Starting Up with Mark 'Baz' Butcher @ St Giles Cafe

This was going to be a blog about the Dining Club dinners that we hold on the last Wednesday of each month, and specifically about the one we’re having on October 29, where an Oxford University English lecturer will be talking to us all about The Ghost Club. But it’s sold out.

In this business the focus is always on today while also thinking about tomorrow. Ensuring that we maintain consistently high standards of food preparation and service requires being constantly on the case and having eyes and ears tuned into the day’s events as they happen. What we serve today requires replacing or changing tomorrow; that means placing orders every day and thinking creatively about what we have to use up on our shelves to ensure zero wastage.

Despite this whirlwind I know how important it is in any business, especially in the early years, to take time out and to stop and ask yourself this very important question: “What the hell am I doing and why?”

In corporate speak it’s called knowing, defining and refining your sense of purpose. It’s not about the making money bit (and certainly not in this type of business at this stage!), it’s about understanding what it is that gets you out of bed in the morning and will continue to do so come rain, shine, Oxford traffic etc.

In August I was very fortunate to get away to California for 10 days. I have increasingly been told about the emergence of new food ideas and café/ restaurant formats there, and so my partner and I took off to go eat for 10 days. We had the full California experience, and not least a 6.5 magnitude earthquake in the middle of the night while staying in a lodge in the middle of a redwood forest. We sampled everything on the food spectrum, from huge plates of rather bland and tasteless mush to extraordinarily small, highly original, sublimely tasting plates. The latter were mostly Japanese in origin. Many of the restaurants generating “buzz” have canteen-style formats where you order as you enter and then watch your food being prepared as you push your tray down the shelf. The chefs are there to talk to you and be “front of house”. We’ve always, as the saying goes, “eaten with our eyes” but now it seems we want the opportunity to see (and discuss) how it’s being cooked. Eating out we’re increasingly concerned about the raw ingredients. The quite horrendous impact (US) food production has had on diet, land, soil and nutrients, and the complicity of chefs and restaurants in the process, is well documented. What responsibility do we have for the fact there are now really only two varieties of wheat left, when there used to be thousands; that flour is by and large dead, as is the soil where wheat grows; that too many fruit and vegetables have rapidly dwindling nutrient content, making a mockery of “five a day”; that billions of tons of unwanted non-breast chicken meat now gets shipped to China every year?

My visit has made me think again the importance we initially attached to taste, or “earthiness” as we call it. I use a refractometer to measure natural sugar content and help us buy better quality fruit and vegetables, irrespective of their provenance. We’re going to make bolder menu decisions about new dishes. We’ve already had success with our evening menu with the likes of Salmorejo and Porra Antequerana: soups that originally ‘used up’ vegetables, and often yesterday’s bread. The domestic cooks of yesteryear in poverty-stricken countries have a lot to offer – respect for the land, zero wastage, nutritional concern and sheer creativity that’s so often missing from menus. We need to get back our roots, in every sense of the words.

It’s been of great satisfaction to me personally that since opening we’ve not sold a single carbonated soft drink. My children told me I was mad not to serve Coke. When customers ask for it we offer our freshly squeezed orange juice, our farm-pressed apple juice or our orange and lime cordial with sparkling water. Children, but not always adults, have been happy to accept one of these options.

You can, I hope, experience eating as a wider, happy, informative and potentially thought provoking experience at St Giles Café. And if you want a really special time, come for dinner on Saturday, November 8. A five-course classic French meal will be served, and the entertaining Nicholas Shakespeare will talk about his latest book – a story of his aunt in wartime France. As it’s the day before Remembrance Sunday we’re encouraging guests to also bring their stories of family wartime experiences.

Visit stgilescafe.com or call us on 01865 554200. But please hurry!

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St Giles Cafe, 52 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LU 
01865 554200

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