Behind the scenes at Scully, a London restaurant where diners can be chef for the day
Whether it's a tour of the National Theatre, the Royal Opera House, the kitchens of the Ritz or the parts of St Paul’s Cathedral that visitors never normally see, going backstage and behind the scenes is always eye-opening.
Only my friend Henrietta could have unearthed this particular gem of a culinary backstage stint – she’s an enthusiast, and enthusiasts make things happen.
Scully is the eponymous first restaurant of Ramael Scully, previously head chef of Ottolenghi’s Nopi, and it opened in St James’s Market, close to Piccadilly Circus, in March last year. Reviewers have fallen over themselves to praise his truly transnational cooking which reflects both his Chinese, Indian, Balinese and Irish heritage and his life, which has taken him from childhood in Malaysia, training in Sydney and extensive travels and work in the Middle East, Russia and Europe.
Henrietta was an early customer at Scully, which is backed by the Ottolenghi family and decorated with an array of brightly coloured jars of pickles, syrups, shrubs, preserves, fermented fruit and vegetables, made and prepped by Scully and his team. Henrietta brought her sister, her children, her friends, and me. She sat at the bar that looks in to the open kitchen and she chatted to Scully.
“I love your restaurant”, she said.
“Come and join us”, replied Scully, "we take two people every Tuesday. They help in the kitchen and in return we give them lunch in the restaurant”.
“How much does it cost?” asked Henrietta, fearing the worst. “Nothing. We want to share what we are doing with people who are interested”.
Wow. It seems too good to be true: we get to nose around in a top restaurant kitchen and then fed a four-course lunch with wine, all for free. I jumped at the chance to join Henrietta, starting at a leisurely 10.30am with cups of excellent coffee brought to us by Will, the smiling restaurant manager.
It never ceases to amaze me how great food can be produced from the tiniest of spaces. At Scully, there is a small (but state of the art) kitchen open to view where Scully and a small band of chefs beaver away. Downstairs are storerooms and a space just big enough for three of us to work on food preparation.
Delightful Brazilian Ramiro Gasparotto was in charge. We tried hard to get on with our work, laying out vegetables and beef tendons (yes) on trays for the dehydrator, marinating broccoli in whey, preparing rich mushroom stocks and garum (an ancient Roman fish sauce), vacuum packing wafer-thin slices of mouli with spoonfuls of homemade miso sauce, splitting lengthways and deseeding a pile of chillis and another of poponcini peppers. But we did an awful lot of talking and asking questions too, which Ramiro took entirely in his stride. We learnt about the rhythm of the kitchen, how preparations for dishes are begun days in advance and how the philosophy is ‘nose to tail’, so that nothing is wasted.
“What does Scully want to achieve with his cooking?” we asked.
“Just one word” replied Ramiro: “Tasty”.
Our four hours in the prep kitchen whizzed by in a flash. And our ‘payment’ for inexpertly cutting up their veg and stirring their stock? The most delicious four-course lunch, including many of the dishes we had helped to make, and more: puff beef tendons, tomato pancetta Kilpatrick, and oyster mayo; chargrilled broccoli, Chinkiang vinegar and salted egg yolk; forbidden rice, vegetable XO, daikon and turnip; barbcued Galician octopus, smoke port XO, pickled daikon and cavolo nero; beef short rib pastrami, fermented turnip and sour wood ear mushroom; jicama crusted with lemon myrtle crusted, and poponcini pepper cream.
We were looked after beautifully and made to feel special. They even thanked us. But it was for us to thank them.
Scully, 4 St James’s Market, London SW1Y 4AH (020 3911 6840; scullyrestaurant.com).
