Creating the Modern British Bakery w/ Anna Higham

Vittles

Pastry chef Anna Higham discusses her professional evolution from high-pressure kitchens like the Gordon Ramsay Group and Gramercy Tavern to estab

Key takeaways

• Anna Higham views baking as a balance between technical precision and intuitive 'feel,' much like cooking.
• Her time at Gramercy Tavern in New York provided essential large-scale training, working within a massive 17-person pastry team.
• The influence of James Lowe at Lyle's instilled a profound respect for the seasonal integrity of ingredients like ripe pears and blackcurrants.
• She advocates for the use of heritage grains and small-scale stone milling to unlock superior depth of flavor in flour.
• Her new venture, Clementine, is designed as a neighborhood anchor rather than a social media-driven 'hype bakery.'

Main topics

• Professional culinary journey
• Seasonality and provenance
• Heritage grains and milling

Notable quotes

Baking is freewheeling... just as much as cooking is.

Conclusion

A thoughtful exploration of how the values of fine-dining seasonality

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:06) Hello and welcome back to the Vittles Podcast with me, Adam Coughlin. Before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to say a huge thank you to everybody who's listened, shared, liked the podcast on YouTube, Apple, Spotify and wherever else you get your podcasts. It means a lot to us. It helps us keep doing what we're doing. If you haven't yet subscribed, please do. Please tell your friends. Shout out the podcast. We've got some very exciting guests coming up over the next few months. And for today's guest, one of the nation's great pastry chefs and bakers, Anna Haim of Quince in Islington. And soon to open Clementine, a neighbourhood cafe and bakery. Speaker 1 (0:49) Today we'll be talking to Anna about her time spent working for the Gordon Ramsay Group, working for Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group in New York City, some of her mentors, coming back to London and working at what was probably the most cutting-edge modern British restaurant of Lyle's with James Lowe, her love of fruit, the importance of seasonality, heritage grains, some of the shocks that she's encountered along her journey. working at institutions like the River Cafe and finally reaching the point in her career where she felt like she could finally open her own thing. Speaker 1 (1:28) Anna Haim, thank you very much for coming on the Vitas podcast. It's great Speaker 2 (1:32) to have you here. Speaker 1 (1:33) I want to start by asking you about where you grew up and who got you into baking. I was rereading the introduction to your book recently. It seems like your mum had a huge bearing on it. Speaker 2 (1:43) Yeah, massive. Thank you for having me. It's very nice. I always listen to it on the early morning bakes. Oh, good. Yeah, it's very nice to be here. Well, I was born in Brighton and then my family moved up to just outside Glasgow when I was three. But yeah, my mum massively. She wasn't a baker at all, but like a really fantastic cook and a very intuitive cook. When she got married, she didn't know how to cook at all. So she just bought like all the Delia books or the Elise cookery books, all the Elizabeth Davids. And I think was quite ambitious and adventurous in teaching herself. And yeah, like now I think I cook very similarly, that I'm really shit at being exact. I always find it funny. talking to my aunt, who's my mum's sister, like you give her a recipe and she's like, how long do I cook the onions for? And I'm like, well, until it's done, until it's delicious. I don't know. Which is exactly as my mum taught me. Speaker 1 (2:38) I mean, maybe this is a naive understanding of mine, but I've always understood the difference between a cook and a baker. A cook can be like freewheeling and a baker has to be precise. I feel like my Speaker 2 (2:49) life mission is to be like baking is freewheeling. Okay. just as much as cooking is. We talk about it at the bakery a lot, of the rigor and vibes. Speaker 2 (3:01) which the boys have coined recently. There's the overriding structure of how things work and how fermentation works within bread and how butter and flour interact in pastry. But for me, very much how we cook and how I've settled into kind of my niche of baking is that it's so much about feel and touch and how does... that bit of fruit taste compared to the batch we had last week and how much vinegar does that need. Speaker 2 (3:34) How do I feel? And I think it's really hard for people when they start at Quince because I'll just be like, well, you're just going to make a peach compote and we're going to kind of roast the peaches and then we're going to thicken it a bit. And they'll be like, so like 3 % corn flour? And I'm like, I don't know. I can look at it and see, but I don't know. And yeah, it's always a big challenge. But I