“Fryers was a big one for me,” says chef Jamie Pickles on the decision to cook everything exclusively over open flames at Stow, the restaurant he’s just opened on Bridge Street with his friend Matt Nellany. ”I just never want to work with a fryer again.”
From a ‘making it easy on yourself’ point of view, such a move seems madness at best, and masochistic at worst.
“We’ve made life so much harder for ourselves,” he laughs. Like opening a restaurant isn’t quite hard enough in the first place, without throwing your own obstacles in the way. But there’s method behind the madness.
“From the atmosphere perspective, having people dine at the pass, there’s a warmth about watching people cooking in such an old fashioned way,” he says.
There is, and when you see it in action, with the smell of burning wood and the heat on your face, you begin to understand that perhaps there’s no ‘better’ or ‘worse’ when it comes to kitchen appliances. Just different.
There’s a romance to it all. There’s even a bit of romance to how it started. The friends took a trip to Paris last year to take in some of the city’s great restaurants and great cocktail bars, and came back with a plan to start their own place.
“That’s when all our ideas came out, talking about what we’re most passionate about. Probably over a few too many cocktails,” says Matt.
“When we came across 62 Bridge Street, with the two separate rooms and the corridor between, it ticked all the boxes. One room for the restaurant to showcase James and all that he can do, and the cocktail bar so we can showcase what I’m passionate about.”
Having met while working at Trof and Albert’s Schloss, back when both were owned by the Mission Mars group, the behemoth behind the ever-growing Rudy’s empire, they bought Trof when it came up for sale a couple of years back.
After years as a general manager, Jamie had decided to go off and retrain as a chef, working in hotels and then in Ireland at the tiny Saint Francis Provisions in Kinsale, where some of the inspiration for Stow has come from. But taking on Trof and now launching Stow has brought him back to the mothership.
Produce will be paramount, with meat from famed local butcher Littlewoods and fish from the Shetland Isles. And while the open-fire cooking will be most pronounced with their dairy cow ribeyes and hunks of monkfish, Stow won’t be all about the ‘low and slow’.
“We don’t want to be known as a barbecue restaurant, with ribs on the menus, that serves everything charred and covered in barbecue sauce, that’s not us,” says Jamie. “It’s just about bringing things back down to basics, while being able to serve quality food.”
Matt wants the ‘back to basics’ ethos to extend to the bar too, which monopolises the whole front of the restaurant. This won’t be a beakers and chemistry set type of cocktail experience – expect the classics, done right, with an occasional twist here and there.
“Some of the great bars in the country are doing some amazing things, with sous vide machines, using the chemistry side of things, but we want to take things back to basics, be honest with what we’re doing,” says Matt. “Be quite raw and artisanal. Vintage. So what Jamie’s doing in the kitchen passes back through to the bar too.”
While there won’t be slabs of brisket smothered in barbecue sauce, most dishes have the kiss of smoke to them, from overnight roasted beetroot to charred red peppers, served with a lash of sherry vinegar. The chicken – the chefs’ favourite dish – is brined before being slapped onto the griddle to char.
Price will be key too. That aforementioned dairy cow ribeye, an intimidatingly-sized slab of beef cut to share, comes in at £48. You could add on another third of the price at any number of places in town.
“We’ve tried to make everything as affordable as possible,” says Jamie. “We want to be good value and be accessible for everyone. We want people to be able to come every couple of weeks, and not feel like they’ve been ripped off. We’d rather be busy every day and have a great atmosphere than be an exclusive place you can only come to once a year.”
As generally goes without saying these days, seasonality will very much drive what’s coming off the grill.
“As chefs we’re really looking forward to the spring, and what comes with that. And maybe having a bit of fun with some Christmas stuff, so we might get some goose on in the week heading up to Christmas. Just being a bit playful,” he goes on.
“But we’ll always be led by what’s coming out of the ground and what’s coming off the trees,”
