Q&A: YASMINE LARIZADEH

The co-founder of The Good Life Eatery on learning on the job, becoming part of a community, and selling London’s best coconut water

Interview: Ellie Costigan

How did The Good Life Eatery come about?

After university, I did an internship in Mayfair. At the time, the only place you could eat lunch for under £30 was Pret A Manger, and the tuna baguette was pretty much the only health-conscious thing on the menu. I grew up in the States and spent a lot of time in California – my brothers went to university there and I’d visit them a lot. The choice there was much more abundant; lots of different concepts and more focus on what’s going into your body. There was definitely a massive gap in the market in London. I’ve always been obsessed with food. My mum is an incredible cook and would make us fresh meals, every day. I’m so grateful that was the experience I had growing up. So I thought, what about opening a small cafe? That’s where the story began.

As I had just finished university, I hadn’t had much experience – it was very much a scratch and itch scenario – so I went and did a bit of training in a Lebanese restaurant to understand what it means to run a restaurant. I worked in every section, from the kitchen to front of house. Otherwise, I’ve learned on the job. We opened our first restaurant in August 2013 and just hit the ground running.

That’s quite a learning curve! What’s been the biggest challenge? Managing people is the trickiest part of the business, but also just understanding the ebbs and flows of the economy. It wasn’t something I really understood before owning a business. There have been a lot of external pressures. Having to trade through the pandemic was insanity. Brexit was also difficult, especially in terms of labour shortages. In the first six months of the restaurant, a mains pipe burst, and the restaurant was flooded. But those challenges brought us closer together. You just switch on survival mode and keep going.

What brought you to Marylebone Lane?

It’s beautiful. A lot of my favourite restaurants were in Marylebone, so I’d spent a lot of time here. It also just fit with our concept, as there are a lot of private medical care providers in the area, which was the market we were trying to penetrate. Awareness of the brand was difficult in the beginning, but people here understood it. That was very much a draw.

Something else that was very important to us was community and being somewhere that was more of a neighbourhood. I think Marylebone really encompasses that. It’s got a very friendly and cosy atmosphere, but you do also get a lot of businesspeople. The site came up and it was a great spot for us. I’m so happy that we’re still here, 10 years down the line.

Having a healthy food offer is clearly central to Good Life Eatery. What does ‘healthy’ mean to you?

It means unprocessed – that’s something I am very adamant about. I don’t believe in counting calories. I find it crazy that they’ve made it a legal requirement on some menus. I went to an all-girls school and so many girls had eating disorders and would calorie count obsessively.

I don’t think it’s a positive way of measuring your nutrient intake and it’s unhealthy mentally.

To me, healthy also means good provenance: we really do focus on where the food is coming from, who makes it, what farming techniques are used, and so on. In general, we believe in choosing local over organic. The organic certification system is super flawed. It inundates producers with paperwork and there are a lot of grey areas. On the flip side, a lot of local producers practise organic farming methods, but they’re not able to get the certification because they can’t afford to pay for it. I really believe in supporting local growers and the local economy.

Food Philosophy

How do you go about putting together your menu?

Most importantly, we want to make sure our food is for everyone. I didn’t want it to be a solely vegan or glutenfree restaurant, I wanted there to be one place you could go and feel safe and included and not judged. Not faddy, diet crap, but good, real food.

Seasonality is also important: we have a winter menu and a summer menu. One of the things I’m eating pretty much every day at the moment is the daaly wood. I love it: it’s a red lentil and turmeric, gingery dahl, that comes on a bed of brown rice or quinoa. You can have it with either

Zoilo

sweet potato or jerk chicken. My other favourite thing is the cocoa butter smoothie, with peanut butter, banana, dates and coconut milk. It’s super filling – quite calorific, but delicious, non-processed and keeps me fuelled throughout the day.

There are some dishes we’ve had on the menu since day one, like the sunset chopped salad, which is just a really easy chopped salad with baby gem, tomato, edamame, bacon, egg and chicken.

What about drinks?

Having a lot of hydrating options is also super important. We were

Diego Jacquet, chef-patron of Zoilo, on the passions that have fuelled his Argentinian restaurant’s first decade of service

Interview: Ellie Costigan Images: Lateef Photography

I’m not one of those guys who can say I was cooking with my mother and grandmother. I didn’t have any interest in cooking when I was a kid or teenager: I wanted to be a footballer, but I was in an accident and lost vision in my left eye. I ended up doing a hotel management course, and one of the classes was cooking. As soon as I walked into that kitchen – saw the craziness and the pressure, how skilful they were – I fell in love with it.

