Dr Rupy: Chet, so good to have you here. Thanks for cooking us lunch as well.
Chet Sharma: It's an absolute pleasure. It's kind of my day job actually, cooking lunch, so it's okay.
Dr Rupy: So look, I wanted to talk a bit about how you transitioned your career from physics and doing your doctorate, your PhD in physics, down into the the role and the world of cheffing and, you know, the Michelin star route and and to now like grow growing and and starting your own restaurant business.
Chet Sharma: Yeah, so I mean, in many ways, quite an unconventional path to go down. But I think I should caveat it as well. I started working in restaurants when I was 17.
Dr Rupy: Oh, 17. Oh, right, okay.
Chet Sharma: Yeah, so there was always something about hospitality that that really drew me, but I never thought of it as a career, because the pathway wasn't that clear before. And so when it came to deciding what to do, I mean, I loved the sciences. So I went to university, was working in kitchens on the side, but purely to purely to understand more about food, because I loved cooking and looking after people. That was always part of a big part of our culture as well. But like I say, never thought of it as a career. Carried on through that process, did the undergrad, masters, PhD, which sounds like quite a big time investment, but I was always, I always loved what I was studying, so it was never, never a chore really.
Dr Rupy: Sure.
C Chet Sharma: And then there was kind of this sort of light bulb moment where I was in the middle of writing my thesis. I was in the lab late one night on a Sunday, and I'd locked up the lab, was leaving, and I saw my supervisor was in his office. This guy, by most measures, is already pretty successful, right? He's a young professor at Oxford, he's got his whole family life and everything else. Instead of being at home with his family, his young kids, he was writing grant applications. And I don't know why I never really thought of it before then, that if you're going to be really successful at something, you're going to have to put in the yards. You know, a lot of people see the glamorous side of kitchens or even with the studying side, I've got this great degree and everything else. But you have to put in the work to get there. And if I'm going to do anything on a Sunday night and miss out on life, it's going to be cooking.
Dr Rupy: Right.
Chet Sharma: So that was the moment where I was like, okay, finished my PhD, two days later, moved out to Spain and got really serious about working in restaurants.
Dr Rupy: Okay. Yeah, yeah. And so I guess the realisation wasn't that you weren't going to have to put in the hours, like you're still going to be working late on a Sunday, but just instead of writing grant applications, you were you were going to thrive in an environment like the the intensity of a of a kitchen, of a professional kitchen.
Chet Sharma: Well, that was just it. I mean, the work is still there. I probably now do more hours, even at this stage of my career, probably do more hours working at the restaurant or with the other external bits and pieces that we're doing. But it never feels like work. And that that for me is the key.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Chet Sharma: Whereas grant applications, I mean, the science is always, it's fun, right? I still keep in touch with it. We still have a new scientist subscription. I still try to know what's going on in the wider world of the sciences in general. But it's a very different thing to being an observer than rather than being being in there.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. And what type of physics were you doing?
Chet Sharma: Yeah, so it's a bit of a bit of an odd one. So my friends who are astrophysicists will tell you that it's not real physics. So my background was actually in chemistry and then neurology.
Dr Rupy: Okay.
Chet Sharma: And I was going to carry on in the neurology space, and it was back in 2008, and that's when the big financial crash happened. And all sorts of companies were pulling away funding. So I actually had a position here in London. I was doing my masters at UCL. I had a position at UCL, and then Pfizer pulled the funding. So it's all medical related. And then I had a project that I really wanted to do. And a little bit of resilience to try and find other funding. And we found the funding through the EPSRC, which is the engineering and physical sciences research council. It's a bit of a mouthful. EPSRC is easier. So we managed to secure some funding from them and also from the medical research council. And then I basically knocked on the doors of professors and postdocs that I thought were doing amazing things within the neurology space. And one guy happened to be in biophysics. So Stephen Tucker, who I studied under for my PhD, and he took me in with open arms and taught me a little bit about physics, but it was really sort of cross-disciplinary.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Chet Sharma: So the physics was, the physics element of it was looking at, I mean, it's electrical conductivity. It just happens to be through soft tissue rather than through material sciences.
