SongSoo Kim is looking ahead, clear-eyed. “Certainly, I think,” she says, “there’s a lot of work to do. For sure.” Kim is the head of sourcing and development for the most influential restaurant company nobody’s ever heard of, Super 8. Not famous, Super 8, but its restaurants are London A-listers, and easily up there with the city’s best: Mountain, Brat, Kiln, Smoking Goat. A cast-iron critical reputation, and two Michelin stars from five restaurants (Brat has a sister in Climpson’s Arch).
But Kim isn’t talking food or service or suppliers — she’s on sexism in hospitality. A little over a month since 70 female chefs signed an open letter decrying gender discrimination in the workplace, how does she think her company is doing?
“Super 8 has been talking about it for a while and, I believe, it wants to do better. I think that’s the best we can do, right? It’s the belief that we want to create an equitable society together,” she says, choosing her words. “I agree,” nods Fanny Derozier, Kiln’s general manager. “We don’t have the solution to this problem, but we have conversations on a daily basis with our teams, open debates.”
At the table with them are Super 8 co-founders Brian Hannon and Ben Chapman, Kiln’s long-term chef Meedu Saad — soon to open a new restaurant with Derozier — and, joining from Australia via zoom, the group’s best-known chef, Tomos Parry. It sounds, I say to Chapman and Hannon, like the group’s quite good on these things. A wrinkle draws itself on Chapman’s face.
“We shouldn’t, as an industry, promote falsehoods, because we’re not going to get better if we do that”
“I mean, I wouldn’t go further than quite good,” he says, matter of factly. “It’s something we want to be better at. A lot better. We’re fortunate having people like SongSoo and Fanny, and the majority of our management teams are female, as that gives these problems a voice. But I think SongSoo’s point is a good one. You’ve got to be honest. We shouldn’t, as an industry, promote falsehoods, because we’re not going to get better if we do that. Let’s just be honest: we’ve all got loads to do.”
Chapman is an atypically straightforward interviewee. But then he is atypical in general. Which is how, a little more than a decade ago, he ended up working with Hannon in the first place.
“Ben would always provide a different perspective on things. The kind of contrarian view,” smiles Hannon with a sideways look.
“Which was often, I found, right, versus the group think.” It was the best part of 15 years ago, at pub operator, The 580 Group. Hannon was there to consult, following his 16 years as a top dog at Mitchells & Butlers. “We crossed over briefly, but we were at very different levels,” says Chapman. “Brian had this huge amount of experience and I… I was working in the bar.” Not long before, he’d been putting on music nights and attempting an art gallery.
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One of the 580 Group was the Owl & Pussycat, where Flat Iron began as a pop-up; Chapman then helped design its first restaurant on Beak Street. Hannon had a say in it, too.
Conversations were kept up. After briefly being director of food and restaurants for Selfridges, Hannon quit and Super 8 began. Did it feel like a risk? Hannon is diplomatic.
“It was very clear Ben has opposite skill sets to myself, and therefore that’s where the business partnership came very strongly together.” And Chapman? “I needed a job…” The story of how they ended up running London’s coolest group is marked by what Hannon calls “a level of smart risk-taking”.
Their first, Thai barbecue dive bar Smoking Goat on Denmark Street, exemplifies this: on the one hand, Thai was suddenly the food of the moment — Peckham’s Begging Bowl was thriving, Som Saa opened at the same time — on the other, Chapman was still learning to cook, and the three-year lease meant the restaurant had no long-term future.
The first problem, Super 8 got over by bringing in Sebby Holmes as head chef. The latter? Well, it also came with a risk of being booted out early after three months. “If we’d had investors or 10 people to answer to, I don’t think we would have got that decision through,” deadpans Hannon.
Lucky they did; critical adoration swiftly followed. Then, in 2016, came Kiln — Hannon raising the cash with a personal guarantee on his flat, and Chapman persuading a farmer to farm pigs for the first time ever, to produce the meat he wanted. This is not the usual way of things.
