Tyler Martin: Manuka Kitchen And Salt & Honey
In a world where gastro themes can become just plain kitschy (hey sriracha-themed restaurant, we mean you) it’s refreshing to discover a restaurant that’s running with a theme that we can actually get behind: honey. High-quality Manuka honey to be specific. So simple, delicious and actually very good for you. We can already tell that Manuka Kitchen is a must-eat because it has all of the ingredients of a new restaurant on the verge of cult status: The menu is carefully and locally curated (meats sourced from Aubrey Allen and vegetables from Wild Harvest), it has a rustic yet stylish décor, has a down-home feel: elegant but not too fussy. Fulham Road is going through a mini makeover. It joins other independent businesses looking to make the area special again including Chosen Bun, an independent burger restaurant. It’s a chance for them to impress West Londoners near Fulham, a neighbourhood filled with young and wealthy yuppies and young parents. And it gets better, they recently opened a second sister location Salt & Honey (28 Sussex Place) that’s already buzzing with reservations and reviews. Something Curated interviews Tyler Martin, head chef at Manuka Kitchen about the sweet-inspired menu, what it’s like opening a restaurant without very much financial help (hard?), why he chose honey over all other gastro-themes and what he and good-friend Joseph Antippa, the restaurant’s manager and sommelier, are mixing up together.
Something Curated: How did you start your culinary career? What made you want to work in the food and dining industry? Tell us about your career path.
Tyler Martin: “I’ve been a chef for 15 years. I got a job in a cafe years ago, it was on a resort during ski season and it was a good way to get a mixture of lifestyle and experience. Snowboarding was something I personally enjoyed so when the season started it was a great way to do something I loved, cook and really enjoyed the ski lifestyle so it was the perfect job for me at that time.”
SC: Tell us more about how you and Joseph came together as team. You worked together at the Gore Hotel. How did that experience help springboard you into owning your own business—a restaurant partnership?
Tyler Martin: “Joseph employed me when we both worked at the Gore Hotel when he was the food and beverage manager there so basically we worked together for about a year and I was looking at moving on — being a chef at a hotel usually has a short lifespan for many people — I wanted something of my own, something different. We just casually talked about it while we worked together and it was about 18 months until we decided to give it a go. We found the perfect place and then that was it, it all came together nicely.”
Joseph Antippa: “It started with recruiting Tyler from the Gore Hotel. I just thought he was very up-to-date and in-tuned with the food trends in the industry and I thought he was the perfect person to start a new concept with, he’s relaxed, very cool — not the usual chef personality and temperament. It was easy to tell that he would be very easy to build a restaurant with. We worked together for a little more than two years and then we had the idea to start our own business.”
SC: What does it take to start a restaurant without an investor? Give us an idea of the process from start to finish. How did you come up with Manuka Kitchen — the concept, the build? What did you already have in place that helped you open successful?
Tyler Martin: You always think when you’re working in this industry that one day you’ll open your own business, thinking is one thing but making it happen is another. Thankfully, I met someone (Joseph) who had the same idea and we could both achieve our career dreams together.”
Joseph Antippa: It’s everyone’s dream: people who are in the catering and hotel business always think they want to start their own restaurant or bar. You lose some of that along the way: you start work and you get busy running other people’s businesses successfully and at some point you realize that the reason why you started in this business is because you’ve always wanted to create your own restaurant or bar. We’re trying to be restauranteurs, more experts in dining experiences and menu creation.
SC: Is there anything in the restaurant you in terms of decor and other touches of service that has been done in continuity of theme or to give it extra personality or character?
Joseph Antippa: “Wine glasses (small water tumblers) are what we use and perhaps a different demographic might not be OK with having small drinking glasses instead of traditional stemware but it’s the relaxed, at-home ambiance that we’re going for and that’s the kind of customer who responds to what we offer. We don’t have a designer, we just picked things that we saw and liked for ourselves at home and tailored the space to suit us. It took us at least six months to plan where we’d open the restaurant and about three months to get all of our interior details and menu together. We made lots of trips to antique stores and furniture stores.”
SC: Why did you choose Fulham to open your new business? How is the restaurant changing the Fulham neighbourhood?
Tyler Martin: “I’ve spent most of my time in Fulham but I currently live in West Brompton. It was reassuring to start Manuka Kitchen in Fulham because I had lived and worked near here for many years and I felt like I could give a valued opinion about the area and what the area needed. I like being close to the river, there are nice parks nearby and it’s an area that has a lot of charm. It’s not too busy to zip into Central London or head out to the country if you need to. We were really lucky to get in the door and it really started with the restaurant’s space. It was derelict before we got here: it was an Italian restaurant that had been closed for a couple years and everything has been stripped from it, it was just a shell of what it had been.”
SC: Did it scare you to open a restaurant in a location that had poor luck before?
Tyler Martin: “It was honestly probably the only location we could afford at the time and it had a great location but poor luck with the businesses that had been there before. I think what sets us apart from the other businesses and the old owners is that we’re doing something different.”
TOM: Were you targeting a specific clientele when you decided to open in Fulham?