Dr Rupy: Right, right, right. And so what is it about cooking that you find so so joyful?
Chet Sharma: So that's definitely a question I've asked myself many, many times over the years. I've been in restaurants now for 19 years. So, more than half my life. And I think part of it is the creative aspect, which the sciences never gave me. They could never sort of scratch that itch. We get to create and we get to storytell and we get to, what we do at Bibi in a big way is look at nostalgia and flavours from my past and my experiences. And how do you put that out in front of people and present it in a way that they've not seen before? So aside from the creative bit, it's also now having come back into Indian food, so my entire upbringing in restaurants was sort of modern European, as you mentioned, sort of multi-Michelin starred. Now I kind of used the restaurant as a tool to understand myself and my own culture and my own family history a little bit better than I did before. Even most recently, we did something with the British Library where we had the opportunity to go in and look at texts from the 16th, 17th, 18th century to go and discover old recipes. And it was really interesting to see how that changed during the East India Company coming in and the Portuguese and all these new influences coming into Indian food. And of course, those texts were also based on the Mughals who came from Uzbekistan originally. So yeah, that's that's a part now as as Bibi sort of finds its feet, we're coming up to our third year in business. And now we get to explore some of the more personal parts of that journey as well.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. What made you go down that path that led you to the best sort of restaurants in in Europe? And I think you've been cooking in Copenhagen, France, all the sort of like great places that people have on their sort of bucket list.
Chet Sharma: So I think the main reason for going down that route was it was defined. If you want to start a business in the fast casual space, it's not actually that straightforward as to how you go about doing that. Whereas with the super high-end stuff, whether it's, you know, Mugaritz or, you know, Noma, L'Enclume or any of those kind of places, you go there, you work your 80 hours, 90 hours a week or whatever it is, get your head down, you learn a whole lot of skills. Some skills still that you miss out, as a business owner, I've sort of learned over the last five or six years. But you get to learn how to do everything to the best standard. And so that's why that world always attracted me. And it's what we try and teach the people who come into Bibi now. You know, there's a right way and a wrong way to do things, but also there's a reason for doing it. And that's what you really learn at the top level. And then actually, it's interesting you say that because Bibi was originally going to be super high-end. Because I've only ever worked in two and three Michelin star restaurants. So it was going to be, I mean, it is tasting menu only, but it was going to be a very fancy tasting menu. It was going to be even more expensive than it is. It's going to be smaller and it's going to be more fine dining. Never necessarily white tablecloths, but a lot of silver service, a lot of truffle at the table and caviar and this and that. And we still do some elements of it, but actually the pandemic hit soon after we signed the lease on the property. And it made us reconsider everything that we love and miss about restaurants. And a big part of why I came down to London anyway, having been at sort of L'Enclume and then Moor Hall and all of those places, was to understand the business of restaurants better, because that's what you definitely don't learn working at high-end restaurants, because it's not that money is no object, but they're not always commercial ventures. You know, they are opportunities to showcase something that you can do and maybe something that you can do that nobody else in the world can do. But they don't necessarily as a business, as a standalone, drive significant revenues in terms of profitability. And that's why I came down to London. It's what I've loved about working with JKS restaurants as well. Because of course, they they open amazing restaurants. Even if you put Bibi to one side, they have an incredible roster of restaurants. And then at a completely different level, Bao and Berenjak and Plaza, like there's so many places that you can name. And it's kind of every vertical within the restaurant industry. And they're all driven by the same sort of thing. Of course, some are more creative and more expressive than others, but they're all businesses. And they are businesses that treat clients, customers, guests incredibly well, which is why they charge what they charge and everything else. But they're also very conscious of like, oh, actually, we do need to turn tables, or we do need to make sure that beverage spend is at a certain point. They're not cash grabbing, but they they have to work as as businesses.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. Let's explore the the Indian aspect of your cooking and what it actually means to do Indian cooking, because I had this conversation with Malika Basu on the on the podcast recently, where she was like, people just call Asian food Asian. Like, how can you condense the food of 49 different countries into one word? It's just impossible. And I think my pushback was, how can you even do that with India with the number of different states, the number of different influences? So when you think of Indian cooking, what do you what do you want people to actually think of? Because I know what people are going to think of, and that is the C word.
