What happened to Vanilla Black? An interview with founder Andrew Dargue

19 January 2022 by

Andrew Dargue's ideas about vegetarian food made restaurant Vanilla Black stand out from the lentil-hued competition. Here Emma Lake talks to him about carving his own path before plant-based was popular and never offering the same dish twice.

Andrew Dargue did not stop cooking meat to save the planet or protest the rearing of livestock for slaughter. Instead, it was a challenge laid down by his partner, Donna Conroy, who was fed up of menus offering "second-rate, meat-free options" in the late 1990s.

Her complaints inspired the chef to launch a venture that would see him preparing vegetarian meals for hotels and restaurants in the north-east before the couple teamed up to open esteemed meat-free restaurant Vanilla Black, first in York and then London, attracting rave reviews before its closure in 2020.

"We did not put posters on the wall saying ‘save the world'. It was just a restaurant that did not serve meat and fish and it generally appealed to people who were interested in food," explains Dargue who stopped eating meat himself when he first took on his partner's challenge.

"It was enlightening. It had been quite difficult to retrain my mind to cook without meat, so I thought I would stop eating meat and fish for a while to see things from a different angle and I never went back. It never bothered me, really. We gave up smoking at the same time and I missed the cigarettes more."

Sticky and crispy rice
Sticky and crispy rice

In the 1990s and early 2000s the listing of a vegetarian option on a menu was predominantly, at best, an afterthought. Dargue recalls his market research turning up a lot of vegetable curries and a reliance on pasta, particularly the faithful roasted vegetable lasagne.

He says: "When you're vegan or vegetarian, people give you lots of vegetables. Often when you see a vegetarian dish there's roasted peppers, chargrilled courgette, aubergine and pesto. But, if you were putting together a meat dish you wouldn't put lamb, beef and chicken on the same plate. When you're cooking with vegetables you still want your dish to have a single focal point, just one that isn't meat or fish, and then you need to balance it out in the same way you would a meat dish."

Coming up with new ideas all the time only gets harder when you're taking more ingredients away

The chef vowed to never to serve either vegetable curries or pasta dishes and applied his classical French training to creating vegetarian dishes that were well thought out, innovative and often subversive.

A unique proposition

The original Vanilla Black opened in York in 2004 and had 20 covers. It would move to the capital in 2008 as the couple sought more space and a new challenge. It quickly gained national attention. Writing for The Guardian in 2010 Simon Hattenstone said: "The food is creative, beautifully presented and exciting… chef/patron Andrew Dargue really understands ingredients and unlikely combinations. Each flavour works to heighten the other."

However, the move to the capital was not all plain sailing. Dargue explains: "When we opened in London we were quite confident because we'd been so successful in York and we wanted a challenge, but we were also a bit naïve. London is a different market, and we didn't appreciate how tough it would be. You're in competition with so many other people in London and you're not big news in the way you are when you open in a small town. In London restaurants open every day; it was very tough at first."

Not content with opening one of the country's first purely vegetarian fine-dining restaurants, Dargue set himself and his team the additional challenge of never listing the same dish on the menu twice, a decision that meant he and several team members would predominantly be tasked with developing new dishes.

One of the chef's favourite starting points was to take a popular dish or trend and turn it on its head. He explains: "Whether you're decorating a room, writing a song, or coming up with a dish you need somewhere to start from, so we would always pick a theme. In the early days I would take a dish that existed, for example the deep-fried Brie with cranberry sauce that was on every pub menu in 1986, and do the opposite, in that case it became very cold Brie… a Brie ice-cream.

"We did it all the time. We once took all the elements of a pizza, but turned it into a cold starter. We jellied some tomato and put it through a mincer, we made a vegan basil mayonnaise, then to recreate that char on the pizza crust we took bread and burnt it, ground it down to a powder and sprinkled it over.

Roasted cauliflower dumplings
Roasted cauliflower dumplings

"Another time we did a play on a mushroom risotto as a dessert. It was puffed crispy rice, rolled in caramel and served with a mushroom custard and a white wine syrup."

Dargue was, and remains, adamant that people going for an evening out need to be entertained as well as fed. He insisted that his team always set out to create something different and surprising that would leave guests wondering how it had been created – while of course also leaving their hunger satiated.

