Murray Chalmers: Leave cooking to the top chefs and just simply enjoy the food

By Murray Chalmers

April 24 2021, 4:00pm

Murray tries some fine dining dishes using ingredients – and instructions – delivered to his door from Haar at Home.

I’ve just eaten a meal which was the result of a collaboration between two well-known chefs, experienced professionals who obviously spent quite some time planning the ingredients, flavours, textures and timings required to present such superb restaurant-quality food at home.

As we get closer to restaurants reopening I expected that this delivery box would surely be up there with some of the best I’ve had in lockdown and was excited to see if I could identify which chef had contributed specific elements to each dish, based on reasonable prior knowledge of their individual work.

Regrettably, my heightened expectations and their expert efforts fell apart a bit when I unpacked the box of great quality ingredients and realised that Dean Banks (Haar) and Ben Murphy (Launceston Place) were relying on me to control the execution – and it has to be said I’m no Albert Pierrepoint.

Hypocrite

My shaved head and tattoos might give a different impression, but here you’re talking about a man who freaks out at the sight and sound of a bluebottle, scared that Buddha himself will catch me with a swatter and consequently shorten my lifespan by a month per swipe.

Karma is a very powerful thing and, at 61, I can’t afford to mess with the universe – although goading the Scottish Tories is still a hoot, and I know that God and the House of Lords will thank me later.

I think it’s safe to admit I will never be a hunter, will always wear brown in town and thus will never marry into the Royal family. I can live with that, but the notion that I will never be a chef is harder to bear.

This respect for life is why I shy away from truly horrible things like killing a lobster, which I’m aware makes me a hypocrite because I sure do love to eat them. Freshness issues aside, it’s a bit like Jersey Royals in that I don’t necessarily need to break my back and get my hands full of manure to know that they taste good – but also potatoes don’t tend to wriggle away when they see a pan of boiling salted water and experience their life flash before them.

I think it’s safe to admit I will never be a hunter, will always wear brown in town and thus will never marry into the Royal family. I can live with that, but the notion that I will never be a chef is harder to bear.

Tracey Emin once released a very moving autobiographical short film called Why I Never Became A Dancer and watching it feels like being part of her revenge on Margate, the town she grew up in.

However, unlike Tracey who actually is a brilliant dancer, I never became a chef for much more prosaic reasons – I don’t have the skills, the patience or enough love for my fellow human beings to want to feed them all day, every day.

This is why I will be banging on the doors of the Tayberry on April 26, begging to be fed, happy to let head chef Adam Newth take over my life and my emotional wellbeing for the next two hours (if it’s cold I’m not discounting a filled hip flask in my pocket in place of a robust Rioja on the table).

For me, restaurant cooking is akin to tiling, psychoanalysis and dealing with an STD – it’s better to get someone in than attempt it yourself.

Foam on a plate

Me trying to be Michel Roux Jr in my own kitchen somehow feels wrong. I just don’t have the temperament or the time and if it’s a choice between swirling foam on a plate or watching First Dates Hotel I’m afraid to say romance wins over a piping bag any day.

Since my style of cooking is distinctly un-cheffy my interpretative dance around the three courses in the box from the Haar at Home Professionals Series (there was supposed to be a dessert but it was missing) was more a pas de deux with erratic technique than a romp with concomitant Michelin stars.

However, my lack of spatial awareness to even open a car bonnet couldn’t stand in the way of what proved to be some excellent food.

Ben Murphy suddenly became a name to watch, although in truth he had already been mentored by the legendary Pierre Koffmann and worked very successfully in France.

Haar’s Professionals Series is an interesting idea in that it pairs chef and founder Dean Banks with other star figures in the catering world. This latest – the fourth – sees Banks teamed with Ben Murphy who, coincidentally, was one of the four chefs from London and the South East to appear in a recent, nail-biting heat of the Great British Menu.

I had forgotten that I have history with Ben Murphy because he was chef at the Woodford in Essex when it won the best restaurant award at the 2016 London Evening Standard awards.