Chet Sharma: Yeah. And and and don't get me wrong, you know, our food is based on a lot of curries. Like there is a lot of curries. And and if you and you know, if you're craving, you know, like butter chicken and garlic naan and those kind of and, you know, dal makhani and all those kind of things, that is a different type of food to what we do. Now, Indian food, I always give the example, India tip to toe is is from from, you know, Kashmir in the north to Kerala in the south is the same distance as here to Istanbul. And it's wider than it is long as well. And then if you actually look at my family's background is kind of mixed because I mean, we're Punjabi, but half of the family is from the Pakistani side. So that's actually, if you throw in India, Pakistan, I've got family from what's now Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, and Nepal. Like these were all part of one kind of giant country. I mean, India as a country didn't really exist. It's kind of one of the few big positives from colonialism, but there was no country called India. And, you know, we happen to be from the same sort of part roughly of the same of the country. We're different religions to start. So we have different cultural viewpoints. And I'm sure there's some things that your family would have eaten that my family wouldn't have eaten. There's going to be differences there. That's within the same state. So when I meet somebody from Kerala or from Tamil Nadu or, you know, from Meghalaya, like any of these other states in India, they don't recognise me or my language or my food as their food. So defining food as Indian is is nearly impossible. So and that I I play into that in a big way because sometimes when people are like, how can you use soy sauce in one of your dishes? It's like, well, in Manipur, we have soy. We have soy sauce. We have traditional, I mean, it's not very good, but we have indigenous versions of fermented soy beans that we use. So we can take those elements and use them here and there. It depends where you really want to draw the line. Because if you want to say Indian food has to be stuff that is indigenously Indian, well, you can say bye to tomatoes, to chilies, to potatoes, cauliflower. Even even the use of a lot of different types of meat in India. I mean, jungle fowl, they kind of trace the roots back to India. So chickens are from India.
Dr Rupy: Oh, really?
Chet Sharma: But but we didn't eat chicken until the British came. Because we would eat, well, what in India is known as mutton, but goat meat. Some places you have sheep and of course some places you'll have buffalo in the non-Hindu parts. But it was it was a it was something that the British brought in. And so when we think of chicken curry as the most Indian thing out there, we didn't eat chicken. So and then curry again, you know, I'm sure many, many people have said this, it's not a word in any of the languages I know from India. So, yeah, it's it's it gives us freedom at Bibi if you come in with an open mind to serve all sorts of things that as long as it has some nostalgic link to Indian cuisine, we can kind of make it work.
Dr Rupy: Totally, yeah. What, I mean, you've already blown my mind with the whole soy sauce sourcing, but there was something else you mentioned to me about chocolate earlier. And I didn't realise that there were chocolate plantations in India. But it's much more than just having a few cocoa trees, right?
