Fusion reaction

As far as Peter Gordon and Anna Hansen are concerned, the history of food is one long fusion cuisine. And the perfect response to critics is bums on seats. Joanna Wood visits the Providores.

Peter Gordon is back on the media treadmill. Actually, the New Zealand-born chef has done so many press interviews in the last three months he could probably conduct them in his sleep. At least, he'd be able to if he was getting any sleep, but the opening of his new restaurant, the Providores, in London's Marylebone High Street, has put paid to any regular shuteye or even days off.

Not that Gordon's complaining. The feverish media interest is a reflection of the status he achieved as head chef at the ground-breaking Sugar Club (he left in 1999) which introduced fusion cooking to the UK's capital city. Column inches in national newspapers and magazines are certainly good for business.

And there's no doubt that the 44-seat Providores and its adjoining sister eaterie, the Tapa Room, a 50-seat café-bar, have been phenomenally busy since day one. The main restaurant is putting out between 45 and 60 covers a night, while the café is serving around 200 daily covers in weekend brunches alone. All this with only nine chefs in the Aladdin's-cave kitchen, including Gordon and fellow Kiwi Anna Hansen, the restaurants' joint head chef and Gordon's business partner. The duo launched the business in mid-August with their respective partners, Michael McGrath and Jeremy Leeming, who run front of house.

So, sleep deprivation goes with the territory. But a buzzing restaurant is the perfect riposte to those critics for whom "fusion cuisine" has become a dirty phrase. These include the Independent on Sunday's Terry Durack, who declared that fusion food could not be graced with the term cuisine.

Gordon, speaking between services and against the din of blaring horns and revving motorbikes drifting in from an open window in the Providores, takes exception to the jibe. "That's like saying Picasso wasn't an artist because he didn't paint flowers. It's denying something that exists - it's insulting," he says wearily. "Besides," he adds, "I don't know any other way to describe my cooking. I take ingredients from all over the world and try to put them together in interesting ways."

"If you look at the history of food," cuts in Hansen, "it's one long fusion cuisine. People have always travelled and borrowed from different cultures. The trouble with fusion is the people doing crap fusion cooking. But there are shit French restaurants around as well."

She continues: "I think it's unjustified that fusion should have negative connotations. Heston Blumenthal's putting some really interesting, funky ingredients together, but what does he get called? The English El Bulli. Now, I'm sorry, but that is fusion. Sometimes I wonder if we get picked on because we're not English."

In fact, Gordon and Hansen don't waste undue time worrying about how other people label their food. They are well aware that one man's meat is another man's poison. The Observer's Jay Rayner and AA Gill ate virtually the same menu and printed diametrically opposing comments on the food - "so who's right?" asks Gordon. However, they are laid-back enough to take note of constructive criticism and clearly Durack's review, because it was unexpected - "We know, no matter what we do, that AA Gill will never like us, so his review didn't bother us" - has troubled them.

Durack complained, for example, that he was minus the oyster in a laksa of grilled baby octopus, harusame noodle, oyster and crispy shallots. "That was bad," admits Hansen. "It gave us a kick up the bum and reminded us that you've always got to be on everyone's case in the kitchen." He was also unimpressed by a grilled scallop starter served with kohlrabi, jicama, green papaya and cabbage salad and crispy fish. It made them look again at the dish, even though feedback from other customers, including reviewers, was excellent. The scallops are now served with roast sweet potato and black pudding, sourced from Stornoway on the Hebridean island of Lewis.

The dish would probably have changed anyway because creations are tweaked by the duo on a daily basis. Suppliers are important for sparking ideas for new dishes, as Gordon and Hansen readily admit. With little time now for wandering round ethnic food markets or, for the immediate future, of taking working trips abroad, supplier-organised tastings are invaluable.

A tasting, for instance, might turn up a new cheese like the creamy Manouri from Greece - a ewes'-milk cheese not unlike feta, but less solid - a pan-fried slice of which tops a salad of poached guinea fowl, lemon roast fennel, broad beans and ruby chard. The dish is the only one to have remained unchanged on the menu since the Providores opened, such is its popularity with customers. Gordon and Hansen have been unable to improve on its contrast of textures and flavours - the crispness of the chard balancing out the softness of the fennel, the acidity of which is tempered by the cheese's richness.

