The secret stagiaire: L’Ortolan / Heaneys
Experience days are pretty popular Christmas presents, whether they might entail white-knuckling Ferraris around icy racetracks or forging Viking axe heads with mad blacksmiths. Tom Clarke, head chef of Michelin-starred L’Ortolan in Reading, offers his own experience day, with members of the public able to buy stages at his high-end French restaurant in southern England.
‘Are you brave enough to enter the L’Ortolan engine room?’ teases the website, with three different purchase levels (bronze, silver and gold) unlocking different degrees of exposure to Clarke and his patient brigade. “We have someone from the public come in every few days and they get to have a crack at all the different sections,” a commis named Ewan tells me as we ‘ballotined’ marinated loins of hogget near the front of the kitchen. “We actually had the owner of Grosvenor Casinos in for one the other day.”
Learning the tricks of the trade is how the main chunk of the experience at L’Ortolan is described and, eager to stick to the programme, I spent the morning being passed around the brigade for different prep tasks, from portioning halibut (which would be brined for 15 minutes and then poached to order) to folding delicate lobster ravioli. And there was, of course, a whole lot of veg prep to be done – free labour’s forte.
My main task for lunch was the soy-marinated mackerel dish which, like pretty much everything on the menu at L’Ortolan, is surgically elegant and teeming with different elements. This mackerel, which I’d lightly torch after applying a drizzle of lemon oil and a pinch of Maldon salt, needed to be plated with wasabi cream, coriander oil, puffed wild rice, seaweed vinegar, mango salsa, coriander cress, pickled fennel, lemongrass jelly, wasabi tobiko (flying fish roe), spring onion and a wasabi/ coriander mayo.
I also needed to use its repurposed, charity shop-bought record player in the corner to make ever-increasing circles with a mango gel on the plates. They call this their ‘swirly-whirly’.
Luckily for me, there were only nine booked in for lunch that afternoon so I could practice in between, with precision tweezer-movements and unblinking focus required for every rendition/objet d’art.
Lunch at L’Ortolan gave me a notepad brimming with recipe ideas and plating inspiration. Sure, it was a quiet service, but it meant I could pick more brains, attempt more plates and really get that ‘gold’ experience, so to speak.
And, not content with just one stage this month, I also got myself into Tommy Heaney’s gaff on the outskirts of a bitterly cold Welsh capital. Well, it is Christmas, I thought.
Heaneys, which has an array of different menus based around the small plate and snack concept, has a modest kitchen with excellent ingredients, with the fridges and store rooms out back guarded by Shea, Tommy’s exquisitely nervous dog who constantly wants to play fetch without any eye contact.
Tommy, a big advocate of the stage circuit and always on the lookout for new blood, had me on potatoes to start, namely feeding them into the peeler machine by the pot wash. “Have you got a chipping machine?” I asked after the last potato had been through. “Yeah – you!” came the answer I deserved.
I had to do them quickly, too, with my prep list also including pickling kohlrabi, making oxtail croquettes and passing burnt pear puree for the Pembrokeshire duck dish with celeriac, sorrel and girolles.
Tommy’s a huge fish fan and his menu’s full of it. And he always has a cured or raw dish on the menu. Right now, it’s a cured monkfish with an elderflower ajo blanco (with homemade elderflower vinegar made last year) and Muscat grapes. Even his chips have Old Bay seasoning – a mix often used on crabs that Tommy discovered while he was cooking in the US.
In true start-of-service style, a table of 17 struck just gone 6pm, and I started off the whole circus with slices of homemade sourdough (charred from the Big Green Egg) and Marmite butter with sprinkles of salt and burnt shallot powder.
There were only four of us in the kitchen that evening and we had a good 50 bookings to contend with. It turned out to be a proper, all-action stage, balancing oxtail croquettes on piped oyster emulsion while mixing a white cabbage and brown shrimp salad one moment, and launching up to the pass with tempura deep sea mussels for the brill dish while timing six portions of chips in the fryer in another.
It was one of those stages where I felt like I’d worked there for months. One of those stages where everything felt right and it would be the most natural thing to start a full-time job there with Tommy and the gang.
Stages really are more than just experiences. They’re adventures. Every time.
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