Jacob Kenedy - How Bocca di Lupo Changed Italian Food in London & Why Great Restaurants Struggle to Survive

The Go To Food Podcast

Jacob Kenedy joins the hosts at Decimo in London to discuss his journey from a science student and glassblower to one of Britain's most celebrated chefs, co-founder of Bocca di Lupo, and author of

Key takeaways

• Kenedy opened Bocca di Lupo in 2008 during the financial crisis; press coverage was unusually positive due to a hunger for good news, giving the restaurant early momentum.
• The brutal first year involved 6-day weeks starting at 6 AM and ending past 1:30 AM, culminating in Kenedy kneeling by a table from exhaustion and physically unable to stand back up.

Main topics

• Opening Bocca di Lupo during the financial crisis
• Unconventional career path (glassblowing, DJing, Moro)

Notable quotes

I just went over to one table and say hello and I knelt down to talk to them. I couldn't get up again. I was dead.

Conclusion

Listeners gain a grounded look at the realities of sustaining a high-e

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:13) to a very special episode of Nice en Place brought to you by Blink, the greatest POS system in the world. We're sat on the 10th floor with the greatest views of London in Decimo, which is in the Standard Hotel, one of the greatest restaurants in the city. It's fully handled. Yeah, it's good, isn't Speaker 4 (0:28) it? Speaker 3 (0:28) Now, obviously, Decimo is a beautiful word, but not as nice as Boca de Lupa on the lips, which was opened in 2008 by our guest today. which was sort of in a hidden back street back then now one of london's greatest a restaurant that would go on to be named london's best restaurant twice two years later he opened giulopo just across the road um i'm dancing between italian and spanish it's tough and then in 2017 he opened the cajun creole pub plackerman lock not not quite as tough on the lips um he's also written three incredible books including the classic the geometry of pasta and it's about with another one um today called the Pasta Tricolor. Michelle Rue, Claudia Roden, and Jerry Renner have all said it's the best book of all time. It's Jacob Kennedy. How are you, sir? Very well. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for coming. What a place. Also, Paola is over there. She's going to take us through the greatest mezcal in the world just to get us going. She's Speaker 4 (1:16) going to wrestle out loud. Because we like to drink on Speaker 3 (1:17) this podcast. We like to get loose, especially on the 10th floor of a restaurant. And in she comes. This is quite exciting. We have here Speaker 2 (1:24) our very own mezcal. It's made by the Sin Gusano Mezcalería in Oaxaca. Hell of Speaker 3 (1:30) a Speaker 2 (1:30) wine. Hell Speaker 3 (1:31) of a wine. Speaker 2 (1:31) From a mescaleria in Santa Catalina. And, well, the notes are very herbal. Yeah. And, well, I hope you will enjoy. Listen, you've got three mezcal Speaker 3 (1:40) experts here, so we're quite excited to get amongst them. A bottle of 10 of 57. Also, Paula's going to bring two or three little snacks, right? Is that right? Yeah, Speaker 4 (1:46) correct. Just for Speaker 3 (1:47) us to try, just to see what genius they're doing here. This is the first day of lunch in the restaurant, I believe. Is that right? Yeah. No. Yeah. Hey there. Yeah. It's quite exciting. It's all perfectly timed. Speaker 2 (1:58) Now talking about Speaker 3 (1:59) perfectly timed, let's talk about this book because it is out now or pre-order, whatever it is, but basically get your hands on it. The Pasta Tricolor. Talk us through why after writing one of the greatest books of all time, The Pasta, you decided to go again. Speaker 5 (2:09) I was not sure what to write. I wanted to write a book about sandwiches and my agent wanted me to write a book about pasta. So I said pitch them both to my publisher and we pitched them both and obviously my agent was right. So I was left, I was stumped as to how we were going to do. I figured I'd done pasta once, the geometry of pasta, which was all about shapes of pasta and the sauces that go with them. And with all, I think, I hope this is some of my better work, all my best work with writing at least seems to come when you struggle with something a little bit. So I was turning it over in my mind. It's how Bocca came about as well. I spent a long time struggling with the idea of the restaurant before it came out. And this one is really all about the sauce, but is built on a... kind of conceit but one that makes sense to me and that I like which is that you can pigeonhole all the sources into red, white or green. Yeah. And from there it's written With a slightly different hand to my normal