Were you to find yourself at Andi Oliver’s east London gastropub – perhaps a plate of spiced and smoked lamb shoulder in front of you, placed at a good angle and ready for snapping – you needn’t worry what the chef thinks of you Instagramming your meal. Restaurateurs have complained about bloggers and Instagrammers who are more interested in photographing their food than eating it, but Oliver is not one of them.
“I love it,” she says, in the middle of preparing orange and ginger syrup for jerk chicken on tonight’s menu at the Jackdaw and Star. “If someone wants to take pictures and share them, I’m happy because I want them to feel excited by what we’re doing.” She has deliberately created a relaxed atmosphere: “We call it no-rules dining because sometimes there are so many rules when you go out for dinner – you can’t have this, you can’t have that, you can’t have that after two o’clock. I think everybody needs to relax – it’s just dinner.”
Though, really, it’s not just dinner to Oliver, who has been a pop singer, TV presenter and chef. Food and music have been “inextricably linked for me throughout my life. Exchange over food and music are how we communicate. For me, it’s a beautiful, daily joy to have those things.”
Oliver’s father was in the RAF and was stationed in Cyprus for a few years when she was a child – she remembers the colourful produce, and watching the fishermen bring their catch in at the harbour. Coming back to England, with its (then) dreary food, was a bit of a shock. But her Antiguan parents’ cooking was always good. “My love of cooking comes from being in the kitchen with my mum and dad, standing on a stool making cauliflower cheese.
“We’ve always eaten everything – there wasn’t one type of food in the house. If you come from diaspora, you adapt. You have the cuisine from the land your family is from, and you also have the cuisine from the land where you end up.”
As a teenager, she joined the post-punk group Rip Rig + Panic. One of the other singers was Neneh Cherry and they became best friends – they would later have a cookery show together. “Even then, we cooked for the band all the time,” she says. “I still remember a bath full of mackerel for a party.”
After years of running smaller kitchens at pubs and pop-ups, she is thrilled to have her own place, where she works with local suppliers, allotment growers and a forager. She still loves cooking at home, and it is a bonding time for her and her daughter, the TV presenter Miquita Oliver, who recently moved in.
“It is really fun and she and I cook a lot together.” Or rather, they don’t – they’re currently experimenting with raw food recipes. “Also, Neneh’s daughter Tyson lives up the road so the other day we made a great lunch together. Neneh’s back in England at the moment and Naima, her other daughter, lives nearby so we come together a lot. Food to me is family – it is love, care, nurture.”
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