Chet Sharma: Yeah, so it's mainly traded as a sort of commodity crop, which is generally not very good quality. And I looked for a long, long, long time to find good quality chocolate in India, because we have, again, because it's so big, so vast, we have every microclimate on the planet. We have rainforests, we have deserts, we have snow-capped mountains, we've got all of it. And there is a place, there's two places that we think grow good chocolate in India. One is sort of the hill station area of Kerala, close to where also some of the world's best coffee comes from. And then there's a part of Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry where we source most of our chocolate from. And I often say to guests, you know, for my money and I guess technically theirs, it's some of the best chocolate in the world. And it really does in blind tastings stand up to any other chocolate that you get anywhere else. We did the same thing with our coffee. We had a coffee expert come in and we tasted stuff from, you know, from Brazil, from Jamaica, from East Africa and India. Until we were happy that this product stands up alongside, we weren't going to serve it in the restaurant. But the fact that it was very easy to find great quality coffee in India tells you a lot. The chocolate took a little bit longer, and we're actually working on a chocolate bar of our own now, which we're super excited about. I mean, we've been working on it for three years, so we're getting there. But we can basically grow anything in India, you just have to find the right place for it.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. You know, we have olive oil in India.
Dr Rupy: What?
Chet Sharma: Yeah. Yeah, we have we have olive oil in India.
Dr Rupy: Are you serious?
Chet Sharma: Yeah, I mean, with some of this stuff, it's the culture doesn't develop out enough. So you're never going to get, unless you get someone super passionate who's just going to look at olive oil for their entire lives, you might not be able to get, I won't say never, you might not be able to get the same quality you can get out of a Greece or Spain or Italy where, you know, the predominant fat they use is olive oil. And they've been doing it for thousands of years. But the Greeks were in India and they left olives there, as they did all over Eurasia. So we have, in Rajasthan, there's lots and lots and lots of olive trees.
Dr Rupy: Oh my gosh.
Chet Sharma: But there's no culture for, you know, virgin, extra virgin olive oil, like cold pressed and all that. But it's changing now because now there's a generation of people who are saying, hey, we have this amazing stuff. How can we we get it to be on par with everything else? So it happened for chocolate in India, it happened for coffee a bit earlier. And I guess the next thing might be olive oil.
Dr Rupy: Wow.
Chet Sharma: Or or soy. One of the two.
Dr Rupy: Or soy. Yeah, yeah. This is turning into an episode of goodness gracious me where everything's Indian. It's just going to the supermarket.
Chet Sharma: Yeah, I I I do get accused of that sometimes, especially by my wife. She's just like, not everything has to be Indian. It's not, but it's it's not Indian. Olives aren't Indian. In the way that chilies aren't Indian. It's actually a longer history of olives in India than than chilies, but no one would ever think.
Dr Rupy: Wow. Really?
Chet Sharma: Yeah, 4,000 years.
Dr Rupy: Of course, yeah, because if the Greeks are there, yeah.
Chet Sharma: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: That's wild. Yeah. And so the potatoes would have come from the Spaniards, I guess, and the Portuguese, yeah.
Chet Sharma: The Portuguese, yeah. Chilies in the 17th century when he landed in in India, and he brought with him fresh chilies. We had some dried chilies through different trade routes maybe 50 years earlier. But actually the big the big influx was 17th and then eventually 18th century when you saw a massive influx of different produce.
Dr Rupy: And was that like the southern parts of the country? Like are we talking like Goa?
Chet Sharma: Yeah, it would have started in Goa and worked its way up.
Dr Rupy: Is there a reason, is that why those dishes are typically hotter? Because they have a lot more variety of chilies that they were experimenting with?
Chet Sharma: I I I mean, it's a really good question. I don't necessarily know the answer to it, but what's interesting now is the most popular chili in India is from Kashmir. So way up in the north, which is never really colonised, not fully anyway. So, yeah, I'm not sure. I think that the heat in, I mean, when you when you think about a lot of hot countries, they tend to have a lot of hot food.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, they do. I always found that strange.
Chet Sharma: It's something, it's got to be something to do with the sweat, right? Like it gets you going. Um, yeah, I mean, you think of like Thai food and and that kind of thing as well. It's it's there's definitely a link there. There's also part of the the story of chilies and spice in general used as um antiseptic agents and things like that. So if you're in a hot country, your proteins are probably going bad quicker. You probably need more chili to cover up those flavours.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. And talking of um uh antiseptic and and stuff, pickles. So pickles are things that I always remember at the table growing up in an Indian household, right? When you go to supermarkets these days, you get quite processed pickles and a sort of limited supply. I really feel there needs to be a renaissance of Indian pickles because we've got the heritage of pickling and I just think there's so much we can do, particularly as it pertains to nutrition these days. Kimchi's having a moment, all the different types of krauts from Germany are having a moment. Indian pickles are really healthy. They can be healthy.
