This year’s Best Newcomers have earned their award the old-fashioned way: graft and determination. Mark Jarvis, owner and head chef of Anglo in Farringdon, east London, and his co-head chef Jack Cashmore both got hooked on cooking at an early age – Jarvis from watching his grandmother bake cakes at home in Buckinghamshire, Cashmore from his weekend pot-washing job at a local restaurant in Staffordshire. Having worked their way up through some of the toughest kitchens – Le Manoir, Restaurant Sat Bains – they seemed a good match when Jarvis decided to set up a place of his own in London.
His initial idea was to open somewhere “a bit refined” in the West End. Then a period working in restaurants in Spain convinced the 34-year-old that his venture needed to be “more approachable and relaxed. The food still had to be amazing,” he clarifies, “but I didn’t want that stiffness you get in high-end places.”
When a space came up on a side street off Leather Lane in Clerkenwell, which throngs with office workers during the day but empties out after 6pm, Jarvis took a gamble. Banks wouldn’t give him a loan so he appealed to friends and family for investment. He raised enough to buy the premises, formerly a cheap-and-cheerful Italian restaurant called Fabrizio’s, but there wasn’t much left over for the refurb.
“The quote from the designer was astronomical so we just thought, let’s have a bit of fun and do it ourselves,” he says.
“We painted all the walls, ripped apart the downstairs area, made the seats, designed the neon sign,” recalls Cashmore.
“We refitted the kitchen, which was disgusting,” says Jarvis, wincing at the memory.
They turned it around in a month, serving their first guests on 12 March. “We didn’t want to create a massive hype to begin with,” says Cashmore. “We wanted to ease into it. Iron out the creases at our own pace.”
That didn’t quite work out as planned. On 7 April, the Evening Standard’s Grace Dent declared she was in love with Anglo “within 15 minutes of perching my bottom”, awarding the food five stars. Another five-star review followed from AA Gill, who declared his lunch at the restaurant “perfect … It was the most accomplished thing a kitchen can achieve: classic flavours made harmonious, but also beguiling and ingénue fresh.”
Now it’s booked six weeks in advance for dinner and it’s easy to see why. The food is glorious.
Jarvis and Cashmore describe their menu as modern British but influences from further afield creep into standout dishes such as salmon with charred leeks and miso sauce, or a surprising pudding of raspberries and burrata.
“Mark and Jack are cooking their hearts out,” says Cashmore’s old boss Sat Bains, who has eaten at Anglo several times. “You can taste the desire to succeed. It’s not over the top: it’s not another Noma-esque restaurant robbing ideas from Scandinavia. It’s a really good restaurant for Britain to have.”
For Cashmore, the OFM award is “a massive achievement”.
Jarvis agrees. “When you’re sitting in a place you painted and decorated yourself and you get an award like that …” He shakes his head. “You realise you don’t have to be a big deal to win. You can just be normal people with a vision.”
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