Undergoing changes

Dishes which have undergone change, on the other hand, include the laksa - grilled octopus, noodles and crispy shallots are retained but they are now matched with deep-fried quail's egg in a coconut-based broth - and grilled cinnamon quail. This was originally served on roast carrot, pomegranate and ginger salad, but wattleseed has since superseded the pomegranate.

The guinea fowl dish grew out of an idea of Hansen's, but the pair appear to work well together. Most dishes are collaborative efforts, the starting point generally being the main ingredient, with ideas for secondary ingredients then tossed back and forth between them until a prototype dish is reached.

Rivalry between the two head chefs seems marked by its absence. Perhaps this is a result of the fact that theirs is a long-standing friendship (they met in the early 1990s in London when Gordon helped out at the restaurant where Hansen was employed at the time, later working together at the short-lived Green's Club and finally the Sugar Club); but there's a suspicion that their no-worries attitude has as much to do with their antipodean upbringing as with a gelling of personalities.

Certainly, there is a healthy southern hemisphere fluidity floating about the kitchen (it helps that nearly half the kitchen team are New Zealanders or Aussies, of course). When there's a crisis, any one of the brigade, including Gordon and Hansen, will step in - even if it means covering for a kitchen porter.

Fitting into a pigeonhole is clearly not Gordon's cup of tea - he's never been a chef, for instance, who shies away from pastry work, and despite the fact that Hansen was head pastry chef at the Sugar Club and has the greater experience in this section, the honours are even in the dish count on the dessert menu. Chocolate mousse cake with crème fraîche and raspberries is his; a delicate green tea panna cotta and lychee jelly with sesame wafer is hers, and a sticky black rice and coconut pudding with mango, toasted coconut, pandan syrup and lime is a joint effort. "I love introducing a citrus or salty element to puddings whose basis is sweetness," explains Gordon, who bemoans the fact that he often ends up doing shifts on the hot section.

Long-term plans include opening a second Tapa Room - Shoreditch, south of the Thames, or the West End are location candidates - and launching a delicatessen, preferably in Marylebone High Street, with a basement kitchen in which to do food demos. The deli will sell ingredients associated with Gordon and Hansen - eg, wattleseed and other bush food - together with items made in the Providores or at the food demos, eg, chutneys, starter mixes for marinades.

However, for the immediate future Gordon, Hansen, McGrath and Leeming have their hands full bedding down the present business. "We want to take things gradually and keep focused," explains Gordon. And he wants time to create dishes and nurture his staff. "What I'd really love is to get more people in the kitchen to free Anna and me up and allow our incredible chefs time for a good foodie talk. We haven't had one of those for weeks - everybody's always rushing home because they're so tired. But I remember when I was a young chef, all the excitement about food was really important. I want that here.

"And I want us to build fusion cuisine into something worthy of the title," he says. With the Providores well on the way to becoming a "must-do" on the London culinary scene, it would be surprising if he doesn't achieve that.

Which wine?

Peter Gordon recommends a 2001 Kim Crawford, Riesling, Marlborough to accompany the coconut laksa; a 2001 Tohu, Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough with the roast halibut, and a 1996 Monbazillac, Chateau Poulvere, Bordeaux with the green tea panna cotta.

All you need to know about the Providores and Tapa Room

• In Australia, a providore means a supplier, or provider, of food.
• The name Tapa refers to a Polynesian cloak made of bark (there's one on the café wall).
• It took Peter Gordon, Anna Hansen, Jeremy Leeming and Michael McGrath 18 months to get the project off the ground.
• £400,000 was spent refurbishing the site.
• The quartet put £50,000 of their own money into the business. The rest of the funding comes from the bank and backers Annie Small (a Kiwi), and Tarik Bayazit and Savas Ertunc (two Istanbul-based restaurateurs).
• The Tapa Room serves all-day breakfasts, both comforting (organic porridge with muscovado sugar and Jersey cream) and challenging (grilled chorizo sausage, capsicum chilli-jam, crème fraîche and watercress with grilled naan bread).
• Spend per head runs from £9 in the Tapa Room up to £40-plus in Providores.
• Early problems with the ventilation meant that during service the kitchen regularly reached temperatures of 40-50°C and because of a direct line into the local fire station the fire brigade turned up unannounced on two occasions.