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! 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

it up as much as you want, you can’t really destroy it. Whereas if I give you a chicken, everyone cooks chicken differently and you can overcook or undercook it easily. We also learned that micro herbs don’t travel well, so don’t even try and go there.

WL: What do you think you’ve learned in the past year that you’ll take with you into the future? OM: I think being patient and honest. How you treat staff as well has been a massive thing for us and many businesses. I think at Aulis we have been so lucky because we as a group have fought to do take-away and that’s enabled us to keep all the staff on. It would be really easy to say, “screw this, were not going to do anything, everyone is on furlough, or everyone is being made redundant”. Instead, we fought to keep it going, keep everyone in their job and keep people happy and it worked out well.

WL: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? OM: To surround yourself with talented people. The restaurants where I’ve learned the most, are where you’re surrounded by people that care, that are passionate and talented, and who have the same drive and goals.

WL: Who is your role model and how have they influenced you? OM: I’ve don’t know if I can have one role model, I’ve worked for so many amazing people. And I think that’s key because you can take bits from different people. Someone like Heston Blumenthal who I worked with at The Fat Duck is just ridiculously crazy. You almost don’t take no for an answer – everything can be accomplished. And someone like Simon Rogan is an incredible boss: he is so kind, and very genuine.

WL: What ingredient can you not live without? OM:Definitely chocolate, I have a ridiculously sweet tooth. I cannot leave a bar unfinished, no matter what size, it is my biggest weakness. WL: What are your biggest passions outside food and drink? OM: I don’t have time to do much outside of work but travelling is a passion that comes hand in hand with my job. I’ve been lucky enough to travel a lot to different countries and I don’t understand why more people don’t do it in the industry. It is a real perk to go and work abroad and get a job. I love going to new places and meeting new people, just getting lost in new cities.

WL: If you could choose anyone from today or history from any time, who would be your ideal dinner party guest? OM: Paul Gascoigne. I’d probably cook him a pie and chips, that’s what he’d want, wouldn’t he? He’s more my choice for the company, not the fine dining.