Roast gets a grilling
Borough Market, like all markets I suppose, is a desolate place on a non-working day. Walking through at around 8am, all there is to see are stacked boxes, metal grills and the odd squashed vegetable. It’s a far cry from Saturday when the place becomes as packed as Camden Market, although without the Japanese girls wearing lampshades for hats. The only sign of life is light pouring down from what, at first glance, appears to be a kind of conservatory on a first floor. Inside can be seen scurrying cooks and waiters whilst the wink and sparkle of glassware and chrome pulls like a magnet. This is Roast, the new restaurant from the man who gave us The Cinnamon Club, Iqbal Wahhab
A lift gets you access. Walk past the reception desk which has grass growing
on it (cray-zeeee!), and down a small corridor glazed on one side to view the
market leading into the brilliant space. Today is the first official open day
of the new restaurant and I’m meeting Iqbal for breakfast, a meal Roast
is proud to offer every day.
" We’ve been ‘soft open’ about ten days," Iqbal tells me as we wait for our breakfast. We’re both being rather good about this, eschewing what sounds to be a brilliant ‘full English’ with market meat and eggs. Instead Iqbal is having stewed fruit and yoghurt and I’ve gone for a mixture of roasted tomatoes on bread. "Each day has been improving a bit more," he says, waving his arm around expansively. "This is about the passion of the market. This was an ideal location for something I wanted to do, all the trouble and effort that I and the chef have gone to, going to all the markets - and we go to their farms in some cases - I wanted that same passion and interest translated to the customers."
It’s a passion that Iqbal radiates, even down to why he has called this place Roast. "Well it's evocative and also quite ironic," he laughs. "It’s like a cheeky thing because that is the cliched image of British food. For its detractors it’s all about roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, it’s all about stodge and meat and two veg. All the caricatures and I thought, well actually roast food is bloody brilliant!"
He pauses thinking back, "And so I said to myself, what would evoke an
interest in British food? And I thought, when you say 'roast' people go 'oh
yeah, wow.' Mind you, I think what will surprise people when they come in is
to find out that we’re also heavily seafood orientated." People
could think it was a Carvery, I suggest, or an ironic reference to footballers’ alleged
off-duty pastimes? Iqbal chuckles. "Yeah, you’d think it might be
like medieval style, Henry VIII banquets with buxom wenches and huge, you know,
carcasses of meat, but as soon as you come in here you know it’s actually
not that!"
It certainly isn’t that the decor is stunning, especially in the end
section, a restored part of the old Covent Garden Market rescued from a field
in Wales. It’s a gorgeous box of light, one side looking down on the
market another onto the unchanged old streets around the restaurant. Iqbal
agrees that it’s a unique area.
"This is about the last part of like, centralish London that hasn’t been spoilt, you don’t see roads like this much anymore," he says as we peer out. "I mean, how many times do you see them? It’s like in ‘Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.’ Somebody was telling me the other day, if I was to hire out one section of the bar, all the paparazzi would be here because every film that’s been made in London seems to have a scene shot around here."
The market is of course a major supplier of produce for Roast. It can also, as Iqbal explains, be a problem. "So many people on a Saturday. You can’t get to the stalls for tourists who are, after all, only looking." So has Roast set up mutually benefit trading with many of the stalls?
Iqbal nods, "Well, it’s a two way thing, because a lot of the produce
that you get in the market is very expensive. Rare breed pigs take like a year,
eighteen months longer to rear than an ordinary pig, and that comes at a price.
Also, you can detect the flavour difference, but suddenly you’re buying
sausages at three or four times the price you would normally pay. We can’t
necessarily pass that onto the customer because otherwise we become a very
expensive restaurant. So, yeah, we’ve had very frank conversations with
all of these guys, and said 'We’d like to use you, but you’ve got
to be a bit more accommodating when it comes to what you charge us.'"
"And in the main menu we’re going to say, ‘the roast on today’s menu was brought to you by…’ and we list where they came from. It doesn’t necessarily mean they rush out of here and buy a packet of that staIl’s sausages on the way out, but it will mean that if they like the product, they know who made it, so they’ll come back and look for that name again.""In one of our trial nights the other night, out of eighty people thirty five people had the Galloway steak that we got from up the road. That stall holder has come in with thirty five rump steaks, that’s good business for him on a trial night. Imagine when we’re doing two hundred people, he’s going to be very happy with that."
Some of Iqbal’s suppliers go to great lengths to bring the best to the
restaurant. "Our scallops, they come with pickled rock samphire. Customers
say, 'What’s rock samphire?' So I tell them the story that these guys,
they go over the edge of a cliff, abseil down and they’re pulling the
stuff off the rock which we then pickle and customers go, 'Oh my god, I’ve
got to try this.' Let’s face it, if someone’s risked their life
to pick it for you it would be rude not to try it!" says Iqbal, roaring
with laughter.Roast certainly has all it needs to be a success; a charismatic
entrepreneurial leader, a fantastic space in a cool area and superb suppliers
literally on its doorstep. Spit roast pigs, ribs of beef, suckling pig, mutton,
pease pudding… Roast has a menu to make British cooking cool and an environment
to make it sexy.
