How to be a culinary genius by Ollie Dabbous

You can’t get a table at Ollie Dabbous’ restaurant until this time next year, but the rock-star chef hasn’t had his head turned by success; all he cares about is how many mint leaves should go into the perfect endive salad (16, if you were wondering)

Dabbous has a massive, solid sheet-metal door. This is partly to match the stripped-back industrial décor of the restaurant itself, but it has another purpose: to stop customers getting in. ‘We have to keep the doors locked until midday,’ says Ollie Dabbous (pronounced Da-boo), the chef whose eponymous restaurant sits on a slightly scruffy street corner in Fitzrovia. ‘It’s a big solid door and it feels reassuringly strong. By the time we open, there’s quite a gathering outside.’

Since they can’t batter down the entrance to try Dabbous’ minimalist, delicately flavoured and visually delightful cooking, customers hit the phones instead. The reservation book is crammed and there isn’t a table to be had until November 2013.

This would be astonishing enough, but what’s more remarkable about Dabbous’ popularity is that the restaurant has only been going for eight months. Three days after it opened, Fay Maschler, this paper’s restaurant critic, wrote a game-changing review, awarding it five stars, and it has been wildly busy ever since. She, and other restaurant critics, were won over by what food writer Tom Parker Bowles calls Ollie’s ‘huge technical skill and keen, whip-smart culinary intelligence’. As Parker Bowles says: the man ‘crackles with talent and makes fascinating food you really want to eat’. This, I found on a raw early November night, included barbecued Ibérico pork with savoury acorn praline, turnip tops and apple vinegar — which was deliciously nutty and rich. But I also devoured a beautiful ribbon of celeriac with muscat grapes, lovage and hazelnuts, and a coddled egg with woodland mushrooms, which is something of a signature — a sort of mushroom hollandaise sauce served in a brown egg shell on straw. The food is light and bright and cleverly put together and the place oozes excitement — the customers are thrilled to be there, and the energetic waiters are proud to be serving the hottest tables in town.

When the new Michelin list was announced in October, it was no surprise that Dabbous had been given a star. What is surprising is how little it means to him: ‘On the day I heard, I had a fridge that wasn’t working, someone phoned in sick, and the star was about number four on my list of priorities. We were too busy to crack open a bottle of champagne. Awards are great, but we got it because we deserved it.’ Other restaurateurs complain that a Michelin star piles pressure on them, raising people’s expectations and increasing bookings to unmanageable levels. But for Dabbous, the star changes nothing, since people’s expectations are sky high already and, well, you know about the bookings situation. ‘Friends call me up all the time and say, “Come on, Giley, get me a table,” ’ says The Times’ critic Giles Coren, whose review of the place said that the coddled egg was the best thing he’d ever eaten until the next course came along. But not even he can help.

A slew of recession-busting hit restaurants has opened this year. You can eat surf and turf at Burger & Lobster in Mayfair, wash hot dogs down with champagne at Charlotte Street’s Bubbledogs. You can be whisked off to Paris in your lunch hour at Chris Corbin and Jeremy King’s Brasserie Zédel, or tuck into fresh seafood at Bonnie Gull in Bloomsbury. A new Zagat survey says that eating out in the capital is better than ever this year, and that customers are spending ever more on their food.

But the Dabbous story is bigger than this. I ask Parker Bowles when was the last time we had a culinary shooting star blaze such a trail over the British restaurant scene, and he replies, ‘Well, The Fat Duck, of course. But Heston was a little older, and it happened gradually. And Russell Norman’s mini-empire [Polpo, Spuntino, Mishkin] changed the way we felt about not booking and small plates, but at the level of Dabbous... not much.’

Luckily, Ollie has charisma to match his growing fame. He’s a compact, fit-looking 32-year-old, given to rock-star jewellery and leather jackets, and has no sign of a cheffy paunch under his honed pectorals. He suits the cool, concrete-and-girder aesthetic of his restaurant. But, he says regretfully, he’s out of shape and has lost weight since he opened the restaurant because he doesn’t have a second to go to the gym.

For although he’s been invited to10 Downing Street, and he’s got the wherewithal to be a TV star, he certainly hasn’t the time. He’s always in the restaurant at lunch and dinner time, checking every dish that comes out of his very small kitchen. Each day, at 11.45am, he conducts an inspection, from making sure that the sugar bowls are clean and filled, to checking that the perforations on the loo roll in the toilets are neat: ‘We don’t fold the paper into a point like in a hotel because it’s not our style. But I like a clean edge,’ he says sheepishly. ‘I once found a jagged edge on a piece and I went mental. I went f***ing mental. I’m fully aware that I probably come across as mad but the staff respect that... and they won’t do it again.’

He is not, though, a chef given to shouting like Gordon Ramsay, throwing tantrums like Marco Pierre White or allegedly branding his staff with red-hot palette knives like Tom Aikens. ‘The best kitchens are the quietest and most efficient,’ he says. ‘With cooking like mine, that’s product-driven and restrained, the chef is subservient to the ingredients’ — and to the recipe. He’s just spent the morning refining a speckled endive salad with gingerbread, mint and orange, whose ingredients include ‘12 leaves of endive, 16 mint leaves and 12 bits of orange’. All the quantities he uses are as precise as this. I fear that it’s going to make the cookery book he has planned for next year a struggle to follow, particularly as the ingredients he works with are a little esoteric. ‘I’m currently devising a lentil dish, trying some with wheat beer and some with an aged tea that’s ten years old so it’s got a damp, mushroomy earthiness about it,’ he says, rummaging around behind the bar to find me a sample to bury my nose in.

Oddly for someone so steeped in food, Ollie’s background isn’t remotely gourmet. His French-Italian father is an architect who worked for years in Kuwait. Ollie and his brother shuttled back and forth between Guildford, where their mother was based and where they went to school, and the Middle East. ‘My mum’s not a great cook,’ he offers somewhat unflatteringly. ‘But she’s got a similar palate to me. She likes light food. My dad’s one of those people who puts black pepper on everything.’ However, Dabbous knew he wanted to be a chef from the age of six, and started cooking in restaurants when he was 15. He worked at Kensington Place for Rowley Leigh and for Guy Savoy in Paris. He spent time with René Redzepi at Noma and with Heston Blumenthal at The Fat Duck, but it was Raymond Blanc, a financial backer of Dabbous, who gave him his best training at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. He then went on to be head chef at the Scandinavian-influenced Texture on Portman Street.

So how did he find himself, just before opening Dabbous, flipping burgers in The Cuckoo Club on Swallow Street? ‘No one knocked on my door with a sack of money to get me started,’ he explains. ‘I hated having to ask for help but I’d never wanted anything more than my own restaurant, so I had a year of getting investors lined up while working in a nightclub. I couldn’t spare the time to work in a good restaurant while I was raising funding. It was hard,’ he remembers, suddenly looking tired. ‘F***ing hard. And there was no light at the end of the tunnel. I’d had eight years of a shit social life and a shit salary, all to get to this point. I was scratching at the door but I wasn’t there yet. It felt like a cul-de-sac. It was horrible.’