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Patrick Williams - TV Chef Patrick recently appeared (6th August 2002) on CBBC's programme XChange feature about Jamaican Food. He demonstrated how to make fried dumplings and banana fool and had a display of popular Caribbean fruit and vegetables, including breadfruit, plantain, jelly coconut. Patrick Williams took home economics to meet girls and then found that he was hooked on cooking. His creative vision may have been snubbed at the Ivy but that hasn't put him off 'Pigeon, beetroot and dandelion are at their best in August and baby beetroot is particular to summer. Beetroot is like the Marmite thing, you either like it or you don't. It has a strong earthy taste, which can work well with other strong flavours such as pigeon. In my seasonal dish, roast pigeon, dandelion salad and beetroot jelly, I've added a few tablespoons of bitters to the jelly to enhance the flavour. Bitters really lift the natural beetroot flavours, matching it well with the earthiness of the pigeon and the tartness of the dandelion. The recipe usually uses traditional techniques for the jelly. In a restaurant I would use calves feet instead of gelatin but you have got to adapt the recipe to cook at home. Cooking in a professional kitchen is a different experience from cooking at home but I don't think that you always get better food from a professional kitchen. I loved eating the Caribbean food my mum would cook, but it wasn't until secondary school that I got a taste for cooking. At my school in East Ham we were given a choice between doing needlework and cookery or metalwork. I'm terrible at metalwork and I thought cookery would be a chance to meet girls, so I studied cookery and I found that I was good at it. I went on to catering college and then got a job at the Ivy in London. Let's say the Ivy was an experience. I found that the emphasis was more on a whose eating there rather than what they were eating. I didn't get on very well because I questioned everything so I could learn from it. They thought I was a cheeky upstart, and I thought that they were very straight and blinkered. Creativity in cooking is vital. If 20 chefs were given the same five ingredients and were asked to cook the same dish, the outcome of each would be completely different. Every chef has their own tastes and vision. I've worked with Marco Pierre White and Richard Neat but my time spent with Gary Rhodes at the Greenhouse is the most memorable. Out of all the chefs around I do tend to like Gary Rhodes's cooking because it's simple and clean, but all the flavours are there. It was when I worked at Greens, a bastion of English food, that I had my first proper chance to experiment. I'd take standard dishes and give them a little twist here and there and it worked out very well. Food in Britain can be excellent but I've always felt that Caribbean food should be more widely available. I don't cook strictly ethnic food but I think a Caribbean version of the Ivy or a top class restaurant would work brilliantly.' Patrick Williams will be launching a new joint venture
restaurant The Green, in Willesden Green, London NW2, where he will be
resident head chef and co-owner. He is author of The Caribbean Cook. Source: Chloe Diski - Observer Newspaper Sunday August 11, 2002
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