writing, I think, where I'm normally quite sparse and leave a lot in the hands of the cook. Whereas this tries to hold your hand to the point where the pasta comes out as though someone who knows how to make pasta actually made it. Yeah. So I'm really happy with it. That's nice. Speaker 3 (3:20) That mezcal's beautiful. Have a little go on that. Fiery, smoky. Not too smoky. No, not too smoky. Just light. No, not smoky at all, actually. No, it's gorgeous. Speaker 4 (3:31) Timey almost. Speaker 3 (3:31) Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Speaker 4 (3:32) time. Speaker 3 (3:33) Sort of like early... I don't know, 5th of November bonfire work, but early. You're about 10 Speaker 4 (3:40) miles from the bonfire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's Speaker 3 (3:42) gunpowdery. Yeah, it's gunpowdery. And a bit sweet. Sort of Guido Fawkes in the basement of West... That Speaker 4 (3:47) is Speaker 3 (3:47) gorgeous. It's something delicious. It feels Speaker 5 (3:48) like Speaker 4 (3:48) it's good for you. Speaker 3 (3:49) Yeah, well, Speaker 5 (3:49) it's not. It's definitely... Well, a little bit. It probably is. It's medicinal. It Speaker 4 (3:52) is medicinal. Well, cheers and congratulations. Yeah, Speaker 5 (3:54) cheers. Speaker 4 (3:55) It's Speaker 3 (3:55) a Speaker 4 (3:55) beautiful book. And I love the size, Jacob. I was saying off camera, it's the perfect... You want to hold it. You can have it in the kitchen. You can probably put it in your kitchen drawer. You can put Speaker 5 (4:03) it Speaker 4 (4:03) in your bag. Speaker 5 (4:05) You could put it anywhere. But I think a book should be holdable when you're working. Speaker 3 (4:10) Yeah, Speaker 5 (4:10) you can use it, get it really grubby, and then you can buy another one. Speaker 3 (4:13) Also, I thought you Speaker 4 (4:14) were Speaker 3 (4:14) going to say the reason you didn't choose to make the sandwich book is because Ben obviously co-authored two of the greatest sandwich books of all time. But that's by the by. You never want to. I made the farfelli with broccoli, chilli, what else was in Speaker 4 (4:25) the Speaker 3 (4:25) capers the other day? Delicious little thing. Did it work? My girlfriend was very happy. That's all I'm going to say. Speaker 4 (4:29) I'm sure she's always happy. Speaker 3 (4:30) She's not. She hates me. Speaker 4 (4:32) She actually has strong opinions. Yeah, yeah. She's Speaker 3 (4:33) disgusted by me in every way. But then I made her that on a Monday night, and she said, fucking hell, maybe life isn't too bad. So you guys should get a hold of that book, because it's a beautiful thing. We want to know, what's the single sort of biggest mistake British people make when cooking pasta? Speaker 5 (4:46) I think, oh God, there are many. Give us multiple, please. One would be putting too many things in the sauce. One would be making too much sauce for the pasta. But I think the really fundamental one that took me a long time to realise that people don't get this automatically. You want to serve pasta al dente, right? A little bit to the tooth. Speaker 4 (5:05) Which Speaker 5 (5:05) means you need to drain it from the water when it's fucking raw. Because it's still going to cook. It's going to cook in the pan more. It's going to cook on the plate until you eat it. And you have to take it out of the water a good few minutes before it's al dente. So you're not Speaker 4 (5:17) getting like pulpy pasta, basically. Speaker 5 (5:19) And it's just kind of understanding when's the right point and then you can be a bit relaxed about it and cooking in the pan as long as it needs to to get to the identity you want. And Speaker 4 (5:27) I know, you're probably going to get into this in the book, but do you think like, because I know in a restaurant, pasta comes out, goes into the sauce, you spend quite a long time working it, a.k.a. just continuing to cook it in the sauce. A home cook might not ever do that. I know, but they should. They should, no, no, 100%. That's an issue, right? It's Speaker 5 (5:45) just a learning thing. that you actually have to take it out of the water a bit raw. Or the amount of salt you have to put in the water. People, you know, you put a handful of salt in, and they're like, I can't eat that much salt. Speaker 4 (5:57) And Speaker 5 (5:57) you're not going to. It goes in the sink. Speaker 4 (5:59) Just Speaker 5 (5:59) a little bit gets in the pasta, but it needs to be there. Speaker 4 (6:01) I actually once did a piece of work for my friend Mira Soda. Speaker 5 (6:04) Trying Speaker 4 (6:04) to work out how much salt goes from the water. And it's a minuscule amount. Speaker 5 (6:11) It's, yeah, I mean, the... So I'd season water to about 