Latest news with #IsaacMcHale
Sky News
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sky News
'We charge diners £225 for our tasting menu - here's why it's worth every penny'
Our Money blog team interviews chefs from around the UK, hearing about their cheap food hacks and more. This week, we chat to Isaac McHale, the owner of the two Michelin-starred restaurant Clove Club in London's Shoreditch... My go-to mid-week dinner is... a fried egg on Japanese white rice with furikake, which is the Japanese seasoning mix for sprinkling on a bowl of rice. You can buy this on Amazon or get it from an Asian supermarket for a couple of quid, and buy some Japanese rice while you're at it. I cook the rice and fry an egg gently, then serve the rice with the furikake sprinkled over and a fried egg on top. On the side, I steam some broccoli and stir-fry it with a tiny bit of butter, garlic and a teaspoon of soy sauce. You can always use non-Japanese rice too if you want, and try a few different furikake mixes until you find your favourite. A 50g bag for £4 or £5 will do you eight bowls of rice so it's about 50p a portion - great value for money. My favourite cheap place to eat where I live is... Singburi, the amazing Thai place that raced into the National Top 100 restaurants. I can't remember which critic reviewed it, but all of a sudden it was even more rammed and impossible to get into than before. Industry folk loved it, they'd all go and suggest only ordering from the blackboard. You could get salted fish and rice for £9.50, or poached squid salad for £13. I am sad to say chef Sirichai Kularbwong has closed down his site here, so I'll be travelling to Shoreditch for the new opening instead, which is just round the corner from Bar Valette and The Clove Club. And the one to watch is... Short Road Pizza, which our neighbour Ugo started in lockdown. For now, you can find them at 199 Cambridge Heath Road at the 3 Colts Tavern in Bethnal Green. Amazing pizza, especially with the major pizza hype happening at the moment. Thin base, good crust. I order the Mark Buffalo, with pickled habanero chilli, from the specials' menu. You really don't get much for a wine under a tenner now... but I buy a Chilean pinot noir for £9.75 on GoPuff sometimes and it is great. Rio Rica pinot noir comes in about 15 minutes straight to your door with other groceries. One restaurant in the UK worth blowing out for is... The Ledbury - I am biased after six years working there, but it is the best. The restaurant is 20 years old this year but gets better every time you visit. The impact of the budget means... at Bar Valette, we're taking the very same ingredients you find at The Clove Club (with two Michelin stars) and serving them in a simpler way in a more relaxed setting. We're by no means reducing the quality of what we're working with so that we can provide a cheaper experience. There's a misconception that running restaurants is always very profitable... If more people understood the costs of running a restaurant, and what the impact of new government regulations are having in terms of staff costs and importing produce, they'd be a little more receptive towards our ethos at Bar Valette. I am cooking whole fish, supporting the small boat fishermen who risk their lives every day going out to catch the freshest fish, and I am happy to pay fair prices so they can live a life, and then charge fair prices for them in the restaurant. I also want to make sure my staff are paid well enough and that their salaries reflect the mass inflation we're experiencing everywhere at the moment. The best city in the world to eat in is... Tokyo. You can eat well from high-end restaurants to simple noodles ordered from a vending machine, like at Butagumi (the original old shop location). The last time I was there, it was around £20 for the breaded pork cutlet, rice, soup and salad set meal lunch. And I love great soba restaurants like Ittoan. Sushi counter restaurants often have cheap lunch sets too. Special mention to Mexico City too for delicious tacos and bright sunny happy vibes. Check out El Higualdense for barbacoa goat tacos and pulque, open for breakfast and lunch. I remember vividly watching the 2012 Olympics there at 8am while eating delicious goat tacos and saying no to the fermented pineapple pulque drink. And go to El Turix in upmarket Polanco for Cochinita pibil - a yucatan braised suckling pig, served on panuchos, bean-filled toastadas. Michelin food is not the tastiest food there is... the tastiest food is cooked with care, love and skill, and that could be anywhere, stars or no stars. But a Michelin star is a recognition of a level of skill and quality in the level of cooking. The tastiest things I've eaten in the past 12 months have been from all parts of the world, from tiny neighbourhood places to high-end ones. The pesto pasta at Chez Davia in the French town of Nice was life-changing... and they haven't got a Michelin star or official recognition of any kind. Ganbara in San Sebastian also doesn't boast a Michelin star but is one of the most recognised pintxos bars in the world. At the same time, you can go to The Chairman, Hong Kong, which is near impossible to get a table at, with no Michelin star but it's ranked in The World's 50 Best Restaurants. The whole meal there was amazing. If fine dining is going to have a prosperous future, we need... lower interest rates, wealth inequality, energy prices and the budget deficit and higher GDP and disposable incomes. Easy right? Apart from that, the industry needs to adapt, as it always has, to an ever-changing landscape politically and financially, while keeping its feet on the ground so that it doesn't become so expensive that it is completely out of reach of most people. That doesn't mean being cheap. It's an industry of labour-intensive, high ingredient cost experiences, that bring people loads and loads of joy. But the headwinds facing the industry risk us having to increase prices so much in order to still be viable businesses, and in doing so we price out the vast majority of people who used to be able to come to a fine dining restaurant for a special occasion, and might not be able to in the future. This is caused by... factors way out of our control from tariffs and the reduction in business spending caused by it, from real estate price changes caused by hybrid working and upward only rent reviews, from government policy to Labour trailing doom budgets for six months in the news before they happen. Growth slows as a result of the drip feed of bad news. But people aren't going to stop eating. And people aren't going to stop appreciating delicious food and wines and great service, so there will always be a demand for fine dining and the best places will always remain. We charge £225 for an eight-course tasting menu... that sounds like a lot but it pays for 16 to 18 people working from morning to night, to make fresh bread, fresh butter, chocolates, ice cream and everything else fresh, using the best ingredients we can buy, rare breed meats aged in-house and line-caught fish, to create delicious, amazing food and special memories for our guests every day. It also includes six small bites before the meal, and chocolates and small cakes after. It isn't cheap, but you get a lot of labour and hard work for your money, along with an unforgettable meal. The weirdest request a customer ever made was... a person who wanted Tabasco sauce on each course - we didn't have any in the kitchen but we offered the guest some of our homemade chilli sauce we use for staff meals. She went home and wrote us a one-star review on Google saying the restaurant is awful because we didn't have Tabasco for her to drown her food in. Or the no dairy person asking if she could have the creme brulee after we jumped through hoops to make alterations all through her meal. "Sorry, it has cream in it." "Oh that's ok, I'll have it anyway." Grrrrr.
