Chef interview: Tom Aikens

Until now, chefs whose restaurants have received Michelin stars have invariably entered the Middle East market with an alcohol licence. Not so Tom Aikens, who has opened his first outlet in the region — Pots, Pans & Boards — at The Beach Mall in JBR, which is a casual dining venue sans alcohol. It’s not an anomaly — the entire stretch is a hot bed of unlicensed and casual dining venues. But is the chef happy with a dry venue?

I meet Aikens for the first time a day or two after he lands in Dubai before the restaurant’s opening. Self-admittedly jet-lagged, he’s still up for a chat. When asked about the licence, he says: “I don’t think it is a problem because everyone else has no licence as well.

“I’ve been here in prime season and seen how packed and busy [the restaurants] are, so I don’t necessarily think it is an issue. Because if everyone else isn’t serving alcohol then it’s not going to make any difference to us either.”

It didn’t affect the menu planning to a large degree, he says. “Some of my dishes may have some alcohol in them which I’ve completely removed [here]. So there were a few recipes that I definitely had to change or not use, which is what it’s all about. When you go abroad to other cities, you have to embrace the culture. There are always some restrictions in what you can or can’t do in any country, really. But that shapes your mind in terms of what you’re going to cook.”

So why did the chef, previously plagued with a reputation for a short temper, decide to enter the Middle East market? Aikens was approached by property developer Meraas “around a year-and-a-half to two years ago to come up with a concept”. While Aikens admits he has been tempted even before that, he was put off by reports of the supply chain.

He reveals: “I had a couple of my chefs who have worked here, and they were saying it was difficult to get reliable delivery of food consistently. When the food travels out of a country, sometimes it’s not in a good state... you can’t send it back all the way to Australia.”

From then until now, Aikens believes that the standard of restaurants has improved in the region, with positive stories filtering back to him in London.

He is all praise for Meraas, and says: “Meraas is a great company to work for. It made it pretty easy, I have to say. You’ve got all sorts of different concepts here, and [Meraas] wanted to have something that was different, but also tied in to the informality and the casualness of the others.” This is the second British chef Meraas has pulled into the mall — the first was young chef Luke Thomas, who opened Retro Feasts just a few units down from Aikens.

Speaking of which, Aikens is obviously not the first celebrity chef to open a restaurant in the Middle East. Whereas some of them have moved here (Gary Rhodes), others visit often (Vineet Bhatia), and others don’t appear at all (Jamie Oliver). Aikens plans to strike a happy medium. Speaking just before a dinner preview at the restaurant, Aikens says competition is good.

“It just goes to show that Dubai has definitely moved up in the food world; reason being that there’s a lot more variety of restaurants in terms of what people want. Before it was very much high-end fine dining, hotels only. There weren’t that many standalone restaurants, and now because Dubai is not viewed as a ‘through city’ just for business, and people are coming here for holidays, bringing their families, they want a better variety of places to eat and not just to eat in a stuffy restaurant in a hotel.

“So the casual market is definitely growing a lot more and I think it’s nice that other chefs are coming and opening things up in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. It’s good for chefs to explore… and it’s a great way for us to learn new habits. That’s what I enjoy about coming to different countries and being able to try different food and different techniques. It’s always something that I really relish, and when opportunities like that come along, it is sometimes difficult to say no.”

There is a caveat, he says. “It’s great fun to be able to go to different cities around the world, but as you’ve seen yourself within Dubai — just because you’re a very renowned world famous chef, it doesn’t always go according to plan. Three-star chefs have come here and failed.

“I don’t think it’s ever a question of the name of the chef but it’s also looking at your local market, the cultures, the eating habits. When I came up with the idea, I definitely checked out the local market. You can see which ones are going really well, the style of food that people like to eat. If you get that right, you can be very successful.

“Some chefs go into a city, and say ‘I’ll do my food, I’ll do it the way that I want’, and in a way that’s kind of the wrong attitude. I think you’ve got to embrace the local culture, and the food.”

And it helps that he has a head chef on the ground, Ibraheem Musleh, whom he can trust and knows well.

Calling him ‘Ibi’, Aikens says: “Ibi worked with me previously at Tom Aikens in Chelsea for a couple of years. He’s been in Dubai for three to four years already so he understands the supply and the setup, which is really helpful.”

Aikens continues: “He’s told me some of the horror stories: getting supplies in and how long it can take and the resistance they [suppliers] have. If you want to, for instance, have a new herb, it can literally take six weeks to get that herb into the country through your supply chain. But it is a little bit easier now.”

However, he’s appreciative of the choice available in Dubai. “You’re quite fortunate in the fact that you’ve got Europe, Asia, Australia and the US. So I’m not going to say the word local, but in essence of the world ‘local’, you can tap into pretty much every food market.”

Aikens opens up a bit more about his relationship with his Dubai team. He says: “I keep in touch with a lot of the chefs who worked with me. Ibi was thinking of leaving the Westin and I told him about the concept. Obviously from a chef’s point of view, it’s much easier to have someone on the ground, someone who knows the system and the suppliers.”

