Phil Leicester Head of Culinary Sales and Retention

One of my earliest food memories is when my mum used to bake with me and my brother most weekends, we used to fight over who would scrape the bowl out with the leftovers, normally he won as he is older than me so he pulled rank.

I feel there are 2 food trends for me. The first one is pasta, I think there are some good pasta orientated restaurants opening up such as Bancone. The other trend at the moment is choux pastry along with bakeries bringing back classics such as, the Paris brest.

One of my favourite places to eat, at the moment, is local to where I live, which is a place called Garrards. It does fully loaded burgers, chips, streaks and ribs. It’s one my children love to go to, as it’s very relaxed and they do really cool ice cream soda floats, in my opinion the cocktails are better!

One of my most memorable meals is when I was on my honeymoon in Hong Kong and, as you do, when you go on holiday, we asked the concierge at the hotel where we can get an authentic dining experience one evening. He made the booking for us and gave us directions to the restaurant which was situated in a shopping complex, which was getting refurbished, so once we navigated the bamboo scaffolding and the rest of the building site. We got to the restaurant and our dining experience, of a 9-course tasting menu, started with the first course being a pig’s head soup, I will let you imagine the other 8 courses, but put it this way, it wasn’t our conventional Cantonese cuisine, not a chicken ball in sight!

My ideal dinner guests would be David Jason, as he is a comic genius, Vinnie Jones, just to hear about his life experiences about his football career and his now movie career, and finally my wife as I would need someone to tidy up at the end of the meal for me…

My cookbook inspiration at the moment is the DJ BBQ Fire food written by Christian Stevenson. This is at the moment my go to book, as it’s BBQ season. I also like The Pie Room by Callum Franklin because, lets face it, who doesn’t like any form of pastry! If I have friends coming over I have a flick through a series of books by Thug Kitchen in LA.  I like this book as, coming from a working kitchen, the recipes are written how we talk in the kitchen, with the expletives included.

The main three items I have in the fridge are: mature cheddar cheese, charcuterie and Branston Pickle.