Next time you’re in a restaurant, look around at your fellow diners and see if you can guess why they’re there. Depending on where you’re eating, you’ll see some people celebrating – birthdays, promotions, anniversaries – some there for business, others arguing, first and last dates and a good number of let’s-just-go-out-to-eaters who couldn’t face cooking at home. At Brawn on Columbia Road, you will see all such diners, such is its laid-back yet refined tone and informal but eminently delicious, considered cooking that makes it somehow as suitable for an impromptu weekend dinner as it does for something more momentous.

In this instalment of ‘The Modern Menu‘, we’re meeting chef and Brawn owner Ed Wilson to get a sense of his approach to food and home cooking, while also getting a seasonal recipe for gazpacho, the Spanish soup that tastes of summer. Enjoy.

Ed: “To be honest, I knew from the age of four that I wanted to be a chef, and that’s never faltered. So I’ve been super lucky, I suppose, in my career, to know exactly what I wanted to do.

“I grew up in Wakefield, Yorkshire, ten miles south of Leeds, in a family in which food was very important. My dad never worked in food but was fascinated and enthused by cooking and had lots of recipe books, and we’d cook collectively on a weekend – it was very family-orientated. 

“My dad was a TV producer who made educational programmes, but always had a love of food, which came from his father, and I guess he passed it on to me. He used to write for the Good Food Guide, which you could contribute to as a reviewer. 

“In the late 1980s he did the first-ever chef cooking programme on Channel 4, which was with Anton Mosimann, and I remember meeting him aged 13 when his restaurant at the Dorchester had two Michelin stars, which made quite an impression on me.

“In terms of the food we cooked at home, it was European-focused, more French because it was the 1980s and that was very much in vogue – it was the food you went out to restaurants for. 

“In fact, French cuisine was always an inspiration for me growing up, and I remember reading a book called Great Chefs of France, which a lot of old-guard chefs will refer to. It was a book written in the 1970s with the great French masters of that time; the authors went and spent two weeks with each chef. It’s just the most incredible story of how these guys created restaurants that were excellent on every level. I think reading that book as a child was so inspiring, and was ultimately what I’ve always wanted to try and achieve. 

“My first job in a kitchen was at age 15, but that was just washing up and doing a little bit of prep. At home, my elder sister and I were pretty much self-sufficient, cooking for ourselves most nights because my parents were at work. We’d make our own dinner, and we had enough of an understanding of things like how to use a knife properly to not injure ourselves! 

“At 18 I went to university. I didn’t want to go to catering school, as my dad told me it wasn’t the right way to learn about cooking. I studied Industrial Design but cooked through university, working in restaurants, but nowhere of great review. When I graduated, that’s when I knew I wanted to get properly stuck into cooking.

“There are huge amounts of transferable skills between Industrial Design and cookery. Both are about discipline and learning core skills that stay with you. In terms of the design process, you have to get the foundational principles right – yes, you can be creative but you need to know what the building blocks are, just like with cooking.

“Also, I’ve been very fortunate that during my 21-year career in London, I’ve opened ten restaurants in which I’ve had an input into the design of the kitchens, and having insight into what works and how you need to operate in that space has helped me a lot. 

“Kitchen design is always about spatial planning and how people can work effectively, which lots of people forget. The key thing in a busy restaurant is to be able to do everything from one foot of where you are standing – the moment you have to start traipsing around is when you start being inefficient. 

“The same things apply to home kitchens. At my house in London Fields, we built a kitchen with an architect, who we gave a brief to of wanting a space we could entertain in, first and foremost. So, we have a big concrete-topped worktop that people can stand on either side of. It’s a very practical kitchen – very open, lots of space and everything is visible. 

“I don’t have fancy gadgets at home, I just have the things you really need; a good coffee maker is very key! It’s not cheffy, and even the kitchen at Brawn was designed to feel like a domestic kitchen. I always think that my restaurant is an extension of my home, which is why I put coloured tiles in here and lots of my pictures on the wall, which softens the whole feel. And, also, we’re a neighbourhood restaurant, which should feel intimate. 

