What can diners expect from The Water House Project?

I’ve shaped The Water House Project into what’s now a nine-course hyper-seasonal tasting menu, it evolves through the seasons and celebrates the best of British ingredients from the land and sea. We keep waste to a minimum: this extends to our soft and hard drinks pairings, where we use offcuts of ingredients such as fig leaves and artichokes, in among our choice of European wines, which are all low intervention. We believe that it’s important to include soft pairings. Guests have commented on the fact that they feel considered when served a non-alcoholic pairing that’s been created with thought.

The Water House Project is an intimate dining experience, and guests feel a connection to the chefs and the team who are serving them as the evening progresses. During service, we develop a closeness with our guests and there’s flexibility to the conversations we have throughout the evening. We now change our menu four times a year, but we’ll tweak certain dishes weekly, allowing us to be reactive to ingredients that are in season. By changing the menu less, it means that we can be more attentive and precise with what we’re presenting. Our winter menu has only been running for six weeks now but I enjoy the fact that everyone knows what they need to do. We can be critical before moving on to the next menu and we’ve found the balance between novelty and developing through a process.

How would you describe the food you cook at The Water House Project? Do you have any signature dishes?

Our menu changes so frequently, so I don’t have a signature dish – instead, ingredient and flavour combinations that I return to and enjoy representing in different ways. We try to keep things streamlined, presenting one clear idea per dish – that’s the beauty of a tasting menu. We have Herdwick lamb on the menu currently, which I pair with kohlrabi, black garlic, mint oil and a sauce that we split with puy lentils. We use chump from the lower back, which is served pink, and belly that’s slowly braised. I love using lamb as it’s so versatile, Herdwick lamb specifically as they are well-treated sheep which are bred locally to where I’m from.

Do you think social fine dining is something we’ve missed out on for the past few years?

Of course, social fine dining has changed since the pandemic, but not necessarily for the worse. The social element will always be at the heart of what we do because of our beginnings in my Bethnal Green flat. We had a couple here last week who had visited our previous site on Mare St and still keep in touch with a couple they met there two years ago. I have a good friend who is now married to someone he met at the previous supper club! Experiences like these are incredibly special and are a reminder that this experience has longevity, beyond even the food.

The past two years have been particularly hard for restaurateurs. What have you learned?

I thought people were incredible during the first lockdown, especially in terms of buying vouchers – we felt really supported. I remember one person who hadn’t even visited the restaurant before bought £500 worth of vouchers. It was very special considering no one knew what would happen at that point. There are a lot of people out there who are very supportive of hospitality, they have a heart for it. The pandemic shows you that you cannot relax or take your foot off the pedal.

What ingredient can you not live without?

My wife Trish would say that we use a lot of eggs, so I think an egg would be mine as they are so versatile. Eggs can be mixed to create sweet and savoury dishes, but they can also work as a standalone dish. I’ve created whole dishes centred around an egg.

Who is your role model and why?

From my immediate circle, I would say my mum because her work ethic has filtered through to me – she’s passionate about what she does and works very hard. From our industry, I admire Simon Rogan, as he’s one of the pioneers of farm-to-table cooking and he keeps food contemporary and relevant – I think he’s really on the pulse. You can see the evolution of his cooking and I like the way he empowers others. He’s considered the bigger picture and acted on it, so I believe whatever he’s doing has had a lasting effect.

What are your biggest passions outside of food and drink?

I’d say football and photography. I love taking photographs and don’t get enough time to take out my camera – I eventually want to do a bit more of this.

What is your favourite restaurant in the world and why?

I don’t have an ultimate favourite, so I suppose this would be somewhere I keep on returning to. I’ll go with my best and most recent dining experiences, which would be Simon Rogan’s now three-Michelin-starred L’Enclume in the Lake District and Rafael Cagali’s two-Michelin-starred Da Terra in Bethnal green.

Who, living or dead, would you most like to invite for a night at The Water House Project and what would you serve them?

Genuinely I’d love to say David Beckham, though that’s too obvious… so instead I’d probably invite Socrates. I used to study philosophy and I think he had a pretty good grasp on the world. He believed in abstaining from physical pleasure, he was also a vegetarian as he thought that eating an animal was akin to eating another person’s soul. For these reasons I’m not sure how he would feel about a nine-course tasting menu. That being said it would be nice to meet him. It would been interesting to see what he thought of mussels: my brother is vegan, but I’ve convinced him that mussels are somewhere in between an animal and a vegetable as they don’t have a central nervous system. My brother does eat mussels now.

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