Interview: Martin Wishart - Sorcerer's apprentice

Published on Tuesday 21 July 2009 16:56

Bright sunshine is bouncing off Loch Lomond. Against the blue water the green grass looks like the plastic stuff you used to get in old-fashioned butcher shop windows, and wispy clouds float in a perfect summer sky. Crunching up the gravel drive of the Cameron House Hotel, couples take photos of each other, laughing about their luck with the weather and the fact that no-one will believe that the luscious backdrop is the west of Scotland.

Inside, the hotel has that unmistakable five star feel: every sound is muffled by expensive plushness, it's dark and sophisticated, a contrast to the dazzling sun. At the end of one of the labyrinthine corridors cushioned with deep pile carpet, I reach a glass door. Martin Wishart at Loch Lomond. It's what I'm looking for.

Chefs who open up second restaurants take a gamble. On the one hand they get to spread their wings, creatively and commercially; on the other they risk accusations that they're stretching themselves, perhaps cashing in on their name. And, of course, they invoke comparisons not only to restaurants run by competitors, but to their own ventures too. The obvious effort that's been put into creating the Loch Lomond restaurant and the decision to start slowly, offering just a dinner service (lunch is served only on a Sunday) belies the charge of cashing in, but the comparisons are going to be trickier.

The chef's Leith restaurant is nearing mythical status – Michelin starred for many years with loyal customers and an international reputation. So can Wishart work the same magic in the west?

"Everybody's been very, very happy," says Steven Strachan, the restaurant manager who previously, in keeping with the rest of the team, worked in the Leith restaurant. "We've only had one negative letter and it was someone comparing us to Leith – but we'd only been open for a month. I wrote back explaining that Leith has been open for ten years, so of course you will find different levels of restaurant.

"We just want to be as consistent as we can. And we want to improve. We're getting a good loyal customer base – some people have been here seven or eight times already. In six months, that's not bad. We've got a couple coming tonight and it'll be their sixth time. They ate in the Leith restaurant two weeks ago."

At eleven in the morning, the large rectangular dining room with a wall of windows looking out to the loch resembles an empty stage being readied for curtain-up. The tables are bare, a huge glass cabinet – which by tonight will be full of glassware steamed and polished to gleaming perfection and crockery buffed to a mirror-like shine – is empty. "Wait until you see it tonight," says Strachan. "It'll be perfect."

Even lacking its finery, the restaurant feels recognisably, reassuringly Martin Wishart. The palette is the trademark muted, neutral shades, the bold striped fabric that backs the winged seats also makes an appearance on the walls of the Martin Wishart Cook School dining room. The wooden Venetian blinds are just like the ones that dress the Leith restaurant's windows, the only difference is what lies beyond them. At this time of day the blinds are hoisted high to let in the summer breeze and the views are picture perfect.

Wishart opened the restaurant in March at the invitation of the directors of the DeVere Group, which runs the hotel. It takes something special to create and sustain a fine dining restaurant that retains its own individuality and quality as part of a five star hotel (ask Andrew Fairlie, who has a restaurant at Gleneagles Hotel). Wishart knew he could do it, but only if he had the right team, both in the kitchen and front of house. "You can't just open up one restaurant and two years later do another one," he says. "You have to take your time. And you've got to find the right person and put the right people around them."

Having all served their time in Leith, the team running the Loch Lomond restaurant know exactly what they are aiming for. What's interesting is that they also want to offer something distinct. "The Leith restaurant is an excellent restaurant so there's no reason that we wouldn't want to aspire to be just like it," says Strachan. "But we want to be known as Martin Wishart at Loch Lomond." For Wishart's part, he's happy for there to be a bit of healthy competition.

If there's an air of anticipation in the dining room, it's a different story in the kitchen.

Swinging the kitchen door open at 11:30am, a smell as comforting as a pot of lentil soup, but likely to be from something a whole lot more sophisticated than that, makes my stomach rumble. Five young chefs are stirring, chopping, seasoning and tasting. Dinner service is eight hours away but the kitchen is already hot and there's plainly plenty to be done.

Head chef Stewart Boyles is only 30 and his pride in running his own kitchen is as clear as the stock simmering in one of the enormous pots. He's been in the kitchen since 8:30am and has spent his morning preparing the meat and fish, delivered daily from the same firms that supply the Edinburgh restaurant.

Hares have been deboned, wine reductions thickened and onions caramelised. Heat shimmers on the stoves, sauces simmer and bundles of fresh herbs and cartons of cream are stacked on the surfaces. Racks of freshly baked rolls are cooling but there are some things that won't appear until later – the little golden discs of rosti potatoes, pomme pure, those are best done right before service. The youngest member of the kitchen staff – he looks about 15 but I'm sure he's older – is bent over a tray of small cubes of smoked salmon. He works silently, with total concentration, wrapping each piece of fish in a sheet of white radish so thin it's translucent.

At around 2pm all the chefs will wash the dishes and scrub the floor, says Boyles. "It's not the job of the kitchen porter, everyone does it," he adds.

Boyles is a perfect example of the Wishart kitchen system. Having worked in kitchens since he was 15, he arrived in Scotland four years ago from his native Canada. A grandmother from Aberdeen and some uncles from Inverness were enough to tempt him back to his ancestral homeland. A Michelin Guide helped him choose where to work. It took three calls to the Leith restaurant to get Martin Wishart himself on the phone. Boyles was so excited when it finally happened that he could barely speak, but he was invited into the restaurant the next week.

Boyles is incredibly softly spoken, even a little shy, but telling me the story he relives the excitement. He jumps out of his seat, mimicking what he did then."I was keen and I was nervous after coming all that way," he says. "I had no idea it was going to be a place where we were going to have that kind of relationship."

