Breaking bread: What the staff in London's top restaurants like to eat

Take a seat at the table with the teams at London’s favourite restaurants
Staff at Bao eating together
Tom Martin
Frankie McCoy13 December 2018

At the unlikely hours of around 11am and 5pm, some of the most lovingly cooked, inventive and happy meals in London are prepared and devoured in restaurants. Laughter crackles across the air as in-jokes fly around tables and platters of emerald and amber-hued salads are set down on them.

An unexpected twist on a classic dish is tasted, appraised and deemed excellent. Spaghetti is slurped, fresh sourdough is handed from person to person and slathered in bright yellow butter. Cheers ring out and feet stomp as a pregnancy is announced.

Within 20 minutes, only crumbs are left and every diner is grinning hugely at each other as they return to work: in the very place where they’ve just broken bread together.

Staff meals are the hearty, deeply savoury and bonding glue that holds together our favourite restaurants. Maître d’s and sous chefs, general managers, pot washers and waitresses, all working in high intensity, pressure cooker environments, pause to refuel and heal rifts over dishes they take it in turns to prepare for each other before the onslaught of lunch and dinner service begins.

Culinary experiments, often wondrous ones, are carried out on colleagues long before the paying public encounters them. It was a staff meal that first brought New York restaurant Momofuku’s now-infamous ‘crack pie’ blinking into the sweet, sweet light, after office assistant Christina Tosi started bringing into work what Gourmet Traveller called ‘psychotically delicious, strange, Betty Crocker-on-acid things’ that she’d baked at home for staff meals. Ten years on, Tosi has been canonised on Netflix’s Chef’s Table for her famous dessert.

The staff meal, then, is powerful: simultaneously creative and comforting, experimental and soothing, and one of the truest expressions of the greatness of sharing good food together.

Take a seat at the table with the teams at London’s favourite restaurants and dig in.

BAO, W1

Chicken skewers, squid ink noodles

Squid ink noodles at Bao
Tom Martin

For Reece Moore, senior sous chef at Bao, the daily staff meal serves a dual purpose. First, he and his colleagues can all take time out from serving up their delicious Taiwanese buns to Soho. But also, they can all take turns cooking and trying out new ideas.

‘We each get to experiment with food we enjoy cooking and food we grew up with,’ he says. ‘We normally have food that reminds us of our families as a lot of us are living far away from our own countries. I think it is a great time to make people happy by cooking food that has love in it.’

EL PASTOR, SE1

Deep-fried eggs with chips and salad

Deep-fried egg with chips and salad
Tom Martin

Each week, the menus for staff meals at El Pastor are printed out for staff to browse and salivate over: carbonara on Monday, perhaps, or stuffed courgettes on Wednesday, or sometimes something wackier, like breadcrumbed deep-fried eggs with chips and salad when certain members of staff get in the kitchen of the Borough Market taqueria.

‘As a Mexican, family meals are some of the best moments of the day, when people relax and enjoy food made with love,’ says head chef Laura Alvarado Aleman.

‘At El Pastor the staff meal is the same. We always have fruit, bread and eggs, but also a main dish, often getting creative with ingredients we don’t want to waste.’

PORTLAND, W1

Tagliatelle with baby octopus, butternut squash salad and homemade lemonade

 Tagliatelle with baby octopus​ at Portland 
Tom Martin

At Fitzrovia’s Michelin-starred modern British restaurant Portland, the 11am staff meal is a chance for the kitchen to experiment with cuisines and flavours they wouldn’t normally.

‘It allows each chef to explore new cuisines or old favourites, and it’s a chance to discuss what each of us is excited about at the moment,’ explains head chef Zach Elliott.

The front of house staff come up with a drink — a homemade lemonade, for example — and everyone sits together.

‘We set aside the tensions from the day and we do what we all love to do most: we share a meal.’

KITTY FISHER’S, W1

Mexican-Chinese fusion: deconstructed burritos

Deconstructed burritos at Kitty Fisher's
Tom Martin

It is of course important to George Barson, head chef of Mayfair’s tiniest ever-cool restaurant, to make sure that everyone who passes through his doors has an unforgettable meal. But the most important thing he or anyone will cook each day, he says, is the staff meal.

‘It’s a moment to relax, laugh and switch off between services,’ he says, referring to the people he shares these meals with as ‘friends, or family’.

SABOR, W1

Pork stew and rice

Pork stew and rice at Sabor
Tom Martin

The sheer volume of customers who frequent Heddon Street’s Michelin-starred Spanish destination is not for the faint-hearted, or unhealthily hearted. So chef and director Nieves Barragan makes sure her troops are fuelled very well before they get down to business. ‘

It’s so important that our staff are well fed with healthy, fresh food,’ she says. ‘Fruit and yoghurts for breakfast; pulses, stews, vegetables and fish in the afternoon. Happy, healthy staff enjoy coming to work.’

TRULLO, N1

Puttanesca pasta

Puttanesca pasta at Trullo
Tom Martin

Talk about ‘work family’. As chef-owner of Islington’s Italian institution Trullo, Tim Siadatan says, ‘we spend more time with each other than we do with our families’, so of course monumental life moments are shared together.

Such as when waitress Lucy Franks announced her pregnancy. Cue cheers and all-round joy as the team tucked into their pasta.

‘As we prepare and cook food for others, it only makes sense that we sit down and look after each other,’ says Siadatan. Cheers to that.

MORO, EC1

Ham and pineapple pizzas, watermelon salad

Ham and pineapple pizza at Moro
Tom Martin

At five o’clock in the evening, every day, all the staff at Exmouth Market’s finest tapas spot down tools and gather for a meal. ‘It’s the one point in the day that everyone — all the staff from the morning and evening shifts — convene together,’ says chef owner Samantha Clark.

Ham and pineapple pizzas and watermelon salad are typical of the fare gobbled up during what she calls ‘a moment of respite from being on your feet, before or after a busy shift’.

ROCHELLE CANTEEN, E2

Bacon, eggs and toast, Black velvet

Bacon, eggs and toast, Black Velvet at Rochelle Canteen
Tom Martin

At Margot Henderson and Melanie Arnold’s legendary Rochelle Canteen in Shoreditch, the staff meal is, as Henderson puts it, ‘a great ritual’.

At 8am the team gathers for bacon, eggs and toast, washed down with black velvet (Guinness and champagne, a potent concoction particularly enjoyed by Henderson’s husband, Fergus, of St John).

The classic English breakfast reflects Arnold and Henderson’s own deceptively simple, delicious seasonal British menu. ‘As well as having a chat and enjoying each other’s company, the power of eating together is a bonding moment and the better the food is, the more smiles around the table.’

HONEY & SMOKE, W1

Crispy chicken with pesto and greens

Crispy chicken with pesto and greens at Honey & Smoke
Tom Martin

Breakfast, as far as Itamar Srulovich is concerned, is not the most important meal of the day.

That honour, says the chef owner of this ever-fantastic Middle Eastern-inspired spot on Great Portland Street, goes to his staff meal — ‘an opportunity for everyone to come together, and for the chefs to explore new ideas and show the rest of the team a bit of character. Our staff meals are usually trimmings and offcuts that the chefs zhuzh up a bit — we’ve had some weird meals in our time!’

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