Pickles, preserves and ferments drive the dishes at Ramael Scully's restaurant, where dishes are planned months or even years in advance
Pantry cookery is at the heart of Ramael Scully's eponymous restaurant in London's St James's. When guests enter, they are greeted by a wall of brightly coloured jars of preserved, dried and fermented produce. The display is beautiful, but it's far more than aesthetics – these jars are the cornerstone of dish creation.
Scully says: "When we opened here I wanted to take a city restaurant with a little basement and create that pantry. I like to cook how I feel, not planning too much. The whole idea is that I'm creating the flavours now for next month, next year, or two years' time, and we can work off those."
The restaurant has recently launched a tasting menu (£110 or £90 for the vegan alternative), something the chef had long wanted to offer as an option, but that became a matter of urgency in the face of current headwinds.
"Creating a tasting menu is fun, it is challenging and there's a creative understanding to it," he says. "I do still believe in the sharing concept and giving people that choice, but that hasn't helped me pay the bills in the last two years.
I really want to tell the public we've not done this because I like chopping and changing the restaurant. Every time that something's happening in the world, I'm chopping and changing because I have to change with the times."
The delivery might have been adapted but the soul of the restaurant remains the pantry, which is extensive and diverse. The menu is billed as Asian fusion, but in reality, Scully is a sponge, taking influences from everywhere and anywhere and experimenting with produce with a Willy Wonka-esque enthusiasm.
To help him develop the tasting menu Scully bought on board head chef Dominic Auger, who he says is essential not just in dish development but also in challenging his feeder tendencies and adding finesse to finished plates.
Auger says: "Pantry cooking isn't new, but it's a very smart way of cooking and it is the identity of what we are here. When you have a pantry, you need to be smart about what you make. You can't just make loads of pickled apples because that's not a pantry, that's just a stock of apples. You need to make things that are broad, like vinegars, salts, dehydrated fruits and vegetables. If you have a wide spectrum of things, that's when you can create things from it. It's not easy because you're always making loads of things and you're not sure what's going to happen with them, but it's nice once it all clicks together."
One of Scully's favourite dishes from the new tasting menu is purple beetroot with urap sayur and a peanut and chilli miso. The description on the menu belies the technique that goes into the dish. The miso was is created from a shio koji, which sees koji rice, boiled to 60°C and left for 10 days with sugar and salt until it becomes a sweet syrup with a powerful umami flavour. This was mixed with roasted, crushed peanuts to make a miso. Six months later Scully found his creation tasted like a ‘posh satay sauce', to which he adds coconut cream and a little peanut butter.
The beetroot is cut with a Japanese slicer and rolled into cylinders before being cooked for four hours in its own juices, which unlocks its natural salt content. It's then brushed with fig leaf vinegar and fig leaf oil, which the chef says adds a coconut flavour, as well as the reduced beetroot juice. It is served alongside the peanut and chilli miso and topped with urap sayur, an Indonesian spiced coconut soil that takes three days to create, with shallots, ginger, garlic, lemongrass, kaffir limes and chilli caramelised down with the coconut before being dehydrated.
The divergence of influences meeting in Scully's cuisine is telling in a dish of barbecued dry-aged stone bass, shio koji butter, brown shrimp, gooseberries and zerbinati melon. The bass is dry-aged on-site for between five and seven days before being cooked using a Hibachi rack, dropped above embers to ensure a crispy skin, before being rested in chicken fat and glazed with fish garum and schmaltz. The shio koji of fermented grains is chilled and then mixed with butter and lime juice, creating a rich sauce similar to the classic French beurre blanc, finished with fermented gooseberries, lacto fermented shrimp, trout eggs and chilli oil. It sits on the plate alongside the fish and a puree of zerbinati melon.
One of the chef's most-loved dishes from the vegan menu is a dessert of caramelised coconut sticky rice and jackfruit sorbet inspired by a favourite street food dessert. The jackfruit is vac-packed and put in a rice cooker for about 10 days, which blackens the fruit and brings out the natural sugars. The chef likens the resulting flavour to a "super-powered banana". The dish is finished with some bitter chocolate to cut through the richness of the sorbet and sticky, caramelised rice.
The experiments will continue as Scully and his team build on their new format. As he says: "You never stop learning".
From the menu
- Arepa, eggplant sambol, bergamot labneh
- Urfa chili short rib pastrami, turnip, salted radish shrub
- Nasi jagung, barbecue maitake mushrooms, candied jalapenos
- Fragolina grape ice, pickled pomegranate
- Strawberry, yogurt sorbet, basil moss
Tasting menu £110, vegan menu £90
St James's Market, London SW1Y 4AH www.scullyrestaurant.com
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