Theo Randall joined The River Café in Hammersmith in 1989. He was twenty years old. Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray were running a kitchen that was, in the context of London at that moment, doing something genuinely radical: taking the food of rural and regional Italy seriously, sourcing produce with an obsessiveness that the British restaurant world had not previously applied to European cuisine, and cooking it with a restraint that the kitchen's alumni — Sam and Sam Clark, April Bloomfield, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, among others — have carried outward into the world for three decades.
Randall stayed for seventeen years. He became head chef. He left in 2006 to open his own restaurant at the InterContinental London Park Lane, a hotel dining room that has, in the twenty years since, become one of the more quietly distinguished expressions of Italian cooking in the city. He is still there. He is still, at the most fundamental level, cooking the food that The River Café taught him to take seriously.
"Italian cooking is one of those things where the more you know about it, the more you realise how much there is to know," he says. "Every region is a different cuisine. The way they cook pasta in Bologna is nothing like the way they cook it in Naples. The olive oils, the wines, the specific cuts of pork, the approach to vegetables — it's endlessly specific and endlessly interesting. After thirty-five years I am still finding things I haven't understood properly."
What the River Café Taught Him
The lessons from Rogers and Gray, Randall says, are reducible to a set of principles that sound simple and require a lifetime to fully execute. The first is sourcing: ingredients at the level of quality that Italian cooking requires are not available through standard food service channels, and building the supplier relationships that give a kitchen access to the right olive oil, the right anchovies, the right aged Parmesan is a project that never ends.
The second is restraint. "Italian cooking at its best is not about doing a lot to the ingredient," he says. "It's about understanding what the ingredient is and getting out of its way. A good piece of fish, grilled over wood, finished with great olive oil and lemon — that's the food. The temptation is to add things because you want to show what you can do. Ruth and Rose were very clear that showing what you can do means showing you understand the ingredient, not showing you can build a sauce."
The third lesson is confidence: the willingness to put a dish on the menu that looks, to the untrained eye, simple, and to trust that the quality of the sourcing and the precision of the execution will speak for themselves without elaborate description or elaborated technique. "In British fine dining culture there's still a residual idea that complex means better," Randall says. "Italian food disagrees fundamentally. A perfectly made pasta with sage butter and good Parmesan is a great dish. It doesn't need to be more."
The Spring Menu
The current spring menu at Theo Randall at the InterContinental is an expression of exactly this philosophy applied to the season. Carpaccio of beef from a Galician dairy cow, with rocket, capers and Parmesan — ingredients of exceptional provenance assembled rather than cooked. Pappardelle with Herefordshire rabbit, white wine, rosemary and cream. Grilled Cornish turbot with salsa verde and Sicilian capers. A wood-roasted whole chicken for two, with roasted spring onions, lemon and Puglian olive oil.
The dessert that has been on the menu in one form or another since the restaurant opened is still there: a chocolate nemesis that is direct lineage from the River Café original, the recipe unmoved, the technique unchanged. "There are things you don't change," Randall says. "Not because you can't, but because they're right."
Theo Randall at the InterContinental is open Monday through Saturday for lunch and dinner. The à la carte menu starts at £32 for a starter.