GetTING a feel for something DELICIOUSLY different
The duo behind the success story that isTexture tell us about opening a new restaurant and the tricky months that follow
If
you’ve ever eaten at Texture,
and you really should, you’ve
probably already seen Chef and co owner Agnar (Aggi) Sverrisson. He can often
be spotted at the back of the room doing some last minute fiddling with a
dish or just gazing about before ducking backinside to his stoves. He clearly
likes to keep an eye on things?“No it’s not really that, “ he
chuckles. “It’s just that the kitchen is so small I need to get
out and stretch a bit every now and then."”
Texture is Aggi’s first restaurant as co-owner, but his CV as a chef goes back quite a way. Previously both he and his business partner and restaurant manager Xavier Rousset, worked at Le Manoir Quatre Saisons under Raymond Blanc, or Monsieur Blanc as Aggi always refers to him, with Xavier being the Sommelier of that famous dining destination. For them both, running a restaurant instead of just working in one has been quite an adventure so far.
“We’ve been open nine months now and we’re pleased,” Aggi says settling into one of the comfy chairs in the champagne bar just after lunchtime service. “Right from the start we were full lunch and dinner and it was crazy. The first year though I don’t think you are always sure on which way you want to go with the food and service. I don’t mean it’s hit and miss; it’s more about deciding on direction. Now after nine months I think we know more or less what we want to do, the first months we were up and down and I didn’t know whether to go left or right!” His Icelandic accent makes this sound less confused than you might think.
They certainly opened to rave reviews I recall. “Yes,” agrees Aggi, ‘but not all were kind. There was one really bad one from a theatre critic who was reviewing a restaurant for some reason, 1 star out of 5 he gave us saying the food was horrible! I think he was just trying to make a name for himself. It was excessive criticism to my mind but the other critics were very positive. But you know,” he muses, “all the critics came in the first month and I wish they would come back now, because I think we are so much better now than we were then.”
I agree with him, restaurants open and there’s a flurry of critical interest but then the critics move on, but the restaurant is still there. “Well that’s also true for the customers,” Aggi points out, “we have to maintain their interest but at the same time people who come here mostly say stay ‘stick to what you do, it’s fine. Don’t make changes’.”
Talking of what he does raises the issue of how to label the food at Texture? “Well that’s a very good question,” he ponders. “I’ve heard it more than once, is it French is it European, what is it? I’m trying to explain it in as few words as possible but it’s very difficult for me. I don’t use butter and cream in the main kitchen, that’s one facet. I try to only use the best ingredients from Scandinavia of course, but also the best ingredients from around the U.K. I would like to say it’s European with Scandinavian influences I suppose.”
Recently he has added an Icelandic menu to the options and it’s gone down very well. “The Icelandic menu has been good, “he agrees. “We thought to run it just for a week or two but there has been so much demand we don’t know when it will end now. We give the customers what they want and there is a lot of interest in it.” It’s a menu that features smoked salmon that actually comes to the table trailing a rich waft of wood smoke. “Ah that’s an interesting dish, “ Aggi enthuses suddenly sitting forward in his chair. “ It’s Scandinavian farmed salmon and we have s special gun that injects the wood smoke onto it, it’s something I saw in Spain two years ago now and I see a few chefs using it in London. In fact one chef, well known, came here for a meal and saw it and he picked up on it.” He chuckles and sits back. “The cooking is simple though. The salmon is marinated for an hour in herbs, salt and sugar then we clean it off. Then we cook it sous vide with some olive oil at 43Cfor 15 minutes and then we blowtorch it on both sides to finish it so you have a nice moist centre and a little bit of crispiness on the outside.” He pauses to think then smiles cheerfully, “ actually you know we cook a lot of our food with a blow torch!”
The cod and chorizo dish, which I tell him is one my personal favourites,
is also a classic Texture dish because of its, well because of its textures
actually. Aggi details the components for me, “the cod is of course
Icelandic, and the chorizo of course is not! We serve it two ways in the
dish; we dry the chorizo slices out in the oven very slowly to make them
nice and crisp. Then we have small cubes of more chewy chorizo and the borlotti
beans,
fresh not dried, that are another texture in between. The cod itself is oven
roasted and I like to break it into serving pieces and I mean break, I do
it with my hands as I don’t like to use a knife I think it’s
just more natural and more attractive.”
“I hadn’t really thought about food textures until I started at the Manoir Quatre Saisons,’ he says reflectively, ‘but there Monsieur Blanc was always on about ‘we need some texture in this dish, we don’t want baby food on a plate!’ You need something firm, you need something crispy, you need different textures.”
What you don’t need in his opinion is an over reliance on gadgets or complication. He tells me that some dishes have changed since the opening weeks but not by much. “Some dishes we have changed half way if that makes sense,” he explains, “rectified if you like. Some dishes weren’t working, they were too complicated and some were just making things too difficult for ourselves. But you know we don’t really have that many ingredients in a dish, although it may seem that way, each ingredient is there for a reason, not simply because for the sake of having ten ingredients. When you look into it many are cooked in the same pan so for me they count as one ingredient, if that makes sense!” Yes, I think it does.
As for the trend for gadgets, he is pragmatic. “We do of course have a sous vide,” he admits. “We do a lot of slow cooking, we slow cook mostly everything and we chargrill most of our meat after the slow cooking. Every animal or fish has a different temperature it needs to be done at though, and so many chefs think they can buy a machine and that’s all there is to it. They just cook everything at the same temperature. Well,” he says, sadly shaking his head, “they might as well forget it. Cook it in the usual way, it will be ten times better than effing about not knowing what they are doing.”
“A gadget I do use a lot is the temperature probe,” he cheerfully adds, “for example on my pigeon. It needs to be rare but cooked and the probe lets me be certain – not 58C but 60C only then is it perfect for flavour and for safety. It’s the same with my lovely Icelandic lamb - too little cooking makes it chewy but too much and it’s equally useless. Precision is the thing.”
Back at Le Manoir he and Xavier would quietly discuss their dream of opening a restaurant together one day. “It took us two and a half years to get Texture together with the money and location we needed. All our days off at Le Manoir we were out trying to find money and do the business plan, we must have done that business plan over twenty times! And you know you can’t tell your colleagues because if it doesn’t work out it’s embarrassing."” Yet they had to tell someone to get some feedback and who else but the boss? “The first person we told was Monsieur Blanc,” Aggi reveals, “and his advice was the same ‘keep it quiet until you’re in there’. He has been so supportive of us all the time then and since. We even have some Manoir kitchen staff here, but they had already left before we did. We didn’t poach anybody.”"
So after this grilling and now, nine months on, what are his and Xavier’s plans for the future? Aggi looks at his business partner and grins “To be full every lunch and dinner and go from there!”" he says and Xavier nods firmly in agreement
Words : Nick Harman
Pics: Al Stuart
