Q&A: Leigh Hartnett

Leigh is executive chef for Cubitt House, whose pubs include The Grazing Goat on New Quebec Street. Later this year, the group is opening a second Marylebone establishment—The Coach Makers Arms on Marylebone Lane.

So, what are the duties of an executive chef?

In a nutshell, everything. I have a business card a friend once made for me which included electrician, plumber, staff relations, head of supplies and lots of other things. The last thing on the list was cook. Every day is different, which is one of the things that I like most about the job. I might spend one day entirely in meetings and spend 16 hours in the kitchen the next. When questions come in from the different sites, my job is to deal with them. Essentially, I am a port of call for all the head chefs, senior sous chefs and the group head chef if they need anything.

In terms of the food, it is an overseeing role. I like all our head chefs to feel they have ownership of their kitchens, so they all write their own menus. Every chef develops their own style and I want them to feel they can express that freely, because they will produce better food if they do. This means each restaurant develops its own identity and individuality, within the Cubitt House style.

Where did your love of food come from?

I’m from New Zealand but my father was born in India, and that definitely influences my approach to food. One of the things that I really enjoy is the recent explosion we’ve seen in people’s knowledge of different styles of food. Take, for example, Asian street food: 10 to 15 years ago, not many people would have known about it. But now, not only are they aware of it, they have some knowledge of how it should taste. Being a chef in this environment is brilliant, it’s one of the things that keeps me interested.

What made you want to become a chef?

My mother wasn’t a fantastic all-round cook, but I have fond memories of making cakes and biscuits with her as a child, which is something she was very good at. The idea of cooking for a living came from speaking to the careers guys—looking at the subjects I was good at, which were mainly the sciences, and knowing I had loved the time spent cooking with my mum, we narrowed down the options to being a chef. I went with that and haven’t looked back.

You mentioned a Cubitt House style. Who determines that?

That brief is written by me and the higher management, and has several aspects. In fact, we have just finished writing a new one to tweak the direction of the food offering we provide. We went back to basics, thinking about what we wanted to offer. At heart, we serve good British cuisine, so the idea was to make sure that not too many dishes from other cuisines are on the menus—but it is incredibly important to differentiate between ingredients and cuisines here. The British have been using ingredients from around the world for centuries and they are deeply intertwined in British cooking. Oranges originally came from China, Worcestershire sauce from India, potatoes came over from South America, and all these are intrinsic to British cooking.

We also wanted to get across the quality of our suppliers and their total commitment to sustainability. Finally, we wanted to give our chefs the chance to really show their skills. A couple of the chefs we have come from Michelin-starred kitchens and they bring those skills and that approach into the group. So, while we are a country house pub group, we are definitely trying to elevate the level of what we offer.

Can you tell us a bit about those sustainable suppliers?

We get a lot of our meat from Lyons Hill Farm in Dorset. Mark Leatham, who owns the farm, is a champion of rare breeds, including his herd of white park, one of Britain’s oldest and finest breeds of cattle, which are delicious and wonderful to cook with. We get whole lamb and venison from him, and Mark also breeds Iron Age pigs, which we serve. Careful selective breeding, crossing the Tamworth pig with wild boar, has produced a hardy, wonderfully tasty pig that is as close as possible to the ones that would have roamed the country in the Iron Age.

We also work closely with Murray’s Fresh Fish, a wonderful supplier. We buy through them from Lyme Bay, which is a Blue Marine Foundation fishery—a model of sustainable fishing. They have set up an area in Dorset that is being extremely well run and offers sustainable levels of stock, including some fish that are otherwise on the restricted list from the Marine Stewardship Council. That’s why you will sometimes see those fish on our menus.There is also Trecorras Farm, which supplies us with wonderful kid goat—they buy the goats from the dairy industry, which has no use for them, and then rear them to sell them to restaurants.

Are you involved with the drinks offering?

We have a beverage manager, Sebastien Morice, who is in charge of the drinks, so that’s not something I get heavily involved in, but we do work closely together. Sometimes he will ask me about ingredients for creating cocktails, for example. He understands that chefs have a decent palate so will sometimes ask me to suggest flavours if something isn’t quite working. We work together well, but the overall responsibility for the drinks offering is his.

One of the things we have introduced this year and will definitely be prominent at The Coach Makers Arms is a greatly expanded range of bottled beers. We will also have a wider variety of beers on tap. Our wines are an eclectic mix—we have wines from small producers who use sustainable production practices alongside the more traditional. The idea is to have a wide choice. Some of them will be a bit more adventurous, but the classics will be there.

What else can we expect from The Coach Makers Arms?

The first thing is that we are putting the word ‘arms’ back into the name—previously it was The Coach Makers, but if you look at the top of the building there is a shield and it has the name Coach Makers Arms, so we decided to reinstate that. I mentioned that we have recently tweaked the Cubitt House food brief, and out of all our premises you will see this most clearly in The Coach Makers Arms. The most obvious area will be in the ‘specials’ menu, which will be roughly 50 per cent of the whole menu—a much higher percentage than we offer anywhere else. This will really allow the head chef, Andrew Tajudin, to showcase the wonderful produce of our suppliers at its very best. If one of them tells us they have something exceptional available at the moment, he and his team will have the flexibility to take it there and then to create something special for the customers.

So, for those who know The Grazing Goat, will The Coach Makers Arms feel different?

Yes, it will. Julian Pedraza, the head chef at The Grazing Goat, has been with us for eight years. He started at the bottom of the ladder and worked his way up, so he fully understands what The Grazing Goat offers to its customers. It has its own unique atmosphere and is probably the most like a traditional pub of all of our premises. While Julian creates some pretty amazing specials, and has a nicely varied menu, they still sell a lot of traditional pub dishes, like pies, burgers and fish and chips, which they do incredibly well. They have a grill section there—it’s the only one of our sites that has one, because it works so well. So, the two pubs will have familiar core ingredients but will definitely have a different feel.

Interview: Viel Richardson

Image: Christopher L Proctor