It’s probably not the first thing you think of when choosing a restaurant but more and more the music played in the dining room – or lack of it – is becoming an important factor. Writer Clare Finney explores the complicated relationship between cooking and music
Before becoming a chef, Stephen Harris was a financier – but before that he was in a punk band (The Ignerents). The proprietor of The Sportsman in Whitstable, Kent, he often compares creating new dishes with recording and playing in a band. “I’m obsessed with perfect pitch,” he says – and for a second, I’m not sure if he’s referencing his food or his music. As it happens, he’s talking about both – because, for Harris, both are a question of harmony.
“I like things that are right and in balance – the harmonic wave that goes through your head and creates a pleasurable feeling. When finishing a sauce or soup, adjusting the seasoning to get it right, I feel as I did in a recording studio with a graphic equaliser, balancing the elements of a piece of music. Umami is depth – the bass – and the treble is like adding acidity,” he continues. “It makes it brighter” – whether ‘it’ is a sauce or a song.
In music, we know what perfect pitch is: the ability to recognise or produce a given note exactly. For Harris the same is true of cooking – “I want everything to taste perfectly of what it’s supposed taste of,” he explains – for a tomato to taste like tomato, no flatter or sharper, just like a perfectly tuned C.
He’s not the only chef to have perceived a connection between music and food, nor the only musician to have turned to restaurants and cooking. Levi Roots is perhaps the most famous, but Graham Garrett of The West House in Kent, Daniel Willis and Johnny Smith of Luca in Farringdon and Amit and Aneesh Patel of Brilliant Corners and Mu in East London were – and in some instances still are – all musicians of some sort, be it producers, drummers, guitarists or DJs.
MENU OR PLAYLIST?
“I had my first job at St John Bread and Wine,” says Johnny Smith – Fergus Henderson’s restaurant, which famously has no music at all, “but Daniel [Willis] and I were DJing at the same time. When we did Clove Club [a supper club series] at our flats, we brought the two together. We asked producers and DJs to create playlists for us, and that became part of what we did, and what made us different. It was a bit of a revolt against traditional formal French style dining.”
Clove Club became the
