interview with loyd grossman, food lover

I don't cook nearly as much as I'd like to.

If I cook once or twice a week, I'm feeling pretty lucky. This morning, I had two poached eggs on a piece of toasted potato and rosemary bread. 

My go-to recipe varies very wildly. I'm quite an old-fashioned cook sometimes; I like stew. I love making stews. If I'm cooking for more than a few people, there is almost nothing easier. I just love the methodology of making a stew, it's always kind of the same but you can come up with a million different results using the same method and I really like that. And I like that, if you happen to have a bunch of rosemary in the fridge instead of thyme, it doesn't matter, just chuck it in. There's a lot of freedom once you know the basic techniques. 

Unsurprisingly, I love making risotto and, because my kind of gastronomic heartland is Italy, I love cooking pasta.

If I had to be limited to one cuisine, it would be Italian but I'd rather not be limited! I suppose a lot of the stuff I turn to is either Italian or Middle Eastern. Largely because I love Middle Eastern flavours and, very early on, one of the first cook books I ever owned was Claudia Roden's Book of Middle Eastern Food which is so brilliant. If there were the world's six greatest cook books, it would be up there. That and Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The flavours are so different to what we have normally and London is actually a great place to shop for Middle Eastern ingredients. I do like cooking Chinese as well. Asian cooking is all so different. With Chinese in particular, the prep is so important - chopping everything to the right size. With other forms of non-European forms of cooking, it's a little less exact in terms of the technicalities but it's more about the flavours. They're all different but I especially like cooking Middle Eastern and when I get a chance, when I'm feeling disciplined, I'll do Chinese.

If I need to cook something very quickly, pasta.

Always. That's always the default, if you want something really good that you don't have to spend a lot of time doing and you can always put it together from stuff in your store cupboard. The store cupboard is really important - you've got to know what you need. I love food shopping. I think if you don't love food shopping, you can never really cook. It's so fabulous. The love affair has to begin there, not in the kitchen; you see what's around. I love winter vegetables and that's partly from growing up in New England where we have very severe winters and a very seasonal menu - you've got to learn to do interesting stuff to do with butternut squash and pumpkins and parsnips and all those wonderful root vegetables. I just think you get the inspiration from the shop. I never set out thinking “Right, I'm going to make this.”, I'm going to go to the shop and see what's there and what looks exciting and intriguing and then I'll figure it out. 

Where I grew up, most of the recipes were based around fish and seafood.

One of the great New England specialties that doesn't really exist anywhere else is lobster pie. It's one of my favourites - it is wonderful. In typical New England fashion, the topping is made out of crushed Ritz crackers. Basically all lobster pie is is lobster, butter and crushed Ritz crackers. If you want to get fancy, maybe a little bit of parmesan on top and maybe some parsley. You can't get it anywhere here, so I have to make it. 

I taught myself how to cook when I was in my late twenties.

I've always been totally devoted to food and I was very lucky because when I was a small child growing up in the 1950s, my parents took me to restaurants all the time. It was very unusual then but, as far back as I can remember, I was always going to restaurants and so I have always absolutely loved food, and the history of food and the cultural stuff around it. I was in London one gloomy, winter weekend when nothing was happening and I suddenly thought, "It's really crazy loving food so much and not knowing how to cook.", so I got a very good cookbook called A Kitchen Primer by Craig Claiborne who was the cookery correspondent for the New York Times and I just spent a few days cooking. It seemed to me that if you can read and you know what things are meant to taste like you should be able to learn how to cook. It's to do with attention to detail and care and not taking pointless shortcuts. But I'm not a fancy, technical cook, you know I wouldn't know how to do something sous-vide, nor would I care to. I like cooking that I can understand. 

I wish I could bake. I can't do it because I don't like measuring things. I wish I could bake bread. 

For my last meal, firstly I'd like to know that it wasn't my last meal because that would put a slight dampener on it.

But I grew up in a lobster fishing village, so I'd never say no to a lobster. I love lobster rolls, but the real New England way is that you have hard-boiled lobster and a lot of melted butter and a plate of chips. And then a lot of ice cream, I love ice cream. The flavour depends on what is in front of me. If I were going for old-fashioned, American-style ice cream I'd have something like butter pecan or maple walnut but if I were going for gelato, pistachio or that very, very, very dark chocolate that almost looks black. I could eat quite a lot of that.

I don't like sweetbreads and I don't like tripe.

Those are the only two things that I really won't eat. Or brains. They kind of taste like what you'd expect them to taste like and they have this consistency which is a bit like scrambled eggs. Some people absolutely love them, but brains, tripe and sweetbreads I just can't do. 

My favourite restaurant in the world is usually the one I am about to eat at.

I like very simple restaurants. Every time I go to some place like the Gavroche, I'm really dazzled by the perfection and beauty, but in general I like really simple restaurants. I like to find the hole in the wall somewhere. I don't particularly have a go-to restaurant in London because there are a lot of London restaurants that I love and a lot of new ones keep coming up. Brat restaurant in Shoreditch is just unbelievable; it is as simple as you can get, but it's perfect because you could not do anything that they do better. There are a lot of places like that, mostly run by relatively young people. When I was first in London, it felt very circumscribed because the restaurants that you went to were in Soho or Mayfair or Kensington or Chelsea, now the restaurants you go to are in Peckham and Willesden and Bermondsey and Shoreditch - it's fantastic. What we think of as the London of restaurants has expanded enormously. I was in Peckham the other day and not only did one of the roads only have independent restaurants, it also had a fabulous butcher and two delicatessens - it's so inspiring. The high street chains have their place, but they kind of crazily over-expanded because private equity was piling in, desperately looking for places to invest. And where you might have had one really good burger joint on the high street, you suddenly had six of them and they were competing, not only against each other, but against themselves. Aside from that, the London restaurant scene is flourishing in a way it has never done before. The biggest problem is the shortage of chefs and, thanks to Brexit, we'll have serious shortages of staff because most of our restaurant staff are from Europe, so I don't know how we'll deal with that.

I just got back from Florence where I go quite a lot.

They are obsessed about steak there and I had the most incredible Bistecca alla Fiorentina the other night. Steak and chips, when it's done right...Speaking of chips, the most incredible chips, and actually Giles Coren has written about it, Cora Pearl in Covent Garden. Their chips are on a different level. You've just got to go there. 

To my fantasy dinner party, I'd invite my friends.