The duo worked together to create the menu offering, which includes a mixture of English, French and Mediterranean cuisine. Aikens reveals he shared all his ideas and plans with Musleh. He then asked Musleh to send back ideas of his own, after which he created the menu. “Part of the menu has developed since we started doing tastings. We did five days at the last tasting; we did almost 60 dishes in five days,” he says.

I point out that it sounds like a party in theory, but stressful in practice. He agrees. “It was intense. It’s almost like doing a cooking marathon non-stop. Just ploughing through it… and then we obviously had to make it all. And then you have to finish it off and taste it all!” laughs Aikens.

“In that way, we started pinpointing what dishes we were going to use. We have a backlog of others which aren’t on the menu, and did other tastings [with] his ideas and tweaked my dishes.”

It’s interesting that he’s happy to let his head chef share the reins on the project. Aikens notes: “It’s definitely something that we’ve done together and it’s important to involve the senior staff, so that they can embrace it as much as me. As I said, he’s here on the ground and he knows what’s good. Obviously there isn’t as much of a seasonality here as in the UK, but he knows more than I do of what’s good and what isn’t, and that will stipulate what is and what isn’t on the menu.”

Not just the menu, but the interior was carefully thought about as well. Led by Aikens and designed by Michaelis Boyd Associates, the restaurant fit-out has been inspired by an old-fashioned rustic home kitchen, with a range of hanging copper pots and pans, old kitchen knives and large heavy cleavers stuck into antique kitchen wall tiles. Large communal size sharing tables made from reclaimed wood join areas for individual diners and smaller crowds, with bar stool seats alongside the marble kitchen counter and restaurant, where they can witness action in the open kitchen.

Aikens admits the concept was “all me”, having personally picked every item that decorates the restaurant, which he collected from various markets on his travels in the UK and France. He says: “Down to every detail, the tiles, the floor, the chairs, the lighting, the banquette, all of these I bought myself. I went to different markets and bought them all.” He points to five chandeliers constructed out of 15-20 copper pans each, and proudly tells me he bought them too.

“I chose the stations, the tables, the reception desks. It’s funny when you have an idea or concept and you see it on paper or PowerPoint, and you actually see it come to life… It’s a lot better than what I imagined,” he adds.

Speaking about the open kitchen, Aikens says: “It’s great, it really is. I thought it was going to be quite cramped, but it’s quite spacious. It creates a good atmosphere, people can see what’s going on. It’s definitely one of the things that you see in all restaurants now: an open kitchen. It’s nice for the chefs that there is that interaction, and it makes them work a little bit more cleanly as well.”

He’s quick to say that it’s hard to compare the design and feel of Pots, Pans & Boards to any of his existing restaurants, and adds that it’s “so far” from Tom’s Kitchen in terms of design.

Where did the inspiration for the name come about, I ask? Aikens says: “I really liked pot cooking, very simple cooking, so that’s where it came from. Looking back to my own childhood when we congregated around the kitchen table, that’s where we ate together, serving ourselves from one pot to another. Also cooking in one pot… you create a brilliant lunch or supper from one pot, and all the flavours are contained in it. Then looking at how we could influence that on the service — with people helping themselves. And we effectively put the food down and they help themselves. It’ll be in pots, pans, and boards, straight to the table, and it’s also a way of creating the informality and casualness in the dining.”

I have to ask, at the risk of angering the fiery chef, what he thinks of “We Want Plates” — the Facebook and Twitter crowd against food served on everything but plates. Will his restaurant’s food, with everything served in pots, pans or boards, be a target?

He’s honest, bitingly so. “I don’t really care to be honest. If you go on their website there are some ridiculous things. Shoes, hats... It’s endless. The premise of what we’re trying to get into is that it’s absolutely fine to serve food in a pot, or a board or a pan to the table. It’s what you would do in your kitchen, where you eat out of a pot, so I don’t think that it’s too far-fetched. I think that’s all that I’m trying to do: make it a home from home and to be as casual and as fun as you would in your own kitchen.”

Fair point. I change tack — is he going to open more in the Middle East? “We have to see how this one goes, because it’s been a year-and-a-half in the making. If it goes well, I might look at it. If I was to do something else here, it would still be casual. I wouldn’t want to do anything typically high end. I don’t think there is as much appetite for that. And for me, it’s a lot more fun to do something casual. It’s less stress, it’s less intensity, it’s less weight on my shoulders, it’s less draining, mentally and physically.”

Fine dining, however, gave him his stars; surely being the youngest British chef to win two Michelin stars put a huge amount of pressure on him? He says, with a tinge of embarrassment: “Yeah hugely. It was a blessing and not. Because when you reach that level at an early age, you are even more highly strung and stressed, because the world is watching you. And although I welcomed it at the time, looking back, would I want it that young again? No, I probably wouldn’t.”

Pressure to succeed or not, one thing is for sure: the 45-year-old chef knows his food, has done his research into the market, and is keen to make his Middle East venture a roaring success.