The Staying Power of Koya w/ Shuko Oda

The Staying Power of Koya w/ Shuko Oda

Today’s episode is an interview with Shuko Oda, the co-creator and executive head chef at Koya, the Japanese udon noodle restaurant with sites in Soho, the City and Hackney. When Koya arrived at 49 Frith Street in Soho, a whole 16 years ago, it replaced Alistair Little, the mighty influential temple of modern British cuisine. Since then, Koya itself has become a huge part of the modern London restaurant, revolutionising how Londoners think of Japanese food. It was the brainchild of former City trader John Devitt who, inspired by Paris’ Kunitoraya, installed Shuko alongside head chef Junya Yamazaki, who had both worked at Rose Bakery in Dover Street Market, to create a restaurant based around udon noodles. Soon, chefs and diners from all over London were flocking to Koya for its blackboard, where Shuko and Junya reinterpreted Japanese cuisine with British ingredients. Since then, Shuko has gone onto open more Koyas, including Koya Ko in Hackney. It remains a restaurant that is principally Japanese – built on the success of its house-made udon noodles and dashi – but, as we talk about in the podcast, its storied blackboard menu of specials of small plates, salads and its relationships with some of Britain’s best suppliers, has made Koya a restaurant that exemplifies a type of modern London dining, and has allowed it to stand the test of time. We hope you enjoy the episode. Like our recent podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/vittles/id1801263549], this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vittles/id1801263549] or through Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/0llkzmLK90Ap7VU5MZyB5n]. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts. A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space [https://www.young-space.co.uk/] for hosting our recording sessions. In an exciting development you can now also watch [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-cNDrzs3Z3phleWJHCo-sQ]this podcast on YouTub [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-cNDrzs3Z3phleWJHCo-sQ]e. For that, huge thanks to our videographer Zaineb Abelque and editor Callum Winter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe [https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Behind the Scenes of London's Most Influential Restaurant Group w/ Songsoo Kim

Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast! Today’s episode is with Songsoo Kim, head of sourcing and development for the Super 8 group, one of the most influential restaurant groups in London. They’re behind Basque restaurants Brat and Mountain, headed up by Tomos Parry, as well as Kiln and Smoking Goat, the modern Thai-inspired restaurants in Soho and in Shoreditch. Last month, the group opened Impala, perhaps the most anticipated new restaurant to arrive in London in the last 12 months. Four years in the making, it is chef Meedu Saad’s first solo project but a restaurant which he would admit owes a lot to the culinary expertise, vision and meticulous sourcing of Songsoo, who liaises between farmer and chef to shape dishes across the group. As well as talking in-depth about the making of Impala and what being a head of sourcing and development actually means, we go into Songsoo’s past (she was born in Korea but grew up in rural Colorado and the south of India), we discuss her influences and the importance of food and the role of plants in her life, why she loves Thai food so much and what being part of supplier-led restaurant group has been like in practice. “I’m very curious about plants from different worlds, eating habits from different worlds, and I have a deep respect for eating and cooking as a cultural entity,” she says during the recording. Songsoo also moonlights as a writer, and is a regular contributor to Vittles’s cooking section. It was during a conversation about the writer-editor/chef-protégé relationship a week or so after the recording of the podcast that Songsoo told me about a word in Korean, transliterated as ‘gyeol’. It means ‘texture, grain or flow’, a word that extends ‘metaphorically to the texture of a person’s soul, breath, or the rhythm of emotions.’ This is a mutuality she seeks from her collaborators: when she’s trying to convey a specific feeling in a sentence, or a particular flavour profile in a dish, there must be always depth and texture. We hope you enjoy the episode. Like our recent podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/vittles/id1801263549], this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vittles/id1801263549] or through Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/0llkzmLK90Ap7VU5MZyB5n]. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts. A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space [https://www.young-space.co.uk/] for hosting our recording sessions. We thank you for listening, reading and supporting our work. We'll be back again later this month with the next episode: a conversation between Adam and Shuko Oda, the co-founder and executive head chef of the beloved Japanese udon-specialist Koya. We’ll see you then. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe [https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

