Restaurants

Ideally, going round a London food market should be all oohing and aahing at ornate loaves of bread, local organic ostrich meat and queuing for chorizo sausage sandwiches. But sadly, if you want to do it like the professionals, the truth is a tad more taxing. It means waking up at 3am, driving a large van through a series of heavily-manned barriers and ploughing pensively up and down two grey aisles under neon lights in search of what’s good. In the winter, this is no fun, since nature all but shuts down and what’s good – at least in Europe – is severely limited. But now that spring is finally here, the stalls are rippling with fresh new fruit and veg, the selection of which changes and improves daily.
Feature continues

Time Out tucks in

‘Touch everything. If it doesn’t look and feel good, don’t buy it,’ says renowned vegetable lover and Michelin-starred chef Alexis Gauthier of Pimlico restaurant Roussillon. I’m accompanying Gauthier on a trip to the New Covent Garden Market in Nine Elms, Vauxhall. Gauthier’s love of fresh produce is obviously of the highest order: when we meet at the industrial main entrance at 4am, he bounds out of his SUV fresh as a daisy and full of excitement. Not surprising, perhaps, for a man who heralds spring with dishes such as ‘pea and its shoots’, ‘purple asparagus’ and ‘large new season Kentish carrots’.

Hundreds of restaurants rely on this market for fresh, seasonal produce as well as top-end staples like gourmet sugars, salts, oils, pickles, chocolate and smoked fish. Supermarkets, which used to buy their stock from Covent Garden, started going direct to suppliers to cut costs in the late ’70s, so the market has quietened considerably since then, but New Covent Garden Market is still an enormous operation with 250 companies employing 2,500 people and 4,500 vehicles entering daily.

‘New’ in this case actually means since 1974. As traffic congestion and ever- larger delivery vehicles increasingly obstructed commerce, the market was moved from its elegant Palladian setting in the West End to this less romantic 56-acre site. However the market couldn’t stray too far because the government insisted, and still insists, on retaining a wholesale food market in central London.

Once through the barriers, we park beside a no-nonsense shed. This is the office of First Choice, the company employed to source the best of the market for Gauthier and some of London’s other top chefs, including Gordon Ramsay. We are met by Clive Thornicroft, one of First Choice’s scouts extraordinaires, who, according to Gauthier, ‘knows how to choose exactly the right radish.’ We skirt a few preliminary crates of leeks and romaine, noting how the initial supermarket smell gives way to a sweeter, more complex scent as we come to the first ‘buyer’s walk’ (there are two). Before us is the equivalent of a catwalk for fruit and vegetables. Each trader has a neat few square feet in which to show his wares, just in from France or Italy or Norfolk. This is the free market at its purest: prices are set daily in response to demand and supply.