My Foodie London: Tim Anderson, Masterchef winner and owner of Nanban restaurant in Brixton

Hot chef Tim Anderson tells Victoria Stewart about his all time favourite cookbooks and where to find the best fish in town
Tim Anderson at his new restaurant, Nanban
Paul Winch Furness
By Victoria Stewart8 February 2016

Chef Tim Anderson has lived in London since 2008, having grown up in Wisconsin and also spent a few years living in southern Japan. His restaurant Nanban, which opened in Brixton in the autumn of 2015, is the expression of those years, plus a childhood spent obsessing over Japanese food and culture. He studied Japanese food at Occidental college in LA, and has said that when signing up to teach English in Japan, his top three choices of city were based around whether the ramen was any good. Aged 26 he won Masterchef, after which he did a series of pop-up Japanese dinners, and published his debut cookbook. Here he gives us his little black book of London food shopping secrets.

Where do you live?

In Forest Hill with my wife.

Where do you shop for home cooking equipment?

I get a lot of it from Nisbets, the catering supplier in Covent Garden and Shoreditch. It’s technically for professional kitchens but it’s cheaper and better than most cook shops. Otherwise the closest places are the houseware shops in Brixton market, as they sell everything from baking dishes to tools and clocks. They’re like pound shops or little Wilkinsons, but better.

What is your favourite kitchen gadget?

I’m not a gadget guy but I like coffee, so I have two gadgets for that: an Aeropress which is amazing for brewing all kinds of small cups of different coffee. You can make a good espresso and a good filter-style coffee. And I have a Chemex, which is like a filter coffee hourglass thing, and good for big batches. It also doubles up as a wine decanter as it’s the right shape and pours easily.

Do you have a favourite fishmonger, grocer and butcher near home?

We have a great butcher called The Butchery, which also has a railway arch in Bermondsey, and it’s especially great for beef - we also get our mince for our restaurant burgers from them. It’s really well aged, delicious British beef, so if I’m in the mood for a steak I’ll go there and cook it at home. In the springtime, they have these great, bright green wild garlic sausages. They have chicken, lamb belly too sometimes, and you can also get lots of south London produced items, like pickles and kimchi.

There isn’t a good fishmonger in Forest Hill, so I buy it from Mash under a railway arch in Brixton. They have really great quality British stuff – really good mackerel, trout, prawns and squid and it’s always very fresh which is not always the case with Brixton fishmongers.

For veg, I go to the Horniman Museum Farmers Market - it's on every Saturday and has a really good range.

Do you have a favourite all-time recipe book?

I look at recipe books all the time. The one I use the most is called Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, and it’s a classic from the Seventies with a range of timeless Japanese recipes. It’s got everything from sushi to noodles to rice bowls and hot pots dishes, and lots of pages of techniques on how to cook fish and vegetables. I’ve had that for years. The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz is another great book.

And which one are you cooking from now?

I don’t really cook verbatim recipes, I tend to dip into things. One at the moment is called Vegan Street Food by Jackie Kearney - it’s just really good street food that happens to be vegan.

Are you experimenting with any new ingredients?

Yes. One thing that the fishmongers around here have that I’ve not cooked much with before is octopus, so I’m playing around in the restaurant with octopus jerky. It’s marinated and then dehydrated, so it goes really dense and chewy. The first test was really good but it was way too salty, so I’m going to have do some more work on it. I actually found that the octopus went so hard, that I could actually grate them, so I’m looking around for other things to grate at the moment.

Do you make any larder-type items at home?

The things I make the most are fermented pickles like sauerkraut and kimchi, which is usually to preserve an excess of something that I have. I had these really nice, ripe carrots for New Year’s Eve so I grated them and added loads of chillies and fermented them and it became a really good spicy carrot pickle. I’ve got some sauerkraut in the fridge, which is about 16 months old now.

Have you tried any interesting dishes in London recently?

I hardly get out any more, but the place I always return to and always talk about is Baozi Inn in Chinatown. They have a stall next to their main restaurant, which is all about skewers - you just go in and order and you eat them outside. It’s really good, really cheap – everything there is about £1.10 – and the things they skewer are thing like Chinese broccoli, enoki mushrooms, and pig’s intestines or pig’s balls.

Where do you go to get good beer?

My favourite place to go is Hop, Burns and Black in Dulwich – hop like beer, burns because of the hot sauce, and black because they sell vinyl records as well. They are on the Dulwich/Peckham border, have a really good beer range and the people who run it are nice - I spend a lot of money there.

Tim Anderson’s cookbook Nanban: Japanese Soul Food is published by Square Peg; Nanban restaurant is at 426 Coldharbour Lane, SW9 8LF; nanban.co.uk

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