Anthony Worrall Thompson Globe-trotting chef with an eco-friendly approach
Words by Peter Leonard 06/11/2007
From food writer to restaurateur, TV chef to pioneer of local organic produce… Antony Worrall Thompson has done it all. He’s one of television’s most recognisable faces, loved by viewers as the witty, quintessential chef. Sam Jones caught up with “AWT” during his recent holiday in Spain at one his favourite Costa restaurants, The Beach House in Elviria. You are currently on holiday in Spain with your wife Jay and two children. I understand, you have a holiday home here…Yes, we have a house with an avocado farm which is up and running but doesn’t make much money. It’s pathetic really (laughs) but it’s a great place. We have a guy who comes in and sells to the co-operative but I’m looking for someone who makes avocado oil as you get so little from the co-operative. So do you have someone who mans the farm while you’re away? They’re fairly easy to man really – a bit of pruning, spraying occasionally if they have a fungus and just picking. The leaves drop so we need someone to clean all the terraces. Well, you know, it will never make any money – but we like it. How much time do you manage to spend here – is Spain like a second home for you?It will be. We bought the house five years ago for the long term. I’m not just one of those people who want to make money out of buying and selling. I guess we come down about six times a year and hopefully more in time. Perhaps to live permanently in Spain?Well, I like the UK, it’s got lots of cons, but it’s getting more and more like big brother all the time. How do you spend your time here − do you tend to go out or stay at home?We cook a lot at home and entertain quite a bit. I do like cooking here as I don’t think the food on the south coast of Spain is particularly good. Of course, there are good places but I think a lot of the restaurants are too much about the tourists. They don’t put that extra effort into it as, say, they would in the middle of Barcelona. So, we tend to cook in quite a lot. Being a TV chef and having six restaurants, I don’t get to cook very much in the restaurants anymore so it’s actually quite nice. We have quite a lot of friends here and throw a party for 40 people once a year. We decided to have a curry night this year. Your cooking is very much about fresh, seasonal and largely organic produce – can it be difficult to find the right ingredients in Spain? Yes, it’s quite hard. There is a little place in Los Boliches which does organic produce. But, Christ, it’s like 10 quid a chicken here. So I try to buy fish as you’d like to think the fish is fairly wild. Or I buy the Iberico pork and things like that which tend to be more organic. Do you use the local markets at all? Yes, I find the market in Fuengirola good. We have our spice man there so we take a lot of spices back for the restaurants. We sometimes take avocados as well, sometimes hams. They’ve got great produce here but the vegetables aren’t great. It’s a bit like they don’t know how to prepare them properly; they just turn them out. Somewhere like this (The Beach House) does them fine but they’re few and far between. Do you see yourself opening a restaurant in Spain? I’d love this one. The setting is nice and the food is pretty ambitious as well. Can you tell me about your restaurants in England? I understand you have places in London, Richmond, Henley…Yes, two near Henley – one’s a pub-bistro, one’s a pub-grill − and the rest are grills: one in Winsor, one in Kew, one in Barnes and one in Notting Hill. We took a bit of a pun on the name, the Notting Grill. All serve mainly organic food and we try to keep it simple. I’ve gone very retro. I used to muck around with food a lot, lots of nouveau. The concept behind the restaurants sounds great… Well, I always judge a restaurant by how full it is and they seem to do well. Do they all use organic vegetables and British meat?Well, yes, and we do a lot of fish as well but still keeping it simple. I put prawn cocktail on a menu as a bit of joke and it’s come to be our bestseller. I think we TV chefs scared everyone into believing they shouldn’t like prawn cocktail but all along they’ve really loved it. Just prawns and sauce – nice simple combination. How do the restaurants differ? They don’t differ too much. The main difference is the décor, some of which I designed myself, and managers can make a huge difference. We butcher our own meat so have the bistro − The Lamb − which uses all the off-cuts and mainly serves stews. Most of the other cuts are used for the grills. We hang our meat for 35 days and butcher it ourselves, and we also rear our own pigs. So you have your own farm? Yes, but only chickens, pigs and vegetables as cattle or sheep would be too much. We shop around and go to farms to see and find the best cattle. Do you use all your own vegetables in the restaurants? Not all of them. We grow more specialist things such as raspberries, all the salads, lots of herbs. We have an orchard where we grow our own apples to make our own jellies. Your television career has rocketed over the past few years – Food and Drink, Saturday Kitchen, Saturday Cooks, now Daily Cooks. Now that you have a live daily show, what else is there left to achieve? I’d like to do something a little more controversial, to be more of a trouble-shooter if you like. Remember the Cook Report? Getting into trouble all the time, but with cooking and food, so you go and bust cheap kitchens… How’s your programme Daily Cooks going? It’s very popular. I think the main attraction is that we’re doing simple food which you can cook at home every night. I think chefs can become a bit pretentious and complicated on television. And you still have your weekly and monthly columns?I’ve been doing that for a long time now. I’m the longest serving food writer now on any one paper, albeit The Express, which is fine – it pays the bills – but doesn’t get the street cred that, say, The Guardian or