think that baking... and very much pastry-shipping. It's just about paying attention in the exact same way that cooking is. Like when you're cooking a bit of meat, like yeah, you're maybe taking the temperature of it, but you're paying attention to how it's colouring, where it is in the pan or where it is on a grill. How does it feel? What does it look like? You're paying attention to all that and that's exactly the same as baking. Speaker 1 (4:22) One of the first kitchen jobs you had I think was working for Ramsay was it? Yeah, that was Speaker 2 (4:26) my first. Speaker 1 (4:26) Which obviously seems so far removed from your kind of cooking. Talk a bit about that and what you learned from that and those early days. Speaker 2 (4:33) I went to uni to do architecture and then was a beauty school dropout and got into cooking and did a year of college in Glasgow because I was like, I'm really old. I've really got to get into this. I was 24, no 23. I was like, oh, I'm so far behind everybody. And after college I just was like... I'm just going to apply to any chef I've heard of, which is basically anyone that's been a master chef. At college, we'd done a dinner with Gordon Ramsay and Claire Smith. So I was like, I'll go on the website. And they were opening Bread Street Kitchen. And so I ended up getting a job as a pastry commie there. So yeah, I did a year at Bread Street and then two years at Patrice. Speaker 2 (5:15) which I don't necessarily think I learned much about food or like cooking necessarily, but I really learned how to get stuff done. I think I really learned how to be tired and like push to the edge of a limit and still. produce. It produces you like 90 hour weeks and I genuinely am like in this body now I'm like I don't know how I was standing up. Speaker 1 (5:41) Those kitchens are exactly as those kitchens are imagined. Are they? Yeah Speaker 2 (5:45) I would be in from like 6am until midnight and I would be like as long as I get four hours of sleep I'm alright I can survive. Saturday night deep cleans you were there until like 4am with two picks in the fridges. And then Sunday you're off, so I'd put my whites on to wash. I'd sleep until about four in the afternoon. I'd iron my whites. I'd have a hot chocolate with a little brandy in because I'd be really stressed about going back to work on Monday and then back in. How Speaker 1 (6:17) long are you able to do it for? Will Gleave obviously was on recently. He didn't get into it as much as you've got into, but he basically said working at The Square, which wasn't a Ramsey restaurant, was like, it wasn't for me. And I know people are different, but how do you manage? I did that for two Speaker 2 (6:31) years. I've always been very comfortable with who I am and who I want to be. And I knew I didn't want to be a dickhead chef. And I think definitely towards the end of that time, I remember one of the commies who was on the Amuse section being like, oh, I can't wait for someone new to start so I can be a dick to them. And I was just like, that is wild to have that mentality. I knew that was going to be an out. OK. I knew that there was always a time. It was going to be a period. And then I was going to go on. Speaker 2 (7:07) Definitely towards the end. I remember the sous chef at one point told me off because I got angry at someone because they'd put their something in the oven when I was just about to put my souffle tester in. And he was like, you need to chill out. And I remember being like, oh my God, this guy's telling me I need to chill out. I think I need to leave. Speaker 2 (7:27) You're telling me I need to chill out. Yeah. Speaker 1 (7:30) Your approach was like, I'm going to break the cycle of inherited trauma. So you went to New York next, did you? Yeah. And went to Gramercy Tavern. Yeah. Jonathan actually mentioned to me recently that he understands that you went there because there wasn't a restaurant like Gramercy Tavern in London. Soon after that, there was. Yeah. So talk a bit about that time. Speaker 2 (7:50) When I was at art school, For some reason in my head I was like, I'm going to graduate, at some point I want to do two years in London and two years in New York, and I just had that as a thing for my life. So I kind of translated that to cooking when I switched. A guy that I worked with at Bread Street was waiting for his visa, and he had got a job at Gramercy Tavern, so I was like, hey, we can be friends. He put me in touch with the pastry chef there, and I got a trial. and then managed to sort a visa for a year. I got to a stage, particularly at Patroos, where I was chef de partie and I was like, I am organised, I can get stuff done, so I know I'm going to progress up in rank, but I don't feel like my skill level is developing and growing to the point that I think I should be like a junior sous or something. I didn't really feel there was anywhere in London that I thought... I want to go to next, or that