MEET THE CHEF

MIKE GANE, GASTRONOMY

By James Rayner, Photos by Julian Winslow

Taking a seat in the comfy, cosily lit interior of Gastronomy in Cowes, we hear a new spring menu is just about to be released, but in the meantime (as we wait for the big reveal), we know exactly what we’ll be ordering - the Thai green curry. Based on a recipe taught to the chef in a Bangkok street food market, it’s as authentic as you can get (just with the fish sauce swapped out for a vegan alternative). It’s just the type of enticing, flavourful, globally influenced dish that you can come to expect with Head Chef Mike Gane in the kitchen.

Chef’s whites on and hair tied back, Mike begins bruising the lemongrass and carefully chopping the coriander, telling us how his culinary career first began. Whilst still a teenager, studying music at Platform One, he began washing dishes in this exact building, for a business known as The Grill. He was soon asked to assist on the gastronomic side of things, quickly developing a passion for it, creating a drive that still motivates him to this day. “I think the Head Chef back then saw my passion before I’d even noticed it myself. He got me cooking pork belly with kimchi and braising octopus, which was quite cool, and I just fell in love with creating food.”

After getting his NVQs, Mike headed off for a job in an Austrian ski resort in Obergurgl, cooking beef goulash (an Austrian classic), before moving on to India and then backpacking around Thailand and Vietnam, testing the street food at every opportunity. Next was an eight month stint in India before another job, this time in a ski resort in France. “I was running a chalet there for families of ten to fifteen people, cooking my own menu and playing around with my own style. It was the first time I’d been let loose on my own, purely cooking what I wanted to.”

Landing back in the UK, Brighton would be the next stop, and a Thai and Indonesian restaurant called Long Grain in St. James Street, Kemp Town. Here, the owner (who comes from the island of Sumatra in Indonesia) taught Mike how to make classic Indonesian food from scratch, including peanut satay sauce for chicken skewers and chilli sambal sauce for meat and noodle dishes. However, this wasn’t his only introduction to Indonesian food. “My mum comes from Java and has cooked all her life. She does a really good

Indonesian beef rendang. It’s one of my all-time favourite dishes, but involves quite a long process and lots of different ingredients. Even now, when I cook it myself, I might send her a photo to check the colour looks right, just to make sure it’s going to be absolutely perfect.”

Now, as Head Chef of Gastronomy in Cowes, Mike has developed his own culinary style and taken the food offering in a new direction. Recent menu options have included a number of attractive Asian dishes (naturally), including Thai fish cakes, Korean chicken, Japanese katsu tofu, Chinese bao buns, and Indonesian satay skewers. Other influences, from Latin America and the Mediterranean, were also on the agenda with chipotle chilli chicken burgers, crispy calamari, and arancini balls featuring too. Whilst we wait to see what the new menu will bring, one thing’s for sure, ingredient traceability and concerns for the environment will always be front and centre.

“We make everything from scratch and aim for a no-waste approach. For example, if we’re carving rib eye steaks, we use the trimmings to make beef tacos, when they’d normally be thrown away. Knowing exactly where your food comes from is really important to me. I’m particularly inspired by Brazilian chef Alex Atala who, after cooking for years in Europe, returned to Brazil to open a fine-dining restaurant, which was unheard of in the country at the time. Now he’s a Michelin-starred chef. He says ‘mise en place [a chef’s preparation before cooking] starts from the farm’. You need to appreciate that someone took the effort to grow your produce, and it’s already been on a journey before it’s even reached the chopping board.”

And that journey is often a short one at Gastronomy, with local suppliers helping to keep those food miles to a minimum. Meat comes from W A Foods in Shanklin, seafood is sourced from J&B in Cowes, vegetables are from Hunts in Rookley and a few South East Asian specialities such as Thai basil and morning glory (also known as water spinach) are grown by Mike’s mum Tetty Lia in her greenhouse in Cowes.

As we prepare to leave Mike to get ready for a busy lunch service, he shares his final thoughts on the year ahead.

“I feel really lucky that I fell into a job I love doing and am able to progress constantly. When a job is good, and you enjoy it, it doesn’t really feel like work.

I’ve also got a really good team with me in the kitchen, and there’s a great atmosphere here, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what the next year will bring.”