Albatross Death Cult - why this? why now?
Albatross Death Cult – but just Albatross will do – is my second restaurant and it’s coming soon. Very soon as it happens.
The planning and conceptual work for Albatross took over a year, but everything that you will experience came together in a matter of intense, feverish days. Think slow, act fast. I was supposed to open it earlier (sorry), but I couldn’t get to the right, singular, and delirious headspace ‘til now. For a year I felt marooned. The restaurant is a creative response after a significant pause. A restaurant with connection and communion at the heart of it, created out of a profound sense of loneliness.
My goal is pretty straight-forward – to open a restaurant that I love. In my wildest dreams, other people (you!) fall in love with it too, but that’s the romantic in me talking. I’ll settle for being a casual fling.
This is a project without pre-conception, expectation, or regard for convention. A blank canvas. Accordingly, the menu, the experience eschews tradition – dizzy on freedom. Each service fourteen of you will gather around a monolithic kitchen counter, with front row seats to the action, served directly by our chefs. The act of forcing a dozen or so strangers to spend three hours together in a room, interacting, existing, and connecting shouldn’t be a radical act, but here we are, entering a dwindling niche where it’s this or an orgy.
The menu is long, but rapid fire, not so much 12+ dishes, but 12+ servings. For me, the beauty of creating food to be eaten in one or two bites is the tease. Pleasure should be fleeting lest it become pedestrian. I am keen to avoid too much that is familiar. There are hundreds of restaurants that offer great examples of tradition. I am not sure the point of adding to that canon.
The food style is both brutalist and ornamental. A machine gun fire sequence that provides the richest cross-section of what we can source on any given day. We have embellished where we think it adds value – flavour, emotion, aesthetic, nostalgia – but at its heart there is a desire to reframe the role of chef to de facto stagehand. Modernist and traditional cooking technique underpins every other element of the performance, but there is a singularity or facet of every ingredient that should play the lead role.
Some dishes are astonishingly simple – with three or four elements, each justified only by their absolute necessity for balance. Others are significantly more technical – painstakingly and meticulously coaxed into existence by our team.
The menu is primarily built around seafood and coastal ingredients, but is not limited in that scope. This preoccupation with the sea is rooted in not insignificant inspiration from the tradition of the Japanese omakase experience. Equally (ironically) the sea scares the shit out of me. Perhaps I’m exorcising my demons through Albatross in more ways than I first imagined. Seafood is alien life, or might as well be. As we progress through this venture it is my intent and hope that we’ll discover more and more ingredients that feel unfamiliar, alien, other-worldly, and keep a curiosity that encourages us to push better-known ingredients further.
Albatross will be run by Piotr Szpak, a stalwart Sous who for 5 years odd has been in The Wilderness camp (aside a brief affair with Aktar at Opheem), alongside young gun Oliver Grieve who started his career at L’Enclume, before joining us during his final year at UCB. He graduates from both UCB and The Wilderness to become one of our founding chefs at Albatross. Wine Director to the stars, Sonal Clare, will expand his remit to oversee grapes at both restaurants and Marius Gedminas will continue by my side as custodian of both The Wilderness (alongside Ediz Engin, Head Chef and Wilderness veteran) and now Albatross. I will attempt to clone myself and be in both places at once, else if, and only if, that fails I will divide my time between ventures.
I want my restaurants to stay rooted in alternative culture and that’s increasingly hard. It feels like alternative culture has become too alternative, too hard. Just existing feels like a monumental challenge and existing outside the mainstream tends towards commercial suicide. It took creating a new restaurant from scratch to remind me of the life-affirming power of ignoring the noise.
I feel, now more than ever given the current climate, a tension between my desire to deliver alternative luxury to those who want it, and the cost of said delivery. I’ll be forever grateful to those who have the desire and means to support us. For launch we’re pricing the menu at £88. This is still a significant sum for the majority, but one which just about covers our costs, and which I hope will open the doors for just a few more people. Inevitably prices will eventually rise, but I want to keep the door open as long as possible, to as many as I can. The world has too many accountants and not enough romantics – let’s roll the dice.
I am eternally grateful for your continued support, your curiosity, and your commitment to keeping it weird. Welcome to the cult.
Alex