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| Looking mad happy... photography by Tom Chambers |
It’s a pleasantly warm Autumn afternoon and I find myself trying to coax a Dictaphone into life while standing in the busy Covent Garden piazza with London Student’s Photo Editor, Tom. I notice that place is buzzing more than usual thanks to a Jun Tanaka and Mark Jankel’s Street Kitchen venture, in the form of a shiny spaceship-like street van in the distance, the front of which is surrounded with people. There also seems to be a curious outgrowth from the side of the van which I later learn is a small supplier’s market where one may purchase all the raw ingredients used by Jun and Mark in their project.
Street Kitchen is an entirely new concept. As part of London Restaurant Festival, Jun, the executive chef at Pearl restaurant and Mark, chef and founder of the Food Initiative have teamed up and are serving delectable gourmet food from their air stream van around different locations in London. It has been a fantastic success so far and has been abundantly praised for the delicious seasonal British food and it’s fantastically affordable prices.
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| Cutesy packaging! |
Although I’ll admit that I was initially slightly nervous, my fears are immediately assuaged by the charming pair behind this yummy gourmet project. You won’t be finding any shouty swearfest à la Gordon Ramsay here because the atmosphere here is chilled and relaxed.
Mark starts off by asking me about London Student and his genuine interest in my section sweeps away any remaining nervousness. We start talking about how Mark and Jun entered the culinary profession, and what really inspired them to become professional chefs. Jun tells me that as a food lover, it seemed like a natural progression to want to know how to cook and his mother’s cooking and family dinners also served a source of inspiration for him. He also confides that he was kicked out of catering college after a year and disliked the experience, only turning up for practicals. This obviously didn’t hinder him at all, in fact, since the cooking part was all he wanted to do it confirmed his believes that he wanted to become a professional chef.
Family also plays a part in the story behind how Mark came to become a chef- he mentions that his grandmother makes excellent ice cream and coincidentally, ice cream is the first thing he made as a child after using an ice cream machine his mother had received for her birthday and not used. Mark also has a degree in Environmental Science and after initially wanting to go into environmental consultancy, he decided to take a cookery course for fun and ended up being offered a job in the cookery school itself. Mark himself sums it up as being ‘a bit of an accident’ which is true, but it’s definitely a good one.
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| Braised Beef with Roasted Carrots and Celeriac Mash |
I ask the pair about the inspiration behind the concept and Mark tells me about how at last year’s London Restaurant Festival, all the events were expensive and frankly inaccessible for the average Londoner. The solution was simple – two chefs, cooking in a van serving simple but really decent food. As Mark says himself, there is a great synergy between the two and combined, they have managed to realise their vision in the form of the Street Kitchen project.
One extraordinary thing about this project is the fact that all the ingredients are from British sources. This is an issue that is clearly very close to Mark’s heart and Jun, although initially apprehensive has supported Mark’s idea throughout. Jun has admitted that was very difficult – a lot of the farmers who grow fantastic, organic produce can’t sustain the supply Street Kitchen needs to feed three to four hundred people a day. As an example of their dedication to sourcing and uncompromising, Mark and Jun have had to omit certain ingredients or use alternatives because produce such as black pepper and French butternut squash simply aren’t available in the UK.
It sounds like it has been a bit of a battle – they’re both perfectionists who have set themselves a very high bar and Mark has admitted that it was temptingly easy to go and order boxes of butternut squash from the continent. However, despite the difficulties, this experience has been extremely positive for them both. Jun tells me that it was a great learning process and they’ve shown that knowledgeable sourcing can be successfully done. In Jun’s own words – when you know where every single ingredient comes from, you a gain real understanding and appreciation of what you’re cooking.
Continuing on the environmental theme, we turn to the subject of the compostable packaging which comes in the form of cardboard like cartons. Mark says that this has been shipped from the far east, and is a waste product of sugar beet production but also notes that while the characteristics of this packaging is environmentally friendly, it’s difficult to know how environmentally damaging it is to ship products into the country, and whether it would have been better for the environment to if they had used plastic packaging from the UK. For Mark, this highlights the fact that gathering enough information to make informed, environmentally friendly decisions as a consumer is a challenge with Jun noting that although companies freely bandy around their ‘sustainability,’ there’s not real measure for it, and this is why sourcing requires a lot of detailed and in depth research.
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| Blueberry Cheesecake! |
Mark and Jun aren’t just talk though – they definitely know their stuff. They know where every ingredient used has been sourced from and can confirm it has been farmed organically with no energy intensive chemicals involved. This is also reflected in their website where there is a detailed and very thorough list of all the ingredients in the food and where they were grown – even extending to the drinks suppliers.
Also, if their commitment to the environment isn’t enough to make you feel warm and fuzzy then there’s more heart warming news. Jun tells me that Mark has wanted to tie Street Kitchen in with a charity and this made perfect sense as Jun is an ambassador for Action Against Hunger. As a result, Street Kitchen dedicated the profits from the 7th October to Action Against Hunger and also invited Nigel Barden, the BBC food presenter to do some cooking.
We end the interview on a high note, with Jun and Mark telling me that Street Kitchen will carry on beyond the London Restaurant Festival and want this to be an inspiration to be others. For Jun, this project has been a way to do something outside of his usual work with a business partner and friend he gets on really well with.
I can see that the fact that they are both laid back individuals who clearly have a lot of respect for one another has been massively important to the success of this venture. We end the interview laughing about my sum up of Street Kitchen as being ‘truly awesome’ being used as a headline for Street Kitchen. I walked away afterwards with a spring in my step and feeling extremely privileged to have had the chance to interview two very creative, professional chefs who are not only incredibly talented and passionate about what they do, but also extremely modest and in all honesty, ‘truly awesome.’
Apologies for the not so great quality of the photos, they were hastily snapped on Gussie's Blackberry :0
Published in London Student 25/10/10
