The All in One Ultimate Restaurant List Interview: Tom Pemberton

After working as head chef at St. John’s Bread & Wine Tom Pemberton opened this neighbourhood restaurant in 2007. The term “honest food” has never seemed more apt; Pemberton’s food is simple yet interesting, as well as being excellently priced for the area. He tells us more.

What does Hereford Road do that nowhere else does?
To be honest with you I wouldn’t say there’s anything we do that no one else does. I would say that we’re probably one of the few neighbourhood restaurants in London doing British food, but we’re not the only one. We’re one of the few in West London. I wouldn’t say we have an absolutely unique selling point, I know that sounds like a strange thing for a chef who owns a restaurant to say, but I hope there are a lot of good British restaurants in London, of which I hope that we’re one. What we really focus on is standing out fairly strongly at our price point. I think the quality of food we use, and the provenance and our price point for a local neighbourhood restaurant is unusual. I like to think we offer very good value and very good quality food. What we’re trying to do is British food, really well sourced, simply cooked, at an accessible price point.

Which is your signature dish?
We do a whole braised oxtail, that’s something people associate with us. Instead of chopping the oxtail into different vertebra we do the whole oxtail on a really long plate. We do lots of things with lamb sweetbreads, which people like and come here for.

Can you give any basic tips on how to prepare offal for someone who is a novice in the kitchen?
Not to be frightened of it, because it’s really delicious. It’s normally not the most expensive thing to buy so it’s a good thing to experiment with. I would start by cooking things like duck liver and chicken liver, which go really well in salads, especially in summer. Don’t be frightened of it and don’t overcook it would be my two basic tips.

Do you cook at home?
At the moment my house is being re-done, but if I do cook at home I do quite simple food like grilled fish with salad, things like that.

Why do you think British food still has a bit of a bad rep around the world?
I think with people who know about food it doesn’t, they know that London has been a good culinary destination for about 10 or 15 years. With people who don’t know about food they probably still associate it with not very nice food from the 50, 60s and 70s. It depends what you like as well. Possibly for some Mediterranean people British cooking is quite heavy. It’s like when you speak to English people about going to Spain and they say they can’t stand the food as it’s greasy and tastes of garlic. I don’t think anyone who came to London and went to The Hand & Flowers or Dinner or The Ledbury would go away thinking there are no decent restaurants in England. It’s an outdated misconception isn’t it?

Have any new restaurants excited you recently?
A lot of them excite me. I went to Lyle’s a couple of times recently, that was very very good, I was blown away by how good it was. And I haven’t been there but everyone at work has been to Chiltern Firehouse and loved it.

What’s been the toughest job you’ve had so far in your career?
I find it quite hard sometimes when we’ve had to do things in parallel with the restaurant. I remember one night having to do a food fair and we had a really busy week at the restaurant, finishing service at 1 in the morning. We had to have 300 portions of braised rabbit, fennel and bacon for this food fair. So I worked all day, had to stay up all night prepping rabbits, then all of next day I was at this food fair. I remember finishing butchering all the rabbits at 6 in the morning and the sun coming up, and I still had another 18 hours to go. That was quite a hard couple of days.