“We have friends over every few weekends, and normally it’s Jon and Tom from the Marksman, and Claire from Violet Bakery, who all have kids so there’s lots of children running around! A couple of weekends ago we had them over for a Turkish-style barbecue, with lots of grilled lamb and aubergine. 

“I’m trying to have a better work/life balance these days. Me and my wife, who also works in food, have two young boys, aged four and two. When they were younger they were really easy to cook for as they would eat anything. All of a sudden our eldest, Kit, has an opinion on everything! But we make freshly cooked food for them everyday day and we use the best ingredients we can buy. We’re blessed with where we are because we have amazing markets and really good produce in this area.

“We cook at home in the same way we do here, and my general approach to food is essentially what I call ‘European cultural cooking’. It’s not creative food, or cooking driven by some sort of cerebral process or mad techniques – it’s very much rooted in the foundations of simple culinary practices.

“My training was predominately French but one thing I think has changed dramatically in the last five to ten years is the level of ingredients that are now accessible – it means we don’t have to rely on heavy sauces and can let the ingredients speak for themselves. Also, as I get older, I’ve started to realise I need to eat a little bit healthier so French food, with its love of butter and cream, is not something I go for too often these days. 

“I think what people want from restaurants has changed too. When I was growing up, you went to a restaurant to eat food that was rich, technical and could never be made at home. These days, people want to eat fresh food that is good for them, without the ceremony. 

“But there is such a fine line between simplicity done excellently, where it can stop you in your tracks, and being the worst. Understanding how to put a dish together and create the magic, that makes people go ‘wow’, is where the skill is.

“Cookbooks are like knives: you build up a collection when you’re young and then, as you get older, you realise you only use about two of them for everything. I’ve got thousands of books I’ve bought over the years, but I realised recently I only read five of them regularly – things like Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories, Great Chefs of France and Elizabeth David’s books. There’s only really a handful, and it’s more about books that inspire me when I read them, that communicate a story, a philosophy, and not necessarily the recipes themselves. 

“Every season is magical, and it’s impossible to say which one I like cooking in the most. I like when I forget about a particular vegetable and then it turns up, and we have a couple of weeks to use them. Take this gazpacho, for example, it’s a lovely dish to make at home because it’s just about showcasing the best of summer vegetables, and there is nothing technical about it. All you need is good ingredients and you’ll end up with something exceptional.” 

Ed’s recipe for gazpacho

Soup
2kg mixed ripe tomatoes (Pink Bull’s heart, San Marzano)
1 Italian red pepper
250ml of best quality passata
1 Sicilian cucumber (peeled and deseeded)
1 Tropea onion (a dry, sweet Italian onion)
1 clove of garlic
1 teaspoon of Nora pepper paste
Tabasco
Worcester Sauce
Red wine vinegar
Salt
Olive oil (splash before blitzing, more to finish)
1/2 bunch basil
Celery salt

To garnish
Hard-boiled egg (cooked for 10 minutes)
Croutons
Chopped chives
Olive oil

In a large bowl, chop all the vegetables into equal size pieces (about the size of a 50p piece). Add the peeled garlic clove, basil, passata and Nora paste.

Add about a teaspoon of salt and mix thoroughly together. Cover and leave for about three hours to marinate.

After that time, add about 30ml of good-quality red wine vinegar, a few dashes of Tabasco and Worcestershire Sauce, a good slug (around 100ml) of olive oil, and finally a pinch of celery salt.

In a food processor, blitz each jug for about two minutes and then pass through a sieve to ensure the soup is smooth.

Taste the soup at this point and adjust the seasoning if necessary, using salt and vinegar until you are happy with the balance of flavours. You can store the soup in the fridge until required.

To garnish, separate the hard-boiled egg between white and yolk and finely grate individually. 

Cut small croutons from some sliced bread and fry gently in olive oil until golden brown.

Pour the soup into the bowl, sprinkle on the grated egg white, yolk and finely chopped chives. Then finish with the croutons and a generous dribble of olive oil.