Chet Sharma: They can be healthy, yeah. I think I think a lot of them, especially the stuff from further north, in the south they use a lot of sesame oil, but in the north they use, honestly, they use a lot of mustard oil. Which mustard oil is great. It's really good for you and everything else as well, but my dad's a big fan of mustard oil. He always called it miracle mustard oil. Well, yeah, my my family's uh background is in in mustard and wheat, so we love mustards. But when my mum used to try and deep fry in mustard oil in our in our house in the UK, it's not the same as doing it on a farm in India. I mean, it's basically you create mustard gas. So everyone in the house is in tears. It's not it's not a good look for anybody. Um, but yeah, no, I think uh you're right. We I can't imagine a day where we ate at my grandmother's house and didn't have three different pickles. Like there'd be one that's quite fresh, typically something like carrot or ginger, something that's been done very recently. More often than not, there was some sort of probably mango related one or a fruit related one, but sour fruit, not not sweet. And then you'd have something super aged. So actually it was a really nice thing that I waited until we had the restaurant. My my maternal grandmother, um, in who's from India, she had this uh black lemon achar, black lemon pickle that she used to make. And I had one bottle left of her achar. And she passed away in uh 2000, a long time ago, 2009. I'm making that up, 2007. Sorry, sorry to my family for not remembering the year. Um, and I had one bottle of it left and on her birthday, the first birthday that we reached at Bibi, uh we served that pickle as a restaurant.
Dr Rupy: Wow.
Chet Sharma: And now I just need to, in 15 years time, I can serve the next batch. But there is also in terms of like the history of pickles as well, there's some that are super prized for being very, very old. Um, when you think of, I guess black garlic had a bit of a phase with people here. We have many versions of blackened vegetables that have been pickled for, you know, 5, 10, 15 years, buried deep underground as well. So they really sort of hit a lot of pressure. So those are the kind of things I'd love to explore more as time goes on at Bibi. You know, the first year of running a restaurant is always a bit frantic. Then you kind of find your feet. And now the team's settled as well, and that makes a big difference.
Dr Rupy: Let's talk a bit about that first year of running the restaurant because um stress is something that you hear about a lot within the cheffing industry, and you've had first-hand experience of just how bad that stress can be physically on your health.
Chet Sharma: Yeah, so um I've not talked about it a great deal before. Um before opening the restaurant, we were running uh meal kits during the pandemic. Um and we were so so far in over our heads on it. It was it was not what we expected at all. I mean, it was incredibly successful in that period. Um so I was doing this for on behalf of JKS as sort of heading up their retail team. And and this is kind of a it's an internal pressure I placed on myself and it's probably the chef within me that did it to try and, you know, to overstretch and push things a bit too far. Um, you know, I'm very always very grateful to the directors at JKS and everything. They never pushed commercially. That was always me who was like, we can do more, we can do more. So I also want to be very keen to to state that they are not in any way responsible for what happened. But I worked so much, I got so stressed, uh my immune system was in the toilet. And um I got something called Ramsay Hunt syndrome. Which we've very strategically, we're placed so you can see this side of my face, not the other side, because the other side is still um I still have facial palsy, which is now been what, three years later. And there's, you know, pain associated with it, dizziness and, you know, a little bit of vertigo, that kind of thing. Uh now I know how to manage it, so it's a lot better. I I when I opened the restaurant, until the week before, I was wearing an eye patch because I couldn't blink. So so it's gotten a lot better. Um it's not 100% recovered and never will be. Um but it made me learn as a leader of a business as well, how important welfare is. Because now we we try and change things. I mean, high-end restaurants are never going to be an easy place to work. But we try and make sure that if you're, you know, closing the night before, you're not opening the following morning. It's very different in my generation. I think everyone says that about everything. It's