He adds: "I think about 30% of the dishes we started we could not make work. But often we learned what doesn't work and that was valuable too. We once tried to do a gin and tonic as a starter that was a tonic jelly with a gin sorbet, but it was quite difficult to maintain the bubbles within the jelly. We found a way to do it, but when you cut through it, it would collapse, because most of it was bubbles. However, we learnt from that and the next time someone suggested a carbonated jelly we steered clear."

Tomato shortbread
Tomato shortbread

During Vanilla Black's tenure the popularity of plant-based diets skyrocketed. Dargue explains that in York he had served maybe two vegan diners a week, but by 2020 around 50% of meals served by the restaurant were vegan.

The scale of the increase has surprised the chef and it presented his team with another challenge, but also an opportunity, as the popularity drove innovation. While the restaurant did not jump to embrace all the new vegan products coming to market – and certainly not the ranges of vegan meat substitutes that now fill supermarket freezer aisles – Dargue says some were useful and gave the team more scope to adapt and experiment.

He says: "Coming up with new ideas all the time only gets harder when you're taking more ingredients away. But we twisted it and said it's a bigger challenge and we'll have to use more of our skills. I like to think we progressed and, as time went on, our vegan options became more complex and interesting.

We did not put posters on the wall saying ‘save the world'. It was just a restaurant that did not serve meat and fish

"It did change the way I thought. We were once making an avocado ice-cream and struggling to make the flavour come through, but when we made it a vegan ice-cream using soya milk we found that the removal of the cream helped the avocado flavour emerge."

Universal appeal

While plant-based diets were on the rise and may have sent more people to door of Vanilla Black, the restaurant always had fans across the demographics of meat-eater, vegetarian and vegan, despite originally being something of an outlier.

"I always found it quite pleasing when I walked around the floor to see a young couple in their early 20s on table four, and then next to them a table of businessmen and on the next table a middle-aged couple, maybe a group of friends on table nine. It was a mix of people because the restaurant was about the food," Dargue says.

Before Covid-19 sent shockwaves around the globe in early 2020, Vanilla Black had cemented its reputation as a groundbreaking and exciting restaurant. But as the pandemic ravaged the country, Dargue and Conroy reluctantly decided it would not be viable financially to bring this phoenix from the ashes.

After announcing its closure in September 2020, Dargue posted a message to social media reading: "The effects of the last few months have been immensely devastating. We have always put our hearts and souls into Vanilla Black and it is a passion rather than a business so it has been a very difficult decision to make. However, we don't see this as the end, this is never the way we imagined it. This is not the end of our mission to create innovative vegetarian and vegan cuisine. We will return in the near future with a new and exciting venture."

The couple have now upped sticks and moved to Devon. Dargue is working with Litmos to provide training to universities, hospitals and schools, while Vanilla Black Cook & Learn has been travelling the country as a gastronomic roadshow, "teaching people how to make something wacky and interesting out of vegetables."

Sticky and crispy rice with pickled cucumber ketchup and ginger purée
Sticky and crispy rice with pickled cucumber ketchup and ginger purée

Andrew Dargue's top dishes from Vanilla Black

Sticky and crispy rice with pickled cucumber ketchup and ginger purée

"Our take on vegan sushi with a contrasting textures and flavours."

Puy lentil and sweet potato ‘dhal' with crispy Lentils and curry oil

"I always thought a dhal was a one-dimensional dish to eat, so we created our own version. This is the only time a curry of sorts has been on the menu, apart from when we did a dessert based around a Thai curry."

Roasted cauliflower dumplings, parsley purée and raisins

"One of the team wanted to add cauliflower cheese to the menu and this is what we came up with. Roasting the cauliflower was what gave the dish depth of flavour."

Tomato shortbread and sheep's yoghurt with roasted broccoli and cured egg yolk

"Someone in the kitchen mentioned that they'd had a tomato and broccoli quiche, so we set the challenge of creating our version and this is what we came up with."

Cep mushroom custard, roasted white chocolate and tarragon cream

"After much discussion we came to the conclusion that mushrooms have a creamy flavour, so why not put them on a dessert? Hence this mushroom-based dessert was born. It was also reincarnated in another version in which one of the team replaced the custard with mushroom fudge."

If you are interested in hearing more from Andrew Dargue, click here to register for the Plant-Based Summit

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