When Alex left Dock Kitchen some four years later, he spent a month in San Francisco, and worked at April Bloomfield’s Tosca and Alice Waters’ legendary Chez Panisse, before returning to head up the kitchen at Stevie’s new restaurant – Rotorino. ‘I stayed for about six months, and then I just felt like I wanted to do something else,’ he says frankly. ‘I’d been thinking about taking a break from cooking for a while.’ He left not knowing if he would ever return to the kitchen, and spent a year and a half with Mons Cheesemongers in Bermondsey learning about affinage and wholesaling. ‘It was really cool, but I started to miss cooking after a while,’ he says. ‘I didn’t expect to miss it the way I did – I wanted to cook every day, and on my days off I’d go mad cooking stuff at home. Around that time, myself and a friend were approached by someone looking to open a restaurant next to an art gallery called Parasol Unit. My friend pulled out and moved to Ireland, so I decided to do it without him, and that restaurant became Sardine.’
When Sardine first opened, they served ‘lamb a la ficelle’ for the first six months. A leg of lamb would be strung up over a wood-fired oven in the kitchen, covered in herbs, olive oil, lemon and cayenne and left to roast over the flames. ‘It’s like an analog, vertical rotisserie,’ says Alex. ‘It’s about as far away from a water bath as you can get really! We served it with fresh white beans and a green sauce.’ The menu is packed with this sort of simple, traditional Provençal ‘granny cooking’, as he and Stevie often refer to it. There’s steak frites – onglet of course – with a Bleu d’Auvergne sauce, poulet rôti with spinach and wild garlic, and a stunning dish of cod, bacon, leeks, sea purslane and white beans, just to pick a few highlights from this week's menu.
Amongst the French flavours, Alex’s food takes inspiration from further down the coastlines on either side. His snacks menu features Jesus Basque (a salami made from Basque pigs) and bottarga and salted butter on toast – a snack typical of Sardinia. ‘From Catalonia all the way to Liguria, along the whole riviera, there are so many similarities between them all,’ he explains. ‘You have paella and bullfighting in the Languedoc, but it’s still very French. In Nice you get pate au pistou, which is pasta with pesto, and you get soup au pistou, which is basically minestrone with pesto. I think there’s a lightness of touch that links them all and is quite unlike the rest of France in its style. When you get to central and northern France, it’s more butter and cream. Provence feels more Italian but has a strong French identity of its own.’
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Ones to watch: Alex Jackson
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