Joseph Antippa: “We’re not High Street: we haven’t set out to create chains of honey-themed restaurants, we’re just creating quality food. Fulham is the right place that we thought our business would be successful. If we pitched the idea of Manuka honey to a different postcode or different kind of clientele it might have not worked so well but luckily for us, we had a great response. This is the market we want to be in and the kind of customers we want to approach.”
SC: What makes your newer restaurant Salt and Honey a nice addition to the brand?
Tyler Martin: “Salt and Honey is our same style but a bigger living room where you can get your food from, it’s our sister restaurant that has the same feel, really similar menu: a touch of bistro and a touch of comfort—still nice and casual but polished. For us it just seemed like the right time to expand.”
SC: Why did you choose honey as your theme? There are a lot of cool and somewhat kitschy themes out there, what makes this the perfect ingredient for your menu?
Tyler Martin: “It’s a quality ingredient, it’s something that we use in many of our dishes and substitute it for refined sugar in our recipes. We use it to garnish our plates. I think it’s an ingredient that is really at the top of its quality and grade. We really strive to have the best locally-sourced ingredients on our menu and we want our customers to associate quality with everything we prepare and create for them. Manuka honey is also from New Zealand so it’s an ingredient that ties back to my personal history and it’s a nice twist for our brand. We change the menu seasonally so it has a lot of variety. I personally like the Market Fish, I have a great fish monger that I’ve worked with for the last six years and he has great, fresh produce. He’s a buyer out of Billingsgate Market and distributes out of Daily Fish. I like to pick out seabass and seabream.”
Joseph Antippa: “It’s mainly to do with quality. Honey, especially Manuka honey. We know we’re a little bit quirky because we’re focusing on honey, and not everyone will like our approach but we think the people who know about it will want to see what we can do with this product. It’s not mainstream but that’s why it’s so appealing to us and the people that eat with us.”
SC: In your opinion is there anything aside from food that makes a restaurant successful?
Tyler Martin: “We try to give people who come here a nice bistro approach, a place they can come once or twice a month, not too expensive. It’s a place where they can pop-in anytime, it doesn’t have to be a special occasion, just a comfortable place where they can enjoy good-quality comfort food and where they feel like they are always welcome.”
Joseph Antippa: “We started very small with our own money: it was one long project of upgrades and improvements—over the past three years we’ve been working to make our menu and service better and better. It’s changed quite a bit through small adjustments. Our benches and tables, we upgraded all of the chairs 12-months after opened, upgraded to larger tables to help make everything feel more homely. We kept the windows exposed to let in as much natural light as possible, sourced vintage cups and saucers—it takes a bit longer to find the right items but that’s what makes everything work so well together. Near Wandsworth Bridge we found a lot of found items from furniture stores and there’s another place on Church Street on the way to Maida Vale, there’s an antique store and we went there to find things that felt right for the restaurant. Mainly it’s all custom made items combined with items we’ve found around London.”
SC: What’s your favourite thing on your menu at the moment? How often does the menu change and what other exciting ingredients are you including at the moment.
Tyler Martin: “We do a nice gravlax appetizer with cured salmon and sweeten it with honey for a salted-honey effect. We use it a lot in the dressings and in our desserts, naturally. There are four or five items on the menu which use honey but it’s not overkill. We like to give people the option. We do a nice Manuka-honey creme brulee and a chocolate peanut butter chocolate tarte and we create some handmade rolled chocolate truffles, bitter chocolate and honey. We don’t have a pastry chef. we just sort of do everything — we’re multi-skilled chefs and a small team — just four of us at the moment including myself.”
SC: Any celeb visits or famous diners to date?
Tyler Martin: “Hugh Grant. He came in about a year ago with a table of six, a group of friends. Henry Winkler (Fonzie from Happy Days) was also here and once David Hasselhoff came in once to pick up lunch one day, his personal assistant came to pick up his order but David actually brought back the plates. We normally don’t do takeout so he came back to bring the cutlery to us. We also get some local celebrities such as Claire Bloom. You always hear about celebrities going to the more stuffy, fancy restaurants — it’s nice to know that they spend a bit of money locally on independent restaurants and food that’s sourced in London instead of only staying on Park Lane or Belgravia.”
SC: When you’re not working hard in Manuka kitchen, what are your favourite restaurants, bars to visit? Where is home?
Tyler Martin: “I really like Ottolenghi, when I need a top up on vegetables from a busy week it keeps me healthy. Joseph and I go to J Sheekey Oyster Bar which is nice. One of the pubs I like to go to east of Putney is The Prince of Wales, that’s a nice pub — nice Sunday roasts — good casual food. I like to go to the Ledbury every so often.”
Joseph Antippa: “I like to go to The Ledbury too — it’s not a restaurant you can go to every day but it’s one that deserves to one of the top restaurants in the world. I really like what they do with the menu and you always leave there trying something very inspirational. I love Chinese dumplings and there’s a really good place nearby where I live in Shepherd’s Bush. Sometimes I go to Hix in Soho for cocktails or I go to 202 on Notting Hill.”
Text by: Glynnis Mapp, @glynnismapp
Images: Andrey Uverskiy, @uverskiy