Toby is holding a plastic bag full of red liquid a little too light to be blood. Strawberry soup, to go on a panacotta, he tells me: “Strawberry and basil, it works quite nicely.” Taps run, fans murmur, and metal clicks on metal as he pours the soup into tiny jugs.
Toby, bald and wearing a striped apron over chef’s whites, places five strawberries upside down in the bowls on the counter. Walking over to a workbench in the corner, he cuts a strip off a foamy green slab, slices the strip lengthwise into two, then dices one of the strips into tiny cubes and puts the cubes at the base of the strawberries, ready for the strawberry sorbet in the middle.
“Chef, this is ready to go?” the waiter asks. “No, no,” Toby replies.
Back in the corner, he runs an ice cream scoop along a tub of pink sorbet three times, then scrapes the excess off with his thumb before placing the sorbet in the middle of the bowl.
The waiter goes to grab the plates. “No! When you hear ‘service’, that is when you go,” says Toby, with no hint of exasperation. “No time earlier, right? I will let you know.”
Next, he pipes some rhubarb purée on to slices of custard tart. Another waiter comes and tries to take the tray upstairs. “No, no, I have just got the ice cream,” Toby says, still patient, before repeating the scooping ritual with white ice cream. When it is on the tarts he declares, finally: “Now it is service!”
Toby. Image: Michael Cheetham
With that, the last dish of lunch is served. It is just the third lunch service in the history of the restaurant, Home Kitchen. Fine dining is on the menu, yet these hiccups are to be expected – not just tolerated but part of the process. Toby is an old hand, here to mentor, but what makes Home Kitchen different special even – is where many of the other staff come from.
The idea for Home Kitchen was born while its founders were working with a Central London soup kitchen and realised there were hundreds of thousands of hospitality vacancies at the same time as hundreds of thousands of people were living in homelessness.
So how to match birds with stones? Home Kitchen is the answer. Its trainees, who have all experienced homelessness in some form, are paid the London Living Wage as well as travel expenses. At the same time, they are given professional training and then sent on to culinary school after completing 90 days with Home Kitchen. Their stories come together to deliver a fine dining experience for punters in Primrose Hill, chiefly in the shape of a £65 six-course tasting menu. The waiter is one of those training up, learning the codes, gestures and unspoken chemistry of the kitchen.
With backing including finance from Big Issue Invest, the restaurant opened in September – and that same week they let Big Issue hang out in the kitchen, speak to its trainees and staff and see how it all comes together.
For customers, the restaurant is easy to find, a short walk from Chalk Farm tube station. But the staff have taken a more complicated route here. Assistant cook Paul, who is trimming turbot into 50-gram pieces, gained his cooking qualifications in prison. Kitchen porter Patrick has struggled to pay his rent, battling the council over benefits. Ade, another porter, was homeless, “hanging around on the bus”. Pastry chef Mimi slept rough after running away from an abusive family and struggled for two years to find a job. Here, joking with each other, they say they’ve found a family already.
Ade
“We have all got to know each other as a little family,” says Mimi. “I got nervous to meet new people. But meeting everyone, finding out everyone has got their own issues, their own story, I don’t feel alone. I feel like there are people out there with a similar story to me. My passion is to cook. I never thought I would be in a professional kitchen cooking with a chef like Adam.”
That cook, by the way, is Adam Simmonds. He’s the executive chef of Home Kitchen. He also has two Michelin stars.
‘Home Kitchen is the most humbling experience I’ve ever had’
Opening a restaurant is, very obviously, hard work. As I talk to Simmonds in the “PDR” – that’s private dining room to me and you – with receipts covering the table, that’s clear. But the work has involved more than the usual.
Simmonds and another director have spent time over the last couple of days to find temporary accommodation for one member of staff who became homeless. “For me, we’re not just employers. We have a duty of care also. For me, I can’t just go up the stairs, shut the door, and say fuck it. It’s not about that,” he says. “He said he hasn’t had help like that since being out of prison.”
The challenge is this: can he deliver high-class, profit-making food, all while training up the staff to propel them to a brighter future? The secret, for now, lies in simplicity, consistency, and tolerance. Mistakes will happen – and must be allowed to happen, he says.
“There is a very fine line between doing the right thing and stepping over the boundary,” says Simmonds. “If we step in too early, they’re going to back off and think, ‘OK, I can’t do this’.”
To that end, the menu has been simplified to help trainees get into a routine, learning through repetition and structure. Take the lamb, which is cooked in a water bath with a temperature probe, making it easier to replicate. But then the chefs must render the fat, putting the lamb in a cold pan, pressing it, and leaving it. This has proved hard to recreate every time at this stage of their training, so Simmonds has swapped it for chicken. For the egg custard tart dessert, the trick is in cooking the tart at the right temperature and filling the casing just enough. It requires consistency.
“I need to be mindful that we’re not doing too many elements. From a consistency point of view, we need to almost reduce the hand movements,” explains Simmonds. “This is about giving them an opportunity and showing them that they can grow with the business. It’s probably the most humbling experience I’ve had. I think going back to basics is always a good thing, even for me.”
But could this project be the path to Simmonds’ third star? “Some of the other directors have said about a star. A star takes years, it’s a trained kitchen. With that comes a massive pressure. To put our staff under that pressure day in, day out is not the right thing to do right now. Who knows what may happen in the future,” he says.
Assistant cook Paul met one of the directors while he was working as a barista for Change Please. Standing in the kitchen, he feels somebody has shown faith in him. Simmonds tells me the first time Paul put his whites on, he had Simmonds take a picture for his girlfriend. “I have always loved cooking. My parents were from Jamaica, they always cooked,” he says. “It gives you escapism. It is like therapy.”
Ade, the kitchen porter, has been looking forward to the job for almost a year. Apart from his training, which included two weeks at Simmonds’ restaurant in the Megaro hotel, Ade has never worked in a kitchen before. “They are very concerned about your wellbeing, which is very important,” he says. Work has boosted his self-belief, as he adds: “I found out that if you put your mind to it then you can achieve anything.”
It has also made him dream, with a sense of the folklore of the restaurant business: “I would like to be part of the history, being able to say I am a founding member working with Home Kitchen.”
Simmonds has been impressed with his novice cohort’s progress. “They have the passion, the desire, and the willingness to learn and to go on and do other things,” he says. “That’s the most important thing. They will be successful, 100%.”
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