like, oh, it's so much harder for us. But it was also, it wasn't necessary. You know, I remember working at a restaurant here in London, in West London, and you'd be on the rota for 8:00 a.m. You'd get in at 6:00 in the morning and you wouldn't be the first person there. People would take food home to prep for the restaurant because they'd be so far behind. And you'd get out of there at midnight, 1:00 in the morning and be back in the next day to do the same thing. Sometimes doing that five days in a row straight. It's a lot of work. So we've tried to rebalance things and change things. Even and going on to the food part, you know, we we write a weekly food plan for the team. So we have breakfast and lunch in the restaurant, or lunch stroke dinner. One meal at sort of 10:00 a.m., one meal at around 4:00 or 4:30. And I'd kind of already got onto this path because of some of my experience working at um in particular Mugaritz in Spain, where they'd have two people just making staff food. I mean, it's a huge brigade there, there's 50 chefs in the kitchen. So it kind of made sense that you'd almost have like a staff canteen. And they they had very strict rules on, you know, you'd have uh basically a probiotic, a green, some fruit. Like there's always stuff on the table that that that that made it felt very very communal, very family family-like. And it's why honestly, everyone I know who's worked at Mugaritz will praise Andoni and the team there because it was, I've never been looked after like that as a chef before. And we try and bring elements of that into to Bibi as well.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, it sounds it. So like bringing balance into your workplace, the staff meals, ensuring that they're healthy, I'm guessing. Any other elements that you've taken on personally from your own experience of ill health? Because you're still not fully recovered from it and it doesn't seem like you're going to have a full recovery from Ramsay Hunt.
Chet Sharma: Yeah, I think I think part of it is is just making sure that workloads are responsible. And I'm really fortunate. A lot of the team, they they want to do the 60, 70, 80 hour weeks. We just don't let it happen. My my, I mean, I'll name one person, my head pastry chef. We said to her the other day, if you don't leave, I'm leaving. Because she was on the rota till 6:00, but she 7:00, got home. And she'd come straight from the airport as well. She'd been away for a few days. So, but the whole team's like that. You have to push them out the door. But I'm very disciplined about it as well. It's like, guys, have a life. Trust me, when I was in my 20s, I didn't. So you can have the balance that I never got. And also look after yourselves. It's it's super important. Um and then, you know, we do other things in terms of uh a big thing that's come out of the pandemic is is sort of looking at the mental health and well-being side of things. From that perspective, so we've got a few mental health first aiders in the team, myself included. Uh we work with a few charities, Kelly's Cause is a great one, specifically for hospitality. Um the Burnt Chef project as well. Because in our industry, we have a really high incidence of uh neurodiversity and in addition to that, it's an incredibly stressful job, or it can be. So we need to make sure people have mechanisms to deal with that too. And if all of those mechanisms fail, then at least a backup is that they have someone they can go and speak to as part of the the employment plan at Bibi.
Dr Rupy: There's so many similarities between the types of people that go into your industry and the types of people that go into medicine. You know, the kind of folks that will turn up early, leave late, constantly bending themselves backwards, not really taking care of their own emotional and physical health, uh just to serve, basically. But I think where you're in a unique position is your ability to change the narrative, whereas in medicine, particularly as we work in a universal healthcare system, we're really at the mercy of um politicians, the general sort of management structure of hospitals and stuff, which is very, very hard to change. Like you can change the rota next week. We can't change the rota for my local A&E department, you know, that's completely out of our control. We can just do the sort of like the best we can within our individual teams and um and respective workplaces um in that in that setting. So that there it's really, really good to know about all these different elements of the cheffing industry and how that's improving. Would you say that's the general trend of improvement?