He watched the service the first day. Then he asked to work three days with the caveat of starting and finishing at the same time as everyone else. "I would respect someone who worked full shifts," he says. "None of that coming in late and leaving early." He was told there were no jobs but he decided he'd do it anyway.

"I'd never seen any kitchen that worked like that. I watched Ricky, the pastry chef, a great chef and a great person who's helped me a lot along the way, I watched him making souffls from scratch and I'd never seen anything like it in any of the hotels I'd worked in. A souffl was something you'd practice once but you'd never actually do it. He was banging them out, perfectly, one after another."

When his few days were up, it transpired there was a job for Boyles if he could start in a month. Hard work and keenness had paid off. But it wasn't straightforward. Wishart was harsh on Boyles because he knew he could push him to improve.

"When he started, Stewart was not that great technically, probably because of where he'd been working in North America," Wishart says. "He was determined to learn, though, and he put up with a lot of criticism from me."

When it came to choosing a chef to head up the Cameron House venture, Wishart knew that Boyles was the right person because he'd seen him work at a distance once already, running a consultancy project in Edinburgh's Home House (now Hawke and Hunter). It allowed a kind of professional trust to develop between the two chefs. And also, Wishart knew how far Boyles had come.

"If someone screws up but they come back and come back, that to me is the best they can give you," Wishart says. "If they're giving me the best what I have to give them back is some appreciation. Stewart and Joe (head chef in the Leith restaurant] have worked themselves into those positions and they get the respect, rightly, for that, from me and from the staff.

"I wanted someone who could work as a people person and could grow into it. That's exactly what Stewart's doing."

Back in the restaurant, the stage is set. The tables look immaculate, as Strachan said they would. With high banquettes and oversized winged chairs, the large space feels intimate despite its size. A waiter, Miguel, works his way along the Venetian blinds ensuring they are even, at just the same height, the entire length of the wall. The sommelier, Alex, has carried an unfeasible number of champagne glasses in one hand to a table where he's set up a display of Veuve Clicquot bottles.

There's only one task left before the first guests arrive: a new dessert is going to be served this evening – caramelised pineapple rings with a yoghurt sorbet and a wafer thin but satisfyingly yielding coconut biscuit. The magic is that it's to be flambed at the table. The waiters look nervous. Strachan talks them through the dish: place the pineapple rings, add the biscuit and the sorbet then light the heated rum in a small copper pan and pour it over the sticky, stacked rings. Watching intently, they strike their lighters and at least one giggles.

First up is Jonny, a young Frenchman working in the restaurant as an intern for a few months. The old hands have pushed him forward. Lighter in one hand, copper pot in the other, his hands shake so much for a moment there's a genuine concern that none of the flaming alcohol will reach the table, but he soldiers on and it works. Flushed with his success, he looks genuinely relieved. The dish is disassembled for another waiter to try. Each does it in turn, the blue flame licking over the dessert. "So, three minutes all in," says Strachan, telling them how quickly they'll be expected to serve. Heads nod.

Then it's back to the kitchen where napkins are folded and pats of French butter placed on small rounded slates, ready to be taken to the tables. Strachan runs through the intricacies of the menus he's just printed. The waiters are expected to be able to advise diners on their choices and tell them where the food has come from: the lamb is from Dornoch, the scallops from the Sound of Kilbrannan, the crabs from Loch Fyne. Delivering plates to tables doesn't cover the half of what the waiters in this restaurant do.

Talk then turns to the diners. Several regulars are coming in tonight and the waiters are expected to know who will be sitting where, what drink they like when they arrive, what the special occasion is – there's a birthday and an anniversary. Like the cooking going on across the kitchen, no detail is overlooked. Fully briefed, they disappear, running around tweaking, polishing and straightening anything in their paths.

With only minutes to go until the first diners arrive, Strachan is like an actor waiting to hear his cue. "This is the worst bit, the waiting," he says. "I really do wish that people would arrive on time."

Standing at the pass – the shining steel bench where Boyles is adding the final touches to the dishes before they're spirited through the swing doors by the team of waiters – I am in the way. I've tucked myself into a corner, but in a restaurant that's run with this kind of precision and intensity, anyone who's not part of the team is, to be frank, a nuisance.

The waiters are serious faced, silently swooshing through the door, eager for their next order. They don't speak. They read the tickets stuck on the pass and check that everything's going to plan. The kitchen is in full swing, dishes – fillets of beef topped with herb crusts, fragrant fillets of sole, buttery, succulent langoustines – head through the swing doors leaving the buzz of conversation from the restaurant in their wake.

Earlier in the day I asked Boyles if he felt frustrated running the kitchen but delivering food designed and controlled (by weekly, sometimes more frequent, visits and daily phone calls) by Wishart.

"The biggest issue with chefs is that they want to go and do their own thing, they've got their own ideas about how they want things to run," he says. "I'll do that eventually but right now I know it's very important that things are done his way."

But isn't it restrictive?

"No it's not. There's actually a lot of freedom. A lot of chefs think that they know best, it's an ego thing. I'm confident that we're doing a good job here. And it's not to say Chef (Wishart] doesn't have a lot of keen interest in our ideas. He's very open. But if he designs a dish he wants the sauce to be this way and the garnish to be that way and that's it. I trust him because he's got a lot of experience and he's worked in a lot of great places so there's a reason for what he wants and, actually, I can always see it."

The door swings open and a waiter brings in a stack of plates. They look as if they had been licked clean. It's clear why Boyles is content. SM

Martin Wishart at Loch Lomond, Cameron House Hotel, Loch Lomond, tel: [phone], e-mail: [e-mail]