The menu at Cornerstone, Tom Brown’s restaurant in Hackney Wick, east London, is bracingly concise: eight savoury dishes, three puddings, a plate of blue cheese. But still, it deserves some proper attention. What to make of the pickled oysters with horseradish, the brill in roast chicken butter sauce? And what about the potted shrimp crumpet with kohlrabi, gherkin and parsley? Delicious as the latter sounds – on a menu that changes every day, this dish is one of only two constants – it might almost have been lifted straight from the pages of a satirical novel. Where I come from (and perhaps where you do, too), crumpets require only butter and, if you insist, a smear of strawberry jam.
At a table by the window of his acclaimed restaurant – a room with an open kitchen and a concrete floor that somehow manages to be both modish and welcoming – Brown grins. “It’s funny,” he says. “Our food can be interpreted in so many ways. For some people, it does sound new-fangled. But I think what we do is quite classic. A butter sauce is completely classic.” Brown, the winner of the OFM Best Newcomer Award, worked for Nathan Outlaw for six years, first in Cornwall, and later as head chef at the Michelin-starred The Capital in Knightsbridge. Last week, like Outlaw in 2012, he made it through to the banquet for The Great British Menu.
The menu at Cornerstone, he insists, reflects only that training. “People chuck around these terms: simple, product-driven. But they’re missing the point. What I learned from Nathan is reverence for produce. It’s not just about having restraint; it’s why you have it. All a beautiful bit of plaice wants is a beautiful sauce to go with it. It doesn’t need two vegetables and potato. It can sing without them. All it needs is something to turn up the volume a bit.”
His voice runs on, all enthusiasm. Gurnard is a meaty fish, he tells me, for which reason he likes first to freeze it, and then to cure it in almond milk, the better to break it down (it’s served like carpaccio with grapes, almonds and sherry vinegar). However, salmon, prepared sashimi-style with a dash of lime pickle on the side, has a texture that means it works best as – to use a technical term – a chunk. “The gurnard is quite an original dish, I suppose,” he says, almost reluctantly. “But our puddings are deliberately nostalgic, because who wants to eat malted yeast bullshit? Honestly, I’ll tell you what drives me mad: meringue shards. That’s why we have pavlova.”
Still, there is a certain – how to put this? – modernist purity at play here. Did he always know, for instance, that there would be no meat on his menu? “Actually, we did serve meat in the beginning. But when Claude Bosi came in he asked why, when the fish was so good, we bothered with it. We took it off that same day, and it feels very right, now. This part of east London is known as fish island, after all.”
Brown, who is 31, grew up in Cornwall, the son of a social worker and a builder, and the kind of fussy child who refused to eat vegetables (he was 14 before he did). As a boy, he had hoped to go into medicine, but at 16, having tired of education, he found a job as a kitchen porter in a Redruth pub. His plan was to work there only for one summer, but when his employer asked him to help out at the stove, his world tilted. “It wasn’t amazing food. It was only pie and chips. But I liked the gratification of it. You cooked it, and you were praised for it. That was motivational for me.” He stayed for years rather than weeks.
“Finally, I wrote to a few chefs in London, asking if I could do a stage or two. When Bryn Williams [the chef/proprietor of Odette’s in Primrose Hill] said I could, I was proper starstruck.” He laughs. “I was such a country boy, arriving in Camden with my suitcase, and it was all so amazing to me: a whole turbot being delivered, a guy walking in with two salt marsh lambs slung over his shoulders. After that, I knew what I wanted to do. I started applying for proper jobs.” He went back to Cornwall, worked his way up, and by the time he was 26 was Outlaw’s head chef. “Nathan took a massive gamble on me, but I had a good work ethic, and the humility to cook his food. He taught me everything, not only about cooking, but about managing people, too.” He looks in the direction of the kitchen, where his team are preparing for lunch service. “Give people responsibility and your trust, and they will flourish.”
Cornerstone, which opened last April, is named after an Arctic Monkeys song. It’s the restaurant he always dreamed of owning. Miraculously, he didn’t have to take out a bank loan, his father, uncles and aunts having all put in money his grandmother had left them. It goes without saying that he would love to win a Michelin star here, too, but given the choice he would rather have a full restaurant and happy customers than spend all his time chasing them. Last night, a couple who had flown in that afternoon from Tel Aviv travelled from their Mayfair hotel for dinner. The look on their faces as they ate was, he says, its own reward.
The same goes for reviews. His proudest moment so far had nothing to do with the critics. “The greatest day of my entire career was when Nathan came in for lunch,” he says. “Of course, I kept away. I treated him like a regular customer. But it was genuinely an emotional experience for me.” Across the table, he fiddles for a while with his coffee cup; when he looks up, his cheeks are a little pink, and his brown eyes are brimful of tears.
3 Prince Edward Rd, London E9 5LX
