Chef profile: Adam Handling, the Frog, London
Of all the chefs I would have expected to see sporting a huge sleeve tattoo, Adam Handling isn't one of them. In an age when there's nary a chef without an illustrated epidermis, it looks a little incongruous on the budding 28-year-old restaurateur at first.
Perhaps the freshly inked tattoo is striking because it stands out so prominently against the Dundee-born chef's pale skin. Or perhaps it's because, rightly or wrongly, tattoos are often associated with a rebellious streak and a healthy disrespect for authority - yet Handling is no insurrectionist. He mentions that his father is a military man and, without that self-discipline and drive, he could hardly have managed to accumulate a list of culinary honours that includes an Acorn Award, BCF Chef of the Year in 2014 and Scottish Chef of the Year in 2015, not to mention being a MasterChef: The Professionals finalist in 2013.
Although, in a way, he's an outlier too, in the sense that he possesses prodigious talent in the kitchen - talent that led Michel Roux Jr, erstwhile MasterChef presenter, to comment that his food created "unexpected harmony" in that it successfully combined ingredients in playful and surprising ways and employed a high level of technical ability.
But if you look closely at the tattoo, you'll see it's partly a story of his career, partly a declaration of intent, rather than a vacant expression of insubordination. There's a compass and maps of the countries in Asia that he has visited, including Japan and China; an eye on his bicep to remind him to open himself up to different cultures, concepts and foods; and, most prominent of all, a large frog.
It's the amphibian we're here to talk about, because it gives its name to Handling's first solo restaurant, the Frog in London's Shoreditch, which he opened in June 2016.
Handling jokes that he came to Shoreditch and couldn't grow a beard, so he got the tattoo instead, but he later admits that he barely even knew where Shoreditch was until one of his chefs spotted an available site.
That's not a shocking revelation when you consider that Handling has spent much of his time in fine-dining establishments, starting at Fairmont St Andrews in Scotland, where he became the Fairmont group's youngest-ever head chef, before moving to St Ermin's hotel in London, where they considered him sufficiently important to change the name of the Caxton Grill to Adam Handling at Caxton.
Given that Handling had been handed the reins of the restaurant at St Ermin's and that he was happy, after spending his early career at the Fairmont being, by his own admission, an "angry little bugger" fixated on becoming the youngest chef ever to win a Michelin star, why move on?
"It was my name on the door, but it wasn't mine," he explains. "Money was not an object. You don't become a chef to make money. We do it for the love and hopefully, one day, the money will come, but you are in someone else's house. I wanted to be busier. In Westminster [prior to the regeneration of nearby Victoria], we were close to everywhere but in the middle of nowhere and we didn't have the backing of the operation to be noticed, as every chef wants."
A solo venture was more or less inevitable then, but the Frog, it is probably fair to say, is not the solo venture Handling originally envisaged, nor the one most people expected.
"I wanted to open a signature restaurant," he says. "All my biggest idols have a restaurant like that, and I wanted to be one of the up-and-coming chefs, creating trends."
There was, of course, a problem with this ambition, as Handling was soon to realise - such restaurants rarely make money and finding someone to back the dream with cash proved a challenge. But that changed just over two years ago when he cut short a holiday in Thailand with friends to return to cook at Adam Handling at Caxton for a group of investors from venture capital firm Toucan Ventures.
He had already approached the firm's founder, Rasha Khawaja, who was interested enough in Handling's ideas to hold her meeting at his restaurant.
One of the party was Philip Seers (see panel), now chairman of Handling's company. "He asked me if I had ever thought of opening my own restaurant. He told me about business, how to raise money, ideas on how to approach people, and so on," recalls Handling.
The pair met up and Seers counselled Handling to come up with a business plan.
Handling enlisted the help of his father for ideas on Restaurant Adam Handling, and worked away at night with his headphones on and a stack of how-to books around him. But after months of work, the plan still wasn't cutting it. Eventually, Toria Ewart-Perks from Toucan (now chief operating officer of Adam Handling Ltd) helped the chef out, and gradually Handling reached the conclusion that the
problem was the restaurant concept itself.
It was about this time that the Shoreditch site came up. "I liked the place and saw the potential, but I hated the area," says Handling.
"I thought everyone was dressed strangely, there were too many beards, and there was too much graffiti. The truth was, I was intimidated by it and I didn't really know what was going on. I realised I was so out of focus with what was
happening in London."
Handling needed a concept that was more accessible and casual, and so he started to form the idea of the Frog. He says he followed Kermit the Frog's maxim that "everything starts with a leap" (although it isn't clear that Kermit ever actually said this). He went to Fat Punk Studio and commissioned them to come up with a "graffiti-ish" logo, even before he had secured the backing for it. It proved to be the catalyst for the whole concept. Finally, Toucan and Seers felt they had something that could work, and so the Shoreditch restaurant was born as a "proof of concept".
That said, the Frog isn't a complete reinvention for the chef. Many of the playful and technically accomplished dishes for which he is best known - such as 'beetroot, beetroot and more beetroot', cheese doughnuts, and bread with chicken butter - are still there on a £50 tasting menu. But there are also more accessible sharing plates in the shape of 'British tapas' and a wide selection of beers, all served in an unstuffy environment with bar stools and wooden chairs and not a tablecloth in sight - along with loud music that Handling happily admits his mother wouldn't like.
The 68-cover venue launched in June 2016 and seven months later it was well on the way to beating its financial projections, taking £1m against a target for the year of £1.2m. That paved the way for Handling to secure a larger site in Covent Garden, with the backing of Toucan Ventures, which is likely to open in July.
The new site, the precise location of which is not yet revealed, will be 90 covers, operating all day, seven days a week. It will be set across two floors, with a large open-plan kitchen and with a table on the pass capable of seating 12-15 people.
"The pass will be gigantic - it's very much a show kitchen," Handling says. In the basement, Handling plans to open a speakeasy-style bar that will have a separate identity to the Frog. It will have a secret side entrance and focus on 10 or so quality cocktails.
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