1 % salinity, which in terms of what you eat. And I imagine when you cook the pasta, it'll roughly double in bulk. So the pasta will come out at about 0.5 % salinity and need a bit more in the sauce. Lovely. Speaker 3 (6:26) Your mother's grown up partly in Italy and your family at home there. What are your earliest food memories? We always ask every single guest. My grandfather, my Speaker 5 (6:32) mum's side, had an eye cancer and he lost an eye and he had an eye patch. They didn't get all of it and eventually it killed him. So he died quite young. But I remember sitting on his lap. and he was pretending to be a pirate because he had an eye patch and he had an artichoke, a boiled globe artichoke and he was peeling off the leaves and dipping them in butter and feeding them to me and then he gave me the heart. And that's still one of my favourite foods. Speaker 4 (6:55) Really big time. Speaker 5 (6:57) Most of my other early food memories are... I remember making doughnuts at some point when... You Speaker 4 (7:04) know that Paddington Bear story where he's making a dumpling and it's a Speaker 5 (7:07) bit too dry so he puts more water in and then it's too wet. And my doughnut dough was a bit like that. And we had a big party, a Hanukkah party, and I had this huge vat of dough that was growing and growing and growing and I was making more and more and more. But most of them were about pasta. Pasta with tomato sauce. Pasta with meatballs. It's Speaker 2 (7:26) a Speaker 5 (7:26) good one. Yeah, yeah. Not Speaker 2 (7:28) very Speaker 5 (7:28) Italian, but it's a good one. No, it's glorious. Pesto. My dad used to make, he called them malfatti, which we still do with bocca, spinach and ricotta. In the semolina, Speaker 4 (7:40) is that malfatti? No, that's nudi. He Speaker 5 (7:41) makes those nudi. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. Speaker 5 (7:48) They're also called rabaton in Piedmont. The same thing, ricotto in greens. A bit of flour to bind it. Gorgeous. Speaker 5 (7:56) So yeah, a lot of my... an ice cream. Pasta and ice cream would be the early food memories. Listen, you've stuck Speaker 4 (8:03) with it. But Speaker 5 (8:04) for everyone, no? Speaker 3 (8:05) Yeah, I'm stuck as a kid. You studied at Westminster, then Cambridge, but before becoming a chef, there was a slightly mad carousel at Jobs. What were you doing? Were you a biologist, reward-winning glassblower? Someone like a DJ? Speaker 5 (8:15) Like a lot of people, I didn't exactly know what I wanted to do when I was going through school. So when I was studying at school, I was very focused on sciences, I was... relatively good at them. And then at a certain point I started glassblowing as a hobby. Right. And I did quite a bit. And I took a gap year between, this was between school and university, and I won a contract to blow a big series of art glass pieces for the Conran shop internationally. Really? It was a big thing. And I was about to start on it, and right at the beginning of my gap year, I... Speaker 5 (8:55) arranged somehow to spend a week in the kitchen at morrow yeah which was a year old at the time and i'd been i'd eaten there was really excited by the food as i still am i think it's an extraordinary restaurant And I went there and I kind of fell deeply in love with the kitchen. Maybe specifically that one because, you know, Sam and Sam are incredible and they have a beautiful culture there. Yeah. But it was also the camaraderie of Speaker 4 (9:20) the Speaker 5 (9:20) kitchen and a space to explore being an adult. So I didn't blow the pieces for the corn run shop. I just kind of ignored it and spent my gap year cooking. Really? Half at Morrow and half at Boulevard in San Francisco. Wow. And over that time... I'd already started spending too much time in nightclubs and I started DJing and I started spinning at a place called The End Up in San Francisco. Speaker 5 (9:45) Friday nights. Yeah. What type Speaker 4 (9:47) of music? House, Speaker 5 (9:50) house. Then kind of funky house, then it got a bit deeper. I Speaker 3 (9:53) miss that. Let's get the impressions in San Fran. Talk us through Murray though, because apparently, like Ben, the Val Warner, they almost had a restraining order on you, the amount you were sort of eating there and demanding to work. Is that right? The record Val's lifted the Speaker 4 (10:06) restraining order. Speaker 5 (10:06) They didn't tell me. Apparently you kept going Speaker 3 (10:09) back, you were obsessed with Speaker 5 (10:09) it. Well, I kept going back and... So I had this gap year and then I went to uni but through the holidays I kept on working one restaurant or the other in Morrill Boulevard. Um... Speaker 5 (10:24) And it seemed to work. I