You need inventiveness, versatility and a can-do attitude to prepare a successful series of banquets that celebrate clementines in every dish. Chef Lee Westcott has all these qualities, and then some more. His restaurant in London’s Bethnal Green, called Typing Room, has won numerous accolades since it opened in 2014, with particular praise for the creativity of Westcott’s dishes; “bloody marvellous” was how Marina O’Loughlin, the Guardian’s main restaurant critic, described it. He is just the man to turn a seasonal stocking-filler into one of the season’s most remarkable dinners.
Westcott’s not even 30 years old yet, but he didn’t come up with Typing Room perfectly formed. He’s spent the last decade working with great chefs, and doing stages (chef internships) at some of the great restaurants of the world. His longest early association was at the two-Michelin-starred Tom Aikens restaurant in Chelsea, where he was second-in-command to Aikens; then with another London-based restaurateur, Jason Atherton, who sent Westcott off to be head chef at two Atherton-run restaurants in Hong Kong. On his return to the UK, Westcott was ready to turn an East End hotel restaurant into an Atherton-owned dining destination.
M&S approached Westcott and Robin Gill, the chef behind The Dairy and The Manor in Clapham, and wowed them with its clementine menu ideas. “I’ve known Robin for years,” Westcott says. “I’m really good friends with Dean Parker, Robin’s head chef at The Manor. M&S were impressed with the menus of Robin and me, and so the two of us ended up collaborating on the dishes.”
Getting clementines into every course of a tasting menu required some lateral thinking. “We made dissolving ‘teabags’ out of starch paper. Inside the pretend teabags is a dried clementine skin powder and dried herb mix. But the diners take these individual teabags hanging from clementine trees back to their table. Then we serve the crab bisque – and the teabags dissolve in the bisque. It really does flavour the dish. I got the teabag idea from the bar, called Peg & Patriot, that’s attached to my restaurant. The barman there uses similar ‘teabags’ for his drinks, and I thought I’d do that for food.”
Another Westcott idea was an unusual drinks pairing. “We made a venison dish, served with salt-baked beetroot, fermented cabbage and apple, pickled blackberries and clementine. We serve this with a glass of 100-year-old madeira, but when the glass is nearly finished, we pour a consommé made from venison bone, served like a tea, into the glass. It works really well, and marks the end of the savoury courses. It was freezing outside The Orangery, so this helped warm the guests up a bit.”
Some of Westcott’s ideas came from a visit to the clementine grower, the Martinavarro estate in Valencia, on Spain’s Balearic coast. M&S has been working with Martinavarro since 1950, a partnership that has resulted in better and better fruit.
“We got a lot of inspiration from our recent trip to the estate,” says Westcott. “It was already the picking season, and we could see amount of love and effort that he puts into it is phenomenal. We ended up using the clementine leaves in an ice cream. They are amazingly fragrant, producing really zingy oils that smell like a clementine fruit, only more strongly. It’s used in the smashing clementine dish, where the idea is that guests get together to smash the frozen top of this dessert with a hammer.”