The Guardian
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Bar Valette, London E2: ‘How to be truly relaxed while paying £11 for a bowl of kale' Grace Dent on restaurants
Bar Valette in Shoreditch is a casual, relaxed, laid-back, let's-go-with-the-flow type of restaurant. It serves modern European food and caters to the kind of audience who follow restaurant news in much the same way as others follow opera gossip or Formula One, and they'll book out of sheer curiosity to experience this all-new, deeply chilled affair from Isaac McHale, chef/owner of the two Michelin-starred Clove Club nearby. We were led to believe that Bar Valette would not be at all like that well-known destination-dining spot. Not as formal. More come as you are. Clapshot croquettes (that's mashed swede and potato, by the way), chicken in a basket, fancy fish with spuds, flan for pudding. The prices, however, aren't informal at all and are very much still wearing tuxes, cummerbunds and spats. Small plates from £16 and snacks at £11. Want spuds with that? That'll be £9, please. Watching the old guard of enfants terribles noughties Michelin chefs do 'informal' is all rather fascinating. These people flew in the face of formality over a decade ago, chipping away at all the stuffiness and forlock-tugging, and making dinner at the Ritz seem like a prison sentence. Now those same chefs are opening places like Bar Valette to show us how to be truly relaxed while paying £11 for a bowl of kale. But, guys, how much more chilled can we get? While the Clove Club is in the rather grand Shoreditch town hall, Bar Valette is just a room overlooking a busy east London bus route. A glass-fronted room with brick walls painted white, a blackboard for wines and specials, and jars of chickpeas and white asparagus used as decor. We began with Vichy Catalan, at £6.50 per bottle, but, spotting that I was a non-drinker, they kindly offered to make me a non-alcoholic spritz with a shot of Sylva Padauk topped with soda. I notice only later that they charged me £18.50 plus service for the privilege. Two apparently complimentary devilled crab tarts appear – pretty unmemorable, but, hey, a gift … and added to the bill at £12. Fried boned chicken – reportedly bathed in buttermilk, though that might just be conjecture – is £14 and, in a nod to the Clove Club's rabble-rousing era, comes in a basket and on a bed of pine branches. Fried Torbay prawns turn up, shell on and inviting us to crunch our way through their sweet tails and heads. For £27. A basket of perfectly nice swiss chard and ricotta barbajuans keep us happy while we chat, even though they're £11. Gosh, we've spent some money so far at this draughty table near the door. For mains, fabada Asturiana arrives – a sticky pork and bean stew featuring blood sausage and belly pork – and then something curious happens: there is a lump of hard plastic in it, which my guest, mistaking it for some pork offcut or other, initially tries to eat before retrieving it from his mouth. 'Oh God!' I mutter. 'This will cause chaos.' That's because this is an expensive restaurant, and while they may not be serious about, say, wallpaper, errors of this kind generally lead to kitchen staff offering to fall on their swords. So I brace for the rumpus. 'Oh, I am sorry,' our server says, and whisks the offending item off to the kitchen. We wait. But no further word or explanation is forthcoming, and the stew stays on the bill. Alert, alert: in the smart, cool dining stakes, I think we may have hit Peak Relaxed Mode. No sane diner pines for the days of the special-occasion restaurant, where servers scowled while you fumbled over the 10 terrifying cutlery options. But the etiquette used to be that if a stew cost £26, someone would care if it contained miscellaneous plastic packaging. Two plump lamb chops 'with spicy mayo' are up next, and at £11 a pop. Then some red mullet fillets with a green olive emulsion for – reach for your smelling salts here – £44. One large potato, sliced up and sauteed in duck fat, was £9. A lump of Stichelton with two figs was another £14. By this stage, we are £249 poorer for this experience. We exit, feeling a bit befuddled and glancing around for anyone who might care to say good bye, but Bar Valette is not the sort of place where people stand on ceremony. 'Is the white asparagus in those decorative jars the same white asparagus that they have on the menu for £16?' my guest wondered. 'If so, that's fairly brass-necked.' It's hard to say, but I do know that everything is informal here except the price. Bar Valette 28–30 Kingsland Road, London E2, 020-3976 0076. Open Tues-Sat 5-11pm, dinner only. From about £80 a head, plus drinks and service. The next episode of Grace's Comfort Eating podcast is out on Tuesday 25 March – listen to it here
