Into the Fire
The Josper oven in action at Ambiente Tapas Fossgate.
If you ask a chef, they are likely to tell you that the beating heart of any restaurant is its kitchen. Now, whilst we realise that they are obviously biased (and possibly suffering from an acute case of God Complex), we do concede that they may have a point. A restaurant without a fully functioning & efficient kitchen is going to be seriously compromised.
Which is why we recently decided to give our Fossgate kitchen some love to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Nothing was broken per se, but we felt that a refresh would keep it at peak performance for another decade.
And so, as the rest of the city nursed their hangovers on New Year’s Day, a few dedicated and eager members of our team got stuck in and stripped out sinks, ovens, walls and ceilings. Over the next ten days we slowly put them back again in a slightly different configuration, and also put some serious time into redesigning the ground floor seating arrangement.
One notable addition that we have incorporated into the new kitchen is a “Josper”.
“…a what??” I hear you say. Let me explain.
Head Executive Chef, Jonathon Cliff, tending to the Josper!
A Josper is a big old charcoal oven designed and built just north of Barcelona. We have had them in our Leeds & Hull restaurants for some time now and our chefs there have become rather adept at getting the best from them.
They are a primitive, simplistic, and unapologetically analogue piece of cooking equipment (that’s the Jospers not the chefs!).
A Josper is the absolute polar opposite of a fully programmable modern oven like a Rational. They have no electrical or gas connections, no timers, no circuit boards, just a basic temperature gauge. A Josper is rather like a Tiger Moth bi-plane in a world of F22 Raptors …. but only if the Tiger Moth had come with a steam engine!
We know that as our Fossgate chefs slowly come to terms with cooking like the Flintstones, they will be working tirelessly to develop new recipes to showcase this fire breathing bit of kit. Just don’t ask them why they have no eyebrows!
The results of our New Year’s renovations are best experienced in person by booking a table (or taking your chances as a walk-in), but we’ve popped a couple of pictures here to whet your appetite. We are really pleased with the end result & look forward to sharing our new space with you during our tenth anniversary year.