"We're a brash New York restaurant, and we don't want to change": Ed Schoenfeld on bringing RedFarm to the UK

Where did your interest in food come from?​
I decided at age 18 I really wanted to work in the food industry, and the best thing I could do was be a food critic or a food journalist. I wanted to cook and write about it, and travel and get paid for that. so I decided to start cooking every day. 

Where did your interest in Chinese cooking come from?​
When I was 19 I started taking cooking classes from a woman named Grace Chu who was a Chinese cookery teacher in New York. She was the doyenne of cooking teachers in America. After a while I wanted to learn at a higher level and the best way to do it was by going to Chinese restaurants that had a good level of skilled chefs and ordering a banquet.

How did it become a career for you?​
My interest in Chinese food coincided with the period where all of the talented Chinese chefs were coming to the US. My curiosity pushed me to start setting up Chinese banquets while writing a food column. After a couple of years I moved out of home and started driving a taxi cab to support my cooking habit, and I while was learning from the Chinese banquet chefs I met a group of Chinese restaurateurs. I became one of their assistants, and helped him to set up Uncle Tai's Hunan Yuan, which was one of the two first Hunan restaurants in the world outside of China.

How heavily involved were you with the American-Chinese food scene?​
For 45 years, on one level or another, I've been at the forefront and very involved with the Chinese food business in the US, either as the guy at the door, or the creator, or the owner. I've set up around 55 restaurants.

Why now to come to the UK?​
I have a partner in the US, a restaurateur, who is more on the business side of things. I also know a restaurateur who specialises in bringing concepts from the States to the UK. He had been to RedFarm and always had it in the back of his mind to bring it to the UK. He knew that this location was coming up from the landlord, CAPCO, and contacted us 18 months ago to ask if we would be interested.

It’s a difficult time to launch a restaurant. Does that worry you?​
People eat every day, and there's always enthusiasm for the new, hot restaurant. Ultimately, what creates success is opening a really good restaurant, so we never worried about Brexit, we worried about whether our business would work well in the UK. I have enormous confidence in the quality of food that we put out and how unique it is, so I took the plunge.

How is your cuisine unique?​
We're sensible cooks, and we put care in everything we do. Joe Ng (the group's co founder and executive chef) does figurative dim sum, for example, which means he makes dumplings that look like things. He makes over 1,000 types of dim sum shapes. Of those, about 150 are shaped like different animals. And he also makes them taste delicious.

Have you adapted the food to cater to a UK market?​
We're a brash New York restaurant, and we don't want to change - we want to be ourselves. That said, RedFarm is about using local and seasonal ingredients, so we have adapted a little bit with our ingredients. I discovered that there are great razor clams and great scallops here, and our pastrami comes from Monty’s Deli instead of Katz’s.

Why did it take so long to launch here?​
We came here last February to train our staff and do chef tryouts. We came back to start training them, and one of the neighbours had complained about our extraction to the council. When we came to look at it we found out that our extraction had never been turned on- it was a neighbouring building’s system. It took six months to unravel it all. Six months of extra rent, extra salaries...

How will you manage the London restaurant and your New York ones?​
I'll be coming back a lot. I haven't been back home for five weeks. Joe went back to the States for one week, tomorrow we're bringing two of our really senior staff here, and our bar manager is here. I'd like to have one of us at least here at all times. We're planning to take good care of this place.

If you opened another UK restaurant, would it be another RedFarm?​
We aren't serving Peking duck here, but we probably will if we open another restaurant. There's care in everything we do, like the jigger of heavily reduced duck consomme made with miso that comes with our duck service in the US. We put drops of it on the duck and cover it with the crispy skin- you wouldn't know it was there, but it adds an extra layer of flavour.

What do you think about the media attention RedFarm London has got so far?​
Attention from the media is good- it drives customers to the door. But It's the hospitality that keeps them coming back. You could call me immodest, passionate... there are a lot of things you can say about me, but I know my stuff, and I really care.