Chet Sharma: I think at the top level for many people, yes. I still think there's it's going to take some work to get everybody on board because the other reality of all of this is it costs money. So I say Bibi is run as a business because it is, but there are things that we do that maybe aren't necessarily business-wise, but my argument would be around staff retention in an environment where every restaurant is short-staffed, Bibi included, um especially when it comes to the the front of house team, because it's an industry that maybe has been sexy in the past or has certain appeals, but it's not it's not glamorous. So you really have to love what you do to do it, which means that there's a very small pool, especially post-Brexit, not going too much into politics, but um, you know, there's a reason why when you go to a restaurant, most people speak with an accent. Um, and it's becoming harder and harder to employ people. So every time we lose a staff member, it's going to cost three times more than it did the year before to hire them back, hire a new person in. Um, and then the training element, the retention, all of that stuff. So if you if you can build a team, keep them happy, and part of that is keeping them healthy, you're in a much, much better position as a restaurant. I mean, you know, we we now, of course, like any business, we have fluctuations, but we have a pretty stable team now. And that makes a big difference to the quality overall of what we're producing, which means that commercially, the business is going to be better. So it kind of, there is, I mean, it's not an exact science, but if you can invest in your team early, you probably will make a little bit of that money back. Maybe not all of it, but a little bit of it will come back. So that's my argument with my investors. That's the way that I justify it. It's like, why are these guys working 45 hours a week? I was like, because normal people work 40 hours a week. So we're still going above and beyond. And that's 45 on paper. Honestly, many of them are working still in the low 50s. But we're not letting it get to the the old numbers. Um, but there's also an education piece around guests on that as well. When somebody says the restaurant's expensive, it's like, well, yes. You want to see my bills at the moment? You know, um, you know, not just on the staffing front, electricity, cost of ingredients, because of course, if we're if we're going to source from a more sustainable uh supplier, farmer, get the best quality product, chances are they're also paying their workers more money. So someone has to pay for that. And we'll take some of it, but yeah.
Dr Rupy: And you know your suppliers by first name as well, so.
Chet Sharma: Yeah, that's I I made the mistake of saying in the early days, there's two things that I said about suppliers. One is that we can name the fishermen who caught any any seafood, because I think sustainability and overfishing, um there's there's this constant sort of tug of war at the moment. And we need to, I mean, I love seafood. We serve a lot of it in the restaurant. And we're a tiny little island, like we have great seafood. And we should be using it, but we need to do it responsibly. So saying that we could name every fisherman means that when I want to put something amazing and new that comes in, I mean, there's some incredible, like there's amazing tuna coming in from Spain at the moment. And all these suppliers are telling me about it and I'm seeing it in other restaurants. I'm just like, I can't use it. Can't use it. I mean, so I have to sit on my hands until August when the tuna fishing season starts in the UK. But it it it still also has to match the quality of the stuff that you get from other parts of the world. So, um, yeah, so there are a few compromises that we have to make as a result. I mean, we we serve the best produce available within the British Isles. Um and the other one was saying that I visit the all the farms that we supply, get our spices from. Now, it was easy when we didn't have a restaurant. I could go to farms and travel around India and, you know, spend three days to go and see some peppercorns. Now we run a restaurant and trying to run a business and trying to build a brand, three days to go and see peppercorns is nearly impossible. So, so we uh yeah, we have to try and figure out how we're going to work that around. Maybe cloning me would work. Or we'll get there. I I also one of the guys who's been with us from the start, off his own back, he was super curious to go and visit some of the people that we work with. So he took a three-month sabbatical um early last year and he traveled around India and Pakistan and visited like the chocolate guys and the peppercorns and the cardamom fields and. So, so at least he's keeping in touch a bit more than than I've been able to in the last year or so. But it doesn't need to be me.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I love that. Uh we're going to finish off with something fun. Your three non-negotiables when it comes to what you keep on your personal kitchen at home.
