London Chef Tomos Parry Is Striking Lightning Twice With Restaurants Brat and Mountain
While Tomos Parry was studying politics and history at Cardiff University, he was simultaneously working for free at a high-end restaurant called Le Gallois.
“I wasn’t qualified, so I couldn’t expect to get paid. After I finished my degree I decided that the academic world wasn’t really for me because I found working with my hands a little bit more vocational and more interesting. So I started working there [at Le Gallois] because I was more trained up and they started paying me,” Parry says in an interview on a midday Monday, which he calls his admin day.
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After three years in Cardiff, he moved to London to work at the River Café, the famed Michelin star restaurant started by chefs Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, in 1987 before moving on to positions at The Ledbury and Noma, the three-Michelin-star restaurant based in Copenhagen, which many consider the best restaurant in the world and which is closing at the end of the year.
On his return to London, he was working with others to open Michelin star restaurants, but in 2013 he decided to venture out on a solo side hustle.
“Cooking over fire is quite intrinsically linked to my Welsh upbringing, even if it’s just basic stuff like barbecues on the beach,” explains Parry, who set up a pop-up at Climpson’s Arch in East London.
“I did my own thing, really, just cooking over fire with a super simple menu that was very much driven by ingredients and fire,” he adds.
Parry was then headhunted by Tim Steel, Oliver Milburn and Tom Mullion, the husband of Samantha Cameron’s little sister, Emily Sheffield, to head the kitchen of Kitty Fisher’s in London’s Mayfair.
The restaurant was a critical and social success due to the crowd it drew, as well as its fancy location a stone’s throw away from private members club Annabel’s and the Rolls-Royce showroom.
“But it wasn’t my restaurant, I couldn’t fully do the things I wanted to do, which is completely fine,” says Parry of leaving Kitty Fisher’s to open Brat in Shoreditch with the help of Brian Hannon and Tomos Parry, the cofounders of the restaurant group Super 8 Restaurants that runs Smoking Goat and Kiln.
Brat received its Michelin star within six months. Then, during the pandemic, the restaurant opened an extension called Brat x Climpson’s Arch that focused on outdoor dining and still operates now.
Parry seems to have a Midas touch when it comes to opening restaurants — when he opened his latest, Mountain, in Soho last year, it received a Michelin star within six months as well, proving that lightning can strike twice.
“Ingredients and atmosphere are key for us, those are the two things that we try to double on. We have open kitchens and fires where all your senses are engaged. You can see it, smell it, touch it and taste it,” the chef says.
Brat and Mountain take their tropes from Parry’s voyages and his habit of cooking outdoors in fields in Wales, Cornwall, Cambridge, France and Porreres in Mallorca, which reminds him of cooking in Wales, where the mountains and sea come together.
“It’s a very rural style of cooking, it’s not overly fussy. It’s land cooking, where the dishes are quite simple but they’ve been handed down over the generations. It’s important for chefs to be exposed to that type of cooking, where it’s not just restaurant-chef based cooking in the city today,” says Parry, who believes that true food culture comes from the countryside.
Items on his menus include velvet crab soup; partridge with blood pudding; duck rice; grilled red peppers with squid; spiny caldereta, and tripe, the edible lining from the stomachs of animals such as cattle, pigs and sheep.
“The style we do is quite Madrid-like, it’s been cooked for ages. It feels luxurious, as it’s been cooked for hours and hours, even though tripe is kind of a cheap thing,” says Parry, who often travels with his team to experience other cuisines and cultures.
The gently spoken chef, whose accent is a mixture of a London city boy with a twang of Welsh, is one of the few who’s changing the bad boy narrative about chefs and the shouty, macho-world of kitchens.
“We have open kitchens, it’s pretty clear that the style of service that we do is a nonaggressive one. But unfortunately, that was the narrative for many, many years. I’m very happy that people are portraying kitchens in the way they do now and ‘The Bear’ has probably helped that a bit because the character is quite good,” Parry explains.
Even though he’s not running around the kitchen in the same Merz b. Schwanen T-shirt as Jeremy Allen White’s character, Parry finds comfort in putting on his chef jacket from Kentaur.
“I like the old schoolness of a chef jacket and the whole process of coming into work to put it on. There’s a workplace element to it as you’re going in to do a job. It’s important to have a balance between creativity and having a sense of going to work, like an artist when they put their overalls on,” Parry says half jokingly.
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