never let them down. I'd tell them I was available for a certain period of time and do it. And then I helped them with their first three books. Speaker 5 (10:35) With the development for the first and the food styling for the second and a bit on the third At Speaker 4 (10:42) what point in that did food did that become what you were gonna do as opposed to? By the end Speaker 5 (10:48) of my guess I still graduated but by the end of my gap year I was a chef. That was it. Yeah, that's kind of Speaker 3 (10:53) I've always Speaker 5 (10:55) done Speaker 5 (10:58) Which is what I think everyone should do. I've always done what felt right in the moment. Yeah. It still feels right-ish in the moment now. Speaker 4 (11:09) Jacob, we're just going to take a pause because Paola is bringing what some people are describing as delicious tacos. Speaker 3 (11:15) Yeah, London's greatest tacos. Okay. To the table. What do we have here Paola? Come on, get on the whistle. Speaker 2 (11:22) So we have two different tacos. We have Baja Taco and then we have the Okra Taco. So the Baja Taco is inspired in Baja California. I made it my own version. We are using first of all blue masa. So we make our tortillas here. So we take the masa. We don't have the... the meal yet, but we buy fresh masa from this supplier, amazing supplier that is Masafina. Speaker 1 (11:46) They Speaker 2 (11:46) nixtamalize the corn here, they get it from different parts of Mexico. And anyway, so we have an amazing product. Then we have the fish, we are using a newling cod. We dip it in a batter that is not a classic batter, it's our very own version. We can say it's gluten free. Lovely. But it's not as gluten free because we put beer. Oh Speaker 4 (12:09) for fuck's sake. Speaker 2 (12:10) Nearly. Speaker 4 (12:11) You shot yourself in the foot at the last minute. Speaker 2 (12:13) But you know, anyways. But it's amazing. Then we have the sauce which I think makes it super special. It's a Morita chili sauce which is super smoky and then you have the sweetness of the tomato and then you have the salad just to top it up with a little bit of acidity. on the other side we have a vegan taco which is one of my personal favorites gorgeous Speaker 1 (12:32) um Speaker 2 (12:32) we're using okra okra it's something i don't know if you have seen the cactus or no Speaker 1 (12:36) have Speaker 4 (12:37) you Speaker 2 (12:38) ever tried it yes so we cannot find that in the uk here so no it's so difficult to find yeah you can grow it like you can find it but it's right so you find it already processed yeah and it's not the same as you have it in mexico let's plant some it is yeah i know right yeah listen we should do that speak Speaker 4 (12:56) to whoever's in charge so Speaker 2 (12:58) i'm using okra because i found out that it has a similar texture Speaker 1 (13:03) you Speaker 2 (13:04) know like slimy crunchy and just delicious so i hope you will enjoy it has some beans salsa we Speaker 4 (13:11) will do this thank you very much thank you very much yeah what is it Speaker 2 (13:14) says i run a Speaker 4 (13:15) little twist on my paloma palomas normally with tequila Speaker 3 (13:17) lime and a bit of grapefruit over here we infuse it with raspberry as well grapefruit itself and we use mezcal a little bit of smokey for you oh and then the grapefruit is dipped into him so when you buy into it you get a good place please enjoy that's Speaker 4 (13:30) so kind um let's Speaker 3 (13:32) go back tomorrow i mean what were those early dishes you were having there which blew your mind and then you arrived thinking you were a decent chef and probably quickly realized you had a lot to learn i'm guessing Speaker 5 (13:40) exactly i thought i was a brilliant cook yeah um they had uh very mind-bendingly weird and delicious salad of rare seared beef with barley and grapes and whole parsley leaves and sumac which was crazily good um the crab brick was on the menu more than than it is now yeah bring back the crab all these yeah they do sometimes it's a lot of work and it's so you know it's extremely dear yeah well they do you know they make the waka themselves by hand it's a lot delicious um the Speaker 5 (14:14) The big thing that I learned when I was there is I had no idea about seasoning. And I think a lot of, certainly I had no idea how to season or really how to taste. And that's something that is fundamentally important as a chef and they're particularly good at Speaker 4 (14:29) it. So are they doing something innovative, special, different, or is it just kind of... What, with seasoning? Yeah, Speaker 5 (14:34) as in how would you be seasoning at night? I noticed that I learned to season there, because the food there is very direct and immediate