Chet Sharma: Yeah, so personal kitchen, one thing we played with already today is the ghee.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Chet Sharma: Uh so the slightly illegal ghee that we have. We have amazing ghee at the restaurant. This is the ghee that I have at home is best in class, but it's it's not legal to have it in the to bring it into this country.
Dr Rupy: Should I admit this on a recording?
Chet Sharma: That's not the ghee that you serve at the restaurant.
Dr Rupy: This is this is this is so we use uh A2 desi cow ghee from India at home and it is like nothing you've ever had before.
Chet Sharma: Okay.
Dr Rupy: I there's not much I can do about it. I'd love to serve it to my guests. I'd love for them to be able to try how good this is. Let's say if this is 10 out of 10, what we serve in the restaurant is like nine and a half.
Chet Sharma: Oh, wow. Okay.
Dr Rupy: So it's close. But it's just that little extra. So we always have that at home. Um uh amazing peppercorns.
Chet Sharma: Okay.
Dr Rupy: Uh so peppercorns from Tellicherry mainly. Um we have nine different peppercorns in the restaurant. At home, I have one because I'm a normal person. Despite how I might come across. Um but these peppercorns are amazing and it makes uh a huge difference.
Chet Sharma: Where are they from? Tellicherry, sorry?
Dr Rupy: They're from Tellicherry. I mean, I could say that about pretty much every spice that I use at home. Like we use the best of the best of the best. And those you can import legally, so we use those in the restaurant as well. Um and then actually something that might sound a bit odd, but salt.
Chet Sharma: Salt?
Dr Rupy: Yeah, because my biggest pet peeve is this the horrible iodized salt that you get. The one that your mum would have at home in the little blue. I won't say the name of the brand, but the yeah. Oh my god, yeah. Yeah, I mean, just good salt. Um so uh we use at home, this is like accents. I'm sorry, I've just offended every Welsh person out there. But the salt is really good. So we're going to learn about it soon. Okay. That's really good to know. Yeah, yeah, good salt. What do you make of the whole Himalayan pink salt stuff? Do you? Yeah, I mean, not all salts are created equal. Sure. Um I don't believe in a system where you if you can have something really good here in the UK, you shouldn't be you shouldn't be using the other stuff. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we again, tiny island, a lot of sea water. It's quite easy to get salt here. Yeah, yeah. And our salt is used around the world, you know, Maldon salt, everybody uses it. It's why I didn't want to name them, but. Um but yeah, no, we use we use Maldon in the restaurant as well. It's it's it's very good salt. And it makes a massive difference because, you know, when you think about the basics, I mean, we never season food with pepper. I hate that idea. Because you never never season food with cumin, why would you? Pepper's a spice at the end of the day. But we season everything with salt. Sweet, savory, doesn't matter. Sometimes even a little bit in your coffee.
Chet Sharma: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: I've tried that actually. Yeah, yeah. I've over-salted my coffee before though. It didn't work. You've got to be careful about that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Chet Sharma: Tiny bit. Tiny bit. Um yeah, so we use salt so widely. So why would you not use the best? And the price difference between really crap salt and amazing salt is very small.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. So for me, it's an investment worth making.
Chet Sharma: Totally, yeah. And price per use as well, given that you're using it across so many meals. Yeah. Those are brilliant. Those I wasn't expecting those uh those the pepper and salt, but it's yeah, it's a very good point.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. Well, I think I think we're all about sourcing at the restaurant. That's the whole story. You know, the the the prodigal son, the son of a farming family as well. So we like ingredients a lot. And the the step change difference between an okay ingredient and a great ingredient is yeah, like it's exponential.
Chet Sharma: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dr Rupy: Chet, this has been awesome, man. I've been loving chatting to you. Uh and I just can't wait to see what you do next with Bibi and all your other ventures that you've got going on as well. So, yeah, this is epic.
Chet Sharma: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
