Thomas Straker is drawing people to Notting Hill with his high-energy food and economical menu.
(Bloomberg) — Most people who have a major TikTok following are more than happy to talk about it. Not Thomas Straker. The angular, wise-cracking, London-based chef has amassed millions of views on the platform and garnered 900,000-plus followers on Instagram through high energy videos that he started making during lockdown.
His favorite subject: butter. His All Things Butter show, featuring 50 days of butter in flavors ranging from crispy skin chicken to whisky get tens of thousands of views on YouTube and millions on TikTok for each episode. He scoops the butter out in dollops that look like gelato and eats enough butter on camera to concern a cardiologist.
But Straker’s real triumph is his new, eponymous restaurant that’s been going gangbusters since it opened in October. Set on a calm street in Notting Hill, not far from a hectic section of Portobello Road, Straker’s looks like any number of the city’s spare, white-walled dining rooms from the street. Step inside, however, and it’s a high-energy party orchestrated by Straker and his team. At the 43-seat restaurant, there are animated conversations at tables and along the chef’s counter, which is dominated by a big, wood-burning oven and a soundtrack of old school hits like Shalamar’s Make That Move.
Straker could have made the place an ode to butter and had customers lining up and down Golborne Street to take videos. Instead the chef prioritizes olive oil in his Mediterranean-British cooking, which features dishes like barbecued quail accompanied by smoked eggplant and yogurt, and sweetbreads with radicchio and sherry vinegar. And no, he doesn’t offer butter boards, the most viral (and worst) food trend of 2022.
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Beyond being crowd-pleasing, Straker’s menu is economical. The chef picked a challenging time to launch a restaurant in London. He threw open the doors to his place when food inflation was hitting 11.1%. (Currently, it’s sitting at 10.7%.) Headlines about people trying to prioritize “eating or heating” were starting to pop up.
Mindful of people’s appetite for high-priced dishes at a neighborhood spot, Straker is militant about his shopping list. When ingredients get too expensive, he won’t sell them. After turbot hit £50 per kg. (about $28 per lb.), he took it off the menu. “For me to make money, I’d have to charge £80. And you can’t do that,” he says about the fancy fish. Diver scallops would have been a pricey entrée at his restaurant; instead he made them an indulgent garnish for his mussel flatbread for an extra £20. “Being a bit more sensible, we do quite a few vegetable dishes, we use game, mollusks, mussels and clams, stuff like that,” he says, listing some of his economical ingredient choices.
In lieu of high-priced proteins, he’s gone for vegetables like broccoli, which he grills to serve with a little of the creamy cheese stracciatella, and pickled pears and roasted beets, with fennel and orange. Tender pork loin is accompanied by modestly priced produce — namely carrots, apples and radishes. And he’s maximizing another less-expensive ingredient: flour. “We’ve got a delicious pasta with chanterelles, which is our best seller, and you can make good margin on that,” he says. “Anything with flour and water is a winner.”
Another money-saving move from Straker is to make the most of his kitchen equipment. “We’ve got a few of the appliances on gas, which is obviously quite expensive,” he says. (After a huge increase in energy prices, small businesses in the UK are projected to get less than £50 in government aid.) But his pizza oven is less costly to operate, and it also holds residual heat overnight. “You’ll come in in the morning, the pizza oven still at 250 degrees,” he says. “What we have been doing is working with roasting ingredients like whole celeriac in the oven overnight.”
Straker says he’s been “captivated by food,” since he was a kid on a farm in Herefordshire, where he hunted and foraged. He has places known for ambitious dishes on his resume. Among the spots he’s cooked are the Ledbury and the two Michelin star Dinner by Heston Blumenthal. But he knew he wanted his own place to be simpler. He spent about £500,000 to open Straker’s. (The high rate of inflation brought them “a bit over budget,” he says.) To economize on style, he anchored the dining room with chairs, tables and bar stools that were bought secondhand. An art dealer friend lent him pictures to put on the wall.
The chef’s social media stardom has come in handy filling the restaurant. It’s hard to get seats in the dining room at dinner. “We literally were sold out in the first months in 10 minutes,” he says.
What’s more, it’s not like butter is banished from the kitchen at Straker’s. A top-selling dish is the mussel and burnt chili flatbread. To make it, the chef throws a handful of cooked mussels, garlic and hot peppers into a mound of into room-temperature butter, purees them and then slathers it on a dough round. He then shovels the loaded dough into his wood-burning oven for about 60 seconds. The result is quite outrageous — when you cut into the leopard charred disk, butter oozes out like a readymade sauce.
But Straker is much happier to serve the buttery flatbread than talk about its most ostentatious ingredient. Scroll back in time on his TikTok page and you’ll see artichoke tagliolini, potato gnocchi and other food more akin to what he’s cooking in Notting Hill. “I don’t want to get pigeonholed into doing something,” he says about the type of dishes he cooks. “I guess go back to being… being me.”
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