The tip of a spoon
It was the year 2000, I started working at a restaurant in Farringdon that had haunted me since the first time I ate there two years earlier. That meal had been a revelation, less inspiration, more a burning jealousy that grew in me. I needed to learn how to create those flavours. At the time, I had just left Soho House, London’s fashionable playground of the time. Its food was bold, classic, Italian at heart, its crowds glittering, but the place in Farringdon is what drew me in with something different. It wasn’t pretentious. Its menu leaned Eastward, flavours that sang in a language my palate and my heart already understood.
Growing up in New Zealand, on the edge of the pacific, our markets brimmed with flavours and smells that told stories of bird’s eye chillis from Thailand, ginger from Fiji and lemongrass from Vietnam. in London, years later, these same ingredients were branded “exotic,” even dismissed as fusion food, the word spat out by the old guard of British kitchens. For me, they were the flavors of my childhood, woven into my DNA. The more they were scorned, the deeper my obsession grew to understand them, to honour them, to cook with them until they made sense in my hands.
The restaurant itself was pared back. White linen on the tables, paintings by local hands, an eclectic wine list that seemed to lean forward into the future. The menu hardly shifted, but it didn’t need to, there were futomaki rolls, crisp avocado tempura, northern Thai curries, and the famed chilli salt squid that arrived at nearly every table. Brazilians ran the kitchen while on student visas, tattoos peeked from under servers’ sleeves, and the dining room vibrated with a kind of unruly elegance.
Deep in the kitchen, my days blurred into a rhythm. I pounded curry pastes until my arms throbbed, chillis, galangal, and ginger ground into paste beneath a mortar’s weight. Shrimp paste roasted, its pungent aroma hanging in the air. Tom yum simmered, sharp, fishy and fragrant. Cutting hundreds of kilos of squid and…as always there was the Nam Jim, the elusive sauce, a symphony of sweet, sour, salt, and spice, dressed the infamous Thai beef salad. Of course, we had a recipe, but it was never used by anyone. I could never master it. Each time I presented a batch, the head chef tasted and frowned. Too sour, add more palm sugar. Too sharp, add more salt. Too much fish sauce, you have screwed it, start again. Again … always again. The repetition gnawed at me. The chef was a good man, but even this time his patience was tested.
One day my Nam Jim failed so epically that he told me to throw the whole container away. I slammed it into the rubbish, anger rising hot, i marched down to the walk-in fridge to gather more chilies, coriander, ginger, and limes. My hands shook as I grabbed the produce. That was where Bin found me.
Bin was unlike anyone else in that kitchen. Burmese by birth, but raised for a time in a monastery on the Tibetan plateau, he carried stories of exile like scars that he never quite spoke aloud. Tibet had been his home until it wasn’t, he had escaped as a teenager, crossing borders on foot, leaving behind silence, mountains, and a discipline in prayer. By the time I met him, he was living in London on a student visa, cooking through the city’s kitchens as though they were temporary stations on a longer pilgrimage. By day he chopped, fried, sweated, bent to the relentless pace of service. By night, he returned to Buddhism, meditation, chanting, stillness. Clean-shaven, eyes bright but calm, he carried that stillness like a warm glow against chaos. He saw me raging with herbs and fruit in my hands, and he laughed, a low, gutteral, knowing sound. “Again?” he said in his Deep thick Burmese accent.
I snapped something back, but he didn’t flinch. instead, he said softly, “you are not tasting the ingredients, chef. You only taste the finished dish.”
I stared at him, uncomprehending, then, without thought, he plucked a chilli from my hand, bit into it, locked eyes with me, and offered me the rest. “Taste it,” he said. I thought him insane. “Fuck off,” I retorted, but he smiled warmly. “Taste it,” he motioned ….I bit it.
The heat didn’t explode as I would have expected, it unfolded. First.. fruit, round and rich, then a warmth that grew slowly, steady, not cruel but insistent. Bin cut a lime, pressed its juice into his palm, tilted his head back and slurped it. Its brightness startled me, sharp and stinging, though the bitterness of the pith lingered. Bin reminded me of how to gently squeeze the lime without damaging the inner skin.
Back at the mortar, I began again. The chillis first, not as hot as I’d thought, so in went a few more. Pound…..Pound. Then garlic, but cut smaller this time, so it would surrender its texture and flavour easier. Pound…pound..pound. Coriander root next, green and earthy, the fragrance rising with the heat. Then ginger, sharp, bright, folding into the rhythm of the pestle. Pound..pound. Taste. Adjust with more coriander root. The flavours shifted with each strike and for the first time in my life I could hear them. I can’t explain it but …..I could speak to them.
I reached for the fish sauce, but Bin stopped me with a gentle hand.
“Not yet,” he said. “Sour first, then sweet, salt last. If you mess up salt, you can’t fix it.” This made sense to me.
Lime juice, bright poured in, palm sugar went in, grain by grain, grinding it, until the mash bloomed with sweetness, taut, pulling everything into focus. Only then, slowly, the fish sauce. drops, not pours. Slowly. real . fucking slowly…
Drop – taste – drop - taste. Salt rising slowly until I could feel the word “stop”. Instinct was at play here.
What emerged was alive. Goosebumps spread across my body, sweetness at the front, sourness ringing clear on the sides of my tongue, salt lingering at the very tip end like an orchestra’s close. It shimmered on the tongue balanced, whole.
The head chef dipped his spoon in….tasted, nodded. With an empathetic smile “best one you’ve made.”
Bin said nothing, just turned back to his station, lowering rice noodles into cold water, softening in readiness for the inevitable onslaught of Pad Thai that he would be throwing in woks tonight.
Something in me shifted. A door opened. This was more than sauce, it was a way of listening. Food was no longer recipes or repetition. It was flavour itself, each ingredient asking to be understood. That day, in a spoonful, I tasted the essence of my cooking as it exists today. patience, balance, and a unique understanding. The art of sweet, sour, salt, and spice, an impossible perfection that, for a moment, made me believe the whole reason for being a chef can be held on the tip of a spoon.