What happens when a restaurant wins a Michelin star? w/ Joké Bakare

Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast. Today’s episode is a conversation with someone who is very close to our hearts at Vittles: Joké Bakare, the chef behind the West African restaurant Chishuru. We first encountered Joké in 2020, when she sent Jonathan a pandemic care package of Nigerian condiments, which led to us publishing her first piece of food writing [https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/vittles-220-yaji]. We couldn’t have predicted what happened next. That year, Chishuru transformed from being a supper club into a restaurant inside Brixton Market, a delayed effect from winning a competition in 2019. During the course of a two and a half year period, Joké introduced many Londoners to many different styles of West African cooking, before moving the restaurant to Fitzrovia with her business partner, Matt Pace. The next year Chishuru won a Michelin star, making Joké the first Black female chef in the UK to hold a star — an accolade she never sought nor imagined receiving. In the Vittles 99 guide to the best restaurants in London, Jonathan described the appeal of Joké’s cooking as ‘food in which you can feel the presence of the chef.’ Many others feel the same. Joké is self-taught and cooks in a very distinct way, with a modern and inclusive approach to the traditions around which she grew up and incorporating pan-African influences that stretch beyond Nigeria and West Africa. At the same time, the star has made her a figurehead for West African food in the U.K., turning Chishuru into a very different type of restaurant to the one she initially envisaged. In this episode, we talked about the pressure of having a Michelin star, how it has changed Chishuru, her own particular culinary heritage, ‘pan-Africanism’, the move from Brixton to Fitzrovia, and the somewhat unlikely journey she’s taken to becoming one of the most respected chefs in London. We hope you enjoy it. Credits: The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan [https://www.instagram.com/adamcoghlan/]. Joké Bakare is the chef-owner of Chishuru. Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker [https://www.leckerpodcast.com/], is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award. The full Vittles masthead can be found here [https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/about]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe [https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Why Does Anyone Open a Restaurant? w/ Ravneet Gill Taiano

Today’s episode is a conversation with Ravneet Gill Taiano who you will either know as a judge from Junior Bake Off, the founder of hospitality recruitment platform Countertalk, the author of Pastry Chefs Guide. Or, if you’ve been paying attention during the last 12 months, you’ll have seen that Rav, together with her partner Mattie, opened Gina Restaurant [https://www.ginarestaurant.co.uk/] in Chingford in June. One of the things that has always marked Rav apart from her peers is that she’s made an effort to promote transparency in hospitality, seeking to shed light on an industry that is often shrouded in mystery or embellished by PR – to pull back the curtain and give a true insight into what’s actually going on with workers, customers and finances. She’s remained faithful to that approach with Gina, publicly disclosing that it cost more than £500,000 to open the restaurant and we wanted to know more about the parts of that sum. And to ask – when knowing all she does about the many challenges facing restaurateurs and chefs in the current economic climate – why she would open her own restaurant? Elsewhere in the episode, we cover how Rav and Mattie ended up opening in Chingford, her food backstory in Southampton and Leyton, dream customers, nightmare customers, her mentors and the ‘pastry idol’ who taught her that you should never work for your heroes. Finally, we discuss the beauty of the invert puff pastry that she used in the two galettes she brought for us to taste at the recording. We hope you enjoy it. Credits The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan [https://www.instagram.com/adamcoghlan/]. Ravneet Gill Taiano is the author of Pastry Chef's Guide, a judge on Junior Bake Off, founder of hospitality platform Countertalk and the owner of restaurant Gina in Chingford. Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker [https://www.leckerpodcast.com/], is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award. The full Vittles masthead can be found here [https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/about]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe [https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Volatile World of London Restaurant PR w/ Gemma Bell

This month's episode covers the volatile world of public relations in restaurants. The industry has been grappling with this uneasy relationship between restaurants, journalists and PRs for as long as PR has existed. On the one hand, pioneering PRs like Alan and Elizabeth Crompton-Batt are partially responsible for the London restaurant scene as we know it today, helping to create the template for the celebrity chef [https://londonist.com/2006/09/the_man_who_was] that runs from Marco Pierre-White to The Bear. On the other, both restaurant owners and journalists have talked to us about their feelings of resentment about relying on PR, with some making it a matter of pride to never use or engage with it. Whatever your opinion, PR remains a significant and integral part of London’s restaurant scene. Almost every new restaurant hoping to get press uses PR... and it seems that the more they do, the more the rest of them need to as well. So it felt like the right time to invite a titan of the restaurant PR industry on this podcast. Gemma Bell is one of the most influential restaurant PRs in the country today, heading up her own agency Gemma Bell & Company, whose clients over the last 15 years have included St. JOHN, Dishoom, Yotam Ottolenghi, The River Café, Koya, Padella, The Clove Club and many more. Adam Coghlan has known Gemma for about 15 years and in that time, the industries of public relations and restaurants have changed dramatically, particularly due to the influence of social media. In this podcast we talk about those huge changes, about what clients want from PR, what she feels her role in the industry is, the influence of her mentors (including Elizabeth Crompton-Batt and hotelier Ian Schrager), parting ways with Yotam Ottolenghi and the biggest lesson she’s learnt from the last two to three decades of working in the restaurant world. We hope you enjoy it. Credits The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan. Gemma Bell is the founder of the agency Gemma Bell & Company. Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker [https://www.leckerpodcast.com/], is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award. The full Vittles masthead can be found here [https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/about]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe [https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]