wow, you saved Christmas. It was just very different to that. And as you know, I worked with Lucy at Food Behind Bars and I had a very similar experience. The crisis meal was a very joyous occasion, yeah. It was very special, but it just was these small little vignettes and insights into the fact that this kind of meal can mean so many different things for lots of different people. And I really learned from that, and I really just had to check myself. And then with regards to Food Behind Bars, which is a prison charity that you know well, I believe, and Lucy has obviously been on your podcast. Just the first time I went into a prison with Lucy, it's just a different experience, but it just really reminded me that the autonomy around what to put in your body and when is something that is so special, and we're so lucky to have it. And what Food Behind Bars is doing is really trying to bring that autonomy, those kind of choices to the prisons, and to have gone in there and seen the impact of just what it feels like to be asked what you want to eat, particularly when my job is asking people what they want to eat. I think that's where those kind of outside pursuits come from. It's sort of just contextualising the work for me. Like, you know, people who eat in restaurants are very lucky and we love looking after them, but there's also this whole other world of food that I think we as restaurant people should know about to help us understand our work better.
SPEAKER_02:I was just thinking as you were talking, how to summarize this conversation. And I think the one word that comes to mind is communion. There's like everything we've talked about here, and each memory that you've talked about, whether it's sitting yesterday and dining with people from all different places around the world, the food cuisine that's currently existing in France, to what exists in the United Kingdom, to being in New York, to also having a restaurant in Soho, to also understanding the role that you play in terms of your own food identity, but also feeding others. Everything is about communion. And I think one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the podcast is because I think that narrative around communion and ensuring that there's a value around communion, and where can I ensure that there is communion in every space, right? And everything largely that you've talked about today is about the constant exploration of communion around food. So whether it's sitting in the pub and watching everybody eat the same thing or eating shellfish in all different environments. I think largely that's the type of culture we need to be encouraging a little bit more, is to say that like being the final frontier of food is only just one chapter as a being an actor in the larger food chain, right? Yeah. There are so many different people who have roles, and there are also so many more people that need to be fed. You see, it's been such a lovely conversation.
SPEAKER_00:It really covered a lot of ground.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's the type of conversation that I love to have. It's nostalgic, it's emotion. I think we also discover parts of ourselves that we didn't really know were connected in different ways. So thank you so much for taking the time and being on the podcast. I loved it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Hey there, folks. Now, if you liked what you just listened to and you felt as if maybe there was something in that story that was quite interesting, please like, subscribe, and actually share the podcast and introduce it to your friend or your mum or your mate or your neighbour. We like to have a community easy. And if you feel like it, follow us on Instagram at the EvertyPlace Podcast.