FOOD + DRINK
Five Minutes With: Wokingham’s own Celebrity Chef - Oliver Marlow A young chef from Wokingham made it through to the semi-finals of one of the culinary world’s most prestigious competitions to be crowned Britain’s finest young chef – The Great British Menu. Oliver Marlow – now the executive chef of Aulis UK and Hong Kong, talks about creating finish-at-home deliveries, and his love of chocolate. WL: Can you tell us a bit about the Aulis London at-home deliveries? OM: Aulis London is one of Simon Rogan’s restaurants. In the group we’re doing Simon Rogan at Home, which delivers nationwide, and Aulis which delivers to London addresses. The aim is to bring people a taste of the restaurant, which is all about natural British ingredients. We want to let guests ordering it play chef a little bit so some of the dishes will be step-by-step how to recreate restaurantstyle dishes. They’re not too complicated but the idea is to get the flavour of the restaurant at home. WL: How challenging has it been to transfer the restaurant spirit of the food into a finishat-home box? OM: At first it was an absolute nightmare. You spend your whole life, 15 years, learning how to run a restaurant – I’ve never done take-away in my life! 28
And all of a sudden, you’ve got three days to change the whole business model from a classic sit-down restaurant to takeaway. It’s everything from ordering the containers, to menus, to delivering, and even little things. In a restaurant if someone orders an orange juice and you forget, it’s no drama, you’re at the table two seconds later but if you send out a delivery and you’ve forgotten to put one of the components in, it’s a much bigger problem. The thought that has been put into making things easy to prepare for non-chefs is impressive. That is what we’ve been doing now for months and, obviously, in the previous lockdown, and in Hong Kong. You improve every week when you change the menu and realise different things. We found out that braised meats are really good, for example, because whether it’s a lamb shank or short rib of beef we’ve already done the hard part. All you have to do is heat it up, and you can heat WOKINGHAM LOCAL • JULY 2021
