Restaurants

Dinner
At 6pm I brief the waiters on any important guests, menu changes and ways to serve the individual dishes. The waiters taste every menu alteration: specials change three times a week or even every day as fresh produce comes through.

Every fortnight I replace six or seven dishes as food comes in and out of season. I usually go to Borough, Billingsgate and New Covent Garden markets, but there’s also a great one behind Kensington Place now at the weekend [Notting Hill Farmers’ Market, Saturdays 9am-1pm]. Salmon, peppers, watermelon, lettuce, strawberries and apricots are all fantastic at the moment, as are peaches, red mullet, John Dory, lamb and courgette flowers. And I have people abroad with digital cameras who go around the markets of Paris, Milan, Bologna or elsewhere to take pictures and email them to me straight away, so I can see what a box of cherries looks like in Sicily or peas in Naples. Feature continues

The fun really begins at 7pm. The restaurant’s packed by 7.30pm, the bar’s rammed and we are on course to serve up to 200 people during the evening. I stress to my team that they must enjoy this part; we’ve worked all day on preparation to reach this point. Customers are here to spend a lot of money on fine food and wine. We’re all on show, and that’s what gets the adrenalin going.

Andy Needham tastes all the sauces

The kitchen is now, metaphorically speaking, on fire. In the centre we have the pass, which is the surface where I or my sous-chef oversees the dressing of every plate before it is carried off to table. In front of the pass is the sauce section, manned by two cooks. They might make stock one day and sauce the next. They also do all the meat and fish prep, one person always learning from the other. That’s how each corner of the kitchen works – a commis learns from his chef de partie or head of section, who in turn answers to one or all of my sous-chefs.

Next is pasta, which is the busiest area with two people cooking and another two making it. We hand-make all our pasta, eight different types a day, with great consideration for traditional recipes. I inspect it individually to make sure there are no holes, so the filling stays inside. The pasta section is the main heart of our kitchen – everything revolves around it.

Then there’s the starter section, where all the antipasti is made. This is manned by three people, with another two on service, dressing salads and slicing meats, and one new arrival cleaning the salad at the back or getting things from the fridge. He also puts away all the deliveries, takes produce out of boxes and puts it into containers. Without the knowledge of how to put produce away, you can’t even begin to wash it, peel it, cut it and cook it.