I saw a quote from Nathan Outlaw a few years ago in a brief interview for the Guardian, and I thought it was probably the most insightful and optimistic thing I had ever read about British food: ‘The British restaurant scene is much newer than in France or Spain or Italy, and I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface of what’s possible in our own country, with our own ingredients.’
One of the implications of this statement, if it proves to be true and if the British restaurant scene continues to flourish, is that restaurants could be the saviour of artisanal production in the UK, and represent a huge opportunity. It is hard in today’s environment to set up a new food business (perhaps any business) without a sustainable element. There is a demand for products that don’t negatively affect the environment but which have a story, a narrative that captures the imagination. Today’s chefs have grown up in that environment and these influences inform their style. In the time I have been involved in cooking, the chef–producer relationship has completely transformed. When I first started cooking in the early 2000s, the meat supplier was a guy at the end of an answering-machine message. Today, chefs and producers are on first-name terms, and it is a two-way working relationship.
Restaurants have changed a lot too. The economics of opening, especially in London, mean that they are just getting bigger. 150 covers is no longer unusual. Back when restaurants were on average smaller, supplying a product direct to a restaurant would be a useful additional income. Now most of the restaurants I supply are selling more meat than butchers’ shops, so it’s worth evaluating where the best market is.
Getting our goats onto restaurant menus has lots of advantages that in retrospect look like a clever business plan, but I have to confess we weren’t aware of them when we started. In fact the idea that we even had a business plan is laughable. First, you put your product in the hands of some very skilled people and they get the very best out of it. After all, they are chefs and that’s what they do. In our case, the goats then ride on the coat-tails of the kudos of the restaurant or chefs. If it’s good enough for the world-renowned St John, Yotam Ottolenghi or River Cottage, then it’s good enough for anyone. A few thousand people a week will read a restaurant menu. Whether they choose to eat it or not, just seeing our product helps normalise goat as something you can eat and buy in the UK. It is tremendous advertising. That is the biggest challenge that Cabrito has faced: to legitimise goat in the eyes of the consumer. Putting it in some of the best restaurants in the country has helped enormously.
The working relationship between chef and supplier has proved priceless because it offers perspective on our product. We have made changes to our product because the chefs have told us we needed to if it was to work for them. When we first started out, we tried to replicate what I had seen when I was cooking in London: small kids, about 10–12 kilograms. I think we would not have survived as a business had we not listened to the chef – in this case, Tom Harris, co-owner of the excellent Marksman on Hackney Road. On his advice we pushed up the weights of the carcasses to make them cost-efficient and to give the chefs more options. This also meant, of course, that we made more money. That’s how important the producer–chef dialogue can be. Thanks, Tom.
The future is challenging for small-scale production. There will always be people who want to do it and they’ll find a retail market amongst those willing to pay for a premium product. However, if we continue to rely on the larger retailers the percentage of artisanal producers will get smaller and smaller because the retailers keep driving suppliers to produce everything more cheaply. Restaurants offer a way to create a product without having a large retail buyer perniciously salami-slicing your price every few months. The devaluing effect that slicing has on the product, the industry and the person’s labour is vicious.
Chefs don’t behave like commercial buyers. Because they work their backsides off for the love of food, there is some understanding of the commitment and drive it takes to be an artisanal food producer. It takes the same qualities to be a decent chef. They aren’t disrespectful or just plain greedy enough to ask a producer to be cheaper and cheaper. If they want the product they’ll cost it and if they can afford it, they’ll buy it. Most artisanal producers don’t do what they do because they want to be millionaires. They do it for the love of doing it. They do it because they believe what they produce deserves a place in the food system, and they do it because they care about showcasing the produce that the area they live in can offer. The question is, do we value that? Does society want people who do this sort of thing? Or is just getting enough food to enough people all that matters?
I believe pushing small artisan producers out of business means we all lose. For the good of communities on a small scale and wider society, we need people to do diverse jobs and to produce things. There is value in the diversity of human experience. We can’t all work in offices. Small producers making artisan products enhance our lives and can give immense pleasure – not just from the product, but from the process and story behind it.
Artisanal products need to be economically viable on their own terms to survive, and working hand in glove with restaurants is the new model. The artisanal products seen in restaurants can drive up the quality of the mass-produced stuff, as supermarkets adjust their offering to remain current and reflect new food trends. I’m not saying restaurants are the silver bullet, the answer to all the food system’s problems. The food system is vast and this is just one small part of it, but restaurants can be the antidote to the argument that food production needs to be bigger and more industrial because people want cheaper and cheaper food. It is an argument that is self-serving, dished out by people who care more about spreadsheets than good food and the future of food production. There is an obvious need for some food to be produced cheaply, but not all food needs to be produced cheaply allthe time, and no one should be pressured into producing food for less than the cost of production.
The British food renaissance and subsequent explosion of restaurant culture leaves an opportunity for producers to bypass more traditional routes – the walled garden of supermarkets – and go directly to chefs who do care about the provenance and process of food. A customer base that not only gets the best out of their product, but that can help to improve it. From there you can build, and if larger retailers come then they come, but producers needn’t be reliant on them. The death of artisanal practice isn’t inevitable; artisanal producers just have to adjust to a new market landscape.