Interview: Mat Follas - Best served cool

Published on Friday 29 May 2009 20:19

AS TELEVISUAL moments go, it had everything: tears, tension and Take That. Mat Follas, the shaven-headed, goatee-bearded Kiwi – a man who looks like he was born to ride a Harley Davidson (which incidentally he does) – was crowned the winner of Masterchef 2009 to the strains of Greatest Day. And for Follas it was.

It's been six months since then and in that time Follas has quit his job as a manager at IBM and set about creating his own restaurant, Wild Garlic, which opens next month in his beloved Dorset. Sitting opposite him in the sun-filled Hadrian's brasserie at the Balmoral, I have to say he's looking remarkably calm for a man whose new venture "looks like a bomb site".

"I had a journalist in the other day and he was like, 'you're never going to open on time' and then he came back in the afternoon when we'd had a clean-up and he was like 'oh, actually I can suddenly see it'.

"I've done house renovations before, so it's fine. I kind of know what I'm looking at."

And there you have it. The secret ingredient in the Mat Follas recipe for success. Quiet confidence. I've only shared a rack of toast with the man, who's here to appear at this weekend's Taste of Edinburgh festival, but he's the kind of person you'd want to have around in a crisis. There's a certain calmness and he just looks so, well, happy.

The two Masterchef hosts, Greg Wallace and John Torode, loved Follas. Torode said: "Mat came in here and absolutely wowed us with food that was extraordinary in both presentation and flavour."

That's not to say it was easy. According to Follas, he screwed up in the semifinals because he was trying to do "what the judges wanted me to do".

"The dish I tried in the second semi was a complete disaster," he says straightforwardly. He's right: the fillet steak was uncooked and the smoked oysters had one of the food critics for whom the dish was made whining about "huge bogeys".

There was a bit of panic, Follas admits, but it was worth it because the experience marked a turning point. Until the final there was no clear winner of the competition. And until that very day, Follas had never managed to cook his dishes within the required time. But, like the best chefs, he delivered when it mattered. "I just thought, to hell with it, I'm in the final. I'm going to show them what I've learned, but I'm just going to cook what I love."

And so he did, with trio of wild rabbit, followed by spider-crab with hand-cut chips and sea vegetables, rounded off with lavender mousse with hokey pokey and a blackberry sauce. It was a three-course meal that had Wallace and Torode waxing lyrical and it brought tears, not for the first time, to Follas's eyes.

One of the reasons viewers loved him was that he was so emotional about his food. There's nothing quite as enjoyable, it seems, as seeing a man who looks like a bruiser – the shaved head, the stocky body, those eyebrows propped at odd angles – crying like a baby over some hokey pokey.

"Ah, s*** happens," he says with a shrug. "To do it properly you've got to put everything into it and that's what you saw. I did put my all into it and I still do.

"It was weird, though, because after that I had to go back to my job at IBM and people there know me as quite a hard-****d European manager. I hired, fired, close things down at times, so reconciling the two was…" he trails off.

Follas is, by his own admission, pretty laid-back, so there'll be no shouting or nonsense in his kitchen. "The sort of management that works is an authoritative style – you lead from the front and even if it's not an area of your expertise people respect you and they work for you.

"The problem for a chef – or anyone – who only knows how to manage by shouting is what do they do when the shouting stops working – shout louder?"

I can't imagine Follas shouting at all. His passion for wild food and the process of cooking it is palpable. The only thing he speaks about with even more fondness is his family. Follas has three children, two with his wife, Mandy – Meadow, three, Jack, six – and Jasper, who's just turned 11, from a previous marriage.

"We all get on well," he says of his family. "I talk to my ex-wife every night when I talk to my eldest son; we all get on fine. I pick up Jasper from school on a Friday and take him to school on Monday. It works really well. My two get a big brother they look up to every weekend."

Are his children foodies? "Kids are funny, they go through phases. Meadow's young enough that she's still up for tasting anything. Jack you can hardly get to eat beans from a can, nothing pleases him. Jasper's got a brilliant palate. He'll taste things and be like 'oh, that's like aniseed, is there fennel in there?'" He beams with pride. "He's brilliant."

Mandy is onboard with the restaurant venture and, although front-of-house isn't her style (that's the one position he's still seeking someone for), having been an analyst at IBM she'll look after payroll and the books.

He knows there'll be an expectation of some of the Masterchef dishes – the crab thermidor, the smoked scallops – but he reckons "it'll be fun to do them again".

"But I'll be changing the menu every month, because for me it's about using wild food and that changes all year round." Follas is a fan of foraging and uses lots of ingredients from his local area.

"You go out for a walk, pick a few things and eat them later," he says. "It isn't any more fussy than that. Where we live we're swamped with wild garlic – it wasn't difficult to pick a name for the restaurant – and it's just wasteful not to use it. We don't really go into supermarkets any more; we've got good local shops."

In fact, the only thing that I can sense hasn't felt right about this whole process is his growing public profile. "It happens sometimes when I'm in London. But where I live, I'm just Mat. They knew me before and I hope I haven't changed. I don't think I have."

A minute passes and it's obvious he's a bit uncomfortable talking about this. Perhaps he feels it makes him look bigheaded.

"I've noticed that I have become protective of my pub," he says finally. "I tend to go later at night than I used to. I understand why people might stare or come and chat when they see someone they recognise, but it's not necessarily what I go to my local for." He can see the upside, though.

"Now tourist season is about to start, it's happening more when I'm out and about – people will come over and talk to me. But in a few weeks it'll be like, there's my restaurant, come and talk to me there."

Breakfast over, we walk outside into the bright sunshine and I ask him what he's doing for the rest of the day.

"I've got work to do," he grins, "suppliers to call and things to organise." He looks positively delighted.

&#149 Mat Follas will be appearing on the Tropicana World Breakfast Bar at Taste of Edinburgh, stand S5, today (8-9pm) and tomorrow (7-8pm).