We use the best produce we can get our hands on. That is nonnegotiable. The only thing we buy that isn’t British or European is the Argentine beef. We are super proud of the beautiful produce we have here.

Why is Argentine beef so good? It’s a combination of things. It’s very natural. The cows can roam freely on very good grass. They move a lot, which makes the meat very tender. Not all beef from Argentina is good, though – it has to be from somewhere central, La Pampa or Buenos Aires. That’s where you have the weather. People in Argentina love to eat meat. It’s something sacred.

When I arrived to work at El Bulli in 1998, it was one of the best restaurants in the world. That restaurant taught me to be a tough cookie: to work long hours, to be disciplined, to get organised. I will always be grateful for that.

Every Thursday, I clear my agenda – no emails, no phone calls, nothing. I go into the kitchen with the guys, cooking, taking deliveries, getting to know the junior staff, teaching them. For me that’s very important. They might think, he’s the chef-patron, he’s in his 50s, he probably doesn’t remember how to cook. Then I jump on the grill and do it faster, cleaner and better than them. That sends a very strong message. Show respect for this profession. And you don’t play with this guy!

After 10 years, there are some dishes that are classics. If we take them out of the menu, people will complain. One of them is a starter, the provolone cheese with almonds and oregano honey. That has been on the menu since day one, we can’t take it away.

We are always asking ourselves, how can we do this differently? We challenge everything we do all the time, otherwise we become too comfortable.

In the beginning, it was very difficult to fight the perception that when you go to an Argentine restaurant, you have steak and malbec. That’s what people expect, so when we were serving lamb or wild sea bass, people were amazed.

When I moved to New York, I worked in a Swedish restaurant, Aquavit. I loved the minimalism of the Scandinavian food and the precision of the techniques – and that the head chef was cooking. Often the head chef just stands at the pass. Aquavit taught me to have that passion for cooking.

We make absolutely everything in-house. We don’t buy anything pre-prepared, down to the dough for our empanadas.

We take our wine very seriously. We have around 100 labels, exclusively from Argentina. We love sourcing from small producers – the way the wine industry in Argentina has improved in the last 25 years is astonishing.

Argentina is a big country, and each region is completely different. In Patagonia, in the south, you have octopus, scallops, a lot of fish. Some of the best king crab in the world comes from Argentina. In the mountains, you’ve got the best lamb, all the berries. If you go to the north, you have a lot of tropical fruits. On the border of Peru, you have quinoa, ceviche. The thing that I’m most proud of in the restaurant is that we serve food that people wouldn’t necessarily associate with Argentina.

ZOILO

9 Duke Street, W1U 3EG zoilo.co.uk probably one of the first outlets in the UK to serve cold-pressed juices, which is juice that’s been made with a hydraulic press. It extracts all of the vitamins and minerals and removes the pulp, leaving you with the best juice ever. Our coconut water is also excellent. People are obsessed with it. Hand over heart, we have the best coconut water in London. I’m not just saying that, we’ve done blind tastings. Recently we bought every brand and bottle we could find in London and did a test – everyone chose ours, so I was super happy about that.

You mentioned that ‘community’ is also a big part of Good Life. How do you engender that in your cafes? Do you feel like you’ve created a community in Marylebone?

One hundred per cent. Being part of a supportive community comes into every decision we make. It’s becoming increasingly common to go into a shop and not interact with a single person. Everything is about making money, fast turnarounds. Someone I really admire is a New York restauranteur called Daniel Meyer, whose hospitality style is very much about human interaction. That’s something I very much believe in –greeting people with a smile, making them feel welcome and that they’re part of something.

We have genuinely created such strong friendships with our customers, and within our teams. One of our best customers passed away a couple of weeks ago and we all went to her funeral. She was 92 and we’d seen her almost every day for 10 years. She would come in with her husband each morning, have coffee together and read the newspaper, or she’d come in for a cappuccino with her girlfriends. It was very sad when she died, of course, but beautiful for us to acknowledge that we had impacted someone’s life. It’s the most inspiring part of the job.

THE GOOD LIFE EATERY

69 Marylebone Lane, W1U 2PH goodlifeeatery.com