could kind of give me that bigger pastry team. So at Gramercy, the pastry team was 17 people, massive. And you did sections, you did service, you did bread, you did chocolate, you did production, and you actually got to rotate around and develop skills in the way that I don't really feel like I could do that in London. Speaker 1 (9:10) So New York was ahead of London. Having restaurants that focused on seasonal fruit and vegetables at that time probably wasn't, was it? Would you describe it about the case? Speaker 2 (9:19) My favorite story from being at Patrice is that we had this strawberry and basil dish. And I remember the sous chef being like, Anna, it really lives or dies by the strawberries. This is really important. You've got to taste them each morning they come in from mash. Are they good enough? And then I'd be like, oh, I don't think these are very good. And he'd be like, okay, so just go to Waitrose and get some. And I just at the time was like, what? That's, yeah. I Speaker 1 (9:44) think that's commonplace across that strata of Michelin star restaurants. I've heard stories about an Italian Michelin star restaurant that has like pre-chopped carrots that come in and stuff. It's all about the Speaker 2 (9:56) assembly, Speaker 1 (9:57) isn't it, essentially? But Speaker 2 (9:58) then I guess the difference was getting to New York at Gramercy. So I started in like October, November time. And I got to the spring. And I just remember all the chefs being like, the tri-star strawberries are about to arrive. Speaker 1 (10:13) They're coming, not Speaker 2 (10:14) just pastry, but like across the kitchen. Everyone getting so excited about like from one farm that they got them from. And I was just like, yeah, great. That's what I want to be cooking. That's where I want to be with people that are that excited about like a singular ingredient arriving in the restaurant. Really wonderful. So that was a Speaker 1 (10:33) moment. Yeah, yeah, for sure. You've mentioned a lot about Claudia Fleming. who was at Gramercy Tavern as being a big influence on you. Speaker 2 (10:41) Yeah. Speaker 1 (10:41) Yeah, just tell us a little bit about Claudia. She Speaker 2 (10:44) was the first pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern when it opened. So there were prep cooks at Gramercy that had worked there 25 years at that point, and they'd worked with her, which was really cool. And she's since gone back and worked for Union Square Hospitality Group. Speaker 1 (11:00) This is Danny Meyer's group, right? Yes, yeah. The restaurant group in New York City, right? Yes, yeah. Speaker 2 (11:06) You get given his book when you join and they rebrand it as the playbook. And they've got all of these acronyms that you learn. The way they hire is that it should always be 49 % technical skill, 51 % kind of who you are, your attitude. And people talk about being 51 percenters. It is a bit culty sometimes. The Speaker 1 (11:27) Dreamweavers as well. Yeah. That's one, isn't it? Yeah. The idea of the front of house basically knowing every single thing about you when you arrive. Yeah, like having to Speaker 2 (11:36) be a swan, so it's all calm. Speaker 1 (11:38) Having to be a swan? Speaker 2 (11:39) Yeah, it should always be calm up top, but busy underneath. Speaker 1 (11:43) But yeah, sorry, Claudia. Speaker 2 (11:44) Yeah, her book is called The Last Course. It's since been republished, but at the time it was kind of out of print, but it was like this beloved book. And I've always really loved cookbooks, so I spent all of my wages in New York at Kitchen Arts and Letters, which is the cookbook shop on the Upper East Side. And I really wanted that book. And then that's what the team gave me as my leaving present. That book goes through kind of ingredient by ingredient through the seasons and like breaks down her dishes. The Last Bite is very much an ode to the last course. Yeah, my book, The Last Bite is a complete ode to Claudia Fleming's book. Because I had that and I was just like, why isn't there a British version of this? That's what I want. is like somebody to have gooseberries and blackcurrants and I can't get huckleberries here so it's lovely to read about them but I want to have them for black currants or whatever. I love her approach. I think it's very simple. She's written all of these recipes that become so iconic for so many American pastry chefs. Like her buttermilk panna cotta, I think, is one of those things that just is on menus across America. And I think, yeah, if you ask any American pastry chef, they would cite her book and her as a massive influence. Speaker 1 (13:04) Have you met her? Speaker 2 (13:04) I've met her now because, yeah, she now works for USHG again and a friend of mine. was the pastry chef for Daily Provisions when they set that up. Speaker 1 (13:12) Ah, the cruller. Speaker 2 (13:13) Yeah, yeah, my friend Christine developed the cruller. Okay. Speaker 1 (13:17) So