That the win was a surprise was emphasised by the paper announcing that “a restaurant close to the Essex border that is housed in a former nightclub shut due to a shooting has been named London’s best”. You could hear the denizens of Belgravia tremble in fear.

What I remember from this time is that the jubilation about the win could be heard in Walthamstow, where I then lived, and Ben Murphy suddenly became a name to watch, although in truth he had already been mentored by the legendary Pierre Koffmann and worked very successfully in France.

Great British Menu

In 2017 Murphy left to go to Launceston Place in Kensington, which was near my office and thus gave me a chance to try his excellent food in a new and posher location. Now, years later, it was quite exciting to see him on TV while eating his food here on the east coast (he didn’t win Great British Menu but did give a very good illustration of his style of cooking). And besides, the idea of collaboration is so very now…

There’s so much hogwash talk about politicians working together right now that it would be hard to imagine how anything would get done amidst this back-slapping maelstrom of bon accord and conviviality.

Just as in every other field, chefs have to reinvent themselves and thus we find top cooks flying around the world for guest appearances and collaborations in the way that someone like Calvin Harris would as a superstar DJ.

Some opposition parties in Scotland seem manically engorged to collaborate with anyone who’ll have them, a process that would entail constant back-watching and referrals to the offside and foul rules. There’s suddenly a lot of people who want to be head chef before they’ve even dealt with a fallen souffle.

How does this idea of collaboration work in the catering world? I’ve enjoyed food cooked by both Dean Banks and Ben Murphy and so, on paper, it’s an interesting idea and one that is very much on trend.

Just as in every other field, chefs have to reinvent themselves and thus we find top cooks flying around the world for guest appearances and collaborations in the way that someone like Calvin Harris would as a superstar DJ.

The professionals

Dean Banks was already an established name here and I’ve enjoyed his food at Haar and Haarbour (where he introduced Korean gochujang to fish and chips, to harmonious effect). News that Haar is to close in

St Andrews and open in Edinburgh is genuinely sad and I respect the drive and ambition that sees Banks constantly trying new things.

The Professionals series is an interesting PR angle but the main win is that the food is very good and I would order it again. To start we had an excellent beef tartare that was all about the assembling of some very good ingredients.

Even then I managed to deviate from the plan when I couldn’t be bothered to fan out some pickled onions – if life was too short to stuff a mushroom in the 1970s I’m damned if I’m going to pimp a silverskin in the middle of a pandemic. Joking aside, the tartare was excellent, with good beef and a great smoked mayonnaise.

I wolfed down all four portions (the box serves two and cost £125).

The next course was hand-dived scallops with gochujang and Asian salad and this required just a quick blast in the oven and a bit of assemblage.

Colour coded

All the courses are colour coded so it’s hard to go wrong although I would recommend reading the instructions before you start cooking. I like to live dangerously so I didn’t, which explains why I threw the piping bag in the bin before realising it was for the Caesar salad dressing. The scallops were delicious.

Instructions are clear but I feel the written versions need to be more closely co-ordinated with the accompanying videos which were too long and laboured (the main course video is 18 minutes long). With hindsight I would plan this better and allow time to watch everything before I started cooking. My fault, not theirs.

The next course was the simple-sounding chicken satay with turnip and this was the course that required the most attention and where I deviated most in terms of timings and presentation. It’s not difficult but again don’t wait until you’re ravenous before cooking this, and bear in mind that only you can judge seasoning and when a chicken is perfectly cooked.

This course also featured the large potato chip which is a signature of Murphy’s and some turnip and brown butter puree that he had to put in the microwave in the demo video as he charmingly announced that his mum didn’t have enough saucepans.
The chicken was delicious, even if my turnips weren’t smeared like a Turner sunset across the plate.

This was a lovely meal devised by two chefs who are hugely compatible. Dean Banks says: “Just getting another up-and-coming chef up to Scotland is a good thing. It also helps my chefs develop their skills and learn new things from new people. We are bringing these incredible chefs in so my team can learn from different people and this has been really exciting to the Haar at Home concept. It’s something we will definitely develop further in the future”.