Independent would. But it’s good to have been writing for so long. How about your own cookery books? I’m working on one at the moment. I’ve done a lot recently on diabetic cooking, and the GI and GL diets. The books seem to be popular and people have written to me to say things like they’ve managed to come off insulin since using them. Where did your interest in health books stem from? I was diagnosed with something called Syndrome X, which is a pre-diabetic state. I was diagnosed on a television programme of all things. I thought, shite, my food career is over. So I looked at diabetic food books, which were awful, and thought there must be something we can do. I managed to come up with some nice dishes and made a little campaign as there are so many diabetics out there. Are the diabetic recipes completely different to those in your other books? Yes, but my main criteria with the health books is that the recipes have to taste good, although we have to find a way of making them healthy and not too fattening. My latest diabetic weight loss diet is only 1,500 calories a day, which is strict but works. It sounds like you’re extremely busy – do you still have time for food shows, appearances, charity work… those sorts of things? I do quite a bit of charity work and a lot of the personal appearance thing. I’m not doing the Good Food Show this year but I do events like Harrogate and the Royal Show. For charity I do Save the Children, the Child Bereavement Trust – mainly kids’ charities. Funnily enough a friend of ours here organised a charity night at a local place for a cancer appeal and part of it was a celebrity chef mouse race. I think we had Antony-Worrall Mousekins and Gordon the Rat or something like that. My one was coming last but suddenly took off and won. There’s been quite a lot in the press about the hostility between Gordon Ramsay and yourself. I think I read something about Delia Smith as well. How much truth is there to the stories?Well, Delia called me the “most repulsive man on telly”, but she’s ok now… There’s quite a lot of truth in the case of Gordon. With Delia, it was fun at the time as it was the first time anyone had heard her speak out of turn. She’s apologised, said I love you and we’re actually quite good friends now. With Gordon though, he seems to hate all other TV chefs and he’s called me some pretty bad names, things like that. Do you bump into each other that much on the whole chef circuit? I suppose so. He’s a smarmy git when you talk to him as he pretends he likes you and then stabs you in the back. I think he’s a great chef and I do like his TV programmes − but the man’s a complete w….r. He’s done very well but, if he were accepting of Ainsley, myself and people like that, I’m sure we’d all get on very well. But he’s just bloody rude. How about the other side of things – who are your good friends in the industry? I get on with pretty well everyone. Funnily enough, it’s the classical chefs who look down their noses a bit. They think we’re cheapening food by doing it on the telly. But they’re just jealous (laughs). But television chefs have done wonders for food in recent years… Well, you’ve got to try to cater for the public, to help them become more knowledgeable and not over-complicate things. My attitude is very simple – cooking is easy. My book at the moment is fast family food and to prepare everything in under 20 minutes. What sorts of dishes are you including in the book?Lots of good fish, small and prime cuts of meat and some fun things, which I know some readers will say are unhealthy, like oven wedges with melted cheese and onion on top. Kids have got to have fun sometimes and you can’t be purist all the time. I just love what I’m doing. I couldn’t resist just a few quick recipes questions… Seasonal produce is hugely important in your cooking – why does this affect the finished result so much? Well, I think if we’re going to be green and eco-friendly we’ve got to think about not importing so much. And local seasonal produce tastes that much better. I remember the days when you used to look forward to strawberries or first-season asparagus. When was the last time a peach dribbled down your chin? Lots of fruit is picked unripe – apricots can taste of cardboard. My opinion is that if we grew things in season, we’d appreciate them that bit more. And you get more benefits from the nutrients in seasonal produce. What would be you favourite meal for a lazy afternoon or long leisurely Spanish lunch? I do like doing tapas. So a big table of tapas, meze or antipasti. I don’t diverge too much in the Mediterranean as it’s all such good food. So I’d create a whole buffet of dishes to pick at, and then I think you’ve got to have fish baked in salt – a big sea bass or dorada. Make a mix with salt, egg white, lemon, garlic and pepper. I love that in the restaurants down here. Serve it with a nice salad. Let the tomatoes sit out in the sun, sliced, and let the sun warm them so you get the sweetness and then drizzle with oil and a little rock salt. Simple – you don’t need anything poncy. We grow our own peppers, chillis and tomatoes here as well. How about your favourite avocado recipe?I could give you loads of those. I do a really good avocado and goat’s cheese soup. Blitz the avocado with a bit of crème fraiche, goat’s cheese, a bit of onion and some blanched parsley and spinach which keeps the colour as avocados go brown. Add a little bit of cumin, cayenne and chilli and blitz it all up. But served cold: I could never get my head around hot avocado. And, finally, your favourite winter warmer treat, or hangover grub in front of the fire? Well, if I’m going to be honest and you’re not on a diet, you can’t go wrong with crumpets and baked beans which have been reduced down until they are quite thick, with a bit of cream, butter and lots of black pepper. Put the beans on the crumpets and crispy bacon on top of that − then lots of grated cheese. Bang it under the grill − fantastic, eat your heart out!