In 2018, Brat opened — all it needed was for Tomos Parry to quit his job, invent new grills and fish cages to cook with, and overcome locals’ fears that a restaurant would be more harmful to the area than its existing tenant, a strip club.
But the market was very different back then. Given the state of things now, with the economy in general disarray, would they still have the gumption to go for it all now? Parry waves it away.
“I don’t know if people who really want to create something just look at the economic situation around them. I think if you want to do it, you will find a way of doing it,” he says. “If you’re that determined, you’ll just navigate whatever circumstance you’re in, really.”
“There’s no less risk in what we’re planning to do later this year,” bristles Chapman. “You know, we’re not taking the easy route on opening our next restaurant in these circumstances.”
That next project sees Meedu Saad and Fanny Derozier moving on from Kiln, though it will stay open. The project — its name is still under legal wraps, but is a nod to a drug detailed in Homer’s Odyssey, which casts trouble from a person’s mind — leans into Saad’s pre-Kiln classical training, but touches on his Egyptian bloodline.
It will open in Soho (“It has a lot of corners, so you’ll have privacy in a big room,” is all Derozier will say on its location). It will take 90 on the ground floor, though there’ll be a bar space, too. I’ve heard it’s an Egyptian brasserie, I say? Saad laughs. “You’ve come along for the concept ride!”
“My grandmother was a big part of my upbringing, I cooked with her, learnt from her”
“It’s a Soho restaurant that definitely touches on some of my heritage and my training. I remember doing some Escoffier competitions back in the day and, you know, I’ll definitely be leaning on some of those memories. But also my childhood summers,” he says. “My father is from the northern part of Egypt that borders the Sinai, and there’s a lot of French influence along the Suez Canal. My grandmother was a big part of my upbringing, I cooked with her, learnt from her. That’s always been part of me and this is just a lovely opportunity to, like, tell those stories.”
Dishes will include whole red mullet roasted the way they do in Ismailia, a city in north-east Egypt — which means coating the fish in wheat bran, blackening it on the floor of a wood oven, then wrapping it in newspaper to help it cook. Saad’s Parisian influence will show in the Beurre rouge it’s served with, a classic French sauce of butter, emulsified with a red wine reduction. There will also be kofte, and black lime and molasses-marinated roast duck. Elsewhere, Saad is hoping to use chicken to the standard of Poulet de Bresse, perhaps the world’s finest chicken. Kim is trying to find the right birds, and somewhere to farm them for the first time in the UK. How’s it going? “I jokingly tell them that I probably need a freaking Nobel Prize for it,” she laughs.
Each Super 8 restaurant starts in a sketchbook — pen and ink come long before a computer screen — and travels abroad. Saad and Derozier’s restaurant is no different. They visited Saad’s aunt’s house with Kim and Chapman to better understand his idea. How much do these trips matter? “I think it’s fundamental for the business, creating amazing great experiences for your team, experiences they couldn’t really get at otherwise, the magical moments,” says Hannon.
Kim agrees: “It’s a study of communing — how we eat and grill on the farms, how we use the vines, those moments. And how in Thailand or San Sebastian, eating is different and how we commune is different.” Derozier nods. “It’s about exchanging with people as passionate as us.”
“How’s finding somewhere to farm Poulet de Bresse? I probably need a freaking Nobel Prize for it”
What the new restaurant won’t come with, Chapman makes clear, is a big marketing push — even much social media is out (“It’s been a meaningful way to tell the detail behind the cooking, sourcing and butchery work we do,” is about as far as they’ll go). “We’re not then putting a load of decoration and a load of marketing on top,” says Chapman of the approach.
Why is it, then, that Super 8 is thriving when most operators are white-knuckling it? “Good restaurants are rooted in emotion,” says Saad.
“Our principles haven’t changed,” Chapman says. “It’s about brilliant atmosphere, brilliant ingredients. That’s what we do.”
Anything else? Hannon mentions looking after suppliers and staff. “We’ve got a financial advisor that helps our team get mortgages and things like that. That’s part of the whole thinking,” he says. Look after your people and they’ll look after you, in other words. But they’re still working on that, of course.
